Brexit slowly becoming a Farce.

[Mastermind]

I’m with Oaksoft on this one. It must be a horrific existence waking up every morning since 2014 thinking what could have been, being perma-raging at the Scottish majority who voted to stay in Britain, seething every time you see a Union Jack, frothing at the mouth at the BBC and generally raging at Scottish life. Can’t be much fun.

 

[dirty dingus]

4 minutes ago, Mastermind said:

I’m with Oaksoft on this one. It must be a horrific existence waking up every morning since 2014 thinking what could have been, being perma-raging at the majority who voted to stay in Britain, seething every time you see a Union Jack, frothing at the mouth at the BBC and generally raging at the majority of Scottish voters who didn’t agree with your minority view. Can’t be much fun.

But fortunately we can then shake the sleep from head to feet and be thankful one's not a fanny like you.

Edited July 4, 2019 by dirty dingus

[Ira Gaines]

Mintermind

[Bairnardo]

Happy to take you at your word but there are clearly plenty of people in this subforum who appear to be happy to waste the few years they have on the planet living under a massive black cloud and endlessly complaining about the "fucking Tories".
Life is great if you just come off the internet for 5 seconds and look around you. Nobody else is going to fix your life. Waste your time or use your time - it's your choice.
I of course mean "you" in the 3rd person.

Not sure how far oaksoft intends to take his current shtick but it will be hard to top this one in terms of harrowingly shite and cringy posts.

Suggest a new direction.

[renton]

1 hour ago, oaksoft said:

Happy to take you at your word but there are clearly plenty of people in this subforum who appear to be happy to waste the few years they have on the planet living under a massive black cloud and endlessly complaining about the "fucking Tories".

Life is great if you just come off the internet for 5 seconds and look around you. Nobody else is going to fix your life. Waste your time or use your time - it's your choice.

I of course mean "you" in the 3rd person.

I think you can still lead a reasonable standard of life and individual happiness and still absolutely deplore the direction of travel the UK is going in. The "Fucking Tories" are only the most visible crest of a mountain of shit that makes up the British establishment. The Westminster system is predicated on it's changeless perpetuity, like an overdamped system it absorbs stimulus without ever showing any delta in it's own trajectory. It's designed to recycle the same semi ignorant idiots from one or two University politics courses through paid party positions, into parliament and back out again into the Lobbies or the Lords. As a result our governmental system is immune to original thought and unequipped to deal with a fast changing, and ever more technically based environment. We have a massive bureaucracy that keeps the show largely on the road while the legislature get's dumber and more vacant by the generation.

This isn't a new phenomenon either, and the latter history of Britain is one of decay, where each local upturn is of a lesser magnitude than it's predecessor. Standards of living have risen with our status as a western nation, but in spite, not because of general government policy. It's impossible for me, not to look on the whole crumbling edifice with despair. I, personally, am in a reasonably comfortable position, personally and professionally but I can still experience vexation, fury and regret of being trapped by a system that makes it impossible for a great many people to get on, and of a system of governance determined to drive the country into the rocks. 

Edited July 4, 2019 by renton

[Granny Danger]

Interesting bit by David Gauke in yesterday’s Guardian about the rise of populism in the U.K.

The idiots in the US have a lot to answer for.  A pathological liar as President should be polling in the low teens at best not the high 30s low 40s.

It illustrates just how much deceit and shocking behaviour a politician can get away with and still win support.  That’s even more worrying in a FPTP electoral system.

[Suspect Device]

2 hours ago, oaksoft said:

So you reckon the "streets are FULL of homeless people" do you?

 

 

There's certainly more in Union street as I walk to work in the morning. Especially ones who are 'proper' homeless sleeping in doorways rather than those kid on homeless who just don't have a permanent abode. 

[tirso]

Back door deals for all these new posts.  Including a Foreign affairs commissioner with a dubious internal track record.  Pretending European People's party or whatever other huge grouping is known by anybody in the electorate is deeply disingenuous. 

I think there are genuine concerns about democracy for some people and it's wrong to dismiss them all as racists.

