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Better late than never I guess. John McDonnell's response to Forde report, open letter to Starmer & Evans. https://labourhub.org.uk/2022/07/27/a-letter-to-keir-starmer-and-david-evans/ quote:
Page snipe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp2p-bMH_-0 Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 10:46 on Jul 28, 2022 |
# ? Jul 28, 2022 10:43 |
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# ? May 26, 2024 09:27 |
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Halisnacks posted:I’m not excited about Starmer’s Labour, but I’m even less excited by the prospect of indefinite Tory rule. I feel the only option is to: You're forgetting, there is a third way 3) Take to the streets
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 10:45 |
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Better late than never I guess. I think a week to read the report in full, digest, and then write a well-thought-out letter is fair. Probably he also reached out to JVL which takes time.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 10:48 |
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Unfortunately, the last time people held their noses and voted for the poo poo labour candidate during a time of tory collapse we got blair which gives you a perfect throughline to where we are now. So, while I don't really have much idea how the alternative is better, I certainly don't think it's a good idea to repeat the previous mistake.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 10:49 |
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Tesseraction posted:See this seemed like a cool sexy hashtag to check on only to find that Prince William likes it up the butt and needs a mistress to peg him because Kate's too prudish. It's part of a larger picture. Wills had Harry ran out of town because Megan found out about William's affairs. Harry was pissed off as Charles's affair was one of the things that destroyed Diana and they had both promised that they wouldn't treat their wives the way their Dad did. Basically William is a grade A wanker but no-one can say that as he is untouchable... For now.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 10:49 |
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notaspy posted:no-one can say that as he is untouchable... Certainly not if you've got a strap-on.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 10:50 |
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OwlFancier posted:Unfortunately, the last time people held their noses and voted for the poo poo labour candidate during a time of tory collapse we got blair which gives you a perfect throughline to where we are now. Like I said, in my case my MP is good so it's an easy choice. Were I in a Blarite dickhead's constituency I would probably think very differently.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 10:51 |
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Just running some numbers based on the energy stuff that came out before. If you're single with no kids and on the National Living Wage of £9.50 (i.e. the highest of the legal minimums), and you work the UK average number of working hours (1,730): Gross pay of £16,435 gives you a take-home per year of £15,061. After a £4,000 energy bill annually you get £11,061. Divide that by 12 for your monthly income to get £922. Rent of £600 because that was the cheapest thing I could find in Nottingham that wasn't a student house share: £322 left. Council Tax of £127 per month for a Band A and now you've got £195. Literally nothing you've done so far even requires you to spend any money and you've got less than £200 to live on. Let's assume you can manage to spend only £120 a month on food (£30 weekly, ish) - £75 left over. You need a phone and the internet for basically everything these days, so let's get you a SIM-only contract of £10 a month on whatever phone you already have and let's forego having home internet at all. I forgot about a water bill, average for one person is £23 per month. You've got £42 left over for the month after paying for literally only the bare minimum you require to survive. This is assuming that you can walk to work, don't have a TV License or anything for entertainment, never need to replace or repair anything that breaks, never over-eat or go for a meal/drink with friends, you aren't already locked into a higher monthly phone contract, don't have kids, never need to get on a bus or in a taxi, and can get free prescriptions (or just ignore when you get ill).
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 10:57 |
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OwlFancier posted:Unfortunately, the last time people held their noses and voted for the poo poo labour candidate during a time of tory collapse we got blair which gives you a perfect throughline to where we are now. Unfortunately, the choice seems to be repeat one mistake (a rightward lurching Tory party) or repeat another (a rightward lurching Labour Party). It’s a poo poo position to be in, but I don’t think it’s histrionic to suggest that more marginalised people will suffer and die if the country chooses the Tory brand of mistake.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 10:58 |
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Halisnacks posted:[...] more marginalised people will suffer and die if the country chooses the Tory brand of mistake. Well it depends. On what timescale? if not voting Labour causes some kind of shift leftward in their party because there's no turnout for more bland neoliberal poo poo then over a longer time period maybe less people would die? But it's not guaranteed, and who are we to suggest that those who will die sooner are an acceptable sacrifice for this chance at a better outcome long-term? If the gamble fails and Labour refuse to shift left, then more people will die both short-and-long-term because Tories will Tory for another 5-10 years while Labour drop wet egg policies and means test their own farts. If we vote Labour and implicitly approve Keir's non-vision for Labour then we just passively approve of more nothingy neoliberalism and the political sphere in this country continues in the direction it's going now. To me the outcome of voting Labour and the gamble failing are essentially the same, because I have no faith in Keir's Labour addressing the causes of the short-term deaths of marginalised people in any meaningful capacity, so what difference does it make whether the blood is on the hands of the guy in a blue or red tie?
