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UK politics general discussion

Bert2theSpark said:
Although the government has accepted the pay review bodies, it's not coming with additional funding...

More austerity, yay!!!
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What I find more curious is they (apparently) have added more funding for education pay rises despite the fact nearly all education is now privatised yet the doctors pay rise must come out of existing NHS budget.

I say I find it curious, I don’t really, it’s protecting the Academy system whilst bludgeoning the NHS non-privatised system.
 
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Bert2theSpark said:
Although the government has accepted the pay review bodies, it's not coming with additional funding...

More austerity, yay!!!
Click to expand...

Bit of a half truth that. The raises are part centrally funded so some comes from an increased budget, some from existing budgets. Which is of course always the case in one way or another, unless you want to pay more taxes?
 
Education Unions have made it plainly clear that if the pay award for 23/24 was not fully funded, industrial action would not cease.

I am glad the government have seen sense.

Ultimately though, whilst I am grateful to see the pay award come through - it's yet another real terms pay cut, which means that yet again the pay of most in the public sector will fall yet further from the real terms value that it was in 2010.

We've been dealing with below-inflation pay awards now for 13 years - not just during this 'crisis'.
 
Can we all send Nadine Dorris a bit of sympathy please? Not only is she useless at everything she does. Nobody wants to give her a peerage.

Let's not forget that she can't even resign with immediate affect correctly and her book will probably flop.

Poor Nadine.
 
pluk said:
Bit of a half truth that. The raises are part centrally funded so some comes from an increased budget, some from existing budgets. Which is of course always the case in one way or another, unless you want to pay more taxes?
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When all the tax loopholes for rich people are closed we can have an argument about paying more taxes in general.

Surprised they are expecting the doctors pay award to come from existing budgets in the NHS. The NHS is pretty much about to fall over financially, we are having overtime stopped which means lists are shutting down and waiting lists increasing, which has never happened in the 16 years I have worked in the NHS.

Yet they keep moving more NHS services to the private providers even though it costs more…. Curious that
 
A fairly dry video at first, really gets going at around the half-way mark but I found it well worth viewing.

Viewed it all in two sittings.

Quick conclusion: financialization and money laundering through the City of London. We probably knew that already but fascinating nonetheless.

Chapters

Intro
Decline of Empire
Most Replayed
Overseas jurisdiction
City of London
House of Commons
Bank of England
The Trust
Offshore Structures
Panama Papers
Communication
Independence
London
UK
Sub-Saharan Africa
UN Tax Committee
Financialization
Financialization of London
John Christensen's Investigation
Stuart Sivray
Jersey as Potemkin Village
Oppression in Jersey
Political Influence in Jersey
Big Story
Power is Hidden

 
Looks like Sunak wants to push the banning of sales of non-electric vehicles back to 2035 (instead of 2030).

I actually think this is a good policy as the forced date of 2030 shouldn't have even been brought in in the first place. People should be incentivized to change, not forced to do so by some arbitrary deadline.

However, these charlatans will still not get my vote next time as they've been the very worst government we've had, without a shadow of a doubt, that I can personally remember in my lifetime.

I'm sure there will be plenty more of these friendly proposals and various giveaways before the next general election. Time to let the other lot have a go at screwing things up for several years.
 
It seems like the Conservatives have a short memory. Only 9 days ago they were harping on about how great the BMW Mini investment in the UK to build electric vehicles was. Now they have reduced the incentive for people to buy them.

Call me a cynic but it seems to me that because ULEZ was such a point of contention in the by-election, the Tories suddenly think if they abandon environmental policies they can become popular again.

Ford UK actually made a statement that putting this back will harm investment and reduce the pressure for people to move to electric vehicles:
“Our business needs three things from the UK government, ambition, commitment, and consistency... A relaxation of 2030 would undermine all three,” said Ford’s UK chair Lisa Brankin. Brankin said Ford had already put investments in place to fit with the 2030 timeline and that the 2030 target was “a vital catalyst to accelerate Ford into a cleaner future”.

The UK still has a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050, so by kicking the can further down the road it means more drastic action has to be taken later on.
 
The whole thing is actually quite laughable, there's one thing in the below graphic that was actual policy:

From: https://twitter.com/RishiSunak/status/1704522548648509467

  • Taxes on eating meat - Where was this a national government policy?
  • New taxes to discourage flying - Again, when was this introduced?
  • Sorting rubbish into seven different bins - Hardly anyone has to do this, and where it is policy, it's a local government decision nothing to do. If you're incapable of deciding where cardboard, glass and metal goes - you've got bigger concerns in your life to worry about.
  • Compulsory Car Sharing - Hasn't been implemented as a national policy whatsoever
  • Expensive insulation upgrades - The one thing in there that has some remote basis in fact. But regardless, an "expensive" insulation upgrade saves money in the long run. It's a policy that's been in place for decades and the government were also providing some decent incentives to do so.
As for "not wanting to force people to change" by delaying the ban on diesel/petrol cars for five years. What's going to be done during that five year delay? Is it literally to just to kick the can further down the road? Or are efforts actually going to be made to ensure infrastructure is in place to support the change. It seems like a poor attempt to try and win some votes back without doing anything of substance to improve the situation when the ban comes in.
 
The UK government are seemingly now just trawling local Facebook groups and claiming to have thrown out policy that is literally just the ramblings of village lunatics.
 