 

 

[Jacksgranda]

2 hours ago, John Lambies Doos said:

3 hours ago, oaksoft said:

OK try this then.
Many people on here who are wallowing in poisonously negative posts are also on the Depression thread in General Nonsense asking for help. I reckon there's a pretty obvious link and my posts are aimed at that.
Rather than bitch about me, why not suggest something yourself to help them.

What type of business do you run Oaksoft?

Supplying food banks...

[ICTJohnboy]

2 minutes ago, Jacksgranda said:

Supplying food banks...

 

Or a brothel keeper and drug dealer.

[tirso]

2 hours ago, renton said:

This isn't a new phenomenon either, and the latter history of Britain is one of decay, where each local upturn is of a lesser magnitude than it's predecessor. Standards of living have risen with our status as a western nation, but in spite, not because of general government policy. It's impossible for me, not to look on the whole crumbling edifice with despair. I, personally, am in a reasonably comfortable position, personally and professionally but I can still experience vexation, fury and regret of being trapped by a system that makes it impossible for a great many people to get on, and of a system of governance determined to drive the country into the rocks. 

Nice post with good vocabulary but I'm not sure what you want the government to do.  There's very little difference between what Labour, SNP, Liberals, Tories would actually do in power.  We're talking margins, not revolutions.  And rightly too.  A lot of these people would want keys to the power to change it.  But what would they actually do?  On the whole, a diminishing country in the world is still richer than the vast majority of its peers.  Most people are on a median salary which is way above the poverty line.  There is a vast swathe of middle management people created in the last generation on 10, 20, 35k over the median that think they're under paid (when if boiled down, they do very little).  

 

 

 

[Jacksgranda]

What is the median wage? (I suppose I could always google it myself...)

[renton]

5 minutes ago, tirso said:

Nice post with good vocabulary but I'm not sure what you want the government to do.  There's very little difference between what Labour, SNP, Liberals, Tories would actually do in power.  We're talking margins, not revolutions.  And rightly too.  A lot of these people would want keys to the power to change it.  But what would they actually do?  On the whole, a diminishing country in the world is still richer than the vast majority of its peers.  Most people are on a median salary which is way above the poverty line.  There is a vast swathe of middle management people created in the last generation on 10, 20, 35k over the median that think they're under paid (when if boiled down, they do very little).  

 

 

 

Collapse, would be a nice start.

However, the actual issue is less with the party platforms and more with the entire architecture of government. It's structural far more than actually political. How and when we vote, the relative balance of power between local and national government, how tax is levied and importantly how it is accounted for, accountability of government to different judicial bodies, the relationship between industry and government as well. The whole system is fucked. Our attitude to government and politics is fucked. 

In the UK there is a general sense that the populace expect someone, somewhere to be doing something about whatever it was. Yet no one wants to be bothered by it. That's fundamentally where local politics is fucked basically, by the necessity of informed and willing citizens to do a job representing their peers. Without that we float towards ever larger and more centralised "local" government with few real powers. Local government should be arguably the most meaningful day to day pillar of governance, yet it absolutely isn't. The net effect is less innovation, less tailoring to local needs, less engagement by the general population with problems that matter to them. 

From this follows a party system that largely acts only in terms of national government and subsequently it's entirety of paid employees and elected officials have ambitions only for that national legislature, and because of this and the hollowing of local government, it allows more and more of those party elected officials to be drawn from a demographically narrow stream.

That's when you get to the legislature that I previously have described as being able to remain almost impenetrable to change, that simply absorbs and damps new ideas. Westminster is as unwilling as it is unable to change or reform.

So yeah, thanks to our status as a Western Nation, and particularly the fact we got into the industrial revolution first, we are still relatively well off as a nation. It doesn't take much imagination to see the general drift and it's direction though.

 

[welshbairn]

1 hour ago, tirso said:

Back door deals for all these new posts.  Including a Foreign affairs commissioner with a dubious internal track record.  Pretending European People's party or whatever other huge grouping is known by anybody in the electorate is deeply disingenuous. 

I think there are genuine concerns about democracy for some people and it's wrong to dismiss them all as racists.

