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Mister Adequate posted:Well at least there's something still good in the world Sorry, but that piglet believes that Hitler did nothing wrong.
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May 4, 2014 18:26
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Another day, another arrest for things said on Twitter: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-27282910 quote:A man has admitted posting abusive Twitter messages about the murder of school teacher Ann Maguire. This is the second arrest for offensive messages posted to the #annmaguire hashtag. I worry about how prosecution for "just" causing offence is now becoming the norm. Obviously when you get into racist/sexist/etc abuse, or direct threats and harassment, then I think yes, the Plod should be involved (and yet they almost never do, possibly because they'd never be able to get anything else done ever). However in this case while what he (is alleged to have) posted, while offensive, is not in any way menacing. Simply being offensive shouldn't result in possible imprisonment - that's a precedent that every single poster here should worry about, particularly people who celebrate the death of elderly women on national television...
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May 5, 2014 13:28
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Umiapik posted:What's he supposed to have posted? I wasn't sure whether it was something along the lines of "ha ha she got what she deserved" or if he was posting the kid's name online. Googling his name will get what he (is alleged to have) posted - I'm leery enough of contempt of court not to repost it directly. schadenfraud posted:Yes, but if you read past the Ann Maguire hook, you will see Yeah, but he was arrested by South Yorkshire Police specifically for the Maguire tweet.
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May 5, 2014 14:57
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Renaissance Robot posted:I won't bother making a bet that whoever buys the place will do exactly that in order to turn a quick profit; nobody here would take it. I thought the point was he was selling the mountain and it's grazing rights so he didn't have to sell houses and farms? It says a lot about modern times that this very faint hint of noblesse oblige is a national news story - "Man in position of power chooses not to gently caress people over!".
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May 6, 2014 13:16
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Trickjaw posted:Its been tory through and through since before time. I would say its odd you know all the places along the A12 that are notorious for cottaging, but then we know how you suffer from digestive stress. That A11/A12/A13 corridor only really turned into the Essex we know and hate in the eighties. Tebbit's "Basildon Man" theory really was the Tories Southern Strategy, playing up on racist fears particularly among those who participated in the massive White Flight in the eighties under Right to Buy, as well as of course convincing every jobbing plumber and chippy that they too were now a Captain Of Industry. You see this most particularly in the areas between the North Circular and the M25 (which I know isn't technically Essex) where the BNP and EDL are well-supported by people absolutely terrified by the fact the Brown Hordes they thought they'd escaped when they flipped their council flat on Vallance Road suddenly started getting enough money to move out to Barking and Rainham.
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May 6, 2014 22:04
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Trickjaw posted:No, the A12 is abominable, even worse when you get beyond the m25 junction. I was talking more about Essex towns, as its Tory central here, with a healthy smattering of racists in Dagenham/Barking The A12 from the M25 junction out to Chelmsford used to be the approved high-speed proving ground for London bikers because Essex plod were all busy ticketing continental lorry drivers on the M11. Then came the Gatso, and a generation lost their licence. (Well not quite but ISTR the speed camera just past Brentwood, cunningly hidden under the overpass, used to be the second-most profitable in the UK)
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May 6, 2014 22:09
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Metrication posted:Out of interest how big an effect is the influx of white middle class professionals into poor ethnic minority areas like Peckham having on demographics? Is it possible inner London is going to end up as a rich white ghetto, like many European cities? *Inner* inner London, basically anything bordering the City or Westminster (Tower Hamlets excluded for now at least) already are. Gentrification isn't a new thing after all - when Booth drew his poverty maps at the turn of the century some of the poorest areas were places like Soho, Pimlico, and even Holborn and Bloomsbury. I don't know about the situation in Peckham but in Tower Hamlets the three-fronted gentrifcation - hipsters to the north and north-west, bankers invading from both the City and Canary Wharf - is having surprisingly little effect on the politics. Part of this is because the arrivistes aren't voting (either not bothering to register or too scared of the brown people to leave their gated communities) and part of it is because the existing communities are becoming more politically-aware and are voting in larger numbers (for both good and ill, we can blame this phenomenon for the Lutfur Rahman catastrofuck and George Galloway taking time off from licking dictator's arses to pretend to be a politician again).
