winegums posted:

He's leagues more popular than Dugdale and right now the tories are backpedaling over their budget. He'd want to be on.

BBC News posted:

The claim: The government's increase in National Insurance contributions is a breach of its 2015 manifesto.
Reality Check verdict: The government did promise in its manifesto not to raise National Insurance contributions, and this is an increase, so it has broken that pledge.

Red Oktober posted:

The news orgs at least got smart to that and have now started writing headlines like 'Trump claims, citing no evidence, that Obama tapped his phones'.

Red Oktober posted:

We saw it a lot at the beginning of the Trump administration where the newspaper headline would be something like 'trump accuses obama of tapping his phone' or 'trump claims millions voted illegally', and while the article states that he had no evidence, that's not the part that people remember, especially if they don't read the article.

The news orgs at least got smart to that and have now started writing headlines like 'Trump claims, citing no evidence, that Obama tapped his phones'.

mehall posted:

Kex performed well at raking the Tories against the coals where she could, but fell apart as soon as Scottish independence came up.

Looke posted:

here are all options

Lord of the Llamas posted:

Well there's the crackpot libertarian wing like Carswell and Hannan, sort of the the anti-Lexit particles. Of course the most funny thing about those guys is the naive belief that any substantive proportion of the population actually agrees with them which somehow makes them almost blind to the ethnic nationalism and xenophobia.

jabby posted:

https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/839993872944136192
Britain remains well on track to becoming a one party state.

mehall posted:

It's a shame Tasmina Ahmed-Sheik has no policies or principles of her own, because she's a fairly effective mouthpiece when she wants to be.
She shouldn't have bothered arguing with Kez about the Scottish attainment at the end because it was sensless bickering to an audience that didn't give a poo poo, but other than that she came across well.

Kex performed well at raking the Tories against the coals where she could, but fell apart as soon as Scottish independence came up.

A good question to ask about the NHS should be "assuming there is no change to the NHS being free at the point of service, should the rich be contributing more to it's cost".
Hard to get anyone to se no to that, and boom you have justification to go back to the 50p top rate.

Breath Ray posted:

I dont think the 50p top rate is very effective

Breath Ray posted:

I dont think the 50p top rate is very effective

JFairfax posted:

hand-fed baby bird posted:

Still great

forkboy84 posted:

The edit with Liz Kendall's face on the doll was funnier tbh

Juliet Samuel posted:

Philip Hammond is worried about the tax take. This, we are told, is why he made the strategic blunder of pushing up taxes on the self-employed this week.

The ultimate limit on how much the Treasury can collect in taxes from workers is, of course, not tax policy, but how much money people make. Any Tory chancellor should instinctively know this. The picture for UK earnings growth has been grim over the last decade and although it is now getting marginally better, it isn’t expected to improve dramatically. Yet despite the importance of earnings, on this basic measure of our economy’s health, the Budget was largely silent.

It’s not just Hammond. Politicians and experts across the Right have few policy suggestions on one of the greatest economic problems facing the country: low pay and, underlying it, Britain’s weak business investment and productivity.

forkboy84 posted:

Agreed. It's no where near high enough. John Lennon hardly lived in poverty when there was a 98p top rate.

quote:

Mrs May is our first Catholic prime minister
The PM’s outlook on life is informed by traditional Anglo-Catholic beliefs that pose a risk to our post-Brexit future

As sacrifices go, it may not seem very much. But as symbols go, it says a lot.

Theresa May’s decision to give up her favourite crisps for Lent may not have been headline news. I suspect, however, that it’s at least as important as anything else we’ve discovered in the past ten days. Because it goes to the heart of the beliefs that guide, and the background that has shaped, our prime minister.

The principle of Lenten sacrifice, of giving up something cherished to recall the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness, is a discipline observed by many Christians. But it is particularly a feature of Catholic practice. And Theresa May is, I believe, Britain’s first Catholic prime minister.

An Anglo-Catholic rather than a Roman Catholic, but no less a Catholic for that. One of the many wonders of the Anglican Church is that it comprehends both those who think of themselves as definitively Protestant in the tradition of Thomas Cranmer and those who believe they are continuity Catholics practising a spirituality and believing in a theology that has passed down from St Augustine to Pusey and Keble. Theresa May’s father, Hubert Brasier, was a priest who very much subscribed to the latter tradition.

