Off Topic Politics Thread

It's much more simple than the short comings of the electorate. We have an electoral system that is inherently biased towards the Tories. There is a Tiry vote and an anti Tory vote and the latter is split. If you look at Labour's polling and add that to the LD's it's virtually the same as 2017. Instead of a 40/8 split we have 33/15. Of course we don't know the exact effect that will have. There are rumours of IDS in trouble in Chingford and there are several other seats on a knife edge. Well we only have 83 hours until we find out.

 

I would guess that millions of people just cast a glance at a newspaper headline on a paper stand and maybe occasionally catch the news headlines.

This, from your post, is why I always believe that we get the government that the media wants and not what the country actually needs.
And it is likely to get worse, since the i newspaper has been taken over by the Mail, enlarging the influence of right wing media to around 80%, iirc, of the written media.

The group that owns the Mirror, now also owns the Express, so it would be good if they could influence a kinder style of reporting, away from the right.

 

Oh and you begrudge her that pension then do you?.........Maybe she's right you shouldn't talk about certain subjects.............

 

no I ****ing don't!

 

What talk about certain subjects??

 

I can't read that in StSerb's post Beds. What I note is the pension is from what was a state owned company.

 

I realize you're being a WUM but in case you just don't understand I'll explain it again. My mother has a nice pension from a state owned company but she won't vote for Corbyn whos Labour Party gave her that pension. That's it. It's the politics thread. It has nothing to do with begrudging her her pension.

 

I just thought you were thinking because it used to be a state owned company she didn’t deserve it. Baring in mind she would have had to personally contribute.

 

That is straight out of the Tory black book Beddy. SiS was saying no such thing.

Edit: For the record, I am retired and living on my NHS pension, which is one of the reasons I stayed loyal to the greatest healthcare organisation on this planet for more than 38 years, despite many chances to join the private sector for higher pay. When I joined in 1975 (under a Labour government) I was assured that job security and the eventual pension was worth the slightly lower pay structure than the Scientific Civil Service. The word “privatisation” hadn’t been invented, computerisation was a brand-new thing, and the successive, destructive, endless series of reorganisations hadn’t begun.
One of the reasons I left on the stroke of my 60th birthday was because the employee contribution to the pension went up from 6% to 9%, which essentially meant I would gain nothing from serving the full 40 years. I was lucky: those who started post-1995 will have to work until they’re 68 or more to collect their pension, with the prospect of that going up to 75 if the Tories are returned. Can anyone imagine a 75 year old Healthcare Assistant working a 12 hour night shift on a busy ward, before calling in at the food bank to find something to keep her on her feet?

Anyone who votes Tory in this election is either a fool or a sociopath.

 

Do I take it you think I’ll vote for the Tories then???

 

Beddy, you strike me as a bright enough guy, but one thing I just don't get is why you sometimes make comments that seem designed to wind people up and then ask questions that are likely to result in replies you really don't want to hear.

It's like you are holding a stick out to people and asking them to pull it, and sooner or later someone is going to pull it a lot harder than you can cope with so the end result is either you have to let go of it, or you fall flat on your face if you don't.

Give it up fella. It doesn't do any good.

 

You forgot deluded and gullible.

 

This is a tiny snapshot of a man who thinks he should be the head of state .....

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50717606

God help us.

 

I don’t know if anyone has seen this undercover report, from 2016, that exposes the influence Israel has been exerting on British politics. It is in four parts.
If the example of anti Semitic speech, used in the third part, is anything to go on then, as a reporter says, they are really scraping the bottom of the barrel to create an impression of anti Semitism within the Labour Party. Joan Ryan MP, should be embarrassed by the part she played in a woman being investigated for anti semitism.
In the fourth episode, there are clear links to MPs being given questions to be asked at PMQ!!

The four episodes run for about 1hr 45mins, but worth a look. To think we are worrying about Russian influence. What are we like.

 

Is it too late to vote Ralph?

 

Oh for crying out loud no, but the form your argument with SiS took was very much the sort of thing the Tories constantly say. I know you deny reading the Express or the Sun or papers like that but sometimes it appears you do.

 

I like Barry Gardiner.

 

Over the last few weeks I have been seriously contemplating cancelling my subscription to the Times as it continues to push Tory propaganda without challenging the lies and deceit. Anything that challenges Johnson’s integrity gets pushed to inside the front cover and virtually hidden. Anything that provides the slightest criticism of Corbyn gets splashed over the front page and several more inside. I may revise my decision having read this piece by Clare Foges in today’s edition. It is the most sensible thing I have read in the paper for months. It is quite lengthy but worth every minute of your time reading it.

Anyone looking to be cheered by a magisterial prime ministerial performance should google “Thatcher jump”. In a TV interview from 1995, the former PM was asked by her Swedish host to play along with the show’s signature gimmick, “stand up and do a jump in the air”. Cue a look from the Lady that would have frozen the molten seas of hell. “I shouldn’t dream of doing that. Why should I? . . . I made great leaps forward, not little jumps in studios.” Thatcher gave interviews in order to be asked tough questions and to rise to them. At her last prime minister’s questions, amid the hail of parliamentary arrows, she roared: “I’m enjoying this!” Scrutiny was welcome because she had a record she was proud to defend, ideals she was passionate about expounding, a vision she relished setting out.