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May 6, 2014 23:52
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SybilVimes posted:Facebook is awash with racist fucks that are apparently INCREDIBLY ANGRY about the news that Pizza Express uses halal chicken, but wait, they're not racist, they're just concerned about the poor chickens being killed inhumanely. Some of them are so incensed at this inhumane killing that they're planning on stabbing pigs to death on PE's doorsteps Every pizza place - in fact every single fast-food place in the UK - is selling halal chicken, because almost all of the chicken sold in the UK is halal (and theoretically kosher although most kitchens in which it's then cooked don't meet most kosher standards). The reason why basically almost all chicken in the UK is halal is because the slaughter method is identical whether halal or not, so it costs the slaughterhouse pretty much nothing to have a couple of dudes saying one thing in Arabic and one thing in Hebrew in the general vicinity of the machine doing the slaughtering and simplifies their job when they want to sell to kosher and halal places. Some certification bodies are happy with just a recording of the prayer being played at the moment of the cut, believe it or not. Drop that fact into conversation and watch peoples faces for a really useful quick shorthand racism check.
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May 7, 2014 22:32
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LemonDrizzle posted:AFAIK, the rules of halal slaughter mean that animals can't be stunned before being killed so the animal will suffer more than is necessary. Advocates of ritual slaughter will say (with some justification) that ritual slaughter actually causes less suffering, on average. The thinking goes that because the boltgun doesn't always render the animal unconscious but merely stunned, they are in considerable distress for quite some time before the killing blow. Ritual slaughter, done right, only distresses the animal for a few seconds. In pre-boltgun days halal/kosher slaughter was considered to be easily the kindest method of slaughter (the rapid exsanguination guaranteeing death in seconds) (FWIW the actual reason why stunning is disallowed is because you're supposed to say the prayer at the moment of the killing blow - bolt guns often just kill the animal so that's out)
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May 7, 2014 22:40
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Larry_Mullet posted:No no no no no no no. I specifically said that that's what advocates of ritual slaughter claim, not that I was claiming it myself. As to your second part - the normal method of slaughter for large animals was a downwards cut with an axe through the spine, or hitting them with a hammer - in both cases this paralyses/renders unconscious the animals (normally) on the first or second blow but still left them taking minutes, if not hours, to die, and of course potentially left you trapped in a small area with a quarter of a ton of very pissed off, wounded animal. Stunning is purely to prevent that second part and has nothing at all to do with preventing cruelty. How did the aliens who built the pyramids kill their animals, by the way?
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May 8, 2014 10:46
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KKKlean Energy posted:The bit in question: Which is, I believe, more than double the amount of the UK electorate who voted for the Tories. Bloody tiny minority of extremists causing massive disruption to public services...
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May 9, 2014 16:30
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Duncan Sperguson posted:Wouldn't matter with General Elections since they get decent turnouts but most by-elections and local elections would be illegitimate by their dumb logic 65% turnout at the last GE which is a pretty high number. 36.4% of the popular vote went to the Tories, meaning that less than a quarter of the voting population asked for them to come in and gently caress poo poo up.
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May 9, 2014 18:27
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kingturnip posted:There was a letter in the Evening Standard yesterday from some idiot who's doing exactly that. A protest vote. No, it's like teaching the kid who was playing with matches a lesson by giving sweets to the one who burned your house down. Every vote for UKIP is another step to the right for UK politics, and anyone who claims that voting for them is a protest vote is basically protesting that the Tories aren't loving up poo poo hard or fast enough.
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May 10, 2014 14:34
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Spangly A posted:You can't not mention their mortgages. There's a bit of a reaction against those types of mortgages (the name of which escapes me right now) in some areas, meaning quite a few Muslims are trying to save up cash to buy a house outright in cash. While in the short-mid term that looks Sisyphean (particularly with non-interest-bearing savings accounts) if The Big Crash ever happens they're going to be the ones who end up owning all the houses and then the Daily Mail will actually implode. As with all things religious of course there's a massive spectrum of thought on it. Most Muslims use a dodge for their savings where they invest in shares (of suitable companies, but as that's mostly Saudi oil firms that's not really an issue in terms of returns) because that's seen as commerce rather than usury, which is fine. There are some interesting things happening with co-operatives to get round the mortgage problem too - partially reinventing the wheel of course, but it's getting a lot of traction in the Bangladeshi community because of course it's just Grameen banking writ very, very large.
