Is it wrong to be ashamed of your own country
If I were abroad these days I would regularly feel the need to apologise.
I love what this country can be. I'm fairly patriotic too. Or was.
These days? I'm just embarrassed.
If I were abroad these days I would regularly feel the need to apologise.
On the day the vote came through, as Trump was walking through his primaries an American friend tuned to me on the way to the pub that afternoon and said "I'm glad we are not the laughing stock for today at least"
I am not sure if this has been mentioned but the next European Parliament elections are 23 May 2019, so that is a deadline of sorts.
Yeah I imagine we will have some sort of clarity by then, but only because the EU will force it.
Our own government are just a rabbit in the headlights
Blind faith in the country of your birth is a terrifying and dangerous thing.
Yet Amber Rudd was on the radio 20 minutes ago repeating the "Britain is great and we will be able to deal with anything" She clearly doesn't live in the same country as me.
I made the decision last year to move to Sweden to both work and live. Quite apart from being intensely glad I did, the current situation has made me more determined than ever never to go 'home'.
If I were abroad these days I would regularly feel the need to apologise.
This sums things up for me. I apologise near enough constantly for what the UK is currently doing to itself and the farce of the government. They alone makes me ashamed of my former country and the vocal small-minded fantasists that seem to represent it these days.
Which is kinda ironic when you think about it, a healthy happy productive society is far less likely to get angry over a bit of political or cooperate tax avoidance by the higher earners..
Indeed. What's more if they are better paid they will spen more - which ought to be a plus in a capitalist system!
yet Amber Rudd was on the radio 20 minutes ago repeating the “Britain is great and we will be able to
deal with anything” She clearly doesn’t live in the same country as me.
Meanwhile
Parliament has the power to block a no-deal Brexit, foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt has admitted.
The cabinet minister said it was "very unrealistic" to believe that MPs would not find a way to thwart a disorderly exit from the European Union if they wanted to, after Theresa May suffered a string of Commons defeats this week.
In a dramatic intervention, Mr Hunt also warned that voting down Ms May's deal next week could lead to "Brexit paralysis" and potentially mean the UK remaining in the EU.
Can we have some Benny Hill music please?
I love the people who said "it's about taking back control" well, this is who your giving it back to.... Useless bunch of self interested halfwits.
I heard Hunts interview
Im not sure if he was trying to back the PM, undermine the PM, scare the Brexiters/remainers or just really piss them all off.
Either way was nice to hear him confirm that brexit can be stopped
I missed QT How was Bruce?
All I know is that this yellow jacket lady nailed it....
https://twitter.com/bbcquestiontime/status/1083498634904256516?s=19
I love that woman in yellow a little bit after hearing that.
Fiona Bruce was good on QT. The programme confirmed what we all already new. Melanie Phillips truly is an absolutely hideous woman, who barely bothers to disguise her racism. Highlight of the show was Nish Kumar (who was brilliant throughout) tearing her a new one when they were discussing knife crime in London. He stopped just short of openly calling her a reactionary racist bigot, but only just
https://twitter.com/Think_Become/status/1083513533575430145
Wish that lady in yellow statement could be repeated in PMQ
Melanie Phillips truly is an absolutely hideous woman, who barely bothers to disguise her racism
She's married to Joshua Rozenberg, who always comes across as measured and reasonable. I know that's his job, and professional personas and all that, but they've always struck me as an odd pairing.
woman in yellow, Nish Kumar
Astonishing isn't it, how much more impressive the non-politicians are on QT?
Whilst he can be funny and raises a lot of valid issues, I don't think Nish and his fellow panel-show / stand-up comedians should be on QT, certainly not every week. It brings too much levity and a lot of them just resort to gags / routines.
I think that if theres one positive to come out of this whole shambles its that surely absolutely nobody can be under any illusions any more about how utterly useles our 'political class' are, right the way across the board? Completely intellectually vacant, wilfully ignorant, totally self-serving and on a practical level; thoroughly inept and incompetent!
Seriously... can you think of a single one of them to emerge with anything positive worth saying about them? I'd say that there are a 2 or 3.... Dominic Grieve, Anna Soubry and maybe Kier Starmer.
