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UK Politics: Winter of Discontent


Werthead

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On ‎12‎/‎28‎/‎2017 at 0:45 PM, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

Sir Nicholas Clegg?

For services to the restoration of two party politics?

I'm still a bit gob-smacked at the way that Lib Dem support just vanished in 2015.  Seats that they'd held for years now have five figure Conservative and Labour majorities.

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Is Theresa May going to reside at 10 Downing Street much longer? Every bit of news I hear here on the other side of the pond suggests that she's a weak and ineffective leader who got worked over during the Brexit negotiations and has lost favor with her party. 

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2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Is Theresa May going to reside at 10 Downing Street much longer? Every bit of news I hear here on the other side of the pond suggests that she's a weak and ineffective leader who got worked over during the Brexit negotiations and has lost favor with her party. 

She’s only still there because no one else wants the job at the moment. The rest of the party is happy to let her take most of the shit from brexit until it’s over, and then someone else will swoop in.

I expected her to go after the election, but she’s clung on, or maybe more accurately been forced to stay.

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Pretty much. There's a feeling in the Tory Party that whoever handles Brexit is going to get shat on from either side of the party, so it makes sense to leave her in play until 2019 and then remove her.

The only reason that will change is if one side or the other feels that they have to intervene to stop a (to them) calamitous outcome. At the moment the hard Brexiteers are very concerned about last month's deal which was essentially a partial surrender to the soft Brexiteers, and may end with us having to abide by a lot of the EU rules whilst not being able to affect them in any way, shape or form. The problem there is that whilst the usual suspects (Mogg) have been taking shots at that outcome, their ringleaders - Gove, Johnson, Davis - have retreated and supported the deal so that leaves them without a viable figurehead to cluster around.

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I think the major thing keeping May in office is that no one faction in the Tory party is quite sure whether the others would be willing to risk the most calamitous outcome they can imagine, which is another General Election in which Jeremy Corbyn takes power, in a fight for the top job.

If it were just down to not wanting to take the blame for Brexit, I think there are candidates who have the ego to be willing to think they can deal with that. They can already blame May for anything that goes wrong from here on in: I inherited a mess, and so on.

Ironically, destroying her majority is probably keeping May in a job.

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I have to admit, I sort of admire May for hanging in there and not quitting by now. Doing a flat out awful job and probably going down with Cameron as one of the worst political leaders Britain has ever seen has got to make it hard to get out of bed in the morning. But she does it. 

 

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I'm no fan of Cameron, as anyone here will attest. But May is without doubt a much, much less competent PM than Cameron, or indeed any other PM I can remember, and I can remember back to Callaghan (if only vaguely).

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Toby "Supercreep" Young deleted several thousand tweets this morning. Fortunately the Internet never forgets.

19 minutes ago, mormont said:

I'm no fan of Cameron, as anyone here will attest. But May is without doubt a much, much less competent PM than Cameron, or indeed any other PM I can remember, and I can remember back to Callaghan (if only vaguely).

I briefly misread that as "Caligula" :o 

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17 minutes ago, Slick Mongoose said:

At least May hasn't bragged about the size of her nuclear button. It could be worse.

"Our button may not be as large as some other countries', but it is a Strong and Stable Button. It is a Button with a Clear Economic Plan. It is a Button For a Brighter and More Secure Future...sorry, I seem to have dropped the button. Wait, why is the button not working? BORIS! Step away from the button."

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41 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Toby "Supercreep" Young deleted several thousand tweets this morning. Fortunately the Internet never forgets.

I actually quite like Toby Young, if only because he seems to get in open angry exchanges with 'world's most irritating human being' Owen Jones. However despite what Young is saying, I cannot really see the sense of him being given the position that he has, he definitely has over inflated his experience in the field, and a few articles on the internet and being a teaching assistant isn't really the sort of qualifications needed to take on that role.

I'd like there to be a bit less homogeny of opinion in academia for sure, but get someone who's actually qualified instead. 

Also I'm not on board with the twitter smearing of anyone you disagree with, I think that is totally unhelpful.

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23 minutes ago, Eggegg said:

Also I'm not on board with the twitter smearing of anyone you disagree with, I think that is totally unhelpful.

Is this somehow relevant? No Twitter smearing here: just accurate reports of relevant public comments that show why Toby Young is not only unqualified, but also completely unsuitable for the post.

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1 minute ago, mormont said:

Is this somehow relevant? No Twitter smearing here: just accurate reports of relevant public comments that show why Toby Young is not only unqualified, but also completely unsuitable for the post.

Yes of course its relevant. Young gets a job, people don't like him, so go about hunting through his twitter account to find things he said they also don't like. It has no bearing on his ability to do the role he's been given, its a bang up smear job, and very unsurprising behaviour. 

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1 hour ago, Eggegg said:

Yes of course its relevant. Young gets a job, people don't like him, so go about hunting through his twitter account to find things he said they also don't like. It has no bearing on his ability to do the role he's been given, its a bang up smear job, and very unsurprising behaviour. 

I'm sorry, but there is no need to 'hunt through' Young's Twitter account. It's liberally sprinkled with such comments. Or it was, until he deleted - sit down for this - 50,000 of them. That's 50,000 things he has said that even he understands would make people think he was unsuitable for the role. If you've made literally thousands of inappropriate comments about women, how can you seriously be expected to look out for the interests of students - the majority of whom are women? How can you seriously suggest that this has 'no bearing' on his ability to do that role?

Again, this is not a 'smear'. None of those comments are being twisted, presented out of context or falsely made to seem typical of his views. This is how he behaves. It makes him unfit for any public office.

