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@Catogrande said in British Politics:
@pakman said in British Politics:
@Victor-Meldrew said in British Politics:
@MiketheSnow said in British Politics:
@MajorRage said in British Politics:
@rotated said in British Politics:
@MajorRage said in British Politics:
Blair was hated for his ability to relate to the right / conservatives but ultimately thats what won elections, It also made for a much more harmonious UK with the exception of the far left who (and they still bang on about this ad bloody nauseum)thought Blair was a traitor to the Labour party etc.
Even if Stamer had all the talents of Blair, how many people are really up for grabs at the moment? After four elections, two referendums (and another one in the offing) in the past decade the electorate has to be totally fatigued with no space for a groundswell behind anyone or anything.
I can see why you would think that but I also think you are flat out wrong. There is a huge space available for a true centrist party at the moment.
They'd have my vote.
Especially if they led with
'The Government is here to help you, but you have to help yourself'
"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help. " Ronald Raegan
Up there with, 'We have to talk'?!
Surely you mean "we have to talk, we have to talk, we..."?
Going to use that on your 'educational' video?
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Reagan's line is up there with "tax and spend" as some of the most damaging rhetoric by a politician in the last 40 years.
Both of those lines taken at face value suggest that anarchy is the best government, which is absolute nonsense. Communism is also nonsense, as is unfettered capitalism, but politics and government is ideally about finding the balance between the extremes, not destroying government or individual capability.
The UK already has a centrist party formed from a split of the UK Labour Party, being the Liberal Democrats.
The Labour Party doesn't need to schism again - if there are centrists who don't like where it's going, they should go and join the Lib Dems. FPP makes it politically moronic to split parties, and even Corbyn, primary representative of the left wing of the Labour Party, understands that, which is why he didn't depart and take half the party membership with him.
Without a change in the electoral system to some sort of proportional representation, Labour and the Tories are stuck with managing wings of the parties, as anything else leads to the other side winning easily. The hard part is convincing internal wings/factions to get along for the sake of getting anything done, because while disunity is punished at the ballot box, that's easily forgotten in the heat of the moment.
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@Godder all very true mate.
I would classify myself as Centre right, but the lib dems are a complete clusterfuck so are unvotable.
But for me, Labour simply remain unvotable as well as they have too many influential hard left. I honestly think they care more about virtue signaling bullshit. The hardest done people in this country are the constantly trod upon deprived white youth, mainly up north.
And Labour do nothing for them.
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@MajorRage said in British Politics:
@Godder all very true mate.
I would classify myself as Centre right, but the lib dems are a complete clusterfuck so are unvotable.
But for me, Labour simply remain unvotable as well as they have too many influential hard left. I honestly think they care more about virtue signaling bullshit. The hardest done people in this country are the constantly trod upon deprived white youth, mainly up north.
And Labour do nothing for them.
See Brexit
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@MajorRage said in British Politics:
@Godder all very true mate.
I would classify myself as Centre right, but the lib dems are a complete clusterfuck so are unvotable.
But for me, Labour simply remain unvotable as well as they have too many influential hard left. I honestly think they care more about virtue signaling bullshit. The hardest done people in this country are the constantly trod upon deprived white youth, mainly up north.
And Labour do nothing for them.
Until a Lib Dem leader comes out and says Clegg was a fluffybunny for letting his supporters and party down by selling his soul to the Conservatives, then the Lib Dems won’t get my vote
I don’t think I’m alone
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I'm actually warming to the concept that governments don't and can't change much at all, apart from external security (and even that's incredibly difficult) and short-term national emergencies- no matter how radical they profess to be.
No matter how much they focus on things like education or health, how many laws they pass or how much they spend, the literacy rate doesn't change much, medical outcomes don't change much and the crime rate is still pretty static, predictable and based on demographics.
Real changes (positive or negative) in things like crime rates and public health seem to be driven by the individual, their families and local communities and central government doesn't have much impact. I think Thatcher was onto something with her much-misquoted "No such thing as society" comments, and which Reagan's quote was also aiming at.
Maybe their be best role in today's society is less to govern and attempt change than to point out what needs to change, give people at the lowest practical level the tools to do it and provide the framework for that to happen?
Just some random, stream-of-conciousness bollocks from Meldrew Towers
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@Victor-Meldrew depends on the framework which is set by Parliament. Obviously a government could use their parliamentary majority to change the framework significantly, but as long as they don't (and would rarely know how or which experts to advise them), tinkering around the margins is government's lot in life. Too much market and personal freedom to expect anything else.
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Absolutely superb column on what is wrong with media and journalism in the UK. Absolutely nailed it.
Naturally, Morgan is melting down with personal abuse in reaction.
Deborah James is a fabulous person. Diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer in 2016, she has become an inspirational campaigner, writing a bestselling book and columns. We have become close friends (our daughters used to attend the same school), have a mutual interest in psychology and share a podcast producer.
