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UK Politics- P0rn, Horn and Local Elections


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Just now, Tywin et al. said:

JFK drank a good amount as well and Obama was a proper pothead in his youth. 

Yeah I left off JFK cuz I think of him as more a drug addict (very understandable considering his afflictions and the times) than alcoholic.  Obama certainly isn't an alcoholic, but he did like to emphasize resolving conflicts through sharing drinks.

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Charles Kennedy was a widely acknowledged alcy who was forced to step down as LibDem leader because his drinking had gotten out of control.

Shortly after, and days after smoking was banned on British trains, he was caught with his head hanging out of a train at 11am, smoking a fag.

Needless to say, unlike the hundreds of plebs who were fined around that time for defying the ban, Kennedy was not.

 

 

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1 hour ago, mormont said:

 Spocky is happy to treat the former as fact. 

 

All I'm saying is if Sir Keir isn't downing liver-perforating amounts of booze every day, I would suggest an urgent appointment with a dermatologist.

 

 

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5 hours ago, Spockydog said:

In the exact same fashion as the British people, subject to the highest rail fares in Europe, currently financing the infrastructure upgrades to German and Swiss national rail.

 

You don't understand how silly German rail infrastructure works. It's almost Brexit levels of stupid. I don't want to derail this thread, but I'll give to you the short version.

The German Railway (Deutsche Bahn, or DB) was privatized a while ago. The German goverment being the main shareholder. The company is yet to make a profit, I reckon. Privatization went about as well, as the one in the UK. Focus on profitable routes, neglection of service to less frequently traveled locations. 

Now then, railway infrastructure in Germany, a bit simplified. Maintenance is the problem of DB, they have to cough up the money for it. Building new shit, that's when the goverment has to cough up funds. DB is a privat owned company with a for profit motif(as mentioned above they are not good at it, but that's what they are). So suppose you are a for profit company, that has to finance the upkeep of old shit, but if things break down, and you need stuff, somebody else (the state) pays for it, what would you do? Yes, you spend as little as possible of maintenance, and when things decayed enough, you point at the goverment and say, dude you need to rebuild it. Your problem, not mine. 

A bit simplified, but that's basically it. 

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1 hour ago, DMC said:

being an alcoholic wouldn't be a disqualification in and of itself

For me, it kinda is, though one needs to evaluate how the alcoholic functions under crisis.

Churchill was one, for what's its worth.  He also wrote an alternative history sf novel of how good it would have been if the CSA won the War of the Rebellion and abolition never happened.  Hmmm.  Which of those would have the greater influence on my Churchill judgements?  :unsure:

 

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16 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

You forgot to mention that Deutsche Bahn owns four British railway services.

 

Yes, but you are not paying for upgrades on the German Rail Infrastructure. You really aren't - DB let's the infrastructure likesay bridges fall into decay, and then the German goverment has to built a new one (German tax payers money). DB just sucks at pretty much everything, that should be the main thing to take away from my previous post.

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3 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Charles Kennedy was a widely acknowledged alcy who was forced to step down as LibDem leader because his drinking had gotten out of control.

Despite all that, still a better Lib Dem leader than Nick Clegg.

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45 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Yes, but you are not paying for upgrades on the German Rail Infrastructure. You really aren't - DB let's the infrastructure likesay bridges fall into decay, and then the German goverment has to built a new one (German tax payers money). DB just sucks at pretty much everything, that should be the main thing to take away from my previous post.

Okay, they are simply profiting from British rail services. 

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Sounds like Starmer has played a blinder.

Rumours that Labour will tomorrow provide the rozzers with a whole bunch of texts and whatsapps which basically prove the event was exactly what they said it was - a work event that went on later than planned.

 

 

 

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Oh dear. Poor Nads. One imagines the coming days will be quite challenging for her and her fellow balloon animals.

It would appear that Sir Keir has been playing 3D chess all along.

