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Another one bites the dust. Ever seen a party commit suicide like this? Must be a mate of Alec Salmond's.
Soon be renamed the 'Louses of Parliament'....
We can chuck graphs around all day (here's another one!), but it's interesting to note that the 'upside' of Brexit is now limited to the likes of David Frost saying 'this bad thing isn't because of Brexit', not even the vaguest pretence left that there's any benefit to the UK at all.
You're spitting facts with that one bruh.Lest we forget, the nation, nay, the world had just started seeing some signs of stability from the Worldwide Financial Crash. And so one had a whole country with their backs up, essentially scapegoating the EU as being detrimental to future growth and prosperity, as well as vetoing anything of note. And thus, Project Fear was born!
It was outright populism, and used to invoke a 'them against us' culture of self-preservation. When really, Brexit's benefits are TBA if anything.
I don't believe for one second that they'd envisaged a Yes vote to come to fruition, so then came the "Shit, what can we salvage from this mess Tristram", where it became such a messy divorce that many were left to wonder what this exit actually truly achieved. F-.....fishing rights?
So yes, Britain's no better off for it, and many politicians involved in its process long-gone. David 'Blub' Cameron, gone. Theresa 'Robot' May, gone. Boris 'DUDE' Johnson, soon to go, couldn't give a flying fig. And as for Sir 'Beer' Starmer and Angela 'Chav' Rayner, well, I wouldn't bank on them sorting Britain's problems out either, nor any current Labour troupe, as the party's in a worse state than the Tories (hard to believe)
At this point the only vote worth casting is to abstain from either of this ruinous duopoly, and hope in the next 50 years someone will step up to the task. Sure, I'll look like the Cryptkeeper, but it'll have been a vote worth saving
Hard to disagree with any of this, so in my eyes it’s a top post.I don't know, Brexit or no Brexit, EU membership didn't seem to do much to address the chronic problems of the UK. But worse, no-one has a plan to make things better since we left, or set the country on some sort of road to improvement. It's shocking how the tories are happy to just bumble along doing nothing much, banking on the clown opposition being marginally more unelectable. You have to wonder if the idiots in Parliament hadn't made such a bad job of things, whether people would have been content wth the status quo.
e.g.
- Huge swathe of ill-educated 'underclass' on benefits / economically inactive - also ageing fast with an increasing number of retired / pensioners
- Generally apathetic population
- Shit politicians with no forward plan for the country behind winning the next election (exhibit A: lack of an energy security policy until the shit hit the fan)
- Don't manufacture much any more and little interest in doing so
- Shit schools
- Predatory housing/renting market
- 'Offence taking' / woke culture often preventing effective action on serious issues like illegal immigration, reverse racism, child abuse etc. causing decay in the fabric of society
Unless we get a leader or party with a vision and a plan, we're fecked - unable to compete globally, a small, decaying island - in or out.
I’ve always thought that the New Labour government was one of the worst things that happened to the UK. How many of the foundations for today’s issues were laid back then?!Blair's Open Door policy was to stimulate the economy through cheap labour, and served nothing more than to aid his tenure at No.10.
How much was put back into the economy, and how much was 'taken out' and sent back to their country of origin? And how many workers settled here? Because frightening a truth though this is, at what point is the country straining at the seams, as services become overburdened, much of what we're seeing now?
The NHS is shot, GPs are disinterested, our Police ineffective and unwilling to even record crimes, and the less said about schools, the better. We won't mention the Strike-pocalypse we're set to endure in the coming months either.
We're now at the point where everything's at breaking point, and irrespective of how this island's been filled, it can only support so many people before the cracks start to show, because horror of horrors, there's only so much to go around.
Politicians will do what betters their figures during their term(s), they couldn't care less beyond that. So whilst Tony Blair did that deed, 25 years later not a lot's changed for the better. And lo and behold, Brexit was used by the current stooges for political clout and their 4-D chess that they love to partake in.
And here we are, 25 years later, and I've yet to see any of that 'sovereignty' and 'autonomy' as people migrate on a whim, often through the system. How many unvetted arrivals has Britain embraced at Dover this year alone? 13000?
So we can all beat the Brexit drum about how it's set to lead Britain into a path of sustainability and enlightenment. Fact is, Brexit's nothing but a buzzword that that politician X Y Z will peddle for political gain, and the very notion that a political saviour's waiting in the wings to eke out anything resembling a handle on it, is somewhat 'hopeful'
Thanks for the nightmares tonight MackWe may as well appoint Nicola Sturgeon lifetime president of the UK as go back under the control of the EU.
The immigration part is absolute bollocks and you know it. Of course population increase grows the economy, as it increases demand and the necessity to provide government services like education and health. However, it has made us all poorer on average as the real indicator of prosperity, that's productivity or GDP per head of population has remained static (a real terms drop) or fallen slightly.Quite a few posts there so I'll try to make a reply that covers the points made.
First off we need to remember that immigration is a net benefit to the UK economy and always has been, with immigrants putting more into the UK economy than they take out (which contrasts sharply with the 'native' population, who take out more than they put in overall).
There is certainly a conversation to be had about the mass importation of cheap labour, but remember it's always been within the UK government's power to fix that with higher minimum wages, strong workplace contracts, anti-exploitation laws and suchlike, the EU has nothing to do with that, the UK government could have done that when we were an EU member.
