Politics

[ewerk 39132]

Actually you can’t stand to be Labour leader unless you’re an MP so it’s all moot.

[Craig 12325]

56 minutes ago, ewerk said:

Actually you can’t stand to be Labour leader unless you’re an MP so it’s all moot.

 

Yeah I was about to say it's more about the party rules than anything else. You can absolutely hold a cabinet position without being an MP - see Cameron being made Foreign Secretary and hastily being sworn into the House of Lords. Make a fucking mockery though.

[Billy Whitehurst 1282]

I’ve stopped my monthly direct debit for the Labour lottery.

 

Still paying my monthly dues for my Labour Party membership though. Not ready just yet to abandon my comrades in the, ahem, Chelsea and Fulham Labour Party branch (wouldn’t want to upset Tarquin and Cressida).

[wykikitoon 28482]

[The Fish 12529]

4 hours ago, Craig said:

I think if Starmer was to announce he was stepping down, Streeting would be one of the first to put his name forward. He definitely sees himself as the natural successor. 

Being Brutus to Julius Caesar? Nope, can't see it.

That's what Julius Caesar thought.

 

 

Like, famously.

[Gemmill 62983]

 

For anyone that thinks Streeting isn't on manoeuvres. 

[Rayvin 8303]

What in the fuck is going on in Labour man, fuck the absolute lot of them. Does literally anyone in the PLP think that they'd do any fucking better than Starmer has? No one fucking cares which spineless nobody is running the Labour party because none of them are prepared to do anything remotely in line with what is needed. There is no one in the cabinet who, if leader, would make the slightest bit of difference to Labour's trajectory. If Streeting is actually doing this then for me, he's essentially just inserting himself up his own backside.

 

I mean I've said it before but even the right wing voters aren't being taken in by this version of Labour. They know it's insincere, they know the PLP are smiling through gritted teeth at them. All this iteration of Labour has managed to do is convince a lot of people on either side of the aisle that it has no principles. This country at some fucking point is going to have to actually deal with reality, it is just going to have to do it. It's not just Brexit, it's austerity. It's collapsing wages, unaffordable housing, a sense of community and civic pride, immigration, and ultimately at the peak of all of it, the fact that people fucking know their lives have been getting more and more shit for about two decades.

 

This is absolutely on the Tories but let's not pretend that Labour in current form have really been anything other than complicit. They have totally failed to understand how bad it has gotten and how angry people are - instead chasing down the high profile issues based on a strategy that seems to be driven by a short termist focus on whatever is immediately in the public eye rather than having the confidence and the mettle to chart their own course across their own landscape.

 

Until or unless someone at Labour comes out and says "Actually, we need to fucking urgently address how miserable people are and stop the rot rather than manage the decline" they can collectively fuck all the way off. I'm not interested in their useless, humiliating, unprincipled, insincere fucking posturing. Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off.

[PaddockLad 22426]

[Craig 12325]

19 minutes ago, Rayvin said:

What in the fuck is going on in Labour man, fuck the absolute lot of them. Does literally anyone in the PLP think that they'd do any fucking better than Starmer has? No one fucking cares which spineless nobody is running the Labour party because none of them are prepared to do anything remotely in line with what is needed. There is no one in the cabinet who, if leader, would make the slightest bit of difference to Labour's trajectory. If Streeting is actually doing this then for me, he's essentially just inserting himself up his own backside.

 

I mean I've said it before but even the right wing voters aren't being taken in by this version of Labour. They know it's insincere, they know the PLP are smiling through gritted teeth at them. All this iteration of Labour has managed to do is convince a lot of people on either side of the aisle that it has no principles. This country at some fucking point is going to have to actually deal with reality, it is just going to have to do it. It's not just Brexit, it's austerity. It's collapsing wages, unaffordable housing, a sense of community and civic pride, immigration, and ultimately at the peak of all of it, the fact that people fucking know their lives have been getting more and more shit for about two decades.

 

This is absolutely on the Tories but let's not pretend that Labour in current form have really been anything other than complicit. They have totally failed to understand how bad it has gotten and how angry people are - instead chasing down the high profile issues based on a strategy that seems to be driven by a short termist focus on whatever is immediately in the public eye rather than having the confidence and the mettle to chart their own course across their own landscape.

 

Until or unless someone at Labour comes out and says "Actually, we need to fucking urgently address how miserable people are and stop the rot rather than manage the decline" they can collectively fuck all the way off. I'm not interested in their useless, humiliating, unprincipled, insincere fucking posturing. Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off.

