Off Topic The Politics Thread

[kiwiqpr]

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Christian Blundell

@Blunders911

Replying to
@JuliaHB1
“Gloucestershire police said on Friday they would patrol the border to make sure people in Wales did not cross to buy contraband items. “

 

[rangercol]

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Very good.

 

[rangercol]

It’s never just about school dinners
By Pete North - October 24, 2020

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The conflict between conservatives and leftists in the UK has, since at least the nineties, is one the left have comprehensively won many times over – and welfare is their primary weapon. It enables all of their other policy ideas.

The centre of that dispute is whether the state or the family has primacy in society. If you can weaken the standing of the family you create a nation of individuals you can more easily manipulate and control.

When the left talks about welfare they talk about how it gives people independence but it doesn’t do that. It simply moves dependency on the family to the state. This is why single mums are always central to the welfare debate. Welfare, they say, gives single mums “independence” but what it buys them is freedom from accountability to their own families whose role is to support the children, and it buys freedom for feckless fathers – freedom of responsibility and to a large extent, freedom from financial obligations.

The single mum is not then independent, nor even unaccountable as such. They become accountable to the government, in that they have to explain themselves and their circumstance, and must then gold plate their sob story to reap the maximum welfare yield. It creates a race to the bottom as the needy compete for rationed resources.

But of course the state never holds people fully accountable in the same way that families do. They have to keep the state appraised of income and any change in circumstances, but they don’t have to justify their poor choices. And that’s why the system doesn’t work. The mantra among welfare dispensaries is that it’s not their place to judge. But of course, it is absolutely the place of society to judge. It can and it does. There’s a reason stigmas exist.

Once you defeat those stigmas, which the left has, you have a society entirely free of social obligation, free of responsibility to themselves and each other, who then believe the role of the state is to act as a guarantor for their poor choices – and will continue to make poor choices – the root cause of nearly all persistent poverty.

It is this mentality that shapes politics as we presently know it where people are both surprised and outraged to learn that the state is a poor substitute for the welfare and security the family can provide. We now elect delegates to go to London to argue the case for more funding for their region which has now become the whole of our politics – and general elections become bidding wars. The left always hopes to expand the welfare dependency voting block because that is the key to winning and maintaining power.

This is the essential hypocrisy of the modern left. They are not interested in lifting anybody out of poverty. Their very existence is contingent on maintaining poverty and expanding the definition of it. That then informs their campaigning strategy where they desperately need to sell the idea that millions of children are starving, believing people will vote out of compassion to save poor people from “evil toories”. They keep losing because everyone knows it isn’t true and nobody wants what they’re offering. Every single attempt at socialism has ended in miserable failure.

The oft used tactic of the left is to promote the edge cases as a basis for a fully comprehensive welfare state, which increasingly demands more resources to tackle the problems it causes. You have have single mums, but society wants mums in work, so we have to have state funded childcare and a myriad of supplementary benefits such as wage subsidy.

In reality it’s the employer getting the subsidy, and because we demand the same level of personal “independence” as those who work to buy their choices in life, everyone is entitled to have self-contained housing paid for them by the state, funnelling billions into the pension funds of landlords – which explains the widening gulf between the haves and have-nots.

The consequence of all this is a nation of individuals in independent housing, cut off from each other and free of obligation to each other. Gone then is any meaningful sense of community while lives play out in isolated cells where people turn to the state because it’s the only option and its all they know.

It’s telling that white working classes are climbing down the social mobility ladder while ethnic minorities with more traditional family structures are gaining wealth and influence. They are not raised by the state or trained in the ways of welfarism. They still have strong families and communities while the central social focus of now gutted working class towns is the job centre – the ones that still have the that is.

The perversity of this welfare system is that we have become so accustomed to the luxury of a rich welfare state, we even call our entitlements “human rights” – even though no good or service is ever a right. Nothing that requires the labour or resources of other people for free is a right. We have no right to the property of others.

What we’ve created in place of a society is a country with weak bonds, subject to alien foreign cultural fads beamed over from America. Having dismantled the family as the centre of power, we now have armies of redundant men with no stake in society with none of the responsibilities, obligations or privileges of being at the head of a family. going some way to explaining their high suicide rate – and maybe even going some way to explaining male to female “transition”).

