Theresa May's Conservatives
Jeremy Corbyn's Labour
Tim Farron's Liberal Democrats
Paul Nuttall's UKIP
2 people's Greens
Nicholas Durgeon's Scottish Nationalists
Satan's Sinn Fein
Dr Ian Paisley's DUP
Some other bunch of nonces
I'm foreign, but I wish I were an Englishman
On moving it to 12, iirc that’s already been passed in the UK but it’s phased in so slowly that 12 will be the equivalent of 10 now.
Wikipedia list was by country, i.e. nationally.
The minimum wage here for adults is £8.91, so the reds want to almost double it.
Do you ever think about whether something is the right thing to do or not, or only about if it would win an election?
Inflation as measured - as opposed to money simply being degraded - doesn't include main housing costs, which makes it a worthless measure for anything other than calculating pension increases and high street interest rates (another property scam that one). They might as well jack minimum wages up though. We're at the irreversibly finished point now so good luck to anyone cashing in.
If we're talking about contested political questions, then assuming we're in a democracy then you need to get your morally right ideas through an election first and foremost.
The only two ways around that are being happy to spend your life as a self-declared saint-on-the-sidelines with none of your morally right ideas ever becoming reality (Corbyn), or rejecting democracy (Pot/Mao/Stalin/Boyd).
You also want achievable goals on the board so you can meet them and then the public can be all, "Ah, they did the thing we remember." Put something daft down and the opposition won't shut up about it.
Realpolitik is far more interesting than moral debates. I mean, you think the min wage should be fifteen quid, I think it should be £11.09, Dave over there thinks you should get a free Wispa with it, Grace thinks brie and grape rolls should be banned, Jenny thinks rabbits should be allowed to drive Saabs, Marcus thinks that mushrooms are fish, Darryl thinks the sky is made of human hair. Ultimately, who gives a shit about what anyone thinks. The interest is in what actually happens.
Jimmy treats Politics as a spectator sport and he analyses it in the same way. Always has done and I doubt you're going to understand it any more this time than you did the last 3 times you HELD HIM TO ACCOUNT for it.
I'm just curious. If he wants me to drop it I will.
If they are of no signifiance then why do you vote?
At the last election there were 32,131,661 votes cast, of which I cast one. So the national significance of my beliefs and opinions was about 0.00000003125%.
I vote because I think democracy is a concept worth supporting. I vote in everything I am eligible to vote in, even crappy things like police & crime commissioner elections. Even if I had zero political opinions, I would still vote, maybe based on personality of the candidates, or spoiling the ballot with 'Unsure'.
Is one of the main concepts of democracy not the idea of debate and persuading others of your beliefs? If you discuss something you strongly believe with people and convince them to change their opinion/actions, you've already had a significantly bigger impact than your vote does.
We'd still own slaves and be putting gay people in prison if everyone thought as you do.
Probably need to see the working on that one.
Caring about things like the minimum wage at the same time the media begins talking about it and in the same direction and magnitude that the popular narrative insists is the right one isn't really caring, is it?
People care about their own self interests and for that reason alone political debate is largely pointless.
Floyd is a wet conservative nonce who has pretty much got everything he wants out of government, including them being shit enough for him to tut and roll his eyes over, but not shit enough for him to actually have to vote Liberal Democrat (or Green if he ever owns his own home). His remaining political posts are from the position of having declared.
Pretty much that. My dream cabinet is 16 John Majors ticking off the agenda ahead of time and then heading to the Oval.
'You may even get tired of winning!'
lol at the idea of people defecting to the right. I read something today that described Sir Keir Starmer as a 'centrist action figure with happening hair', you have to laugh.
I'd argue Boris has the most happening with his haircut.
Just put me in charge of Labour ffs. I could dethrone BoJo with memes and "mIxEd CaPs QuOtEs" of the shit he says in about 6 weeks.
This isn't difficult. Be mildly likeable, oppose things, help BoJer make himself look silly. If Labour can't win an election following this shit show then they're dead in the water.