Deborah was thrust into the spotlight last week after a BBC debate with the retired judge Lord Sumption. Sumption set out his now familiar disagreements with government policy over lockdown. He also made the point that in a world of scarce resources, it is sometimes necessary to ascribe relative value to human life. In essence, he argued that if you face the awful decision of saving the life of a 90-year-old or that of a nine-year-old, you should save the latter.
A few minutes later, Sumption made an intervention while Deborah was making an eloquent contribution of her own, and stated that her life was “less valuable” than others. It was a clumsy, indeed crass, contribution from the former judge, but it would have taken an inattentive viewer to have failed to understand what he meant. For those two words made sense only in the light of the broader discussion and his fundamental point that, while all human life is precious, we nevertheless sometimes face dilemmas in which not all lives can be saved.
But I do not wish to get into a discussion of Sumption’s views here (as it happens, I largely agree that it is sometimes necessary to weigh human life, but I disagree that it is in the public interest to lift restrictions on social distancing). Instead, I want to focus on what happened next. An hour or so later, a clip of his intervention, stripped of all context, was posted on Twitter. Instant headlines followed. As the “scandal” went viral, the story metastasised from one about how to make complex moral judgments to one about an evil judge seeking to euthanise people. About 99% of the coverage, in other words, focused on about 1% of what he actually said.
Then it got worse. The following morning, Sumption was invited onto Good Morning Britain to discuss a poll on the pandemic. In the event, he was hijacked by Piers Morgan, who constantly pressed him about his appearance on the BBC. ITV even played the clip of his intervention, again stripped of context. Four times, Sumption attempted to explain that the intervention was, indeed, clumsy, but should be seen as part of a broader contribution in which he acknowledged that all life has intrinsic value. Four times, he was interrupted by Morgan, the exchange ending when Sumption threatened to curtail the interview.
Why did Morgan act this way? Because he also had an eye on how a clip from his own show might play on Twitter. Sure enough, a little later, a segment of their exchange was pumped onto the internet. By this stage, we were left not with a parody of Sumption’s position, but a parody of a parody. It was as if a two-word intervention had come to stand for the world-view of a human being. In years to come, I suspect that few will remember anything of the incident beyond a vague sense that Sumption is sinister, perhaps wicked.
I have gone into this episode in detail not because I hold any brief for Sumption, but because of how it symbolises a wider catastrophe unfolding in our public life. In a wise essay in 1953, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin contrasted two types of thinker: the hedgehog and the fox. The hedgehog has one big idea. It reduces everything to this one idea. Everything else is filtered out. The fox, conversely, has lots of ideas. It likes to see the broader context, how concepts fit together, and is anxious to bring more information to light.
Berlin’s point — although he made it subtly — is that it is psychologically easier to be a hedgehog, but to understand a complex world, it pays to be a fox. Neither meaning nor truth is contained in bare facts, assertions, data points, viral clips and simplistic headlines: rather, truth is contained within a context — how one thing relates to many other things, and how parts fits into more complex wholes.
The tragedy is that the world is being dragged — almost without our noticing — towards ever more extreme hedgehoggery. Twitter users argue on the basis of 280-character caricatures of one another’s positions. Television interviewers seek not to elicit information, but to provoke viral controversies. Readers respond to the headlines of articles rather than the words beneath them. Empathy has been sacrificed in the rush to misconstrue and misrepresent. Nuance has been destroyed in a bonfire of contrived outrage.
Morgan is, perhaps, the archetype of the world into which we have arrived, a parasite on the contours of democracy. He is a cunning operator who spotted the opportunities of Twitter early, learning to surf the waves that to outsiders seem arbitrary, but to him have become like second nature. He takes artificially emphatic stances, conveys false certainty, caricatures positions, strips away ambiguity, seeks scapegoats for complex problems and cajoles guests into simplistic answers that mislead the public — and then seeks to humiliate them when they think better of returning to the studio.
He becomes a temporary hero to the deluded souls for whom he becomes a cheerleader — at present, it is those who support restrictions over Covid — but they don’t see how he is systematically demeaning public debate upon which we all ultimately rely, or how he will soon be off to adopt another position, riding soap boxes like waves. He doesn’t seem to care about what soap box he is on, provided it is topical and divisive.
But let’s not reduce this to Morgan, for platoons of people have been sucked into the vortex of this cesspool — individuals whose rationality has been corrupted by the deep infrastructure of this perilous age. It perhaps goes without saying that Twitter is a huge culprit, a digital cancer whose catastrophic influence on our consciousness has yet to be fully grasped. Its algorithms are like acid, silently eating away at the fabric of how we converse, engage and grow in collective wisdom. Its influence has seeped into every medium; by proxy, into every life.
Yet I refuse to lose my optimism, the belief that with courage we can transcend this malaise. Two and a half millennia ago, Socrates argued that rationality and shared understanding would ultimately defeat their opposites. It may take a sea change in attitudes to ensure that his words remain prophetic. But we can do it. In fact, we must.
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@pakman said in British Politics:
@MajorRage Matthew Syed frequently writes superb pieces.
