uziq
Member
+492|3422
anywhey

the interesting thing about today will be seeing how many young people turn up at the polls. voter registration in the lead up has been unprecedented. all the polling models essentially hedge very conservatively along the ‘young people will stay in bed watching netflix’ model.

the postal votes are always pretty safely going to be old biddies leaning conservative. let’s see if the other end of the precarious pyramid actually take part.
Larssen
Member
+99|1857
Exit polls predict a landslide win for Boris, pretty much what we feared would happen after he became PM. He succesfully spun the narrative to blame labour for all the inaction.

I guess that's it then. Brexit january 2020. The thing the public doesn't yet realise is that the formal withdrawal is only the beginning of this whole Brexit fiasco, while many in their ignorance assume it to be the end.

I don't know what's in store for the next 5 years in the UK / for the EU and I won't make any prediction here, but the picture is looking pretty grim.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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Looks like a big swing from Labour in northern England.
The chattering classes have repeatedly ignored the average working (or not) peon and how they think, and how venal populists can swing them.

This is going to be a 5,10,20 year disaster, the average moron has no understanding of whats coming.

And the UK will disintegrate, awesome.
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Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
People think America will ride to the rescue, Trump is wholly unpredictable and America didn't give Britain a dime when they were facing a German invasion - they made sure the made a fat profit.
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Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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The Turkeys have voted.
https://i.imgur.com/CtaW39u.png
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Larssen
Member
+99|1857
Depending on the state of things a decade down the road, Brexit, Trump, resurgent nationalism in other countries and possiblly issues like climate change may bring about some serious reflection on the supposed superiority or suitability of representative democratic governance in our era.

Last edited by Larssen (2019-12-13 03:30:50)

uziq
Member
+492|3422
yeah, a surprising result, not because of ‘ignoring the peons’ but rather just how isolated and remote every group is from one another. plus i can hardly see how a working class gary voting for boris and hard no-deal brexit is in any way some triumph of representation. turkeys, xmas indeed.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
“In the past hundred years no opposition has lost seats after 9 years in opposition. None,” observed former Labour adviser Torsten Bell.

The tide has gone so far out for Labour that it is now predominantly a party of the English cities and their commuter suburbs.
Interesting quote from the Atlantic. Last line could be said of the Democrats too.

The [white] working class just want guys as dumb and mean as they are. When will the liberals recognize this and start nominating NFL quarterbacks for office?
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
uziq
Member
+492|3422
i think it's pretty likely, as larssen points to above, that the politics of fear and hatred are going to play out in a big way as things tighten for the west's democracies. whether it's competition from asia, technological disruption, economic contraction, climate change, huge amounts of human movement due to the same, etc -- the right's message and appealing to fear is just far more effective than the left's so many plural projects.

corbyn was a marmite leader and was never going to win over a huge number of traditional working-class labour voters. it was a gamble the party took, embracing the momentum faction and gunning all-out for a radical programme. they put together one of the most audacious green plans seen on an election manifesto, and reintroduced shibboleths like nationalisation and redistribution of wealth back into mainstream political discourse. but it just didn't sell, not on the merits of the policy but on the cadre-like style of corbyn's leadership.

centrists have been purged from both the main left and right wing parties of the UK. we've now given a carte blanche mandate for one of the most right-wing cabinets in history to prosecute their vision for the next 5 years. any viable opposition is going to have to, in some way, rebuild the centre ground. it'll be hard to see many alternative paths to make electoral inroads in the future that aren't in some essential way just tory-lite. there's too much of a gulf between what the unreconstructed thatcherites in power see as britain's future and what the social democratic left just proposed.

there is a huge grassroots movement now in labour, predominantly young people, and even despite the grim outlook, a huge collective effort went into organising and campaigning on their radical programme. that against a media and establishment that were clearly biased in favour of the right, or, depending on how you look at it, riven by the populist/'post-truth'/big data state of play and unable to properly challenge it. they won't go away, either. it's hard to see how a cohesive opposition is going to come together. momentum might be discredited as an electoral possibility, but those ideas aren't being put to bed any time soon.

scotland wants to become independent and model itself after a northern european scandi state-democratic state. dodgy economic accounting notwithstanding, i say good luck o them. hard brexit and tax-haven capitalism is not mainstream political opinion up there. god knows why the average worker in the UK thinks this will benefit them, but the momentum is clearly all there and we are lurching in that direction.

