General Election 2019

[Dr Arthur De Sabre]

1 hour ago, Pistonbroke said:

 

In conjunction with the licence fee in danger of being scrapped. Have the BBC changed tact all of a sudden and told her to get in line? 

 

1 hour ago, Dougie Do'ins said:

With two days to go until the election,  the BBC damage is done. Any change of tact now is to little to late. 

change of tack lads, it's a nautical term, don't want to upset popeye @Bjornebye now.

[Strontium]

12 minutes ago, viRdjil said:

Remember when you expressed your bafflement that I wouldn’t take @CCHQ or the Daily Mail as a trusted source of info?

 

No, I don't remember that at all, because it didn't happen.

 

It's getting somewhat exhausting having to explain everything to you as I would a child, but here we go again.

 

What I actually said was that just because a source was biased (and my source was neither CCHQ or the Mail), this does not make everything it says untrue.

 

Such a thing ought to be self-evidentially obvious, but this is the third time I've had to spoon-feed an explanation to you, and something tells me it won't be the last.

 

Even the likes of Skwawkbox and The Canary have been known to post accurate stories from time to time. Amazing but true.

[aRdja]

19 minutes ago, Strontium Dog™ said:

 

No, I don't remember that at all, because it didn't happen.

 

It's getting somewhat exhausting having to explain everything to you as I would a child, but here we go again.

 

What I actually said was that just because a source was biased (and my source was neither CCHQ or the Mail), this does not make everything it says untrue.

 

Such a thing ought to be self-evidentially obvious, but this is the third time I've had to spoon-feed an explanation to you, and something tells me it won't be the last.

 

Even the likes of Skwawkbox and The Canary have been known to post accurate stories from time to time. Amazing but true.

Please keep it civil SD, I’ve always been respectful towards you (and everyone I disagree with). I was trying to give you a clearer picture as to the reason behind my skepticism wrt news or information coming out of Tory volunteers, The Sun, or the Daily Mail. Hope you’re not as ‘baffled’ next time, when I ask for a better source than @CCHQ.

[Spy Bee]

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/dec/10/thousands-of-patients-die-waiting-for-beds-in-hospitals-study

 

Thousands of patients die waiting for beds in hospitals – study

Doctors’ report finds 5,449 deaths since 2016 followed delayed admission to A&E

[Strontium]

19 minutes ago, viRdjil said:

Please keep it civil SD, I’ve always been respectful towards you (and everyone I disagree with). I was trying to give you a clearer picture as to the reason behind my skepticism wrt news or information coming out of Tory volunteers, The Sun, or the Daily Mail. Hope you’re not as ‘baffled’ next time, when I ask for a better source than @CCHQ.

 

I think I was amazingly civil, giving your repeated false accusations towards me. Even now, you're still insisting my source was CCHQ, when it wasn't. And the reference to The Sun, a source I wouldn't even think of citing, is clearly inflammatory.

[Red Phoenix]

Guido has leaked a recording of Ashworth and he's then gone on the BBC with one of the most cringeworthy interviews I've ever seen. Properly office/partridge like. Tories have got the day off to a good start with this.

 

 

[aRdja]

3 minutes ago, Strontium Dog™ said:

 

I think I was amazingly civil, giving your repeated false accusations towards me. Even now, you're still insisting my source was CCHQ, when it wasn't. And the reference to The Sun, a source I wouldn't even think of citing, is clearly inflammatory.

Lol. It’s like our conversation the other day didn’t happen. Oh well.. 

[Strontium]

Just now, viRdjil said:

Lol. It’s like our conversation the other day didn’t happen. Oh well.. 

 

Yes, isn't it just.

[clockspeed]

5 minutes ago, Red Phoenix said:

Guido has leaked a recording of Ashworth and he's then gone on the BBC with one of the most cringeworthy interviews I've ever seen. Properly office/partridge like. Tories have got the day off to a good start with this.

 

 

Tories will keep this up front all day . Cons going to win tick , Brexit bad for labour tick, Corbyn not liked tick, Corbyn a national security risk tick. Oh and it was leaked by a long standing Tory friend. This from the guy who should be pushing the NHS  today . Pathetic whatever happens needs binning.

[Brownie]

7 minutes ago, Red Phoenix said:

Guido has leaked a recording of Ashworth and he's then gone on the BBC with one of the most cringeworthy interviews I've ever seen. Properly office/partridge like. Tories have got the day off to a good start with this.

 

 

What a bellend.

 

Politicians eh.

[Red Phoenix]

With all the focus on the NHS and this could've been the guy in charge of it too, it's almost like he's been picked out deliberately because of that. Not that it isn't his own fault too, what a fucking clown.