I thought Starmer was going to be a good choice because he’s a great speaker but I didn’t factor in that he has absolutely no beliefs and will just say whatever the polling consultants say is the message of the day.
I think the lack of beliefs is more of a party-wide problem.
Quite. I genuinely don’t know how you fix it without krystalnachting all these absolute nobodies that think it’s still 1996.
Turns out a good leader is hard to find. Did New Labour just have a Class of '92 moment with Tony, Brown, Prescott and Dark Lord Mandelson?
No. Just Anyone who had any power in the party had died.
The problem is that it’s too financially viable to be a middle manager in the party now so who cares if they win or not.
New Labour weren't any good. They had a shit government that had lost its one remaining claim to credibility with Black Wednesday, all of the media and cultural/parasite sector on board, and a booming economy [built on sand and house prices]. There is a weird myth around these days that they were a competent, long-sighted government rather than a bunch of media-driven wanks who fucked up literally every big project they attempted. Which brings us to:
Good call mate. Fortunately for them, Keir 'Sir Keir Starmer' Starmer is shit, and the rest of his party is worse, so Rishi Sunak will win the next election unless the country literally goes bankrupt in the meantime.
Black Wednesday, if it’s what I think it is, is a good explainer of why they won back then.
Labour died for me the day Brown sold off our entire gold reserve because if we hadn’t Goldman Sachs would have been close to filing for bankruptcy and the guy caved. Pathetic. I would have signed up to him being made God emperor if he had done that.
Sachs had done a massive short on gold and if it hit the price it was supposed to they would have gone under.
White Wednesday in retrospect.
For all the mockery they got at the time Occupy Wall Street and their ilk were bang on. Now we have a fake economy that doesn’t actually exist but people already at the top are 10x better off and everyone else is fucked.
Next election is Rishi Sunak vs Andy Burnham's 'traffic lights' coalition with candidates standing aside for each other, and still losing. What a time we shall soon live in.
The Conservative Party launch their manifesto with a bold pledge to allow over-sixties to stop anyone under forty in the street and demand their cash. The Labour Party denounce this as 'falling woefully short', and promise free card readers and training as part of their plans.
Andy Burnham is the worst. He'd be the Prime Minister equivalent of David Moyes at Man Utd.
David Moyes failed in part because he tried to shake the place up. Andy Burnham would be more like Ole Gunnar Binman, just going on about the North - by which he means Greater Manchester - and saying things like 'We need to listen to what the teachers and the nurses are telling us' whilst not coaching transitions.
That's an incredibly kind way to view Moyes' tenure. He clearly failed as he was massively out of his depth, which was apparent after about a week when he was moaning about the fixture computer screwing his poor little Manchester United.
He was generally out of his depth, but Andy Burnham wouldn't ban chips.
Andy Burnham v Rishi Sunak for control of the country is the best argument I can think of for the fall of the British empire being a good thing.
What absolute mediocrities we’re ruled by.
Better than Johnson v Corbyn and probably better than May v Corbyn.
This is quite literally a tallest dwarf contest. And whoever won that would probably do better than all involved.
Boris Johnson is more temperamentally unsuited to it than he is a mediocrity in the Andy Burnham/random nobody sense. Wor Jezza wasn't even mediocre. He was and is a certifiable cretin, which was where most of his problems with things like anti-Semitism came from. Theresa May I don't know. Definitely also unsuited to it at the other end of the spectrum(!), and, although she seems to have been reasonably successful before getting into politics, her prominence in the party was in large part down to being a woman who wasn't Ann Widdecombe during the opposition years.
Reminds me of the time a few years ago when I had a league squash game after work. As I was getting changed, I realised I hadn't packed my shorts. Had to play the match in the trousers from my suit.
Still won
ToriesFormer minister Jake Berry on the return to work: “We have to end the civil service ‘woke-ing’ from home - sorry I mean working from home, but let’s be honest, it often is woke-ing.”
'WFH' seems to have developed a large band of violently opinionated online advocates now, like it's Scottish Independence or Brexit.