The UK Politics Thread [Wot did Jez do now...]

[GS]

Hanging is the British way of offing people, so it would have to be that.

They'd fuck one up and someone would end up swinging for ages. There would be an immediate halt called, and the shit would hit the fan.

Imagine the aftermath. The Express would go ballistic that we're not just throwing them off cliffs instead, and The Guardian would have a black border on the front page lamenting "the death of British values", probably with the Bill of Rights enveloped by a noose.

It's a good job there's no chance of it ever coming back.

[phonics]

Oh god, today's topic of conversation is that the National Trust has TAKEN THE EASTER OUT OF EASTER EGG HUNTING despite the fact that it hasn't. Theresa May has even got involved despite being over in Saudi Arabia, no doubt to sell a bunch of weapons to them to drop on Yemen for a reason I'm still not completely sure of. Yay.

The country has become a fucking shit America. Who will be the thick celebrity we vote in? I'm going for Peter Andre.

[Offshore Toon]

Janet Street-Porter

[Jimmy Floyd]

Today's topic of conversation on politics twitter, yeah. No one in the real country knows or cares.

Oh and as in all things, we did that ages before America and with far less damaging consequences (Boris Johnson).

[phonics]

Yes, we will be raising the humanitarian issue. We believe it is important that we recognise the threat that there is in terms of people’s lives. We will be supporting that through the aid and support that we give.

The important thing for the United Kingdom when we meet people and we want to raise issues of human rights - and that may be in a number of countries around the world - is if we have the relationship with them, then we are able to do that.

So, rather than just standing on the sidelines and sniping, it’s important to engage, to talk to people, to talk about our interests and to raise, yes, difficult issues when we feel it’s necessary to do so.

Fucking hell, she is such a twat. She's going to sell them a bunch of bombs and some luxury flats in London and that's it.

[GS]

What's your issue, exactly?

[Jimmy Floyd]

I'd like to see the version of international relations in which we only do deals with New Zealand, Denmark and other 'nice' countries.

[phonics]

The Saudi's are comitting war crimes in Yemen, their treatment of women is horrific, they're lashing human rights activists in the streets when they're not locking them up. Stuff that's not just limited to Saudi but the Gulf at large, like modern slavery is a very real and very bad thing.

They're the most backwards country on the fucking planet. Mentioning this stuff in passing is the definition of 'sniping from the sidelines', actually saying 'We will not sell you bombs to go do war crimes with until these things change'. We've spent a decade and a half levelling the Middle East when the biggest exporters of terrorism and the terrorist ideology that pushes all these mentalists (wahhabism) is preached by their top clerics and they are our best mates. We let them rape people and keep slaves on UK mainland and they can't be touched because they're Saudi Royalty (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3361640/Saudi-millionaire-cleared-raping-teenager-telling-court-accidentally-penetrated-18-year-old-tripped-fell-her.html). It's disgusting.

If just one politician would mention half this stuff out loud at a press conference while Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud had to stand there looking like a twat, they'd have my vote for a long time. They are the definition of evil and we do business with them because private military contracts are more important to us than human rights. There are literally no consequences for their actions ever. I'll say it again, it's disgusting.

[Jimmy Floyd]

They're politicians, not priests. They have to weigh up the benefits to the nation of keeping Saudi onside versus the costs to the nation of the bad stuff they get up to. Why do you think they boycott Robert Mugabe until the cows come home, but let the Chinese get away with much worse crimes.

The moralising preacher-politician you'd like to see is basically Jeremy Corbyn, i.e. no help to anyone.

[Henry]

Let's sell some weapons to North Korea then. And maybe ISIS while we're at it.

[Jimmy Floyd]

That is a classic example of you missing the point - we don't sell weapons to either of those two because it isn't in our interests (quite the opposite) to do so.

[phonics]

At the end of the day, when you have harsher words for the National Trust over a fake Easter Egg story then Saudi Arabia. You're a twat.

[GS]

That's all fine and easy to say when you're a "private citizen" with no responsibility for anything, but I suspect it's quite different when you actually have responsibility for things.