Last edited by uziq (2019-12-13 08:47:35)

SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
I actually respect the anti-immigrant and ethno-nationalist desire of voters. Maybe respect is a bad word and "understand" might be better. But I get just wanting to stick to your own.  What I don't respect is people siding with people who will make their economic situation worse just because they want to stick it to the immigrants and liberals. Nothing is more important than your health, right?

For that reason I have little sympathy for working class workers who vote conservative.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX

Larssen wrote:

the supposed superiority or suitability of representative democratic governance in our era.
Whats the alternative? I do the agree the people are not delivering great government.

'Thuh people' have voted for Brexit four times now, without anyone setting out in detail what it means. What does this mean? They're truly dumb and don't understand the consequences, are willing to put anti-immigrant policies ahead of their standard of living, or truly believe the UK will be better off out of the EU?

The Scots think they'll be better off out of the EU. They may find they'll lose all the considerable subsidies they currently get from England and the EU will expect them to be a net contributor - a neat double whammy leaving them far worse off. (Its was instructive seeing Sturgeon gloating when her potential ally Swinson lost her seat).

I think in 5-10 years it will be recognised as a colossal disaster, but the blame will be pinned on the mean Euros for giving Britain a bad deal and the morons will be no more enlightened.
The architects will be sitting on boards of hedge funds and US health companies and they won't give a shit.

Fun times ahead, I'm glad I'm not there.
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Larssen
Member
+99|1857
Brexit won't be the end of it - as you state blame will likely be pinned elsewhere at first. But there's a dozen other global & regional problems confronting our system of governance alongside that and the blame game will only get people so far. We can elect demagogues left and right and may do so for some time to come, but as their isolationist policies will only negatively affect people's standard of living & increase tensions they will certainly not bring about the change that the people who vote for them 'want'. In the end the conclusion must be that our system is failing us, rather than placing blame on X, Y party, country or people.

Once we reach that tipping point we have to start thinking about alternatives. I do believe there's viable options other than letting representative democracy & party politics dominate government. Additionally, I don't see the small nation states survive in a world where they are increasingly dependent on international organisations & superpowers in dealing with (trans)national issues.

Last edited by Larssen (2019-12-14 03:05:40)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
I disagree, its a steady spiral down into idiocracy from here.

People will elect populists and demagogues instead of realists and technocrats, voting increasing benefits for the 1% in the belief they themselves will some day be part of the 1%.
The US has been down this track for a while, Britain has started, Australia nearly there.

We're witnessing the end of democracy and the failure of the west.
China and Russia will rape us, the morons will be sitting with their popcorn watching on TV the tanks roll through their own houses.
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uziq
Member
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thinking aside from brexit for a hot minute (even though it was obviously the defining issue of this election, and discussed passim): this country is quite riven now, anyway, and for complex reasons that aren't at all along old traditional class lines.

the blue-collar working class, lots of contractors and self-employed, are now hard tory's. this is largely the legacy of thatcher. they bought out their council homes, benefitted greatly from the ever-inflating bubble of house prices, and now all make £50k+ a year as scaffolders, plasterers, plumbers, etc.

the youth bloc of labour have swung even further left, and are no longer even interested in centrist politics for the most part, because they have been mis-sold hugely expensive university educations due, first, to a giant blair-era drive to get as many as possible into higher education and then, latterly, a giant defunding and marketisation of higher ed.. university places have ballooned along with their fees, graduate jobs haven't, and now you have a generation of people with giant debts all making 1/2 the money as the tradespeople.

not necessarily an unjust scenario -- but it is very much a role reversal between 'my old man voted labour' / 'we've always been labour around here' and the conservative swots going up to oxbridge and securing jobs at the BBC or whitehall. the problem is that the media and pundits are still talking about 'the North' and 'the red wall' as if we're still dealing with durham miner's gala and salford radicals.