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:05 |
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OwlFancier posted:this is what yang's ubi proposal meant Universal Bottom Income
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:08 |
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If Starmer becomes PM he isn't going to undo anything the Tories have done, he's going to shake his head sadly and mumble something about tightening our belts, sacrifices have to be made, tough choices, and spend several years reinforcing the belief that this is the only way things can be E: I honestly don't understand voting for Labour just because they're not the Tories. If the two main parties were the Tories and UKIP, would you vote for the Tories because they're not as bad? How extreme does the hypothetical have to get before you'd consider the system to be broken? TACD fucked around with this message at 11:15 on Jul 28, 2022 |
# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:13 |
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Halisnacks posted:I don’t think it’s histrionic to suggest that more marginalised people will suffer and die if the country chooses the Tory brand of mistake. you don't have close to enough information to make an accurate read on that you could have run the same line about labour in 2001 or the lib dems in 2010 and been disastrously wrong on both counts becasue events took a different turn; you just cant make that kind of utilitarian read in advance even if it feels like you can
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:15 |
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Surprise T Rex posted:Well it depends. On what timescale? if not voting Labour causes some kind of shift leftward in their party because there's no turnout for more bland neoliberal poo poo then over a longer time period maybe less people would die? But it's not guaranteed, and who are we to suggest that those who will die sooner are an acceptable sacrifice for this chance at a better outcome long-term? Exactly. And you need to apply at least two discounts to the possibility of a better outcome long term: (i) the likelihood that the Labour Party will actually shift left; (ii) if (i), the likelihood that a Labour Party that has shifted left will gain power. quote:If the gamble fails and Labour refuse to shift left, then more people will die both short-and-long-term because Tories will Tory for another 5-10 years while Labour drop wet egg policies and means test their own farts. Labour under Keir are a poo poo party and it’s fair and apt to call them Red Tories. Still, Red Tories are (at least for now) better than Blue Tories. It’s like the Dems in the US: they are a lovely neoliberal party, but I’d have crawled over glass to vote for Clinton or Biden over Trump.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:15 |
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Got sent the warning about bills going up and the power bill is going to £3400. Woof. Gas to £850. If the government doesn't do anything about this I hope they storm the bastille.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:17 |
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The issue is that you are likely to get that anyway, just a bit later and with no opposition because the right wing absolutely obliterated the party's capability to win elections or rhetorically oppose the government.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:17 |
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Halisnacks posted:Unfortunately, the choice seems to be repeat one mistake (a rightward lurching Tory party) or repeat another (a rightward lurching Labour Party). The present Labour leadership is attempting to flank the Tories from the right with even harsher austerity and authoritarian crackdowns. They're not a chance at something marginally less bad, they're part of what is now a fully bipartisan consensus towards sadistic, kleptocratic, and astonishingly inept misgovernance on behalf of a tiny, incestuous, and deeply radicalised media-political clique. The choice is not between Labour and the Tories, the choice is between Westminster and other, more democratic expressions of political power. The recent surge in union activism is a much more promising route to go down.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:17 |
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I refuse to engage with the argument that the voters are at fault if labour continues to make it clear they don't want left wing voters to support them. Thats not how politics works, if labour loses it will be their own fault just like last time.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:18 |
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Also that, yeah, the outcome of the elections seems increasingly irrelevant because neither party is offering solutions and are going to have to be forced into enacting them from outside.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:18 |
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Barry Foster posted:David Jason is still around, I guess I remember a few years ago some people were heavily implying David Jason was a nonce and there was a big story about to break but I haven't heard anything on those lines since so it might have been bollocks
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:19 |
Surprise T Rex posted:Just running some numbers based on the energy stuff that came out before. If you're single with no kids and on the National Living Wage of £9.50 (i.e. the highest of the legal minimums), and you work the UK average number of working hours (1,730): To be fair, the "average" energy bill is for a household of 4 in a house - the kind of pokey 1-bed you'd be in would be tiny enough you'd "only" be paying like £2000-2500. Still a miserable existence, though. And makes it clear that if your a single parent with a house and kids you're even harder hit. And many of the poorest on minimum wage are in houseshares with bills included - contracts that are disappearing or being ripped up as landlords try to shift the cost of bills for them onto their tenants.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:19 |
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Rustybear posted:you don't have close to enough information to make an accurate read on that Sure, that is always true - but it seems a reasonable enough forecast with the information we have today? I concede the LibDems 2010 point, but are you suggesting the Tories under IDS would not have invaded Iraq with the US?
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:20 |
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Nothingtoseehere posted:To be fair, the "average" energy bill is for a household of 4 in a house - the kind of pokey 1-bed you'd be in would be tiny enough you'd "only" be paying like £2000-2500. This is true, and I guess goes some way toward making me feel a little bit better.... but like you say a lot of people are in houses or have kids etc. Plus I'm sure my fake 5-minute budget left out a lot of expenses that slipped my mind but are similarly unavoidable.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:22 |
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Finally got around to sending in my foreign driver's licence to the DVLA to swap it out for a UK one. Applied online for a UK licence on June 6, sent out the application form with my foreign licence June 14, and both arrived at the DVLA June 15. Haven't received anything and the status of my application was still "awaiting return form," which means it's still processing. I called the DVLA because it's now been over the 4 week timeframe they recommend you wait and they said that because my application wasn't processed within 21 days of the online application (which would've been June 27), it expired. A) It's not made clear anywhere that there's such a tight window for the application to be processed B) There was no notification or update online that would give me any indication something was wrong C) 1.5 weeks isn't enough to process a simple application? They now have my foreign licence and I have to begin the whole application process again. Not impressed.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:23 |
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As conditions get worse, people insist that it's more important than ever to vote in the lesser evil, which further legitimises the lurch right. Nothing actually improves, it just gets worse at a slightly different rate, which makes conditions worse, so people argue that it's even more important than ever to vote in the lesser evil, which further legitimises the lurch right...
