news & politics:discussion

[topmarksbri]

2 hours ago, Matt42 said:

I don’t really know the process or whether it’s feasible but he really is the best choice for labour leader IMO. Because the Labour Party is the Labour Party he probably will never be.

I think that's probably his long term plan. He's odds on favourite at the moment and I don't really know anyone in the party who doesn't like him - seems to be a genuine unity candidate. I am curious about what his policy platform would look like to be honest, I think it's quite hard to extrapolate his work as mayor to a national level.

[topmarksbri]

I would say though that I know a few who live in and around Manchester and are more clued up into local politics up there than I am and reckon that he's got into bed with some pretty unsavoury characters - Sacha Lord/Tim Heatley in particular they feel are wolves in sheeps clothing. 

[mattiloy]

grotesque

for context, thats the al aqsa mosque on fire in the background, causing wild celebrations on the part of the fascists in the foreground

Edited May 10, 2021 by mattiloy

[Guest]

2 hours ago, crazyfool1 said:

likewise ... I know it has always said .... will be considered for debate at 100,000 signatures .... do these debates actually happen ? or does someone consider and then reject them ? think its JRMs job isnt it "? 

 

Petitions which reach 10,000 signatures receive a written response from the UK Government. The Committee can schedule debates in the House of Commons' second debating chamber (Westminster Hall), on Monday evenings at 4.30 pm. Petitions which reach 100,000 signatures are considered by the Committee for debate.

[eFestivals]

1 hour ago, Ozanne said:

Petitions which reach 10,000 signatures receive a written response from the UK Government. The Committee can schedule debates in the House of Commons' second debating chamber (Westminster Hall), on Monday evenings at 4.30 pm. Petitions which reach 100,000 signatures are considered by the Committee for debate.

That whole petition thing is a pointless waste of time.

[Matt42]

11 hours ago, topmarksbri said:

I think that's probably his long term plan. He's odds on favourite at the moment and I don't really know anyone in the party who doesn't like him - seems to be a genuine unity candidate. I am curious about what his policy platform would look like to be honest, I think it's quite hard to extrapolate his work as mayor to a national level.

 

11 hours ago, topmarksbri said:

I would say though that I know a few who live in and around Manchester and are more clued up into local politics up there than I am and reckon that he's got into bed with some pretty unsavoury characters - Sacha Lord/Tim Heatley in particular they feel are wolves in sheeps clothing. 

Sacha Lord before the lockdowns was pretty Tory. Wouldn’t shock me if he was a shy Tory at all.

Everyone is going to have skeletons in the closet but I’d be shocked if they could find anything serious on Andy Burnham. As you said, he’s a unity candidate and I feel like he’d at least try and get on good terms with the regions in the north, not just the metropolitan areas. 

[Guest]

8 hours ago, eFestivals said:

That whole petition thing is a pointless waste of time.

I wouldn’t say they are a pointless waste of time but I know where you are coming from. The government does have a tendency to ignore petitions even when they are debated but they are still important parts of the democratic process. 

[Ryan1984]

Where’s Sunak at the moment? Seems very quiet...

[incident]

1 hour ago, Ozanne said:

I wouldn’t say they are a pointless waste of time but I know where you are coming from. The government does have a tendency to ignore petitions even when they are debated but they are still important parts of the democratic process. 

Sorry, but they're not part of the democratic process at all, let alone an important one.

They're a gimmick introduced by the Cameron government to simultaneously produce the illusion of listening the people while at the same time allowing the Government to ensure that they can ignore anything they don't already want to do.

[maelzoid]

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the voter ID thing will not get as far as passing into law.

It's not dissimilar to the whole ID card thing of 15 years ago. Once the practical realities and cost of implementation became known, the enterprise looked massively expensive and unable to deliver on its intended promises.

Given that the amount of voter fraud in this country is minuscule (4 convictions following the 2019 election - even if every 'allegation' of fraud proved to be true, that would still be orders of magnitude lower than the numbers needed to actually affect polling outcomes), the govt simply cannot make a reasonable case that their intent is to reduce fraud - I know that's not what they really want, but they at least need it as an excuse.

Even if they claim they don't want to disenfranchise people (which I believe would be a lie), they have to at least acknowledge that that would be an outcome, moreso for the young, ethnic minorities, the poor and people living with disability. They would need to make an attempt to sincerely look like they are doing something to prevent this.

There are other questions, such as how this affects proxy voters and voters by mail. And what kind of additional training and support would be needed by those working in the polling stations (who are all unpaid volunteers).

Another question is what forms of ID would be acceptable. About a quarter of UK adults don't have a driver's license. About 1 in 5 do not have a passport. If these are the only things acceptable, can the relevant agencies cope with issuing IDs to those extra people (something like 10 million). Even if not all of them want to do it, the gov't has to prove that it would nevertheless be possible without overwhelming the system. If a new form of voter ID card is to be introduced, we are back to where we were with the old ID cards, which wasted billions of pounds and produced nothing.

All of this adds up to a monstrous amount of spending, a significant number of years to implement (certainly longer than the current election cycle), with no measurable benefit in terms of the stated goals.

[Mimo]

Dunno... It's one of them where the 80 seat majority comes into play. I think certain Tories will definitely rebel, David Davis for example will speak out strongly against it I think (might have that wrong), but if they whip it it will pass.

If/when the tabloids all start pushing an identical bullshit pro voting ID propaganda line you know it's going to happen. Wonder what that will be. IMMIGRANTS are stealing our sacred BRITISH votes? THE WOKE must be stopped from destroying OUR country with their dangerous free thinking ideas? Young people CAN'T BE TRUSTED? Liberals are PLOTTING to win future elections?

