I think you are right. We will get a month or two of posturing over Brexit, then a GE when the unicorns inevitably fail to appear.
Westminster Politics
- Thread starter altodevil
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Maybe he will, but i cant see that working well as a strategy.
No he won’t. It’ll be the most ridiculous spread ever seen in a general election.
Tories 35%
Lib Dems 30%
Labour 25%
Rest: 10%
Presuming Brexit party don’t run against this hard leave government. Zero hope of a coalition.
What you call ridiculous other countries call normal. I wouldn't be surprised if something like Brexit brakes up the two party system/dominance permanently (e.g. people turning their back on a party because they feel betrayed by it for allowing outcome x).
I struggle to see Labour/Lib Dems getting that much combined. Most recent YG poll had Labour on 19% and Lib Dems on 23%.
But even on the figures above I imagine the Tories would come close to a majority. The Lib Dems will, as always, struggle to convert their votes to seats en masse, while the split between Labour/Lib Dems will benefit the Tories in a lot of swing constituencies while they win in their own stomping grounds.
We’ll see. He’s only just been hired, and a no deal Brexit is now a very likely reality.
Depressing.
Another era of Thatcherism could be looming.
Johnson/Farage = Thatcher
Corbyn = Foot
You’ll also be hoping if you are of a leftist persuasion that Blair mk II (yes, I understand the irony) comes along more quickly than the 18 years he took last time.
Labour need to ditch Corbyn. NOW.
Let’s hope so, PR please
Johnson/Farage = Thatcher
Corbyn = Foot
You’ll also be hoping if you are of a leftist persuasion that Blair mk II (yes, I understand the irony) comes along more quickly than the 18 years he took last time.
Labour need to ditch Corbyn. NOW.
Let’s hope so, PR please
Boris's Britain
You can't do another era of Thatcherism for a various reasons. To name a few
.The tory voting base is dying off and isn't being replace with younger tories.
.There's isn't much left to privatise.
.There's isn't the union boogie man anymore.
.The results of Thatcherism has destroyed any future for people under 45.
In the long term the tories have serious deep rooted problems.
What we need is an ultra modern party for the 21st century with a broad socialist agenda. Where the state takes back control of the main industries, workers own the means of production and there is a major program of wealth distribution (controlled by the government obviously).
Your point is ?
But centrists (whatever that means) are critical thinkers able to divine the true meaning of course? This smacks of arrogance and condescension.Both Daily Mail / Express and Guardian / Mirror readers. Left and right hoover up and believe whatever they want to.
None of us really know any of that ... idiotic? Probably, but racist? Xenophobic? We don't know that for sure but hearing his Dad and Sister talk they don't appear to have been a family brought up that way. I don't know any better than you. Middle class twat though? Definitely
Also, do you really equate the Guardian with the Daily Mail? One is internationally highly respected for the standards of its investigative journalism. The other is the Daily Mail.
The reason he calls Boris racists may be somewhat supported by his many racist comments (watermelon smiles, picaninnies and letterboxes may jog your memory).
I think he's taking the piss.
A cunning plan, no doubt.
Except they're not. Who exactly are left wingers benefitting when they want people to be able to live until they're old, have social care that doesn't put them into serious debt, responsibility being something that all people are expected to take for their actions and not just those who can't afford to pay their way out of situations, the environment not being ruined for future generations in exchange for short term gains that only benefits a select few, and putting people ahead of business interests that already make obscene profits? Because it sure as feck isn't just about lining their own pockets.
The left are just as bad as the right when it comes to pushing their agenda, but don't for one second think that people who want to put society first are somehow worse than those who only want to put elites first - and, if they're fortunate, might be allowed to lap up any of the drops of wine that fall onto the floor.
Which one is Baldrick?
We live in the age where populism is King, but ironically it's coming from wealthy elite types that are just slowly pushing more and more to see what bullshit they can get away with. The first example in recent times was when the financial crisis, caused by a handful of bankers, resulted in catastrophic results as people - poor and rich alike - lots their jobs and found their public and private services diminished. These same people were told "no, the bankers who caused the crisis aren't to blame it's benefit scum and illegal immigrants" and once it became clear that people were lapping it up they must have rubbed their hands together and thought "feck me, what else can we get away with?"
What was once scandalous has slowly become normal, and the default response to anything that could kill a political career is to lie. And if you somehow manage to get caught and your management of media and public opinion isn't strong enough to stop a mountain of allegations to come your way, you simply just ignore it until it goes away.
Let's face it; Boris will win any election that comes up, the UK will be slowly sold off and fecked even more but nothing will change for the better in our lifetimes because they've already fecking won.
What was once scandalous has slowly become normal, and the default response to anything that could kill a political career is to lie. And if you somehow manage to get caught and your management of media and public opinion isn't strong enough to stop a mountain of allegations to come your way, you simply just ignore it until it goes away.
Let's face it; Boris will win any election that comes up, the UK will be slowly sold off and fecked even more but nothing will change for the better in our lifetimes because they've already fecking won.
Can we not just lock them all in one big cabinet and lose the key?
‘Populism’ is the current media buzzword but it’s nothing new in politics really. Hitler was at it big stylee 80 years ago. He also blamed ‘the elites’ like you are doing btw. The elites are still here thank you very much after being assaulted from both sides.
Thing with the left is, yes, they want ‘Social Justice’ with altruistic policies - and indeed what person with even a modicum of human compassion could possibly criticise a lot of those leftist aims?
