BF2S Forums Where are all the whiny peaceful "Enlightened" European now?

the same group have already tripled tuition fees, putting the entire debt burden on the student whilst defunding higher education, and to slash public and social services over the last 10 years.

it’s part of the reason why so many of those jobs won’t be gleefully picked up by native britons. the wages have been depressed, none of them come with job security or anything in the way of benefits, etc.

uziq wrote:

the top civil servant in the UK has resigned because of the ideologues in control.

the lot peddling dilbert's line about immigration and UK workers, incidentally.

what could possibly go wrong?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p … 45151.html

No-one grasps up or punches down like Indians, then cries racism.

Johnson wants the American system of political appointees instead of career mandarins.
The civil service has its problems, replacing one bunch of Ruperts with another is probably a retrograde step.

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

the top civil servant in the UK has resigned because of the ideologues in control.

the lot peddling dilbert's line about immigration and UK workers, incidentally.

what could possibly go wrong?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p … 45151.html

No-one grasps up or punches down like Indians, then cries racism.

Johnson wants the American system of political appointees instead of career mandarins.
The civil service has its problems, replacing one bunch of Ruperts with another is probably a retrograde step.

in a country without a written constitution, the long-term stability and integrity of institutions is paramount. it is unprecedented in modern history for a civil servant to vocally and publicly clash with a cabinet member. this one is taking them to court, so presumably he has the conviction to air all of the dirty laundry that is normally suppressed for the public good.

this home secretary, of course, having been re-appointed after she was fired from her last cabinet position for making sub rosa deals with israel. it's unthinkable that a person making that mistake would have ever seen front-bench politics again, a generation ago. indeed, many MPs have gone to prison for much less (think of jonathan aitken).

very depressing development. this, not nearly a year after a widespread assault by the right-wing tabloids on the judiciary and supreme court.

it looks like a bunch of 55+ white people, egged on by a declining tabloid press who increasingly only have that demographic to cling to for their readership, have voted in one of the most corrupt and self-interested bunch of chancers we’ve seen.

Last edited by uziq (2020-03-01 01:43:26)

you are far more ideologically aligned with them than i am.

you really misuse and abuse terms like 'finger on the pulse' when the voter core of the conservative party are about 55+.

as for 'incestuous bubble', you misunderstand how first past the post works. the majority of the country in terms of numbers are not aligned with your far-right lunatic interpretation of the world. i don't know who is meant to be in a bubble, here, but i am aligned with pretty much the entire population under the age of 35.

even interpreting the original brexit vote as being 'in an incestuous bubble' is a bit disingenuous. it was 51:49 ffs.

Last edited by uziq (2020-03-01 15:54:11)

so you think they're a bunch of crooks but delight in how they've been elected and trounced their opponents? how very sophisticated of you.

pretty sure i said at the election that it would be a conservative win. as for ‘wrong about everything’, it seems i share the views of my generation, which can hardly be expressed as such. ‘incestuous bubble’ and ‘wrong about everything’ is a curious way to refer to a nation’s under-35s. why are the old cannibalising the young and making war with this rhetoric? maybe the childless bachelor can help me figure it out – come on peter pan, you spend a lot of your time with geriatrics.

Last edited by uziq (2020-03-02 00:29:51)

very neat trick, blaming the avarice and self-interest of a generation who coasted through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, as the state slowly sold off the family jewels and individuals/landlords/businesses reaped the profits ... on the fashions and concerns of people born in 1995. i'm sure it's the youth's fault that the boomers are obsessed with their pension funds and their inflated property prices. so someone who bought a modest house in london in 1983, and now finds themselves a millionaire, is against the mass provision of affordable housing because ... this whole pronoun thing is out of control!!!

i happen to know many manual workers. they are my brethren in the struggle against capitalism. ones in the UK, too, something you seem singularly out-of-contact with.

you're right, i did moot the idea of another hung parliament when the election was first called due to the brexit impasse. lesson learned never to make political predictions.

Last edited by uziq (2020-03-02 03:17:47)

I wonder how long it will take for the british working class to realise they've been suckered into the most consequential political decision since WW2 by a bunch of machiavellian weasels who abused them to gain power. Brexit and post-brexit negotiations will remain front page headlines for the next 5 years to come, slowly tearing down the illusion and the energy of all the idiots who supported it. Perhaps even the territorial integrity of the UK. No doubt the people who are now in power will only continue down this road kicking and screaming, trying to direct public anger at the EU and their neighbours as much as possible.

You mean the decision to not let major financial institutions fail and cause economic collapse in Greece, Ireland, possibly Italy? Had the ECB not given out gigantic loans and other related measures the consequences would have been nothing short of catastrophic. The imposition of the politics of austerity on the countries that directly or indirectly received aid is a matter I cannot comment on with much expertise, but the proposed inverse solutions of pumping even more money that way to stimulate consumerism or, worse, solutions such as Grexit to abandon the common currency were both impossible and would have potentially had so much unforeseen fallout both struck me as terrible ideas. Some of the imposed politics also derived from the resurgent nationalist disease back home. The 'lazy southern Europeans' stereotype was widely circulated and people wanted to see austerity on these countries, voting in their elections for parties that vowed to enact it. Some of it not without cause - apparently the Greek government and others were fraudulent and had been for a long time. It was impossible to stem the anger resulting from that news reaching northern European TV screens.

