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Off Topic The Politics Thread

Discussion in 'Queens Park Rangers' started by Stroller, Jun 25, 2015.

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Should the UK remain a part of the EU or leave?

Poll closed Jun 24, 2016.
  1. Stay in

    56 vote(s)
    47.9%
  2. Get out

    61 vote(s)
    52.1%
  1. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    Roger Hallam calls Holocaust "just another ****ery in human history"
    The Extinction Rebellion founder says genocides are "like a regular event" in history. Hallam tells DIE ZEIT the Germans' attitude to the Holocaust is holding them back.
    20. November 2019, 10:38 Uhr Quelle: ZEIT ONLINE, kas 1 Kommentar
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    Roger Hallam, co-founder of the Extinction Rebellion activist group © Laura Pannack für DIE ZEIT
    Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, has said the Holocaust was "just another ****ery in human history".
    Hallam believes the Germans' attitude towards the Holocaust is holding them back. "The extremity of a trauma can create a paralysis in actually learning the lessons from it", he told the German weekly DIE ZEIT in an interview.
    Talking to DIE ZEIT, the 53-year-old British citizen referenced the Holocaust several times. The "fact of the matter is, millions of people have been killed in vicious circumstances on a regular basis throughout history", Hallam said. He cites, for example, the Belgians, who "went to the Congo in the late 19th century and decimated it".
    He notes that genocides have happened repeatedly over the past five centuries: "In fact, you might say it is like a regular event."
     
    #43541
  2. ELLERS

    ELLERS Well-Known Member

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    AS I said you need to keep him away from the BBC. I have seen him 3 times in recent days and Raab looks and sounds like the Tories have won. He came across laughing and sweating like he had just done a line in the toilets. I would just let Gove do all the talking from now on.
     
    #43542
  3. Stroller

    Stroller Well-Known Member

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    Bloody experts. No one believes what the IFS has to say. Or is that just when they tell us what a disaster Brexit will be?
     
    #43543
  4. ELLERS

    ELLERS Well-Known Member

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    I don't believe them but I listened to what Labour were proposing and other than the trains and student fees I thought they were talking utter rubbish. The maths doesn't add up (remember I am not Watford when it comes to maths), however I think they have just found a 'money forest'.
     
    #43544
  5. QPR Oslo

    QPR Oslo Well-Known Member

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    Wish I could manage your optimism.
     
    #43545
  6. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    labour could borrow money from germany
    banks there getting ready to pay you to borrow money


    Most German banks are imposing negative rates on corporate clients

    Practice proves controversial in country where ECB has been accused of penalising savers










    Martin Arnold and Olaf Storbeck in Frankfurt

    November 19 2019





    Almost 60 per cent of German banks are charging negative interest rates on the deposits of corporate clients and more than 20 per cent are doing the same for retail customers, according to new data published on Monday.The figures, revealed in a survey by the German central bank, give one of the clearest indications of how many lenders are charging customers to deposit money since the European Central Bank cut interest rates deeper into negative territory in mid-September.
    The Bundesbank surveyed 220 lenders at the end of September — two weeks after the ECB’s cut its deposit rate from minus 0.4 to a record low of minus 0.5 per cent. In response, 58 per cent of the banks said they were levying negative rates on some corporate deposits and 23 per cent said they were doing the same for retail depositors.While most of the lenders are passing on negative rates only to institutions, companies or individuals with large deposits, the practice has proved particularly controversial in Germany, where the ECB has been attacked for penalising prudent savers.
    Germany’s Bild tabloid depicted Mario Draghi, the recently retired ECB president, as “Count Draghila”, a vampire sucking dry the accounts of savers. James von Moltke, Deutsche Bank’s chief financial officer, last month told analysts that Germany’s largest lender had stepped up its attempts to pass on negative interest rates to clients after concluding it could do so for about a fifth of all its retail deposits.
    “This is more difficult in the private bank business than in corporate or institutional deposits and we don’t see an ability to adjust legal terms and conditions of our accounts on a broad-based basis,” said Mr von Moltke, adding that Deutsche was instead approaching retail clients with large deposits on an individual basis. Stephan Engels, Commerzbank’s chief financial officer, said this month that Germany’s second-largest listed lender had started to approach wealthy retail customers holding deposits of more than €1m.
    In one of the most aggressive moves in the sector, Berliner Volksbank said last month that it would start applying a minus 0.5 per cent rate on any deposits above €100,000 at the country’s biggest co-operative lender.
    Negative interest rates were first introduced in the eurozone in June 2014 to boost a flagging economy by nudging banks into lending more money, rather than leaving excess liquidity languishing at the central bank.

    But the knock-on effect has been to further dent the already strained earnings of Europe’s banks, which hold a combined €1.9tn of reserves at the ECB to satisfy post-crisis liquidity regulations.According to Biallo.de, a German price comparison website, 140 lenders in Germany have already started to charge negative interest rates.