I enjoy his articles
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I think it's worthwhile me adding a bit more of my own observations here, so it doesn't just seem like another Twitter / Morgan rant.
I saw this on BBC a a few days ago and though, jeez thats a bit rough. Then he want on GMB and Morgan tore him to shreds over it and then snippets of him doing this were everywhere. So had my opinion on the Lord & the fiasco based on that.
However, I was sent this article by a mate (who would likely punch Morgan if he saw him) so I read it through. And then I took a look online to see who the Deborah James was and the first thing I find is her retweeting this article - which is a clear endorsement (as you'd expect I suppose). Then I checked out Morgan and he's doing a straight out personal abuse attack on the author. He's also claiming that Syed is realising how badly judged his columns was (which he isn't - quite the opposite). And constantly retweeting people who support his abuse of the government. Which is totally not the point of the article (although I'll concede it's certainly an undisguised attack on Morgans journalistic style). In fact, in private I'd actually think Morgan feels complimented by the argument.
So the person with stage 4 cancer who Sumption made his controversial comment to, is supporting this article. Which means unequivocally, I have been misled to judge somebody by the media, and one very high profile person's take on it, which is completely out of synch with the stage 4 Cancer patient that he said his comment too.
Journalists job, especially during a pandemic, is not to be the news. IT's fucking disgraceful.
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@MajorRage said in British Politics:
I think it's worthwhile me adding a bit more of my own observations here, so it doesn't just seem like another Twitter / Morgan rant.
I saw this on BBC a a few days ago and though, jeez thats a bit rough. Then he want on GMB and Morgan tore him to shreds over it and then snippets of him doing this were everywhere. So had my opinion on the Lord & the fiasco based on that.
However, I was sent this article by a mate (who would likely punch Morgan if he saw him) so I read it through. And then I took a look online to see who the Deborah James was and the first thing I find is her retweeting this article - which is a clear endorsement (as you'd expect I suppose). Then I checked out Morgan and he's doing a straight out personal abuse attack on the author. He's also claiming that Syed is realising how badly judged his columns was (which he isn't - quite the opposite). And constantly retweeting people who support his abuse of the government. Which is totally not the point of the article (although I'll concede it's certainly an undisguised attack on Morgans journalistic style). In fact, in private I'd actually think Morgan feels complimented by the argument.
So the person with stage 4 cancer who Sumption made his controversial comment to, is supporting this article. Which means unequivocally, I have been misled to judge somebody by the media, and one very high profile person's take on it, which is completely out of synch with the stage 4 Cancer patient that he said his comment too.
Journalists job, especially during a pandemic, is not to be the news. IT's fucking disgraceful.
The irony is that the topic at hand was how do you value a human life, and judges like Lord Sumption was do it all the time. If he had had more time to prepare a response he probably would have said as much. They get asked to rule on end of life cases, whether to remove children, whether to force or withhold treatment, it’s part of their job for fucks sake. The beat-up from Morgan is entirely disingenuous
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@MajorRage said in British Politics:
Journalists job, especially during a pandemic, is not to be the news. IT's fucking disgraceful.
Spot on, mate.
The whole media seem to be on a merry-go-round of creating stories and clickbait outrage - and fuck the consequences if it costs lives
The Guardian ran a series of fake news articles last week on the Pfizer jab saying it was ineffective with only one jab, in a thinly veiled attempt to undermine & politicise the UK's vaccine strategy. And the Mail spent days attacking Whitty & Co. for suggesting the Kent variant might be more lethal - scaremongering apparently.
And they protect their own. Piers Morgan fucked off to Antigua for Christmas ignoring government guidance - bugger all about that in the media.
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@MajorRage said in British Politics:
@Godder all very true mate.
I would classify myself as Centre right, but the lib dems are a complete clusterfuck so are unvotable.
But for me, Labour simply remain unvotable as well as they have too many influential hard left. I honestly think they care more about virtue signaling bullshit. The hardest done people in this country are the constantly trod upon deprived white youth, mainly up north.
And Labour do nothing for them.
BBC showing my exact point. Of children on free meals ...
26% go to university
White people - 16%
White boys - 13%
Black african - 59%
Black carribbean - 32%
Indian - 57%
Pakistan - 47% -
@MajorRage said in British Politics:
@MajorRage said in British Politics:
@Godder all very true mate.
I would classify myself as Centre right, but the lib dems are a complete clusterfuck so are unvotable.
But for me, Labour simply remain unvotable as well as they have too many influential hard left. I honestly think they care more about virtue signaling bullshit. The hardest done people in this country are the constantly trod upon deprived white youth, mainly up north.
And Labour do nothing for them.
BBC showing my exact point. Of children on free meals ...
26% go to university
% going to university by demographic:
White people - 16%
White boys - 13%
Black african - 59%
Black carribbean - 32%
Indian - 57%
Pakistan - 47%Feeding them not making much difference to poor young white males.
You are so right @MajorRage !
British Politics