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Poll: Who Should Be Leader of HM Most Loyal Opposition? This poll is closed. |
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| Jeremy Corbyn |
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95 | 18.63% |
| Dennis Skinner |
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53 | 10.39% |
| Angus Robertson |
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20 | 3.92% |
| Tim Farron |
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9 | 1.76% |
| Paul Ukips |
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7 | 1.37% |
| Robot Lenin |
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105 | 20.59% |
| Tony Blair |
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28 | 5.49% |
| Pissflaps |
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193 | 37.84% |
| Total: | 510 votes | ||
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Percipient Badger posted:Recent news wise there hasn't been anything in the last couple of threads about our dirty little secret - the failing prison system. Surprised as there has been a lot more coverage recently & the hidden (sorry, I mean prison) service typically gets bugger all press. Maybe I'm just noticing it more but every issue lately seems to be presented as a pay issue. Obviously the government has an interest in pretending that's all anyone cares about, but the news feels like it's dutifully running with that angle a lot more, and the union side gets reduced to whatever they have to say about pay even when it's not the core of the dispute Anyway everything I've seen on prisons has basically been "the problems are staff levels, the government has committed to offering higher salaries to attract people, problem solved". There's barely been any mention of underfunding and the systemic issues Pochoclo posted:Wait, isn't that actually the case? I'm not saying every prison guard smuggles drugs, but certainly a small minority of them do indeed turn a blind eye. Or am I missing something here? It's not really the issue is it? It's the tabloid mentality of deflecting onto a scapegoat, like when serious welfare problems are shouted down with TEN-CHILDREN FAMILY GETS MANSION or DISABILITY CHEAT'S SECRET CIRCUS ACT baka kaba fucked around with this message at 09:04 on Mar 1, 2017 |
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Mar 1, 2017 08:56
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 11:52 |
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Surely a studied expert on UK politics like yourself doesn't need to ask
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Mar 1, 2017 09:43
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Namtab posted:Just because people may not have the cognitive ability to understand money doesnt mean they shouldn't be fairly paid. Some might even say that makes the need for legal guarantees even stronger  Reminds me of this a bit http://www.theonion.com/article/developmentally-disabled-burger-king-employee-only-462
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Mar 2, 2017 19:41
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*sinister quacking*
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Mar 2, 2017 23:42
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Trickjaw posted:Why do the racists who pop up on QT invariably dress up like colour blind clowns? They don't see colour innit
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Mar 3, 2017 01:04
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Thanks for the effort post, it's always good to hear a view from the inside (uh no pun intended). What are those changes they made that make it hard to get compensation if you're hurt? Doesn't sound too legal, especially if they're putting you in more dangerous situations to begin with
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Mar 3, 2017 22:11
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It was definitely the people campaigning in Stoke. They know what they did!
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Mar 5, 2017 14:54
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Fangz posted:Philip Hammond vows UK will fight back if it gets bad Brexit deal There's been a trend lately of really really defensive statements and front pages written in the style of a small animal that puffs itself up to look like a threat. Stuff like BRITAIN WARNS EU: DON'T YOU DARE!! and ministers saying 'oi EU, we can totally have you, right everyone!?' The Leave side really aren't sounding confident at all, getting ahead of the story that's going to develop Funny, with britane so strong and the EU needing us so much you wouldn't think it would be possible for them to push us around in negotiations. Unless.... 🤔
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Mar 5, 2017 18:30
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The best part is that not only is Hammond not investing in the NHS and social care, he's literally putting money aside to tide the UK over during the totally good brexit process that cannot fail. That bus just gets more and more 
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Mar 5, 2017 19:06
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poo poo, sorry. I remember him posting a bit, UKMT usually attracts the good people
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Mar 5, 2017 19:57
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jabby posted:Presumably the first media person to look at his return was too dumb to realise he didn't get the full benefit in the tax year shown More like they saw an opportunity to manufacture a controversy and set themselves up with a nice juicy story for the day. So engaging it's sparking off a bunch of armchair accountancy
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Mar 6, 2017 11:13
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Pissflaps posted:The leader of the opposition misreporting his income on a tax return he's published to demonstrate transparency is a bit controversial tbf. Yeah this is exactly what I'm talking about. "I'm not an accountant... but I reckon this actual accountant definitely did these accounts wrong!!"
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Mar 6, 2017 11:19
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Pissflaps posted:Insisting that it must be correct because 'an actual accountant did it' seems no more credible. Yeah for sure, a professional is no more credible than some random saying "I don't understand so it must be wrong!" Either a qualified accountant failed to do their job properly, making an error that's apparently obvious even to a layman, and then it also slipped by everyone else involved in publishing it... or people who don't know what they're talking about are chatting poo poo. Hmm both possibilities are equally likely I think!! You couldn't make it up!
