Off Topic Politics Thread

Ha! Ha! You can't fecking well wind me up you cnut!

 

Don’t rise to it. That is a warning.

 

Point taken, perhaps I should have blued it, that expression usually taken as tongue in cheeks.

 

Even if it was tongue in cheek, using such language (deliberate spelling mistake notwithstanding) towards another member is ill advised. Can easily be misinterpreted and can just escalate matters further.

 

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In fairness to Rishi, he was trying to show he had 'hardship' when he was younger, but failed miserably by using Sky as an example, rather than food lol.

What he was referencing is the generalisation that some people that can't afford food, but they do seem to have 65" flat screen TVs, 40 ***s a day as well as a fridge full of beer.

This is a gross generalisation and out of 10,000 people that cant afford basic food, maybe 1 person lives this way and the press lap it up.

 

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Benefit scroungers vs corporation tax dodgers.

 

I will find the link somewhere, but a study a few years ago showed that if no one cheated on benefits, dodged tax (ie cash in hand), dodged corp tax, etc, you could get the same Tax revenue from one rate of tax of around 5% (I think...it may have been 8%) for everyone. Quite mind-blowing.

 

It would also be interesting to know the relative values of the different dodges

Bearing in mind that there are two different kinds of benefit fraud, one a dodgy claimant, the other organised crime
And two different kinds of dodged tax, one one man band cash-in-hand, the other offshore and corporate

 

Yep I am looking for the info now,

As an aside, I think that a lot lower taxes, coupled with a lot higher penalties for avoiding it would actually increase the tax revenue too. It would stop cash in hand jabs as the risk isn’t worth the reward and would stop corporations too for the same reason. Or maybe I overestimate how greedy some people are.

 

This is not true at all and yes I logged back in solely to address this statement.

Favourite amongst Tory members on Conservative home polling was Kemi Badnoch until the MPs got rid of her, instead railing behind their political machinations to present us with Rishi and Truss. Truss won through because the batshit crazy side of the membership somehow thought she was the great conservative hope while many like myself did not vote at all, in fact the day Badenoch was eliminated I cancelled my membership!

To try and present the media narrative that the membership voted for whitey (indeed you state it is fact) because they don't like Brownie just does not stack up when Kemi Badenoch was in fact the favoured choice of the membership until her elimination She began second to Mordaunt before topping the polls after hustings and remained top until the MPs got rid of her.! And yes I was on that panel and I would have voted for her as well if she had been in the final 2:


The stitch up that is the Tory leadership process is to blame there! Rishi was way behind Truss all the way, not because "he's brown" but because he is vacuous and more of the same. My second choice would probably have been Mordaunt but then there was not a lot of choice (yes that huge majority yet not much choice of PM material.)

Continuing this media narrative of Tory members weren't going to vote for someone with Brown skin is listening to people who want that to be true ignoring the reality that Kemi Badenoch would have beaten both Sunak and Truss if they had a leadership election process and is just not true! Sunak was nowhere near winning that from the start, not because he has Indian heritage but because he is him! Stands for nothing, technocratic method man, with no ideas of his own that is not a leader at all! And I think the past couple of weeks should pretty much tell you that assessment of the man is pretty accurate.

And no I am not voting Tory this time round. I probably will not vote at all seeing as no vote counts anymore with everything decided by technocrats and corporates (and the lenders we borrow from) with politicians merely tinkerers of those set policies whose only decisions to make is where to spend the money they borrow from the rich while saddling us all with much more debt to paid off in the future and authorising the interest payments to the paymasters.

I should add (which should fuel your contempt for the batshit crazy side of the Tory membership) that if Priti Patel had
been there, they would have all gone for her rather than Truss and that kinda blows the "Indian Heritage" narrative out of the water entirely!

 

Good to see you back Imps. Should stick around.

 

Thank you for the welcome but I have no wish to get back into so much arguing over my experience / worldview anecdotal or backed by "fact" angainst someone else's different experiences/worldview different facts, and I fell out of love with football again before Covid and Covid then finished me off entirely I am juust sounding off mainly beccause of the state of our politics and how it is driven by narrative / media / alternative facts.

TBH I think there are far too many (as the poster above) that are too willing to believe narratives because they want it to be true or back up their existing beliefs.

The reality is I am quite willing to accept that there is a substantial part of the party membership that is completely bonkers. there is an element of racism in there too just as there is in every other party despite the way things are portrayed.

