British Politics

The claim is that Starmer and Sarwar have a 'big Scotland problem'. His vacuous article and the polling show that there is no 'big Scotland problem'. Scottish Labour previously did have a big issue there and it was Corbyn. He took them to a historically low vote share in the last election but thankfully his removal has seen a steady recovery.

This is a cracking interview. Extinction Rebellion Founder Speaks Out. Aaron Bastani meets Roger Hallam

People can knock Novara all they like but this is real content that imo we need a lot more of in politics.

I said OJ's article was vacuous and you deny it without being able to point to anything in it that shows that isn't the case. You've just given a hand wavy reply withour giving any specifics to refute that point. We've been here before on this thread.

Secondly, Labour has a principled position on independence and that is that we had a referendum, and the decision was to remain in the UK and nothing has changed since then in terms of the polling etc. The problem Labour had under Corbyn was that his position on independence was rejected by the electorate and ended up with the most embarrasing result Labour has had in it's history in Scotland. Owen Jones is advocating that same position and that is why no Labour supporter up here takes him seriously but he is being used by the SNP's pet comic to attack Labour.

Any genuine Labour supporter, rather than a supporter of a specific person, would stop to reflect on all this and wonder why Jones, and Corbyn, were so out of step with opinion up here. That might lead to some inconvenient conclusions though.

Lest I be accused of being biased against Sturgeon and the SNP as I don't agree with independence, here's a tweet from someone who was a SNP MSP from 2011 till 2021.

Wont bother rehashing the first parts but as to the bolded other than to say again that i disagree.

As to teh bolded. Of course. we're not 'Labour' supporters. We're left wing. I'm not supporting this labour party. As it is, I wont be voting for them. I woould be very happy to vote for KS's Labour if it was left wing. It's not about the person at all. It's about policies and principles.

How's Brexit going?

I mean... no. From their website:

Their website is full of similar such student politics bollocks than has no evidential basis beyond a small section of universities social science/humanities departments.

Climate change is just the trojan horse organisations like this use to push communism. And not the champagne communism the likes of Ash Sarkar stump for, but the nasty kind where lots of people die.

Couldn't disagree with you much more but it's a fruitless conversation

I still think you might enjoy the interview if you can be bothered to watch it.

I agree it's a fruitless conversation, but I will listen to the podcast

�� I'm not saying I agree with much of it but lots of interesting stuff about real political protest

How's Trump going?

You'd have to be completely ignorant of human history as well as totally unobservant of the present to believe that societies aren't structured around class, gender etc.

Yes, but next to no one cares what the 'luxury communists' of Novara (basically Aaron and Ash) think, and XR are just annoying, histrionic posers as well. The UK's carbon footprint has halved in recent years, mainly due to the phase-out of coal. You'd never know from the way the XR wankers carry on. China, of course, is still mining, importing and burning coal like there's no tomorrow, which there won't be if the dictatorship carries on like that. XR couldn't care less what China does, of course.

FA is coming.

I'm a democratic socialist which may be a FAD but bit's better than the altermative FAF

Not sure how XR slid into this but although the lack of interest from governments in the US and China is obvious, industry is driven by demand which is fuelled by consumerism which is a social phenomenon.

If the biggest consumers of new phones and clothes etc stopped replacing them every year it would help a lot, and that's down to individual choice.

The interview is with one of the founders of XR

If this is the guy the left are pinning their hopes on, we're ****ed. He's David Ike at best and I actually think Bastani did a good job at calling out his bullshit.

I mean, tell me you know nothing about science without telling me you know nothing about science:

I dont think the left are pining their hopes on him. I'm certainly not and I definitely didn't expect you to appreciate the interview because you agreed with him. We dont have to agree with people to be interested in them being interviewed. As you say he is my no means given an easy time time of it by Bastani.

David Icke is very unfair imo and I think there are some strong points made about politcal action/debate.

I'd ignore him on normal distributions but the point about truth is getting there imo. Not because truth/facts aren't important (and very interesting in their own rigtht) but I do think he is dead right that the obsession with facts within the political debate from the left (or anyone who wants action) is totally misguided. i.e lets just take it as read that climate change will be catastrophic - the timelines and precise facts are almost entirely irrelevent to what need to be done politically. We allow this obsession to make us feel like we're doing something by arguing the facts when all we're doing is drowning our anything important. Brexit was another even more obvious example.

It's true that, despite the polls, Labour would supposedly still need a record swing, bigger than Attlee's in 1945, to gain a majority at all, starting from where they are and with boundary changes that seem to favour the Conservatives.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-6...

This might look silly on election night if Labour sweep the board. Or then again it might not.

Facts matter. For example, it matters that it is a fact that climate change is real and it's highly likely man made.

The issue I have with people like this is the suggestion that the only possible solution is communism. Climate change might be catastrophic, it might not, but I'd hedge my bets that it will be less catastrophic than the 100m killed by communists in the 20th century. Personally, I'd prefer to find more palatable alternatives to either of these catastrophes.

The only time the conversation veered towards anything interesting was the question of emotion in politics. The further you go left or right politically, the more rationality goes out of the window and is replaced with emotion. The idea that a 2-4 degree increase in global temperature will kill every human on the planet is absurd, but that's what the likes of Hallam would have us believe. It's basically end of the world cultish nonsense, hence the David Ike comparison.

Facts matter enormously. That is very different from the facts mattering in the political debate where I'd argue they should usually get a fleeting mention at best. The political debate should be on what to do (and crucially what to do now) not on whether there is a problem or not. It's the opponents who want the debate on the facts of climate change and if they can turn into a slanging match than all the better for them - those of us who want something done should focus the debate on what to do and how to get it done.

There should be less poliitcal more science based discussions for those who are interested. Most people are uninterested on ill-equiped to make any useful assessment beyond whether they trust the scientists or not. That trust is fairly strong and but isn't helped when it infringes too much on the political debate of what to do.

I certainly wouldn't debate the facts of climate change. However, how do we get the world's major polluters to lower their carbon emissions? Gluing yourself to the M25 might feel like you are having an impact, but it's not making any difference to CO2 emissions and probably does more harm than good, at least in terms of attitudes.

FWIW, I'm resigned to believing the whole issue is futile. We're just not wired to care about stuff that will happen 20, 30, 50 years in the future. When people are not even motivated enough to change their current health behaviour to avoid personal catastrophic consequences in the future, they are not going to change their behaviour for (what is from a personal point of view) a fairly abstract concept like climate change.

The UK has halved its CO2 output since 1970, much of the reduction being since 1990, due to the elimination of power generation by coal. This despite the expansion of the economy and population in that time.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/uk-b...

However, we have effectively offshored much of our emissions, like other countries, by importing goods made in China, where they're still burning coal like it's going out of fashion, which indeed it is. Global problems require global solutions and the Chinese dictatorship still isn't terribly amenable to change.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-envir...