Off Topic The QPR Not 606 Rolling Election Poll

It would help if the leaders of parties stopped treating the British public like idiots and repeatedly lying through their teeth and pulling stupid stunts like Cameron and May did yesterday attending an immigration raid. It seems far too much time is spent on their own agendas rather than listening to what the voters want, that is where Farage was very effective.

Sadly, I feel nothing will now change as none of the Labour candidates are particularly appealing, the Lib Dems are a mess and the Tories can now manipulate their good fortune to strengthen their position both through the Boundary Commission and the lack of credible opposition. Very depressing...

 

Why not? That's what Labour did in 2005...

 

Interesting day
- flood of boat immigrants to Italy continues. No plan other than dump them in Italy. Heartbreaking interview with a couple of Nigerians, one of whom said 'I'll be fine in Europe, they treat people as human beings'. Cut to some Sudanese digging potatoes for €30 a ten hour day if they are lucky, living on bare earth under tarpaulins in Sicily.
- Cameron unsure whether he will sack government ministers not supporting wherever he ends up on EU
- Areas occupied by ISIS beginning to resemble Khmer Rouge type totalitarianism as they blow up the past and deny there is a future
- FIFA's Jack Warner embezzles 750K of money meant for earthquake relief in Haiti
- the odious President of Turkey, Erdogan, stalled in his attempt to create a one party state by losing his parliamentary majority in elections. Sadly the party he is likely to form a coalition with is even worse than his mob.

At least Putin was banned from the G7 meeting, so missed out on the bier and wurst in Bavaria.

 

But conveniently forgetting that the MPs have no say in their pay rises, whether it's zero or 100%. That was the unanimously cheered decision of the review conducted by the coalition. People only disagree with it because they all thought the independent body would hold MP Pay down. I note you also conveniently forget that pay is only a small part of the overall changes, which include very wide ranging restrictions on what can no longer claimed as expenses, and also changes to MP pensions and allowances.

Still - we never allow facts to get in the way of a good dig at those nasty Tories, eh?

 

Perhaps you conveniently forgot that you conveniently forgot?

 

? Apart from the self employed, owners of small, privately owned, businesses, and corrupt senior management of things like banks I don't think anyone awards themselves a pay rise. Certainly not public sector workers. Why don't we have 'independent' bodies deciding pay rises for nurses, firemen etc, as well as MPs, instead of just 'advising' on them? If the public sector norm is nothing or 1%, clearly they should be happy with that. Even better, any pay/reward increases I get are 100% dependent on my performance. Let's do that for the ****ers. Productivity for ordinary MPs - attendance, committee membership, speeches made, constituency clinics held (lets face it, they don't produce anything, nothing else to measure them by. Which brings us to why on earth we need 650 of them). For ministers it's easy, achieving the targets they set themselves. So May and Cameron are on disciplinary for their immigration broken 'promises' as is Osborne for not clearing the deficit by 2015.

Having said that they have done a spectacularly bad job of explaining that this rise is paid for by cuts to their pensions and expenses (which are obviously income supplements)

 

Perhaps those close to Tory thinking can explain the EU thing to me:

You fight a General Election on a manifesto which says we will try to renegotiate our relationship with the EU, and then hold an in/out referendum on the issue. If the renogotiation delivers what we (the Tories) want we will campaign to stay in the EU.

Your leader says you will be expected to support the renegotiation, and (perhaps, he can't make up his mind) support staying in if the Tory Party leadership thinks that the right think to do. Just like you have promised your electorate/constituents.

Then you cry foul and protest that you should have a free voice all the time, essentially because you want to vote no whatever the arguments/result of renegotiation.

Why not just **** off and join the Kippers, now Dave has given you your seat back? Nobody expects honest, let alone honourable, behaviour from you, just do it. From my point of view this could be enormous fun. A month in and the Tories already coming apart at the seams.

Current polls: In - 45%, out - 35%, don't know - 20%. That's before a renegotiation. The in's only need 30% of undecided voters to win. We're staying in.

 

OK. This is me thinking this, not a 'tory' perspective...

The EU is flawed, perhaps fatally. The relationships between all of the Euro countries is hopelessly imbalanced in favour of those countries with stronger economies, to the detriment of those against. That's why Germany and France will always do well out of the EU, and Greece, Italy and Spain will not. Germany has the industry, France has the agriculture. Having a single currency but different taxation rates and economic / fiscal regulations is crazy. It's a recipe for rampant inflation in the less wealth-producing nations.