Sadly there’s no politicians out there any more who are doing it for anything but their own self gain and certainly not for what is best for the long term future of this country.

 

We need a government prepared to make decisions that the nation will profit from in 10-15 years. None of them will because they know their careers will be over by that point so it’ll be on someone else to sort. 
 

Wankers the lot of them.

[spongebob toonpants 5181]

28 minutes ago, Rayvin said:

What in the fuck is going on in Labour man, fuck the absolute lot of them. Does literally anyone in the PLP think that they'd do any fucking better than Starmer has? No one fucking cares which spineless nobody is running the Labour party because none of them are prepared to do anything remotely in line with what is needed. There is no one in the cabinet who, if leader, would make the slightest bit of difference to Labour's trajectory. If Streeting is actually doing this then for me, he's essentially just inserting himself up his own backside.

 

I mean I've said it before but even the right wing voters aren't being taken in by this version of Labour. They know it's insincere, they know the PLP are smiling through gritted teeth at them. All this iteration of Labour has managed to do is convince a lot of people on either side of the aisle that it has no principles. This country at some fucking point is going to have to actually deal with reality, it is just going to have to do it. It's not just Brexit, it's austerity. It's collapsing wages, unaffordable housing, a sense of community and civic pride, immigration, and ultimately at the peak of all of it, the fact that people fucking know their lives have been getting more and more shit for about two decades.

 

This is absolutely on the Tories but let's not pretend that Labour in current form have really been anything other than complicit. They have totally failed to understand how bad it has gotten and how angry people are - instead chasing down the high profile issues based on a strategy that seems to be driven by a short termist focus on whatever is immediately in the public eye rather than having the confidence and the mettle to chart their own course across their own landscape.

 

Until or unless someone at Labour comes out and says "Actually, we need to fucking urgently address how miserable people are and stop the rot rather than manage the decline" they can collectively fuck all the way off. I'm not interested in their useless, humiliating, unprincipled, insincere fucking posturing. Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off.

Absolutely. They've been so much worse than I could have possibly imagined. And I wasn't expecting much

[PaddockLad 22426]

Thats a great post @Rayvin. I sort of knew from the moment they cut the WFA what they'd be like.  Inheriting a piss poor hand doesn't excuse how fundamentally fucking useless they've been 

[Renton 27740]

57 minutes ago, Rayvin said:

What in the fuck is going on in Labour man, fuck the absolute lot of them. Does literally anyone in the PLP think that they'd do any fucking better than Starmer has? No one fucking cares which spineless nobody is running the Labour party because none of them are prepared to do anything remotely in line with what is needed. There is no one in the cabinet who, if leader, would make the slightest bit of difference to Labour's trajectory. If Streeting is actually doing this then for me, he's essentially just inserting himself up his own backside.

 

I mean I've said it before but even the right wing voters aren't being taken in by this version of Labour. They know it's insincere, they know the PLP are smiling through gritted teeth at them. All this iteration of Labour has managed to do is convince a lot of people on either side of the aisle that it has no principles. This country at some fucking point is going to have to actually deal with reality, it is just going to have to do it. It's not just Brexit, it's austerity. It's collapsing wages, unaffordable housing, a sense of community and civic pride, immigration, and ultimately at the peak of all of it, the fact that people fucking know their lives have been getting more and more shit for about two decades.

 

This is absolutely on the Tories but let's not pretend that Labour in current form have really been anything other than complicit. They have totally failed to understand how bad it has gotten and how angry people are - instead chasing down the high profile issues based on a strategy that seems to be driven by a short termist focus on whatever is immediately in the public eye rather than having the confidence and the mettle to chart their own course across their own landscape.

 

Until or unless someone at Labour comes out and says "Actually, we need to fucking urgently address how miserable people are and stop the rot rather than manage the decline" they can collectively fuck all the way off. I'm not interested in their useless, humiliating, unprincipled, insincere fucking posturing. Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off.

 

[Renton 27740]

49 minutes ago, Craig said:

Sadly there’s no politicians out there any more who are doing it for anything but their own self gain and certainly not for what is best for the long term future of this country.

 

We need a government prepared to make decisions that the nation will profit from in 10-15 years. None of them will because they know their careers will be over by that point so it’ll be on someone else to sort. 
 

Wankers the lot of them.

 

Not just personal careers though is it? No party can get re-elected with long term projects, and that's the crux of the matter, or one of the cruxes. Made worse by the ultra partisan nature of British politics currently.

