Is it time to start to question what's really happening?

[VladimirIlyich]

Sorry Bruce but why are you surprised? This is the tory party and their whole creation was to look after the wealthy at the expense of everything else. It's what they've always done and will continue to do so.Nothing surprises me any more,even the stupidity and ignorance of the British public is not a surprise at all.

[Gnasher]

18 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

One of the most chilling things he's ever seen? He mustn't get out much, I was expecting him to get cracked or something but they basically just walk him to a van. Don't know what the backstory is but is he insinuating that you can't arrest someone if they're old? 

I think it's the police overkill to protect the state that's chilling. The two big issues of the next decade will be climate change and the rebellion against authoratian governments who protect the rich/poor divide. You saw the outcry when Mavis couldn't read the daily mail. Pital has thrown the gauntlet over the so called interruption of the press, any threat will be stamped and the police will be used to do the stamping.

[Gnasher]

16 minutes ago, Rico1304 said:

It’s from Craig Murray who’s 20 mins from being David Icke. 

Nonsense. He was a British ambassador not a goalie for Norwich.

[Section_31]

9 minutes ago, Gnasher said:

I think it's the police overkill to protect the state that's chilling. The two big issues of the next decade will be climate change and the rebellion against authoratian governments who protect the rich/poor divide. You saw the outcry when Mavis couldn't read the daily mail. Pital has thrown the gauntlet over the so called interruption of the press, any threat will be stamped and the police will be used to do the stamping.

That'll be their undoing. The public are more susceptible to soft power than they are to being shoved around, which they stubbornly and instinctively buck.

 

The twin arms of fascism are terror and propaganda, they're too lazy and thick to now properly pull off propaganda, and the state has been hollowed out and sold off to the point there probably aren't enough coppers and soldiers to do their bidding anyway. 

 

Country feels like a tinder box and has done for a while, wouldn't take much IMO.

[Colonel Bumcunt]

This all falls apart over Christmas.

Any shortage of food, any change to the normal British Christmas experience, anything shit, and the worm will turn at speed.  

You can see the moderate Tories getting louder, some of the right wing press are starting to think this is mad, and obviously they don't want a Labour government but it might lead to Johnson falling, as it's the only way of ousting Cummings. 

 

I think the Machiavelli behind all of it is Gove.  He's the one that needs to get caught with his hand in the till, he's the power-broker who opts for the backseat Duchy of Lancaster role, but he's the one who brought Cummings back in, who get him involved in the Leave campaign, who worked with him in his early days in the Dept for Education.  He knows where the bodies are buried.  

 

Even now, with the bombs going off all around, he's not seen at the epicentre of any of it, he's just 'around', hanging out of shot, but constantly pulling strings. 

 

And when the time comes, he will pull the lever and throw Johnson under the wheels of the bus, and Cummings will also slide into the shadows, and Gove will step forward and pretend it's all a new dawn for the Tories. 

 

  

[Elite]

I don't worry about all this kind of stuff as there's nothing you can do to change it. Apart from not voting for the cunts, what else can you do? And even elections are the illusion of choice.

[Gnasher]

2 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

That'll be their undoing. The public are more susceptible to soft power than they are to being shoved around, which they stubbornly and instinctively buck.

 

The twin arms of fascism are terror and propaganda, they're too lazy and thick to now properly pull off propaganda, and the state has been hollowed out and sold off to the point there probably aren't enough coppers and soldiers to do their bidding anyway. 

 

Country feels like a tinder box and has done for a while, wouldn't take much IMO.

I hope so, brexit could rebound on them, the greed they are showing in making money on hedge funds is off the scale. The public will be disappointed when the way it is played does not provide the results they hoped for.  The kids will hopefully ask questions on the government and media over climate change plus the obvious oncoming recession will be badly  managed by these clowns.

[Section_31]

2 minutes ago, Elite said:

I don't worry about all this kind of stuff as there's nothing you can do to change it. Apart from not voting for the cunts, what else can you do? And even elections are the illusion of choice.

Yeah that's my Mrs's take and I envy her, she's got great mental health, I lie awake at night thinking about American politics and it gives me a bad arse.

