General Election 2019

Sorry Scully - less consumption means less production which means less growth. We must learn to be able to contemplate the idea of the post growth society - what is needed is not more growth. or production, but better sharing of what we have. Green politics are, automatically, left of centre - there is no way that it could be otherwise.

 

Another day, another lie...

 

Just because Ministers are idiots, is it right that they should take the population to be idiots to?

 

It takes a lot to get an honest answer out of one of them, they generally seem to just keep on repeating lies until they think it's been done enough. I do wonder why Diane Abbott gets vilified by some on here because she messed up some maths once on an interview, yet other MPs never get the same treatment? More dog-whistle politics by the same culprits...

 

Nationalisation of public services could save £13billion every year
Public ownership of rail, water, energy, buses, Royal Mail, broadband and the NHS would save the UK nearly £13billion every year, a study has found. Research based on studies by Greenwich University in south east London, the Transport for Quality of Life and the Centre for Health and the Public Interest, has helped the group pinpoint savings to pay for a “public services upgrade.”

The savings are calculated by comparing the current cost of dividends and interest paid by the private companies with the cost of refinancing the current equity and debt with debt raised by issuing government bonds. Professor David Hall, Director of the Public Services International Research Unit (PSIR) at Greenwich University, said: “Based on intensive empirical research, this paper shows that public ownership of utilities would result in annual savings of just under £8billion – so nationalisation would pay for itself in less than seven years.

“Nationalisation would cost less than £50billion if shareholders are compensated for the amount they have actually invested, rather than costing the country nearly £200billion as claimed by the CBI last month. UK law does not require that they be paid the ‘market value’, and it is up to parliament to decide on a case by case basis the appropriate amount of compensation.”

 

I don't think the population are idiots Frenchie, but I think the majority of them are non political. I have taken part in election campaigns in both the UK and in Germany and they have one thing in common, namely that the majority do not read manifestoes - that being the case, short snappy slogans and soundbites are the call of the day. So many voters will vote on one, or, at the most, a couple of issues - if all voters were asked to actually decide their votes on a policy for policy basis (as in the questionnaire which some of us have done on here) then results could turn out very differently. So the question is - how do people decide which way to vote ? Unfortunately reading all of the manifestoes and researching all of the issues leads to only one vote - which is promptly cancelled out by the vote of someone who decided as the result of what someone said in the pub. Corbyn's cardinal mistake was in mistrusting all journalists from day one of his holding office, and without a good relationship to the media you have little chance in politics.

 

The problem is Toby that the electorate do not read 'intensive empirical research', nor does the media report it. The other problem is that if the benefits only appear after 7 years, whereas the costs are immediate, this does not fit well into one electoral term !

 

Oh I agree, if it's not a 3 word slogan then people won't register with it...

I've lost hope for this election now. Even the BBC, who are meant to be impartial, have gone full North Korea on this election. I've lost track of all the sneaky underhand tactics they've used over the last couple of weeks, from video editing to posting Labour's manifesto with 'how much will all this cost' comments, yet the Tories one just gets plastered all over without being questioned (like the extra nurses, the hospitals, the rewriting of the HRA, the house building, etc...)

 

The difference is the promised Labour spend is massively more. The WASPI promise is completely un-costed, just add it to the nation's debt willy nilly, French style. Simply let our grandchildren suffer the consequences.

 

Selectively not paying attention. Again.

 

Tony Blair has today launched an attack on the Marxist-Lenin wing now running the Labour Party saying a Labour government would pose a risk to the UK if given a majority. This follows Lord Blunkett warned the party is facing 'irrevelance, unless there is a re-think of the Corbyn project'.

Not much confidence there.

 

I see Project Fear is in full swing, weird that experts are to be trusted again...

 

I noticed an article in the Sunday Times yesterday about the promises made by the current government in their last manifesto to keep the numbers in the army above 82,000 soldiers. It is a promise that hasn't been kept as the numbers are already well below that. The article went on to describe the fact that there is not enough money in the budget to float our second aircraft carrier that is still under construction. The MOD is looking at either leasing it to another country, or asking for other countries to provide vessels to sail with and protect it.
So more promises broken in only a couple of years, yet we are asked to believe that it will be different in the future. Why should we believe?

 

I would agree, consume less. Green politics is different to the UK Green Party. Green politics largely comes from pressure groups such as Greenpeace and other environmental charities such as marine conservation. We occasionally do beach clean ups and whilst we are only scratching the surface of the problem, what we collect is analysed and combined with other clean ups and this is used to take polluters to task and to pressurise the government to do something. These clean ups directly led to the banning of single use plastics and plastic bottle deposits are not far away.

 

we must not forget that business exploits the Earths resources because us humans buy the stuff they make (ok I accept that there is a lot of marketing coersion going on). We are the idiots cos we buy all this stuff.

 

Don't lose hope, demand more and more ultra left wing policies, blame the media and keep the Marx twins in place till 2030, this will ensure the natural party of government, the Tories, will stay in power for years.

 

I've just been phoned up by chance by Populus doing a political poll. One of the questions was how did I think Corbyn was doing as a party leader. I said he was doing a fantastic job in making his party unelectable, not the answer he was looking for.
I qualified to say if I was a Labour supporter I would say he was terrible.

I never do surveys but quite enjoyed this one.

 

Marketing is all about trying to convince people that they need things, which they, in fact, don't need - and about turning yesterday's luxury into today's necessity - they need a certain dumbing down of the population in order to do this. The more stupid people become the better it is for capitalism. The main aim being to turn citizens into consumers.

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...on-article-50-second-referendum-a9217656.html

And here we have it, the slow transformation of the UK into a dictatorship.

Courts? Pah, they have too much power, the PM knows best.

 

The Uk's chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, has devastatingly entered the general election fray by accusing Corbyn of allowing the 'poison of anti-Semitism to take root in the Labour Party'. He warned against voting Labour saying 'the very soul of our nation is at stake'. He stated 'Labour could no longer claim to the party of diversity, equality and anti racism'.

This view has been endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury this morning, what a dreadful state Labour is currently in.

Both religious leaders have been subjected to vicious comments on social media from the Corbynistas.