    State-owned German development bank KfW is preparing to pass on negative interest rates to its borrowers — paying them to borrow money. KfW is legally obliged to pass on its own funding terms to clients and it can already refinance itself at negative rates.
    “We don’t know if and when we might offer loans at negative interest rates, but from a technical point of view, we want to be ready to do so,” it said.To give banks some relief from the cost of negative rates, the ECB introduced a “tiering” system that exempts part of their deposits with the central bank from the charges.Luis de Guindos, vice-president of the ECB, said in a speech on Monday that the profitability of European banks had been “persistently low” and their aggregate return on equity dipped below 6 per cent in the year to June.
    But he said negative interest rates were not the main cause, blaming a lack of consolidation and bloated costs compared with US and Nordic rivals.
     
    #43546
  7. Quite Possibly Raving

    Quite Possibly Raving Well-Known Member

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    I'm not defending the action (which is poor form IMO) but this is a bad measure of whether Raab is right.

    I'd hypothesise that an extremely limited number of people are aware of what the Tories get up to on their Twitter account, and therefore probably don't "give a toss". That they don't like it once they are made aware by a pollster is a separate - even if highly related - issue.

    It's a bit like showing a random sample of 1,000 people a montage of QPR's defending this year and asking those people if they think it's acceptable. 50% (or more!) will state it is unacceptable despite the fact almost all weren't aware before hand i.e. they don't give a toss about our defensive record despite agreeing it's unacceptable.

    A better test would have been to ask people to name unprompted examples of dishonesty in the election campaign and seen how many cited the Twitter example. [In the analogy above we would ask people to name the team in the football league with zero clean sheets].
     
    #43547
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  8. Quite Possibly Raving

    Quite Possibly Raving Well-Known Member

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    Your position on polling is about as clear as Labour's on Brexit :p

    For those interested, I thought this article on the differing polling methodologies was very interesting:

    https://capx.co/why-are-the-polls-telling-such-different-stories/
     
    #43548
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  9. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    has greta been to see the chinese leaders yet

    Climate change: China coal surge threatens Paris targets
    By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent
    • 20 November 2019
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    Image copyright Planet Labs Inc
    Image caption Construction at Shanxi coal power plant was stopped in July 2017 but resumed in March 2019
    While the rest of the world has cut coal-based electricity over the past 18 months, China has added enough to power 31 million homes.
    That's according to a study that says China is now in the process of building or reviving coal equivalent to the EU's entire generating capacity.
    China is also financing around a quarter of all proposed coal plants outside its borders.
    Researchers say the surge is a major threat to the Paris climate targets.
    China's reliance on coal as a key step in developing the economy led to the fabled "one coal plant a week" building programme between 2006 and 2015.
    But the push had many negative consequences, choking the air with pollution in many Chinese cities and leading to huge overcapacity. Many of these plants were only able to run 50% of the time.
    In 2015, in an attempt to curb the growth, the national government tried to clamp down on new-build coal. However, it continued to allow provincial governments the freedom to issue permits for new coal plants. That move misfired badly.
    Local authorities subsequently permitted up to five times more plants than in any comparable period.
    According to Ted Nace, from coal researchers Global Energy Monitor, it was like a "snake swallowing a goat".
    "This goat that the snake swallowed is still moving through the snake, and it's coming out in the form of another 20% in the Chinese coal fleet on top of a fleet that was already over-built," Mr Nace added.
    The researchers say that through 2018 and up to June 2019, countries outside of China cut their coal power capacity by 8.1 gigawatts (GW). In the same period, China added 43GW, enough to power around 31 million homes.
    The authors say that right now the amount of coal power under construction or under suspension and likely to be revived is about 147.7GW, an amount that is almost the same as the entire coal generating capacity of the European Union (150GW).
    Compared to the rest of the world, China is building about 50% more coal plants than are under construction in all other countries combined.
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    Image copyright Getty Images
    Image caption A coal power plant in Jiangxi, China
    The country is on track to top 1,100GW of coal by 2020.
    The Chinese government has signalled that it wants to rely less on coal for the country's energy production and is making some headway cutting coal's share of total energy from 68% in 2012 to 59% in 2018.
    However, despite the share going down, absolute coal consumption has gone up in line with overall energy demand.
    What concerns the researchers is that within China, coal and electricity industry groups are pushing for an even bigger increase in the country's overall coal power capacity.
    "The thing we are super worried about is that industry has actually organised to keep the whole thing going," said Ted Nace.
    "There are three different powerful trade groups, proposing to increase the coal fleet by 40%. This is sheer madness at this point."
    China is also busy financing coal development outside the country, funding over a quarter of all the coal plants outside its borders in countries like South Africa, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
    Observers outside of China say they are concerned that by building or permitting these plants, the authorities are locking in a form of power generation that just doesn't make sense economically.
    "The economics will not be borne out," said Mark Lewis, head of climate change investment research at BNP Paribas Asset Management.
    "I would argue that almost all this new capacity that's being added will never make the economic return on which they have been premised. Those assets that are coming online now will have to be written down; they will be stranded assets essentially."
    The bigger question is how this new coal will affect the ability of the world to meet the targets set out in the Paris climate agreement.
    The researchers say that by 2030, China needs to reduce its coal power capacity by over 40% from current levels in order to meet the reductions required to hold global warming well below 2C.
    "China's proposed coal expansion is so far out of alignment with the Paris Agreement that it would put the necessary reductions in coal power out of reach, even if every other country were to completely eliminate its coal fleet," said co-author Christine Shearer of Global Energy Monitor.
    "Instead of expanding further, China needs to make significant reductions to its coal fleet over the coming decade."
    Global Energy Monitor was originally known as Coal Swarm and has received funding from environmental groups, including the ClimateWorks Foundation, the Rockefeller Family fund, the US National Resources Defence Council, the European Climate Foundation, among others.
     
