Kopfkino Posted 8 March 2020 Share Posted 8 March 2020 why do the Lib Dems still exist 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest MattP Posted 8 March 2020 Share Posted 8 March 2020 (edited) 1 hour ago, Kopfkino said: why do the Lib Dems still exist Personally I think it's to remind us how bad coalitions and PR can be. Historically though I've no idea. The bigger question is why they still contain the word Democrats in the party name, though removed that would smear the 1800's Liberals. Edited 8 March 2020 by MattP Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Desabafar Posted 8 March 2020 Share Posted 8 March 2020 I think the Lib Dems and the green party should merge as an alternative to labour Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest MattP Posted 8 March 2020 Share Posted 8 March 2020 5 minutes ago, Desabafar said: I think the Lib Dems and the green party should merge as an alternative to labour The Green party are insane though. We are talking about a political party that just a few years ago wanted an 800 billion citizens income, to convert army bases into wind farms and to ban air travel. Any serious government can't look at them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
somebum Posted 8 March 2020 Share Posted 8 March 2020 Corey Feldman... For those who don't know child star of the 80s, was in Goonies, for years has suggested (surprise surprise) that Hollywood has a big paedo problem. Never named anybody, but says his friend was raped and he too raped by top Hollywood icon. Well tonight he premiers his new movie, its D day and he will 'identify' those responsible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
urban.spaceman Posted 9 March 2020 Share Posted 9 March 2020 Get used to the Tories for at least another decade: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51797316 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest MattP Posted 9 March 2020 Share Posted 9 March 2020 1 hour ago, urban.spaceman said: Get used to the Tories for at least another decade: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51797316 Phillips has been suspended pending investigation over remarks, including expressing concerns about Pakistani Muslim men sexually abusing children in northern British towns, according to the Times. FFS. It's hard to laugh. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LiberalFox Posted 9 March 2020 Share Posted 9 March 2020 21 hours ago, Desabafar said: I think the Lib Dems and the green party should merge as an alternative to labour There are too many differences. Greens are pro Scottish Independence, they oppose HS2. They are anti-capitalist. The Social Liberal Forum has opened its membership up to Green Party members and has a stall at their conference. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ClaphamFox Posted 9 March 2020 Share Posted 9 March 2020 4 hours ago, urban.spaceman said: Get used to the Tories for at least another decade: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51797316 The Corbynite leadership knows its days are numbered and wants to go out with a bang. It's the equivalent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid charging out towards the Bolivian soldiers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carl the Llama Posted 9 March 2020 Share Posted 9 March 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/09/tories-brexit-phoney-test-patriotism-mary-beard Quote If the period between the referendum and leaving the EU was when the seeds of a new political culture were sown, the season since the general election last December is when they have borne fruit. Downing Street’s consolidation exercise has not only extended to the purging of ministers who refuse to become vassals of No 10. It has weaponised the Brexit mandate it received by in effect turning the EU into a loyalty test. Based on who passes it, the Tories can then impose limitations on who has the right to assume government-vetted jobs, and how those jobs are fulfilled. In an episode right out of a cold war movie, last week it emerged that classics scholar Mary Beard was blocked by Downing Street from becoming a British Museum trustee last year. Whitehall sources told the Observer the decision was made because of Beard’s pro-European views, ones that she had felt free to express on social media and are shared by half the country. But the country in which she lives has changed. The social media walls have ears. A Kremlin-style monitoring of those with EU sympathies stalks public figures. Whether her views have any bearing on her ability to do the job is neither here nor there. All that matters is allegiance to the Boris Johnson-Dominic Cummings project. Even the job of protecting the public has been affected. The coronavirus outbreak too has fallen victim to the obsession with blocking anything EU-related, no matter whether it could cost lives. Downing Street is now locked in a row with the Department of Health over access to the EU pandemic early warning system. No 10 is allegedly preventing the department from attending meetings with EU officials to coordinate a response to the crisis. The reason for this reckless politicisation of a medical emergency is that it would risk giving the EU leverage in negotiations. Strengthening Britain’s position against the EU will happen literally over our dead bodies. Soon, there will no criteria for how a public interest role is filled other than the candidate’s fealty and acquiescence to the control centre of a government that has put ideological loyalty above professional ability. Consider Alok Sharma, the secretary of state for business and new, UK-appointed president of the vital UN climate conference in Glasgow at the end of this year. Yet he has voted against setting decarbonisation targets, and has opposed incentives for renewable energy, and requiring the energy industry to have a carbon capture and storage strategy. Under Johnson’s government of vassals, the ability to do a job well seems to have become a disqualifying feature, lest someone’s vocational excellence and integrity