Are you Pritti Patel in disguise?
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Itās a fucking good disguise.
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Do you have above average facial hair by any chance.
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You know - one of the things that Labour could do which people would actually respond to, particularly given the current issues, is focusing on things like vocational training, apprenticeships, government grants for HGV training, train drivers, bus drivers, operating construction tools, farm machinery, repairing telephone lines, wind-turbines, solar panel installation, laying fibre optic cables etc. Support bio-sciences, software and communications development etc. What would it do regarding the training of nurses and doctors?
Fund the training of skills that will help the country improve and expand its infrastructure.
Even simple things like saying that theyād convert every 10th lamp post so that it can double as an electric vehicle charging point. Couple it with saying theyād invest in training electrical engineers and funding apprenticeships so that there are the people in the domestic workforce with the skills equipped to implement such a roll-out. That sort of stuff.
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Iām shaven like a newborn, never liked the facefluff.
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Just in relation to converting lamp posts to electrical charging points. I had this idea about a month ago and I thought to myself what a genius I am. I could make millions from this idea.
So I then looked it up to see if it was already being done and, yup, itās already being implemented in some places and has been for at least two years. Fuck. Iāve missed my opportunity to be a millionaire!
But itās a good idea and the government should be investing in this sort of infrastructure as it uses existing electricity supply and makes use of existing road āfurnitureā so doesnāt add to the roadside āclutterā.
In addition, you can have charging points installed next to parking bays in town centres and it would double as a pay-meter for parking (and electrical charging if the charging point was being used). In this way, users would help pay for the electricity being provided and the infrastructure and maintenance necessary. It would soon pay for the cost of installing it and would then go on to be a revenue generator for local councils/government that could then go towards funding community schemes like play areas, parks, community centres, waste recycling initiatives, public bicycles, other āgreenā initiatives etc.
You could even incentivise peopleās use by saying that parking would not be charged if you were paying to charge your electric vehicle. If you were parked in a spot and didnāt have an electric vehicle, youād have to pay for parking. So simple. But effective and, whatās more, something that people could actually picture for themselves.
I have no idea how much that would cost but the cost is somewhat unimportant because most people cannot properly have any concept of what Ā£20 billion or Ā£50 billion is. These are just figures beyond anything that is relatable to most of us so meaningless. If a party was to say that something would cost an extra penny on income tax then thatās more relatable. Or if they were to say that whatever the cost of something was, that it would pay for itself within, say, 5 years - thatās something (and a period of time) that most people can reasonably appreciate. Sounds good.
As soon as you start extending it to 20 years, for example, it sounds less good. Fuck that - sounds too expensive particularly as many people voting may know that they are then unlikely to see any benefit from the funds feeding back into the public purse.
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Never too late. Thereās a pub you can go to.
Is this thread correct?
https://twitter.com/MichaelPDeacon/status/1442737385712857092?s=19
https://twitter.com/MichaelPDeacon/status/1442737550691549184?s=19
https://twitter.com/damocrat/status/1442791080810983427?s=19
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Doesnāt Burnham have to get himself back into a Westminster seat first?
I support Starmer, but he is really making it fucking hard at the minute with his ideological purge of the left. And his 14000 word essay calling for an end to navel gazing was beyond absurd.
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I complete agree, and itās why Starmerās essay just left me with my head in my hands. Labour need to articulate a vision of the country, and do it fast. If Starmer hasnāt got one of those, he needs to pop off, as much as I quite like him.
However, there is still a question in my head about just how fucking bad the Tories have to be before it becomes a moral imperative to vote them out. For me, all roads lead back to the simple fact that they not only mismanaged the pandemic, but showed a sickening flair for profiteering off peopleās misery, and this lead to tens of thousands of preventable deaths. And then you have scandal, after scandal, after scandal - and itās been that way for two years now.
Letās just repeat that for emphasis. Over 150,000 dead people. 150,000 families devastated. And these cunts have laughed all the way to the bank through the whole episode.
Whatever Labourās failings, of which we can agree there are many, surely they pale into insignificant next to the damage Johnson and co have done over the last three years.
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They should not have quietly dropped their plans for a National Education Service. In my opinion itās the sanest economic policy that a political party has come up with in decades.
Sadly I dont think he grasps what he needs to do. At the same time thereās a bunch of nutters making it incredibly difficult for him to achieve anything.
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No idea but it honestly wouldnāt surprise me if it was. I just absolutely gobsmacked that thereās an obvious way forward on this and yet they want to start a petty fight that serves no one other than the Conservatives. The solution is so obvious, even I could think of it.
The pay and benefits structure of the UK is completely bonkers and needs a major overhaul.
Iāve seen more order in a kindergarten.
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You are much closer to the party than I am. I donāt know how representative of Labour left Corbyn is but I get the impression this is less about a purge of the ideological left and more so of Corbynites who are doing what they can to bring down the current leadership - both to have another crack at getting the leadership again and to cover what a disaster the party found itself in by the last election.
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Well, this is the problem the party has, and why it struggles to get elected. The party has a number of factions and unfortunately some appear to see their priority as bringing down the party ahead of winning an election. The other parties donāt really have this problem.
This is probably where Starmerās comments about winning elections being more important than unity comes from.
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They are honestly both as bad as each other. My position has always been you back the leader and you be grown up enough to understand the leader canāt be everything you want them to be. If youāre undermining the party by attacking the leader, whether thatās the centrists doing everything they could to topple Corbyn, or the leftists undermining Starmer, you are as culpable for the state of the country as the Tories.
Itās partly the reason I donāt do very much party activism anymore. There are vast swathes of the party, across the spectrum, who are more concerned with the idea logical purity of the party than they are winning an election.
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The Conservatives certainly have their factions. A big reason for the mess weāre in re Brexit is that Cameron saw it as an opportunity to bury the Eurosceptic fringe who were on his back. That went well for all of us. Johnson is currently torn between doing the right thing on Covid and appeasing the libertarian fucknuts who would rather have done nothing and let two million people die.
What they are very good at is knowing when to indulge their factionalism and when to just win a fucking election.
I think youāre right but I dont think you can win elections without having some kind of unity either. You just become a rabble of mixed messages or descend into a group of squabbling children.
The Conservatives, to their credit, seem to be able to get a unified and simple message out that people can latch onto.
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