Dilbert_X
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uziq wrote:

these are often ruses used by sociopaths and manipulators.
No kidding.
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uziq
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https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FJZbr_BXMAEfhOQ?format=jpg&name=large

the conservatives are geniuses.

with predictions this week that CPI inflation will reach 5.3%. the highest it has been since the bank of england went independent.

meanwhile ...

https://i.imgur.com/hWQ9R4u.png

and you can bet it's dyed-in-the-wool, true-blue 50-something conservative columnists who write about how 'millennials are lazy', 'young people spend too much money on ipods and sourdough', 'gen-z don't have any ideals or believe in anything' ...

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-19 02:05:04)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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Here 'the right' are desperate to crank up immigration

"We have to keep wages down, high wages mean fewer jobs, er terrible skills shortage, we need to grow the economy"

Personally and through linkedin I know plenty of highly qualified people working on production lines, as baristas etc
Really it comes down to corporate and management laziness.

Some right-wing pundits are just starting to question this, Labor have firmly said immigration will be crimped and work done on local up-skilling.
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uziq
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boris’s official excuse, given in a staggeringly painful 16 minute Sky news interview, is that he wasn’t aware that large gatherings at a private residence with mixed households were illegal.

this is the leader of the country. a man who’s stood in front of a podium no less than about 30 times, at least once per week, throughout the last year and announced/reminded/urged people as to the rules.

his excuse has shifted from ‘wasn’t there, chap’ to ‘was there but it was a work meeting’ to ‘was there, but oh it was a party? nobody seemed aware’ to ‘was there, yep, but only for 25 minutes to thank my staff, who if they were breaking the rules anyway it’s my not problem’. now many insiders are leaking that he was explicitly taken aside and told ‘this isn’t a good idea, shut the thing down’, to which he replied they were ‘over-reacting’ (allegedly).

bearing in mind that dom cummings memorably leaked to the press that boris practically had to be strapped to a chair to refrain from going to meet the queen for his weekly brief/tea … whilst he was likely still positive with covid. the man had to be restrained from possibly killing off the queen. lol. staggering lack of judgement for a leader. 

he could be toast. but the conservatives really have to think up a good exit strategy/next step; and fast. liz truss, funnily enough, is sitting this one out in australia … it could be a glorious revolution.

meanwhile in normal island, whilst the met police are refusing to investigate any one of about 7 documented records of lockdown lawbreaking at no. 10 downing street …

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FJcuoeCXoAErdl3?format=jpg&name=900x900
uziq
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Dilbert_X wrote:

Here 'the right' are desperate to crank up immigration

"We have to keep wages down, high wages mean fewer jobs, er terrible skills shortage, we need to grow the economy"

Personally and through linkedin I know plenty of highly qualified people working on production lines, as baristas etc
Really it comes down to corporate and management laziness.

Some right-wing pundits are just starting to question this, Labor have firmly said immigration will be crimped and work done on local up-skilling.
the thing is, the conservatives' marquee under latter-day theresa may and boris johnson was to 'level-up' the economy and achieve a 'high-wages' economy. it's not even as if depressing wages and ruining living standards was their aim. they wanted to create high-wage jobs! they've failed utterly.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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Johnson, and his cronies, are a bunch of dishonest and arrogant turds. I don't believe for a second their 'levelling up' bullshit.
Its very very bad that they have the Met Police, who are also a bunch of wankers, in their pocket.

Looking back over years of conservatives they do little but line their pockets, whereas labour just do little.
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uziq
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The shock of the pandemic has exposed some uncomfortable truths about the modern British state: its vast emergency powers, but also its unpreparedness for the unexpected, its scope for inefficiency under lax leadership, and its instinctive reliance on corporate contracts. In November 2020, the National Audit Office reported that the government had awarded £18 billion in Covid-related contracts between March and July that year, more than half of it without competition. Labour claimed around that time that at least £1 billion had been awarded to companies with connections to the Conservative Party; by October 2021 it suggested that the figure had grown to £3.5 billion. In November 2021, the government was forced to release details of 47 companies awarded contracts for PPE through a high-priority lane set up to allow officials and NHS professionals, but also MPs and members of the House of Lords, to make rapid referrals of firms deemed particularly good prospects. Unsurprisingly, some of these deals were signed without due diligence, resulting in the production, for instance, of millions of unusable face masks. On 12 January the High Court ruled that these high priority lanes were unlawful and that the justification for them was flawed. As Abby Innes has argued (LRB, 16 December 2021), the outsourcing of government functions since the 1980s, originally advocated in the name of efficiency, has produced vastly complicated and often questionable state relationships with business and third-sector agencies.

