UK Politics

Well, that's Adidas f***ed for everyone then...

 

That's not an Anti-Labour political structure though is it. Its how it basically always works with the losing "side".

Show the 'vote per MP' stat for the Blair years and you'll see what I mean.

 

All fair.....but Labour (like the Tories) show absolutely zero plan to change any of those things.

You're harping back to a golden era where the whole Western World (Not specific to Labour policies) rode the wave of an economic boom on the back of a bubble which eventually burst and led to the UK entering a long a deep recession before the Tories and Lib Dems took power.

It would be nice to think that the Labour Party could bring back that sort of era of Cool Britannia but I can't see it because (a) they don't seem to have the policies to make it work and (b) I see no sign of the global economy generating that sort of impetus for the UK to ride.

 

There’s some truth to what you say. But the fact is that the Tories deliberately cut government spending for ten years when all the economic wisdom indicated that they should have been borrowing, at record low interest rates, and pump priming the economy, as other more successful countries did.
As a result of this madness, our economy failed to recover from the global crash and has been moribund ever since. This was a deliberate political decision, designed to decimate the public sector, and is the main reason that all of our public services are in the shocking state they are today.

 

Apart from the recession started for about 2 years under Labour and at the point Allister Darling agreed with with the Conservatives were suggesting.

Maybe the cuts went on too long, maybe, but the majority of the cuts with in the initial stages and that idea was universally accepted by the political parties with their being a wafer between them. We're getting into the same situation again where there are no dramatic ideas and everyone is on the status quo, it's nothing even vaguely similar to the beginning of Blair.

 

The recession started with the bankers crashing the global economy. Nothing to do with Labour - it happened everywhere. Brown got a lot of international credit for the way he steered us through the initial post crash period.
Yes, most countries pulled their horns in for three or four years. But the Tories quite deliberately continued to cut spending at a time when everyone else was reflating their economies by borrowing at close to zero interest and investing. By about 2012 the World Bank and the IMF were urging us to stop cutting and start investing. But Osborne and Cameron ignored them and went on cutting for years longer. This had nothing to do with economic good management; it was purely driven by their ideological obsession with shrinking the public sector. And that’s why our public services were so ill equipped to cope with the pandemic and the main reason why nothing in this country works any more.
Starmer is promising nothing at the moment, in order to avoid the traditional media smears about ‘Labour profligacy’ ahead of the election. He’s sticking to Tory ideas about repaying the huge debt that the Tories have run up, over a shorter period than is necessary. But, if he gets in with a decent majority, I can see some of those shackles coming off after a couple of years. There’s so much that is broken that can only be mended by targeted government investment. The public is crying out for those things to be fixed, not for more austerity.

 

So the unelected PM Sunak is going to hand over another £50m to Rwanda whilst not a single person has been sent there and as it stands boat crossings are up 28% on last year (because it's weather related, it always has been it was disingenuous for Sunak to claim otherwise) because it's no deterant at all.

If people are willing to risk death to cross the channel, then they aren't going to think twice about a 0.05% chance of being picked out and being sent to Rwanda. What's the total cost now, closing in on half a billion pounds of taxpayers money? I mean the Tories seem upset that Rayner possibly avoided £1,500 whilst paying out £35,000 in liable charges for one of their ministers.

This extra £50m Sunak is handing over, papers at both ends of the spectrum are reporting it, from the Guardian to the Mail.

Sunak to give Rwanda £50m if deportation bill passed into law | Politics | The Guardian

Ministers to hand Rwanda another £50m when migrant flights become law (msn.com)

We are being taken for mugs and every day that passes Sunak is doing more and more damage to there ever being even a two party system in the UK.

 

It’s absolutely bonkers. There are only going to be 300 deportations per year. As you say, the ‘deterrent’ effect is utterly microscopic. Even Rishi Sunak is intellectually capable of recognising this, so it’s obvious that this whole sorry, pathetic charade is just a load of window dressing designed to look as though they are doing something, however ineffective. And it’s all taking so long that the Rwandans are now busy selling off the houses that were meant to be for the deportees. This is the politics of farce. You couldn’t make it up.