meanwhile large tranches of people in now-tory parts of the country don't even know what a trade union is, and don't engage with politics at all. as always, widespread apathy seems to benefit any victor in an election more than passionate support.

it's true that the media and establishment probably did a fair amount of damage to poison the image of corbyn. the labour manifesto was undoubtedly in the best interests of its traditional base, but corbyn was sold as an untrustworthy radical (furthermore, one with BAME and islamic friends ...) corbyn always polled terribly and received no sympathy from the people he most needed to turn up and vote for him. but i think to blame it exclusively on leadership misses the bigger point, that the half of the country that labour has always depended upon for its life support has slowly been sold the tory vision of free market capitalism.

put another way: the younger you are, the more working class you are; if you were an adult in the era of free university education and cheap house prices, your life has taken place as part of a now-unreachable class (without inherited wealth or especially high wages).

Last edited by uziq (2019-12-17 08:06:40)

SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
that the half of the country that labour has always depended upon for its life support has slowly been sold the tory vision of free market capitalism.
The American white working class shifted right during this same period and I am not convinced they are suddenly all big supporters of the free market. T. May did pretty lousy in the last election despite having the same economic outlook as the rest of the Tories.

I think in both countries Trump and Johnson are popular due to the fact that pig ignorant working class people finally found a leader as obnoxious as they are. And they really resent anyone telling them to try to be better people. I used to work in a blue collar field. I know these people. They really are just dumb and proud of it.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
uziq
Member
+492|3422
news cycle + political churn mean people evidently have very short-term memories.

people literally just voted in a party who said they would make some small steps to fix the huge steps they just made in the last election cycle. it's mystifying that a government was given a fourth-term in office, an electoral miracle, based on a platform of ending austerity. austerity was a wet dream in thatcher's dying eyes before the current tory lot. the only explanation for that sort of myopia is either severe manipulation of reality via tabloids/media, which sounds deterministic and reductive tbh, or to start admitting that actually 'white van man' must be doing okay or is feeling pretty chipper about his finances.

the reduction in the social democratic state, the closed youth centres and libraries and newly opened food banks, perhaps just don't bother the vast majority of working people. the old traditional community bonds between families and communities perhaps just don't exist: no factories, no working men's social clubs full of factory workers. instead you have people working for themselves, spending their time sealed away in quiet suburbs, flicking through their facebooks. closing libraries aren't just about a decline in literacy (although working people did used to read far more, and library subscriptions were way up, once upon a time), it's about a decline in public spaces for community events, gatherings, and, yes, social support and helping those poorer off than yourself (IT facilities, free books, lessons, etc.) but taking that away doesn't seem to incense people very much; that or they have been truly numbed and made apathetic by austerity and decline.

a lack of 'solidarity', or really even just sympathy, has been a common aspect of blue-collar communities. people like to punch down in their climb up the greasy pole; it's part of aspirational identity formation. there's always been a strong ethic of dismissing shirkers, eyeing those on disability or benefits with suspicion rather than empathy, etc. the 'mean streak' plus the obvious double-think of 'just doing enough' to please the boss, fly under the radar, take a few units, fadge a quick job, etc. the whole mystifying blue-collar stratifications between 'well-to-do', i.e. a family that thinks they're 'proper', and the 'lazy buggers', i.e. the family down the street whose habits and manners are obviously so far below (they are the same).

'turkey's voting for xmas' is an obvious figure, but i think maybe these communities are finished in a more profound way. and, with it, national community at an ultimate level is changing into an entirely different base. with a whole new economic base, social ties change and people's attitudes with it. the centre ground, that which pretty much held that the new economics and status quo were sustainable and desirable, has been evacuated.

right-populism has won over the new tide. the 'new' conservatives are evidently going to have to be more extreme than the moderate-gentle conservatives of the centre, that which was painstakingly established and scuppered by cameron-may. and in the collapse of the centre, the left wing is back -- for the young. it's like a generation gap now defines the central antagonism of society, rather than hoary old marxist class struggle.