[...]

The second plank of the November 2021 scandal was the Conservatives’ attempt to overturn the suspension of Owen Paterson after the Commons Select Committee on Standards decided that he had broken the rules on paid advocacy by making repeated approaches to government agencies on behalf of the diagnostics firm Randox and a sausage manufacturer, Lynn’s Country Foods. The committee, and Parliament’s own standards commissioner, Kathryn Stone, exist to scrutinise such behaviour, and, as Theresa May pointed out, the rules are clear and have been enforced often enough. The House of Commons first declared in 1695 that nobody should gain an advantage by paying an MP to advocate a particular cause. Yet Johnson’s government still chose to impose a three-line whip in an attempt (successful, but short-lived) to force its MPs to support a motion to delay Paterson’s suspension while a new committee with a Conservative majority was set up to decide on revising the rules. It seemed to want to undermine the standards regime implemented in the 1990s by John Major and triggered by controversy about financial rewards given to two Tory MPs, Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken. This was when the select committee and the role of parliamentary commissioner were established, together with an extra-parliamentary Committee on Standards in Public Life. The latter drew up seven principles of public life – selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership – named for its first chair, Lord Nolan. Conservative MPs have recently criticised Stone’s unusually high-profile actions as standards commissioner, such as her determined investigation of Johnson’s holiday arrangements on Mustique, though the committee ended by concluding that his declarations on the matter had not been irregular.

[...]

The furore​  over regulation should therefore be seen in a wider context. Conservative MPs who justify the government’s counterattacks often present them as assertions of democratic accountability. These bothersome unelected bodies represent a worldview many Tories distrust as biased: as bureaucratic, indeed Eurocratic, and Blairite. Against the conventional assertion that their independent scrutiny of official power serves the public interest, the claim is now rife, especially when these bodies slip up, that they are politicised participants in a culture war. The Electoral Commission (2001) and the Supreme Court (2009) were both New Labour innovations. The standards regime was also strengthened under Blair: the House of Lords Appointments Commission was set up as a vetting body in 2000. In December 2020 Johnson rejected the commission’s advice that he should not grant a peerage to the online stock-trading magnate and former Conservative Party treasurer Peter Cruddas, who, like most recent treasurers, has given the party at least £3 million. Johnson also disregarded the findings of Sir Alex Allan, then his independent adviser on ministerial standards, that the home secretary, Priti Patel, had breached the ministerial code by bullying her staff. He wasn’t constitutionally bound to act on this because the post (created by New Labour in 2006) has no independent powers of investigation. Similarly, Britain doesn’t have an anti-corruption agency, though many other countries now do. Instead it has an ‘anti-corruption champion’, an unpaid post (created by Blair in 2004) appointed by the prime minister. It is now held by John Penrose, a Conservative MP who, according to his official webpage, ‘enjoys fishing and beekeeping’. Penrose is married to Dido Harding, the Conservative life peer appointed by the government to successive senior NHS roles, who has been extensively criticised for the cost of the Test and Trace programme, particularly the use of expensive private consultants.