The problem however lies in paying for it all & the oft chanted & tried ‘tax the rich’ mantra.
It’ll never work, unless all nations on earth have uniform tax rates/same strategy. One nation -or merely some nations- doing it ain’t enough. Because those rich elites simply upsticks to where the fiscal sun shines. Indeed that’s where the typical right winger argument comes in: reduce tax so you encourage those elites to stay on your patch and pay *something* - as a little of a lot is better than a lot of nothing.
For all your faults, I doubt that you were that bad.
Except it is working, right now, in country after country. In Britain Labour and the Liberals before them have introduced pensions for all, free basic health care, free education to 18, housing benefits for those that wouldn't afford anything otherwise, benefits for the sick, the disabled and the unemployed, the list goes on and on, and all paid for out of taxes, nothing else, just taxes. Yes the left would like to go further and the right would like to reverse it a bit, but the fact is a great many left-wing principles have been won, are here to stay, and rightly so.
So true. "Ian Duncan Smith in an afro." made me chuckle.
If it is working, what are you all still moaning about then? You’ve never had it so good to coin MacMillans phrase.
On a more serious, less flippant note.
Yes, the left have introduced some pillars of modern society as you say (though the quality and maintenance of some of these are questionable through lack of income/investment/affordability) & we aren't sending kids down the Coal mines any longer. But it’s still nowhere near approaching an egalitarian British society or wider world is it?
...and those elites are still there just as they have been for hundreds of years.
I get what you're saying but yeah... The elites in Germany during Hitler's rise were the landed vassals and nobility but also it was a phrase used to try and turn the public against the Jewish community. Not to mention Germany's elite class throughout the years after WW2, when the class opened up, has been filled by those who have worked to gain the status. Not inherited wealth and class isolation such as the generation after generation of old wealth families that exist in what predominantly is referred to as this country's "elite".
But, aye, you of course have a very good point. People have and always will be distracted and coerced into believing that their party are awesome and the rest are all evil scheming wankers. I used to naively think that about Labour and then the SNPs.
A lot of people, it seems sadly. Andrew Langley and then Jeremy Hunt have had no problems carving up the NHS for their own personal gain. Labour, for all their bluster have been no better since the rise (and fall) of New Labour, when they opened up the public service to foundation trusts and letting private companies access commissioning. My dad always loved the say "99% of people are good, 99% of the time". There's no denying that across the political landscape people are making money off of every policy - even the ones that we think are completely altruistic. After all, you don't get anything for free.
Maybe that's where the divide ultimately is. We all know that those at the top are always going to make money, and we all have things that we excuse because they benefit us. The difference is whether those things benefit you to the detriment of others or if they have the potential to benefit everyone. Sometimes, however, the things that might solely benefit some to the detriment of others (private healthcare that puts millions of Americans into debt every year) benefits everyone (public healthcare services like ours using medical procedures and medicines for free that were created by those same US private companies that put some of their profits into R&D).
It did work, it was the 90s. It wasn't perfect but...
...we had a balance that was fairer. Maybe not perfect but it was more evenly spread out. All that's happened in the years following the crunch is rhetoric about how "nothing can be fixed" as if we're meant to forget about what happened before. It's also a clever way of trying to divert our attention from what incompetent behaviours and practices caused the whole thing to collapse in the first place. Rather than rebuild and learn from our mistakes we've just shifted back to class warfare and soundbites.
This has made me think though... we should build our own country. You can handle trade, finances, all the day to day politics and I'll eat chips on a lounge chair.
No. They just aren't driven blindly by one ideology unlike those that stick strictly to the right and left. Hey, the day I figure out how to divine the course I'll let you know.
That's exactly why I used the examples I did. All newspaper readers read what they read because they like their views reflected back at them and they all soak them up.
I actually believe clumsy and inappropriate rhetoric doesn't always make someone inherently racist. I may get lambasted for that view but hey. We don't know if he is actually racist any more than we know Jeremy Corbyn is anti-semitic. It's just conjecture for those that want to believe it.
I would have come back with, 'and I'm not confident that you won't cut a deal with the Tories and vote for what ever they tell you as long as they give you a seat on the cabinet but we've got to rise above that if we want to stop Brexit.'
It's as old as democracy itself. The originators of democracy, the Athenians, made some utterly moronic decisions when influenced by populist politicians who were more interested in their own agenda than serving the public.
I don't see how the current problems get fixed no matter who is in charge.
With the exception that I have never seen or heard Corbyn say anything that is the equivalent of Johnson saying "watermelon smiles" or "piccaninnies" or how Obama had an "ancestral dislike" for Britain as he was "part-Kenyan" or calling burkhas "letterboxes" or those who wear them looking like "bank robbers" or how 'Papa New Guinea style' is "orgies of cannibalism and chief killing" or how the rise in Malaysian women attending universities was so that they could find husbands.
Let's spread it out into general bigotry while we're at it. Since Johnson has called gay people "tank topped bumboys" and equated gay marriage to being the same as "three men and a dog".
At what point do we stop calling all of these "bluster" and fobbing them off as being simple slips of the tongue, and start facing the reality that these are things he genuinely believes? You don't keep saying this stuff accidentally unless you think there's truth behind it.
Seriously? I know he said the second part of the sentence about gay marriage.
Edit. Just read the quote
Boris doesn't have the political capital to survive that process, nor the time or patience in parliament to attempt it.
It was you moaning as I recall, not me