Off Topic The Politics Thread

[bobmid]

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/

Totally doesn't understand this debate. You are so out of touch Ellers it's crazy. I dont believe for one second that you help children in any capacity. You're full of ****.

 

[ELLERS]

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.

You really need to wake up? I always thought you were smarter than the usual suspects? You are sounding just like them., Watford rather than read the Limps Local try and read up on other commentators and reporters that are not some lefty leftover from a forgotten past.

 

[Stroller]

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/

Coronavirus: 67% back 'circuit breaker' lockdown - and 61% don't trust PM on pandemic, Sky News poll suggests

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavi...m-on-pandemic-sky-news-poll-suggests-12108347

 

[Goldhawk-Road]

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!

It's not free school meals, Bob. Those are in place. It's free meals in the holidays. Personally, I agree with you and think the government should do more on this issue. The government are concerned it sends out a message of Big Government, which is then responsible for paying for children's upbringing rather than the parents. But with the pandemic, we are in extraordinary times, so they should recognise this.

Problem I see is timing. Right in the middle of crucial Brexit talks, where Boris has forced the EU to acknowledge we are a sovereign state and that they must compromise and come back to the table, he won't want to be seen to do another U turn.

 

[Steelmonkey]

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.

You really need to get out more if you count yourself as normal.

Try a wee trip up the M1 or M6 and see how "normal" you truly are.

 

[Star of David Bardsley]

It's not free school meals, Bob. Those are in place. It's free meals in the holidays. Personally, I agree with you and think the government should do more on this issue. The government are concerned it sends out a message of Big Government, which is then responsible for paying for children's upbringing rather than the parents. But with the pandemic, we are in extraordinary times, so they should recognise this.

Problem I see is timing. Right in the middle of crucial Brexit talks, where Boris has forced the EU to acknowledge we are a sovereign state and that they must compromise and come back to the table, he won't want to be seen to do another U turn.

Fortunately various councils, business and individuals have come to the aid of the poor kids so Johnson can focus on the important stuff.

 

[Goldhawk-Road]

Fortunately various councils, business and individuals have come to the aid of the poor kids so Johnson can focus on the important stuff.

Councils have been funded by government so they should indeed step up to the plate. They will know individual circumstances of families in their area better than Westminster

 

[ELLERS]

Coronavirus: 67% back 'circuit breaker' lockdown - and 61% don't trust PM on pandemic, Sky News poll suggests

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavi...m-on-pandemic-sky-news-poll-suggests-12108347

That was from Monday 19th? try and keep up Stroller you know how things are changing daily.

 

[ELLERS]

You really need to get out more if you count yourself as normal.

Try a wee trip up the M1 or M6 and see how "normal" you truly are.

Why?

 

[Star of David Bardsley]

Councils have been funded by government so they should indeed step up to the plate. They will know individual circumstances of families in their area better than Westminster

I think you know that’s not the point. The holy Brexit is still on course.

 

[ELLERS]

Councils have been funded by government so they should indeed step up to the plate. They will know individual circumstances of families in their area better than Westminster

Spot bloody on! Westminster just gives out the money and expects local councils to spend it wisely?... Maybe that £1M statue of some weird artist doesn't seem important now? Well it probably will to some?

 

[Sooperhoop]

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.

The headline is right in the context of the article as it is another 'Bash the Tory' campaign. On this occasion the government for the sake of however many millions it would have cost have missed a golden opportunity to show a more 'human' side and rightly have taken flak. As you say if it's right v wrong it's obvious but it seems they are determined to save face and misjudging the public mood on this has clearly damaged them. Once this is done there'll be another campaign about something else following on. It seems this is how politics will be played out in the modern era with social media which has helped polarise opinions towards the extremes. The vast majority of people sit somewhere between the two and deserve a voice in all of this but it doesn't generate headlines for the 24/7 newshounds who must dictate the agenda that suits their slant on things and having two sides at each others throats is the way they like it.

If only there were a credible middle ground party but the LibDems are out with the fairies, Starmer is trying to move towards there but his own party are the biggest handicap in achieving that. Very depressing...

 

[ELLERS]

Spot bloody on! Westminster just gives out the money and expects local councils to spend it wisely?... Maybe that £1M statue of some weird artist doesn't seem important now? Well it probably will to some?