He trained at the College of the Resurrection, at Mirfield in Yorkshire, an Anglo-Catholic centre which combines preparation for Anglican ministry with a monastic community. The prime minister has herself revealed something of her family’s specifically Catholic approach to worship when she was a guest on Desert Island Discs. She chose two hymns. And one of them, Therefore We, Before Him Bending, is particularly theologically significant. It is normally sung during a service known as Benediction of (or with) the Blessed Sacrament, an Anglo-Catholic ritual which was illegal before 1917, so incendiary was it in the eyes of Low Church Protestants. The Rev Giles Fraser, the former canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, has explained that Benediction, “the worship of the holy sacrament — or ‘wafer worship’ as Protestant scoffers often describe it — is pretty hardcore Anglo-Catholic stuff”.

Now, of course, growing up in a household steeped in Catholic spirituality is one thing. Carrying that through to one’s life and work quite another. But I believe the best way of considering the prime minister’s approach to office, in the round, is to see it through the prism of Catholic thought and practice.

Particularly Catholic social thought. There is a coherent and distinguished political tradition, pioneered by, but not unique to, Catholic intellectuals which attempts to steer between the twin dangers of excessive individualism and oppressive statism. It has its roots in the philosophy of Aquinas, borrows from the work of Aristotle and was revived for the industrial age by Pope Leo XIII with his encyclical De Rerum Novarum (Of Revolutionary Things) in 1891.

Catholic social thought places emphasis on the cultivation of virtue rather than the exercise of liberty or the accumulation of prosperity as mankind’s goal. In economic terms it thinks of the common good, with individuals given the chance to find dignity in the exercise of skill, as the guiding principle rather than profits or abstract equality targets. And it is particularly concerned about the dignity of work and workers. It celebrates vocation, believes in worker participation in industrial decision-making and sees firms as institutions which exist to serve society and imbue individual lives with purpose rather than just maximising shareholder value.

It is striking how much of the prime minister’s rhetoric and policy reflects these beliefs. In interviews, including most strikingly in the New Statesman last month, she refers repeatedly to the common good. Her flirtation with workers on boards, interest in corporate governance reform and laceration of capitalists who plunder firms rather than protect workers is all of a piece.

Just as the Catholic social thinkers of the late 19th century were reacting to the capitalist ruthlessness of utilitarians and Manchester Liberals while also guarding against the growing allure of Marxism and revolution, so the prime minister’s supporters see her reacting against the excesses of unfettered globalisation and corporate greed while also guarding against the dangers of a populist and protectionist counter-revolution.

Until recently the principal intellectual upholders of Catholic social thought in British politics have been identified with the “Blue Labour” tradition — individuals such as Jon Cruddas, MP, Adrian Pabst and Lord Glasman. The occupation of this philosophical terrain by Mrs May is in line with her broader incursion into Labour’s electoral heartland.

Paradoxically, it is precisely Mrs May’s conservatism — her ethic of service, attachment to traditions and unease with globalisation’s wrenching pace of change — that makes her so attractive to Labour voters outside the major cities. But it also exposes the government to a longer-term risk. Britain’s path to preeminence in the past followed our break with Catholicism and embrace of the Reformation. We pursued a global, maritime, buccaneering, individualistic, liberal destiny — the spirit of our capitalism was infused with a very Protestant ethic. Now that we are once more freeing ourselves from a conformist Continent to make our own way in the world the question of whether we need to be more radical to maximise opportunities or more cautious to reassure and protect is central to our politics. I can see the case for both. Which may not be very crusading. But I suspect it makes me genuinely Anglican.

Pissflaps posted:

Didn't Tony turn to Rome after he stood down?

peanut- posted:

Michael Gove's column in The Times today is really quite something

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/mrs-may-is-our-first-catholic-prime-minister-zmbgdqjz3

Entropy238 posted:

Is there a UKMT thread consensus on George Galloway? Good man or bad man?

Entropy238 posted:

Is there a UKMT thread consensus on George Galloway? Good man or bad man?

Entropy238 posted:

Is there a UKMT thread consensus on George Galloway? Good man or bad man?