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Mar 6, 2017 11:34
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namesake posted:And then using that economic clout to the detriment of weaker trading partners while also erecting serious barriers to entry for those worst affected by this strategy, as well as awful internal settlement policies leading to smugglers and The Jungle in Calais as well as the disappearance of thousands of child refugees. The refugee stuff is more about the EU not behaving as a union though, acting like it's a private issue for each individual country to deal with and too bad if you're on the EU border. If they'd actually developed an EU-wide system to process and relocate refugees and put resources in place where they're needed then it would have gone a lot better. I don't really think making that separation official would improve things
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Mar 7, 2017 19:09
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namesake posted:The EU was founded on and principally developed as a functioning market, not a functioning state. That was the priority and everything else was bodged, rushed or not even done. This is why the EU is bad. Even if it had properly built a European state and replaced individual nationalism with European nationalism it would still be bad because it would be acting more like the USA under a Democrat president but actually bordering Russia, it wouldn't help the poor or the non-European any more than now. Sure, but it has the potential to solve these EU-wide problems in an effective way, instead of letting members struggle and enabling the right wing to exploit that. The way it was actually handled was almost as if the EU didn't exist at all, so I wouldn't really characterise it as a failure of the EU as a concept. A failure to act like an organisation, definitely, but the alternative without the EU would basically have been the same situation
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Mar 7, 2017 21:57
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namesake posted:Eh, it's selfserving to assume that the alternative to the EU is 'nothing', even if that has been the most likely alternative. The reforms needed to the EU and Europe to make it a united area are so revolutionarily transformative that it's basically remaking the EU from the ground up anyway, let alone the changes needed to make it a leftwing united area. Yeah I'm not saying the EU is ideal or that the way it is didn't contribute to its 'eh whatever' approach or anything, but like you say it would take a lot for an alternative to have become a more effective cohesive whole Just saying that I don't think their non-approach is something you can blame on the EU itself, since it likely would have panned out the same way with border states struggling and other countries taking as many or as few as they like. Unlike say its economic policies and their consequences which are absolutely down to the EU and its priorities
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Mar 7, 2017 23:04
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Pissflaps posted:Good catch Or maybe he had other things to do, and naively assumed (as we're constantly told) that the right wing of the party aren't constantly working to undermine him with shenanigans? You missed the best part of the quote: "they're just bad losers" says Keith Vaz, smirking
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Mar 7, 2017 23:12
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HJB posted:Well, yes, this is a roundabout way of describing the main driving force behind the Leave vote, it's by no means a unique circumstance. You claiming the Leave vote was fully informed individuals voting rationally?
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Mar 8, 2017 21:19
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quote:Wareham said she did not think pay was a factor – even in London where the starting package of £16,000 a year would barely be enough to cover a worker’s rent. Those are some amazing sandwiches
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Mar 8, 2017 21:31
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jBrereton posted:Yeah and making no traction because they're diluting the message with "oh no the tories spent too much on hotels 2 years ago" or "we're against austerity except in this specific circumstance in Surrey where we're going to make a big deal of the government trying to find money to spend on local government with links to its MPs which at no point happened in the Blair/Brown years". What the hell, focusing on this isn't supporting austerity at all - the whole point is that austerity is causing huge pressures on local government and services, and the Tories are -yet again- giving their own constituencies special treatment so the burden falls on everyone else. The need for austerity is at the core of the Tory narrative on everything, so of course it needs highlighting that they're secretly exempting themselves
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Mar 8, 2017 23:34
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They're probably just going to magnanimously row back on it, cut spending elsewhere and act like this is a good thing the public has asked for and they've delivered. They've been tying the tax and NI stuff to the idea that it's specifically paying for social care funding, so something in welfare is going to lose out
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Mar 9, 2017 18:39
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Fans posted:The issue is they're running out of things to cut that doesn't piss people off. If easy cuts were an option we wouldn't even be discussing tax rises. Well that's sort of what I mean - this way they've 'tried' to avoid cuts by raising taxes, but now there's a public outcry and they can 'rethink' - and that way whatever they do, they can say that the public rejected tax rises as a way of raising revenue, and they're responding to that. It becomes less of a unilateral thing and makes doing bad poo poo a bit easier for them As well a lot of the criticism has been about them breaking a manifesto commitment (which feels like criticising someone's manners instead of what they're actually doing but whatever) about not raising taxes - which effectively changes the criticism from 'this disproportionately hits poorer people' to 'you can't raise any taxes', which is definitely an argument we don't want to be making. Also might also be why Labour weren't pressing that point too hard