 

Starmer is Mr Anti-charisma but he has inherited an absolute shit show that will take more than a decade to turn around with conventional economics. He won't get the chance as an individual and the party won't get the chance. The media, particularly social media, control the narrative and they are against Starmer. Anything good they do, like for instance abolishing the child benefit cap, is ignored or claimed as frivolous. Has anyone here even mentioned it? The realities of their economic constraints are simply ignored. You can ignore them if you want, but they are still there 

 

I mean it's not been great but holy shit, 3 years ago we had Boris fucking Johnson at the helm. I think the criticism on here of the government has been disproportionate tbh things aren't going to change in 16 months. But hey ho, let's roll the dice and get Farage in, let's see where that gets us.

Edited November 12 by Renton

[spongebob toonpants 5181]

8 minutes ago, Renton said:

 

Not just personal careers though is it? No party can get re-elected with long term projects, and that's the crux of the matter, or one of the cruxes. Made worse by the ultra partisan nature of British politics currently.

 

Starmer is Mr Anti-charisma but he has inherited an absolute shit show that will take more than a decade to turn around with conventional economics. He won't get the chance as an individual and the party won't get the chance. The media, particularly social media, control the narrative and they are against Starmer. Anything good they do, like for instance abolishing the child benefit cap, is ignored or claimed as frivolous. Has anyone here even mentioned it? The realities of their economic constraints are simply ignored. You can ignore them if you want, but they are still there 

 

I mean it's not been great but holy shit, 3 years ago we had Boris fucking Johnson at the helm. I think the criticism on here of the government has been disproportionate tbh things aren't going to change in 16 months. But hey ho, let's roll the dice and get Farage in, let's see where that gets us.

Things aren't going to change if you don't try to change anything, and you refuse to honestly address the huge  deep seated structural inequality facing the country

If your whole policy is Farage bad but where going to kowtow to his demands  then you guarenteeing a Farage win

 

You ask if anyone here acknowledging the economic reality, maybe Labour should be the ones being honest

[ewerk 39132]

58 minutes ago, Renton said:

 

Not just personal careers though is it? No party can get re-elected with long term projects, and that's the crux of the matter, or one of the cruxes. Made worse by the ultra partisan nature of British politics currently.

 

Starmer is Mr Anti-charisma but he has inherited an absolute shit show that will take more than a decade to turn around with conventional economics. He won't get the chance as an individual and the party won't get the chance. The media, particularly social media, control the narrative and they are against Starmer. Anything good they do, like for instance abolishing the child benefit cap, is ignored or claimed as frivolous. Has anyone here even mentioned it? The realities of their economic constraints are simply ignored. You can ignore them if you want, but they are still there 

 

I mean it's not been great but holy shit, 3 years ago we had Boris fucking Johnson at the helm. I think the criticism on here of the government has been disproportionate tbh things aren't going to change in 16 months. But hey ho, let's roll the dice and get Farage in, let's see where that gets us.

Things won’t change straight away but have we seen a semblance of a long term plan? Labour had a good idea of how shit things were going to be but they don’t seem to have any sort of a plan for it. Even something like reform of the Lords would be progress that wouldn’t cost anything but there has been zero movement on that.

[Renton 27740]

42 minutes ago, spongebob toonpants said:

Things aren't going to change if you don't try to change anything, and you refuse to honestly address the huge  deep seated structural inequality facing the country

If your whole policy is Farage bad but where going to kowtow to his demands  then you guarenteeing a Farage win

 

You ask if anyone here acknowledging the economic reality, maybe Labour should be the ones being honest

 

I think they have been relatively honest about it. They were elected on a manifesto of fiscal responsibility and no working tax rises. I think they've tried to keep to it, but for various reasons the productivity and growrltg curves have matched the pessimistic scenarios more than the optimistic ones they sold. So they are probably going to row back on the tax pledges next. I get you don't like it but I don't think it's dishonest, well not compared with the previous 14 years anyway where the tories lied constantly.

 

I think Farage is a liar. I think Polanski will turn out to be a liar. That's what populist do, sell a vision that resonates with certain groups regardless of reality.

[Renton 27740]

3 minutes ago, ewerk said:

Things won’t change straight away but have we seen a semblance of a long term plan? Labour had a good idea of how shit things were going to be but they don’t seem to have any sort of a plan for it. Even something like reform of the Lords would be progress that wouldn’t cost anything but there has been zero movement on that.

