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Private Speech posted:This one: Look at the pink lines... what you'll see is France abusing the gently caress out of agricultural subsidies, thanks for playing.
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Jun 2, 2015 21:57
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Private Speech posted:I'm just saying that it's more about how the money is spent, rather than where it comes from. And the rebate is a bit ridiculous because it goes back directly to the government, rather than just to the economy, Not as ridiculous as the rebates on our rebate, that some countries get back! quote:Is Britain the only EU country that enjoys a rebate?
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Jun 2, 2015 22:01
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BigPaddy posted:Being white, educated and most importantly not living in the UK right now I will enjoy watching the Tories fumble about to stab each other in the back until they lose a no confidence vote some time before Christmas. Ditto this. The one consolation about a Tory government is that they can't directly gently caress me over from the other side of the Atlantic.  Sucks for people still in the UK though. Even relatively apolitical American friends of mine have heard about how quickly the government is making GBS threads out awful policies. 
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Jun 2, 2015 22:02
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That the UK is a 'net contributor' to the EU doesn't mean we don't benefit from it either, even financially. Greece is a net recipient and it's destroyed their economy via the Euro.
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Jun 2, 2015 22:02
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Peel posted:That the UK is a 'net contributor' to the EU doesn't mean we don't benefit from it either, even financially. Greece is a net recipient and it's destroyed their economy via the Euro. http://ec.europa.eu/budget/mycountry/UK/index_en.cfm I found this EU page on benefits etc. accruing to the UK to be quite informative/interesting, once you start expanding the sections below. Still bloody shocking that 90% of EU expenditure can't be audited though.
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Jun 2, 2015 22:08
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I remember when the LibDems went into coalition with the Tories and everyone (including me) was  and "It'll never last  " and for the next five loving years the media (Channel 4 news at least) prefaced virtually every news report with "Cracks in the coalition???!? *amusing graphic of blue and yellow plate smashing*" and began every interview with "So with this latest disagreement, is this coalition going to last?"And it did So excuse me while I take all your "Yeah this slim Tory majority is going to collapse into a seething mass of stabbed backs " comments and put them in the bin, before proceeding to get out the whiskey and preparing for 5 solid years of uninterrupted Tory rule
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Jun 2, 2015 22:10
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Please don't piss on my dreams.
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Jun 2, 2015 22:14
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KKKlean Energy posted:So excuse me while I take all your "Yeah this slim Tory majority is going to collapse into a seething mass of stabbed backs Dreams of the government collapsing are all we have for the next 5 years
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Jun 2, 2015 22:46
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It is less likely than we'd like but what is politics if not repeating the same fruitless gesture in the vain hope of something good happening this time?
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Jun 2, 2015 22:55
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Zephro posted:It was pretty much an open secret around Westminster and Fleet Street long before he admittedly it publicly. There's quite a few high-functioning alcoholics around in political circles, to no-one's great surprise. Charles Kennedy was sometimes very non-functional with the drink though. The life expectancy for a recently-single man, a smoker, with a drink problem, who's just lost his beloved father, and his job of 32 years, at the age of 55, is not a rosy one.
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Jun 2, 2015 23:04
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I'm pretty sure that every time there's been the prospect of reforming the agricultural subsidies, various farmers' groups have immediately started jumping up and down on their haybales, screaming bloody murder. And then started lobbying MPs to make sure it doesn't happen. Farmers being core Tory voters just makes it all the more  And I just realised that G4S and Serco are probably lobbying pretty hard right now to exit the EU. Imagine all the money they'd make from the extra detention camps they'd be contracted to run.
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Jun 2, 2015 23:24
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kingturnip posted:I'm pretty sure that every time there's been the prospect of reforming the agricultural subsidies, various farmers' groups have immediately started jumping up and down on their haybales, screaming bloody murder. Our farmers union is surprisingly powerful considering its pitiful size.
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Jun 2, 2015 23:26
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Surely G4S and Serco should be in favor of EU membership and high immigration? That's how you run a detention camp based economy.
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Jun 2, 2015 23:28
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We all wanted a drink to celebrate Thatcher dying, but we all just wanted to have a drink with Charlie
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Jun 2, 2015 23:51
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Peel posted:That the UK is a 'net contributor' to the EU doesn't mean we don't benefit from it either, even financially. Greece is a net recipient and it's destroyed their economy via the Euro. Yeah exactly, it's not some money laundering scheme where the whole point is to put money in just to take it back out again
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Jun 3, 2015 00:16
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So I was thinking, how would things have looked over the last five years had Kennedy been in sufficient health to remain Lib Dem leader?