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May 10, 2014 19:24
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QuantumCrayons posted:Both Britain First and An Independence From Europe are splinters from the BNP and UKIP respectively. No2EU seems to be a left wing, less xenophobic based party that just wants out of the EU rather than protecting the homeland. No2EU have pretty solid left-wing credentials, with most of the non-poo poo hard left involved. While their platform is pretty much "Let's use all the scare stories about Brussels to try and get people to listen to us", there are pretty solid reasons to dislike the EU. It enforces neoliberal orthodoxy both indirectly - with expansion and freedom of movement of workers being used as a way to depress wages across the EU12 and freedom of movement of money encouraging a race to the bottom on national tax policies - and very much directly - just ask Greece. EU agricultural policies are massively damaging to developing economies, and it acts as a cartel to try and prevent any competition from outside the EU affecting bottom lines. Even if you're absolutely on board with the European Ideal, the actual European Union is bloated, massively corrupt, and generally about the worst possible way of implementing that ideal.
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May 11, 2014 00:03
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Kurtofan posted:Yorkshire First That's nothing, we've got a Tower Hamlets First candidate for mayor. Unfortunately his platform does not include the annexation of Newham and the forced repatriation of undesirables to Hackney. Also half a dozen "Independents" who are the shrapnel from the now 15-year-old political bunfight in the Bangladeshi community that gave us the rise and spectacular fall of George Galloway and Respect, accusations of terrorist links for everyone who's ever set foot in a council building, and more hysterical Daily Mail headlines than anything not involving a tunnel in Paris. Oh, and TUSC, who are very nice people but as politically relevant here, home of the Dockers Tanner Strike, Bow Matchgirls Strike, and Poplar Rates Rebellion and former stomping ground of George Lansbury, Kier Hardie, and Clement Attlee (and Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky, at least for a couple of weeks, for that matter) as The Whigs. 
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May 11, 2014 00:12
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Renaissance Robot posted:But would you agree that getting out right now is not likely to do anything to fix this or help the UK in the short term? In the world as it stands right now? No, we're definitely much better inside the tent pissing out, not least because the only scenarios that are likely to end up with us outside the EU are cataclysmic. If you could wave a magic wand, reset the UK economy and political situation back to about 1967, and impregnate every copy of Road to Serfdom with some kind of extremely powerful poison, we'd be better off out of the EU.
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May 11, 2014 19:10
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EvilGenius posted:Notice how many of these involve removable media? I'd argue that the issue was with the tech, not the Labour party in particular. There's also the fact that data leaks were story de jour at the time. I bet there have leaks under the coalition, it's just that people are bored of that story. it's not even a government thing - data protection breaches just as, or more, shocking go on every single day in every large company. Of course they never get reported because "commercial confidentiality", the same reason we're almost never allowed to see the details of PFI contracts. Often these sort of leaks are actually a result of data protection policies that are too restrictive (and poorly written). There shouldn't be any reason, in this day and age, for removable media to ever be used under any circumstances for the transmission or storage of sensitive data - but stupid data protection policies mean that it's often difficult if not impossible to move large files between systems in the same organisation other than via CD and post. What's perhaps strangest and most impressive, when it comes to HMG leaks, is all of them 9so far) seem to have been incompetence rather than malice. It's obvious that a malicious person would be able to get hold of truly breathtaking amounts of personal data without any real difficulty and yet nobody seems to have used this for financial advantage on a large scale (PNC checks on behalf of organised crime excluded). Of course whether this will continue now that a lot of civil servants have had effectively 5 years of pay cuts, as well as erosion of working conditions, pensions, etc, is an exercise for the reader.
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May 18, 2014 09:23
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QuantumCrayons posted:Is it only severe data losses that cause this? I might have mis-remembered the stats. Loss as in data is gone and totally unrecoverable? Yeah, possibly, but there's a huge selection bias there because the kind of business that has so poor a backup process is going to be on the ragged edge long before the loss. Loss as in backup left on a train/bad guys steal everything? Nah. Target, in the US, have just suffered probably the biggest hack in the history of retail, with cc details for every single customer over at least a month (including Christmas shopping!) cloned. Their sales numbers didn't even take a dent and the share price was back to normal within a month.