Of course, lefty feminists love this idea. This is what they call empowerment. But is it? Working harder for longer, spending less time with your offspring (while the state raises them), living a far lonelier existence – and not actually independent in any real sense while the state has the right to know every last detail of your life.

There is an argument to be had about how we as a society deal with exceptional cases of poverty, but on the whole, we are better off with parish level welfare systems with money collected and distributed locally instead of centrally funded systems where all the decisions are made by software with increasingly fewer human interactions. You obtain your government ID number and communicate with a database via the internet.

As it happens, I think Britain is finally working all this out. The west as a whole is becoming more socially conservative having realised the horrific consequences of the sexual revolution. It has brought our societies to the brink of collapse. Over a long enough timeline, all but the thickest work this out which is why older voters tend to vote conservative. The left keep rubbing their hands with glee at the idea that conservative voting elders will eventually die off, but most will eventually have their conservative awakening.

There was a time when the old Labour party was in touch with northern working class conservative instincts which is why patriotic euroscepticism very often came from the left. It has since jettisoned its traditional base in favour of younger metropolitan liberals who believe the mark of conscientious compassion is a belief in equality of outcomes, regulated by a powerful welfare state. Blair believed in this, funded by global capital (hence his fondness to the neoliberal EU).

Consequently, old conservative values were castigated as stodgy and bigoted. They still do this because they know that the greatest threat to them and the largest impediment to their agenda is a strong family based society. They’re just too stupid to realise that insulting your traditional base means they won’t vote for you or any of your causes.

We keep teaching this lesson to the left at every election but they won’t have it. Whenever they lose they think it’s because we’re brainwashed by Rupert Murdoch to vote against our own interests (assuming it’s in our self-interest to become welfare serfs under an all powerful state). “If only they weren’t so stupid!” they lament.

But it’s actually the left who are stupid – but also arrogant and condescending. They believe themselves to be the pillars of virtue and compassion, and firmly believe they are better than everyone else for thinking the way they do – which is why they’re so keen to broadcast their lefty credentials. They see the poor as lesser mortals in need of rescue and moral correction by their betters. This is why whenever the left takes power and expands the grip of the welfare system, it always comes with limits to free speech and a programme of social indoctrination. Government, to them, is not an apparatus to serve the people, rather an instrument of control over them.

I’m not a Tory, and I don’t see myself ever voting for them again, but I will if ever there is the remotest chance of a Labour government and my vote could help stop it. That’s another thing the left doesn’t understand. Nobody actually likes the Tories and we weren’t duped by Boris Johnson. We just weren’t offered a better alternative – and no matter how bad the Tories get, Labour still doesn’t look attractive. I have long said that the first rule of politics is to never trust a Tory. But it seems the second rule of politics, these days is that no matter how bad the Tories get, the left will always find a way to be worse. Until the left learns to respect people, we’re stuck with what we’ve got.

Cue howls of derision from our resident leftists.

 

[Sooperhoop]

It’s never just about school dinners
By Pete North - October 24, 2020

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The conflict between conservatives and leftists in the UK has, since at least the nineties, is one the left have comprehensively won many times over – and welfare is their primary weapon. It enables all of their other policy ideas.

The centre of that dispute is whether the state or the family has primacy in society. If you can weaken the standing of the family you create a nation of individuals you can more easily manipulate and control.

When the left talks about welfare they talk about how it gives people independence but it doesn’t do that. It simply moves dependency on the family to the state. This is why single mums are always central to the welfare debate. Welfare, they say, gives single mums “independence” but what it buys them is freedom from accountability to their own families whose role is to support the children, and it buys freedom for feckless fathers – freedom of responsibility and to a large extent, freedom from financial obligations.

The single mum is not then independent, nor even unaccountable as such. They become accountable to the government, in that they have to explain themselves and their circumstance, and must then gold plate their sob story to reap the maximum welfare yield. It creates a race to the bottom as the needy compete for rationed resources.