Then there was, and still is, national selfishness. It is the Council that ultimately steers and controls the most important political decisions in the EU, and it was the Council that agreed on and directed the institutions to implement monetary union without proper fiscal checks or control. Because of the argument of 'sovereignty' and the always insistent calls not to let evil Brussels encroach on national self-determination. The eternal irony of the Eurosceptics here is that they are hopelessly out of their depth in a globalised world and often end up causing the malaise for which they afterwards blame the EU. I can't give you a source, but I'm absolutely certain more than one voice must have been in the room in the 90s and early 2000s who saw the fundamental issues within this half-conceived system. I am also certain that in their zeal for self-preservation the nation states in this Union must've been blind and deaf to any such critique. Look at the political dialogue at the time of the crisis, the focus often being to blame Brussels while these same figureheads were there in the European Council meetings signing the damn agreements they barely or outright refused to defend back home.

Of course the economic circumstance of the working class plays its part, and I empathise with it. When I was doing my undergraduate I worked part time in manual labour and I still regularly find myself thinking of the colleagues I had back then wondering how they manage to make ends meet in our reality of skyrocketing housing prices and destruction of social services. Yet it assigns a fundamentally rational argument to a situation that was caused largely in part by an irrational drive for self-destruction as well. People in our countries are fed the unique, exclusive national identity drivel from birth and many seem as conditioned to instinctively react to and condemn in general the negative actions of 'the others' as your average small-town Christian is conditioned to sit in church every sunday. Your 100k/year bricklayer in London who lives in a house that increased its value twentyfold within its lifetime still went out and voted Boris anyway. Many middle class, upper class, seemingly educated people who have great standards of living went to the ballots with him to do the same.

This isn't just an issue of the working class being economically downtrodden. Actually, these days that downtrodden working class has largely been replaced by cheap immigrant labour anyway, as you well know. The swathes of our societies that unknowingly but happily march themselves to dystopia are definitely not in majority the low-income households. Most of them even belong to the older generation that holds all the wealth. I think the political situation in Flanders and Holland in the last 20 years can give you a good indication of where we're heading as well - the nationalist or identiterian resurgence there came in the 90s and seemed to preempt that in many other western countries. Now from the likes of Wilders and other more brash, simple individuals it has progressed to a deceivingly 'civilised' form of far-right activism that quotes the likes of Oswald Spengler and who glorify late 19th century Europe as having had a 'wholeness' we need to return to, parading around as prophets of the imminent demise of the West. The article you linked a few days ago which predicted that fascism is in our future was and still is right, but the cause discussed is only one of multitudes. If Marxist analysis is your thing you would do well to expand beyond that one dimensional scope to recognise and account for the inherent irrationality that is getting us where we are today.

Last edited by Larssen (2020-03-02 09:13:59)

The EU is absolutely too big to fail. You have no concept of how much of daily life in Europe is now facilitated and supported by over 50 years of institutional development in Brussels. It is also a necessary institution. If the EU were to be destroyed tomorrow, we'd have to start rebuilding it the day after. That is, after the collapse of our societies and the conflicts that would follow.

The economic and monetary union was visionary, even if the nation states failed to enact fiscal union it is what has forced us to act in a more coordinated manner in our internal and external trade policies. On the whole it has made us more competitive and much more able to resist and control outside economic pressures. It also made our continent more stable, as extreme currency fluctuations had historically been precursors to social instability and war. The trade-off a degree of national economic inflexibility, but I argue it's a small price to pay. Especially now faced with figures such as Trump and Xi Jinping who would be very eager to pick off and bully individual states into 'bad deals'. Who would not care for the individual voices of countries that would be affected by internal policies in China or the States. In contrast, the voice of the EU as a whole greatly matters.

And yes, I don't know if you followed the crisis closely at the time but prevailing sentiment was that there should be 'no more money' going to the south. This was a strongly heard argument in Germany, the Benelux and Scandinavian countries which were expected to foot the bill for the bailouts. The fiscal conservatives won elections everywhere, in part supported through xenophobic stereotyping of Southern Europeans. And once the majority of the EC that controls the greatest amount of wealth is made up of fiscal conservatives who want to impose austerity, that is the consensus that you will have to live with.

Frankly I don't know if 20th century Marxism accounts for irrationality and identity politics outside of it circling back to its fundamental reasoning on class economics. In your posts apart from economic arguments I see very little acknowledgment of the direct emotional appeal of nationalism and othering to whole swathes of people. The point about the bricklayer is that he isn't the traditional tory voter at all - he was a labour voter, and even in economic prosperity he still now chooses to vote conservative. Not just him. People who are certainly fairly well off yet drawn to vote for ethno-nationalists and who keep harping on about protecting our identity against the outside threats. Steeped in symbolism and an imagined history that never was, looking upon the immigrant (especially non European) and the EU with disdain. I've also made the point about part of the cause of this before - how short-sighted economic policy of the 60s and 70s allowed for large low-income areas to become immigrant neighbourhoods with all future consequences it entailed.

Last edited by Larssen (2020-03-02 14:49:09)