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UK PoliGAF |OT3| - Strong and Stable Government? No. Coalition Of Chaos!
- Thread starter Jezbollah
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QuicheFontaine
Member
You mean I do
Well, there's only four words in this post...
<thoughtful emoji.jpg>
Edit:
Speaking of light hearted questions, this YouGov poll is hilarious.
lol that's like one of those questions your mate asks you on the playground "What would you choose if you could only eat crisps or chocolate for the rest of your life? But you HAVE to choose"
I assumed grey was fascism at first and got very scaredSpeaking of light hearted questions, this YouGov poll is hilarious.
Jacob Rees-Mogg says he opposes abortion in cases of rape and incest https://t.co/Nm3NQPKfw3 https://t.co/c7XvpRSM3c
"Afraid so" to being asked if abortion for rape victims is wrong is by far the worse part.
"Afraid so" to being asked if abortion for rape victims is wrong is by far the worse part.
TomWaitsForNoMan
Banned
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TomWaitsForNoMan
Banned
That many don't knows should be scary regardless
It's a disgusting opinion, but at least he could credibly claim that he believes abortion is murder. Saying that abortion is killing a person, but that it's ok in cases of rape (i.e. when it's not that woman's "fault") just makes it obvious that the position is rooted in misogyny rather than any kind of "respect for life". Not that Rees-Mogg's position isn't also inherently misogynistic, obviously.
CyclopsRock
Member
Isn't that the case on a lot of issues, though? I mean fundamentally we ask MPs to represent all their constituents, including those who have entirely different views on basically every issue as they do.
It's a natural consequence of believing that life begins at conception. To be honest, I support abortion - actively encourage it in many cases, actually - at basically any point for any reason, but I don't actually understand the logic of people who are against abortion except in those cases. The only case that makes sense to be an exception, to me, are when the mother's life is in danger and it's basically a zero sum game. Because I understand the argument that life begins at conception and therefore a fetus deserves the same protection as a 1 day old baby. What I don't get is people saying "Abortion is wrong and shouldn't be done, unless it's a rape baby in which case kill it." I mean, I obviously understand the anguish that it would cause a rape victim, and presumably they do too which is why they make it an exception, but I don't really see how they justify it.
I dunno man, I'm kinda floating between Communism and Don't Know. To me, the fact that all the countries that have attempted to go down a route of Communism have ended up as despotic shit holes isn't a quirk of statistics, it's an inevitable consequence of a) the revolutionaries becoming counter-revolutionaries the day after the revolt and b) pooling that much power in the hands of the relatively few. Their goal isn't death but when the state has the power over everything, then any challenge becomes an existential threat and therefore worthy of being met with the extreme force we've become accustomed to in the various places that have tried it. I know, I know, communism doesn't have a state etc but I have to assume that the question implied that we'd need to actually get there, rather than clicking our fingers into it. And I know no country ever got there, but that's rather my point. At that point, whether you end up doing well or whether you get shot against a wall in communism seems to be as much a roll of the dice as whether you do well under fascism.
So work have given me a Twitter account and we happen to be following a guy blogging on Brexit, Simon Usherwood. Hadn't heard of him before but he talks a lot of sense. Anyway. he reckons May's mystery box announcement on 21st Sept can be narrowed down to one of three things:
1) Major policy reversal i.e. we want it soft not hard.
2) May will resign with immediate effect
3) Revoking of Article 50 until we can get our shit together.
The long and short of it though is it can't be anything good and whatever it is is going to have bad consequences.
Also alerted me to this letter which is apparently being passed around the backbench:
1) Major policy reversal i.e. we want it soft not hard.
2) May will resign with immediate effect
3) Revoking of Article 50 until we can get our shit together.
The long and short of it though is it can't be anything good and whatever it is is going to have bad consequences.
Also alerted me to this letter which is apparently being passed around the backbench:
Nigel Farage to address far-right rally in Germany
Former Ukip leader was invited to speak at event held by AfD party by the granddaughter of Hitlers finance minister
https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/07/nigel-farage-to-address-far-right-rally-in-germany
Not racist though.....