Indonesia lashes people in the street and executes them for drug trafficking, Iran locks women up for attending volleyball matches, the Indians turn a blind eye to village elders implementing medievalist judgements on young women. We engage with those countries, because we can't put ourselves in the position of basing foreign policy on these things, unpalatable as they are. It's in our interests to engage.

We need Saudi cooperation on terrorism and intelligence, and you'll get that by incentivising them to work with you. We ostracised Gaddafi, and he was a key source of weaponry flowing to the IRA as a consequence, including Semtex. We ostracised Assad when he was fighting Islamic State, and he ended up turning to the Russians and the West lost the initiative to influence it completely.

There is no appetite whatever for a global boycott ala apartheid to force domestic change in Saudi. The country is built, and held together, on the twin pillars of the House of Saud and Wahhabism. Any change will come very, very slowly and any reforming moves by the monarchy have met fierce resistance. If we block them out of international affairs, we'll leave ourselves open to justifiable accusations of hypocrisy, lose key cooperation on terrorism in the region, and make it far less likely that you'll ever get any actual change there.

It's naïve in the extreme to think that trying to morally shame them at a governmental level would be anything other than totally counterproductive.

I agree with your view on their policies, by the way. I think they're medievalist. But that's why you wouldn't go and live there.

[GS]

They're politicians, not priests. They have to weigh up the benefits to the nation of keeping Saudi onside versus the costs to the nation of the bad stuff they get up to. Why do you think they boycott Robert Mugabe until the cows come home, but let the Chinese get away with much worse crimes.

The moralising preacher-politician you'd like to see is basically Jeremy Corbyn, i.e. no help to anyone.

This is also a good point.

[phonics]

Saudi cooperation on terrorism? They're the ones bloody funding it.

[Jimmy Floyd]

India recriminalised homosexuality in 2015. Should be a total ban on curry as it's against British values.

[GS]

India recriminalised homosexuality in 2015. Should be a total ban on curry as it's against British values.

Another irony is that the one genuine democracy in the Middle East is boycotted by certain sections of the left.

I don't think they quite appreciate the hypocrisy.

[Henry]

That is a classic example of you missing the point - we don't sell weapons to either of those two because it isn't in our interests (quite the opposite) to do so.

It's actually a classic example of me making the point that you'd be happy enough to sell them weapons if you thought it was serving some "national interest".
I mean, the Saudi's are doing a lot to inflame Islamic extremism in Syria and elsewhere and apparently that isn't as important as protecting the interests of British arms companies, so it's more or less the same thing.

[phonics]

Because the one true democracy is an apartheid state that could quite easily stop being one if they so chose.

[ItalAussie]

Bit harsh on Jordan. It's a little different, but it's certainly a functional democracy.

[Lewis]

Saudi Arabia wants wiping off the face of the planet, so, until that becomes a possibility, we might as well take their money.

[GS]

Red Ken survives to push the boundaries of acceptable behaviour for another year. What a party. :cool:

[Lewis]

Other than him being crap at history, I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. You would have to be a bit of a precious Jew to not vote for Labour because of this.

[GS]

Non-Corbyn MPs are going BERSERK, but presumably part of it is exasperation with the whole farce.

[phonics]

Love to wake up to see "Disgraced former cabinet minister Liam Fox" coming out and saying we have shared values with fucking Duerte. Christ.

[Lewis]

He's a right laugh him.

[Jimmy Floyd]

Fox and Davis are surely plants to make Boris look like a genius. Pair of absolute thundercunts.

[phonics]

David Davis has the insane ability to make you think, "Maybe I've misjudged this guy" only to have you think, "Nope, total twat" within the same sentence.

[GS]

The Scottish economy contracted by 0.2% in Q4 (UK: +0.7%) and only grew by 0.4% in 2016 (UK: +1.8%).

The SNP have, naturally, blamed Brexit and thus, by extension, Westminster. No doubt we'll hear Sturgeon defend it further by claiming she doesn't have access to the full range of 'economic levers'. They are, instead, subjected to economically crippling measures like £9bn fiscal transfers to allow them to keep the lights on.

What a country.

[Lewis]

'Andrew Neil's Twitter Numpties' should be an official club.