But of course the state never holds people fully accountable in the same way that families do. They have to keep the state appraised of income and any change in circumstances, but they don’t have to justify their poor choices. And that’s why the system doesn’t work. The mantra among welfare dispensaries is that it’s not their place to judge. But of course, it is absolutely the place of society to judge. It can and it does. There’s a reason stigmas exist.

Once you defeat those stigmas, which the left has, you have a society entirely free of social obligation, free of responsibility to themselves and each other, who then believe the role of the state is to act as a guarantor for their poor choices – and will continue to make poor choices – the root cause of nearly all persistent poverty.

It is this mentality that shapes politics as we presently know it where people are both surprised and outraged to learn that the state is a poor substitute for the welfare and security the family can provide. We now elect delegates to go to London to argue the case for more funding for their region which has now become the whole of our politics – and general elections become bidding wars. The left always hopes to expand the welfare dependency voting block because that is the key to winning and maintaining power.

This is the essential hypocrisy of the modern left. They are not interested in lifting anybody out of poverty. Their very existence is contingent on maintaining poverty and expanding the definition of it. That then informs their campaigning strategy where they desperately need to sell the idea that millions of children are starving, believing people will vote out of compassion to save poor people from “evil toories”. They keep losing because everyone knows it isn’t true and nobody wants what they’re offering. Every single attempt at socialism has ended in miserable failure.

The oft used tactic of the left is to promote the edge cases as a basis for a fully comprehensive welfare state, which increasingly demands more resources to tackle the problems it causes. You have have single mums, but society wants mums in work, so we have to have state funded childcare and a myriad of supplementary benefits such as wage subsidy.

In reality it’s the employer getting the subsidy, and because we demand the same level of personal “independence” as those who work to buy their choices in life, everyone is entitled to have self-contained housing paid for them by the state, funnelling billions into the pension funds of landlords – which explains the widening gulf between the haves and have-nots.

The consequence of all this is a nation of individuals in independent housing, cut off from each other and free of obligation to each other. Gone then is any meaningful sense of community while lives play out in isolated cells where people turn to the state because it’s the only option and its all they know.

It’s telling that white working classes are climbing down the social mobility ladder while ethnic minorities with more traditional family structures are gaining wealth and influence. They are not raised by the state or trained in the ways of welfarism. They still have strong families and communities while the central social focus of now gutted working class towns is the job centre – the ones that still have the that is.

The perversity of this welfare system is that we have become so accustomed to the luxury of a rich welfare state, we even call our entitlements “human rights” – even though no good or service is ever a right. Nothing that requires the labour or resources of other people for free is a right. We have no right to the property of others.

What we’ve created in place of a society is a country with weak bonds, subject to alien foreign cultural fads beamed over from America. Having dismantled the family as the centre of power, we now have armies of redundant men with no stake in society with none of the responsibilities, obligations or privileges of being at the head of a family. going some way to explaining their high suicide rate – and maybe even going some way to explaining male to female “transition”).

Of course, lefty feminists love this idea. This is what they call empowerment. But is it? Working harder for longer, spending less time with your offspring (while the state raises them), living a far lonelier existence – and not actually independent in any real sense while the state has the right to know every last detail of your life.

There is an argument to be had about how we as a society deal with exceptional cases of poverty, but on the whole, we are better off with parish level welfare systems with money collected and distributed locally instead of centrally funded systems where all the decisions are made by software with increasingly fewer human interactions. You obtain your government ID number and communicate with a database via the internet.

As it happens, I think Britain is finally working all this out. The west as a whole is becoming more socially conservative having realised the horrific consequences of the sexual revolution. It has brought our societies to the brink of collapse. Over a long enough timeline, all but the thickest work this out which is why older voters tend to vote conservative. The left keep rubbing their hands with glee at the idea that conservative voting elders will eventually die off, but most will eventually have their conservative awakening.

There was a time when the old Labour party was in touch with northern working class conservative instincts which is why patriotic euroscepticism very often came from the left. It has since jettisoned its traditional base in favour of younger metropolitan liberals who believe the mark of conscientious compassion is a belief in equality of outcomes, regulated by a powerful welfare state. Blair believed in this, funded by global capital (hence his fondness to the neoliberal EU).

