Westminster Politics

Status
Not open for further replies.
it's like when obama became president and racism ended forever in america. they prefer to dress up their really non-representative operation with the symbolic veneer of representation. it's only this which keeps people looking toward politicians at all. as soon as you check out of the personality cults and party partisanship, the game is over.
 
Ramshock said:
Why are you brits so shit at getting a half decent government? Was Gordon Brown and Labour really that fecking bad that you are going into your 13th year of Tory led bullshit?
Click to expand...
Blair illegal wars lost alot of votes after Brown. The right wing media don't help.
 
Ramshock said:
Why are you brits so shit at getting a half decent government? Was Gordon Brown and Labour really that fecking bad that you are going into your 13th year of Tory led bullshit?
Click to expand...

FPTP. It has created a two party system where loons can hijack one of the two of those parties and attain near absolute power with 25% of the UK voting for them.
 
Since Brexit and Cameron's resignation I've repeatedly thought well I guess it can't be worse and each appointment since has shown how fecking wrong I am.

Jesus fecking Christ.
 
It’s been well over 24hrs since Liz Trut (for the Dutch speakers in ear) became PM and still nobody has asked the most important question: wuddya?
 
neverdie said:
it's like when obama became president and racism ended forever in america. they prefer to dress up their really non-representative operation with the symbolic veneer of representation. it's only this which keeps people looking toward politicians at all. as soon as you check out of the personality cults and party partisanship, the game is over.
Click to expand...

wtf even is this post?
 
neverdie said:
they were in office when the crash happened. it was the gop in america. whoever was in office at that time, by and large, got the blame for it in their host country. the irony is that they all deserved some of the blame but that the opposition party is just as terrible. truthfully, most democracies now offer very little choice between the parties that can *realistically* be elected. there is some, a country like france is better than britain or america for example, but overall the picture is bleak and that's a feature of democracy, or has been for the past four decades.

if labour were in office, they'd be doing more or less the same thing. starmer went to the centres of business and asked them "what do you want from me as labour leader". that's his default attitude. if he was to ask business' opinion and then weigh it against the overall public good, that would be something else, but i think it's clear by now that he's another version of blair without the economic base to back it up. he was elected on corbyn's manifesto. corbyn but not corbyn was the pledge; corbyn like manifesto but different personality and "healing". commenced a purge of the "left" and said pledge is long since broken.

two shades of the same shit and it's called capital(ism).
Click to expand...

Cant really argue with any of that, especially the last line.
 
Ramshock said:
Little America it is then.
Click to expand...

It’s the system. The majority of people in the UK are not hard-right and there is even a small majority in favour of EU membership (if that were possible). Problem is, a large number of those people are concentrated in the cities. Under our constituency-based, FPTP system, the minority can exercise disproportionate influence. So, you’re right, a bit like America.
 
Pexbo said:
Jibes like captain hindsight aren’t off the cuff remarks that just so happen to land, they’re carefully planned by their advisors and script writers and crowbarred into their responses. The right wing media are in cahoots with Johnson’s team and the drilling home of soundbites like that is a pincer action repetition by both the traditional media and the many bot networks that are a cancer to social media.
Click to expand...

I don’t know if it’s a phrase Truss used but case in point all the same:
 
So sounds like we know what their strategy is going to be going forward. Refocus on tax and then offer tax cuts at a general election. The old classics basically.

Hopefully every policy the Tories claim they can't fund will be compared to the excess profits they've allowed oil companies to keep.

If they did even a small windfall tax you're talking tens of billions that could be fed into renewables drive.
 
Solius said:
Surely they know how easy this is to spot and how ridiculous it looks.
Click to expand...
My theory is that Truss’ team has sold them all down the river there. Boris‘ had his client journalists and it was obviously to anyone who was really taking notice but I expect they worked a lot harder to brief them all individually and keep it relatively ”natural”. Who ever is leading Truss’ COMs has lazily sent the same cookie cutter tweet to all the journos sucking on the Tory teet and embarrassed the lot of them. Disappointed with Ridge, I don’t watch Sky News but have seen some of her interviews go viral and thought she was one of the better ones.
 
Pexbo said:
My theory is that Truss’ team has sold them all down the river there. Boris‘ had his client journalists and it was obviously to anyone who was really taking notice but I expect they worked a lot harder to brief them all individually and keep it relatively ”natural”. Who ever is leading Truss’ COMs has lazily sent the same cookie cutter tweet to all the journos sucking on the Tory teet and embarrassed the lot of them. Disappointed with Ridge, I don’t watch Sky News but have seen some of her interviews go viral and thought she was one of the better ones.
Click to expand...
The Historic Collapse of Journalism
Click to expand...
I have never gotten over a story The New York Times ran in its Sunday magazine back in May 2016. Maybe you will remember the occasion. It was a lengthy profile of Ben Rhodes, the Obama administration’s chief adviser for “strategic communications.” It was written by a reporter named David Samuels.