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7 hours ago, mormont said:

I think the major thing keeping May in office is that no one faction in the Tory party is quite sure whether the others would be willing to risk the most calamitous outcome they can imagine, which is another General Election in which Jeremy Corbyn takes power, in a fight for the top job.

If it were just down to not wanting to take the blame for Brexit, I think there are candidates who have the ego to be willing to think they can deal with that. They can already blame May for anything that goes wrong from here on in: I inherited a mess, and so on.

Ironically, destroying her majority is probably keeping May in a job.

It’s too late now, but wouldn’t it have been wise for the Tories to destroy their majority just before the Brexit negotiations began? Sometimes it’s smart to take the short term beating.

3 hours ago, Slick Mongoose said:

At least May hasn't bragged about the size of her nuclear button. It could be worse.

Really, is there anything more American than bragging about the size of your junk?

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38 minutes ago, mormont said:

I'm sorry, but there is no need to 'hunt through' Young's Twitter account. It's liberally sprinkled with such comments. Or it was, until he deleted - sit down for this - 50,000 of them. That's 50,000 things he has said that even he understands would make people think he was unsuitable for the role. If you've made literally thousands of inappropriate comments about women, how can you seriously be expected to look out for the interests of students - the majority of whom are women? How can you seriously suggest that this has 'no bearing' on his ability to do that role?

Again, this is not a 'smear'. None of those comments are being twisted, presented out of context or falsely made to seem typical of his views. This is how he behaves. It makes him unfit for any public office.

"Guys look! Someone said they liked boobs on the internet!! Turn on the outrage machine and set it level 11!"

I would  disagree that him making humourous comments on Twitter means he's not qualified to do the job he's been appointed to do.. of course that only applies to a normal world where common sense applies. But we don't live in that world, we live in an enormous twittersphere of offence.

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39 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

It’s too late now, but wouldn’t it have been wise for the Tories to destroy their majority just before the Brexit negotiations began? Sometimes it’s smart to take the short term beating.

It certainly was never the plan.

May's situation right now reminds me of Monty Burns:

She's still in office because a hundred things went wrong all at the same time, and it will just take one of them to shift and POW, she's gone.

15 minutes ago, Eggegg said:

"Guys look! Someone said they liked boobs on the internet!! Turn on the outrage machine and set it level 11!"

I'm trying to be polite here, but the above remark really just comes over as pathetic. You know, if you have read the actual comments Young made, that this is a deliberate and childish misrepresentation.

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I would  disagree that him making humourous comments on Twitter means he's not qualified to do the job he's been appointed to do.. of course that only applies to a normal world where common sense applies. But we don't live in that world, we live in an enormous twittersphere of offence.

I would disagree that any of those comments are humorous. Any one of them would get you sacked from any public sector job. If you can't see that they are offensive and unfunny, I would suggest that tells us nothing except that you, too, should never be appointed to a position of responsibility. Let's for one second imagine that the Universities regulator is asked, for example, to look into whether the prevalence of short-term contracts has led to a culture of exploitation of women in some institutions: not an unlikely scenario. How is anybody supposed to take such an inquiry seriously when it's led by a man who thinks it's funny to publicly remark on the size of a stranger's breasts? And we have not yet got into his record in other areas, which is equally awful.

Toby Young has a long record of being a wanker. His sole qualification for this job is that he is an old pal of the Johnson brothers from his Spectator days. This appointment is literally cronyism to start with, which is bad enough. But there is no doubt that he is personally unsuitable as well.

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13 minutes ago, mormont said:

I would disagree that any of those comments are humorous. Any one of them would get you sacked from any public sector job. If you can't see that they are offensive and unfunny, I would suggest that tells us nothing except that you, too, should never be appointed to a position of responsibility. Let's for one second imagine that the Universities regulator is asked, for example, to look into whether the prevalence of short-term contracts has led to a culture of exploitation of women in some institutions: not an unlikely scenario. How is anybody supposed to take such an inquiry seriously when it's led by a man who thinks it's funny to publicly remark on the size of a stranger's breasts? And we have not yet got into his record in other areas, which is equally awful.

That you don't find them amusing isn't the point. They were said in humour, and luckily there are still some people in the world who can understand the difference between jokes and actual offensive behaviour, especially if its things said almost a decade ago in some cases. 

He's certainly an arsehole, and an abrasive arsehole, but that doesn't preclude him from doing his job. He certainly has some opposing views on subject to many other people in the area, but thats a good thing as far as I'm concerned, for there to be a diversity of opinion. 

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That you don't find them amusing isn't the point. They were said in humour, and luckily there are still some people in the world who can understand the difference between jokes and actual offensive behaviour, especially if its things said almost a decade ago in some cases. 

Young is a misogynist. He believes women exist solely to provide him with amusement/sex/entertainment. His constant discussions about women's bodies on Twitter going on over a period of years is juvenile and disturbing. He openly leered over Danny Boyle's daughter when she was on stage at an awards ceremony when she was underage. That's not humour, that's being a fucking creep. He has also referred to disabled people as troglodytes and then tried to laugh it off. He should not be allowed within three miles of any post that requires interaction with young women or children (or the public at large, to be safe).

He's also quite remarkably thick, in the Gove/Raab camp of people who like to pretend they are intellectual and then show the precise opposite (unlike, say, Johnson, who actually is relatively bright but completely collapses when he is required to perform on the spot without the benefit of several hours of revising and editing what he's saying). He doesn't do the thing Raab does when he loses an argument which is start blustering and sweating like a mofo, which is endlessly entertaining.

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