Consequently, old conservative values were castigated as stodgy and bigoted. They still do this because they know that the greatest threat to them and the largest impediment to their agenda is a strong family based society. They’re just too stupid to realise that insulting your traditional base means they won’t vote for you or any of your causes.

We keep teaching this lesson to the left at every election but they won’t have it. Whenever they lose they think it’s because we’re brainwashed by Rupert Murdoch to vote against our own interests (assuming it’s in our self-interest to become welfare serfs under an all powerful state). “If only they weren’t so stupid!” they lament.

But it’s actually the left who are stupid – but also arrogant and condescending. They believe themselves to be the pillars of virtue and compassion, and firmly believe they are better than everyone else for thinking the way they do – which is why they’re so keen to broadcast their lefty credentials. They see the poor as lesser mortals in need of rescue and moral correction by their betters. This is why whenever the left takes power and expands the grip of the welfare system, it always comes with limits to free speech and a programme of social indoctrination. Government, to them, is not an apparatus to serve the people, rather an instrument of control over them.

I’m not a Tory, and I don’t see myself ever voting for them again, but I will if ever there is the remotest chance of a Labour government and my vote could help stop it. That’s another thing the left doesn’t understand. Nobody actually likes the Tories and we weren’t duped by Boris Johnson. We just weren’t offered a better alternative – and no matter how bad the Tories get, Labour still doesn’t look attractive. I have long said that the first rule of politics is to never trust a Tory. But it seems the second rule of politics, these days is that no matter how bad the Tories get, the left will always find a way to be worse. Until the left learns to respect people, we’re stuck with what we’ve got.

Hard to disagree with most of that. Sadly anyone that does is labelled Fascist, Nazi, Scum etc. And therein lies the problem this country will face for many years...

 

[Star of David Bardsley]

Cue howls of derision from our resident leftists.

You soppy old tart you.

 

[rangercol]

Hard to disagree with most of that. Sadly anyone that does is labelled Fascist, Nazi, Scum etc. And therein lies the problem this country will face for many years...

Spot on.

 

[bobmid]

Hard to disagree with most of that. Sadly anyone that does is labelled Fascist, Nazi, Scum etc. And therein lies the problem this country will face for many years...

I totally disagree with the headline. It's totally about free school dinners for those entitled being extended whilst this pandemic is on. Its not even about left v right. It just comes down to what is right and what is wrong. It's a very simple thing, you can drag the welfare state into it of course but that soon disappears when you hear of nurses and co using food banks. This is simply about providing a meal to those unable to get access to food whether it be via unemployment, low income, cost of living, bad parenting, drug issues, criminality etc. To dig deeper into this is denying a child the basic human need, which I personally find unbelievable for a country like ours. Luckily, despite nearly economic bankruptcy, the good people of the uk are not morally bankrupt yet. To defend or even detract from this policy speaks volumes. The article is very interesting though and I agree with a lot but it has absolutely nothing to do with the headline.

 

[ELLERS]

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wow what an amazing insight. It must have taken him all of 3 minutes to create that? that will stop us voting.

 

[ELLERS]

I listened to an interesting reporter last night who was basically saying Starmer and Labour pounced on the school diners issue because they knew it would make the Government look bad. He said they were 'seizing on a political opportunity' . There is also a story regarding the use of Laptops for school children at home. That will be next weeks 'attack on the government'.

 

[Star of David Bardsley]

I listened to an interesting reporter last night who was basically saying Starmer and Labour pounced on the school diners issue because they knew it would make the Government look bad. He said they were 'seizing on a political opportunity' . There is also a story regarding the use of Laptops for school children at home. That will be next weeks 'attack on the government'.

Maybe your party could just stop worsening the lives of the most vulnerable people in society while getting their mates richer for providing sub-par services rather than everything being some conspiracy to make the government look bad.

 

[bobmid]

I listened to an interesting reporter last night who was basically saying Starmer and Labour pounced on the school diners issue because they knew it would make the Government look bad. He said they were 'seizing on a political opportunity' . There is also a story regarding the use of Laptops for school children at home. That will be next weeks 'attack on the government'.