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May 18, 2014 11:40
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QuantumCrayons posted:Solely based on unrecoverable data loss e.g. failure or loss of backups too. I'll try and find the paper(s) I read on it. I don't quite agree with the selection bias, since a company's ability to understand the importance of (or possible critical downside of not) backing up doesn't necessarily impact their ability to work within their specialised sector. Often it's as simple as the higher ups in the company not seeing IT as important as another department. A higher-up dumb enough to not realise their company will go under for the sake of the price of a tape drive is a higher-up who's fairly unlikely to understand other concepts like "fire insurance", "paying rent", and "not betting the whole takings on the Grand National". The data loss is just the straw that broke the camels back. (It also ignores the circumstances of the loss - I'm certain my company would go under if we lost all of our data but that's because, with our backup policies, this would require three cities in two countries to be wiped off the map and/or some phenomenon capable of destroying data on hard drives and tapes, including both in offline secure storage - something that would probably basically mean the end of human life as we know it, which would tend to impact on the bottom line. On a slightly smaller scale, a small company with only on-site backups could lose all its data in a fire, and would go out of business as a result, but that would be more to do with the fact that they'd also lost all their stock, tools, assets and maybe even staff)
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May 18, 2014 12:35
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UKIP have taken to spamming people in Tower Hamlets-related groups on Facebook from fake profiles. Because when they see a new patch of poo poo that UK political parties haven't been rolling in they just have to go loving roll in it.
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May 19, 2014 22:49
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TACD posted:In addition to this, their own legal page happily points out that if you register as a communications provider (nothing more than a setting you can change on your account page) they are then free to ignore any copyright infringement notices about you that get sent to them. Legally they're on incredibly shaky ground and so are you if you sign up for that.
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May 21, 2014 07:37
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StarkingBarfish posted:What is the legal definition of a service provider? Like, if you have a wireless AP in your house can you argue you're an ISP to anyone in receiving range (even if you give nobody the password)? It depends under which law you're talking about, and what it is you're actually trying to do by claiming that. The short answer is that doing so while not being an actual service provider grants you absolutely no protection and actually removes some protections you have when it comes to copyright infringement and other civil liability.
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May 21, 2014 08:05
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Ddraig posted:I still can't believe line rental is an actual thing. Surely there must be some sort of Monopoly style law that could do something about every person with a phone line having to pay BT for it. Anyone's free to install their own last mile - it's just stupendously, ridiculously expensive to do so. Virgin, whatever the gently caress Kingston are called these days, and a few small other regional telephone companies on the various outlying islands have all done so, it just so happens BT inherited the (taxpayer-subsidised) infrastructure when they were privatised (and with it the universal service provision which they really loving hate). The only absurdity here is that such a large natural monopoly was ever privatised, and renationalisation of Openreach (along with the other utilities) really should be point number 1 on any sensible manifesto because not only is there no improvement in having it in the private sector there's literally no possible way there *can* be improvement. FWIW Openreach don't actually make much of a profit at all on the line rental. 10 quid a month (which is what Openreach get for maintaining your pair - the rest of it goes to your telco for maintaining the entire rest of their voice network) sounds a lot for a couple of quid's worth of copper but the last-mile network is huge, and hugely complex, and requires absolutely shitloads of supporting infrastructure and engineering. The USP really drives that up too - not everyone lives in new-build tower blocks where an engineer just turns up and plugs up jumpers already installed in the building to a trunk in a nice spacious duct. You pay that same 10 quid a month even if you live in a tin shack in the middle of the Cairngorms and they have to put up a hundred poles to get to you.
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May 21, 2014 12:52
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Trickjaw posted:Its hoying it down here in Essex, so I hope the UKIP minibus thing they have is too busy to get many grumpy racists to the polling stations. Unfortunately lovely weather tends to benefit fringe parties more than mainstream ones. Would you step out in that to vote for Labour? Of course not. Your neighbour, who is FURIOUS AT ALL THE YURP TAKING OUR JOBS AND LETTING FORRIN PEDOS KIDNAP MADDY, is much more motivated than you are and so more likely to brave the tempest. Also after a truly apocalyptic thunderstorm in London (that may have ripped the fabric of space-time and allowed Satan to walk the earth), all is calm and peaceful with bright blue skies, and that's heading your way now.
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May 22, 2014 15:59
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TinTower posted:Vote Labour. Reminder that Robin Wales is an outright fascist who established his own police force until the actual Police threatened to arrest them en masse. Interesting wrinkle in Tower Hamlets - I've posted before that the Tories tend to be underrepresented here because although there's a fairly massive natural Tory demographic (both old-fashioned Basildon Man types and the arriviste Canary Wharf crowd) the positioning of the polling stations, in schools that tend to be in the middle of the old council estates, who are of course full of Those People. Tonight though I noticed three portakabin Polling Stations on the way home, all positioned as close as possible to new developments. It's not like actual physical distance (or overcrowding - turnout is always low) is a barrier here, this seems like a pretty blatant "Vote here without having to see brown people" move on the part of the Tory councillors.