undermine their pliancy. It was only a matter of time before “having enough of experts” turned into blocking those experts from doing their jobs – whether to make our lives safer, or our cultural life richer. It’s hard to keep up with all the ways the country’s political culture has deteriorated over the relatively short period since the referendum. The language of betrayal and treachery, at first a shock on the front pages that pronounced British judges “enemies of the people”, quickly became normalised as the withdrawal agreement negotiations turned into a sort of war re-enactment. Brexit became not a matter of bloodless negotiation with a large trading bloc, where both parties naturally wanted to maximise their positions, but an exercise in national chest-thumping as EU technocrats looked on bemused. The false binary of British or European was created. A new traitor, the “citizen of nowhere”, was identified. If they were not 100% with us, they must be against us. Britain prevailing and making a success of Brexit became a matter of believing, of having faith in your country: even the act of questioning or worrying about the future became suspect. Some of it we can laugh at. Nonsense about “patriotic breakfasts” the British negotiating team ate this month before talks began reveals only the juvenile pettiness of Tory HQ. We can be almost entertained by the awkward patriotic virtue-signalling of Conservative MPs sipping good old English cuppas. Rishi Sunak, of Winchester, Oxford and Stanford, and only recently of Yorkshire when he became an MP just five years ago, tweeted a picture of himself with the caption: “Quick Budget prep break making tea for the team. Nothing like a good Yorkshire brew.” But the rest isn’t funny. And any hope that it would subside with the delivery of Brexit, that the fever would break once it became clear that there was no conspiracy to thwart the “will of the people”, has disappeared with Johnson’s new government. In fake “patriot games”, he and Cummings have built a team around themselves that is more fortress than government, in a party that has barricaded itself against the country and against Europe. We should call things what they are. As we slip further into a dark timeline, being pro-EU is no longer simply a defunct remain position, it is a way for the Tories to sort people into us and them. This is authoritarianism. And it has to be challenged. We ignore culture-war skirmishes at our peril. Every flag-waving gimmick, every stunt, every media swipe at an elected “bureaucrat” for doing their job leads to this. It is no longer limited to a conflict between leavers or remainers, or internecine scuffles within the government itself. Loyalty tests are now determining whether we receive vital information from our closest neighbours on a pandemic, and who sits on the boards of public institutions. They may seem like separate isolated, containable incidents. But that’s what we always say about the first stages of a spreading virus. Are we all being good little patriots, are we all honouring the party? Left foot right foot left foot right foot. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest MattP Posted 9 March 2020 Share Posted 9 March 2020 51 minutes ago, ClaphamFox said: The Corbynite leadership knows its days are numbered and wants to go out with a bang. It's the equivalent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid charging out towards the Bolivian soldiers. Suspicions will be aroused when a shocked Keir Starmer is announced as the leader of "The Islamic Socialist People's Party of Liverpool" on April 4th after the NEC voted on the name change in a behind closed doors meeting minutes before. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Innovindil Posted 9 March 2020 Share Posted 9 March 2020 1 hour ago, Carl the Llama said: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/09/tories-brexit-phoney-test-patriotism-mary-beard Are we all being good little patriots, are we all honouring the party? Left foot right foot left foot right foot. Yes sir! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest MattP Posted 9 March 2020 Share Posted 9 March 2020 Does anyone aside from it's small band of subscribers still take The Guardian seriously anyway? Even the mainstream lefties and centrists seem to chuckle at it now and the borderline racist campaign it is running against Priti Patel is disturbing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toddybad Posted 9 March 2020 Share Posted 9 March 2020 9 minutes ago, MattP said: Does anyone aside from it's small band of subscribers still take The Guardian seriously anyway? Even the mainstream lefties and centrists seem to chuckle at it now and the borderline racist campaign it is running against Priti Patel is disturbing. It's commentators are an utter joke and it's obsession with identity politics means it prints a lot of utter drivel. Can't stand the little idiot Owen whatever his name is either. On the other hand it was only ever cordial regarding Corbyn, far from the ultra left wing cheerleader it gets painted as. It has been involved in some really good journalism in recent years and it at least attempts to look at the detail behind news stories rather than pandering to the lowest common denominator like most right wing rags. If you want to see a paper in rapid decline it's the Telegraph you should be looking at. You're being deliberately silly with your Priti Patel comment. She's somebody that has previously breached the ministerial code for acting against the express instruction of the previous PM and who appears to have form for bullying behaviour. The allegations of bullying against her far outweigh those against Bercow, for example. