This Tory peer says what she thinks, without holding back, when interviewed about the Home Secretary. As she was once Chairman of the Tory party, it shows how much they have moved away from the centre ground of UK politics.
There are times (plenty of them actually) when I simply cannot understand why people vote for the Tory party in elections. Earlier this week, a Councillor in Swansea publicly announced his belief that "all white men should have a black man or black woman as a slave" - and now here's one from Cardiff publicly declaring that "Welsh people have lower IQs". At least the residents of Cardiff had the good sense to not elect her, but I'd bet she still wonders why they didn't. https://nation.cymru/news/prominent...h-people-have-lower-iqs-in-social-media-post/
A comment from President Biden's address to the Irish Parliament. "The greatest peace dividend of the Good Friday Agreement is an entire generation of young people … whose hearts have been shaped not by grievances of the past, but by confidence that there are no checkpoints on their dreams. They are writing a new future of unlimited possibilities." What a shame that young people from the UK are now finding that their dreams of being free to work, live and experience life abroad, are now being stopped by the checkpoints that the government has imposed.
A not-very-flattering view of Britain from German news magazine Der Spiegel - probably not far from the truth though. https://archive.ph/NWLbv
Telling it like it is. I was in Blackpool for the weekend "Away Day" and the whole place is thoroughly depressing as written. The likes of murdoch, barclay, rothermere, farage, de piffle, etc., have a f*****g hell of a lot to answer for.
Unfortunately a realistic picture of some places in the UK. It also causes the hackles to rise (at least mine) because the German media loves nothing better than such stories from beyond Germany's borders - the implication being that here everything is ok. They find (admittedly) true articles like this more usefull than to concentrate on getting their own house in order - it doesn't make good reading for the German public to know that in one of their richest, most successfull cities (Hamburg) there live 48,000 millionaires (and more than a few billionaires) yet one in four pensioners there can't live from their pensions and one in five children live under the poverty line. The pictures shown in the article could have been taken in many other European centres. The main diference between Germany and the UK is the decentralization here - from public expenditure in Germany only 26% comes from Berlin, the rest is done at the state level. I pay my taxes to the state capital of NRW (ie. Düsseldorf) and not to Berlin. In contrast most public spending in the UK comes directly from Westminster. Britain is one of the most centralized countries Worldwide with little or none of the regional power which other countries have. Nonetheless the German media loves to report things live this - they do the same about poverty in the USA, corruption in Italy, and lack of democracy almost anywhere other than in Germany - the assumption being that they live in the most egalitarian, fairest, most democratic country on this planet (none of which is true by the way).
I suppose this was a risk faced by all NHS workers during the pandemic, but to answer the government’s plea for help and ‘do your bit in hospitals’, catch long Covid due to a lack of PPE thanks to government greed and incompetence, only to be thanked with a few claps on a Thursday night and the sack is utterly shameful. Being left with a study debt of £100K and then finding out that the UK government are still paying over £0.5million a day storage for unusable PPE probably doesn’t help the doctor’s mood either. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1647948265562726405.html
My sister, the Diagnostic Nurse, has had Covid twice and does the work of a Junior Doctor without the remuneration of course. She voted to strike again, I fully support her. My other sister, the GP, has had Covid 5 times I found out on Friday at a family get together. The complete and utter contempt I have for the past 13 years of tory "government" continues to fathom new depths with each passing day.
I found this interesting, and compared Germany to France. Financially, regional spending is certainly more under the control of the regions than it is in the UK. It is not just money though. Politically there is a much broader spread of powers, whereas in the UK government is taking more away from the people, and their elected members of Parliament. Far too much is now decided by just a few Ministers, with no debate in Westminster. We have seen the reaction of the French population over the pension reforms. One part of me thinks that people should get out and protest, as the private pension is not really a normality here, with the government traditionally being the pension provider, but it is well known that there will not be enough available to maintain a reasonable, not lavish, standard of living in the years ahead. In my mind, the voting system in the UK is obsolete and creates a situation where people can vote at all elections, yet never get a candidate they want elected because they live in a "safe seat". PR can create problems, but there are ways around this, if you take Holland as an example. It expands the government rather than leave power in the hands of a few, left or right. Just to go back to the original part of cologne's post, there is not a lot of comment here about how others choose to be governed, but there have been articles that show how Brexit has driven the UK economy down. As with most such articles, this is all fact based story, with lots of facts and figures.
My daughter told me that she had two of the people she worked with die as a result of Covid, and she has been running still to keep up because of others being too ill to go to work in the hospital. She caught it once, not too badly, but her feelings about the way the nurses are being treated doesn't allow me to repeat them here.
The history of Germany has been totally different from the UK Frenchie in that the country didn't exist as a separate country called Germany until the time of Bismark - just a collection of principalities and parts of the Holy Roman Empire. As a result it is decentralized by nature - there was no connection between eg. Berlin, Munich and Cologne until unification in 1878. For this reason cities like Hamburg, Frankfurt, Cologne, Munich etc. had developed into regional powerhouses long before Germany, as an entity, existed. The only person who ever tried to rule Germany as a centralized entity was Hitler. In contrast England has been 'looking up to London' for all major initiatives, and as the source of all government, culture and history for the last thousand years.
Of course France was a collection of regional powers, and it took centuries before there was even an official language. So today we see change as people in the UK and NI have had enough of rule from London. Scotland, Wales in increasing numbers, seek independence, and NI is now closer to reunification than it has been for a century.
Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister, when due in Parliament, gets his bike out and cycles there alone from his home. The latest Prime Minister of the UK prefers a major security presence when he makes a similar journey.
"The energy regulator is considering letting suppliers charge households an average of £30 a year to recoup a forecast rise in unpaid bills following curbs on prepayment meter installations." As far as I'm aware, UK energy suppliers are still making a fortune thanks to the ridiculous prices they charge their customers - should those customers really be charged extra so that profits or shareholders' dividends are protected? https://archive.is/xFylo#selection-923.0-923.189
Energy and water should both be not for profit, but for the nation. Reinvestment in infrastructure or user rebates. Ditto public transport. Ditto heavy industry such as steel, gas, and coal. Pre-thatcher levels of social housing with fair rent surplus going back into the infrastructure. Properly funded NHS. Odd how tory politicians want to go back to the "good old days" without paying the "good old days" taxes. The country is broken and the greedy bastards broke it.
And here they are - the most ridiculous government in the history of governments. Having caused the problem of excessive waiting times due to passport checks in the first place by leaving the EU, it now wants to fix the problem, not by re-joining the EU, but by pleading for a 'special deal'. The prime minister's spokesman said: "We will always want to find ways to minimise unnecessary waiting times." Perhaps they should have put more thought into the consequences of leaving - then there wouldn't be any unnecessary waiting times to minimise at all. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/en...aused-by-brexit-chaos_uk_64479de4e4b03c1b88c9 0dd1