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May 22, 2014 18:26
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Pencils also make a much larger and more definite mark, and don't potentially leak and produce redundant marks. Rumours saying that Labour have finally got their poo poo together in Tower Hamlets and may regain both the council and the Mayoralty, but multiple recounts (and accusations of massive fraud in every direction) in several wards mean this could run and run.
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May 23, 2014 07:29
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Michael Gove is on the telly saying "We need to gently caress the poors much harder to counter the UKIP threat".
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May 23, 2014 07:49
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Labour have regained Croydon, UKIP splitting the Tory vote probably had a small part in that. This is the sort of thing that Tory wonks will be looking at very carefully.
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May 23, 2014 10:43
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A Sloth posted:Ha, a Bangladeshi mob has formed outside of the Tower Hamlets count and the police are guarding it, not allowing Labour activists to leave. "A bangladeshi mob" == a couple of local activists making noise about the fact Lutfur looks like he's going to lose. But no, this is definitely the beginning of the Sharia Revolution As The Prophet Fartage Has Foretold (I only just realised how easy Farage is typoed to Fartage and I think I'm going to keep on with that)
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May 23, 2014 23:38
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So they've just followed the bullshit put out by a couple of local Tory stooges on Twitter hook, line and sinker. I've literally just come back from the Troxy and there's literally maybe 30 or so lads a bit overexcited by the rumour that Lutfur won the first-choice votes and confused by the fact he didn't win as a result. There's more violent and dangerous things happening outside every pub in London right now, but noooo, this time it's brown people so it's loving Armageddon.
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May 23, 2014 23:45
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A Sloth posted:30 is a little small looking at the pictures. And the police felt the need to barricade the doors and not allow Labour activists to leave. Are Labour activists Tories? (Well I guess sort of...) Lol literally all that happened was the crowd that had gathered for Lutfur's victory party thought they could go in because the count was up, gathered around the doors, then the police asked them to move back out of the way so people could get in and out. That's it. Now unless you've got another narrative - and one with pretty big loving proof if you're going to go throwing around words like "Bangladeshi mob" - then shut the gently caress up with your thrice-recycled LOOK AT THE SCARY WOGS bullshit. I'm not for one minute denying that there are problems with voter fraud in TH, by the way, and the Police have made multiple arrests over it. However - outside of the more histrionic members of all sides in the area - nobody actually believes they're going to make much of a difference to the outcome this time. And nobody (again, outside of those who like to stir up a bit of racial hatred) is talking about voter intimidation at the polling places in TH. The only people who feel intimidated are the Tory voters I've mentioned before too scared to set foot on a council estate to cast their votes, lest they see someone on less than a million quid a year.
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May 24, 2014 01:04
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Gnoll Pie posted:Really baffling to see people defending a corrupt character like Rahman, but hey he's a Muslim and a member of a minority group so he can do no wrong right? Well, except for all this: I've never defended Lutfur, he's corrupt as gently caress and Tower Hamlets politics would make the Medicis blush. What I very strenuously object to is people using the corruption of one borough as justification and reinforcement for their racism. (Of course this isn't helped by all sides of the fight in the Bangladeshi community being willing to jump straight to THEY HANG AROUND WITH MUSLIMS THEREFORE THEY ARE TERRORISTS, as Helal Abbas did in the last mayoral election, with the gleeful support of the local Tories who are overjoyed that they barely even have to blow the dogwhistle because their opponents are all using loudhailers)
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May 24, 2014 11:41
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Jippa posted:loving hell. I didn't realise it was that bad. Yeah, like I say, it's pretty bad. The cult of personality Lutfur is trying to build around himself - his face is literally everywhere in TH - is particularly grating. The IFE stuff is a bit of a red herring though, because it fits into the "East London Mosque are all terrorists" line that the Brick Lane Mosque contingent in the Labour party have been peddling since getting their arses handed to them by ELM and Respect after the convulsions in the local Labour party at the turn of the century. What we've actually got going on here is good old-fashioned graft, with nasty people fighting dirty to get their hands on power. This is the sort of poo poo that (to a lesser but sometimes greater extent) is happening in councils up and down the country. However, because the rift happens to sit between two groups associated with two mosques, rather than two golf clubs, or two unions, or two masonic lodges, it makes lovely scary reading for Middle England to tut over. e: It's bad enough that I almost voted Tory for the local council ward because they're the only ones even making vague noises about the absolute insanity of the last five years of planning decisions. goddamnedtwisto fucked around with this message at 11:54 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 11:51
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HortonNash posted:That was very neatly demonstrated by the recent Free Schools and Academies dramas, where governors were found to be handing vast sums of money to their families and friends. It seems that any time anyone gets hold of some purse strings the temptation to derive a little personal profit just too much to resist. Haven't they actually already done this with the local government oversight bodies? Or maybe that was Labour, but I definitely remember big cuts at Standards for England and the NAO a few years ago.