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest MattP Posted 9 March 2020 Share Posted 9 March 2020 (edited) 7 minutes ago, Toddybad said: It's commentators are an utter joke and it's obsession with identity politics means it prints a lot of utter drivel. Can't stand the little idiot Owen whatever his name is either. On the other hand it was only ever cordial regarding Corbyn, far from the ultra left wing cheerleader it gets painted as. It has been involved in some really good journalism in recent years and it at least attempts to look at the detail behind news stories rather than pandering to the lowest common denominator like most right wing rags. If you want to see a paper in rapid decline it's the Telegraph you should be looking at. You're being deliberately silly with your Priti Patel comment. She's somebody that has previously breached the ministerial code for acting against the express instruction of the previous PM and who appears to have form for bullying behaviour. The allegations of bullying against her far outweigh those against Bercow, for example. I haven't read the Telegraph for years but it wouldn't surprise me it was in decline, its circulation is still about three times the size of the Guardian though. With regards to Patel, from that paper we've had a cartoon of her depicted as a fat bull with horns and an outrageous article just last week asking why British Hindus are so prominent in the party - it's hard not to see it as wider co ordinate racist attack on British Indians as a whole based on their political opinions. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/27/how-did-british-indians-become-so-prominent-in-the-conservative-party Reverse that situation, the Daily Mail asks why so many Pakistanis are prominent in Labour and prints a cartoon of Sajid Javid as a pig? I think the reaction would be very different. How do they "far outweigh" the allegations against Bercow as well? Edited 9 March 2020 by MattP Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Kopfkino Posted 9 March 2020 Popular Post Share Posted 9 March 2020 1 hour ago, MattP said: Does anyone aside from it's small band of subscribers still take The Guardian seriously anyway? Even the mainstream lefties and centrists seem to chuckle at it now and the borderline racist campaign it is running against Priti Patel is disturbing. I think The Guardian still does lots of good stuff, its actual journalists produce lots of good stuff, Nils Prately is good, it's investigative journalism is damned good, it's long reads are often interesting and it produces some good podcasts. But yeah the comments section is just a competition for who can produce the most ridiculous, inane, insufferable bollocks, an echo chamber of virtue signalling. It's partly the point of comment sections (to be a bit daft) but it is the sheer volume of it in The Guardian that's the issue for me. 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MC Prussian Posted 9 March 2020 Share Posted 9 March 2020 7 hours ago, LiberalFox said: There are too many differences. Greens are pro Scottish Independence, they oppose HS2. They are anti-capitalist. The Social Liberal Forum has opened its membership up to Green Party members and has a stall at their conference. Are the Social Democrats still a thing? Shame they don't get more recognition. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
String fellow Posted 9 March 2020 Share Posted 9 March 2020 'Alex Salmond' anagrams to 'All sex-mad? No!' Maybe that'll be the former SNP leader's main line of defence! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest MattP Posted 10 March 2020 Share Posted 10 March 2020 On 09/03/2020 at 07:42, urban.spaceman said: Get used to the Tories for at least another decade: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51797316 He's lost his skin colour according to this guy. Some random weirdo on Twitter? Nope. This guy is the professor of "black studies" at Birmingham university. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
urban.spaceman Posted 10 March 2020 Share Posted 10 March 2020 2 hours ago, MattP said: He's lost his skin colour according to this guy. Some random weirdo on Twitter? Nope. This guy is the professor of "black studies" at Birmingham university. Kehinde is regularly on BBC panel shows and Good Morning Britain. He's so anti racist he's gone full circle and is actually a full on racist. The Guardian did a similar article the other week about British Asians in the Tory party, essentially saying that you can only be black if you have the right opinion. Which is insanely toxic. And racist. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post String fellow Posted 10 March 2020 Popular Post Share Posted 10 March 2020 The news today of the senseless killing of two extremely rare white giraffes in Kenya by poachers makes me despair of (and despise) some members of the human race. 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fuchsntf Posted 10 March 2020 Share Posted 10 March 2020 On 08/03/2020 at 15:50, MattP said: The Green party are insane though. We are talking about a political party that just a few years ago wanted an 800 billion citizens income, to convert army bases into wind farms and to ban air travel. Any serious government can't look at them. Its not up to government....Its upto the electorate..!!! Oh yes..!! I agree many ( Not all) are ,like their intended Mandate insane.!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ajthefox Posted 10 March 2020 Share Posted 10 March 2020 1 hour ago, String fellow said: The news today of the senseless killing of two extremely rare white giraffes in Kenya by poachers makes me despair of (and despise) some members of the human race. Put this horse trainer bloke in the same pile https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/mar/10/jason-servis-trainer-maximum-security-doping-horse-racing Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ealingfox Posted 11 March 2020 Share Posted 11 March 2020 Chris Grayling given chair of Intelligence and Security - wtf!!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alf Bentley Posted 11 March 2020 Share Posted 11 March 2020 19 minutes ago, ealingfox said: Chris Grayling given chair of Intelligence and Security - wtf!!!! I wouldn't trust him to have the competence to sit down on a chair. I'd expect him to fall onto the floor. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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