[phonics]

Considering his penchant for telling people their spelling is wrong, he completely ignored when I pointed out the Spectator article he retweeted had 4 typos in a 3 paragraph 'article'.

I'm not allowed to read the article anymore so I can't even tell if they fixed them.

[GS]

Brillo is first class - he clearly can't hack the nationalists either, so when they try and out jock him using the grievance card they invariably look like wankers.

[ItalAussie]

Fox and Davis are surely plants to make Boris look like a genius. Pair of absolute thundercunts.

Not having really heard of Fox before this, I looked him up. God yes.

[GS]

If they're thundercunts, spare a thought for Mark Reckless.

There's hope for everybody who fancies a go in public life.

[Waffdon]

Happy four years, folks x

[GS]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/08/brexit-poll-eurosceptics-think-ending-eu-payments-important/#

Some interesting focus group analysis on what people want to see now we're leaving (hint: none of it can be delivered if we stay in the Single Market), but there's a right gem at the very end of the article:


Mrs May enjoys a 37-point lead in who would make the best prime minister over Mr Corbyn, with 55 per cent of voters saying her and just 18 per cent supporting him. Even among Labour voters, Mrs May is favoured to their own leader.

:harold:

[Jimmy Floyd]

If he gets to the next election they'll divebomb to double figures. You just can't be as shit as he is.

[Lewis]

They will lose seats, but who is really going to dislodge them in the coalfields and Liverpool and the more 'diverse'/wankier parts of London?

[Lewis]

Shit, I've just realised there will be television debates. The absolute state of those.

[Jimmy Floyd]

No one, but that isn't many seats. Anywhere where the Tories have a decent setup they'll get destroyed.

You'd also think a lot of 2015 UKIP votes will go blue again if they continue to disintegrate.

[GS]

There's apparently a concern that the Tories might lose some seats to the RESURGENT Lib Dems in their former heartlands, but presumably they'd more than make those losses up by massacring Labour in current marginals outside the holier-than-thou strongholds in London and the former coal miners in the north.

Corbyn is clearly a huge problem for them, but he's not going before the next election.

[GS]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0082


There is immense concern about economic inequality, both among the scholarly community and in the general public, and many insist that equality is an important social goal. However, when people are asked about the ideal distribution of wealth in their country, they actually prefer unequal societies. We suggest that these two phenomena can be reconciled by noticing that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself.

Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness. Drawing upon laboratory studies, cross-cultural research, and experiments with babies and young children, we argue that humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality. Both psychological research and decisions by policymakers would benefit from more clearly distinguishing inequality from unfairness.

This is interesting. If it was to hold, it would suggest that people are actually put off by the 'equality' argument. They actually welcome inequality if it's seen as being reasonably fair. Probably not the sort of research that is going to appeal to the hard-left holdouts or, indeed, Ed Miliband.

[Lewis]

Christopher Snowdon has a good theory about this (recalled (https://iea.org.uk/blog/the-rich-versus-the-super-rich) the other day), which is that, since nearly everybody has seen their real terms incomes steadily rise over the past thirty years, the most drastic rise in inequality is between the rich and the really rich. The gap between average wages and really good wages is what it was in the mid-eighties, whilst the gap between really good and really, really good wages has expanded - hence most people not giving a fuck, but the upper middle classes (who happen to drive these narratives) losing it because second homes and private school fees are becoming unaffordable.

[Henry]

Real incomes have stagnated in many places though, so that's just inaccurate.

It can be well argued that some inequality is a good thing, so it's not surprising that people will say so. The extent that it has now reached is a different story.

[GS]

By which one assumes you mean the extent of wealth concentrated in the top 1%. This is completely the wrong way to look at it, because it focuses on the relative and not the absolute wealth for the less well-off. The logical extension of such a view is that you would rather the poor were poorer providing the rich were less rich to a greater degree. Thus the gap would be smaller and thus more equal.

We should, instead, be interested in what's happening, in absolute terms, for the bottom 10% or 20%. This would allow the focus to be on pragmatic, sensible measures which could be taken without appealing to pointless counterproductive symbolism. The corporation tax cut, for instance, has been a demonstrably positive thing but you'll still find holdouts claiming it's TAX BREAKS FOR BILLIONAIRES rather than the effective job creating measure it has proven to be.