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Jun 3, 2015 01:03
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Mister Adequate posted:So I was thinking, how would things have looked over the last five years had Kennedy been in sufficient health to remain Lib Dem leader? Assuming Kennedy has the ear of the party: No coalition means* no collapse in the Lib Dem vote. No collapse in the Lib Dem vote means smaller SNP swings in the Scottish Election, which means no majority government for the SNP, which means no referendum, which means no skyrocketing SNP membership and engagement, which means no focus on the SNP in the following election. (*could theoretically mean, for all usage of means in the above.) Suppose the Labour party still picks Ed Milliband. Without the Fixed Term Parliament act, Cameron is likely to call another election when the poll numbers look worst for Labour. That's late 2011, which makes some sense, about a year and a half into a minority administration where perhaps a snap election could have backfired given the economy. But if the Lib Dem support is holding strong at that point, what becomes the focus of the election? The Lib Dems came out of 2010 in second place in about 250 seats. And if you're having an election in mid-to-late 2011, with a largely unpopular Labour party leader and a generally popular person in Charles Kennedy leading the Lib Dems, I think the papers angle of attack would probably be to analogise the whole election to being a re-run of the 2011 Canadian Election, where the Liberals collapsed and the NDP became the official opposition for the first time. If the Lib Dems were able to capitalise on that, it could have been the breakout moment for them, possibly. So who knows? Instead of six seats, maybe the Lib Dems could have been looking at 200MPs and a Shadow Cabinet to form. Unlikely, to be sure, but who knows what could have happened in those five years.
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Jun 3, 2015 01:55
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What I'm getting from that is that Clegg is Literally Hitler.
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Jun 3, 2015 02:41
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the alternative to a Tory-LD coalition would've been a Lab-LD coalition, isn't it. Gordon Brown and Kennedy in government. it'd mean you'd spend 2015 explaining how it's self-evident that a coalition reeking of unvarnished third-way neoliberalism (only with even less regulation!), arrogant and unpunished after a global financial crisis, was always doomed to lose the confidence of the White Van classes and/or nationalists the wind only got really punched out of no2eu because of the Tories annexing the Euroskeptic plank, so a British left-wing euroskeptic movement screaming about the perfidy of Brussels and solidarity with SYRIZA would've been fun too. full-time Scandipol-thread-flavoured "I'm not racist but I'm for the workers who are harmed by immigrants". ronya fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Jun 3, 2015 |
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Jun 3, 2015 02:56
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OwlFancier posted:What I'm getting from that is that Clegg is Literally Hitler. The libdems in general is since Charles went, he was on the Social Democrat side. Almost all the important libdemers who took over were libertarian Orange Bookers. David Laws, Chris Huhne, Cleggy, Vince Cable, Edward Davey, Susan Kramer etc. Tory MP David Davis said it was one of the main reasons the coalition was formed between the libdems and tories as there were many overlaps in ideology.
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Jun 3, 2015 05:47
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Peel posted:That the UK is a 'net contributor' to the EU doesn't mean we don't benefit from it either, even financially. Greece is a net recipient and it's destroyed their economy via the Euro. Nah, the Greeks already did a good job killing their own economy. Like a quarter of their GDP goes to pensions and they've always been an outlier even before they joined the EU. Can't wait for the lazy fucks to implode.
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Jun 3, 2015 06:00
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All 'failing' schools to be academies under Education BillBBC News posted:Every school in England rated inadequate by Ofsted, up to 1,000 over five years, will become an academy, under a bill to be published later. A Tory minister actually said this posted:The bill will allow the best education experts to intervene "from the first day we spot failure", said Mrs Morgan. I can't decide if or  is the more appropriate response to that quote.
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Jun 3, 2015 06:54
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shrike82 posted:Nah, the Greeks already did a good job killing their own economy. Like a quarter of their GDP goes to pensions and they've always been an outlier even before they joined the EU. Can't wait for the lazy fucks to implode. A quarter (well, a fifth) of their GDP goes on pensions because their GDP is in the shitter and they have a load of old people. Their pension spending per pensioner is actually pretty low compared to some EU countries. And of course the Greeks are no more "lazy fucks" than any other similarly stereotyped race or culture you'd care to mention.
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Jun 3, 2015 07:42
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Lousy. They've missed the point of local consultation, which New Labour understood - it gives a podium for Ofsted to publicly air its long list of failings of the local authority whilst baiting the unions to defend the school in an intrinsically disadvantageous terrain (namely, defending a high principle of the sovereignty of local education authority self-determination when the school involved is almost certainly one of the worst schools in the country). Consultation wouldn't prevent Ofsted from academizing them regardless, so there's no point in scrapping it. It's a mild inconvenience but it's a way of buying political capital.
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Jun 3, 2015 07:49
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kingturnip posted:All 'failing' schools to be academies under Education Bill A political incentive to give schools a 'poor' grade? What could possibly go wrong?