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:26 |
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Halisnacks posted:Sure, that is always true - but it seems a reasonable enough forecast with the information we have today? the point was not to start haggling over counterfactuals, the point was you're kidding yourself that some 4d calculus about least worst option is ever going to be remotely meaningful if you want what starmer is selling then vote for it, if you don't then don't.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:30 |
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1) Vote for the lesser evil. Someone is going to run the government; the less evil, the better. 2) Attempt to improve society in non-electoral ways. Activism, community service, building and supporting non-parliamentary power structures (e.g. trade unions). This doesn’t seem hard to me. (1) doesn’t feel good for someone on the left. But abstaining, spoiling a ballot, or, in the extreme, voting Tory in pursuit of accelerationism, is tantamount to being complicit in a proto-Fascist party being in power. Edit: Rustybear posted:the point was not to start haggling over counterfactuals, the point was you're kidding yourself that some 4d calculus about least worst option is ever going to be remotely meaningful I honestly don’t know what you’re trying to imply: that there is no point voting because we can’t forecast the future with complete certainty and accuracy? Halisnacks fucked around with this message at 11:46 on Jul 28, 2022 |
# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:35 |
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Rustybear posted:if you want what starmer is selling then vote for it
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:37 |
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Halisnacks posted:1) Vote for the lesser evil. Someone is going to run the government; the less evil, the better. But you can't advocate for 2 while supporting Keir's Labour. Labour official policy seems to directly oppose number 2, at least on the trade union part. There's no guarantee he won't carry on the Tory legacy of hobbling unions as much as possible to appease our Distinctively British corporate overlords.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:40 |
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Guavanaut posted:Has anyone found out what it is? I think it's just misery
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:40 |
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Halisnacks posted:1) Vote for the lesser evil. Someone is going to run the government; the less evil, the better. Except if you take the slightly longer view, putting starmer/blair in power is a critical component of getting the fascists into power, because that is the other part of the ratchet. The handle moves back and forth, and has to move both ways for it to work, but the torque is only in one direction. The opportunity to fix the problem is occupied by people who do nothing or actively make it worse, and then the disgust at them is key in putting the real swivel eyed nutters back in charge.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:43 |
Doctor_Fruitbat posted:As conditions get worse, people insist that it's more important than ever to vote in the lesser evil, which further legitimises the lurch right. Nothing actually improves, it just gets worse at a slightly different rate, which makes conditions worse, so people argue that it's even more important than ever to vote in the lesser evil, which further legitimises the lurch right... haha ratchet go tickticktickticktick
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:45 |
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Halisnacks posted:1) Vote for the lesser evil. Someone is going to run the government; the less evil, the better. If you agree it’s hypothetically possible, what would that point look like for you?
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:46 |
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Halisnacks posted:1) Vote for the lesser evil. Someone is going to run the government; the less evil, the better. happy to agree on 2 1 i just find dishonest I'm sorry. if you believe in something you have a duty to support it and not to lend your support to those who don't. this lesser of two evils stuff is just an attempt to have your cake and eat it if you're willing to endlessly compromise on a particular principle then you're not as committed to that principle as you say you are; which is fine but you should be honest about it. some things have real meaning to some people and you can't be surprised when they give you short shift accordingly; you're not able to know the lesser of two evils and invoking 'the suffering of marginalised people' as if you're somehow the principled one is crass I'm sorry
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:51 |
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Halisnacks posted:1) Vote for the lesser evil. Someone is going to run the government; the less evil, the better. They tanked two elections because the leader was left leaning, that should tell you all you need to know about these bastards. Its not the lesser of two evils, its the same evil with a red rosette.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:51 |
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TACD posted:You don’t think there’s ever a point where (1) just makes you complicit in validating a system of governance wholly divorced from serving the populace? I agree it’s hypothetically possible. I don’t know exactly what that point would look like, but I know it doesn’t look like the point where one of the options still includes returning MPs like McDonnell, Abbott, Ribeiro-Addy, Sultana, Begum, Long-Bailey, etc., to Parliament.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:53 |
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Individual MPs being good in a poo poo party doesn't mean much though. They fall in line or eventually get the whip removed, are no longer Labour MPs.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:54 |
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Guavanaut posted:Has anyone found out what it is? New Labour ad campaign :
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:55 |
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Yeah, the idea that Starmer's Labour are sufficiently divorced in culture and policy from the Tories to even count as a different evil, let alone a lesser one, seems like something that needs a big [citation needed]. Unless you're really attached to the idea of having our parade of inept authoritarian kleptocrats wearing red rather than blue, I guess.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 11:57 |
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# ? May 26, 2024 09:27 |
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Something else to calm us all on a stressful day https://twitter.com/FT/status/1552597401340448768
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 12:02 |