Last edited by uziq (2019-12-17 10:28:56)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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Your average self-employed plasterer or plumber has been tory for decades, they did get on their bikes when Thatcher told them to and view with contempt all the people who sat on their arses whining. They don't much like being heavily taxed and the people who aspire to be them don't like it either.

People who did support socialism have seen all the benefits flow to inner city 'refugees', benefit tourists and terrorists. They can't get a house or an appointment with their GP while gypsies, afghans and nigerians are first in the queue and the extended families of Al Qaeda are being given millions in legal aid to assert their right to live in mansion blocks in Kensington for nothing and get all the free healthcare they want to keep producing kids.

The last socialist government opened the floodgates for immigration, annihilated the education system and sent privates off to die in a war which seems to have only benefited Tony Blair.

The 'lower class' can see clearly that you can't have a socialist country with open borders, the last thing they want is an inner-city ideological nut promising another two million drains on the system.
When the 'lazy buggers' are predominantly black, muslim and sympathise with terrorists its easy to see how a populist will work that to his advantage.

At a psychological level people see their country in a fight with other countries, when you have a dog in the fight you want an ugly aggressive thug who gets on with it, not a limp-wristed ditherer who's never been in a scrap and would likely sell out to the enemy anyway.
Hence they went for Johnson's Churchill over Corbyn's Chamberlain, without necessarily agreeing with all of his policies.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2019-12-17 15:31:21)

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Larssen
Member
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It's an interesting view but I don't know if the blue collar working class only cared about benefits & social security if it was in their direct interest. It's true that many are off much better than previous generations in the same position. Different country and political system, but my father and his wife grew up poor as children of rural fishermen and farmers in the mid 20th century. Their standard of living now is incomparable to that of their parents or during their childhood, while neither really climbed the social ladder so to say. Both worked modest jobs during their careers. On the topic of politics it's clear that they inherited the value system they grew up with. Social security, healthcare, educational opportunities and especially pensions are always on the radar. This is the same with most others in their generation.

But I see their lives as testaments to the fact that the fight for the working class has sort of been won. The political & societal pressure points have moved away from these issues and landed elsewhere. Mostly relating to globalisation, particularly identity. Both grew up religious & socially conservative and it's the question of what defines their communities which has never been more in doubt. Be it due to technology or immigration, it's the death of the traditional community and the rapid change of the demographics in (nearby) cities that invoke the strongest reactions. The parties they have voted for in the last 35+ years have responded to this change as well, focusing their political messaging more on the preservation of nationalism and the traditional community (i.e. preferably not immigrant and a focus on the 'innate values' which define our culture).

Reflecting on this it's notable my mother's standard of living has declined compared to her youth. She grew up in a wealthy family with minor nobility roots & a colonial legacy, was pampered and worked as a lawyer. However, she's part of the last generation in her family with that sort of lifestyle and I think it's true for many of her peers. Her core politics are still clearly what you'd expect from someone with that background. Yet she and others of the old 'upper class' intersect somewhat with the old working class in that their social/identity politics is conservative and under pressure as well. Moreso directed against the political consequences of globalisation, notably the loss of the nation's stature, the EU's impact on national sovereignty and the political manifestation of new immigrant communities.

Now of course there's plenty differences with the UK but probably many parallels as well. These now older generations have strongly shaped the political debate & direction of the last 20 years, being more numerous, more politically active, often in control of many media outlets. Much of the working class after them sure has gotten richer and perhaps cares less about social security, but the shift in political priorities is still true for those who remained poor. The people who are "self-employed" amazon delivery drivers that barely get by overwhelmingly vote tory. I don't think many of those who voted for a tory government did it because they wanted to punch down, but because the tories pretend to have the clearest answer to what the biggest election issues are to these groups of people. It was still Brexit, the image of the English community & the nation vs the outside world. While labour was stuck in its antique rhetoric on rights for the poor, it failed to formulate a decisive platform on any of these topics. For which Corbyn really is to blame, having had over 3 years to come up with an answer.