Actually maybe if the council hadn't spent so much money on cleaning up statues after those soap dodgers vandalised and graffitied them that some thought was a good idea then the councils may have had the extra money?
Councils' graffiti clean-ups cost £290,000

Nelson statue vandalism cost £2,400 to clean up
https://www.eveningnews24.co.uk/new...g-vandalised-nelson-statue-revealed-1-6803882

 

[Quite Possibly Raving]

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.

Anyone who can't distinguish between adults, who have fallen on hard times through their own poor choices (although obviously not always) and children, who should never go hungry as a result of poor decisions by their guardians, really isn't worth engaging with.

If anyone were to apply a Rawlsian veil of ignorance type test to this issue, it's hard to believe anyone would choose for kids to go hungry, even if that's their parents' fault, which is how some are coming across.

Still can't believe quite how badly the Govt are handling the politics of this. Especially after the exams fiasco - not exactly sending out the message that they give a shiny £&!t about the next generations.

 

[Star of David Bardsley]

Actually maybe if the council hadn't spent so much money on cleaning up statues after those soap dodgers vandalised and graffitied them that some thought was a good idea then the councils may have had the extra money?
Councils' graffiti clean-ups cost £290,000

Nelson statue vandalism cost £2,400 to clean up
https://www.eveningnews24.co.uk/new...g-vandalised-nelson-statue-revealed-1-6803882

For an ‘awake’ Telegraph reader you don’t half post a lot of ****e that would be more at home in The Sun.

 

[Goldhawk-Road]

I think you know that’s not the point. The holy Brexit is still on course.

I agree that the Brexit talks are taking a lot of Boris's attention. This is the critical time. But I'm not sure that it affects the principle that he wants to establish re kids meals in school holidays. If we weren't in the middle of a pandemic with recession looming, I'd go along with that, but these are exceptional times.

There may be a way of avoiding a U turn, by giving councils additional funds

 

[Steelmonkey]

Why?

Try getting out of your cosy coccooned corner of South East England.

 

[ELLERS]

The headline is right in the context of the article as it is another 'Bash the Tory' campaign. On this occasion the government for the sake of however many millions it would have cost have missed a golden opportunity to show a more 'human' side and rightly have taken flak. As you say if it's right v wrong it's obvious but it seems they are determined to save face and misjudging the public mood on this has clearly damaged them. Once this is done there'll be another campaign about something else following on. It seems this is how politics will be played out in the modern era with social media which has helped polarise opinions towards the extremes.

Spot on Sooper. It's not about the school meals it's more about the politics and point scoring behind it. You are also correct, in that next week it will be something else the government has done wrong? It plays into the laps of the "we hate the Tories mob". This is why people like me and many many others in the country are just turning off to these stories. If you keep crying wolf people will not listen. The school meals is a very important issue but gets lost in the politics. The Tories are told that they are not caring, which couldn't be further from the truth. Plenty of Tories have done some outstanding work with charities and other organisations without all the media attention. Sadly this overlooked in cheap memes of a bloke putting a bit of paper on a door?
This ploy by Labour and the MSM of keep attacking the government will backfire. Starmer's political lockdown ploy has now been shot down in flames. We will come out of this and Starmer will be left with egg on his face. He would have done better to support the government and if things go wrong then say we supported you and you let us down?
As for the misjudgment of the public mood... in this case they have be slow and will no doubt u-turn. People move on and in the future people will vote on who they believe will do a better job and most importantly how the economy is doing. It wasn't long ago that the Tories were getting bashed about food banks and austerity but once the election came they won but an historic total. Once the chips are down people are not as stupid as some think.

 

[ELLERS]

Try getting out of your cosy coccooned corner of South East England.

What has that got to do with anything? When I was a kid my family struggled and got by. When I left school I worked my socks off to get a job when there weren't many about. I then went to Uni and uni again over 5 years where I hardly had the funds to eat or pay the extortionate rent. I scarified a lot to then find another job and through my years of working I have had times when my family have had no money but I kept working and sacrificing stuff. A few years of hard working I now live in a nice town in Berkshire. If I can do it so should others. Sorry but people shouldn't knock others because of a few headlines in a paper.

 

[Quite Possibly Raving]

There may be a way of avoiding a U turn, by giving councils additional funds

Quite - or by extending Universal Credit for qualifying families over the holidays etc, and get Rashford to do a report on longer term solutions to kick it into the long grass etc etc. Quite a few ways to do this without looking like they've U-turned.