 

I don't disagree. But you can't give the Labour Party the credit for the global boom years and then absolve them of blame for the bust. They are two sides of the same coin.

Equally the "10 years of Tory cuts" are basically "3 years of cutting too far". And I would agree.

Equally you can't have a go about the debts the "Torys have run up" when all through lockdown you wanted more, more and more.

But nothing in this Country doesn't work because of that. Nothing in this Country doesn't work because its underfunded.

We pay more to the government than we've ever done and every meaningful aspect of the state spends more money than its ever done. Nothing in this country works because its inefficient and people resist every single bit of change even when it's needed. That goes from planning to immigration to infrastructure.

That's what Labour need to change and I'm just dying to hear something positive from them about it. The point of politics isn't to keep things up your sleeve and then spring them on the electorate once you've got in. You might like it because they're 'your' side but in general that's horrendous politics and bad for the trust of the public. We need to know what we're voting for and, to me, it needs to address those key aspects.

 

Where's the 300 come from?

But I don't disagree that its a farce but it goes back to the point of people resisting change. What about if the government actually did this properly and what about if it actually did work? But we spend 2 years faffing about with a plan which then gets watered down and watered down through the laugable Lords and the courts and then we're surprised when it doesn't work.

As a country we need to try and be bolder, actually put plans in place and then if it doesn't work the next government can reverse them. Its an absolutely great example of us half-arseing things to try and appease everyone instead of just doing things and seeing what happens.

People are too scared of things actually working - especially if they're done by a party they don't support - rather than embracing the radical changes that are 100% needed.

 

https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/300-migrants-will-be-sent-to-rwanda-each-year-despite-thousands-pledge/

Also reported in several different ther news outlets.

It’s a joke. We are a laughing stock. And the Rwandans are laughing all the way to the bank.

 

I don't think that says that there are only going to be 300 sent there. There's nothing to say that the definition of inadmissible won't or can't be changed.

But thats by the by to some degree and it goes back to the point of actually trying things. I'd rather any political party try things and then be criticised for them not working rather than people doing everything they can to stop things changing. That's a perfect example of why things don't move on.

 

Don’t be ridiculous - Labour didn’t cause the global banking crash. And, yes, they were fortunate to be in power during a period of relative global prosperity. But if Osborne had been Chancellor during those years he would still have instituted austerity, because his primary ideological motivation was to drastically shrink the public sector, not to deliver better public services. He’d never have instituted the incredibly successful Sure Start programme or got the NHS to its best ever levels of performance and public satisfaction, as Blair and Brown did. Labour chose to do positive things with the period of economic prosperity (albeit they now admit that they were too timid and should have gone further, earlier). The Tories wouldn’t have done those things, because they were obsessed with outdated, discredited Thatcherite/Friedmanite notions that every other developed economy dropped long before then. In short, we’d have been in a far worse position to deal with the global recession had the Tories been in power when it happened.

Had Labour still been in charge when the pandemic occurred we would wouldn’t have had those five or six unnecessary years (not three) of slash and burn economics destroying vast swathes of our public capabilities.

If Labour had been in power in 2020 we would have:

a) taken the pandemic seriously when it was obvious that it was killing people in droves in Italy and was going to hit our shores very soon. We wouldn’t have had a PM who couldn’t be arsed to attend Cobra meetings, or any other sort of planning, but preferred to spend his time writing a book and sorting out his personal finances rather than actually doing his job as PM of protecting the British public.

b) had a much better functioning NHS, with higher staffing levels. We wouldn’t have slashed the doctor and nurses training programmes as the Tories did.

c) had far higher stocks of up to date PPE (which the Tories allowed to run down to the point of almost total ineffectiveness, requiring wasteful panic buying from wherever they could get it, including paying shitloads for stock that never arrived or was totally useless when it did).

d) had a better emergency Pandemic Response Plan - because they’d have listened to the warning reports that came out a couple of years earlier, instead of binning them, and would have taken responsible steps to ensure that we were as reasonably prepared as we could be.

e) utilised the existing levels of expertise in the (undiminished) public sector for things like track and trace, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel with start up companies who actually didn’t have a fricking clue what they were doing

e) never showered £38 billions of public money on our mates’ personal wealth creation schemes masquerading as pandemic responses.