Former Ukip leader was invited to speak at event held by AfD party by the granddaughter of Hitlers finance minister
https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/07/nigel-farage-to-address-far-right-rally-in-germany
Not racist though.....
Anything for money. He is probably desperate for Brexit to not happen so idiots start asking him back again. Wish he would piss off forever.
TomWaitsForNoMan
Banned
Just imagine how things would be if he hadn't walked away from that plane crash
Its genuinely a tragedy
Theonik
Member
I hit the full Brexiteer Bingo the other day at work. I'd never seen a proper Brexiteer in the wild before.
Basically got the whole 'We didn't sign up for the EU but for the single market I remember it clear as day!' also got a 'I hate how people assume everyone who voted brexit are racist. They haven't seen the Polish people drunk on Vodka hurting people! I have nothing against immigration and it's not racist but those Polish must go.'
I was dying. Got the whole take back control of course.
CyclopsRock
Member
Some people said we'd leave the single market. Some people said we wouldn't.
D
Deleted member 231381
Unconfirmed Member
Enough people that the 'will of the people' is rather unclear, at least.
Caroline Lucas is disappointed at the reaction to her question about climate change in the aftermath of what has happened in Barbuda.
https://twitter.com/CarolineLucas/status/905785888483016704
https://twitter.com/CarolineLucas/status/905785888483016704
Spuck-uk
Banned
Speaking of light hearted questions, this YouGov poll is hilarious.
This does reinforce my belief that a lot of Lib Dem voters aren't really looking at the party they vote for.
JonathanEx
Member
A little late - and I don't know how it was in context of the whole show - but previously when Daily/Sunday Politics and This Week have covered Stormzy and other grime things there's often an uncomfortable undertone of 'don't these urban types talk funny'. So when Stormzy's statements are just reduced to 'which of these black sounding things did he say' I can see why it'd grate a bit, even if there was nothing particularly standout on this occasion.
It's as if a binary option with unclear plans (if any plans) was a dumb idea, hahahaha oh sadface.
In other things, I saw something on a local paper that wound me the fuck up the other day. So Lincoln has a growing problem with homelessness - and drug use, people just sleeping in the streets, or passed out. It's nowhere near say, Manchester, but it's definitely getting worse in the city.
Anyway the local paper has decided to refer to these people as 'Lincoln Zombies', on front pages, massive fonts and their trendy hashtags. And it's all 'how do we deal with the Lincoln zombies problem'.
How about 'how do we help drug addicts', you pricks. Their hashtag hasn't taken off, but when there over the weekend I saw it on the cover and it proper angered me.
But hey dealing with things like this costs money and requires attention and Brexit means Brexit means doing nothing and things getting worse, lovely.
Spuck-uk
Banned
Can I introduce you to my friend Anarcho-Communism. Has a less illustrious but more effective track record, and actively insists on abolishing heirachies.
Bear in mind, it's FPTP a lot of people don't get the opportunity of voting for their preferred party, and instead have to vote against the party they hate the most.
I think it could be because a higher proportion of Lib Dem supporters are more politically interested, and therefore have a better understanding of what Communism is.
I imagine the vast majority of disinterested people will identify as Labour or Tory supporters, and never look at the other parties.
And even for a "centrist" party I think communism would be preferable to fascism.
CyclopsRock
Member
I dunno, man. I still struggle to imagine how many people would think "Well, I like the single market, I like the customs union, I like abiding by EU regulations, I like free movement of people, but what I really can't stand is the fact we send our representatives to the parliament." It seems that if you're on board with all the stuff a soft Brexit entails, what possible reason would you have to vote leave rather than staying in the EU, especially considering the ambiguity over the type of Brexit. I find it really hard to believe that there's a sizeable contingent of people who voted Leave thinking we were going to have an almost identical relationship with the EU that we have now.
Spuck-uk
Banned
I think it's more of a thing of them thinking they're 'left wing' when the party, or at least certain parts of the party (Orange bookers etc), are pretty centre-right.
Not that I won't gladly accept anyone voting against the tories in our shit electoral system.