These two made a striking pair — fitting, I would say. Rhodes was an aspiring fiction writer living in Brooklyn when, by the unlikeliest of turns, he found his way into the inner circle of the Obama White House. Samuels, a freelancer who usually covered popular culture celebrities, had long earlier succumbed to that unfortunately clever style commonly affected by those writing about rock stars and others of greater or lesser frivolity.

Rhodes’ job was to spin “some larger restructuring of the American narrative,” as Samuels put it. “Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics.” A professional flack straight out of Edward Bernays, in plain English. A teller of tales trafficking in manipulable facts and happy endings. “Packaged as politics:” a nice touch conveying the commodification of our public discourse.

Rhodes and Ned Price, his deputy, were social-media acrobats. Price, a former C.I.A. analyst and now the State Department’s spokesman, recounted without inhibition how they fed White House correspondents, columnists, and others in positions to influence public opinion as a fois gras farmer feeds his geese.

Here is Price on the day-to-day of the exercise:

“There are sort of these force multipliers. We have our compadres. I will reach out to a couple of people, and, you know, I wouldn’t want to name them…. And I’ll give them some color, and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space and have huge followings, and they’ll be putting out this message on their own.”
Click to expand...

Rhodes gave Samuels a more structured analysis of this arrangement:

“All the newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what is happening in Moscow or Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Click to expand...

I wrote at length about the Times piece in Salon, where I was foreign affairs columnist at the time. There was so much to unpack in Samuels’s report I hardly knew where to begin. In Price we had a complete failure to understand the role of properly functioning media and the nature of public space altogether.

Rhodes described a White House press corps comprised of post-adolescents thoroughly dependent on the geese-feeding arrangement, especially when they reported on national security questions: “They literally know nothing.”

Rhodes and Price were describing some qualitative turn in the media’s relations with power. I do not mean to suggest these relations were ever in living memory very good, but at some point there had been a swoon, a giving way from bad to worse. “When you read routine press reports in the Times or any of the other major dailies,” I wrote of the Rhodes profile, “you are looking at what the clerks we still call reporters post on government bulletin boards, which we still call newspapers.”


Why is this? Why do I settle on Sept. 11, 2001, as the point of departure?


Jill Abramson went on to serve as The Times’s executive editor. Although that interim ended when she was fired after two and a half years, she was a journalist of very high stature, if not of high caliber. Here is what she said when she explained to her Chautauqua audience the reasons the American press caved so cravenly to Ari Fleischer’s objectionable demands. “Journalists are Americans, too. I consider myself, like I’m sure many of you do, to be a patriot.”

These two sentences flabbergast me every time I think of them. For one thing, they are an almost verbatim repeat of what scores of publishers, editors, columnists, correspondents, and reporters said after Carl Bernstein, in the Oct. 20, 1977, edition of Rolling Stone, exposed more than 400 of them as C.I.A. collaborators. Joe Alsop, columnist at the New York Herald Tribune and later The Washington Post and a Cold Warrior par excellence: “I’ve done things for them when I thought they were the right thing to do. I call it doing my duty as a citizen.”
Click to expand...

full article here
 
webbthepostie said:
We need to stamp that shite out.
Click to expand...
It'll take 10 years to see any output and it won't impact prices. But the current short term crisis is being cited as justification.

Not surprising now that our PM is an ex Shell employee and our energy minister is a climate change denier, they are not investing in green energy for the future.
 
My contact in the treasury says the energy bills solution isn't what they would do. It will benefit people who are doing ok and who are well off, but not those struggling :rolleyes:
 
the kind of sums being spoken about, and the way in which the government intends to raise said funds, would, in a democracy, necessitate a popular vote. since covid, we're talking about 100s of billions of pounds being added to the public debt column and not a single meaningful chance for the public to have its say. it's a farce.

imagine a referendum along the lines of a) support government initiative; b) support nationalization and eventual creation of publicly owned renewable company; c) support a wealth tax as the means by which to achieve either a or b. but then the electorate does not refer to the people but to capital. what passes for democracy is fundamentally broken. or, if you're well off or exist to make money for people who are well off, then I suppose it's all fine.

the last election came down to "get brexit done". ignoring whether you supported brexit or not, because it was mostly a wedge issue which divided people even if I'd have voted remain, the effect is that the people are locked out of the representational mechanism. the media plays a key role in this. it's telling that you can find people with more substantive opinions to add on a football sub-forum than you can on the majority of corporate media websites and channels the majority of the time. the press really has become a class of clerks. they just amplify whatever it is officialdom or capitaldom has told them on any given day. it's not like it was incredible in terms of integrity fifteen years ago but there has been an incredible decline nonetheless. from bad to abysmal.
 
Last edited:
Pexbo said:
My theory is that Truss’ team has sold them all down the river there. Boris‘ had his client journalists and it was obviously to anyone who was really taking notice but I expect they worked a lot harder to brief them all individually and keep it relatively ”natural”. Who ever is leading Truss’ COMs has lazily sent the same cookie cutter tweet to all the journos sucking on the Tory teet and embarrassed the lot of them. Disappointed with Ridge, I don’t watch Sky News but have seen some of her interviews go viral and thought she was one of the better ones.
Click to expand...
Disappointed the Guardian is in there.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.