British Politics
Been on holiday for a few weeks, surprised to find no general discussion of British politics so though I'd kick one off.
A gift to antisemitic extremists?
You think they don't want more recruits and people willing to commit extreme antisemitic acts?
Do you think that's more important to them than what's going on in Gaza and The West Bank?
If you mean netnayahu is doing them more harm than good. Then absolutely not.
The threat has increased dramatically and it's going to be hard to recover.
According to More in Common, Polanski's net approval has dropped 14 points in a week, putting him below every other leader except Starmer. I doubt that is because of a few cartoons.
Maybe fearless principled anti Semitic campaigner @Elrazor will deliver his verdict on the cartoons when he’s next online, at about 3am as usual.
I guess the good thing about your girlfriend being imaginary is you don’t need to worry about your weirdo internet habits and psychotic sleep patterns disturbing her.
Embarrassing enough when teenagers invent girlfriends but the idea of someone in their 50s doing it is quite something.
Embarrassing enough when teenagers invent girlfriends but the idea of someone in their 50s doing it is quite something.
Yes, it's terrible when grown adults say embarrassingly childish statements, isn't it.
Nightmare results for starmer.
Labour even lost to tories in harlow - which the tories are going to talk about incessantly in the aftermath to defelct from how bad it was for them as well.
Starmer's spin? "we did badly in manchester as well so no point blaming me" Plus the usual nonsense about needing to communicate much better about doing **** all
Of course you think Reform doing well is cool. You'll be hoping they repeat it in a GE so they can start deporting immigrants, who you obviously don't like, and who you concocted a narrative about being criminals (refuted by studies) in an attempt to mask your bigotry.
No I don't
wrong again.
My partner is an immigrant, so no to that too.
and who you concocted a narrative about being criminals (refuted by studies) in an attempt to mask your bigotry.
No I didn't.
"Black friend"
It only takes a cursory sift through your bilge to find many examples of you claiming that more immigration = higher crime rates.
Who on earth has to post for advice on attracting women at the age of 40 other than a sad incel loser, and rants about how he believes his 'inability to compete in the dating market' is all the fault of feminism and immigration?
You have no self-respect, only a misplaced sense of entitlement. What a total embarrassment you are.
The people of Hackney have made their feelings about New New Labour known.
Incels may find this picture offensive, making it Not Safe For Wankers
wow the results so far look like a rout for Labour and Tories.
What is horribly depressing I'm finding a spectrum of antisemitic/racist stuff for all the main parties, except Lib Dem.
I expected better from Labour after Corbyn got the elbow, and somewhat shocked it's there in the Greens too.
And how the **** it not more being made about Farage's 5 million bung in the mainstream. They frightened of Nige, or what?
Investigative journalism died a while ago. It’s all about client journalism now, witness the appalling Laura K, Chris Mason and Trevor Phillips..
People in positions of power and responsibility have responded to the threats of climate change and AI by abandoning their responsibilities and exerting their power for their own benefit in accordance with the wishes of their new paymasters. They aren’t demanding the truth about Farages 5M because most of them also have unknown paymasters.
It feels like the beginning of the end of times.
The Greens seem to have under-performed, contrary to media spam, whereas Reform have done quite well, which is awkward for the boroughs now run by those numpties.
In Camden, Labour retain control with a sharply reduced majority. A couple of wards flipped Labour to Green, but a lot, like mine, are no-change. (We now have the same councillors as before, two Labour, one Green.) The Tories and Lib Dems in other wards held on.
Well said, Clive.
One cannot help but feel a measure of sympathy for Angela Rayner. I know her well enough to say that she came into politics for the best of reasons: a desire to serve, a determination to improve the lives of people whose struggles she understood from her own experience.
But the further up the ladder one climbs in politics, the more insistent the temptations become. This is not simply about individual weakness or personal failing. It is structural. Over the past 40 years, Britain has built a society in which consumption, status, and proximity to wealth have become defining features of the political class. The gravitational pull of money is now so great that even those who arrive in Westminster with the clearest sense of purpose find their heads turned.
Angela’s story is not unique. She came from humble beginnings, but the wealth that circles political life today is more concentrated, more brazen, and more intrusive than in the past. The old checks and balances, party rootedness in mass membership, trade union accountability, a press less entangled with oligarchic interests, have all weakened. Where once honour, public service, even a sense of historical duty could command respect, today those values are dimmed in comparison to the pursuit of material position.
The mechanism is subtle but relentless. It is not corruption in the brown-envelope-under-the-table sense. It is the slow, almost invisible turning of heads. You are introduced to those who walked this path before you, former ministers who now sit comfortably in boardrooms or on the payroll of consultancies with six and seven-figure salaries. You are invited to corporate boxes at sporting events, to private dinners, to concerts and premiers. Lavish clothes or spectacles can be “within the rules,” provided they are declared. But by then the damage has been done.
The message is implicit but unmistakable: play the game, listen to us, and you too can enjoy more of this. The logic creeps into your personal life. You stretch to buy the house that can host the right gatherings. You measure your worth by the standards of a world that equates success with possessions and proximity to privilege. And once you are on that path, it is hard to step off.
This is, of course, a simplification of a complex socio-economic and political process. But as someone who came from a council estate myself, I see it all around me in Westminster. And it is not going to be changed by media witch-hunts, the tutting of ethics advisers, or even the occasional burst of public outrage.
As Gladstone once warned, “Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.” But in our current system, what is morally questionable is too often normalised, excused, and rebranded as “just the way things are.”
Real change will only come from a collective decision to choose a different path: to stop outsourcing our state to private interests, to end the revolving door between government and corporate boardrooms, to challenge the idea that the role of politics is to serve vast concentrations of wealth.
We can choose differently. We can once again put community, solidarity, and public service at the heart of our political life. We can insist that worth is measured not in the size of one’s house or the company one keeps, but in the contribution one makes to society and the integrity with which one serves.
Until we do, until we decide as a polity to hold up those values rather than the glittering prizes of private gain, these scandals will not just recur. They will define the very character of our politics.
Except even defacto communists, who surround themselves with like-minded people, ultimately steal and hoard their countries resources for themselves. It's not "the system", it's human nature.
In Rayner's case, she was just dumb enough to get caught with her snout in the trough. She's lost any moral authority to demand anyone, particularly the "rich", pays more tax as it turns out she doesn't particularly want to pay her fair share either.