Labour says it can prove Starmer’s team worked past 1am on Beergate night

Quote

 

Keir Starmer dramatically pledged to quit if he is fined for breaking lockdown rules, as Labour prepared to present police with a dossier of evidence to show his team worked beyond 1am on the night he was pictured drinking a beer.

The Guardian can reveal that Labour has compiled time-stamped logs of WhatsApp chats, documents and video edits – which it will provide to the investigation by Durham police.

The party claims it proves the curry and beers shared between his team came as part of a long working day preparing for the Hartlepool byelection, meaning it was permitted under Covid rules at the time.

In a speech on Monday, Starmer said he had “simply had something to eat whilst working late in the evening, as any politician would do days before an election.”

Not all participants in the WhatsApp group were at the hall – and Starmer is not a member of either group – but one message the following day says, “Keir woke up this morning with some queries about the video.” A source said Starmer was given overnight briefing papers to work through for the following day’s visit.

The Labour leader filmed a video in the hall with timestamps on the video showing filming took place until 9.07pm – and WhatsApp messages then show aides corresponding about the edits.

In a message at 10.52pm, an aide says they are “only just editing” a message for International Workers’ Day and warns they “won’t have something through for an hour or two”. They also say a script for Starmer’s visit to Liberty Steel in Hartlepool still needs to be completed.

Labour will also show police edits made to a Google document containing a script for a clip that Starmer would film at Liberty Steel, which show changes being made from 10.41pm until 11.19pm.

One WhatsApp message with the final edit – from an aide who was with Starmer – sends the final edit at 1.56am with the message “Sorry it’s so late”.

 

 

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18 hours ago, mormont said:

In other news, predictably the DUP are refusing to enter a power-sharing agreement until the UK government takes 'decisive action' over the NI protocol. Conveniently this avoids them having to be the first Unionist party to nominate a Deputy First Minister rather than a First Minister.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-61373504

Interesting tactic. Main unionist parties lost a net 3.3% of the vote share, I am guessing the TUV picked up a lot of what the DUP lost. But I wonder if some of the unionist vote swung to the Alliance, which I understand is kinda neutral when it comes to unionist vs republican. But still, if the DUP forces another election in my guess is the DUP would bank on votes coming back to them from TUV and bleed some votes from UUP to jump back to first. I assume one thing all of those parties agree on is that Sinn Fein must never be allowed to pick the First Minister. Would enough TUV and UUP voters be willing to hold their nose, vote DUP and put them up ahead of Sinn Fein?

I suppose for them it's worth the gamble, because if they don't try to stop Sinn Fein this time around the whole Unionist bloc might be in trouble. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

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14 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Interesting tactic. Main unionist parties lost a net 3.3% of the vote share, I am guessing the TUV picked up a lot of what the DUP lost.

The TUV managed the difficult trick of getting one MLA from 7.6% of the first preference vote (People Before profit got one from 1.1% of the FP vote: the SDLP got 8 from 9.1%). This was a huge increase in their first preferences but suggests their vote is geographically diffuse and doesn't do particularly well at picking up transfers in later rounds of voting. So that would be consistent with former DUP voters going to the TUV, but also suggests that the DUP voters who stayed loyal didn't rank TUV as second choice.

14 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

But I wonder if some of the unionist vote swung to the Alliance, which I understand is kinda neutral when it comes to unionist vs republican.

The commentary I've seen suggests that the increase in the Alliance vote came from former SDLP voters in the main. But some of it must have come from Unionists, just numerically speaking. 

14 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

But still, if the DUP forces another election in my guess is the DUP would bank on votes coming back to them from TUV and bleed some votes from UUP to jump back to first. I assume one thing all of those parties agree on is that Sinn Fein must never be allowed to pick the First Minister. Would enough TUV and UUP voters be willing to hold their nose, vote DUP and put them up ahead of Sinn Fein?

Possibly, but it's delaying the inevitable at this point. The total first preference Nationalist vote was 38.1% vs 40.1% for the Unionists. And as noted, many of the former voted Alliance. if they come back to the SDLP, the Unionists are going to have to face up to a Nationalist FM at some point. 

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