Guest 745- Registered: 27 Mar 2012
- Posts: 3,370
Brian Dixon- Location: Dover
- Registered: 23 Sep 2008
- Posts: 23,940
no not signing that rubbish.
Jan Higgins likes this
howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
Most people seem to think a second chamber is necessary but not in my view, especially when there are hereditary peers so I wouldn't complain if they abolished it.
Brian Dixon- Location: Dover
- Registered: 23 Sep 2008
- Posts: 23,940
any way trying to get rid of the wrong chamber.
Weird Granny Slater likes this
Guest 649- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 14,118
They get £300 per sitting so they will not move,
Jan Higgins- Location: Dover
- Registered: 5 Jul 2010
- Posts: 13,657
howard mcsweeney1 wrote:Most people seem to think a second chamber is necessary but not in my view, especially when there are hereditary peers so I wouldn't complain if they abolished it.
To be honest I would rather have some of the hereditary peers than most of the political cronies who are only there because they lost their seat or retired, the religious lot should also go.
Paul M and John Buckley like this
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I try to be neutral and polite but it is hard and getting even more difficult at times.
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Neil Moors- Registered: 3 Feb 2016
- Posts: 1,225
In an increasingly bonkers political climate, their Lordships are about the only lot holding the Government to account in any meaningful way. They provide vital scrutiny to our legislation - they are also right to highlight that staying in the Customs Union is in the best interests of the UK. Having said that, I do take the point that they must then ultimately give way as they are unelected. However, it is absolutely in their remit to ask the HoC to have a rethink.
Brian Dixon likes this
Weird Granny Slater- Location: Dover
- Registered: 7 Jun 2017
- Posts: 2,844
BD's right, of course. The Lords is a large red herring. If we're going to have a democracy, rather than the 'democracy' that we have currently, then it's the 'Commons' (there's a laugh) that needs reform. At the moment we effectively have a two-party state, as those two parties broadly share the same ideology (JC notwithstanding). Since 1979 it's been a case of 'whoever you vote for the (neoliberal) government wins.' PR and right of recall are minimum requirements. After that, get rid of the Lords as well.
'Pass the cow dung, my dropsy's killing me' - Heraclitus
Captain Haddock- Location: Marlinspike Hall
- Registered: 8 Oct 2012
- Posts: 7,481
'If no one went no faster than what I do there'd be a sight less trouble in this world'
Guest 1881- Registered: 16 Oct 2016
- Posts: 1,071
I'll start...Austerity: punishing the vulnerable for the mismanagement of the under-regulated capitalist ethos.
NEXT...
howard mcsweeney1 likes this
Just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean that politics won't take an interest in you. PERICLES.
Brian Dixon- Location: Dover
- Registered: 23 Sep 2008
- Posts: 23,940
the windrush cock up ................ next
Guest 1881- Registered: 16 Oct 2016
- Posts: 1,071
The British government refused to assist a French investigation into suspected money laundering and tax fraud by the UK telecoms giant Lycamobile – citing the fact that the company is the “biggest corporate donor to the Conservative party”.
Source:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/uk-refused-to-raid-lycamobile-citing-its-tory-donations?utm_term=.bkEDDKDnq#.odQqqYqaR
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Just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean that politics won't take an interest in you. PERICLES.
Guest 1881- Registered: 16 Oct 2016
- Posts: 1,071
Dodgy dossier to give invasion access to Iraq and then hand out contracts to multi-nationals thus pillaging the indigenous population rather than having their interests at 'regime change' heart.
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Just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean that politics won't take an interest in you. PERICLES.
Guest 1881- Registered: 16 Oct 2016
- Posts: 1,071
Guest 1713 likes this
Just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean that politics won't take an interest in you. PERICLES.
Weird Granny Slater- Location: Dover
- Registered: 7 Jun 2017
- Posts: 2,844
Last weekend's NATO attack on Syria prompted a rise in the value of BAE Systems shares. Philip May's (yes, you know who he is) Capital Group is the largest shareholder In BAE Systems...
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'Pass the cow dung, my dropsy's killing me' - Heraclitus
Guest 1881- Registered: 16 Oct 2016
- Posts: 1,071
Just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean that politics won't take an interest in you. PERICLES.
