Dogs of war and men of hate
With no cause, we don’t discriminate
Discovery is to be disowned
Our currency is flesh and bone
Hell opened up and put on sale
Gather 'round and haggle
For hard cash, we will lie and deceive
Even our masters don’t know the webs we weave
One world, it’s a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world … One world
Invisible transfers, long distance calls
Hollow laughter in marble halls
Steps have been taken, a silent uproar
Has unleashed the dogs of war
You can’t stop what has begun
Signed, sealed, they deliver oblivion
We all have a dark side, to say the least
And dealing in death is the nature of the beast
One world, it’s a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world … One world
(One world)
(One world)
The dogs of war don’t negotiate
The dogs of war won’t capitulate
They will take and you will give
And you must die so that they may live
You can knock at any door
But wherever you go, you know they’ve been there before
Well winners can lose and things can get strained
But whatever you change, you know the dogs remain
One world, it’s a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world … One world
I see she has been banned from standing.
I think she is an incredible woman. Has endured more abuse than any other politician, and a huge part of this is racism, whether conscious or unconscious.
She’s a far stronger human being that any of the keyboard warriors/wankers that mock her
I mean there are some things that she has said that I really disagree with but I disagree with what she has said, based on data that indicate what she has said is wrong. That’s a difference of opinion.
However, the level of abuse that has been aimed at her is off the scale. It is all personal abuse and applied to her in a way that is unlike any other politician. In fact, it was so much that when a report was done into online abuse, they had to exclude Abbott from these overall assessment because she completely skewed the statistics:
Interestingly, my former MP was one of the other most abused MPs: an ethnic minority woman. Do you see a patten here? I found the worst element of that case was Scottish Labour members calling for people to vote for the Conservative candidate to get her out. That is something that I will never forgive them for.
It’s incredibly shocking to realise how much hate there is out there, how twisted and sick so many people are. What has happened to produce this outpouring of bile? Why do so many people hate others because of their skin colour or gender? How can we get out of this spiral?
Make social media companies responsible for what they are publishing?
I’m sure that a lot of what of what I’ve seen aimed at Abbott comes under hate crime laws anyway: Death threats, racist memes (morphing her face to look like a gorilla etc).
At the same time, you have a government that promotes policies to carry out performative cruelty against whoever they think that week’s scapegoats are: migrants to Rwanda, teenages to National Service etc.
It’s going to be difficult to close the social media Pandora‘s box.
Some accountability for what is posted would be a start, if it can be enforced.
SM isn’t the only cause of this phenomenon though, there are other factors involved. The press, and politicians themselves have fostered this atmosphere.
Do politicians really need Twitter though? Would it be impossible to do the job without it?
It will be, but it is that. Also, its part of the hybrid warfare - to exploit the openness of western societies. To create ever widening social rifts. A lot of it is Russia/NK/China meme bots
It’s not quite a cut and dried as this. Starmer is denying he has banned her from standing. It’s probably quite a simple one for him to navigate. He just needs to say it’s up to the local party to select their candidate.
I agree on the abuse thing. And Diane Abbott is pretty close politically my own views.
However she is also guilty of saying some phenomenally stupid things, and making some very crass generalisations; especially about Race.
I don’t believe that she is antisemitic, but much like Corbyn has often mistakenly shared platforms and found common cause with people who are.
Sunak lying and talking shit.
Starmer talking about how shit the Tories are and generic shit about ‘change’, with no specific plans or hope, other than getting the rid of shit Tories.
We could do better than that surely, how about the back of Richard Hammond’s car or a minefield or sitting next to an emergency exit on a Boeing plane?
The top 5% are nowhere close to ‘mega-rich’. I don’t know the UK data, but I am confident that you would be startled to see what the distribution looks like. The difference between the top 5%, 1%, and 0.1% in most G8 countries is staggering. At a guess, the top 5% in the UK is probably somewhere around £90k per year income, which is a comfortable income, but would you even call it rich?
She is an obviously intelligent woman. Her accent is not ‘polished’, but I for one assume arrogant incompetence when I hear the polished accent of RP - and the assumption generally holds up. I cannot say I have ever read anything she has written, but my understanding is that she was streamed at an early age into whatever the UK now calls the inferior tier of education, and did not even finish that. The UK has been led into a really dire situation by people who can speak and write in the polished fashion, and now needs genuinely tough people to dig it out. I know I could not stand her politics, but the way she sounds has very little to do with that.
He has run off Corbyn, appears to be running off Abbott, and all while being out of office. Once he has actual power, there is no way the Labour Party will touch him for years. If anything, he appears to be orders of magnitude more ruthless than his public persona.
I am not sure what point you were trying to make, but the way I read it was you don’t like the way she sounds (or writes). What were you trying to get at with ‘hardly speak’?
Some googled results showed that the top fifth (top 20%) gross income is 120K and they earn 36% of the UK total income. So you can imagine the top 5% would be pretty much better off than the 120K. Of course, like you mentioned, I believe the top 1% would be ridiculously well off. I think a big issue is not this segment of the households. The problems UK I believe would have is even a big chunk (again some googled results) of almost 35% of middle income households are struggling to make ends meet. This could be due to personal indiscretion or it could also indeed a result of inapt government policies for this segment of households.
In Singapore we have a very small percentage of households that are classified below middle income and has a huge middle income households. But that presents another headache, because while its “easy” to find policies for the top tier and bottom tier households i.e. increase tax for top tier, have more assistance for the bottom tier. The middle income however gets neglected as a result, in fact some of the middle income households become less well off than the bottom tier because they just about exceeded the threshold for any assistance.
So maybe in the UK, they really got to find money to help the middle income earners. Because these people have shown they want to work and its down to the government then to find a short term solution to prop them up and not to have to worry about short term needed and in the long term, to help them elevate their earnings through skill upgrades or other relevant policies. And that money has to come from somewhere. It might not entirely come from taxing the rich because you also do not want to entirely drive the rich away but surely, the rich has to pay more to a country that gave them a platform to be rich. I know the tax in the UK is already very high compared to what we pay here but I think plenty of the rich gets around these taxes with plenty of loopholes? So I think those are the people that need to be clamped down and make them pay what they need to pay.
All valid points, but when he is in power, and it becomes obvious the “being less shit than the Tories” novelty has worn off, there’s every possibility that his party will become disgruntled when the man with no plan shows he has no plan.