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UK Politics: Trumpy Cat Trumpy Cat Where Have You Been?


mormont

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2 hours ago, williamjm said:

I'm not sure he really passes the 'MPs who anyone has heard of' test Wert mentioned.

True, but resigning did get him in the news, so he's starting to fix that problem.

Although using that test, Hilary Benn is probably the best bet.

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3 hours ago, Maltaran said:

True, but resigning did get him in the news, so he's starting to fix that problem.

Although using that test, Hilary Benn is probably the best bet.

At this rate by the time of the next election it might be easier to find a Labour MP that has resigned from the Shadow Cabinet than one that hasn't.

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Trump to play Wembley possibly, with profits going to poppies or some other populist shit he can think of closer to the time.  You can just imagine how pleasant the crowd will be.  Almost worth giving up a Saturday afternoon off, and policing to laugh at the cretins. 

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The Conservatives have always hated Bercow, even when he was in their party. This is just another in a long line of attempts to get rid.

Maybe he'd be up for taking over from Corbyn? Just a thought. :P

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45 minutes ago, mormont said:

The Conservatives have always hated Bercow, even when he was in their party. This is just another in a long line of attempts to get rid.

Maybe he'd be up for taking over from Corbyn? Just a thought. :P

Ha. A Speaker has never become either leader of a party or PM, right? A quick survey of Wikipedia suggests that is the case. I think they also by custom retire to the House of Lords, but again that's not a requirement.

I am curious at the moment about the government having its head in the sands. It may just outlast the immediate rail crisis, but there's a perfect storm brewing with the NHS, the prisons and the schools about to blow up almost simultaneously. They really need to start addressing those issues more substantively.

I did see last week that our F-35s had started arriving, meaning our new aircraft carriers will actually have planes, which is useful.

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4 hours ago, mormont said:

The Conservatives have always hated Bercow, even when he was in their party. This is just another in a long line of attempts to get rid.

Maybe he'd be up for taking over from Corbyn? Just a thought. :P

He did get more support from Labour than the Tories when he was first elected Speaker, and before that there were rumours that he would cross the floor

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Predictably the government have rejected the petition to deny Trump a state visit - having offered it, they were never likely to withdraw it. But the debate goes ahead on the 20th. So I've written to my MP encouraging him to ask some tough questions at that debate, starting with why the invite was offered so prematurely in the first place. I encourage any other UK folks to do the same. Let's hold their feet to the fire.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38967075

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On ‎2‎/‎12‎/‎2017 at 3:46 PM, mormont said:

The Conservatives have always hated Bercow, even when he was in their party. This is just another in a long line of attempts to get rid.

Maybe he'd be up for taking over from Corbyn? Just a thought. :P

Bercow's journey from very right wing to very left wing is a curious one.  He must really regret not having joined the Labour Party years ago.

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My little joke above notwithstanding, Bercow has a long way still to go on that journey before he can even arguably be called 'very left wing'.

The views he now holds would have been fairly unremarkable in the Conservative party even ten years ago, when that party had something that could be called a moderate wing.

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The Conservatives haven't got a moderate wing? What, to you, defines such a thing? If you're definition is the left wing of the party, how about the Tory Reform group, members of which include Ken Clarke, Damian Green, Robert Buckland, Nicky Morgan, Alistair Burt, Neil Carmichael, Nicholas Soames, Jane Ellison, Richard Fuller, Nick Boles (MPs), plus luminaries and peers such as John Major, Michael Heseltine, Chris Patton, Douglas Hurd. Also how about The Conservatives for Reform In Europe, with members such as Nick Herbert, Ben Gummer, Damian Green, David Lidington and James Cartlidge. Or how about the Open Britain group, the pro-EU, pro-immigration, pro-civil liberties group, which includes Anna Soubry and Dominic Grieve as leading members. Or the NHS and anti-welfare cuts campaigners such as Heidi Allen, David Burrows and Johnny Mercer.

Anyway, I think it's a real stretch to claim even people like Cameron, and his modernising group are not moderates in the context of the greater scheme of things, but particularly in the Tory context, but I realise that won't wash with most readers of this thread.

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To be fair, I should have said 'in the Commons'. Ruth Davidson, for example, is pretty moderate.