All of the above still fails to touch on why Scotland has remained overwhelmingly pro-Labour, even pro-EU. Most of that country is part of the poor working class, but evidently not out to 'punch down' or concerned much with globalisation and identity politics. Perhaps they welcome it as beneficiaries of these changes?

Last edited by Larssen (2019-12-17 15:11:11)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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'Rights for the poor' has become 'benefits for migrants'. People are fucked off with it.

The Scots expect someone else to pay their way, for decades its been the English, thats why they vote SNP/Labour.

As mentioned already they stand a good chance of coming unstuck, with the double whammy of losing English subsidies and being expected to pay into Europe, not receive money from it. They might even be forced to pay for their own pensions - the horror.

Probably it will come down to whether the French and Germans want to subsidise Scotland as a way to stick it to the English, and whether the City of London moves to Edinburgh - which it could well do, despite the midges.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2019-12-17 15:42:07)

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SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
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Again I will reiterate my sympathy for anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. I get not wanting your money to go to "those people". But when conservatives come to power they don't just cut benefits for the immigrants and brown people. They cut it for everyone. And while your body at 40 can still install sheetrock, when you get older you or whoever is taking care of you will need that social safety net you voted away to get out of the E.U. for however long or short that is. If someone is too dumb to realize this then there is little left wing parties can do to get through to them.

All of the above still fails to touch on why Scotland has remained overwhelmingly pro-Labour, even pro-EU. Most of that country is part of the poor working class, but evidently not out to 'punch down' or concerned much with globalisation and identity politics.
This happens in the U.S. too. We talk about the working class going for Trump but the reality is that it was mostly blue collar whites who voted R and not the poor non-whites who make up the probable majority of the working class as they clean dishes, prepare food, and empty garbage cans.

I think groups outside of the mainstream are much less susceptible to the "Make X Great Again" message.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
No-one is 'voting away the safety net'. Britain has more of a social safety net than many European countries, many of which have one on paper but which doesn't really apply to migrants when they actually apply for it, they find all sort of obstacles in the way. Hence migrants treks across Italy and France and camp in Calais in the hope of getting to Britain where the system is much less racist easier to navigate.

What they voted for was to stop letting migrants in or letting migrants take advantage of it.
Eventually they'll get the message and stop coming, meanwhile the Euros can STFU lecturing Britain on xenophobia and handing out benefits they don't give themselves.

Yes I know its the Daily Mail, but people got tired of this shit.

'Your benefits system is crazy. It's like finding a sackful of cash left on the road': How shocking admission by Rudi and his huge Romanian family debunks Eurocrat's claims that 'benefit tourism is a myth'

Rudi Ion's huge family could consist of up to 100 children, with 25 cousins
His family moved to a 3-bedroomed house in 'shabby' Nottingham suburb
Laszlo Andor, announced to UK ministers: ‘Benefits tourism is a myth.’

Rudi Ion struggles to count up the children from his huge Romanian clan who now call Britain home. It could be 100, he tells me.

‘I’ve got 25 cousins all living around Nottingham, each with three or four kids,’ he adds with a loud laugh.

Rudi is speaking from his rented three-bedroom terrace house in Bridlington Street, a shabby part of the Midlands city where he’s settled with his wife Anda and their two sons, nine-year-old Ionut and Constantin, six.

His mother Elena, 53, and sister Ana, who is 32, live there, too.

Rudi is an ebullient 28-year-old who speaks English well. He doesn’t seem surprised when I tell him that a recent controversial report from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that more than 25 per cent of children born in England and Wales in 2011 were to foreign mothers — up 16 per cent on the decade before.

The highest number among women from Europe — 2.93 children per family on average — were the offspring of Romanians, and a spokesman for the ONS has suggested that Britain’s generous benefits system could encourage the migrants to have more children so they can claim extra money.

What is particularly striking, according to the ONS, is that Romanians who come to Britain are actually having more than twice as many children as they would at home, where the average is 1.25 children born to each family.