[steviewevie]

21 minutes ago, maelzoid said:

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the voter ID thing will not get as far as passing into law.

It's not dissimilar to the whole ID card thing of 15 years ago. Once the practical realities and cost of implementation became known, the enterprise looked massively expensive and unable to deliver on its intended promises.

Given that the amount of voter fraud in this country is minuscule (4 convictions following the 2019 election - even if every 'allegation' of fraud proved to be true, that would still be orders of magnitude lower than the numbers needed to actually affect polling outcomes), the govt simply cannot make a reasonable case that their intent is to reduce fraud - I know that's not what they really want, but they at least need it as an excuse.

Even if they claim they don't want to disenfranchise people (which I believe would be a lie), they have to at least acknowledge that that would be an outcome, moreso for the young, ethnic minorities, the poor and people living with disability. They would need to make an attempt to sincerely look like they are doing something to prevent this.

There are other questions, such as how this affects proxy voters and voters by mail. And what kind of additional training and support would be needed by those working in the polling stations (who are all unpaid volunteers).

Another question is what forms of ID would be acceptable. About a quarter of UK adults don't have a driver's license. About 1 in 5 do not have a passport. If these are the only things acceptable, can the relevant agencies cope with issuing IDs to those extra people (something like 10 million). Even if not all of them want to do it, the gov't has to prove that it would nevertheless be possible without overwhelming the system. If a new form of voter ID card is to be introduced, we are back to where we were with the old ID cards, which wasted billions of pounds and produced nothing.

All of this adds up to a monstrous amount of spending, a significant number of years to implement (certainly longer than the current election cycle), with no measurable benefit in terms of the stated goals.

house of lords will block it.

[steviewevie]

Boris going to make a load more promises today. Bullshit baffles brains.

[Guest]

48 minutes ago, incident said:

Sorry, but they're not part of the democratic process at all, let alone an important one.

They're a gimmick introduced by the Cameron government to simultaneously produce the illusion of listening the people while at the same time allowing the Government to ensure that they can ignore anything they don't already want to do.

I do get what you mean but I dunno, I’ve always though of petitions as a part of the process as they reflect a certain feeling within a group of people which if signed by enough gets attention in the legislature. I guess this is where my argument falls apart because when you have a governing party like we’ve had for recent years that just ignores petitions then I suppose they aren’t really a part of the process at all.  

[eFestivals]

2 hours ago, Ozanne said:

I wouldn’t say they are a pointless waste of time but I know where you are coming from. The government does have a tendency to ignore petitions even when they are debated but they are still important parts of the democratic process. 

It's a deflection mechanism. Not a serious way for the public to influence or change policy.

[steviewevie]

The whole queens speech thing is pretty feckin stupid. 

[eFestivals]

Spaffers speech from the gob of Brenda say they'll introduce I'd for elections. I remember reading something about some strange postal vote goings on that lead to the Tories winning a seat have the Tories just knobbled themselves.

[Guest]

Back in 2004 Boris Johnson was vehemently against voter ID. Conveniently he doesn’t feel that way now.

 

[eFestivals]

8 minutes ago, Ozanne said:

Back in 2004 Boris Johnson was vehemently against voter ID. Conveniently he doesn’t feel that way now.

 

Who knew spaffer is full of shit?

[eFestivals]

A song about politicians.

Edited May 11, 2021 by eFestivals

[DeanoL]

 

On 5/10/2021 at 10:41 AM, eFestivals said:

Corbyns flaws were always obvious and what happened proved the criticisms correct.

Right - so people that have spoken against Starmer are part of the reason he did so badly, but people who spoke against Corbyn weren't part of the reason that Corbyn did so badly, because you're right about Corbyn and people are wrong about Starmer? 

You've been laying into Corbyn for years (and for some reason, still are) - it's complete hypocrisy and your defense basically comes down to you being smarter than everyone else - which happens to be one of the other arguments your berate people for making!

22 hours ago, eFestivals said:

What you missed from that is tax rates so highveven for the low paid it'd make everyone scream. You never see people advocating for high tax rates for the low paid.

When you have a strong welfare state, such that the low paid have much of their basic needs taken care of for them regardless, people tend not to mind so much. Yes, I pay 10% more in tax but my rent is 30% cheaper because of rent controls. It balances out.

[DeanoL]

Labour have a challenge ahead of them for reasons people have touched on here: you have the working class northern Labour voters, and the middle-class southern champagne socialists/young people, and those two groups can't stand each other. I'm not sure there's a way to square that circle. The progressive social policies of the latter find their natural opposition in the former. But the latter won't have any interest in a party that doesn't support those policies, because economically the party doesn't do anything for them either.

But unless we get an early election, there's a massive disruptive element that will come into play because of FPTP, and that is the mass movement of people we're going to see over the coming years. As remote working becomes more of a thing, your middle-class lefties will increasingly be moving out into more traditionally Tory-voting areas. I think we saw the very first shoots of this with the increases Labour support in areas just outside London. People that would normally live in the city their entire lives until retirement will be moving out far earlier.

Broadly this should be good for Labour, but until we actually have an election, I think it's going to be almost impossible to model. 

[steviewevie]

 

[topmarksbri]

2 hours ago, DeanoL said:

you have the working class northern Labour voters, and the middle-class southern champagne socialists/young people

I think it's a pretty one way street of distaste here. Most of the second category have no real beef with the former (or at least not that I've experienced) 

[steviewevie]

10 minutes ago, topmarksbri said:

I think it's a pretty one way street of distaste here. Most of the second category have no real beef with the former (or at least not that I've experienced) 

I  mean that is such a simplistic way of looking at it it's almost the problem.

Apparently there are working class people down south, and in the cities...and apparently not all northern working class think the same....and I swear to god I saw some young people up here the other day.