UK Politics Thread (Part 1)

Away End - General Chat
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Quite true. I guess my point is that the reasons for wanting an independent Wales are the very same arguments that were used for leaving the EU.

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There it is. You are not irked because they are English. You are irked because they lack the compassion for your culture. So, they are the nationalist while you are a patriot.

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Off-topic, but Welsh orthography is just wild - even for a Celtic language, though I guess Cornish and Breton must be fairly similar. Started on Welsh Duolingo this summer on a very casual basis. The place names will take some time


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Good for you.

Without wanting to drift too far off the thread topic, the language has similarities with Breton and Cornish but also shares many similarities with French and German in many areas. It’s an old language!

One thing with it though it is a very, what I would call logical language. Everything is as you say it. No hidden / silent letters etc. The only area of difficulty is the softening of certain letters at the start of words depending on what precedes it. Again this is more to assist with the spoken side. Often it’s a natural transition.

As with many languages the difficulty is trying to think and translate in English. That doesn’t work so well in this case. Mind you we often cheat, shoving the odd English word in. The sad thing is that as languages change and become more modern with the addition of new words the Welsh version is often just plain stupid.

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My favourite is the Welsh word for microwave.

Edit:

Well
that’s disappointing. I thought it was “Popty Ping”


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:clap:t2: :clap:t2: :clap:t2:

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Popty Ping is one version yes :grimacing: Exactly my point on the stupid side. I can understand trying to keep it simple but there’s line you cross into absurdity.

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This is a brilliant video, well worth a watch.

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I always suspect that the real intention of the Arabs, Russians and Chinese investing in UK or European clubs is to develop liaison and buy off political and social influencers.

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i think money laundering is a big part of it sadly.

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Don’t forget Indians. I think there is a much stronger strategic sense to what the Chinese do. Just taking agriculture as an example you hear they are buying up swathes of arable land in Africa then a few years later buy up the 2nd largest seed producer in the world. Our capitalist system just doesn’t seem intellegent enough to see where they are going even though we know that they (and India for that matter) have a policy to be able to feed their increasing population. I have heard criticism of how China and India buy up arable land in Africa (and other continents) but no one blinked when they bought up the seed manufacturer (double standards?).

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Westerners concentrate on the next year.
The Chinese concentrate on the next 100 years

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I would say it’s more the delineation between state and business.

China uses industry for government purposes (see Huawei as recent high profile example) Whilst they have quietly been doing this years (like diamond mines in Africa) I think the strategy is starting to backfire.

Take Papua New Guinea as an example. In a way it’s in a modern proxy war. China has invested billions (from gold mines, data centers, airports hydro dams). Attempts to buy influence and use debt diplomacy. PNG has taken the money and now starting to sticking two fingers up at China. It’s taken back control of huge gold mine, the data center has been shown to have big security flaws by Australia so they are not paying for it given it could be used for spying.

Small countries start to cynically look at the investment and they play the game. It’s easy target to blame foreigners (irrespective of truth) for a countries woes. Especially with tin pot governments in poorer nations.

China is investing billions world wide in infrastructure, their main problem though is the perception of ulterior motives.

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C&P from Facebook:

RussInCheshire is back. Bumper edition.

“#TheWeekInTory had to pause for a bit while I dealt with a poorly old mum. So this is actually about 3 weeks, very compressed

I dreaded coming back to this. I mean, honestly, where do you start?

Deep breath


  1. Theresa May couldn’t agree a Withdrawal Agreement (WI) because – in news that will shock the millions who warned about this – it’s impossible due do without accepting EU rules, or harming NI, or breaking up the UK, or crippling the economy, or all of the above

  2. Nevertheless, Boris Johnson agreed a WI from the EU

  3. Then Tories voted to accelerate the Withdrawal Agreement through parliament, specifically so it wouldn’t have to face scrutiny

  4. And Boris Johnson withdrew the whip – sacked – 21 Tories who didn’t support the delay

  5. Then he won an election by promising the WI was “oven-ready” and “brilliant”

  6. Later, in a massive shock, it was discovered the WI contains all the problems that prevented May from agreeing it

  7. So the govt announced it would just break the law and ignore its own treaty

  8. Each MP’s Oath of Allegiance includes “I will give my loyalty to the United Kingdom
 uphold its democratic values 
 and observe laws faithfully”

