UK Politics Thread (Part 5)

A lot of them do it, we all know it, but clearly some are antagonistic toward Rayner or are they frightened of her, time will tell but the answer looks pretty clear,Kemi is!

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She is worse than a greedy, nest feathering politician. She is a formerly working class, single mum. The Telegraph can’t abide proles at the best of times, but they have special contempt for one that refused to know its place.

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This isn’t really fair. There are definitely some shysters who are in it for themselves, but they are generally in the minority. Most MPs are constituency MPs, the political equivalent of a GP, and the scope for serious shenanigans is narrow.

That applies to MPs from all parties. You may not agree with their politics, but they do try to serve the interests of their constituents.

You have to look at the individual and ask yourself whether they are seeking power or responsibility.

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She plays on the working class single mother and then behaves like an entitled, money grabbing politician. Hypocrcy and I would say fair game.

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Yeah, I probably shouldn’t generalise.
There will be decent hard working ones, trying their best for their constituants.
BUT the ones at the decision making end of the stick are on the whole conniving rats

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Of course she is fair game, and pointing out her extracurricular little earners in the public interest is fine. But I think she gets it worse than any other politician, and a large part of that is down to the sexist and classist nature or organs like the Telegraph. Have they had anything to say about Farage?

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It’s a profession where it’s phenomenally easy to justify compromising one’s principles, and then compromising again, and again. And again. Until you’ve reached the point what you can’t remember what you ever stood for in the first place.

It’s my wife’s subscription I borrow for the record. I have the Times :slight_smile:

Yes they have actually. Lots on his £5m (legal but dodgy as feck) and how Reform would survive without him (not).

It does seem the Regorm bubble has somewhat burst with Star er going and Badenoch looking more the leader.

Hurty words? How about ā€œjust because you’re a fucking ugly, bald cunt with a shit carā€?
Two derogatory references to my appearance and one to my financial situation in one short sentence.
Hurty words doesn’t do it justice. That’s fighting talk between men where I come from, especially when delivered from a few feet away. Except in this case one of us knew there was no jeopardy involved.
And I’d bet my last penny it wasn’t her first rodeo, nor will it be her last. You don’t blow up like that at a complete stranger unless you’re fucking nasty and that’s your nature on display right there. There isn’t a world where my wife or sister would behave like that.
But you think I should just accept that because, what was it, some women are being murdered by their partners? Have you got any idea how pathetic that argument is?
Nobody, fucking nobody, has the right to speak to me like that.

Did I say that? They’re your words, not mine. I didn’t say anything was contingent on anything else.
What the fuck has shouting extremely personal abuse at a stranger in the street got to do with domestic abuse or murder? Another nonsense argument.
I expect to be treated with the same respect I show other people, man or woman, and that’s it.

You tell me to ā€œget some fucking perspectiveā€. You clearly had your own bollocks fed to you a long time ago. You’re a hand-wringer, an apologist for the crimes of the white male. There’s a term for it, vicarious guilt.
As for me,I’ve got fuck all to apologise for. I’ve never abused women either physically or mentally, the same with kids. I never banned women from playing football. I wasn’t involved in the slave trade.
My conscience is clear, I owe nobody an apology for anything and don’t have to attemp to assuage guilt in everyday situations. If you want to go through life loathing what you are that’s on you.

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This could go in any number of threads, however, since the major root cause is political, here will do.

From exactly 1 year ago…

Currently under a hosepipe ban here. Fully acknowledge this pisses me off, but this post is very much about the bigger picture.

Thames Water has imposed a hosepipe ban after a winter where it rained literally EVERY DAY for several months.

If this isn’t the perfect encapsulation of how a capitalist system (throw in a huge dose of NIMBYism, too) ultimately does not give a SINGLE FUCK about humanity’s survival, then I don’t know what is. Coming in closely behind oxygen, water is the most basic human need.

I get why the UK is not best placed to be a global leader in any number of ways, but a lack of water infratsructure is so mind-bendingly stupid I begin to wonder how the British Empire ever got off the ground.

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Yeah what a bellend he is.

I’m so glad you are back after your ban, having used your two days of reflection to conclude that ā€˜yes, actually I do want to dig down on this argument’ :rofl:

So let’s do it properly.

First of all, let’s be clear that if you’ve described is accurate, she is totally in the wrong. Of course she hasn’t got any right to speak to you like that, and of course you’re right to reflect that probably isn’t an isolated issue, from someone with anger management issues.

However if you’d left it there, there wouldn’t have been a problem. I might have noticed the implication in your post that the only reason you didn’t deck this person was that she was a woman, and wonder about your own anger issues. I might have wondered what part you’d played in that flare up. I might have reflected that cars are fucking bastards for making people behave in ways that they wouldn’t ever in real life, (however, I have to say that when I experience people behaving like pricks on the road, 9/10 it’s a man). But none of that would have made me want to reply. What I replied to is the point where you brought violence against women into it.

You said that I said that you should suck it up because some women are being murdered by their partners - that’s not strictly true. You brought the comparison up when you said this.

I mean, that’s literally your quote. And I appreciate you might not understand the implications of an another opinion fired off in typical Jaffod anger, but you are absolutely making one contingent on the other. If women want to raise the issue of male violence (in your words, ram in down your throat) then you should not have to put up with a women (singular) - who in your world seems to now be a spokesperson for their gender - calling you a bald cunt. That is so fucking dripping in ignorance, privilege, self-centredness, and sheer fucking stupidity that it needs calling out.