Cut to 2019 and our current prime minister continues to dodge an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Neil. Johnson’s schedule did, however, have room for a chat on This Morning in which he was asked about his description of burka-wearing women as “letterboxes”. This is hardly dangerous territory. Johnson’s old writings have been exhumed too many times for them to move the needle of public opinion now. Those who loathe him for calling gay people “bum-boys” or Africans “piccaninnies” will always do so; those who think such comments are evidence of his colourful, admirably non-PC character will continue to do so.

In contrast, the Neil interview promised a proper dig beneath the platitudes. No politician anticipates these encounters with a song in their heart. As Corbyn, Sturgeon, Swinson and Farage have found, the veteran knows his detail. He will not be fobbed off with answers that begin “Let me be clear” and which proceed to be anything but. Johnson is, in Thatcher speak, “frit”. But as Neil said to viewers, “the prime minister of our nation will, at times, have to stand up to President Trump, President Putin, President Xi of China. So it was surely not expecting too much that he spend half an hour standing up to me.”

A lot of things we huff and puff about in politics don’t really matter in the end. But this does matter, because it betrays something deeply troubling: the Conservative Party’s disdain for the voters. “Disdain” might sound strong but let us view it through the lens of its opposite: respect. When you respect people you treat them at least as equals. You credit them with intelligence. You seek to be open with them, to earn their respect in turn. During this campaign the Conservatives have displayed no such respect for the electorate. Instead they are scornful of scrutiny, complacent about what they need to prove in order to govern. They think that repeating the same phrases endlessly is all the detail we deserve. They are prepared to lay out the bare minimum of policy and no more. In short, they patronise us as idiots, polling booth fodder, Pavlov’s dogs who will leap to vote Tory at the sniff of a tax cut.

Johnson’s refusal to grace Neil’s studio is just one example of this disdain playing out. See also: the formulaic campaign; the lack of any meaningful new ideas in the manifesto; the desperate reliance on bogeyman Corbyn as a reason to vote Tory. This is a party coasting back into government on autopilot, treating the voters as dim, gullible, easily biddable.

The emptiness of the manifesto is disdainful. Volumes are spoken by the thinness of this one. A manifesto is meant to be the blueprint for national transformation, yet one of its more eye-catching policies is to increase the budget for mending potholes. Yes, it is full of big spending commitments — 50,000 more nurses, 40 new hospitals — but beyond pledges to shovel billions more into the ever-hungry maw of public services, where is the thinking about how to re-organise the state to address the overwhelming issues of our age: automation and its challenge to work; our ageing population and the pressures on social care? Where is the imaginative effort? Where is the coherent plan for the next ten or 20 years? It seems the party is so confident that voters will have nowhere else to go that it doesn’t need to bother.

The disdain is there, too, in the performances of those sent out to make the government’s case. They have been given scripts which they read dutifully, no matter the intervention of facts or common sense. One of the most painful I witnessed was outgoing MP Nicky Morgan, sent on breakfast TV to sell the policy of 50,000 more nurses. As the presenters pointed out, the inclusion of 18,500 existing nurses made the 50,000 figure disingenuous. No, Morgan maintained, these would be 50,000 more nurses, an assertion that bent both maths and English. Likewise, the announcement of 40 new hospitals is so heavily caveated (only six are being built now; the rest is seed funding to plan for upgrades down the line) that it takes people for fools. We expect Labour to give us fantasy numbers on hospitals and nurses, not the Conservatives. Surely they can see that such guff patronises the voters, treats us with disdain?

The Conservatives have calculated that this dull, safety-first, ideas-free campaign will do because come polling day millions of voters feel there is no other conceivable box to tick and because “getting Brexit done” is all that matters to the majority of them. They’re probably right but it’s a dispiriting approach.

I don’t want Corbyn anywhere near No 10: his economic ideas are irresponsible, his views on foreign policy dangerous. I don’t want Farage near power; whether he means to or not, he summons ugly spirits in our country. I don’t want Sturgeon in the ascendant; I dearly want the United Kingdom to hold. But at least their politics are animated by genuine beliefs which shape their ideas and policies. These very different politicians have their unshakeable positions which they try to persuade people to get behind. That is very different from focus-grouping a load of slogans and repeating them ad nauseam.

Some Tories will greet all this with a shrug. The goal is to keep Corbyn out of power and get Britain out of the EU and they may believe that in reaching that end all means are justified, whether dodging real scrutiny or offering up the blandest of manifestos. I’m sure they are correct and that none of these things will matter much on polling day. But there may be some who, after the Neil no-show, find they have other things to do this Thursday. After all, if Johnson can’t be bothered to turn up for them, why should they bother to turn out for him?

 

Corbyn has just been speaking to a massive crowd on College Green in Bristol. Anyone who tells you he is unpopular is talking out their arse:
https://skwawkbox.org/2019/12/09/br...byn-in-bristol-has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed/

 

Don't kid yourself. I recall an election meeting in 1983 when Michael Foot received a rapturous welcome at a meeting in my constituency. Remember how that ended? Well in 75 hours we will find out.