This week, the EU Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, Laszlo Andor, attacked the so-called xenophobia of British politicians over the issue of migrants coming to Britain and claiming welfare. He grandiosly announced: ‘Benefits tourism as such is a myth.’

Yet Rudi readily admits that our generous benefits’ culture does encourage Romanians to uproot to the UK, where they can claim state money for the children they bring with them.

‘Of course Romanians will settle in Britain if they get this kind of money. It is like walking down the road and seeing a sack full of cash that has been dropped, picking it up and no one saying anything.

‘If my people bring more children in, or have more children here, there are more benefits. So, of course, they have babies.’

His family came here from District Two, a multicultural area of the Romanian capital, Bucharest, after Rudi had first tried his luck in eight other countries dotted around the European Union.

He admits: ‘I made my way by pick-pocketing, thieving and other small crimes.

‘I was put into prison or arrested by the police in Norway, Finland, Sweden, Spain, Italy, France, Austria and Germany before I arrived here. My German is quite good because they jailed me there for six months, and the Austrian prison was very tough.’

When I was in the rest of Europe, I never got benefits,’ he says. ‘In France, they chucked me out of the country and gave me £250 in Euros to fly back to Bucharest. ‘But, of course, I just returned to Western Europe again.

‘There is nothing for a Roma gipsy in Romania. The authorities treat us like dogs. They beat the kids in the schools and they refuse to give us jobs.

‘It is different here. We are even welcome at the GP’s surgery when we are ill.’

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/02/14/article-0-1B3B635E00000578-942_634x420.jpg
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl … -road.html

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2019-12-17 21:52:06)

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uziq
Member
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people are literally voting away the social safety net. the conservatives austerity programme has been the most severe cutting back of public services in recent memory. hence labour's alarmist rhetoric about 'selling off the NHS' in the last election (and all of the angry NHS staff shouting down boris johnson). hence the conservatives' new promises to recruit more nurses/GPs seeming shallow: due to a double action of cuts and now brexit stifling european hires, recruitment across the NHS has fallen and doctors numbers are DOWN. the NHS has been under-funded and under-staffed for several consecutive years now.  if that isn't a cut to a public service, what is?

and hence the explosion in food banks. hence the punitive policies of the home office, 'making life difficult' for people. hence the huge swathes of people being 'declared fit for work' despite illness or disability by an opaque bureaucratic system. hence the number of hungry children in school, dependent on free meals. hence the growth in 'free schools' and 'academies' which shift public education into shady semi-corporate/tory chum hands, putting childrens' education off the exchequer's book.

public transport, bus and train services, have been cut to ribbons. this is a consequence of the local councils' budgets being cut to ribbons successively over the last decade. see also the situation with town halls, community centres, youth centres, and libraries. public swimming pools or outdoor play areas. all disappearing with the funding. the state of public transport in the north, especially, is terrible. bus routes between various towns have been reduced to one-per-day, if any at all. the public subsidy for 'uncompetitive' stagecoach routes has dried up. who took away the funding and de-prioritised this? if you're working-class and precariously employed at the next town over, because all the shops on your high-street have closed, good luck commuting on a bus that runs intermittently.

but, hey, the private sector will take care of it! too bad if you can't afford uber! and the tory's are obsessed with building a giant high-speed rail directly between westminster and manchester! that should cover the entire north's problems, shouldn't it? don't snivel about your commute, at least your MP can get between their constituency home and their westminster domicile in under 2 hours!

but, hey, people aren't voting to cut their services! look! syrian refugees!

it's not as if there has been an estimated fucking 130,000 avoidable deaths in this country since austerity was implemented. it's not as if the UN released a report saying that the conservatives' austerity programme had needlessly worsened conditions, cut the safety net to shreds, violated human rights, and returned britain to a victorian 'workhouse' ethic.

https://www.ohchr.org/documents/issues/ … ov2018.pdf
https://www.ft.com/content/9ede68ba-7c8 … 85092ab560

The experience of the United Kingdom, especially since 2010, underscores the conclusion that poverty is a political choice. Austerity could easily have spared the poor, if the political will had existed to do so. Resources were available to the Treasury at the last budget that could have transformed the situation of millions of people living in poverty, but the political choice was made to fund tax cuts for the wealthy instead.