In terms of the societal structures to support this increase in population, yes of course we need to make sure those are in place and functional, but on that we must remember that the Tory austerity years stripped public services to the bone, they ransacked local council budgets and adopted a scorched earth approach to public finances, all predicated on the lie that 'the nation's credit card was maxed out', so working people got it in the neck year after year, whilst the rich made out like bandits. (No austerity for for David, George and their mates!) So now we have the likes of Priti Patel boasting about all the new police officers they're recruiting, whilst failing to mention that even if they recruit the numbers they say they will (unlikely), we'll still be below the numbers we had when they came into office back in 2010.
I'm not wildly impressed with Keir Starmer's Labour Party, he's repaired a lot of the damage of the Corbyn era and has at least made the Labour Party look electable (I rather liked Corbyn and thought the last election manifesto he ran on was very impressive, but I recognise he was an electoral liability in many areas). However, in terms of a clear vision for how they're going to fix things, Labour are being far too timid, but I am mindful that the right wing attack media in this country, largely owned by, and run for the convenience of billionaires - are looking for any opportunity to start screaming about, for example, 'BREXIT BETRAYAL'.
The next general election is still a couple of years out, as Napoleon said, 'Never interrupt your enemy when he is in the process of making a mistake', and with the Tories apparently determined to self-immolate on a biblical scale at the moment, one can understand Labour sitting back and letting them crack on with it, but we're going to need some clear and determined policy announcements before too long.
A point I made earlier in this thread, probably back in 2019, so long before we were actually out of the EU and transition, was that a lot of the stuff people were angry about and cited as their reason for voting for Leave, wasn't going to be fixed by the UK leaving the EU, because they were UK problems that were within the power of the UK government to fix, it just didn't want to. The extent to which the UK was 'UNDER EU CONTROL' was always massively overstated (to this day I've never met anyone who can actually name 'An EU rule' they specifically wanted to get rid of, it's always just 'all them EU rules innit') - what we had was an awful decade of Tory rule (variously propped up by the Lib Dems and DUP), and people were justifiably angry with how shit a lot of stuff had got, the problem was they blamed the EU, when the real culprits were sat in Downing Street.
And here we are in the year 2022, with what is probably the worst government the UK has ever had, headed up by the worst Prime Minister we've ever had, we're out of the EU and guess what, it didn't fix anything. Nothing magically got better when we left the EU, because all the shit that's fucked up in the UK isn't the EU's fault, it never was, Brexit got done*, and it didn't do anything.
* I mean, sort of, Johnson's deal was so tragi-comedically bad that we'll be suffering its negative effects for years, if not decades to come.
I think many remainers are of the left and see the EU as a 'friend' to their cause, which is mainly 'social' justice and woke ideology nowadays. If you're not popular enough to win general elections, then the EU forcing its liberal and progressive 'values' onto the uk public is the next best thing.
It was costing the UK 10 billion pounds [10,000,000,000 net] to be a member, imagine the benefit to the uk of spending that here on various projects to increase the standard of living, business etc...
Why would even the labour party want to hand over all that tax money for brussels to spend elsewhere, when we have all the problems that we have, makes no sense.
A different type of EU, with more democracy and less imposing, could have been okay, but it is a slow, power grab project, where eventually no members will realistically be able to leave, with powers and agency similar to a uk borough council.
Look at Poland and Hungary, helping many ukrainian refugees, while at the same time moves are afoot to fine them because the EU doesn't like how they run their countries, which are the result of democratic elections unlike the EU.
OK so we're out of the EU now and have been for a while, so where's all the extra money that's supposed to be sloshing around? You're complaining about all the things Leavers were complaining about back in 2016, none of it applies any more - so where's the good stuff?
Leave won! Brexit happened! Sunlit uplands remember? So where are they?
Also, what does 'woke' even mean? The word is bandied about constantly, and used as insult, and yet getting a definition of it is surprisingly difficult.
The Daily Mail suggested that builders had GONE WOKE because they, erm, read books, talk about things and don't always eat fried breakfasts.
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Jeez. He of low wages, capitalizing on COVID to cheaply reduce workforce then whines like one of his engines when he realizes like many others he's wasted his main asset - staff. Their bean counting is coming back to bite them - and guess what? It's the government's fault.Michael O'Leary not exactly mincing his words.
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View attachment 169482
Jeez. He of low wages, capitalizing on COVID to cheaply reduce workforce then whines like one of his engines when he realizes like many others he's wasted his main asset - staff. Their bean counting is coming back to bite them - and guess what? It's the government's fault.
As for George Floyd - a criminal in a foreign country killed by over-zealous police. It was shocking.
But equally shocking, to me, was that just when this kneeling business started a month after his death 3 members of the LGBT community (including a US citizen) were murdered and 3 injured by some Libyan 'asylum seeker' in Reading. This piece of crap had already been convicted of numerous violent and racially-religiously aggravated attacks beforehand. No minute's silence at sports events for them, no gestures, no publicity.
So the agenda-laden media encourage support for one, while ignoring the other which is far more relevant to UK society. Obviously those three lives don't fit their narrative, as the victims were white and the murderer was a muslim African (who the good old UK taxpayer had hosted and accomodated) not a nasty white cop with a black victim. Silly me, I was thinking ALL lives mattered.
To be fair she only has herself to blame.Well look at JK Rowling for a current example, how she's being cancelled, or attempts to do so, even frozen out by the stars of the HP films.
Scary thought - the SNP hate private enterprise, as do their partners in crime, the Greens.We may as well appoint Nicola Sturgeon lifetime president of the UK as go back under the control of the EU.