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Jun 3, 2015 08:47
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KKKlean Energy posted:So excuse me while I take all your "Yeah this slim Tory majority is going to collapse into a seething mass of stabbed backs 5 seems optimistically low tbh
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Jun 3, 2015 08:49
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ronya posted:Lousy. They've missed the point of local consultation, which New Labour understood - it gives a podium for Ofsted to publicly air its long list of failings of the local authority whilst baiting the unions to defend the school in an intrinsically disadvantageous terrain (namely, defending a high principle of the sovereignty of local education authority self-determination when the school involved is almost certainly one of the worst schools in the country). Why do you think they only target 'bad schools'? Even temporary problems have been used as an excuse to let academy groups snap up high-performing schools, which then 'recover' from their temporary blip and allow the academy group and the government to take credit, hail Satan The trouble is people have a bad habit of liking things like the concept of state schools, keeping the private sector out of education, keeping the local school open under local authority control, that kind of thing. Giving people the option to protest against something you expressly intend to do doesn't necessarily make you look good, and it risks stalling the campaign and missing the window of opportunity
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Jun 3, 2015 08:55
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kingturnip posted:All 'failing' schools to be academies under Education Bill The coasting euphemism bugs the poo poo out of me, it's literally saying that performance which is "merely" acceptable is unacceptable. It's like writing "could do better" on every C graded test paper, and plays into to the striver/skiver narrative in a way that paints teachers who don't return ever higher grades as lazy (and at the other end of the cycle blames them for grade inflation and making tests too easy)
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Jun 3, 2015 09:02
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Fluo posted:The libdems in general is since Charles went, he was on the Social Democrat side. Almost all the important libdemers who took over were libertarian Orange Bookers. David Laws, Chris Huhne, Cleggy, Vince Cable, Edward Davey, Susan Kramer etc. Tory MP David Davis said it was one of the main reasons the coalition was formed between the libdems and tories as there were many overlaps in ideology. You're making the assumption, of course, that the SDP were the left-wing part of the Alliance. They weren't; they were proto-Blairites in comparison to the sandal-wearing Liberals. Clegg's "radical centrism" is an ancient SDP policy tactic.
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Jun 3, 2015 09:34
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Renaissance Robot posted:The coasting euphemism bugs the poo poo out of me, it's literally saying that performance which is "merely" acceptable is unacceptable. It's like writing "could do better" on every C graded test paper, and plays into to the striver/skiver narrative in a way that paints teachers who don't return ever higher grades as lazy (and at the other end of the cycle blames them for grade inflation and making tests too easy) That's just a continuation of the trend in the expansion of higher education and grade inflation though - it affects both parties because no politician is ever going to have the cohones to tell parents that their kids should be sent to a school that's only trying to be average.
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Jun 3, 2015 09:35
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Here's one of Kennedy's last Conference speeches, on the issue of Europe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4poB2T-ohVw
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Jun 3, 2015 10:04
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TinTower posted:You're making the assumption, of course, that the SDP were the left-wing part of the Alliance. They weren't; they were proto-Blairites in comparison to the sandal-wearing Liberals. Clegg's "radical centrism" is an ancient SDP policy tactic. Social Democrats were Social liberals, the Liberal Party were Classical liberals. One loved Adam Smith, the other didn't. TinTower posted:Here's one of Kennedy's last Conference speeches, on the issue of Europe. There are pro and anti EU types on the whole spectrum of politics. Fluo fucked around with this message at 10:18 on Jun 3, 2015 |
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Jun 3, 2015 10:15
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kingturnip posted:I can't decide if
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Jun 3, 2015 11:21
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MrL_JaKiri posted:And of course the Greeks are no more "lazy fucks" than any other similarly stereotyped race or culture you'd care to mention.
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Jun 3, 2015 11:23
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Based on self-reporting which is likely as accurate as their tax filings. Lmao, it has them working more hours than the Japanese. Sure. shrike82 fucked around with this message at 11:30 on Jun 3, 2015 |
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Jun 3, 2015 11:27
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shrike82 posted:Based on self-reporting which is likely as accurate as their tax filings. Yeah, those crafty Greeks, all of them universally lie!  shrike82 posted:Lmao, it has them working more hours than the Japanese. Sure. I love that you edited this in too. "I'll back up my accusation based on nothing but national stereotype...with another stereotype!" Gyro Zeppeli fucked around with this message at 11:39 on Jun 3, 2015 |
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Jun 3, 2015 11:31
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Well obviously racial stereotyping is more accurate than statistics, everyone knows that.
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Jun 3, 2015 11:31
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Ironically, a bunch of people posting on an internet forum during a working day are arguing about Greeks being idle fucks. Time at work is irrelevant, it's how much poo poo you get done while you're there that counts. Just look at Germany's figures.
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Jun 3, 2015 11:35
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Your "facts" are merely statistics, whereas my national stereotypes are facts!
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Jun 3, 2015 11:35
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No-one doubts their productivity is terrible, though. And long working hours are a symptom of terrible productivity almost by definition.
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Jun 3, 2015 12:11
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