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May 24, 2014 11:55
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Jippa posted:I'm probably incredibly naive but I didn't think stuff like that happened in england (at least on that scale)? Have you been at the bottom of a well for the last 50 years?
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May 24, 2014 11:56
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namesake posted:Yeah I just saw that, overall it seems a pretty good election, the far right knocking each other about and Labour moving in (not that that's a particular victory). Labour is still completely failing to inspire confidence in people about them leading the country though, I reckon the Euro results will be interesting. I think the main interest in the Euro results is that they're pretty much an opinion poll with a massive sample size, on the question "Which party do you like?" and not, crucially, "Which party will you vote for at the next election?". This is the big worry when the far-right does well - it's the sort of thing policy wonks care a lot about and will almost certainly shape the rhetoric of next year's election (if not the actual policies). ronya posted:the 2011 'Purple Book' was still pretty hard pro-direct-election of mayors and devolving powers as a solution The funny thing is, absent the corruption we've talked about, Lutfur Rahman is actually not doing a bad job in TH. "Soft" services like rubbish collection and street cleaning, adult education and care, and accessibility to services, which are the main things the Mayor has control over, have definitely improved. He managed to save Bancroft Library and - possibly uniquely in the UK - we've opened two new
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May 24, 2014 14:18
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ronya posted:it doesn't help, sure, but they'll blame immigrants regardless of what the media says because it'll be their chain mail and/or bloke in the pub telling them about the immigrant that was in front of them in the jobseeker's agency today. People believe the Daily Mail because the Daily Mail tells them what they want to hear, not the other way around; if the Mail said something else it'll just be dismissed as a mouthpiece of the shadowy conspiracy du jour (which in today's Britain seems to be some nebulous "PC crowd"). I think you're really underestimating the power the press has in this, as they are often the starting point of the Things That Everybody Knows, and because certain papers now only like to report What Everybody Knows you really quickly get into a vicious echo chamber. To take a trivial - and trivially-debunked - example, how many people "know" that they've banned Christmas in Birmingham? Or that the council have installed Muslim-only public toilets in Bradford? These are stupid, ridiculous lies that started with a gross misrepresentation of actual events, whipped up by a press who wanted to fit stories to (what they perceived to be) their readerships existing prejudices because they're terrified of losing readership to other papers if they challenge the preconceptions of their readership (the Express and Mail are of course the most vicious pairing of papers engaged in this, but you also see this between the Times and Telegraph and even between the Indy and the Guardian). Now apply this to much more subtle, complex stories like immigration or crime - where the lies have the additional allure of being an easily-digested just-so story like "Immigrants have taken all the jobs" and "Muslim gangs prey on young white girls" or "Bombers were ALL spongeing(sic) asylum seekers" - all actual genuine front-page headlines - and take the only news source that has a chance of being impartial, the Beeb, out of the game because they're utterly cowed by both the press and the Government - both sides - and you get into a situation like we have now:
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May 26, 2014 09:30
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Psybro posted:Debates on entryism used to be pretty frequent in previous incarnations of this thread, but now seems as good a time as any to pose this as devil's advocate: The Labour Party constitution is designed to prevent entryism following the Militant attempts in the 80s, and this effect was only worsened by the centralisation of power in Blair's reforms. It would honestly be easier to turn the Conservatives into a left-wing party via entryism than Labour, simply because (for now) the constituency parties still have a considerable say in central policy, although this is something that has been eroded significantly over the last decade.
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May 26, 2014 11:39
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marktheando posted:Yeah I remember people talking about how Clegg's seat was in danger right after the last general election. Pretty much the first act the Tories made once they got their feet under the table was cancel a loan - not a grant, just a loan - to Forgemasters that would have allowed them to gear up for making the new generation of nukes that - like it or not - are absolutely required in the next two decades. Even if the following four years had been an unqualified success, Clegg would have been unelectable because of the (probably rightful) perception that he was responsible for the loss of hundreds of new jobs. I'm fairly certain that's the political equivalent of one of those fictional gang initiations where you have to go kill someone for no reason for ickle Nick, and he's probably baffled to this day why Dave and Gideon still flick bits of paper at the back of his head all the time.
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May 26, 2014 21:46
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