Our relationship, as a relative outsider, differs from that, only in that we don't have to be tied by the idiocy of the single currency. So we can benefit from a stronger economy and trade with better exchange rates. Aside from that, we're still dictated to by many of the constraints that Brussels puts on all its member states, and pay hugely (disproportionally) for the 'privilege'.

The renegotiation is an attempt to balance out some of those constraints and allow some of the legal ownership back to the UK, whilst still retaining the benefits that trade with the EU as a member state brings. The best solution is that we can get - for example - the ability to have more say on who comes into our country from the EU, the ability to determine for ourselves who is able to stay here after breaking our laws, without Brussels overruling our courts in the name of 'human rights', etc.

Ideal solution: we get a large proportion of the changes we are seeking, and we stay in.

Worst case: We get none of them, and we then have to try and build a post-referendum relationship, either in or out of the EU.

Most likely case: we get some, but not all of our wishlist, but we still stay in after the vote.

 

Cogently put Chaz, though I might be tempted to argue that until they cocked up their own economies (with the aid of the single currency, a genuinely half arsed concept shockingly executed) Spain, Italy and Greece were doing very well out of the EU. But not really what I was clumsily trying to address. Why do some Tory MPs (and ministers) think it's ok to stand for election on a very clear platform - we renegotiate, our preference is to stay in - and and a month later whine about the party line? I would be making the same point if it were Labour or any other party.

 

The simple answer is because they are politicians.

The more accurate answer is probably that they haven't really moved from that position, however nobody likes being publicly rebuked - especially when they don't think they have done anything wrong. I doubt they think any differently now, it's just that they have been told that if the renegotiations fail and the position of the party is that the EU will never change enough, then out could be the only option and they should support that view. We're a long way from that point, and if Merkel is to be believed, we'll never get to it.

 

It's clear that the Euro countries (possibly without Greece, that may get kicked out) will become closer, economically and politically, moving to a United States of Europe. That is the aim and these countries will become increasingly influential and become The Block.

Any country in the EU but out of the single currency faces being in the club but not making the rules.

Clearly we're not going to go into the euro at present, so even if there is a "yes" to stay in the EU at the impending referendum, I suspect this issue will not go away and will be revisited in years to come when the UK finds itself marginalised by The Block.

 

I think if Greece withdraws from the Euro others may follow.

 

It's been a while, but I'm watching Question Time, God help me. Nothing much has changed. Some Tory non-entity blaming the last Government for something or other - eh? The same non-entity regurgitating the Tory election lie about 'the people that got us into this mess', meaning the Labour government rather than the real culprits - the people that fund them. Depressing.

The balance of the panel is interesting. Marks out of ten for right-wingedness:

SNP woman 2
Labour bloke 6
Tory non-entity 8
UKIP chap 9
Christina Odone 10

Bloody BBC!

 

Christina Odone? Isn't she the Catholic fundamentalist, who by her own standards should be on her knees in confession rather than parading on telly? Didn't watch, my obligation to listen to nonentities expired when the election finished.

Weird scenes inside the gold mine:
- Cameron told by multiple EU leaders that much of his renegotiation strategy hasn't got a prayer
- Osborne announces cretinous 'law' about generating surpluses. This is so stupid I don't know where to start. But lets try with - who gets punished if this 'law' is broken? Ponder.
- The cap for 'skilled non EU immigration' for June already breached, visas no longer being issued to anyone who already has a job offer if the salary is less than £46k. Business outrage, long term consequence of this headline grabbing policy will be economic damage. The consequence of a **** education system, methinks.
- more boat people arriving in Greece, the country least well equipped to deal with them. No help from rest of Europe, but plenty of bluster about making them pay their interest on debts which everyone knows are unsustainable. But hey, far more important than human decency, eh?
- A woman faces 3 months in jail for taking her bra off on top of a 'sacred' mountain in Malaysia, an action which locals said sparked an earthquake. Stupidity squared.

 

Haven't seen QT this week yet, but it is true that ever since THAT exit poll and of course the election result (not forgetting UKIP's 4 million votes), there has been a general march to the right - by the media (including the bloody BBC) and by political parties including Labour, presumably in an attempt to stay in touch with the majority of the voting public. Only the SNP is waving the red flag, and possibly the Greens although I haven't heard a peep out of them recently and suspect Natalie Bennett may have been a figment of my imagination.

 

For me, it's all about governing ourselves.
I will vote to come out of the EU even if it's proved to me that me and my family would be better off staying in.

 

Has got to be a wum post.

You're getting good at this Winston