[Gnasher]

7 minutes ago, Elite said:

I don't worry about all this kind of stuff as there's nothing you can do to change it. Apart from not voting for the cunts, what else can you do? And even elections are the illusion of choice.

I dont know, it only took a handful of protesters to block the papers getting out, imagine if the mail and sun were both blocked for say a month before an election or blocked often enough it was not worth the effort them publishing?  They are a cancer which is there to by attacked and the kids are on it 

 

The over the top response told it's own story.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/04/extinction-rebellion-block-roads-to-murdoch-paper-print-sites

[Elite]

Just now, Section_31 said:

Yeah that's my Mrs's take and I envy her, she's got great mental health, I lie awake at night thinking about American politics and it gives me a bad arse.

To me, it's just wasted head space. Worry about things you can change or just fill your head with irrational shit like helicopters crashing into your house.

[Rico1304]

20 minutes ago, Gnasher said:

I hope so, brexit could rebound on them, the greed they are showing in making money on hedge funds is off the scale. The public will be disappointed when the way it is played does not provide the results they hoped for.  The kids will hopefully ask questions on the government and media over climate change plus the obvious oncoming recession will be badly  managed by these clowns.

What the fuck? So you are pivoting from Brexit being good, to it bringing down the Tories?

 

You predicted the Tories splitting apart at least once before. 
 

fucking idiot. 

[Rico1304]

12 minutes ago, Elite said:

To me, it's just wasted head space. Worry about things you can change or just fill your head with irrational shit like helicopters crashing into your house.

That’s what I do. Then one night I was out in Glasgow. 

[Gnasher]

25 minutes ago, Rico1304 said:

What the fuck? So you are pivoting from Brexit being good, to it bringing down the Tories?

 

You predicted the Tories splitting apart at least once before. 
 

fucking idiot. 

Your the only cunt here who voted for a tory party who offered a referendum to leave the uk you fucking clueless clown.

[Mudface]

11 minutes ago, Gnasher said:

Your the only cunt here who voted for a tory party who offered a referendum to leave the uk you fucking clueless clown.

Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop ignoring your posts. You honestly must be the stupidest bastard that ever lived.

[Rico1304]

9 minutes ago, Gnasher said:

Your the only cunt here who voted for a tory party who offered a referendum to leave the uk you fucking clueless clown.

Jesus. I voted for the Tories as it benefited me. And it did for a long time. 
 

I voted against Brexit because I couldn’t see any benefit, not only to me, but to the U.K.  it made no sense then, it makes absolutely no sense now. So I was right. 

 

The referendum was for everyone, your pal Jeremy wanted it too so you can’t blame Tories for it happening. 

[Bruce Spanner]

2 hours ago, VladimirIlyich said:

Sorry Bruce but why are you surprised? This is the tory party and their whole creation was to look after the wealthy at the expense of everything else. It's what they've always done and will continue to do so.Nothing surprises me any more,even the stupidity and ignorance of the British public is not a surprise at all.

You missed the point.

 

Im saying we’re ambling towards the unknown, these are not Tories, they’re worse, and what they’re doing is genuinely deplorable and dangerous, that was the point.

 

This is worse, this is on the verge of something very dark.

[Gnasher]

37 minutes ago, Mudface said:

Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop ignoring your posts. You honestly must be the stupidest bastard that ever lived.

From a cunt who calls himself mudface.

[Vincent Vega]

Good opinion piece in The Guardian today on this theme.

 

The Tories aren't incompetent on the economy – they know exactly what they are doing

David Edgerton

This Brexiter government is pursuing its political goal, whatever the economic cost. Its predecessors did the same
 

“There is no alternative” was the mantra of British politics from the 1980s to the very recent past. To bring about change it was necessary to unleash enterprise, or globalisation, or technology. Politics was about staying out of the economy, and coping with the social consequences. But there always was an alternative – it is just that the loudest voices denied it. As Adam Tooze has noted, the state never left the economy, it just changed its role, and its visibility. Since the 1980s the economy has been actively reshaped by a series of political-economic decisions by successive activist governments.

