Have you considered what the NHS might be worth on the magic bean market?
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Speaking as a fellow (for now) EU citizen, I’d say that you are, unfortunately, extremely fucked.
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That is sadly hilarious or hilariously sad. I’ve spoken with ardent Leavers who seem to think that leaving Europe is like flipping a switch.
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Hasn’t Bercow become a “made man” after his Speaker gig? I thought that it was usual for ex-speakers to take their Lordship and move to the Westminster Retirement Home/House of Lords?
FTFY. The Lying Git has a long history of using his supporters to bolster third placed candidates so that the second place definitely loses. And nearly all current LD MPs are actual Tories, can you trust them not to go back again immediately? No, of course you can’t trust them, they’re Tories…
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He’s not a Lord, and the current Tory leadership bastards aren’t going to make him one. His ‘retirement’ is to the stewardship position I mention above.
Not for me mate. I stand by my previous post.
Only 5 of the current ldp mps were elected as conservatives. 3 were elected as Labour.
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How fucked are we? Rather a lot - but not as shoot-selves-in-foot fucked as the Tories were yesterday. Let’s hope it’s not temporary.
- Rees-Mogg insults Grenfell vitctms
- Andrew Bridgen doubles down on that
- Welsh Tory lead lied about not knowing a Tory candidate had basically screwed a rape trial - deliberately (to the extent of being publicly and strongly admonished from the bench by the judge)
- Gove says MPs will get no vote on extending trade deal talks if time runs out to finish it by end of 2020, after govt promised MPs they would
And so it goes.
Remember: A scandal a day keeps the Tories at bay.
PS and I forgot the Piers Morgan/Kier Starmer interview video tampering.
PPS Victoria Derbyshire seems to have summed it up quite well (she missed the Gove U-turn, though):
Calling the launch of the Conservative’s campaign ‘an absolute disaster’, Derbyshire said: “A candidate saying people on benefits should be put down, Jacob Rees-Mogg said people with common sense would have got out of Grenfell Tower, Andrew Bridgen excusing that by saying Mr Rees-Mogg is ‘clever’, the government refusing to publish a report into whether the Russians have interfered in previous elections here, the Conservatives doctoring an interview with Labour’s Keir Starmer, and a rape survivor calling on the Welsh secretary to quit.”
From this article (link below) and if anyone has not seen this website/newspaper before, I heartily recommend it.
https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/conservative-mp-nigel-evans-criticised-for-laughing-at-bbc-campaign-question-1-6360727
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I have my own nightmarish memories of that. I was living in Carlisle at the time of the F&M outbreak and saw what you described first hand. My grandma was dying in Longtown, Ground Zero for the outbreak too. There were lots of visits to relatives in that hellscape. There was no getting away from it, even if you never set foot in the countryside (Rickerby Park effectively means that rural areas extend right to the city centre). The sky was orange all night, it never truly got dark. The smell of burned animals was in the air everywhere, I would wash my hair, go out for five-ten minutes and my hair would stink again. There were disinfectant baths everywhere to stop the spread of the disease. I became vegetarian because of it, and the only reason I eat meat now is because of health reasons (I can’t prepare a meal, and vegetarian ready meals nearly always have onion in them which will make me sick.)
Another memory was of the sexism at the job centre. Men were encouraged to do the outdoors work and women were offered the office work. You had to ask if you didn’t want the jobs being offered to you. There wasn’t actual segregation (that would have been very illegal) but it did lead to it effectively. I’m just glad that they accepted my refusal to take those jobs on ethical grounds.
Is the situation that bad? I don’t know, but I am leaning towards yes.
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This! 17.3 million times this!
Like I said above:
I wish I had the time and skills to publish a detailed list of every EU institution which once we leave will cause us no end of trouble and cost.
I’m busking here, so some of this is vague but these happened months ago and are just the thin end of the slippery slope:
That EU medicines regulation body that decamped to Holland losing many UK jobs and which means drug cos will not look to put new drugs into UK so quickly now
That atomic regulation authority which means we are no longer able to meet international obligations re nuclear stuff we do, without huge cost
Loss of access to Galileo GPS system, FFS! Which the Maybot decided we’d replace with £6bn spent on building ourselves a new on (where was THAT magic money tree before, Mrs May?)
European Space Agency - UK participation blasted out of orbit
And that’s just off the top of my head from months ago.
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Otherwise known as a tuesday.
