Westminster Politics
- Thread starter altodevil
- Start date
That is right.
Pension funds essentially rely on two things for growth.
Compounding - the amount of time the money is invested over.
Interest rates or return on capital invested.
If basic interest rates are low, say 2% for say 20 years then capital growth would be modest. And recently that has been the case.
Prior to that, interest rates were much higher.
And if that was the case early on in ones working life then their pension pot would have had a much better outcome.
If this virus really hits the UK(Which I'm assuming it will)then every argument about why we needed cuts to public services and how awful it would have been Labour had won(Soviet Union 2.0 etc etc) will be thrown out the window and we see the full force of the state. Hopefully anyway as the alternative is just everyone in Britain dying.You have a fair point.
In fairness the other guy is doing it while wearing a blue tie.
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Does Patel ever stop fecking grinning
Tories think we're all alcoholics.
Tories think we're all alcoholics.
Didn't know Dorries was health minister. Know she used be be a nurse but feck me...she is and idiot.
These types of things are common. For understandable reasons, they are not framed as such by media. So they circulate on twitter screenshots, changing nobody's mind.
(Speculation) - The bigger problem in the UK I think is the respect the BBC has. Since people seem to expect an unbiased broadcaster to do its job, their framing really matters. From very limited experience, the US is a bit better since the media landscape is totally polarised and people are vaguely aware of who is on which side. So if you frame something in an unfamiliar way, especially if its different than both main sides, it can get traction. But, again, this happens 1 on 1, not at scale, and so is politically useless.
So far, it looks like some of the claims of the election are panning out then, the Tories are spending a lot more under Johnson than those that came before. Labour need to come to terms with this pretty quickly. Corbyn's comments about how this is just putting right the years of austerity may be true, but he's fighting the last war not the current one. Johnson will be little more harmed by that than by someone claiming that Corbyn is responsible for PFI or the Iraq war. The rhetoric of austerity, at least, is gone, arguably its gone for real. Now Labour need to decide how to frame this Tory Government and respond to it.
In truth I think it was clear during the election campaign that it was "tax and spend" vs "tax and spend". The Tories were just better at attacking the tax and spend policies of Labour as economically illiterate whilst also advocating a similar economic divergence. This is true in the US also with Trump.
It's why for me it was the most extreme "turd sandwich vs giant douche" election I've seen (I know you'd differ on this front).
There's no success being seen in candidates like Bernie/Corbyn, but also no success with the likes of Paul in the US and Raab in the UK (both very flawed in their own right of course).
It irritates me that people with a radical policy vision (either way) seem to be getting outgunned by tempestuous populists. Although the candidates on each side aren't exactly beacons of electability.
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Posted this since it's as much about our politics as it is about Corona.
That’s an absolutely shocking read.
Yes it is, but it was 100% predictable.
Now, just imagine the reaction had Jeremy Corbyn missed one, let alone FIVE, Cobra meetings.
Sir Keir would have a lot more to say.
Forget about ideology, it’s a damning indictment that people like Johnson are able to wander into positions of such power. Anyone who knows him could tell you he is exactly the kind of uncaring self-absorbed cretin who would miss key meetings even in his role as PM during the biggest peacetime crisis, yet he is able to become Mayor of London, Foreign Sec, PM etc virtually all by virtue of the privilege he was born into.
who could have ever guessed that boris doesn't give a shit about anything but himself
Comments below the first one are insightful - Times is a left-wing rag, for example. I've always felt the long-term way to combat media bias isn't to point out mistakes or examples of it, but to build an entirely parallel media ecosystem like the right has.
Boris must be one of the most popular PMs we've had at the moment I'd have thought. I can't recall any being in the positive before, Thatcher in the Falklands excepted, although I do have a shit memory so I might be wrong.One would expect Starmer to get a new leader bounce soon though, they usually do.
It would have been shocking
That he had not replaced cobra meetings with weekly tea parties for his terrorist friends
Kinda pointless talking about Corbyn though... He got decimated in an election and he's finished in Westminster politics
someone in the shadow cabinet needs to come out as a maoist to keep up
British democracy at it's best.