  9. All 5 living ex-PM’s oppose this plan

  10. Every living ex-Tory leader opposes it (except IDS, but c’mon, it’s IDS)

  11. So now the govt which sacked 21 MPs for opposing the WI is threatening to sack any MPs who support the same WI

  12. The actual Police Minister said it’s OK to break the law

  13. The Lord Chancellor, Britain’s highest law officer, said it’s OK to break the law

  14. The Attorney General, responsible for advising the govt on legal matters, said it’s OK to break the law

  15. The Lord Chancellor and Attorney General are barristers, and the Bar Council guidelines say you will be struck-off if you “knowingly advise a client to break the law”

  16. Same day, Foreign Secretary and irony no-fly-zone Dominic Raab said Iran “must comply with its legal commitments and treaties”

  17. Gavin Williamson and Mark Francois were nominated for the MP Of The Year Award

  18. This was the last known sighting of Mark Francois

  19. Michael Gove said in a July speech “failures of policy and judgement”, are generating a “crisis of authority” and “Politicians like me must take responsibility for the effect of their actions”

  20. Gavin Williamson is still in his job

  21. But the head of Ofqual was sacked

  22. And the most senior education civil servant had to stand down

  23. In fact, resignations by senior civil servants are up 14% in a year

  24. But 44% of new senior appointments are personal friends of Michael Gove, in one of those amazing coincidence things

  25. Other amazing coincidences, a sub-thread:

a. Public First, a company led by Govt and Cummings associates, was handed a contract to help Ofqual with the exams fiasco. The contract wasn’t put out to tender
b. Gove appointed ex-girlfriend Simone Finn as adviser to Cabinet Office. Finn immediately paid her own company to “shake up the Cabinet Office”
c. Gove handed a contract (without tender) to PWC, a company that pays him ÂŁ5000 per hour to give speeches
d. Gove gave ÂŁ21k to Signal AI, a company associated with Gove and Cummings, to ask Tunisians what they think about Covid
e. Faculty AI, associated with Gove and Cummings, got ÂŁ400k to analyse tweets by UK citizens. So if I vanish one dark night, tell my family I tolerated them
f. And another contract went to the cousin of Tory MP Tom Tugendhat to “analyse the awarding of govt contracts”, which is like a spiral, wrapped inside a Möbius strip, encased in a corkscrew, and tethered to a twat

  1. Anyway, back to the fun: Home Secretary and Nurse Ratched cosplayer Priti Patel authorised “more painful” Taser guns, clearly anticipating more determined rioters

  2. She then abandoned a deportation flight after it was found every passenger had leave to stay in the UK

  3. Matt Hancock said we should get back to work as there is “little evidence” coronavirus is passed on in offices, having seen Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings catch coronavirus in their office

  4. Then he voted for himself to continue to work remotely for 11 more weeks

  5. Tories told us to lose weight

  6. Then they paid us to go and eat out

  7. Then they told us face-masks were essential

  8. But not in schools

  9. Then they were essential in schools

  10. Then they told us to keep social distancing

  11. Then they held a meeting of 50 PMs in a room with a capacity for 29

  12. Then only 8 minutes later, they tweeted that the were updating advice to ban meeting in groups of 30

  13. Then they banned you from meeting more than 6 people

  14. But you can still go to the pub, 30 of you can attend a wedding or (more likely) a funeral, 30 of you get in a rugby scrum, and you can sit on a packed train carriage with 80 other people

  15. Oh, and obviously, grouse-shooting is exempt. After all, what are we: French!?

  16. And the new ban didn’t start for a week, and excluded the St Leger horse racing meet, where 3640 people crowded together making money for The Jockey Club; and isn’t it amazing that Matt Hancock is MP for Newmarket, where his major donors The Jockey Club are based?

  17. So now the R number (which Boris Johnson was “absolutely committed to keeping below 1”) is at 1.7

  18. Matt Hancock made a big deal of ÂŁ60k compensation for families of NHS workers who died fighting Covid. The govt simultaneously stopped all their benefits

  19. Hancock then started a scheme to financially support those forced to self-isolate, paying them up to (that’s “up to”) £13 a day

  20. In preparation for the forthcoming homelessness epidemic, Tory councils voted to fine people ÂŁ1000 for being too poor have anywhere to sleep

  21. The govt said it was “ramping up to 150k tests a fortnight” 3 months after they claimed they were doing “over 100k tests a week”

  22. Matt Hancock said he was changing the law to allow nurses to give flu vaccinations, unaware nurses already give over 93% of flu vaccinations

  23. Then he launched a campaign to fight obesity, and immediately closed the agency responsible for delivering it

  24. And then he advertised for a person to replace the head of Public Health England. The advert said no experience in health is required. In a pandemic.