[GS]

In other news, the collective bed shitting of the "European elites" is fucking spectacular:

853140838662021120

[Jimmy Floyd]

Twitter is shitting itself about a Theresa May ANNOUNCEMENT in half an hour. It can't be a snap election, despite their sweetest dreams, because of the fixed term parliaments act.

I'm going with war against the Netherlands.

[Jimmy Floyd]

Now Laura Kuenssberg says it is an election. I don't understand how she can just call one.

[Jimmy Floyd]

Fuck it, let's run with it.

FIRE UP THE JEZMOBILE

[Alan Shearer The 2nd]

Labour are fucked.

[Yevrah]

What the hell is she playing at?

There's absolutely no appetite for one, is there?

[Jimmy Floyd]

No, but there's probably even less appetite for electing any of the options other than her.

[Yevrah]

Absolutely, but we don't need an election to establish that.

[Jimmy Floyd]

She currently has a majority of 12 or whatever so could probably do with increasing that for a less shitty government (from her point of view).

Sorry, what am I saying. MANDATE

[Henry]

Now Laura Kuenssberg says it is an election. I don't understand how she can just call one.

She needs two-thirds of parliament to vote in favour I thought. Which she'd probably get but it's hardly a foregone conclusion.

[Jimmy Floyd]

If it wasn't a foregone conclusion then presumably she wouldn't be calling it. She'd look utterly ridiculous if she couldn't get the vote through.

[Jimmy Floyd]

Christ, imagine the TV debates for this. Get Tim Farron involved.

[Pleb]

The POLLS must be scrambling for May to remain PM at this point.

[phonics]

If this ends up in a Lib/Lab coalition I might just have to give up on reading anything about politics ever again and just come to terms with the fact that we're run by incompetent muppets.

Actually, thinking of that, can we just get Boaty McBoatface in on an independent ticket?

[GS]

Of course she'll get it through parliament. It'd be impossible for the opposition parties to say they're denying the British people the right to have their say on things - politically impossible, that is.

This is perfect timing, really. They've had a number of polls over the last few weeks which show them with 16+ point leads, and Labour's numbers are traditionally soft in this polls. It steals narrative from the SNP in Scotland for the next two months, and if they can erode some of the vote there then they can spin it as "losing support".

The biggest one is the need to increase her majority, mind you. At the minute, you have the hardcore holdout remainer contingent like Anna Soubry and Nicky Morgan exercising a far greater influence on things than they otherwise would because the majority is only 12 plus the unionist contingent in NI. If they can get that up significantly, which every indication says they should, then they're flying. It'll also kill stone dead the accusations from the Continuity Remain (e.g. Alistair Campbell) that she lacks MANDATE for everything she's doing.

My only surprise is that she's had the balls to call it. The anti-Brown.

[Kikó]

Can we have a new thread for this?

[Weaver]

And even if it doesn't get through Parliament, that's a green light for her anyway, isn't it?

Will Jeremy Corbyn or any of the others want to stand for this General Election? He'd have to take us through Brexit if he won. Or does he not have a choice?

[Jimmy Floyd]

Presumably if the Lib Dems win and Tim Farron becomes PM (don't laugh), they'll be taking that as a mandate to reverse Brexit. I think Jeremy is signed up to the will of the people.

[GS]

They'll run on an unashamedly anti-Brexit platform, so any increase in their vote will be used to justify that position.

Having just seen her statement, it wasn't particularly strong. Then again, it doesn't exactly need to be. It seems some of the Labour moderates are going to bail out before the election comes round.

[Lewis]

I hope Arron Banks beats Douglas Carswell.

[GS]

The Tories have hired Crosby. :drool:

[phonics]

Don't think I'm allowed to vote in this one. Shame.

edit: Oooh turns out that a 2020 election would have ruled me ineligible but I can still enter this one. God bless Theresa May.

edit2: Damn, got my dates wrong. I'm not allowed.

edit3: Maybe I should lie and then vote Conservative to start off a swarm of voter fraud allegations.

[Browning]

Another election where all I can vote for is Bercow? Fantastic.