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Mar 9, 2017 18:51
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Jeza posted:Just got a jury summons at the Old Bailey in May. Time to wait around and possibly be selected to dispense goon justice. I bet jury deliberations are amazing these days
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Mar 9, 2017 19:04
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ShaneMacGowansTeeth posted:not really. The two I was involved with certainly aren't anything like they're portrayed on TV and that's pretty much all I can say on the matter I wasn't really thinking of TV, unless you mean Question Time But yeah I guess it depends on the case too 
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Mar 9, 2017 19:31
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> REPLACE CORBYN Who do you want to replace the Corbyn with? > Red Oktober posted:There's a good article in the FT by Tim Hartford using the tobacco industries 'deny, refute, obfuscate' tactics to talk about Brexit and Trump: Thanks for this too. Depressing! There's been a bunch of reporting on the interview style of Trump's people, how they pick out key words and repeat them before talking about something completely different, so it gives the impression they answered it. And then the interviewer either lets them get away with it or starts arguing on their terms, explaining why they're wrong and letting them keep repeating that simple point. Even when journalists are trying to hold people to account they're getting circles run round them
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Mar 9, 2017 20:48
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That doesn't sound like something anyone would have said
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Mar 9, 2017 22:38
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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. Honestly it seems like the journalistic thing to do would be to just ignore his Twitter at the very least. Used to be that the dead cat strategy was something that took some planning, Trump can just pick up his phone and spend a few seconds typing any old poo poo that comes to mind and bam, it dominates the news And of course the big story ends up being 'THING: why thing probably isn't true'. Journalism
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Mar 10, 2017 00:17
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Hoops posted:I don't think people looked at it that closely because he was the leader of a party (and supporters) that were so pro-Europe for so long. I'm sure people might have guessed that he personally was against the EU, but it wasn't the defining feature in their eyes. This is literally the exact argument he made though - people were complaining that he wasn't going 'I'M 100% FOR THE EU AND NO MISTAKE' instead of trying to make a nuanced case. Don't forget that the Labour Remain vote was only a few % lower than the Lib Dems', and you'd expect them to have a much easier sell. But the narrative being pushed (this was part of the scheduled coup) was that 'Corbyn lost the referendum', and Tim Farron joined in without even blinking. Whatever Corbyn's personal opinion, his public position has always been 'better in' Hoops posted:They think he's thrown the baby out with the bathwater. How so? The Tories have a majority and Corbyn didn't have the power to force anything. Labour's position at this point is purely one of principle given the current reality of the situation. People might not like it, and it is hard to swallow, but it hasn't had any material effect on what's actually happening - it's a reaction to it. The Tories are fully in control It's like people think Corbyn had the deciding vote and did some pantomime villain 'hahaha now we LEAVE' reveal or something
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Mar 10, 2017 21:57
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The principle is respecting the result and trying to be pragmatic about going forward
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Mar 10, 2017 22:12
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Hoops posted:You're saying the parliamentary opposition is redundant, by its nature. In terms of parliamentary votes nothing about that vote was conceptually or procedurally different to any other vote, if you use that argument here you have to use it for everything the governing party wants to do. You know this isn't true at all. Effectively the vote was either respecting or rejecting the results of an incredibly charged democratic referendum. It's not the usual situation where they act as our representatives and vote on our behalf - direct democracy had already taken place Labour was put in a situation where the public had already voted, the Tories basically had a lock on the result in the Commons, the media were looking to savage anyone who blocked the process (and for a convenient scapegoat when things go badly), and Labour is already in a weak position going into a completely new era of British politics. Nothing about this is a normal vote, and they had to make a decision: vote against Article 50, change nothing, and suffer vilification and blame and distrust for the next two years - or hold their noses, alienate supporters, and take the difficult position to try and make the best of things going forward. And people like to blame Corbyn for this, but they discussed this plan internally, and the vast majority of MPs voted yes despite being heavily pro-Remain. They didn't do it out of their famous loyalty and fear of his leadership
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Mar 10, 2017 23:00
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^^^ Well of course you don't. Corbyn badLord of the Llamas posted:Which is a load of crap because Labour - at ~66% - delivered as strong a remain vote as the SNP (and the Lib Dems only achieved like 75% despite their 2015 vote clearly being a hardcore rump) whereas Cameron and the Tories only managed half that despite being the government telling their people what's good for them. I don't know if there are any updated numbers that contradict this, but the lib dems didn't get that much: 