It was a British philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, who memorably claimed that without a social contract, life outside society would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The risk is that if current policies do not change, this is the direction in which low-income earners and the poor are headed. Loneliness rates have soared in recent years and life expectancy rates have stalled in the United Kingdom, with the latest statistics showing a sharp drop in the annual improvement that has been experienced every year since the records began, and an actual drop for certain groups.

The compassion and mutual concern that has long been part of the British tradition has been outsourced. At the same time many of the public places and institutions that previously brought communities together, such as libraries, community and recreation centers, and public parks, have been steadily dismantled or undermined. In its fiscal analyses, the Treasury and the Government constantly repeat the refrain that fiscal policy must “avoid burdening the next generation.” The message is that the debt burden must be paid off now. The problem is that the next generation’s prospects are already being grievously undermined by the systematic dismantling of social protection policies since 2010.
how the fuck are you going to sit there and say the 'social safety net' is still safe? have you seen the rise in homelessness figures in the last decade? the increase in food banks in the 1000s of %?

but, no, link a DAILY MAIL article, of all places, about roma people. classic daily fail tabloid hate rhetoric. cheering on the tory's as they hand out life peerages to their corrupt business-class chums, and piling hatred and stoking up fear about people living 10-to-a-room in romania. lol GJ. you're a marvellous example of how the slow death of social democracy is aided and abetted by a desertion of compassion. sitting in fucking australia complaining about immigrants with your white man's prerogative, the problem being every group except rich white people. shaking my HEAD.

Last edited by uziq (2019-12-18 02:32:17)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Nevertheless, it was Blair throwing the door open to a flood of immigrants, and borrowing and spending unproductively like a drunken sailor which triggered austerity.
If the only way to disrupt the flood of immigrants is to vote for welfare cuts and vote for Brexit then I guess the people have decided -  so be it.

I'm not in favour of cuts at all, but you can't have unlimited services with excess drain on the system.

Throwing the door open to people whose sole interest is leaching off benefits has killed socialism and it wasn't socialism which drove it, it was Blair wanting to import a welfare dependent social underclass who would forever vote labour - interesting how that backfired and they're now voting tory.

However you look at it Britain is proper fucked now, best of luck.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422
it's just such populist-right nonsense to make the issue predominantly about immigrants, 'Others', system-cheating thieves from abroad, etc.

you are illiterate. austerity caused by profligate labour spending? LOL. another big heaving shit swallowed whole, fresh from the tabloid-squeezed tory anus. there was a thing called 'the financial crash', you should look into it. it wasn't new labour allotting council housing to the pakistani community in bradford that led to 10 years of eurozone austerity. or was quantitative easing there to address the bus route and public library burden? all those polacks, shuffling onto crammed stagecoaches ...

the funny thing is, when the republican party go on and on with the usual right-wing lines about 'irresponsible democrat spending', and massively increase the deficit by other means, you see straight through it. i guess the thought of brown people in the UK is clouding your judgment. 

the government are openly enacting policies that are anti-poor. they are giving tax cuts to the rich and criminalising poverty. the conservative agenda and ideology is on plain display.

but, no, it's the number of brown people in the country that has incensed people. the people have had enough!!!!!

cut the fucking bullshit and read a book instead of those shit-stain Tory tabloids. i can understand how the populist-right narrative bamboozles people who get their information from facebook and the front covers, but you should really know better. appealing to base xenophobia and blaming 'foreigners' for all problems in times of economic dire straits is an absolutely textbook move for the right-wing to consolidate power.

Last edited by uziq (2019-12-18 03:21:48)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Lets see what those neo-cons at the Grauniad have to say about Labour's record.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 … c-handover

Blair spending GBP20Bn on two unnecessary and illegal wars put a bit of a dent in the numbers eh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial … _war_costs
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!

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