 

 

Britons are uniquely ill informed about EU politics because of a hostile or apathetic media. Eurosceptics fight tooth and nail to prevent power going to the directly elected Parliament, instead keeping it in the hands of member states through the Council of Ministers or the Commission through member states' nominated representatives, and then whine about a democratic deficit. The fact remains when you ask leavers what EU laws or regulations they would change they invariably can't come up with anything, and when you push them on what taking back control actually means, it always comes back to foreigners and immigration. Meanwhile far more immigrants come from outside the EU where we've always had control, and the controls we have available for EU immigration we don't bother using.

[Gaz FFC]

14 hours ago, John Lambies Doos said:

Oaksoft trying to defend 'shambles britain'

Oaksoft has unicorns and leprechauns in his world

[topcat(The most tip top)]

Cooper is a cow

At least she can rely on the Hindu vote

[Gaz FFC]

4 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

Britons are uniquely ill informed about EU politics because of a hostile or apathetic media. Eurosceptics fight tooth and nail to prevent power going to the directly elected Parliament, instead keeping it in the hands of member states through the Council of Ministers or the Commission through member states' nominated representatives, and then whine about a democratic deficit. The fact remains when you ask leavers what EU laws or regulations they would change they invariably can't come up with anything, and when you push them on what taking back control actually means, it always comes back to foreigners and immigration. Meanwhile far more immigrants come from outside the EU where we've always had control, and the controls we have available for EU immigration we don't bother using.

I'd seen something a while ago (not saying it's true as I can't remember the source) but it said the only laws the UK rejected from Brussels involved tax evasion.

[John Lambies Doos]

Why do you ask?

Just wondering sector and any brexit implications...

[Kaz]

Hang on, is it not Oaksoft who regularly voices doubt as to whether Scotland is capable of being the same as every other nation in the world because our young people are lazy or some such nonsense. Lecturing people about negativity [emoji23]

[tirso]

6 minutes ago, renton said:

Collapse, would be a nice start.

However, the actual issue is less with the party platforms and more with the entire architecture of government. It's structural far more than actually political. How and when we vote, the relative balance of power between local and national government, how tax is levied and importantly how it is accounted for, accountability of government to different judicial bodies, the relationship between industry and government as well. The whole system is fucked. Our attitude to government and politics is fucked. 

In the UK there is a general sense that the populace expect someone, somewhere to be doing something about whatever it was. Yet no one wants to be bothered by it. That's fundamentally where local politics is fucked basically, by the necessity of informed and willing citizens to do a job representing their peers. Without that we float towards ever larger and more centralised "local" government with few real powers. Local government should be arguably the most meaningful day to day pillar of governance, yet it absolutely isn't. The net effect is less innovation, less tailoring to local needs, less engagement by the general population with problems that matter to them. 

From this follows a party system that largely acts only in terms of national government and subsequently it's entirety of paid employees and elected officials have ambitions only for that national legislature, and because of this and the hollowing of local government, it allows more and more of those party elected officials to be drawn from a demographically narrow stream.

That's when you get to the legislature that I previously have described as being able to remain almost impenetrable to change, that simply absorbs and damps new ideas. Westminster is as unwilling as it is unable to change or reform.

So yeah, thanks to our status as a Western Nation, and particularly the fact we got into the industrial revolution first, we are still relatively well off as a nation. It doesn't take much imagination to see the general drift and it's direction though.

 

Not sure what's wrong with a structure that has community councils, local government, regional government and national government to be honest. 

Not sure what's wrong with a public audit system including Audit Scotland and the Accounts Commission.

If these didn't exist, you'd invent them.

The UK is not impenetrable to change.  See Devolution, Independence , Brexit, private house ownership, women in workplace, social changes, upward mobility.  The majority of PMs in my company are ethnically from another part of the world.  That would never have happened 20 years ago.

The UK is one of the richest countries in the world and the general drift will be towards us getting poorer in comparison - unless defense mechanisms are put in place.  Don't doubt it for a minute.  That's the nature of removing inequality.

If the people don't like it, they can vote them out.  Can't remember what we disagree about!