Captain Haddock- Location: Marlinspike Hall
- Registered: 8 Oct 2012
- Posts: 7,481
From the FT:-
Declinism is in fashion. From the conservative writer and gadfly Jonah Goldberg this week comes Suicide of the West. The cover story of the impeccably centrist Foreign Affairs asks: “Is Democracy Dying?” Most experts the magazine polled said it wasn’t, but an alarmingly large minority thought it was. For Patrick Deneen, a hostile critic from the Catholic right, liberalism’s game is already over, as he recently explained without regrets in Why Liberalism Failed.
Since Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West first appeared in Germany 100 years ago, you might think that an old publishing standby — the centenary — was at work. You’d be wrong for two reasons. One is that democratic liberalism does indeed need serious repair, giving defenders much to be concerned for. The other is that declinism has always been with us.
If Goldberg’s lurid title sounds familiar, you are not imagining things. Collective self-immolation is a cherished image in prophetic oratory. In 2010 Thilo Sarrazin had a best-seller in Germany is Destroying Itself, as did Eric Zemmour four years later in Le Suicide français. Nor were either of those titles new. Back in 1964 James Burnham of the conservative US weekly National Review promised readers a “definitive analysis of the pathology of liberalism” in Suicide of the West.
The political centre is also prone to bouts of civilisational nerves. In 1957, the theorist of nationalism, Hans Kohn, wrote in Is the Liberal West in Decline? that people were “coming to believe that everything is breaking down”. Soon after, British diplomat David Ormsby-Gore penned an anxious-sounding Must the West Decline? Both were corrective and reassuring in intent.
By the 1970s the question marks had vanished and tones darkened. American political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing with a Japanese and French colleague, worried in The Crisis of Democracy that inflated expectations and administrative overload were making western nations ungovernable. In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism neo-conservative Daniel Bell saw personal liberties and insatiable consumerism undermining the virtues and disciplines on which capitalism depended.
Since then, bookshop shelves have rarely been free of spirited essays claiming that this or that western nation was washed-up — or wasn’t. For declinism invites anti-declinism as in George Bernstein’s The Myth of Decline: The Rise of Britain Since 1945 and Josef Joffe’s The Myth of America’s Decline. More recently, Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now) and Hans Rosling (Factfulness) stress humanity’s global progress.
Arthur Herman noticed that higher-level cycle in The Idea of Decline in Western History, a study of the pessimistic strain in historical narratives with which people have tried to make sense of their times. For Herman, the pessimists were more often wrong than right.
The flaws and follies of declinism are easy to spot. That shouldn’t be undue comfort to anyone worried by the state we’re in. Declinism is unoriginal, speaks in sermony tones and has sloppy intellectual habits. True enough, but the deeper trouble is that it’s a distraction. Declinism appeals to speculative trends we can’t be sure about and a future we can’t see. Its scarifications distract us from urgent repairs needed for democratic liberalism here and now.
Edmund Fawcett is the author of ‘Liberalism: The Life of an Idea’
I know you won't believe me but for most people in most places most things are getting better day by day, here's Hans Rosling's lad pointing it out
'If no one went no faster than what I do there'd be a sight less trouble in this world'
Brian Dixon- Location: Dover
- Registered: 23 Sep 2008
- Posts: 23,940
pot holes. ................ next
Guest 1881- Registered: 16 Oct 2016
- Posts: 1,071
GP crisis ....... NEXT
Just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean that politics won't take an interest in you. PERICLES.
Guest 1881- Registered: 16 Oct 2016
- Posts: 1,071
The neo-liberal gig economy -
‘The pay does vary a lot, I’ve noticed. So, because they’re very quick, you’re paid on individual tasks, and they can be from 5p to 20p, I think. So, you have got to do a lot of them to get paid properly. The pay is awful, and it’s monotonous. It would send you a bit mental after a while.’ Online/office/administrative worker ‘It can be a bit of a race to the bottom, where it’s obviously not a UK-only platform. Inevitably, if someone posts a job who wants a user guide written and I, as a qualified professional would quote, I don’t know, say, £400 for a piece of work, inevitably somebody in Bangladesh will quote £50 and somebody in, I don’t know, the Scottish Highlands or somewhere might quote £300.’ Online/office/administrative worker
Source:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gig-economy-research
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Just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean that politics won't take an interest in you. PERICLES.