    #43549
  10. bobmid

    bobmid Well-Known Member

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    Tory donations millions ahead of rival parties

    https://f7td5.app.goo.gl/MNzLq2

    Not bloody surprised with all the Russian backing! The Tory manifesto hasn't been published yet as they are still translating it into English!
     
    #43550
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  11. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    SCAMPUS UK
    Fears of mass election fraud after hundreds of students are illegally registered to vote as Tories call for probe
    Exclusive
    • 20 Nov 2019, 22:00
    • Updated: 20 Nov 2019, 21:49
    FEARS of mass election fraud were growing last night after worried parents said their student sons and daughters are being illegally registered without their knowledge all over the country.
    The Sun yesterday revealed that Labour-controlled Plymouth Council broke the law by registering 850 students without their permission.
    4
    More concerned parents have come forward to claim that their children were registered to vote without their knowledgeCredit: Rex Features
    YOU decide!
    Voting in the election opens in...
    20
    Days
    14
    Hours
    33
    Minutes
    2
    Seconds
    That included 247 17-year-olds, who are too young to vote.
    But it emerged tonight that the shady practice that Tories think is a bid to boost the leftwing vote could be taking place nationwide.
    Multiple reports were made to The Sun today by concerned parents.
    They said their offspring had been sent polling cards out of the blue at their addresses in university towns all over England, despite never requesting to vote there.
    They included Lancaster, Nottingham and Hendon in North London – each the location of close marginal fights between Labour and the Tories.
    Tory chairman James Cleverly last night called on the Electoral Commission to begin a nationwide probe to discover how widespread the illegal practice is.
    Only individuals can register themselves to vote under a law change in 2014 to halt voter fraud and intimidation.
    Mr Clevery told The Sun: “This raises extremely serious questions about the integrity of our system and apparent lack of checks and balances to ensure those registering to vote are doing so of their own accord.
    “I am calling on the authorities to launch a full investigation into this immediately.
    “Democracy begins and ends with trust in our electoral system. It is vital that we get to the bottom of these very concerning allegations, before that trust is eroded any further.”
    Some Tory candidates last night questioned whether Labour councils were working in cahoots with universities.
    Democracy begins and ends with trust in our electoral system. It is vital that we get to the bottom of these very concerning allegations, before that trust is eroded any further.
    James CleverlyConservative chairman
    It emerged that some unis and colleges have a standing arrangement with councils to pass on the names and details of all students living in their accommodation who qualify for council tax exemption.
    The secret registrations could also be a breach of data protection laws as a full name, date of birth, National Insurance number and a postal address are all needed to get on the electoral roll.
    TORIES LOSING SEATS
    Tory MP-turned-candidate David Morris, who looked into voter registration during a Commons probe, added: “This has been happening for some while. I am of the firm belief that there are irregularities going on all over university towns.
    “We have lost Conservative seats in 2017 because of it, and Canterbury was one of them.”
    One furious dad, Rob Kilby from Luton, revealed: “My daughter is at uni in London, never registered at her uni address but surprise surprise got a polling card delivered as well as one at our home address.
    “It’s an absolute disgrace. Her uni is in Hendon, which has a slim Conservative majority of only a 1,000...strange that.”
    The Electoral Commission said last night that they are “disappointed” with Plymouth City Council and are in contact with its officials to clean up their electoral register.
    But it has so far found no evidence of illegal mass registrations elsewhere.
    A commission spokesman said: “It’s vital that electors and those taking part in elections have confidence that the register is accurate and complete, and we will be working closely with the Council to fully understand and address the issues that have been identified.
     
    #43551
  12. Toby

    Toby GC's Life Coach

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    Someone might vote legally because they were automatically registered!?!?!? QUICK, FULL INVESTIGATION!!!!