Charles Moore recently complained in the Daily Telegraph about an unelected bureaucratic establishment or ‘blob’, and encouraged the government to challenge it. Clearly this is a different establishment from the one patronised by Lord Moore, an alumnus of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, a famous foxhunter, ex-editor of the Telegraph and recipient of a peerage from Johnson. In November 2021, Johnson and Moore both attended the Garrick Club dinner at which, allegedly, it was decided that Johnson should challenge the Standards Committee’s judgment on Paterson, a friend of Moore’s since they studied history together at Cambridge. Moore’s ideal establishment is a profoundly historical one, and so, surely, is Johnson’s. They want to preserve what they regard as the traditions and idiosyncrasies of British political life from those they consider unimaginative, humourless, ahistorical enforcers. There is a type of historical biography that idealises the shrewdness of a small cadre of 18th and 19th-century male politicians: their plots against domestic rivals, their canny and extensive patronage, their parliamentary bon mots and their nonchalant forays into international affairs, all of which left ample time for hunting, dining and writing elegant works of history. In forty years of teaching history, I have often encountered undergraduates (usually Tory student politicians) whose touching enthusiasm for this Great Man version of history I have rarely managed to unsettle. Johnson seems to share it. The attempt to lump him in with the Bannon-Trump new right has always been problematic: his view of the world is much more instinctively historical than theirs, though imaginary in its own way.

Ironically, Johnson is likely to succeed in being viewed like his 18th-century predecessors, but for the wrong reasons, because of the third element of the corruption scandal: the revelations about Downing Street life that ran parallel to the Paterson affair. They began with reports about the refurbishment of the prime minister’s flat, initially focused on the £840-a-roll gold wallpaper apparently required by his wife (christened ‘Carrie Antoinette’ by the faction opposed to her) and moving on to the question of whose money was used to pay for it, and what they might have wanted in return. This saga has now been investigated twice by Johnson’s new adviser on ministerial standards, Lord Geidt, but his lack of powers, on top of his background as an army officer and senior courtier, has led to calls that scrutiny of this sort should be conducted by a more high-profile tribune of the public interest.

More damagingly, a series of stories then broke about parties at Number Ten during the 2020 lockdown, helpfully leaked from within the government. The sequence of revelations has forced the government into ever more absurd defences of its behaviour, inviting public ridicule, but the basic story is one of feasting, entitlement, hypocrisy and abuse of the public’s trust. Those who eat, drink and make merry, potentially at public expense, while imposing severe restrictions on the liberties of the vast majority of citizens, cannot expect any favours. That was the main lesson of the potent and often scurrilous popular allegations of the post-1780 period. Just as these had most effect at times of severe economic depression, so voters now have particular cause to resent politicians who disregard the rules that have forced millions to make repeated sacrifices of companionship, earnings and freedom (as well as compelling them to pay hundreds of pounds to private companies for simple tests before travelling abroad).

Two judgments will be cast on the Johnson government, one electoral, one historical. As the polls show, the affair of the Downing Street parties has rekindled a long-standing popular assumption that governments are staffed by suspect elites: that the snouts in the trough are all much the same. This is particularly damaging to an administration whose electoral majority and political messaging rely so much on its boast that it will protect ordinary Britons against hostile threats at home and abroad. (This populist appeal was already under strain as a result of the difficulty of showing any tangible Brexit benefits.) Even if the effectiveness of the corruption charge has waned by the next election, the government must still negotiate the challenges of inflation and energy price increases in such a way as to suggest that it remains on the side of ordinary voters. The opposition will no doubt seek to turn the election, when it comes, into a referendum on ministerial competence and character.

Historically, the government will be judged in the first instance by the evidence from the various inquiries into its behaviour: on its conduct during lockdown, and then on the management of Covid. Later, the historians will descend, and they will look for consistency and plausibility in the government’s public presentation, coherence in its core policies and success in delivering on its stated promises. They will do this not because they are a ‘blob’ but because it is the way they work.

It seems unlikely that Johnson will lead his party into the next election. This raises the broader question of whether the government’s handling of patronage and contracts merely reflects his personal style as a chancer for whom politics is the art of transcending rules and constraints – or whether there is a more ambitious agenda. Clearly, many Conservatives want to challenge the Blairite state settlement. The underlying issue is whether, intentionally or otherwise, their cavalier approach to government will upend the whole 19th-century idea of the public interest on which the popular legitimacy of the Victorian state rested. A lot may depend on who succeeds Johnson as party leader. In any case, it’s a fair bet that ‘Boris’, the beneficiaries of his patronage and his media cheerleaders will come to be seen as symbolic of the shortcomings of a political generation, in the same way that ‘Old Corruption’ is inseparable from ‘Robin’ Walpole and his ‘Robinocracy’.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n02 … my-friends
SuperJail Warden
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Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FJxj-LPWYAYkidy.jpg
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uziq
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the only reason boris and his current cabinet have been thrust to the front-benches is because of brexit. the muck has risen to the top, especially over years of cummings-inspired executive shenanigans (recall that bojo even expelled a whole faction of tory party old timers, even people like ken clarke, who seems positively sage compared to this lot).