[Red Phoenix]

He's back on the BBC shortly too :

 

 

[Bjornebye]

You don't half have to question the logic of allowing idiots like that a public platform to make a show of themselves. The Tories have had it with James Cleverly on question time nearly every week. Its got to the point with him where I reckon they are just throwing him on for a wind-up. 

[Mudface]

Getting really dirty this.

 

Woman says account hacked to post fake story about hospital boy
Post falsely claimed mother of four-year-old sleeping on hospital floor had staged photo

 

Despite the claim being acknowledged as false, it has continued to spread on Facebook and Twitter. Photograph: Denis Charlet/AFP via Getty Images


A false online story that the photograph of an ill boy lying on the floor of Leeds General infirmary was staged came from a hacked account, according to the medical secretary whose name was attached to the initial post.

 

The woman, whose name the Guardian is withholding because she says she has received death threats since the post was made, denied posting the allegation that four-year-old Jack Willment-Barr’s mother placed him on the floor specifically to take the picture, which was on the front page of Monday’s Daily Mirror.

 

“I was hacked. I am not a nurse and I certainly don’t know anyone in Leeds,” the woman told the Guardian. “I’ve had to delete everything as I have had death threats to myself and my children.”


She said she had tried to report the hack of her Facebook account to Action Fraud.

 

The row over Jack’s treatment has become a central part of the election campaign, with Boris Johnson being criticised for repeatedly refusing to look at the photograph he was shown by a journalist during an interview on Monday.

 

Despite the claim that the photo was staged having been acknowledged as false, it has continued to spread on both Facebook and Twitter, largely through individual low-follower accounts cutting and pasting the original text to share with their friends.

 

One version, posted by a man who claims to work for the British Army’s intelligence corps, has received 2,000 shares on Facebook; another, from a self-professed former soldier, has received a further 500.

 

The same claim was shared on Twitter, where it was spread by much more significant accounts. The Telegraph columnist Alison Pearson retweeted screenshots of the Facebook page to her followers twice, telling them “I presume this is genuine”, and adding later that the photo was “100% faked”. Her posts have received thousands of retweets between them.

 

According to the researcher Marc Owen Jones, Pearson is “perhaps the most influential proponent of the faked floor theory”, although a tweet from the former England cricketer Kevin Pietersen sent to Piers Morgan may have been seen by more people as a one-off.

 

While many of the users who initially posted the claims to Twitter shared it with identical wording, there is little indication that the false narrative is being artificially boosted by automated accounts.

 

Twitter metadata shows that the vast majority of the tweets were posted through the social network’s website or smartphone apps, and the accounts sharing them overwhelmingly appear to be those of real people with an interest in politics.

 

Despite claims of a staged photo, Leeds General infirmary has confirmed that Jack did suffer due to an exceptionally busy week.

 

“Our hospitals are extremely busy at the moment and we are very sorry that Jack’s family had a long wait in our emergency department,” said Dr Yvette Oade, the chief medical officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS trust.

 

“We are extremely sorry that there were only chairs available in the treatment room, and no bed. This falls below our usual high standards, and for this we would like to sincerely apologise to Jack and his family.”

[Brownie]

Just reading the transcript of the Ashworth stuff and he describes Labour as “them”. WTF?

[Anubis]

George Monbiot in The Guardian

 

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/10/break-embargo-expose-press-lies-labour?__twitter_impression=true

 

 

One of the golden rules of journalism is that you don’t break an embargo – a block on publication until a certain date. For the first time in my career, I’m breaking one now. The moral case for doing so outweighs the moral case for respecting it.

 

For five months the press regulator, Ipso, which was set up by British newspapers, has been considering a complaint that could play a role in this election. It concerns an outrageous lie about the Labour party first published by the Mail on Sunday and repeated many times by other newspapers and the Conservative party.

 

Two weeks ago, Ipso ruled against the paper, and imposed a major sanction. The Mail on Sunday asked for a review of the decision, delaying its publication.

 

 As far as voters are concerned, the lie stands. A key claim used to tip the balance against Labour remains uncorrected

The review upheld the decision, but it still hasn’t been published. So, as far as voters are concerned, the lie stands. A key claim used to tip the balance against Labour remains uncorrected. I owe more to the truth than I do to the embargo.

 

Last summer, I co-published a report to the Labour party titled Land for the Many. It took many months of work, drawing on a vast range of sources and expertise, to produce radical but realistic ideas for changing the way we use our most important resource. We worked hard to make our arguments as watertight as possible. We needn’t have bothered, because our opponents scarcely addressed them.