 

Yeah, I agree a lot of it is just platitudes. I'd love someone that had a workable long term plan and was charismatic enough to sell it. I don't see anyone in that category unfortunately.

[Rayvin 8303]

 

1 minute ago, Renton said:

I think Farage is a liar. I think Polanski will turn out to be a liar. That's what populist do, sell a vision that resonates with certain groups regardless of reality.

 

Is Starmer not a liar? He betrayed everything he was elected on as leader... Farage for all his many, many faults probably will attempt to implement everything he's claiming. It'll be devastating in all sorts of way he didn't have the intelligence to appreciate, but he'll try. Polanski you'd imagine would be the same - and maybe with the same possible pitfalls, but I think for me personally we're now at the point where the patient is dying. We can slow it down and 'manage it' or we can try some radical new treatment that might kill it quicker, but might also save it. Only one of those outcomes leads to anything getting better.

 

This country is waiting for the world to save it IMO. We're waiting for the revolution to happen somewhere else so that we can follow. It's not coming though, no one is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves.

[spongebob toonpants 5181]

11 minutes ago, Renton said:

 

I think they have been relatively honest about it. They were elected on a manifesto of fiscal responsibility and no working tax rises. I think they've tried to keep to it, but for various reasons the productivity and growrltg curves have matched the pessimistic scenarios more than the optimistic ones they sold. So they are probably going to row back on the tax pledges next. I get you don't like it but I don't think it's dishonest, well not compared with the previous 14 years anyway where the tories lied constantly.

 

I think Farage is a liar. I think Polanski will turn out to be a liar. That's what populist do, sell a vision that resonates with certain groups regardless of reality.

There not being honest about Brexit, and apart from taxing wealth that's the the most important thing they need to do

 

Their immigration policy is also dishonest and morally repugnant

Edited November 12 by spongebob toonpants

[Rayvin 8303]

Also reading that they're considering introducing a lower limit on tax free pension contributions...? Meaning essentially that people who are still working/the young will be paying more than anyone previously has been, in order to pay the pensions of the people who have already retired now. And when these same young people retire, they will be tens of thousands worse off than they should have been.

 

I don't really know what to do with my rage around Labour to be honest. How can they claim to be a party for working people while thieving people's pension contributions to cover for the fact that Brexit has destroyed the country?

[Craig 12325]

1 hour ago, Renton said:

 

Not just personal careers though is it? No party can get re-elected with long term projects, and that's the crux of the matter, or one of the cruxes. Made worse by the ultra partisan nature of British politics currently.

 

Starmer is Mr Anti-charisma but he has inherited an absolute shit show that will take more than a decade to turn around with conventional economics. He won't get the chance as an individual and the party won't get the chance. The media, particularly social media, control the narrative and they are against Starmer. Anything good they do, like for instance abolishing the child benefit cap, is ignored or claimed as frivolous. Has anyone here even mentioned it? The realities of their economic constraints are simply ignored. You can ignore them if you want, but they are still there 

 

I mean it's not been great but holy shit, 3 years ago we had Boris fucking Johnson at the helm. I think the criticism on here of the government has been disproportionate tbh things aren't going to change in 16 months. But hey ho, let's roll the dice and get Farage in, let's see where that gets us.

It’s what I fucking hate about majority governments. Don’t mistake that for me yearning for the coalition we had between 2010-15 because I’m absolutely not but if we do get coalitions in the future there’s some hope that they’re not just toeing party lines.

 

Of course for that to properly work would need PR.

[Craig 12325]

37 minutes ago, Renton said:

 

Yeah, I agree a lot of it is just platitudes. I'd love someone that had a workable long term plan and was charismatic enough to sell it. I don't see anyone in that category unfortunately.

Wouldn’t that be a beautiful thing? Never going to happen though unless there was some way of locking it in - but even that is fraught with issue. The economy traditionally swings between boom and recession over a decade or locking into fixed long term planning could be disastrous if not done diligently.

[AgentAxeman 584]

Deluded some of you daft sods. 

[Rayvin 8303]

Aye it'll be alright. Farage will save us. We just need to keep our heads down and doff our caps to our betters.

[Monkeys Fist 50627]

2 hours ago, Rayvin said:

Aye it'll be alright. Farage will save us. We just need to keep our heads down and doff our caps to our betters.

Hey, come on, none of this is Nigel’s fault, it’s those awful hordes of brown folk paddling around the North Sea that have turned the place in to a right wing shitshow.