D
Deleted member 231381
Unconfirmed Member
I think most people thought 'I want the single market without freedom of movement!', since that's what polling consistently tells us they thought, and they preferred that to the status quo. Given that's impossible, it's much more difficult determining whether they'd prefer single market and freedom of movement OR no single market and no freedom of movement.
JonathanEx
Member
Plus we add the full version of this, "...without free movement, but that's people coming here, I of course am British and so should have the freedom to travel and live where I like".
CyclopsRock
Member
Lol.
The leaflet that was sent to every single household in the United Kingdom by HM Government - which has the words "The Government will implement what you decide" in its conclusion - built its entire economic case around extolling the virtues of the single market. Almost everything they say about the economy in there is also valid for Norway, so it seems pretty clear that the government (ie the people that were going to go on and actually implement Brexit) thought that leaving the EU meant leaving the single market. Do you really need me to provide "citations" that "some people said we'd leave the single market" ?!
I find it hard to swallow that Leave voters aren't capable of cognitive dissonance.
Edit: Nor am I sure that I buy the argument that "Remain campaigners said that leaving the single market would be a bad thing [amid assurances from Leave campaigners that it wouldn't happen]" equals "There is a mandate to leave the single market."
Edit: Nor am I sure that I buy the argument that "Remain campaigners said that leaving the single market would be a bad thing [amid assurances from Leave campaigners that it wouldn't happen]" equals "There is a mandate to leave the single market."
Would the orange bookers choose fascism over communism though?
Even Tory voters chose Comm over Fasc (albeit by an embarrassingly slim margin)
CyclopsRock
Member
If you can show me how we get there without first pooling the power and means of production in the hands of a glorious vanguard (who will obviously definitely no-doubt-about-it let it wither away once those evil capitalist forces are spent) then I'm all ears.
I dunno, I'm sure there's a huge swathe of internationalist reds who thought "Well I bloody love immigration but I can't stand people having the freedom to trade with others, so I'm voting out" and having much the same despair now. Does their love of immigration outweigh their hated of freedom? I guess we'll never know.
D
Deleted member 231381
Unconfirmed Member
Either way, we've sort of reached the point where what things are supposed to look like is very unclear, which was the original point.
QuicheFontaine
Member
I'll admit that I know next to nothing about grime, but I'm guessing each of those four words appear in Stormzy's songs at some point. I don't really see the problem with using "black sounding" words, especially since one of those black sounding words is the actual one he said (apparently).
And I guarantee that you and I have now both put more thought into this than the actual makers of the quiz.
JonathanEx
Member
CyclopsRock
Member
Yeah, you're right. We're in a position where it's likely that none of the options have a majority of support, so either way whatever choice is made we're going to end up with more people against it than for it. Then again, that's what every election this side of the second world war has been like, and no one would really care if Blair circa 1998 said that New Labour's reforms represented the will of the people. Maybe we should all just stop using the phrase except in the case of someone called William from a town called "The People".
Oh, you mean the material from the remain-backing Government that was largely derided by Leavers as "Project Fear"? LOL indeed. So yes, I'd like you provide a citation from the major Leave campaigns that categorically stated we would be leaving the single market. The video I posted (which you ignored) suggests a different story. Or are we really going with this revisionist history tale?
Edit: The onus here should be on what the Leave side said at the time, since that's the side that won the referendum and supposedly reflects the 'will of the people'.
CyclopsRock
Member
I said "Some people said we'd leave the single market.", you asked for a citation. I gave you the government. I'm sure if you keep moving the goal posts you'll end up with what you want.
Read my edit. The context of your "some people..." statement was in reply to a comment made about the will of the people. The people voted to leave, but the Leave campaign wasn't arguing for an exit of the single market.
Perhaps I should've clearer in the first place, but surely the point is clear? How can you or anyone say that leaving the single market is a reflection of the will of the people when the side the people voted for didn't mention it or specifically said the opposite?? Again, to argue otherwise is revising history.
That video I posted should be watched time and time again when any politician or armchair pundit talks about a clear mandate for leaving the single market. The facts don't bear it out. Unless you or anyone can provide evidence to the contrary, it's not what people voted for. It wasn't on the ballot paper and it wasn't even in the Vote Leave literature. For anyone to argue otherwise is to simply overlay a bunch of conjecture.