 

Over the years, the aims of British political-economic policy have changed. Once, the main concerns were the national rate of growth, the national balance of trade, reducing inequalities within the boundaries of the nation, and strengthening the nation compared with others. Since the 1980s, and by these measures, things have not got better. Neither under Thatcher nor under New Labour, let alone more recently, did the UK achieve the rates of GDP growth of the 1950s and 1960s. Since the 1980s the balance of trade has stayed systematically worse than in the 1950s or 1960s. In relation to goods it is at the previously unthinkable level of -6% of GDP.

Nor has the acquiescence to the supposed necessities of economic realism transformed the UK’s relative position. The levels of efficiency of the British economy are still lower than those of France and Germany, to roughly the same extent as in the 1970s. The UK manufactures less than Italy and France, and a third of what Germany does. Germany exports much more outside the EU than the UK, and, deliciously, its exports to the Canzuk countries (the fantasy potential British superpower of the dimmest Brexiters: Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK) are twice UK levels. The English north is poorer than the regions that used to make up communist East Germany, and the north-east is poorer than the poorest German province.

 

Nor has the new post-national economy thrown up transforming British entrepreneurs and firms. Where are the world-beating British firms to replace the supposedly dozy giants of past? There was lots of talk of startups and venture capital and all the rest. But after 40 years, where are the results? When pressed for examples of great entrepreneurs, I get given the same tedious list of an operator of airlines and railways, a maker of vacuum cleaners, a pizza chain owner and the designer of Apple phones.

 

And then there is ARM (which makes the crucial chips used in Apple phones and elsewhere, which was sold to the Japanese Softbank in 2016) – indeed a successful firm, but one with origins in the despised 1970s, perhaps the last moment of serious British creativity. Note too that British R&D was higher as a proportion of GDP in the 1970s than it is today. It was higher still in the early 1960s.

 

The object of political-economic policy since the 1980s has not been to make a better British national economy. It has been directed at changing the balance of power in the country, to open the economy up to the world, essentially to make the rich richer and more powerful. The Thatcher revolution was fundamentally a rulers’ revolt.

 

While inequality of all kinds was driven down by policy in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, it was pushed back up by policy from the 1980s. Similarly regional disparities, which had been huge before 1939, were reduced after the war. In the post-war years the state transformed infrastructure, from electricity to the telephone, from gas to housing, to an astonishing degree. Since the 1980s these public assets have been privatised, handed over to a new class of rentier capitalist to sweat and to extract monopolistic rents.

 

In 1954 the economist W Arthur Lewis published his theory of the dual economy, to describe the economic problem of underdeveloped countries, with a mass of workers who would work for very little, and a small rich sector, which liked it that way. The US economic historian Peter Temin has cheekily applied that model to the recent history of the US, where the mass of wages have been stagnant since the 1970s, the rich have got richer and the old middle class has shrunk. On a lesser scale something similar has been done to the UK. We now have the enclave economy of London with its rich professionals, with offshoots elsewhere, and for much of the rest of the country effectively a low-wage, low-productivity economy, where the minimum wage is often a maximum too. As Temin noted in the US, the hyper-rich control politics. This too has happened here. Indeed, as Peter Geoghegan shows, the Brexiteer-Thatcherites are the local British branch of US culture warriors, climate deniers and haters of the EU.
 

Brexit has exposed the political nature of the economy. But don’t be fooled into believing that the Brexiters will reverse the policies of the last 40 years. They are not economic nationalists, nor do they care about economic sovereignty or about rebuilding the nation. They are not Lexiters in disguise, rediscovering the 1970s Brexiter nationalist politics of Tony Benn.

 

They are radical Thatcherites, who have to believe that the British economy has been turned into a world-beating one by Thatcher’s policies. They have to deny the painful reality they are handing out contracts not to world-beating British firms but to shipping lines without ships, PPE suppliers without PPE, to crony, not creative, capitalists. But don’t be fooled either by critics’ talk of their incompetence or lack of ideas. They know what they are doing, and are succeeding. Their aim is to further change the economy, even at the expense of growth. Like Margaret Thatcher’s indifference to the waste of unemployment, and the 2010 coalition’s lack of concern about the ways in which austerity caused the economy to stagnate, the Brexit hit will in their view be a price worth paying. It’s the politics, stupid. It always has been.