But a number of those names above support policies that I can't describe as 'moderate' Tory policies, including 'free schools'. Others qualify as moderate only because the party has moved to the right and they haven't. Then there's the likes of Soames, a man with no discernible political philosophy beyond 'line my pockets, defend the Establishment and behave badly to women'. If you're citing that waste of space as a 'moderate' you're scrambling.

The few remaining hardly qualify as a 'wing' of the parliamentary party: they don't have the numbers, organisation or influence. They're there, but they're ignored.

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The Conservative Party has embraced Brexit, which could be seen as a shift to the Right (although, there are plenty of left wing opponents of the EU).  Other than that, I don't really see that the party is more right wing than ten years ago.

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Again, free schools: also NHS privatisation, immigration, environmental policy, employee rights and business regulation, higher and further education, social care, and more. On a whole raft of policies the Conservative party has moved substantially to the right over the last ten years and they appear to view Brexit as a golden opportunity to move even further in that direction.

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Not to mention their renewed commitment to rail privatisation (despite it not working) and union-busting (see the utter glee with which they have attacked the RMT, realising they can make the union irrelevant through technology and destroy it). Major and then Labour moving to the centre took the wind out of the sails of the more right-wing end of the party, but the delight with which the Tories used the recession as a justification to trash worker's rights and (regrettably) have to stop funding the NHS to the degree which is required (whilst on paper "ring-fencing" it) show that they are firmly back in charge, and using Brexit and the departure of Cameron to push through that agenda.

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31 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Not to mention their renewed commitment to rail privatisation (despite it not working)...


It isn't an unmitigated failure; it did mostly work, eventually. Passenger numbers have more than doubled since privitisation, the UK network is literally the safest in Europe, and lost passenger hours are far lower than in the days of British Rail, and stack up fairly well against France, for example.

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I'd say the rightwards shift has been in the last two years since the 2015 General Election. The end of the coalition and weakening of the Labour Party's credibility under Corbyn allowed Cameron to pander to the increasingly agitated, but at that point not hugely influential right of the Tory Party. He tried to shut them up for a while with the EU referendum, hoping for a similar result to Indyref, but that backfired consolidating the right's gain in power.

Yes you can pick out issues where in the previous ten years the Conservatives had moved to the right, but there are a similar number of issues where the reverse happened - equal marriage, income tax for low earners, etc.

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On 15/02/2017 at 5:03 PM, Mathis said:

It isn't an unmitigated failure; it did mostly work, eventually. Passenger numbers have more than doubled since privitisation, the UK network is literally the safest in Europe, and lost passenger hours are far lower than in the days of British Rail, and stack up fairly well against France, for example.

Passenger numbers have doubled due to people being forced further and further away from the big cities by rising house prices. That's out of necessity, not because the rail system is so amazing.

We have a very safe system because of a series of massive accidents (culminating in Potter's Bar) which basically made it impossible for the same corners to be cut. We've actually been pretty lucky that no-one has been accidentally killed since 2011 (and that was someone at a level crossing, no passenger has actually been accidentally killed since 2007) because there's been quite a few injuries and incidents (people being dragged down stations, mostly). Safety standards are also being reduced on the rail system, with a move away from 12 weeks of safety training with an annual refresher course for guards to just 8 weeks and then no refresher.

Lost passenger hours are an easily cooked figure: to make them up (and the drivers are constantly told to make them up as their top priority), the drivers are instructed to start dropping "minor" stations from their routes so they can "catch up" with the scheduled timetable at the big ones (and screw the passengers who are now five miles from where they need to be). That is happening on a daily basis on Southern at the moment.

The big failure of privatisation has been to make the rail service profitable. The companies are making such little profit from it that some TOCs are not bothering to re-bid for franchises when they expire, which is then giving the government headaches because they haven't got enough competition.

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On 15/02/2017 at 5:31 PM, Horse of Kent said:

I'd say the rightwards shift has been in the last two years since the 2015 General Election. The end of the coalition and weakening of the Labour Party's credibility under Corbyn allowed Cameron to pander to the increasingly agitated, but at that point not hugely influential right of the Tory Party. He tried to shut them up for a while with the EU referendum, hoping for a similar result to Indyref, but that backfired consolidating the right's gain in power.

Yes you can pick out issues where in the previous ten years the Conservatives had moved to the right, but there are a similar number of issues where the reverse happened - equal marriage, income tax for low earners, etc.

I find myself missing Cameron's leadership now, can't stand Theresa May.

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