Plus a lot of people are racist to some degree. They may not openly admit it but when given some options that appeal to their inner racist they like them. The options are made up and not based on fact of course but that is where the stupidity comes in and they just believe it.

Better known as populism.

Totally this.

I am hearing a lot about friends of friends and family members of people who are not frothing at the mouth, street fighting racists in the Classic image.

They tend more to be people whose lives aren’t working out as they want them to (generally due to circumstances that are now beyond their control, but weren’t in the past). Instinctively they find it easier to blame someone else than have a look in the mirror where most of the reasons lay.

Too many cars cramming into the town in the morning? It is due to Asians as they never walk anywhere and have eight cars to one family.

Job opportunities not there even though you have never really knuckled down either at school or later and did boring shit like professional qualifications? Positive discrimination is to blame. ‘They’ favour everyone but ‘real’ English people.

The media in this country is very very good at manipulating these people.

When Rees Mogg sounds off about Grenfell it is not a mistake. A lot of the people he is trying to court have an underlying feeling that the residents of Grenfell largely ‘should not be in this country anyway’.

These are the times we live in. This country is in managed decline. It makes it very easy to prey on people who think the world owes them a living.

binners

Subscriber

To be honest I’m quite happy with the situation as it stands, where the amount of damage any one party can do is severely curtailed. Its actually been quite funny watching ‘World King’ Joris Bohnsons impotent rage at his inability to actually do anything

The worst thing that can happen IMHO is anyone getting an overall majority. Nobody in UK politics could be trusted with one, on account of the fact that they’re all mental! Luckily there seems to be a vanishingly small chance of that happening

I think you’re right there. My business partner likened the prospect of a Tory or Labour majority to a choice between being hanged or shot.

JP

The underlying problems are poor business practices

British business mostly focus their efforts on cost cutting – which is always detrimental to the service or goods they provide.

I’ve been on countless projects that have been buggered up by cost cutting.

We also have some pretty arcane Treasury rules where any savings delivered by Government departments can’t be re-invested, but have to be returned to the Treasury and ‘spend-to-save’ initiatives are discouraged. I’ve worked on a number of Government programmes where we spend years developing solutions, applying for funding, co-investment from industry, getting it approved for 5-10 years with promise of more to find the whole thing abandoned after a couple of years because a new administration or minister wants to re-direct it elsewhere. The short-termism of recent Governments is what has deprived investment in many areas and in fact if it wasn’t for EU money we’d be a lot worse.

Can I just jump into to say todays headlines where the Tories are being attacked for not responding to the flooding promptly is really ripping my knitting.

All parties need to be responding better to anthropomorphic climate change, the individual weather event is a passing side show.

Unimpressed.

Well done Tim Walker. We just need his party, and the party of the candidate he stood down for, to wake the **** up.

I don’t think Johnson is keen on HS2 at all, is he? It’s a vote loser in his own seat, and plenty of other Conservative seats. Hopefully he’ll look long term and push ahead with it still.

but Labour then invests but wastes a lot…

Cite? Evidence? In my time in the NHS nothing has wasted ( that I have seen) anything like as much money as the tories fake market. that has added at least 10% to costs for zero benefit – its actually a detriment as it makes strategic planning more difficult

Steve XTC – yes the NHS performs poorly on some indicators – now look at what is spent by other countries on health and compare it to us. Not seen the numbers recently but even at the peak of labours cash injuecton it still ranked a few % behind other counties. We spend IIRC just under 10% of gdp. US 20% EU average is around 12% Germany spends around 14% IIRC

Labours time in power it went up from under 8% of gdp to around 10% – and the improvement was huge

I ain’t gonna waste my time actually looking at the numbers for someone who puts it down on ideological grounds without evidence as is clear

https://twitter.com/MikeGapes/status/1194374636139679750?s=09

😁

It’s a weird bit of british exceptionalism to think that we suck at these things and that just about every european government would be better at running our critical services than we can be.

Unfortunately, we did suck at those sorts of things. Almost every nationalised industry in the UK was shockingly bad, and I say this as someone who opposed privatisation of natural monopolies.

Just think back to British Leyland, British Rail et al if you don’t believe me.

JP

Lib Dems are stuck really, they can’t be seen to be uniting with labour if they want to try and steal some soft tories. Corbyn is so toxic that anyone who is seen to be aligned with him get’s hurt if they are trying to take centrist voters.

