Off Topic Politics Thread

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Ian Thumwood said:
It is akin to the success of the Liberals in 2010.

I feel that Farage is due a big fall at some point. He will make big gaff and that will be the end of him and Reform. They are purely a protest vote and will be unable to govern.
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The Tories and Labour have proven they are unable to govern the past decade or more. I doubt even Farage's pretenders can do any worse and that is where the problem lies. Can't keep banging on about experience or ability.............while showing your experience doesn't help at all and your ability is not up to the job either.

You need results to fend off the threat of reform and both Tories and Labour are unable to get any points on the board.

What needs to be realised is that the elections that were held on Thursday were mainly Tory held seats. It wasn't the whole of the country. If it were I daresay the Labour numbers would mirror the Tory collapse!

Should also add that in many cases those "tory held" seats were trad Labour voters that crossed over in the Boris wave so in reality without that Tory bounce last time round those would be direct transfers from Labour held seats!
 
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StJabbo1 said:
A hung parliament with any coalition dependant on PR being on the agenda would suit me. Italy and other countries have managed fine without an overall majority.
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hung parliaments = coalitions
coalitions = governments that use their partners as an excuse why they didn't do what they said they would do
excuses = governments doing what they want and ignoring what the electorate says.

Not sure how people think the rest of Europe and coalitions is the way to go. The whole of Europe has followed the above and the result is their electorates rising up bit by bit because technocratc government just ploughs on and ignores voters. They are a lot further towards getting nasty than we are with reform but this is a success?

The fact we are approaching the same result with FPTP is because for some reason the Tories and now Labour thought they could do the same when they are the sole partner in government.

Europe is gonna get a lot worse before it gets better because of decades of the technocratic advance ignoring their electorates and thinking they can just advance their dream of totalitarianist rule! The advance into authoritarianism was almost complete and the next stage of complete ignorance of the demos would've been about to begin.

After all we are already in the first stages of being told what we should think say believe do. what we can and can't watch, see hear say etc.

Gonna be a rough decade or more to come where we find the balance between progress (real not imagined) without the authoritarian rule we have been witnessing the increase of. Hopefully it will not slide too far back past that balance point and hopefully those with ambitions of leadership and real progress will learn from the past 20 years that............you have to take the electorate with you!
 
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I am not sure how you do ‘deal with immigration’. Has anybody ever actually come up with a method for doing this other than just airy words? We are disadvantaged in having no land border - we cannot sink boats and when they arrive we cannot ignore the law.
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The boats focus is BS. Minimal amounts of people. The problem numbers are legal immigration. Doctors, nurses? No problem. These are skills we need. Curry chefs, nail salon workers? Not skills we need. Construction workers? Where have all the pre 2007 housing boom construction workers gone? How come we now have skills shortages in construction when we were building on steroids before the financial crisis?

All the parties are using the "stop the boats" issue to cloud the argument. Not just reform. They could quite easily ignore that side of it and deal with the legal immigration part of it but they all want headlines and easy things to distract from real issues.
 
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Shandy_top_89 said:
The only saving grace for Labour is that this is happening now with 4 years notice.

This gives them time to try and figure out a solution.

I have very little faith they will, but its better than the tables turning a year out with nothing you can do to forestall the momentum.

Also with Reform now running a number of councils it gives a reasonable time for them to form a track record of failure ...(or success). Although my faith in the ability of the public at large to hold them accountable and not just blame who they tell them to is lacking.
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The "delayed" local elections will take place next year! This will be a bigger indicator of where things are and I'm not too sure that reform's success/failure in the ones they won this week will show through in that time. A lot of these councils have been run very badly by Labour/Tory and are financially in trouble due mostly to their own in house decisions so I daresay the usual political narratives will apply here with incumbents blamed for what they inherit :D
 
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It'sOnlyAGame said:
From the Times in 2023. A remarkable similarity to our resident extremist's comments posted at the same time. So now we know where he gets his ideology of hate from.

https://archive.md/NqPiU#selection-1529.0-1549.244

Mahmoud Sheleib, a BBC News senior broadcast journalist, appeared to insinuate that young Israelis are fair game to be targeted by Hamas militants because they are akin to soldiers. “[I see] In front of me on Al Jazeera, their so-called civilians are standing armed alongside the police and shooting because they basically don’t have any civilians among the youth. This is what the ignorant often don’t know. I am in favour of fighting them with love, yes, this is the solution.” Followed by a laughing emoji.
He also joked about a woman whose grandmother who had been kidnapped receiving her “inheritance”.

Aya Hossam, a freelance journalist who has previously worked for BBC News Arabic, liked a tweet that also cast doubt on the civilian status of Israelis.
“Every member of the Zionist entity served in the army at some point in his life, whether men or women, and they all had victims of explicit violations,” the message said. “This term ‘civilians’ applies to the animals and pets that live there.”
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BBC News Arabic has come under a lot of scrutiny lately because of the sheer number of its "journalists" that like, repeat and report stuff like the above. It isn't just a historic pre-2023 thing. The origin of this is most likely not the times. They were probably alerted to it from a report in 2021 from CAMERA (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis) which highlighted loads of journalists that BBC Arabic frequently used saying things like "Hitler was right" and other much worse things.
 
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Social media ****e post, but reading through all of the Reformie humble brag stuff on Facebook this morning, there seems to be a bizarre subtrend of people saying the monarchy must go if they don’t remove Starmer. (I.e. the King is not politically impartial because he lets Starmer be PM).