 

The storm of lies about our report in the billionaire press gave me an idea of what it must be like to be a Labour politician. Pushing back against them all would be a fulltime job for several people. But we decided to confront one of them in the hope that it might illuminate the others. The Mail on Sunday turned our independent report for the Labour party into “bombshell plans being drawn up by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn”, then told an outright lie about what it contained.

 

We proposed, it said, “to scrap the capital gains tax exemption on main homes”. At the moment, if you sell the house or flat in which you live, you don’t pay capital gains tax on the profit you might make. We examined the case for changing this, explained the arguments for and against, then clearly and specifically rejected the idea. But who cares, if you can terrify the living daylights out of your readership, convincing them that Corbyn is the spawn of Satan?

 

As if to suggest that such lies are organised with the Conservative party, the article quoted Boris Johnson, who claimed “this mad ‘tax on all your houses’ would cripple every Brit who owns or wants to own their own home”. The lie was picked up on social media by other senior Conservatives, and has been used repeatedly in the party’s campaign materials, websites and Facebook pages. It was reproduced by most of the other billionaire papers, and continues to be circulated. Just last week, an article by Tom Newton Dunn in the Sun claimed that Labour was considering a “movers tax”, “scrapping the capital gains exemption on main homes”. The false claim has now been deeply implanted in people’s minds: Labour is coming for your home.

 

One of the authors of our report, Anna Powell-Smith, made a complaint to Ipso. Had she not been determined, she might have been defeated by a process that seems designed to deter. For much of the five months this has taken to resolve, the newspaper, with its vastly greater resources, was allowed to bombard her with Johnsonian arguments, or offer tiny clarifications on a remote page. It was time-consuming and intimidating. Most people are likely to have given up or accepted a meaningless concession. Watching this process, I came to the conclusion that Ipso is not fit for purpose.

 

Even so, it eventually bowed to the inevitable. This is a rare victory against the billionaire press, but it would count for nothing if buried until the election is over. Anyone who wants a better world finds themselves at war with the exceedingly rich people who own the media and the editors and journalists they employ. The pen might be mightier than the sword, but the wallet is mightier than the pen. News is the propaganda of the oligarch. Are we prepared to allow the proprietors of the newspapers, many of whom live offshore, to determine the course of our politics?

 

The rewards for political lying are massive: they include winning referendums and elections. The penalties are either nonexistent or tiny. If the Conservative party is sanctioned by the Electoral Commission for any of its outrageous lying and cheating, it might, long after the election, have to pay the maximum fine of £20,000, which a friendly billionaire could doubtless pull out of his back pocket.

 

If elections are won by lies, we find ourselves governed by liars. They won’t hesitate to ramp up their deceptions when in office. One focus is likely to be voter suppression. Already the Conservatives, learning from Republican tricks in the US, have floated the idea that people must bring photo ID to the polling booths. They know that 3.5 million people, few of whom are likely to vote Conservative, don’t possess it.

 

The old adages – cheats never prosper, the truth will out, virtue always triumphs – are themselves falsehoods. But, futile as it often seems, one-sided as the war between truth and falsehood always is, we must fight the tide of lies. Don’t let them win this week.

[Champ]

3 hours ago, Jairzinho said:

I'd imagine the BBC wanted to appear "balanced" by, essentially, choosing an unrepresentative selection of 18-30s. That said, they were still considerably less idiotic than the usual Question Time audience.

 

[Aventus]

 

 

 

[Red Phoenix]

Ashworth was a fucking shambles on politics live before they eventually started talking about the NHS where he finally got back to himself a bit. Tories have really played a blinder with him though, I can't stand the bastards but to set him up like that just after what happened yesterday is pretty amazing really, especially with him being the shadow health secretary.

 

One guest on there (Iain Dale) said he hoped Ashworth was going to be on LBC later I think so he's got another round to get through as well.

 

Looks like he's going to have to be replaced though if Corbyn stays leader when you have shit like this from The Guardian/transcript of the leak :

 

He says Labour MPs opposed to Corbyn made a mistake in 2016 when they tried to depose him too early. Asked about what Labour MPs might do to get rid of Corbyn, he says: "We fucked it up. We fucked it up in 2016 when we went too early. People like me were internally saying ‘this isn’t the right moment’ but I got ignored."

 

 

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

I'm getting an increasing sense of dread that that Thursday night exit poll is going to be fairly horiffic and that in that very moment it pops up on my TV screen I'll feel that overwhelming sense of nausea and resignation that I felt when Sakho's pass slid under Gerrard's foot to a waiting Demba Ba. 