    A report into Russian interference into our politics and elections? Nah, let's just leave that til after the election.

    :confused:
     
    #43552
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  13. bobmid

    bobmid Well-Known Member

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  14. bobmid

    bobmid Well-Known Member

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    It's no biggy that theres a report about russian interference. Just one of those things to some people. ****ing disgraceful and disgusting to a real patriot like me though!
     
    #43554
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  15. Toby

    Toby GC's Life Coach

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    The amount of reports the Tories are sitting on is a disgrace, if Labour were doing the same it'd be in the news 24/7...
     
    #43555
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  16. bobmid

    bobmid Well-Known Member

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    That's the right wing media for you! This whole farce of an election is corrupt as were probably the ones before, along with the referendum. All corrupt, built on lies and back stabbing and russian interference.
     
    #43556
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  17. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    sounds like a good idea

    No-one will have to sell their house to pay for social care under Tories, says Boris Johnson

    20 November 2019 • 10:30pm
    Boris Johnson has pledged that no-one will have to sell their house to pay for social care under a Conservative government, as he announced a £5 billion cash injection to ease the current funding crisis.
    The Prime Minister will “end the injustice” of people having to sell their family home by seeking a cross-party agreement on how to pay for the soaring costs of caring for the elderly and disabled.
    He said politicians must agree a solution that “stands the test of time”, in the same way that the principles of the NHS were agreed 70 years ago.
    It came as Mr Johnson unveiled an £11 billion personal tax giveaway that will put £464 back in the pocket of all but the very highest earners.
    The Prime...
     
    #43557
  18. Toby

    Toby GC's Life Coach

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    The Tories caused it ffs.
     
    #43558
  19. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    'Right to be offended' does not exist, judge says as court hears police record hate incidents even if there is no evidence

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    Former police officer Harry Miller outside the High Court in London Credit: Dominic Lipinski /PA
    20 November 2019 • 11:56pm
    The “right to be offended” does not exist, a judge has said, as the High Court hears that British police forces are recording hate incidents even if there is no evidence that they took place.
    Mr Justice Knowles made the remark on the first day of a landmark legal challenge against guidelines issued to police forces across the country on how to record "non-crime hate incidents".
    The College of Policing, the professional body which delivers training for all officers in England and Wales, issued their Hate Crime Operational Guidance (HCOG) in 2014, which states that a comment reported as hateful by a victim must be recorded “irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element”.
    Mr Justice Knowles expressed surprise at the rule, asking the court: “That doesn’t make sense to me. How can it be a hate incident if there is no evidence of the hate element?”
    He added: “We live in a pluralistic society where none of us have a right to be offended by something that they hear.
    “Freedom of expression laws are not there to protect statements such as ‘kittens are cute’ - but they are there to protect unpleasant things.
    “Its utility lies in exposing people to things that they do not want to hear.”
    The case against the College is being brought by Harry Miller, a 53-year-old man from Lincoln, who claims that the HCOG is unlawful because it infringes on his right to freedom of expression.
    Mr Miller, a married father of four, was investigated by Humberside Police earlier this year after a Twitter user complained that he shared a "transphobic limerick". Even though no crime was committed, his sharing of the limerick online was recorded as a "hate incident" and he was described as a “suspect” in police reports, the court heard.
    Mr Miller, who was previously an officer for the Humberside force, accused the police of "creating a chilling atmosphere for those who would express a gender critical position".
    "The idea that a law-abiding citizen can have their name recorded against a hate incident on a crime report when there was neither hate nor crime undermines principles of justice, free expression, democracy and common sense,” he said.
    A judicial review into the HCOG began yesterday (Weds), in which Mr Justice Knowles is set to rule on whether the rules are unlawful.
    In legal documents lodged before the High Court, lawyers representing the College argued that the guidelines are necessary to resolve social tensions that could escalate into crimes.
    “The role of British police today goes beyond bringing offenders to justice when they commit crimes,” the College argued in written submissions, adding that “police now take an active role in the resolution of conflict within and between communities.”
    Their defence comes amid rising knife crime violence across the country, with offences reaching an all time high in 2019. According to the ONS, the number of offences involving a knife or sharp instrument increased from 41,000 in June 2018 to just over 44,000 in the following 12 months.
    Ian Wise QC, acting on behalf of Mr Miller, argued that the presumption of a victim telling the truth in the College’s guidelines echoes the mistakes made by the Metropolitan Police during Operation Midland, when £2.5m of tax-payer money was spent investigating the false claims made by fantasist Carl Beech.
    “The Beech inquiry revealed a similar error that is apparent in the operation of this policy and the actions of the police by believing the so-called victim’s account,” Mr Wise told the court.
     
    #43559
  20. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    good they are going to fix it then
     
    #43560

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