All of which means that we’d have locked down quicker, but shorter, and generally managed the pandemic far more efficiently, resulting in us spending far less public money overall.

This country has been suffering from a massive investment strike for decades. Despite record levels of income inequality the private sector pays out record dividends to already wealthy shareholders, squirrels away its money in offshore accounts or overseas investments but does sweet FA to invest in our economy, whether that’s automation, retraining, new start-ups, whatever. On the public side, successive Governments (of both stripes) have been dissuaded from borrowing to invest, despite an unprecedented extended period of record low interest rates, because of idiotic Thatcherite ideas that equate the national economy to a household budget. So we have no substantial innovation, investment in plant and infrastructure etc etc. We make next to nothing.

It’s much more important for an incoming Labour government to borrow money at still low interest rates to pump prime the economy with capital projects, than it is to follow Tory plans to repay debt levels in a short timescale. But the public and (especially) the media don’t want to hear this. The moment Labour starts talking about ambitious investment plans the media will jump all over them, as they always do, with screaming headlines of Labour ‘profligacy’ and made up shite about tax rises for ordinary people. And the people will swallow it. So, I agree, it’s very annoying that Labour feel forced into being so timid and unable to break out of the shackles of the Tories’ self imposed fiscal rules. But that’s where we are with our political system and the media that reports on it.

The one thing I agree with mad Liz Truss on is the need for investment to grow the economy. But that doesn’t mean borrowing billions in tax giveaways to the rich in the blind hope (despite decades of evidence to the contrary) that they will use the extra liquidity to fund the growth we need. It needs targeted government investment to kick start national growth. The private sector will follow when it sees there are returns to be made, but relying on them to initiate digging us out of the hole we’re in is utter folly. It hasn’t happened for the last forty years and it won’t start now with government leading the way.

 

The article I’m reading says, in as many words, that only 300 per year will be sent to Rwanda. What’s unclear about that? And I’ve read exactly the same thing in several other news sources.
It’s one thing ‘trying things’, if they have some realistic chance of achieving anything of significance. It’s quite another spending incredibly large sums of our money on crackpot schemes that will make no visible dent in the numbers of asylum seekers here and will have precisely zero deterrent effect, so low are the chances of any given person being deported to Rwanda.
It’s all just window dressing to fire up the Sun and Mail headline writers. Sunak and Co know full well that it is pointless nonsense. It just gives them an opportunity to berate as ‘woke lefties’ anyone who points out the utter folly of the scheme. Thankfully, the public appear to have now seen through this blustering nonsense, no longer believe anything they say and just want rid of them as soon as possible.

 

Doesn't it say......according to a Home Office model. They're demonstrating cost, not predicting accurate numbers.

All fair. But once again, we won't actually know unless we try.

If they go through the process and they send 300 to Rwanda then it's a failure, get out, you've screwed up.......but why not try the only deterrent any one has put on the table? It's not like people are coming up with different plans.

 

So a Tory MP was held in a room after visiting a rent boy who is an illegal immigrant who has been turned down for asylum three times and had to get a staff member to pay £5k which he repaid out of party funds. This was known three months ago but the Tories did nothing.

Sunak is polling as unpopular as Jeremy Corbyn and the Tory Party is on 19% in the polls.

Nicola Sturgeon's Husband has now been formally charge with embezzlement of SNP funds.

Just your standard day in UK politics.

 

It really is a shocking state of affairs all way round.............but what can be done, vote Reform, it's our only chance ....

 

Really. ok, good luck with that, always thought you had more about you than that ... !!