The rest of them...? Dear God!
Seriously… can you think of a single one of them to emerge with anything positive worth saying about them? I’d say that there are a 2 or 3…. Dominic Grieve, Anna Soubry and maybe Kier Starmer.
David Lammy
The "political class" covers more than 2 parties and more than Westminster.
Fair point... David Lammy, for sure.
Whats been ruthlessly exposed is the vacuum at the top of both main parties. Chris Grayling is still Transport secratery, apparently secure in his job. And Dianne Abbott is what passes for a political heavyweight in the Labour Party. That tells you everything you need to know about where we are with our present 'frontbench' politics
Astonishing isn’t it, how much more impressive the non-politicians are on QT?
and
can you think of a single one of them to emerge with anything positive worth saying about them? I’d say that there are a 2 or 3….
Career politicians mainly whose main interest is in staying in a career in politics. I refuse to believe they are all as stupid as they can appear, but in an effort to keep their jobs and party positions, they just do what the whips tell them to. It's not intelligence, it's integrity to do the right things rather than the self-serving. And given that many (genuinely, i believe) went into politics to try to do good, where this gets derailed and they just become tied to the gravy train like all the rest, I don't know.
The ones who stand out, like the Yellow Lady, are not that much more intelligent if at all, but they are simply speaking what they believe instead of a finessed version of the party line.
On top of which - when the party line becomes so frustratingly and obviously indefensible, they then revert to PR tactics of listening to a question, offering a nothing answer followed by some linking words and then talking about whatever they want to anyway. ALL THE BLOODY TIME.
I'd like the press to say 'enough's enough' and when they won't answer clearly and unambiguously, refuse to give them the airtime, and instead just play suitable music (Benny Hill theme for example) over their answers.
I'd like the press to pull them up on it, and bully them into either giving a proper answer or refusing to answer at all - actual journalists doing their job, the press are in many ways complicit in the current mess.
Yvette Cooper did okay with her amendment to the finance bill. Backbench of course.
I’d like the press to say ‘enough’s enough’ and when they won’t answer clearly and unambiguously, refuse to give them the airtime, and instead just play suitable music (Benny Hill theme for example) over their answers.
the bbc should also stop playing devils advocate with "the Government would say blah blah" (as they did with the 1 in 5 children in food insecurity story). I'm sorry if the government are not prepared to defend their position in person with a minister it is not the job of the bbc to do it for them.
After watching Peter grant of the SNP just put the Tories in their place I'm not so sure the SNP shouldn't be running the country....not one of them had any regiments about what he just said...well no one who dare stand up and put their paper house argument against
The press are a lot more than complicit in my view ...
Whether that is the full blown "enemies of the people" campaigns or the slow drip feed of lies and misinformation over the last 30-40 years...
The trouble is the tail is wagging the dog... politicians should be prepared to steer/educate and inform the masses, stand up for what they believe in and persuade folks into understanding their position. However what they have to do is bend with the wind to keep a bunch of folk happy who have had their opinions handed to them by the media... (the right wing media is particularly bad but the left wing media are at it too)
That is one of the reasons why we have ended up where we are
I’d like the press to pull them up on it, and bully them into either giving a proper answer or refusing to answer at all – actual journalists doing their job, the press are in many ways complicit in the current mess.
Never seen Paxo doing this to Michael Howard way back when?
John Humphries does it all the time - the problem is that the average Joe 'soundbite/snippet' relier only remembers the first time something like this happens. So everyone (me included) only remembers the Michael Howard one when there have been hundreds of comparable incidences since. Granted that the Howard one was because Paxo had backed him into a corner where the only answer was yes/no so anything other than a definitive yes/no was obviously evasion.
If journos get too aggro the politicians will just hide or run away and everything will be done by written statements - which won't contain anything more than ambiguities.
The spectre of one BBC employee anchoring the programme in the studio asking another BBC employee stood outside Downing Street what they think of something always makes me turn the channel over. This only happens because the politicians don't dare put anyone up for an interview, so the BBC tries to busk it.
^^^^^^^^
Very much like the 'Royal Correspondent' that Armstrong and Miller used to take off.
Yup, I was thinking of an idea like brass eye, where if the statement is bullshit it's read out by a clown.
