Off Topic Politics Thread

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Whiteley Saint said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38608825
Labour MP Tristram Hunt is quitting as an MP to become the director of London's Victoria and Albert Museum, triggering a by-election.

This could be a tricky one for Labour. UKIP are waiting in the wings - does anyone actually know what UKIP now stands for (policy wise that is)?
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Agree it could be tricky for Labour. A loss could mean big trouble for Corbyn.

Seeing as Stoke voted 70-30 in favour of leaving the EU I imagine that (barring significant local issues - I don't know if there are any) UKIP will stick to their main arguments - that most of the House of Commons don't want to leave the EU, that people voting to leave the EU wanted to take back control of laws and immigration and the only way to do that is to leave the single market, that they are the only party that can be trusted on the topic of the EU and that electing a UKIP MP would send a clear message to the government and House of Commons and make sure the public aren't betrayed again by the liberal, metropolitan elite.
 
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Whiteley Saint said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38608825
Labour MP Tristram Hunt is quitting as an MP to become the director of London's Victoria and Albert Museum, triggering a by-election.

This could be a tricky one for Labour. UKIP are waiting in the wings - does anyone actually know what UKIP now stands for (policy wise that is)?
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I think they are just hoping to mobilise the Working Class Racist vote, though to what end, and how big that is anyway, is anybody's guess.
 
The Ides of March said:
Still can't see anything other than a comfortable Labour victory.
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I hope you're right but I don't know. Google "post industrial wasteland" on Images and you'll get pictures of Stoke on Trent. My ex wife is from there, it is one bleak place, and I am guessing a lot of it's inhabitants feel pretty let down by Labour after the Blair years. Plus, people there are quite parochial and "little England" in their outlook (Being a Londoner meant I was always considered a foreigner). And the region returned a massive Brexit vote. A perfect storm for Labour in one of it's former heartlands, I would say.

Stoke is very much the sort of place Labour needs to reconnect with, but it won't be easy. The old Trade Unions and Non-Conformist Christian Churches that were once at the heart of the Labour movement have gone now too, making the ties that bind the old industrial towns to Labour that much weaker.

If Stoke were in the US, they'd have voted Trump imo. And Brexit proves that UK citizens are just as susceptible to ill informed populist demagoguery as our American cousins.
 
Forget the subject matter and forget whether you agree with the lady or not, why on earth do media outlets even entertain Katie Hopkins? She is just a spiteful bitch and a nasty person. She should be kept away from the public domain.
 
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The Ides of March said:
I noticed that Hopkins writes for the Mail. She is in good company there as Richard Littlejohn also writes for them. Two peas in a pod come to mind!!
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And Yasmin Alibah Brown who after years of giving it the big "Daily Mail is a disgusting rag" is taking their money now the Independent is gone.

I don't read it and don't like Hopkins either but it is what it is. A newspaper that online is like all the rest. Lots of celeb stuff for clickbait and then plenty more opinionated stuff. Offline none of the papers are taken that seriously by anyone other than those who think people actually read newspapers these days for anything other than filling in their work break time.

And no, even Stoke would not vote for Trump, however they would very likely vote against Hillary.
 
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Wanted!! A PM for the UK!! I nominate none other than Mariano Rajoy!!! He would be a huge step up in class from the t****** we have both in Government and opposition, plus unlike our Conservatives, the Spanish Conservatives are very much europhile in their outlook. Our Government could do worse than embrace Spanish Conservtive policy regarding the EU. It is called embrace it!!
 
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The Ides of March said:
Wanted!! A PM for the UK!! I nominate none other than Mariano Rajoy!!! He would be a huge step up in class from the t****** we have both in Government and opposition, plus unlike our Conservatives, the Spanish Conservatives are very much europhile in their outlook. Our Government could do worse than embrace Spanish Conservtive policy regarding the EU. It is called embrace it!!
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Nope We need out of the EU. It won't reform and is nothing more than a corporate shill body. Like the Davos lot who are meeting up yet again to discuss how the world should be run this month while being the very people that are the problem in the first place. I guess Mr Sorrell will be all over the news this month telling us how the world needs to stick together meaning continue their trickle up mantras.

And then we have the leaks from the EU (We will be giving the UK a hard time) that their chief negotiator is saying to EU chiefs that they must work out how to maintain access to London in their deals.....

Then we hear that although in public we can't negotiate trade deals until we've left that the US are already working on a trade deal for us and looking to have it ready to go the day we leave.

One thing though with Rajoy. At least when he announced spending cuts he did them, while our government and the EU just utilised cuts to divert even more money into the "trickle up" syphon.

All this talk of demagoguery may be true about someone like Trump. I don't know but it's way off the mark on Farage and with all of them public scrutiny is now much more focused on how what they say compares to what they actually do. May, Trump, Farage/Nuttall.......all of them are being watched by the very people you want to think are turkeys voting for Christmas. Difference is that these turkeys will cancel Christmas if their promises turn into BS because then they will just be more of the same.
 
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Interesting (and in my opinion reasonably sensible) comments on free movement of people from the Dutch deputy prime minister this week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38613027

I'll be surprised if anything comes of it though. As he said about Brexit, you need an agreement that suits all the nations of the EU and I can see the eastern european countries opposing anything like that. Also hard to see Juncker - the man who blocked EU curbs on tax avoidance by multinationals - pushing this agenda.
 