 

•David Edgerton is the author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: a Twentieth-Century History

[YorkshireRed]

18 hours ago, Elite said:

I don't worry about all this kind of stuff as there's nothing you can do to change it. Apart from not voting for the cunts, what else can you do? And even elections are the illusion of choice.

The wife and a good few of my friends think the same. They hold the view that nothing much changes for them no matter who’s in power.

 

Mostly I envy them as I think I’d be a lot happier if I thought the same. There’s another part of me that keeps making me try and make them see that their apathy is part of the problem. An approach that rarely goes well. By rarely I mean never. 

[Elite]

27 minutes ago, YorkshireRed said:

The wife and a good few of my friends think the same. They hold the view that nothing much changes for them no matter who’s in power.

 

Mostly I envy them as I think I’d be a lot happier if I thought the same. There’s another part of me that keeps making me try and make them see that their apathy is part of the problem. An approach that rarely goes well. By rarely I mean never. 

I don't disagree with the notion that corruption for personal gain by the rich and powerful is what's going on, which is being done by manipulating the general populace via the media but I just can't be arsed getting worked up by it all. I only have space for a limited number of things in my head, otherwise I get overwhelmed and just end up needing to sleep. On that thought, night x

[Bruce Spanner]

100B On 'Operation Moonshot' an idea that has been ridiculed by anyone with half a brain, it's technology doesn't yet exist and the logistics are not in any way feasable.

 

They haven't even contacted The National Screening Committee who would be the only real go to body for this.

 

They'll be rushed contracts and very little to show for them, the fix is in.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/11/uk-health-screening-advisers-not-involved-in-moonshot-covid-plan-mass-testing-coronavirus

[Mudface]

1 hour ago, Bruce Spanner said:

100B On 'Operation Moonshot' an idea that has been ridiculed by anyone with half a brain, it's technology doesn't yet exist and the logistics are not in any way feasable.

 

They haven't even contacted The National Screening Committee who would be the only real go to body for this.

 

They'll be rushed contracts and very little to show for them, the fix is in.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/11/uk-health-screening-advisers-not-involved-in-moonshot-covid-plan-mass-testing-coronavirus

It's just the latest in a long line of 'game-changing' distractions, with the added bonus of siphoning off another billion or two before it inevitably fizzles out.

[Guest]

On 10/09/2020 at 21:23, Elite said:

I don't worry about all this kind of stuff as there's nothing you can do to change it. Apart from not voting for the cunts, what else can you do? And even elections are the illusion of choice.

I got a letter last week saying that it looks like I am not registered at my address for voting. I had two weeks to change that if I wanted to be able to vote.

 

Only a week to go and I will be FREE!!!!

[Guest]

5 hours ago, YorkshireRed said:

The wife and a good few of my friends think the same. They hold the view that nothing much changes for them no matter who’s in power.

 

Mostly I envy them as I think I’d be a lot happier if I thought the same. There’s another part of me that keeps making me try and make them see that their apathy is part of the problem. An approach that rarely goes well. By rarely I mean never. 

This is exactly how I feel as I really hold the keys to MY life in MY hands. The moment I give the power to some schmuck who wants me to believe that they care about my life is the moment I throw the keys away.

 

I have enormous empathy for the people alongside me but complete apathy for the people who think they are above me.

[VladimirIlyich]

5 hours ago, YorkshireRed said:

The wife and a good few of my friends think the same. They hold the view that nothing much changes for them no matter who’s in power.

 

Mostly I envy them as I think I’d be a lot happier if I thought the same. There’s another part of me that keeps making me try and make them see that their apathy is part of the problem. An approach that rarely goes well. By rarely I mean never. 

This is why I will never forgive Tony Blair. He was first Labour Prime Minister that allowed the British public to think 'they're all the same' and with him they weren't that far wrong.