Alan Duncan really is a snidey little shit. Not to mention the hypocrisy of anyone in this government when accusing someone else of lacking "humanity"
In his defence here, you have also set your goalposts particularly wide there too
You're totally right by saying that the information was there if people wanted to see it, and I would agree that ultimately it's up to a person to be informed, but let's not pretend that the general voter had much trust in anything the government said about the EU, nor that the people pointing out that soft-brexit isn't realistically possible were remotely as frequent or loud as the other arguments made about leaving
It's kind of like when one of the tabloids prints a small correction on page 20 about some lie they had plastered on a front page - sure the info is there if people want to read it, but generally they don't, and mainly the headline argument shouting loudest is what sticks
To go back to the original point - given the narrow victory by Leave, and the sheer number of different (and impossible) benefits that Leavers promised, it's impossible to really say "the people have spoken" about anything
Speaking of goalposts, you haven't posted a citation of people advocating leaving the single market. You can't be so intellectually lazy you don't realise the difference between stating an outcome for people to vote in favour and stating it for people to vote against.
In a thread of many stretched football analogies, this one is just too far.
I'm sure I can do much worse than that!!
JonathanEx
Member
I believe you mean this analogy is a wide pass with the ball kick
CyclopsRock
Member
But my point wasn't that "Hard Brexit has a clear mandate". That's the guy in that photo's point, not mine. My argument was that saying that Brexit was uniformly presented as being soft in nature by Leave campaigners is revisionist, because throughout the entire campaign you were hearing different things from different people. You can find a leave campaigner who said almost anything, from the Norway model to outright hard Brexit (this argument was more common from the left, actually, who viewed the single market as bad in an of itself, rather than simply a casualty - John Mann, Dennis Skinner etc). And the kicker is that the vast majority of them - unlike HM Government, which is why I keep bringing them up - were not in a position to be making any promises. Vast swathes of the Leave talking heads had no more power over our Brexit position than you or I.
Also that video's contents are all from before the referendum campaign. Andrew Neil ticked off Open Britain for it pretty heavily on, I think, the Daily Politics, because if they could have found clips from during the actual referendum, I daresay they'd have used them.
I agree! My point was about how it's untrue to characterise the campaign as singing from the Soft Brexit hymn sheet only to switch gears after victory. It was a mish mash of different, mostly bullshit, opinions from the get go.
It's a distinction not relevant to my argument, because an argument in favour of staying in the EU based on single market membership obviously implies that leaving the EU involves removing single market membership. Again, my point isn't that the campaign was all about leaving the single market - it was an argument against the idea that everyone thought Brexit meant staying in the single market and only now are they discovering we're having a hard Brexit. The Prime Minister himself said that if we voted Leave then we'd exit the single market! They also got told by other people it would be a soft Brexit. That combination of views is precisely my point.
Spuck-uk
Banned
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia
There you go,
spoiler alert, fascists fucked everything up.
Interesting bit of European history.
CyclopsRock
Member
I actually do intend to do some more reading on it.
If you've got a half hour to spend, there's some genuinely fascinating articles over on ConservativeHome, looking into just what happened with the Tories campaign during the recent election. The differences between the 2015 and 2017 campaigns are going to be studied in politics classes for decades to come, I'm certain.
First article looks at CCHQ itself, the second looks at the ground campaign, and the third offers suggestions on how to fix it.
It appears that May's announcement of a general election really did catch everyone by surprise. CCHQ's staff and data had been left to wither, and candidates were plucked out of nowhere without any real local association involvement, who were mostly ignored by CCHQ when it came time to send out leaflets and what messages to campaign on.
First article looks at CCHQ itself, the second looks at the ground campaign, and the third offers suggestions on how to fix it.
It appears that May's announcement of a general election really did catch everyone by surprise. CCHQ's staff and data had been left to wither, and candidates were plucked out of nowhere without any real local association involvement, who were mostly ignored by CCHQ when it came time to send out leaflets and what messages to campaign on.
You should read Homage to Catalonia if you are interested, its really short and you can never have too much Orwell!
Really interesting articles, thanks for posting the links. Still digesting them now but a lot to think about!
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