many good politicians have resigned in the last few years. or at least not-so-shit ones.

boris was the ‘get brexit done’ schtick. repeat the mantra ad infinitum whilst having no realistic grasp on the northern ireland protocol/the backstop, on trade and customs, on the great wall of freight that now wends through kent from dover-calais, etc. just mindless repetition of slogans. ‘the will of the peeepul’.

you were implicitly in support of all this. you’ve been informing me as an ‘hopeless elite liberal metropolitan who doesn’t know anything about how people think’ on the merits of populism. well, this is the leader that populism serves up: the bloviating, media-personality, charismatic type. the bluffer and blagger. this isn’t unique to the U.K. or in history, dilbert. none of this was unforeseeable. own it.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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Nope, you're grasping again.

All I've said was when you were ridiculing Farage and the idea that Brexit would win the vote that you misunderestimated the anger of the average person to immigration, asylum seekers and overreach of the Euro parliament.
As a bloviating hipster you were blind to this.

I always expected Brexit to be a disaster, but remaining within a corrupt Europe which fucked over Britain at every opportunity and gave no ground whatsoever on issues which were themselves overreach - even faced with Britain leaving - was also a disaster.
One was the lesser evil of the two.

What Britain should have done is exactly what every other European country has ever done - Stay within Europe, take all the benefits and ignore anything they find annoying.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2022-01-26 00:17:44)

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uziq
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brexit was the original, foundational lie of this lot. misleading the public and playing fast and loose with actual figures has been their whole modus operandi. appealing to ‘the people’ in the tabloids and then secretly regarding them as a bunch of dimwit plebs IS their whole ideology. brexit is THE crux of it.

now you’re surprised we have a leader who lies and tries to mislead people. a leader who can’t stand up to scrutiny. lol.

if this is where ‘listening to the common man’ and conducting politics based on emotional responses like anger, fear and xenophobia gets us … well then it’s probably not a very good way to conduct national politics, is it, dumkopf?

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-26 00:19:53)

Dilbert_X
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When have I indicated I'm surprised?

Pretty sure I've said consistently he's your typical Eton-Oxbridge entitled vegetable and walking disaster.
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Dilbert_X
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He was elected in a landslide, it says a lot about the British people.
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uziq
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it says a lot about the debacle of brexit. after years of quagmire and irresolution, people voted for the shysters promising the quick and easy solution – when of course there was no such thing. they chose the comforting lie.

no shit most people don’t have the attention span or eye for fine detail when it comes to 500 page political agreements. detail is boring. they have lives to be getting on with and mortgages to pay off.

remind me again of the particular brilliance of populism?

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-26 04:08:51)

Dilbert_X
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It relies on the populace being stupid?
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uziq
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hmm, isn't it weird that there's a correlation between xenophobic attitudes, unreconstructed racism, empire nostalgia, little englander-fever, and making disastrously poor-informed political choices?

i mean, if they're intelligent people who reason through things clearly, you'd think this nation would be in safe hands, on the up, regaining her past glories. they've got their hands on the steering wheel and they've no one but themselves to blame for this unfolding calamity, no?

they've had an overwhelming parliamentary majority to implement all of their harebrained, gammon-faced policies; all of cummings' technocratic wet dreams, hiring a 'brain unit' full of big-data wizards and algorithm gurus ... where's the results? the UK economy is in the worst shape it's been in for decades, including a measurable entire 15 or so years of wage stagnation. it suffered the worst economic hit/performance of any G7 nation during the pandemic. one of the worst death tolls. but this is exactly what people voted for, on a ticket that sounds surprisingly like everything you've been advocating for for years: kick all the immigrants out (ergo now no farm workers or lorry drivers, great, and a massive brain drain of talented international researchers and workers, double great), get rid of the red-tape and bureaucracy (ergo introduce another layer of trade regulations and bureaucracy that have massively hobbled business and decimated imports/exports), let the tech-wizards devise policy (ergo use cambridge analytica to cheat the political process and mislead people, because of course 'technocratic' government is aimed as much at retaining power and winning elections as devising for-the-greatest-good-of-all policies) ... etc.

cummings et al. blaming everyone else for the manifest failures reminds me a bit of the republicans/trumpists who still had that acquired reflex of blaming every failure on the democrats. it's like ... guys ... you've been in power for over a decade. this is on you.