But yeah, if you wanted a better narrative to show the inherent malice of the tories towards ordinary people then you couldn’t do much better than looking to the tory general election 2019 launch!
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Tom Watson stands down as MP
Ian Austin is being counterproductive - The Tories are just better at hiding their anti-semitism and far worse than Labour in many other ways.
1500 voters in Swindon are wrongly told they cannot vote
There is an election pact between Plaid Cymru, the Lib-Dems and the Green Party
And a rape apologist is selected as a Tory candidate
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Silly them! I’m pretty sure that it’s a push button.
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An ex-Labour MP thinking Corbyn is not fit to be PM is one thing; thinking Johnson IS, is something else entirely! I know we are not allowed to comment on the state of a person’s mental health here, so I won’t say any more about Mr Austin’s possible sanity issues.
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Although, as noted, Labour did attempt a “hold my beer” moment.
None of the main parties have started well at all - even the smaller parties have struggled to make headway so far - but it is notable that even the BBC are actually having to address the endless mendacity of the Tories. I sympathise a little with their problem here. For starters, it is their job to be on the side of the government, whatever stripe it is (remember when it was called the Blair Broadcasting Corp?), but their real problem is the requirement for electoral balance, in which broadcasters are expected to give approximately equal airtime to all the major parties. But if they spend their allocated Tory time on reporting on Johnson’s lies rather than, say, their policies, then how do they report on Labour and Corbyn? Obviously one method is to fall back on the antisemitism issue (which is real but crosses both parties equally); it will be interesting (and probably depressing) to see where the BBC ends up.
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Utter rubbish. Sorry - no idea where you got that idea from but it is demonstrably untrue.
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I was thinking about this while watching him practically break down on Kay Burley’s show. Based on coverage of him over the last year (especially in thejc) I think Austin genuinely believes JC is an antisemite, and not just an indifferent leader enabling it passively in the party. As a Jew I can fully sympathize with his unwillingness to see JC as PM, even if he thinks (as Austin surely does) that Tory policy is racist and ultimately worse for Jews and every other minority than Labour.
However, I also think his dismissal of the option of voting 3rd party is wrong. If after the election Labour can gain government with and only with a coalition, and the coalition partners refuse to consider it with JC as Labour leader, then Labour will have to reconsider its unwillingness to drop JC as leader.
This is agonizing for Jews in the UK.
Aaaand… he’s gone. Even though he should have been kicked out.
We have had some discussion about this before and if they’re not exactly a government mouthpiece then they’re far from being impartial.
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We can debate their impartiality from minute to minute. One minute they’re on one side’s side and the next the other’s. Balance - even in not 50/50. Saying ‘far from impartial’ is a sweeping generalisation, which is easy to prove if you home in on any one spot rather than take the whole. I’m happy, as long as all sides are accusing them of bias.
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The BBC’s own internal study found it to be biased towards euroscepticism and the right wing.
It has only got worse since then.
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A very big read!! (That report.)
I guess these 2 paras from the summary are largely to your point.
- Although political voices dominate, and the ruling party has a larger share of voice,
the Conservative dominance in 2012 is by a notably larger margin than Labour
dominance in 2007 (although the two governments were at different points in the
electoral cycle), and there is only a relatively limited presence of Liberal Democrats
across both years.- In coverage of the UK’s relationship to Europe, the EU was frequently framed as a
problem, and from the vantage point of British national interests.
My take on this is that the BBC does have a tendency in news to mirror the ‘balance’ of the national debate, especially as covered (= led) by the national press, which has an in-built right-wing bias. Unfortunately, setting the agenda rather than reporting on it may contravene their charter.
But at the same time, it has to cover what is going on and like it or not (and who here does like it) what is going on does sometimes tend to be led by the press. MPs react to what the Daily Mail says, more than the other way round.
When, for years, politics - esp. electoral politics - were being disrupted by UKIP and constant screaming about the EU and how we must leave it, with almost total silence about why this was nonsense and why we should stay - because nobody in public life was addressing that argument - what was the BBC to do? If it ignored it and did not report on UKIP (deny them the oxygen of publicity) they’d have been even more eviscerated for bias in a different direction. It could not report to the same extent on pro-EU arguments, because they were simply not being put forward publicly - in the same way that UKIP was campaigning - for anyone to actually report on. I’d certainly have liked to see more fact-checking and calling out of misleading crap from Farage and co, but it is hard to do that without being characterised as attacking UKIP and displaying political bias.
They cannot win.