  25. The govt announced Operation Moonshot!, an exciting-sounding £100bn plan to test 10m people a day using technology that doesn’t exist, delivered by the people behind the PPE crisis, Brexit, Gavin Williamson, and Chris Grayling literally failing his own intelligence test

  26. Meanwhile, we ran out of home testing kits

  27. Then more shortages led us sending people on 500-mile round trips for a Covid test, in what experts have dubbed “the full Cummings Experience”

  28. Six months after the first case in the UK, despite having diligently spent over ÂŁ1bn on contracts with sweet suppliers and dormant companies with no employees, the UK still is not capable of producing a single piece of hospital-standard PPE

  29. Researchers from King’s College London found Tories “employed overt disinformation” with “new levels of impunity” in the 2019 General Election

  30. The govt was “formally warned for threatening press freedom” (putting us in the same classification as Russia) by the Council of Europe, which the UK co-founded in 1949 to protect human rights

  31. It was then reported Boris Johnson plans to opt out of human rights laws

  32. Meanwhile, a cross-party group of MPs is threatening to sue Boris Johnson if he continues to ignore calls for an enquiry into Russian interference in UK politics. People connected to the Putin regime paid ÂŁ160k to play tennis with Boris Johnson

  33. The leader of Scottish Tories tweeted “I would have no hesitation in voting against any legislation which would allow chlorinated chicken or hormone-injected beef. That’s a categorical assurance.”

  34. He then voted to allow chlorinated chicken and hormone-injected beef

  35. The govt voted not to implement the recommendations of the Grenfell Tower enquiry

  36. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions was quoted as saying “it is not my job to worry about people starving to death in the UK”

  37. The govt announced new Covid restrictions with a densely worded 10-page legal document, released at 11.38pm on Sunday night, just 22 minutes before police, hospitals, health officials, local councils, schools and businesses had to implement them

  38. The document ends: “no impact assessment has been done”, surprising nobody familiar with Brexit

  39. Environment news, and as a liveable world slips relentlessly from our grasp, the UK spent just £2000 – not a typo - tackling environmental damage to the British countryside

  40. They spent £46m (2300 times as much) telling us to get ready for a Brexit that didn’t happen

  41. And the Tory-appointed head of the Environment Agency endorsed proposals to weaken laws on the cleanliness of rivers, lakes and coastlines

  42. Meanwhile the Fisheries Minister posed “catching mackerel” with a rod that had no line in a sea that has no mackerel, and I had to order a fresh barrel of satire

  43. Nine months into Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda, the gap between rich and poor pupils has grown 46%

  44. And finally, because no list of abject failure is complete without him, Chris Grayling literally resigned from Intelligence

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You forgot the leaked report from Gove’s office on the possibility of 7000 parked lorries in Kent.

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It’s stuff like this that only highlights why we need the ability to prosecute electoral fraud. Boris Johnson literally won the election of the basis of having a Brexit deal ready to go.

If I were the leader of an opposition party I would make democratic reform the cornerstone of my offer to the public.

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It’s actually getting hilarious now if you really start looking. There’s u-turns and things they were repeatedly warned about all happening.

  • Remember the UK investing in new satellite GPS system? That’s gone. Couldn’t be done.
  • The House of Lords voted down allowing lesser food standards into the UK thus undermining UK farmers and food producers.
  • Bank accounts being closed because the UK government wont agree the terms of financial services with the EU. They basically want to heavily deregulate it so that their Russian friends can continue their money laundering activities.
  • JP Morgan moving huge cash sums to Germany
  • And of course Gove setting the groundwork for blaming businesses for the fact that they will struggle to move products to and from the EU

There will be more I’m sure. But I am a little alarmed at how quietly it’s all coming out.

And of course the biggest challenge to convincing the public that reform is required is convincing people that there’s actually a problem to begin with.