Well that certainly justifies the governments position. All cleared up now

 

[bobmid]

Tory MPs threaten to join Labour bid to force U-turn on free school meals as they warn PM has 'misunderstood the public mood' - while Children's Commissioner likens row to 'Oliver Twist novel'
Misunderstood the public mood? For **** sake. It's called having values, morals and leading your country to try be better!

 

[Star of David Bardsley]

Tory MPs threaten to join Labour bid to force U-turn on free school meals as they warn PM has 'misunderstood the public mood' - while Children's Commissioner likens row to 'Oliver Twist novel'
Misunderstood the public mood? For **** sake. It's called having values, morals and leading your country to try be better!

Damn them seizing the opportunity to feed vulnerable kids at Christmas.

 

[ELLERS]

Maybe your party could just stop worsening the lives of the most vulnerable people in society while getting their mates richer for providing sub-par services rather than everything being some conspiracy to make the government look bad.

Well if you are honest you would agree that Starmer called for a lockdown for a political reason... but now that has backfired he needs something else to take attention of it?
You would also agree that Andy Burnham did recieve a phone call from Jenrick before that interview where he said on national TV that he hadn't.
You would also agree that the individual calling someone 'Scum' in the house of our democracy is not fit to lead this country.

I am sure you will come back with some negative moan about the government but that's just you. For normal folk like me and others I have discussed this with, seem to think that the opposition is actually not fit to govern. And they are not all Tory mates.

 

[bobmid]

Well if you are honest you would agree that Starmer called for a lockdown for a political reason... but now that has backfired he needs something else to take attention of it?
You would also agree that Andy Burnham did recieve a phone call from Jenrick before that interview where he said on national TV that he hadn't.
You would also agree that the individual calling someone 'Scum' in the house of our democracy is not fit to lead this country.

I am sure you will come back with some negative moan about the government but that's just you. For normal folk like me and others I have discussed this with, seem to think that the opposition is actually not fit to govern. And they are not all Tory mates.

What a delusional post. Normal folk like me! Spat my coffee out then! Thank **** people arent like you.

 

[bobmid]

I seriously dont understand why people (I mean Ellers) are jumping on the oppositions back for calls to feed children who need feeding! You should applaud them for doing so. What a scummy thing not to.

 

[Star of David Bardsley]

Well if you are honest you would agree that Starmer called for a lockdown for a political reason... but now that has backfired he needs something else to take attention of it?
You would also agree that Andy Burnham did recieve a phone call from Jenrick before that interview where he said on national TV that he hadn't.
You would also agree that the individual calling someone 'Scum' in the house of our democracy is not fit to lead this country.

I am sure you will come back with some negative moan about the government but that's just you. For normal folk like me and others I have discussed this with, seem to think that the opposition is actually not fit to govern. And they are not all Tory mates.

Starmer followed the advice of the government’s scientists, unlike the government. Infections and deaths are spiralling as a result.

Apparently you expect me to take a corrupt liar like Jenrick’s word for it.

Rayner was 100% correct albeit the way she went about it was wrong and she subsequently apologised. The language of the Home Secretary towards lawyers provoked a far right terrorist attack but that’s not such an issue to you for some reason as some chinless bootlicker being called a mildly rude name.

 

[bobmid]

What's wrong with calling scum, scum?
Theres no complaints when they call each other honorable!

 

[bobmid]

To be fair, anyone who wants children not to be fed is SCUM. Simples

 

[ELLERS]

I said at the time it was a 'political move' and 'Starmer was playing politics with peoples lives.' The usual suspects on here said the opposite and once again proved that they actually don't know very much. Maybe they should spend a bit more time understanding the full facts before they post their usual anti-government cr2p.
I also said it was 'a gamble and would probably backfire'. Well it has. Even a huge Labour commentator said on Friday night on SkyNews that he "Didn't agree with it and it was the wrong thing to do".
Public opinion is turning against lockdown and Labour’s cynical Covid opportunism
A sensitive politician knows when the wind is about to change - Sir Keir lacks the PM's sixth sense
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...rning-against-lockdown-labours-cynical-covid/