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Mar 11, 2017 00:29
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Guavanaut posted:We know there were plenty of Did Not Votes who came out to vote Leave, but was there anyone who voted in 2015 who didn't vote at all in the Referendum? Even just enough to make up 1% for one of the parties? It's weird, I can't find anything that's bothered to ask non-voters. The closest I've seen is the Ashcroft data which has a 'have you voted yet' result from before the referendum and all the results are - - - - - - - A cat is clearly a Remain vote, they love doing that
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Mar 11, 2017 01:12
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Hoops posted:Two of the reports I saw (that most of the newspapers referenced) were both done as extrapolations of vote splits in local authorities, to determine how many MPs were in "Leave" constituencies but voted against Article 50 etc. If there are standard polls that ask those two questions then I agree that's a simpler method, but I didn't actually see any done based on poll data when I was googling before. Here's the Ashcroft report here's the data from the polling linked at the end
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Mar 11, 2017 02:03
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quote:So what of the extra health investment announced in the Budget? quote:These extra investments in health will be treated as capital spending rather than revenue for running costs so the money can't be used for recruiting staff. So now hospitals get to travel to the capital and petition Emperor Hunt himself, known for his wisdom and generosity
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Mar 11, 2017 02:28
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Fangz posted:What percentage of Labour voted remain is really irrelevant to this overall question. How do you reckon
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Mar 11, 2017 02:58
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Well that goes for every party, but the narrative is that 'Corbyn failed' and the only way we can really judge that (or claim it in the first place) is by looking at how each party's voters went. And that's not exactly a massive gap between Labour and the Lib Dems, whose base are much more likely to be pro-EU and less affected by the issues that were being blamed on the EU. Maybe Farron should have done better? And Cameron? It may not prove anything but that's these are the premises everyone's running under when they talk about this stuff, so it's looking at the argument on its own terms
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Mar 11, 2017 03:13
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Hunt is very good at his job, which is being the NHS Terminator. He just keeps going Why would he want a politics job after this anyway? He's going to be showered with gold by the private sector for services rendered Skinty McEdger posted:Let's not forget the other cycle that happens every time they introduce policies like this: The trusts and individual hospitals competing with each other for funding all have to increase the number of staff it employs to put together pitch packages and market their plans to the government, all of which need to be full of further research and feasibility studies which costs money regardless of whether or not they get the funding from the government. The right wing press then kicks up a fuss about the number of "bureaucratic" staff at the hospitals and hold them somehow responsible for the lack of doctors and nurses. The gov uses this as further reason to tighten the purse on hospitals. I think the markets can provide a service solution for this conundrum, friend. Step forward, Atos! G4S! Capita! And whatever the 4th horseman is these days
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Mar 11, 2017 03:27
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HJB posted:The genuine answer is nobody knows. The thread's taking the most pessimistic possibility for comfort, but nobody knows how anything's going to go down. We're taking the most pessimistic possibility because the UK as a functioning state and economy has been deeply integrated with the EU for decades, and the people responsible for handling our emergency ejection (given the short timespan involved) seem to have no perspective whatsoever, a plan that reads more like a kid's letter to Santa, and none of the necessary negotiating structure or bargaining power in place The 'optimistic' reading seems to be the equivalent of 'hope the EU gets hit by a bus', which only improves our position in a relative sense. I haven't heard any visions for a successful independent UK that don't just fall back on our equivalent of 'USA! USA! USA!' and poo poo about exporting jam and scones to anglophiles. There isn't really anything to be comforted by, except the hope that people will see how badly it's going and cancelling the whole thing (possibly even with meaningful improvements as a sweetener) will actually become politically viable
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Mar 11, 2017 20:21
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Lightning Lord posted:Who in loving hell is Paul Cattermole and why do half of the posters in this thread have redtext about him? Watch it
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Mar 11, 2017 20:50
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 11:52 |
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jBrereton posted:I have literally no idea, and it depends quite heavily on whether Tess May as PM can give up on a bad idea like grammar schools and redirect attention to properly training people for the trades salmon it is. They literally just pushed ahead with grammar schools. It was the first budget since the referendum and it was their opportunity to start reprioritising, and preparing the UK for independence and strengthening our negotiating position. We didn't get investment to make the UK more self-sufficient, we got grammars and Hammond burying a bunch of money in case we need some later What's this about salmon anyway. The Norwegian gravlax model?
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Mar 11, 2017 22:28
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