HappyHamza

I want to know why I'm banned from posting in general. It isnt acceptable that you can be banned without explanation.

Seems I'm banned from general.surprise surprise. Mattp can send dozens of nonsense posts daily designed to troll and spread propaganda yet every left winger on the site gets banned in weeks. Absolute joke website.

I went a bit far with the bit in italics tbf. I do genuinally think that pensioners need to feel the same economic pain as everybody else if brexit goes badly though. I realise many won't agree but they are currently insulated from many of their own decisions. Tbh I'm feeling like real world problems are being ignored in favour of a fictional brexit reality. The NHS for example - here in Leicestershire we are the only county in for a very long way with only one A&E. It's the busiest A&E in europe. Ambulances spend literally the bulk of their time parked outside A&E for 3/4/5+ hours at a time waiting for space for the patients they carry. Where is the Tory response to this? More nurses isnt going to made any difference. Where is the capital funding? We know the 20 hospitals is a lie. Even with nurses we know the 50,000 nurses is a lie. We know that their removal of the nurse bursaries exacerbated recruitment problems. We know that brexit has caused a huge drop off in recruitment and nurses actively leaving the country. Yet voters continue to vote for a party that don't even pretend to have any answers. I just find it depressing. And I'm not moose or toddy or anybody else, just for the record, not sure why I keep getting accused of being somebody else.

C4 is an educated platform that gives proper time to the news and political debate. Because it does this it ends up in left wing positions. The UK has one of the most extreme forms of capitalism on the planet, to our detriment, and honest scrutiny of facts causes one to recognise the right has lost the plot. Can't wait for the brexiteers to lose their jobs and brexiteer pensioners lose the value of their pensions. They're mainly either old (so not working) or poorly educated (So working at the mercy of the markets). If there is an economic crisis at the end of 2020 (when transition ends) the cuts need to come from pensions. They voted for it, they can pay this time.

BBC should agree to a Sunday morning hour long slot and then Andrew Neil should walk out and be introduced by Marr. This sort of thing is ridiculous. It shouldn't be down to the candidates. The electoral commission should be charged with agreeing terms with broadcasters and for potential PMs it should be mandatory. Don't turn up, don't stand. How anybody can vote for Boris is beyond me. The bloke is an absolute pleb.

It's not the red faced white haired brexiteers they should be worried out. Its the u45s that have jobs at risk if no deal happens. The country will be in a dangerous place if that were to occur imo.

The withdrawal agreement means that things carry on for a year. No problems in that time. If we get no trade deal at that point then it will smash the econony, people's jobs and the Tory party to pieces. But Boris will sign anything to avoid that, much as he did with the withdrawel agreement.

Can @Jon the Hat or @Strokes use their clear thinking to explain this?

Guys. What are you doing? If you want to vote Tory just vote Tory. You don't have to tie yourself up in knots defending what is a blatently disingenuous (at best) policy. You're not convincing anybody and are frankly looking pretty silly. Though I half think Strokes is on the wind up tbh.

I think brexit is the reason so many are voting Tory, coupled with the decades long and highly successful campaign by the media to convince everybody that public spending is bad. Corbyn was never going to be able to fight the incessant smear campaign. It was really rather amazing what he managed last time round in the face of the media attacks. But the party has been really stupid in not taking the chance to change leader. Had Keir Starmar been leading Labour and brexit not been an issue I can't see much beyond a labour landslide. Nobody is able to defend the last 9 years of austerity, the lack of tory ideas for our country going forward or the embarrassing liar that our prime minister is. Most tory voters appear to recognise these flaws tbf. Everybody is talking about voting for the least worst option atm.

Growth is not good though is it? Several sectors are in recession and as a whole our economy is bitting and bobbing around the zero line. Whilst I take your point over wage growth, growth itself is stagnant. This is unsurprising given the huge drop in business investment - particularly foreign investment into the UK - since the brexit referendum. We could certainly do with propping up construction and similar sectors, for example, by undergoing a green revolution and spending on capital projects.

We already have a stagnent economy riddled with debt. We have to do something to invest. More than happy to debate where that line is but I'm unconvinced that pushing corporation tax to 2010 levels - and still less than france and Germany- is a serious argument against labour.

I think by the end corbyn had at least levelled it though I guess if you believed Johnson's lies you might disagree.

Though Boris is doing his best to lose it by only having one soundbite

Boris is talking rubbish but Corbyn is giving him an open goal by not just answering the question.

She isn't shadow chancellor.

No they haven't. A majority of Mps have voted for one form of brexit or another, just not at the same time. We'd have left last March if the ERG had supported a deal that didn't break the UK into two pieces. The lib dems stood on a manifesto of no brexit and area perfectly within their rights to vote as they choose. The last parliament did a great job in trying to bring to heel a government that attempted to ignore it's will at every turn. In this country it is parliament that is sovereign and it is our representatives that exercise their democratically in the House.

I read a range of different papers but did naturally gravitate towards the guardian. It's a funny paper. It's commentators spend way too much time on personality politics and I can't really abide owen Jones. But it does do really good investigative journalism - ed Snowdon, Panama papers etc. It also isnt a huge fan of corbyn and doesn't give him anything like a free pass. It isn't like the right wing rags that actively propogate propaganda.

The problem is that neither side want to look at actual evidence. Nobody wants to go beyond the front page of the paper that tells them what they want to hear. I suspect it's been this way for some time. Take the economic crisis. I had a disagreement with Fox the other day where he (as usual) tried to claim that a global crisis was the fault of labour. The Tory party has been very successful in leading people to believe that a relatively modest deficit pre-crisis was the reason we got hit quite hard. Its quite easy to sell that story and it has stuck with most people. But it isn't true. But minds are made up and will not accept the possibility that they are wrong. We have a government that is actively hiding information by not releasing brexit economic impact assessments and the Russia report but if people have chosen that team they will come up with reasons why it's fine. It isn't fine. We have people that use the same words as their favoured politicians to describe lies and deceit and then, when somebody like Boris simply changes tack leaving all his previous lies in his wake, they just change with him and start arguing the exact opposite of what they were previously arguing without even questioning themselves (thinking that a different customs arrangement in NI to the UK was something we couldn't possibly have, for example). I don't get it. There's only a fairly small number of people that actually read this thread. So why is everybody taking politician type positions as if they are personally going to affect the outcome? There's virtually no honest discussion of policy here at all which is a great shame when it's the fundamental way in which politics affects the world.

I do recognise it. I haven't denied it. But my point remains that nobody is changing their minds over anything.

You think the financial crisis was caused by a small deficit. You haven't got a clue.

I'm well aware of that my friend. But this isnt a reasoned discussion where people enter with an open mind, seek truth and then determine their response, is it? Nobody changes their mind on anything any more. They enter with mind made up and will excuse anything by that side whilst continually pointing at straw men or character flaws on the other. It's depressing but there you are. That's modern Britain.

Depressing that 50% of our nation apparently has **** for brains. But then we discovered that the total is 52% back in 2016.