It just winds me up watching a journalist nodding along to a politician who is clearly spouting utter bollocks/not answering the question at all. For ****s sakes, just pull them up on it, it's part of your job, and not doing it is basically an affront to journalistic integrity.
I don't want a paxman level of grilling, I just want them to not enable the terribleness.
Channel 4 news are about the only ones nowadays who actually interview politicians properly. The BBC is a total waste of space. They're now obsessed with this whole idea of 'balance' which means they're prepared to let someone like Farage sit there spouting lie after lie after lie, totally unchallenged, because... balance
I don’t want a paxman level of grilling, I just want them to not enable the terribleness.
It would have to be 'Full Paxo' in a lot of cases, though.
The vast majority of MPs are in possession of a good level of intelligence and the vast majority will be saying, in private, what we all know. A good Brexit is an impossibility and a 100% contradiction in terms. They just can't say it because they are afraid to. In the context of what we are talking about here, how long/far should an interviewer push them to elicit this truth?
Verbal trickery? Reducto ad absurdum? Sleep deprivation? White noise?
John Humphries does it all the time – the problem is that the average Joe ‘soundbite/snippet’ relier only remembers the first time something like this happens. So everyone (me included) only remembers the Michael Howard one when there have been hundreds of comparable incidences since. Granted that the Howard one was because Paxo had backed him into a corner where the only answer was yes/no so anything other than a definitive yes/no was obviously evasion.
Dont know if you can get the parliament channel to playback but Mhairi Blacks speech yesterday was a cracker. The striking thing about most if not all the SNP is how articulate they are compared to the rest.
Dont know if you can get the parliament channel to playback but Mhairi Blacks speech yesterday was a cracker.
This one?
https://twitter.com/mhairiblack/status/1083442319863492608?s=21
I would vote SNP based on what I have seen from them and not surprising they took over Scotland. They do largely appear more honest with more integrity but if I looked deeper I may be disappointed I suppose.
Can you see why the idea of the Scots cutting loose from Westminster and many of the Little Englander attitudes was/is appealing up here?
There is obviously a lot more nuance to it than that, but still...
I totally get it. I think that most of the country outside the south east (now effectively a country within a country) feels just as shut out and excluded from Westminster politics and totally unrepresented by the two main parties. None of the rest of us are even on the radar.
If I was in Scotland, voting SNP would be an absolute no-brainer. I just wish that we had the option to give both labour and the Tory's the same two fingers, and vote for a party that seems to actually represent something other than their own narrow self-interest, and the eternal 'is it our turn now?' two party system that has delivered us into this car-crash!
I am reminded of Robin Day interviewing John Nott.
The striking thing about most if not all the SNP is how articulate they are compared to the rest.
It's because they are in a unique situation. They have totally won their own political battle whilst not being in the one everyone else is fighting. So they can make great speeches without having to worry about pissing anyone off.
The BBC is a total waste of space. They’re now obsessed with this whole idea of ‘balance’ which means they’re prepared to let someone like Farage sit there spouting lie after lie after lie, totally unchallenged, because… balance
I've certainly heard BBC interviewers challenge MPs on the nonsense they're spouting. However the worst pedlars of nonsense have learnt well from Trump and will quite blatantly deny evidence and claim their own version of reality when challenged.
One horrid example was Jacob Rees Mogg being interviewed by Evan Davis. When Evan Davis suggested to Mogg that virtually no economists agreed with his rosy predictions for a no deal Brexit, Mogg went on the attack, accusing Davis of impugning his honour and terrible rudeness. Yet moments later Mogg was attacking Mark Carney for being a "second-rate failed Canadian politician".
The striking thing about most if not all the SNP is how articulate they are compared to the rest.
They really should start a takeover of UK politics - send a few candidates down south for the next election, see how they get on. I would probably vote for them.
. Yet moments later Mogg was attacking Mark Carney for being a “second-rate failed Canadian politician”.
Regardless of the fact that Carney was NEVER a politician.
I've said this about the SNP a few times. I'm glad folk are catching on!
In fact the logical extension of this is for them to take over at Westminster and sack off the nationalism. Remain and reform....