[Guest Pistonbroke]

https://www.sunderlandecho.com/news/politics/if-election-was-match-id-have-probably-been-sent-ex-sunderland-boss-peter-reids-explosive-election-rant-1336760?fbclid=IwAR3ksCR7iinejY80WpYNM70tBD_vgdb0tQ2Uu0JsQAp2Ayu0Ic1bPVRs9ZI

 

'If this election was a match, I’d have probably been sent off' - Ex-Sunderland boss Peter Reid's explosive election rant

Former Sunderland boss Peter Reid has warned voters against supporting the Brexit Party or Conservatives in the General Election.

 

Speaking as both the Prime Minister and Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage visited the North East, Reid accused Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson of lying and tricking the people of the region.

And he warns that a vote for the Brexit Party or Conservative is ‘not just an own goal, it’s self-relegation.’

Peter Reid said: “If this election was a match, I’d have probably been sent off.

 

“There is no way I could stay on the touchline and watch the good people of Sunderland or Sedgefield or the wider North East be lied to and tricked by the likes of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.”

 

Backing local candidates who are calling for a second referendum; Phil Wilson in Sedgefield, as well as Bridget Philipson and Julie Elliot in Sunderland; the former England international continued: “There’s a statue next to the Stadium of Light.

“A working-class man in a flat clap, a woman wearing a scarf and two children reaching for a ball.

“No top hat and tails. No sign of privilege. No Eton scarf or Bullingdon Club cravat.

"But a placard saying today’s fans represent those past and those who will follow.

“It’s the same this election.

“How people vote on Thursday impacts on the lives of kids following.

“You vote Tory or Brexit Party then you take opportunity away from kids of the North East, you vote to make the poorest poorer, you vote to put our NHS in the sweaty hands of Donald Trump.

“It’s not just an own goal, it’s self-relegation.”

The Conservatives have categorically denied that the NHS will be part of any trade discussions throughout the election campaign.

His comments come as PM Boris Johnson visited Sunderland in a bid to gather support in the final week of the election campaign.

Mr Johnson has told voters in leave-voting Labour heartlands that they had been ‘betrayed’ by Labour over Brexit.

However in a direct message to voters, Mr Reid said: “Johnson is not your mate. Ex-Tory Farage is not your mate.

“They just want your votes. And are hoping to sell us a pup twice.

“First it was on the side of a big red bus, now it’s promises of 50,000 nurses which turns out to be 31,000 or 40 new hospitals that turn out to be six.

“Johnson said working class men ‘are likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless.’ He thinks he can get away with it.

“Well, I've a message for Boris Johnson.

“The people who shouted us on to promotion twice and finishing seventh twice, were none of those things.

“They were smart, honest people full of hope.”

“As am I. Which is why I hope people will vote for Phil Wilson in Sedgefield or Bridget Phillipson and Julie Elliott in Sunderland.

“People from the area who know its values, who have been there through good times and bad, and who genuinely care about the people of the North East - not just their votes.”

The full list of candidates in Sedgefield are; David Bull, The Brexit Party; John Furness, Green Party; Paul Howell, Conservative and Unionist Party; Mike Joyce, Independent; Dawn Elizabeth Welsh, Liberal Democrats; Phil Wilson, Labour.

The full list of candidates in Houghton and Sunderland South are; Richard Peter Bradley, Green Party; Paul Edgeworth, Liberal Democrats; Richard Elvin, UK Independence Party (UKIP); Christopher John Charles Howarth,

Conservative and Unionist Party; Bridget Phillipson, Labour Party; Kevin Yuill, The Brexit Party.

The full list of candidates in Sunderland Central are; Tom D'Silva, Conservative and Unionist Party; Julie Elliott, Labour Party; Rachel Featherstone, Green Party; Niall Hodson, Liberal Democrats; Dale McKenzie, Independent; Viral Parikh, The Brexit Party.

[ZonkoVille77]

 

[Brownie]

The fella in Twitter who got the result right in 2017, based on analysis of the polling data, has adjusted his predictions.

 

He has the Tories 4.45% ahead in the polls, which he says means a hung parliament.

[skend04]

12 minutes ago, Brownie said:

The fella in Twitter who got the result right in 2017, based on analysis of the polling data, has adjusted his predictions.

 

He has the Tories 4.45% ahead in the polls, which he says means a hung parliament.

Think anything around 6% or so is hung parliament territory. But we all know there's plenty of shy cunts who will tick "Tory" at the ballot box. Most voters can't remember or haven't experienced a decent Tory majority, they're about to get a taste of what it's all about in 3 days time.

[Bjornebye]

15 minutes ago, Brownie said:

The fella in Twitter who got the result right in 2017, based on analysis of the polling data, has adjusted his predictions.

 

He has the Tories 4.45% ahead in the polls, which he says means a hung parliament.

If only it meant we could hang the bastards.