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-26 04:36:15)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,813|6305|eXtreme to the maX
The bigger correlation is between Eton, Oxbridge, History and PPE degrees and being entitled, grasping, arrogant and not caring about what happens to the country or the people or even simply being honest.

It would be great if the UK had technocratic govt, a bunch of public school history coasters who have deluded themselves into believing they understand technocracy and the people because they once wrote an essay on industry and got a B and met Nigel Farage at a party isn't it.
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uziq
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nigel farage is part of the public school entitled lot, not some tribune of the medway tribes. which shows just how well you’ve been duped by all his beery PR bollocks.

isn’t it funny that all the architects of populist brexit are multimillionaires with major ties to the City and old boy networks of patronage?

it must be the academic subject of History that’s to blame. too much gibbon!
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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But Farage didn't go to Oxford, he doesn't even have a degree let alone a history degree, what a pleb!
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uziq
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you know full-well that there is a huge elite overlap with the City, traders and stockbrokers as with the history-PPE government/whitehall/civil service fast-track. don't be so fucking obtuse.

the funders of brexit were people like arron banks. major players. also a very 'non-U' person.

the main players in the so-called 'ERG', the brexit ultras who have held theresa may and bojo ransom over brexit's negotiations, were gammons like the hilariously inaptly named mark francois. hardly an effete eton classicist, there.

the main media barons spinning the lies and directing the turkeys in their vote for xmas were people like rupert murdoch and his red-top rag empire. another person noted for his hatred of the english class system, eton, oxbridge, etc.

sorry that your stupid pantomime caricatures of, erm, history graduates (?!) are ridiculous.

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-27 14:59:44)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,813|6305|eXtreme to the maX

uziq wrote:

you know full-well that there is a huge elite overlap with the City, traders and stockbrokers
That was my point you dunderhead. Farage is as close to a pleb as these morons will ever meet.

the funders of brexit were people like arron banks. major players. also a very 'non-U' person.

the main players in the so-called 'ERG', the brexit ultras who have held theresa may and bojo ransom over brexit's negotiations, were gammons like the hilariously inaptly named mark francois. hardly an effete eton classicist, there.

the main media barons spinning the lies and directing the turkeys in their vote for xmas were people like rupert murdoch and his red-top rag empire. another person noted for his hatred of the english class system, eton, oxbridge, etc.
And how did all the geniuses who have studied thousands of years of history get taken in or manipulated?

If you don't learn from history you're doomed to repeat it, yet these cretins make the same mistakes week after week and get manipulated by the simplest and most repeated strategies.

Bigly sad!

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2022-01-27 15:09:00)

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uziq
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Farage is as close to a pleb as these morons will ever meet.
erm, farage worked as a stockbroker for his entire career. he worked on the metals exchange, one of the oldest fashioned and most 'clubbable' exchanges in the entire City.

well done. like i said, you've fallen hook, line and sinker for his 'beery pleb' PR stunts. farage is a pinstriped City wanker.

my point was that his lack of oxbridge, or university education, doesn't mean he's non-elite. there's an entire caste of stockbroker and City trader who don't come through the 'oxbridge' route and instead go straight into the big-bucks and financial elite. farage is very much an elite and represents a huge faction of the 'brexit' masterminds who had fuck-all to do with your hobby-horse of eton/oxford/history, and who seemingly bankrolled and manipulated the whole thing.

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-27 15:21:05)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,813|6305|eXtreme to the maX
You're still not getting it, for the average Oxbridge nincompoop Farage is as close to a pleb as they'll ever meet in their entire lives.
That was the point. Please try to wake up.

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