Politics is a fecking joke and we are the mugs. The media and the government are part of a show. Just look at how many government personnel are former journalists.
The revolving door between leading jobs in the media and the Conservative party/government continues. And yet I still have to put up with idiots claiming the media is biased towards the left, apparently.
Michael Gove’s shelves:
Twitter is going crazy over the bookshelf
Strange Death of Europe... HummmTwitter is going crazy over the bookshelf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strange_Death_of_Europe
though this has to be the highlight
https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Michael-Gove-Saves-World/dp/1521231079
the david irving book hopefully finishes gove though - probably the most slimy man in parliament which in and of its self is quite an achievement
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Twitter is going crazy over the bookshelf
It’s a bit ridiculous but you just know Gove would be nodding along to the two Murray books.
resigned as minister ... really should have resigned as an mp...
suspect we will see him back in a government post in 6 months once this has blown over
I have a book written by Hitler on my shelf....
Yes, at the least he'll retain his MP's salary, pension and influence, and in many cases they just keep their head down for a year or so and then get promotion again. Constituency parties never seem to act on these things either. Or even the voters. One does despair a bit at times.
We're being trolled by the BookShelfGate photo, I fear.
My second reaction as well. I mean the whole set up is a who's who of Cnuts and it's not like Mail journos are averse to trolling.
And another thing ... if someone junior in his office or the civil service had used HOC notepaper for personal advantage they would have been sacked. People always talk of those at the top having more responsibility, but in practice they don't, It's the lower levels that are always punished the most.
Is there any plausible deniability to suggest that it's still possible to come across Irving without knowing who he is?
His credibility as a historian is obviously in tatters as a result of the Lipstadt case, but there are at least enough references to him as serious historian (in some cases from people who are pushing their own denialism agenda but in some cases not) to make me think that you could stumble across it and not realise who he is.
I simply don't accept that as an excuse for Gove, at the very least we should hold our politicians to the standards of being able to do a google search, but it was a question which struck me when I re-read Slaughterhouse Five and saw Irving quoted uncritically by Vonnegut without any comment.
The thing is that Hitler's book is of interest at a primary source account of that period of history. Irving's work has absolutely no value except as a study of denialism, and I don't see any of the necessary works surrounding that (e.g. Lipstadt's own book) to suggest that that is the context in which Gove may have been interested in it. The best defence you can offer is that he didn't know what Irving was, but I think it's both extremely implausible and ludicrously week.
His credibility as a historian is obviously in tatters as a result of the Lipstadt case, but there are at least enough references to him as serious historian (in some cases from people who are pushing their own denialism agenda but in some cases not) to make me think that you could stumble across it and not realise who he is.
I simply don't accept that as an excuse for Gove, at the very least we should hold our politicians to the standards of being able to do a google search, but it was a question which struck me when I re-read Slaughterhouse Five and saw Irving quoted uncritically by Vonnegut without any comment.
The thing is that Hitler's book is of interest at a primary source account of that period of history. Irving's work has absolutely no value except as a study of denialism, and I don't see any of the necessary works surrounding that (e.g. Lipstadt's own book) to suggest that that is the context in which Gove may have been interested in it. The best defence you can offer is that he didn't know what Irving was, but I think it's both extremely implausible and ludicrously week.
I'm trying to be objective - no doubt many of us have owned controversial books - but Irving's work is something I'd avoid completely, as frankly he disgusts me:
Wikipedia: 'Several of these statements were cited by the judge's decision in Irving's lawsuit against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, leading the judge to conclude that Irving "had on many occasions spoken in terms which are plainly racist." One example brought was his diary entry for 17 September 1994, in which Irving wrote about a ditty he composed for his young daughter "when halfbreed children are wheeled past":
I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian.'
Wikipedia: 'Several of these statements were cited by the judge's decision in Irving's lawsuit against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, leading the judge to conclude that Irving "had on many occasions spoken in terms which are plainly racist." One example brought was his diary entry for 17 September 1994, in which Irving wrote about a ditty he composed for his young daughter "when halfbreed children are wheeled past":
I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian.'