I’ve been called a bald cunt by clearly disturbed people, and I hate it. It’s one of the last semi-acceptable avenues of appearance based insult. It’s the reason why I took a dim view on people using his baldness to attack Slot last year. But at the end of the day, it’s just words. It’s annoying, and it makes you feel shit, but there is no lasting damage. Last year I politely declined buying a tatty spring of heather from a clearly disturbed woman in the city, who then shouted ā€˜Fuck off then you bald wanker’ after me as I walked away. It wasn’t nice, but I’m happy to say I’ve made a complete recovery from the incident.

(By the way, my instinct was to walk away from someone in a much worse situation that I’ll ever be in, not ā€˜that’s fighting talk between men, and she’s lucky she’s a women’)

And as one last point on this, saying women want ā€˜respect’, is massively understating the issue, and totally mischaracterising what women are calling out. You are demanding a reciprocity of respect, and there is nothing wrong with that at all. If you’d said I don’t shout abuse at people, so I don’t expect people to shout abuse at me, there is no argument there at all. But there is absolutely no comparison between your right to go about your day without being called a bald cunt, and a women’s right to go about their day without being raped or murdered.

I don’t know. You brought it up.

Great. That’s what you should have said originally, and you wouldn’t have ended up getting yourself banned.

And there’s the toxic masculinity, right there. Because I’ve an awareness of the scale and impact of male violence towards women, and a desire to call it out, I’ve had ā€˜my bollocks fed to me’. Brilliant stuff.

I am proudly an apologist for the crimes of men, because those crimes cannot be dismissed as ā€˜a few bad apples’, or waved away with blithe ā€˜not all men’ attitude, and it’s absolutely correct to want to be part of the solution. And your attitude of ā€˜well I’ve never done anything wrong, so stop bothering me’ is part of the problem. 20% of women will be the victims of sexual violence. That isn’t trivial, as we see time and time again, given power and opportunity, a fuck of a lot of men will behave abhorrently towards women.

And nobody is saying you should. But just to be clear again, the point at which I stepped in was not to demand you apologise to women for abuse that you haven’t perpetrated - it was to point out the jaw-dropping lack of awareness that led you to disregard the problem of male sexual and physical violence towards many, many women, because one women called you a bald cunt.

Acknowledging a problem within a group that you are part of is not self-loathing. In the same way that patriotism doesn’t mean you ignore all the faults of your country.

There have been plenty of times I’ve found myself walking along a quiet-ish road, and noticed a women ahead of me, taking evasive measures (like crossing over, or speeding up, or one one occasion I noticed she’d put her keys between her fingers). One reaction to that is to get angry and indignant at what she is assuming I’m capable of. How dare she act as if I’m a problem.

However a more rationale response is to understand that while it isn’t all men, it’s still a fuck of a lot of men, and assault is common enough that it’s a matter of simple self-preservation for women in that situation to proceed on the basis that every man walking behind her is a potential attacker. A million women were estimated to have being sexually assaulted last year.

So while you are not being asked to apologise for this, you are being asked to acknowledge the problem, be part of the solution, and certainly don’t suggest women’s right to demand better of men should be contingent on you never having to put up with the indignity of a random women calling you a name.

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I get the Telegraph daily email briefing, just because I find it interesting to see what they are up to (mostly obsessing about Alzheimer’s and Property) but I think there is a pronounced tonal difference in how they report on Raynor and Farage. With Raynor there is a much more judgemental, handwringing editorial tone than Farage, who gets a more factual, news based approach.

They can’t just totally ignore Farage, because it’s a huge story. But what I’ve read has been a grudging acknowledgment of the story, with opinion and comment limited to what he needs to do next, his he’ll survive etc. With Raynor, it’s all about what it tells us about the moral decline of the left and the Labour Party.

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I just saw this news:

UK’s iconic Jodrell Bank telescope faces axe in science cuts

The funding body, the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) agency, said it had to focus investment on projects that deliver ā€œthe greatest long-term impactā€.

This seems massively short sighted for a very small saving (Ā£2.8million). I think it’s the ā€œlong term impactā€ phrase which I picked out, because this sounds like they are looking for research with commercial return, whereas Jodrell Bank and similar facilities tend to do fundamental research which is for the benefit of all mankind. It sounds very similar to the development grant debacle that resulted in projects in London and the South-East getting priority over the rest of the country.

However, I think this could be a massive miscalculation. The huge Lovell Telescope is a Grade I listed building which means someone, probably a government body, will be left with a massive white elephant to maintain. It’s probably much cheaper to keep it in service as a functional scientific instrument.

I’m interested to see what Andy Burnham has to say about it.

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We need a new world class observatory. In Manchester.

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But they have one… in Cheshire.

By coincidence this article dropped into my inbox today.

How the Glorious Revolution crushed the NIMBYs

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There’s far too much in there to respond to so I wont bother, we’d just be going round in circles and a lot of it would be nit-picking and splitting hairs. I also think we’ve both mis-interpreted certain things but that happens and again, I’m not going to go into it for the same reasons. That’s not to say I disagree with everything you’ve written, just that it’s clear we don’t see eye to eye on most things.
The only thing I want to make absolutely clear is I wasn’t suggesting at any point that not being violent towards women was contingent on them behaving themselves. That wasn’t my intention at all.

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:roll_eyes:

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(srsly, great read…ta)

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