Sounds like the latest Bot instruction from the Kremlin has landed.
 
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The spin I read on the net and across twitter's "enlightened" mass is Tories lost votes, Labour hardly touched" but that ignores where those Tory wins came from last time round.

Take Durham County elections. If we ignore the 2021 vote and see where those votes were before the "Boris wave" you have:
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And now we have:
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So while it is easy to ignore history and say Tories were the losers..........Labour had 74 seats pre 2021 and now only have 4! Of course not all of that -70 difference went to the Tories in '21 nor did they all vote Reform this time round but it shows a truer picture of where these votes historically went to.

If you go back even further to 2013 Labour had 94 seats! They have gone from 94 to 4 in the space of 12 years! and that was while the Tories were in power messing things up with the narrative we have always heard being about local elections being a protest vote and difficult for whoever is in government!!

Durham was pretty much Labour heartland nailed on whatever they did but not anymore. With the Tory decline since winning those seats in 2021 they would have been expecting those votes to come back to them and not lose a shedload more!

EDIT: Lib Dems unchanged. 14 before 2021. 14 now.
 
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Ian Thumwood said:
Gary

Thanks a lot ! Do you mean that you thought i was or that you imagined me in a twinset which is a bit disturbing !

I get Laces and No. 7 muddled up but i had not twigged until 2 weeks ago that Imp and Lincoln are different !
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I think there might be 3 Saints fans in Lincoln actually ;) although I am now an ex fan. Don't watch much football at all nowadays and absolutely no interest in the PL or Champions League. I guess I am now a follower rather than a fan. I check results occasionally.
 
ImpSaint said:
BBC News Arabic has come under a lot of scrutiny lately because of the sheer number of its "journalists" that like, repeat and report stuff like the above. It isn't just a historic pre-2023 thing. The origin of this is most likely not the times. They were probably alerted to it from a report in 2021 from CAMERA (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis) which highlighted loads of journalists that BBC Arabic frequently used saying things like "Hitler was right" and other much worse things.
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The BBC seems to have been employing foriegn journalists for a while. By and large , i think that is ok but feel that there has been a slip in quality since the days of Kate Adie, etc. What surprised me is that the BBC are enploying American journalists in thhe US. There is a tie in with ABC , I think.

I have never listened to the Arabic section of the BBC but not surprised some go rogue. When i have been un Doha the taxi driver always had the local Doha station on and then played the Indian equivalent of Radio 2 in the afternoon.
 
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Ian Thumwood said:
Gary

Thanks a lot ! Do you mean that you thought i was or that you imagined me in a twinset which is a bit disturbing !

I get Laces and No. 7 muddled up but i had not twigged until 2 weeks ago that Imp and Lincoln are different !
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I'm younger, more handsome and very much taller. <laugh>

(Though with less hair tbf).
 
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ImpSaint said:
And looking at the state of the EU area's economies I wonder how much it accounts for those changes or if it is based off what they used to import/export from/to us!
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Unlikely the UK share of EU overall trade is around 10%.
https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/e...gion/countries-and-regions/united-kingdom_en#
"Trade picture
The EU is the UK’s biggest trading partner, accounting for 40% of UK foreign trade in goods in 2022.
The UK is the EU’s third biggest trading partner (9.8%), after the United States and China. Switzerland is the fourth biggest.
The EU's surplus trade in goods with the UK amounted to €113 billion.
 
StJabbo1 said:
Unlikely the UK share of EU overall trade is around 10%.
https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/e...gion/countries-and-regions/united-kingdom_en#
"Trade picture
The EU is the UK’s biggest trading partner, accounting for 40% of UK foreign trade in goods in 2022.
The UK is the EU’s third biggest trading partner (9.8%), after the United States and China. Switzerland is the fourth biggest.
The EU's surplus trade in goods with the UK amounted to €113 billion.
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I was meaning that it would be pretty hard to gauge how much more / less imports and exports would be in or out of the EU with the current climate in the EU as well as UK and globally. So how close or accurate any "prediction" would be has to be called into question. How much of "our stuff" would the EU actually be buying today in this climate if we were still in versus what actually was exported?
 
ImpSaint said:
I was meaning that it would be pretty hard to gauge how much more / less imports and exports would be in or out of the EU with the current climate in the EU as well as UK and globally. So how close or accurate any "prediction" would be has to be called into question. How much of "our stuff" would the EU actually be buying today in this climate if we were still in versus what actually was exported?
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See my link to the BBC article.
 
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StJabbo1 said:
Whilst looking for info on EU/UK trade I came across this looking at five effects of brexit five years on.
The majority now think it was the wrong decision badly implemented.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrynjz1glpo
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I agree on the badly implemented bit. However if Kier Starmer continues to spend the next 4 years rejoining bit by bit........Labour will continue to lose votes. I think in reality what people say and do is a lot different no matter what the OBR, YouGov or the BBC like to present as "facts."
 
ImpSaint said:
I agree on the badly implemented bit. However if Kier Starmer continues to spend the next 4 years rejoining bit by bit........Labour will continue to lose votes. I think in reality what people say and do is a lot different no matter what the OBR, YouGov or the BBC like to present as "facts."
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Not at all likely to happen but the bit by bit should be replaced by rejoining the single market and customs union. The facts you appear to be questioning without any counter arguments are in fact facts from verifiable sources. Unlike the mis/disinformation and outright lies of the brexit campaign and it's ongoing supporters who are dwindling in number day by day.
 
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