If you watch the recent despatches programme on HS2 all the rail experts were unanimous. It’s going to end up as 150 billion plus commuter line into London. It’ll be stopped at Birmingham, so the whole ‘northern powerhouse’ thing will be exposed as the total bollocks it always was. HS2 will never get north of the midlands

And while they spaff another 150 billlion on top of cross-rail tens of billions overspend, the reality of rail travel for users outside London and the south east looks like this

But apparently rail nationalisation would be a bad thing? Well I suppose it might be if you live in the South East

Unfortunately, we did suck at those sorts of things. Almost every nationalised industry in the UK was shockingly bad, and I say this as someone who opposed privatisation of natural monopolies.

Just think back to British Leyland, British Rail et al if you don’t believe me.

Taking this and Northwind’s post to which it’s replying…someone humour me. As when I arrived here from Ireland, privatisation was well underway, and I wasn’t a big user of trains so I don’t really remember the days of BR.

Were “we” shit at railways? If so, why so? If not, why not? I’m sure I remember some uni mates doing some inter-railing and saying how awesome it was to travel around Europe on the train but that was compared to the national Irish operator, CIE, which was a **** joke. That aside, I don’t hear many extolling the halcyon days of BR or is that just everyone looking through Maggie coloured glasses (accepting that it was Major’s government which passed the Railway Act…I think)?

So what made us so shite at railways and the rest of Europe so good? And why do we now yearn for nationalisation because the rest of Europe does it so well? How come they didn’t privatise to our level?

[Apologies for thread diversion.]

British real had suffered many years of underinvestment before privatisation

We had great innovative stuff ready to be used but tory ideology meant it was never put into service – look into the ATP / tilting trains for one example

Stevextc – got any evidence to back your assertions on the NHS? Or do you now I have give you the numbers accept that poor NHS performance is down to the tories underfunding and waste on the fake market?

What caused this shift?

Thatcherism.
Greed is good. The cult of the individual, the deliberate creation of an easy to blame underclass and the demonisation of the disenfranchised.

Evil, hateful ideology that has now gained so much momentum it cannot be stopped.
A nation of selfish, greedy individuals, ready to sacrifice those most in need to get an inch or two nearer the trough.

Yep, that was the start of it. Our main hope is the young who were not around back then and should be looking at the state we are in and doing something about it. Currently they are still outnumbered so a few years yet.

That all ignores how FPTP works, outofbreath. Having “all three options” in a seat so often just lowers the vote count needed for the Conservatives to win that seat.

At first this looks like a shit idea

I thought he was a better actor than that… it looks so practised and contrived… I honestly thought one of his big skills was making this stuff look natural.

Northwind …

EDF are an interesting example to choose. Mostly because it’s not privatised. Much like the trains, when we talk about privatisation in the UK it often means “nationalisation, just with a different nation than us”. I mean, I like the French but exactly what is it that makes us think we couldn’t possibly run a public nuclear power industry ourselves but the French can run it for us? So much so that we nationalised British Energy then sold it to the French.

And trains, people say Britain can’t run a nationalised train service but we can have Abelio, Kelios and Arriva run chunks of ours at a profit- why are the Dutch, French and Germans so much better at nationalised rail that they can run ours and we can’t?

It’s a weird bit of british exceptionalism to think that we suck at these things and that just about every european government would be better at running our critical services than we can be.

I don’t think it’s so clear cut… there is perhaps some British exceptionalism but I think it relates to the history of business/industries and other European countries have their own exceptions.

EDF, GDF (now Engie) and Orange/France Telecom were pretty crap in France from a consumer PoV… and much more successful exported.. whereas TGV/SNCF were always streets ahead.

It’s a weird bit of british exceptionalism to think that we suck at these things and that just about every european government would be better at running our critical services than we can be.

No, it’s a result of the way that the rail system was carved up such that it allowed profits to be privatised and liabilities to be nationalised. Any operator ought to be able to appear a success if the game is rigged in your favour.

Unfortunately, we did suck at those sorts of things. Almost every nationalised industry in the UK was shockingly bad, and I say this as someone who opposed privatisation of natural monopolies.

Just think back to British Leyland, British Rail et al if you don’t believe me.

As someone else posted, if you take a shit business on it’s arse, nationalise it but don’t fundamentally change it, it’s still going to be a shit business on it’s arse.

If you think we can’t effectively run a nationalised business look at the recent history (15 years or so ) of the East Coast Line. Quite pertinent.