But just looking at the membership (not MPs) panel's polling through that leadership election should be showing you clearly that firstly the membership polled all the women at the top! It then showed that far from not liking brown faces, they polled a brown face top from poll 2 onward until she was eliminated by the MPs and you only have to read through the comments on Conservative Home for a long time before that election to see that the bokers lot went from being 100% Priti Patel supporters to Liz Truss when Priti did not stand. Strange but true. Priti was and still is a favourite of the bonkers side of the membership"despite" her Indian heritage!

My main annoyance is the way politics is now where none of them that could get the job have a clue giving us the 2 charsimaless, non entity robots of Sunak and Starmer! 2 politicians who caould only ever stand a chance of winning an election if the other side was in collapse! and all the while we now have Farage chipping back in again when his issue should have been dead and buried.

Then sat behind these 2 are groups of people who do not do politics at all, not for the people at least. It is all about grandstanding, calling the other side out, whataboutery while in real terms their "changes" to policy make no difference and are not supposed to make a difference because it is not them that decide what will happen! They are merely allowed to present it as if they have changed something when they are told from up on high what they should do!

Yes I am still anti globalist, anti big corp and with the way things are I am most definitely a political anarchist.........in a period now where there is no-one to vote for for any semblence of veering of that chosen path. Its a pity Corbyn had not got in and potentially hit the big red reset button but I daresay the reaction would have been the same as Truss where if you don't bow down to the big boys then you are out!

Maybe the BoE and markets would have dumped a huge pile of debt to get rid of him too! There's nothing like utilising some market panic about some crazy policies and making sure you double it down to make sure you get your man (or woman.)

 

Wow. I mean, it's only one poll, but still... wow.

 

And yet they'll probably only get 1/2 seats absolute max.

Can't stand Farage and what he stands for but our politics system is so broken and I do agree with him on PR. I'd probably even vote if such a system existed.

 

Governments have always spent more than they had. Look how rarely we have a cash surplus!

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The national debt right now is high because it follows the financial crash of 2009 and the pandemic. In fact, public sector debt right now is 97.6%. That is a lot!

However, borrowing is actually incredibly cheap right now. We are repaying national debt at around 4% GDP as the low interest rates paid on government bonds are not massively difficult to cope with. This is like getting a credit card with a low interest rate and maxing it out. As long as we keep servicing the debt, we are fine. But if we can’t pay… well, we sell more bonds.

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Debt is only set to go up. There are two ways to fix this. One is to cut cut cut - austerity politics. The other is grow grow grow - which can mean more borrowing in the short term.

In the 1920s we tried austerity. Out economy flatlined and debt was not reduced. In the 2010s we tried it again. Same result. In the 1940s we tried spending our way out of it. It worked.

So… you know… don’t be scared of debt. Just grow the economy and service the debt. Don’t shrink our economy by cutting services for the poor.

 

Depends how low the Tories go. A few more polls like this and you might see a lot of people switch allegiance.

I'm not really a fan of PR. I think political parties act as a filtering system and these days you end up with career politicians who openly admit they say whatever they're told to say instead of what they actually think. PR would just entrench the power of the parties. I'd rather see political parties banned so we could go back to how the system is meant to work - pick good local people to represent your area. No chance of it ever happening though.

 

I'm not scared of debt at all however with low growth which shows no signs across Europe of recovering any time soon the deficit will grow faster than GDP growth and at some point the interest will become overbearing!

And I do not accept that "we tried austerity in the 2010s" The reality is the IMF and EU criticised Osborne for not being Austere enough in fact they were very vocal about it and we still kept borrowing more! That isn't austerity! then the IMF backtracked when the UK started growing faster than the rest of the EU in that period but at no point did we do any kind of real austerity no matter the narrative that was presented and all the big world mouthbox setups were critical of us not following their wishes and cutting much much heavier!

And if borrowing is nothing to worry about (playing devil's advocate) why was Gordon Brown so proud of wiping out the national debt after following Tory spending plans in the first 2 years before then going on a binge spending spree on PFI instead of the government borrowing and building that infrastructure themselves on those favourable rates instead of the crippling PFI deals they made to benefit their pals up the chain?

 

While not a fan of Truss at all nor her mad budget people should not fall hook line and sinker that it was all her that crashed the markets! BofE and their LDI blindness should take the majority of the blame, in fact before that mini budget people were warning of a crash due to the BoE actions/inactions! But timings a bitch and good riddance. I'm not gonna cry over Truss being ousted even if the blame mostly laid elsewhere.

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/december-january-2023/how-the-bank-broke-the-government/

The reason no-one hgas really recovered (despite austerity) since 2008 and why we are all feeling the pinch despite all that "austerity" is mainly down to the reliance on policy of Brrrrr

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