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Puck said:
Interesting (and in my opinion reasonably sensible) comments on free movement of people from the Dutch deputy prime minister this week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38613027

I'll be surprised if anything comes of it though. As he said about Brexit, you need an agreement that suits all the nations of the EU and I can see the eastern european countries opposing anything like that. Also hard to see Juncker - the man who blocked EU curbs on tax avoidance by multinationals - pushing this agenda.
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The problem there though is that it has already happened. Jobs that were above the NMW that aren't now are not going to go back up. The businesses have already done their work there so it isn't really about "equal pay for equal workers" because the pay has already gone down. The government love to hide behind the NMW as making sure that wages aren't undercut but it is a fact that all the low paid jobs have reduced to NMW over the past decade when pre 2004 they had to pay more because of the market conditions back then. They had to pay more than the NMW to get people to do that work. Now they don't yet they try and spin it as people thinking they are above that kind of work. They probably thought they were above that kind of work back then but they were prepared to do it for the wage offered back then which would in my case have been over £1 higher than NMW per hour and with the overtime rates as they were back then you are looking in real terms at those jobs now being £100 a week less than they were when you use the BofE inflation calculator to equate that 2004 wage to 2015!

You have to look at who is leading the EU. The head is the former Luxembourg PM. Luxembourg is the key tax haven that a lot of the corporations are using and the LuxLeaks which came out days after he became the President of the EU detailed this. While he was PM he fought any efforts to fight tax avoidance even though corporations were paying less than 1% tax.

Donald Tusk is the former PM of Poland and like Tony Blair did here he got in on promises of reducing bureaucracy, cutting taxes. He basically promised to attract business to Poland and to attract foreign working Poles back to Poland. When he got in like Blair he did the reverse, increased the state massively, raised taxes and excises and foreign investment was never as high in his reign as it was beforehand. Rather than Poles returning they left in greater numbers.

So we have the EU ordering Apple to pay backtaxes to Ireland and insisting that Ireland cannot have a tax rate as low as 2% yet their head fought to maintain a much lower tax rate back when he was PM of Luxembourg. And we have a "failed" PM of Poland that they don't want back there insisting on rules that when he came to power in Poland he didn't agree with.

Its all just a massive scam where they scratch the backs of the big corps, get huge salaries to maintain their own statuses and then tell all the "little people" that they are doing it all for their benefit.

The fact that Trump s a billionaire and Farage is making a tidy living out of his exploits is by the by. IF they actually do what they say they will do and take on this corporate scam that is dressed up as "globalisation" then they will have been worth the risk of bringing them in. They are a hope of a reset and how many more decades should people have had to wait to reset? Another 20 years of this legal scam? It is nothing more than legal corruption where big business and the establishment politicians back each other up in the never ending quest for more personal profits.
 
ImpSaint said:
The fact that Trump s a billionaire and Farage is making a tidy living out of his exploits is by the by. IF they actually do what they say they will do and take on this corporate scam that is dressed up as "globalisation" then they will have been worth the risk of bringing them in. They are a hope of a reset and how many more decades should people have had to wait to reset? Another 20 years of this legal scam? It is nothing more than legal corruption where big business and the establishment politicians back each other up in the never ending quest for more personal profits.
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I'm sorry Imps, but only an actual idiot would expect a former currency trader and saloon bar bore, and a billionaire property dealer who inherited a million dollars from his father, to take on any supposed corporate scam or vested interest.

Not only do these guys personify the very establishment they claim to be opposing, they each represent the very worst of said establishment.
 
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ImpSaint said:
You have to look at who is leading the EU. The head is the former Luxembourg PM. Luxembourg is the key tax haven that a lot of the corporations are using and the LuxLeaks which came out days after he became the President of the EU detailed this. While he was PM he fought any efforts to fight tax avoidance even though corporations were paying less than 1% tax.


In the wake of Brexit, Gibraltar should try to get independence from the UK, get fast-tracked back into the EU (99.8% backed remaining). It could easily become a tax haven, thus attracting lots of inward investment, Instead of being a British defence base, it could become a NATO defence base. In addition it is now a popular tourist destintion. Do it Gibraltar and get independence. Mind you UK Government would make this difficult as it sees Gibraltar as a prized asset and benefits the UK, and not Gibraltarians.
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Trump Meets With Physicist Who Says ‘Benefits’ Of Climate Change ‘Outweigh Any Harm’

William Happer also compared the “demonization of carbon dioxide” to the Holocaust.

Continuing to surround himself with like-minded climate deniers and skeptics, President-elect Donald Trump met Friday with none other than William Happer, the Princeton physics professor who believes global warming is “good for mankind.”


Happer, who served as director of energy research at the Department of Energy in the early 1990s under President George H.W. Bush, has championed the notion that we humans should increase rather than curb carbon dioxide emissions.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_587957e7e4b09281d0eafc70?section=politics

Completely insane

 
Beefy said:
Trump Meets With Physicist Who Says ‘Benefits’ Of Climate Change ‘Outweigh Any Harm’

William Happer also compared the “demonization of carbon dioxide” to the Holocaust.

Continuing to surround himself with like-minded climate deniers and skeptics, President-elect Donald Trump met Friday with none other than William Happer, the Princeton physics professor who believes global warming is “good for mankind.”


Happer, who served as director of energy research at the Department of Energy in the early 1990s under President George H.W. Bush, has championed the notion that we humans should increase rather than curb carbon dioxide emissions.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_587957e7e4b09281d0eafc70?section=politics

Completely insane
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I said after the election that climate change denial was probably Trump's worst fault, so this isn't a surprise really. Tragic beyond belief for every living thing on the planet, but not surprising.
 
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