I've just watched it again. Rising fuel and food costs, councils going bankrupt, hospitals struggling to operate and schools quite literally crumbling. People are struggling to afford even the basics. I genuinely can't believe that the Prime Minister of the UK has just stood behind a podium and said:

"I'm going give you less bins"

It's such a nonsensical speech with the sole aim being to drum up another wedge issue to spark up the old culture wars again. It's so tiresome. He talks about change, but of all the things he babbled on about, there's a huge chunk of it that wasn't even a policy to change in the first place.
 
The timing is also suspicious, they've waited until the day after parliament was dissolved for conference season and leaked it to the media to avoid questioning by the commons. Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has been very vocal about the government bypassing parliament in this way both today and in the past. Luckily the Lords are sitting today and have been discussing it through an urgent question, hopefully the Hansard for that will be available in the next hour as that will make fun reading!
 
There's nothing whatsoever suspicious about it, they know exactly what they're doing. It's what they do best, completely steamrollering convention. I'm not even going to start on the use of the government press room (with its questionable colour scheme in the first place) to announce all this, while stood behind the lectern displaying the political party's own conference slogan.

There's a purposeful blurring of the lines between party and government. The colour scheme crap has been done to our local council, with the local changing to a blue colour too.
 
The problem I think the Conservatives could face, though, is that compared to Brexit, which had (has?) the potential to have a fair effect on our country, I’m not sure how big of an issue culture wars, the transgender debate and the like are for the vast majority of the population. I’m not saying that these issues don’t affect people, as in instances like the transgender debate, I can’t deny that they absolutely do, but compared to issues like the economy, strikes and the struggles of public services, I’d argue that they are comparatively less significant issues for the majority of the population. I’d call them “fringe issues” rather than big problems for the broader populace.
 
Matt N said:
The problem I think the Conservatives could face, though, is that compared to Brexit, which had (has?) the potential to have a fair effect on our country, I’m not sure how big of an issue culture wars, the transgender debate and the like are for the vast majority of the population. I’m not saying that these issues don’t affect people, as in instances like the transgender debate, I can’t deny that they absolutely do, but compared to issues like the economy, strikes and the struggles of public services, I’d argue that they are comparatively less significant issues for the majority of the population. I’d call them “fringe issues” rather than big problems for the broader populace.
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On the flipside, Brexit also started as a fringe issue that most people didn't give a damn about. Cameron thought he could call the referendum to silence the loudmouths of his party, without much impact to the wider country because the result would be as expected. However, the issue that people didn't give a damn about suddenly turned into one of the biggest shifts the UK has seen in decades.

For what it's worth, I do think this is a different beast to Brexit and it's very much a desperate attempt to scrape up whatever votes they can by pushing these emotive issues. That said, I don't think we should minimise the wider effect these "culture war" issues can have. It only pushes both politics and the wider population to a binary choice between left and right, further evacuating that sensible middle ground. As mentioned before, a lot of these "reversals" were never policies in the first place - or indeed even suggested by the opposition, so what does it end up doing away from trying to nab a few votes? It amplifies these extreme sides of the argument and more of these idiotic figures like Truss, Johnson and Farage are pushed to the mainstream.
 
Apologies if this sounds like a stupid question, but; out of interest, what is a “culture war issue”?

I was always under the impression that “culture war” encapsulated things such as “wokeness”, “cancel culture” and freedom of speech, but if recycling bins are falling within the remit of “culture war”, then I think I’ve got the wrong idea…
 
Matt N said:
Apologies if this sounds like a stupid question, but; out of interest, what is a “culture war issue”?

I was always under the impression that “culture war” encapsulated things such as “wokeness”, “cancel culture” and freedom of speech, but if recycling bins are falling within the remit of “culture war”, then I think I’ve got the wrong idea…
Click to expand...
Culture Wars issues are whatever a political party think they can successfully divide the nation over. The topic of the culture war isn't real important beyond the short term, it's the somewhat arbitrary division that is key.

Culture war politics only ever tend to kick off at a point that one of the political parties realise they can't make any progress around policy points that would actually affect people's lives. At this point, it is easier to manufacture outrage based around a topic that doesn't really affect most people in any tangible way.
 
The problem is, you can only fight the election on culture wars if everything is rosy and people are basically doing ok. If people can't afford to heat their homes, pay their mortgages and feed their kids, they actually couldn't give a toss about the culture wars and would rather the government sorted the cost of living crisis instead
 
I guess the best way to hit Net Zero is to have everyone burn to death.

Tories are desperately clinging onto power. Sunak is possibly the weakest PM we've had in the past few years (which is impressive in of itself) and is currently playing the typical "quick, distract them from the REAL problems" game by rolling the dice on the "divisive" issues that their supporters are being mouthy over.

Environmental policy is key, and doing nothing about it in a country that takes nearly a decade to get anything off the ground is incompetency at its finest. Yet there's a high number of people who lap it up because their team "won" against the "Liberal elite" who make sure you can't just sexually abuse teenagers anymore.

Sunak is saying we'll still hit 2050 targets whilst reducing our ability to even get anywhere with them. It's nonsense and playing up to the crowd who don't care as long as they can get a bit richer and keep their house whilst their kids go non-contact because of their crappy views.
 
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