Politics, politics, politics

[r-u-s-x01]

Gideon knows best, Breeding is important

 

[Danishfurniturelover]

It's the "British Dream". We need to be told what to do by our betters, as they were born to rule and we were born to toil, unless they can find someone from the third world to do the job for less.

Totally agree, am proudly working class and hate the benefit cheats but I also Osborne and the ones that dont work for it.

The must be thousands of students at university every year studying journalism who deserve the job ahead of him, or more obviously someone in their 50s who has worked their way up through a newspaper.

 

[K.D.D.D.D.Soc]

Totally agree, am proudly working class and hate the benefit cheats but I also Osborne and the ones that dont work for it.

The must be thousands of students at university every year studying journalism who deserve the job ahead of him, or more obviously someone in their 50s who has worked their way up through a newspaper.

If you don't have your on column/spot by your mid 30's promotion is impossible in the media.

 

[monkeybarry]

Does the evening standard actually need editing? Does anyone even read the evening standard?

 

[glorygloryeze]

Does the evening standard actually need editing? Does anyone even read the evening standard?

Well i do on the commute home; only because it's free mind and mainly for the football news/gossip

 

[Gilzeantoscore]

It's the "British Dream". We need to be told what to do by our betters, as they were born to rule and we were born to toil, unless they can find someone from the third world to do the job for less.

Our forebears must be rolling in their graves to see just how servile working class Englishman have become. As Warren Buffett (fourth richest man on the planet) said "there's a class war going on and my class are winning It."

 

[K.D.D.D.D.Soc]

Our forebears must be rolling in their graves to see just how servile working class Englishman have become. As Warren Buffett (fourth richest man on the planet) said "there's a class war going on and my class are winning It."

Mrs Thatcher treated the working class like the settlers with the north american indians, but instead of beads and blankets she sold them their own homes* and utilities, allowing the price of both to rocket.

* local council don't own anything, they are custodians of assets of the community

 

[Gutter Boy]

Our forebears must be rolling in their graves to see just how servile working class Englishman have become. As Warren Buffett (fourth richest man on the planet) said "there's a class war going on and my class are winning It."

Consumerism has become a very effective opiate of the masses. They have no energy or willingness to confront their oppression because they are too focused on their next shiny tv or phone

 

[Gilzeantoscore]

My grandmother had a two year secondary education, but despite that she was an office bearer in her local branch of the Labour Party. Churchill won a war, but even he couldn't hoodwink my Nan's generation when it came to the '45 election. She knew what was in her economic and social interest and voted accordingly. But today, the masses just drift along swallowing all the Murdoch press inspired garbage being fed them.

 

[DubaiSpur]

My grandmother had a two year secondary education, but despite that she was an office bearer in her local branch of the Labour Party. Churchill won a war, but even he couldn't hoodwink my Nan's generation when it came to the '45 election. She knew what was in her economic and social interest and voted accordingly. But today, the masses just drift along swallowing all the Murdoch press inspired garbage being fed them.

I'll never stop being amazed by the that 1945 election. Churchill was at his titanic zenith in terms of his political stance - he had led an exhausted nation to victory over five painful years ,dragging it from fear and vulnerability in 1940 to an absolute mastery over Nazi Germany by 1945. His sheer dominance and force of will had driven the nation to recover from setback after setback and blast one of the most unequivocally evil regimes that had ever existed out of its lairs and into oblivion - in North Africa, in Italy, in occupied Europe and finally in Germany itself. The prospect of this titan actually losing an election while at such personal heights seems so ....*outlandish* given that historical context.

And yet, it happened. Across the United Kingdom - in leafy towns, in quiet villages, in the bomb-scarred cities, people quietly went out and cast their votes in 1945. And all they seemingly had with them were ideals and a sense of quiet determination. A determination that the suffering of the last six years would not be for nothing. That there would never again be a relapse into the bitterness of wealth inequality, destitution and poverty that had pockmarked the landscape of pre-war Britain. And that the ideals of the Beveridge Report - that no man should suffer from want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness - would not be forgotten or cruelly ignored by their social betters.

Together, they contributed to the greatest electoral upset in British history. They swept Churchill and his pompous Conservative Party from power, decimating them across every stronghold they had. And the Attlee government that followed swept aside all the squealing protests of the Tories and the wealthy to make gigantic, historic strides that still occupy a hallowed space in British politics today. The Labour government they elected was a giant, a titan which no subsequent party has managed to measure up to - and it was all possible because of those quietly determined voters, marching to cast their historic votes in 1945.

That generation will never cease to amaze me. For someone born far, far after they made history the way they did, I'll never quite be able to envision such a united generation again. And when their modern equivalents are happily being led like sheep by Murdoch and the elite which would see them starving and destitute in a society stripped of all its social protections and common humanity if they could get away with it...it baffles me how such a generation ever managed to unite as fully as it did in those historic days back in 1945.

 

[Gutter Boy]

I'll never stop being amazed by the that 1945 election. Churchill was at his titanic zenith in terms of his political stance - he had led an exhausted nation to victory over five painful years ,dragging it from fear and vulnerability in 1940 to an absolute mastery over Nazi Germany by 1945. His sheer dominance and force of will had driven the nation to recover from setback after setback and blast one of the most unequivocally evil regimes that had ever existed out of its lairs and into oblivion - in North Africa, in Italy, in occupied Europe and finally in Germany itself. The prospect of this titan actually losing an election while at such personal heights seems so ....*outlandish* given that historical context.

And yet, it happened. Across the United Kingdom - in leafy towns, in quiet villages, in the bomb-scarred cities, people quietly went out and cast their votes in 1945. And all they seemingly had with them were ideals and a sense of quiet determination. A determination that the suffering of the last six years would not be for nothing. That there would never again be a relapse into the bitterness of wealth inequality, destitution and poverty that had pockmarked the landscape of pre-war Britain. And that the ideals of the Beveridge Report - that no man should suffer from want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness - would not be forgotten or cruelly ignored by their social betters.

Together, they contributed to the greatest electoral upset in British history. They swept Churchill and his pompous Conservative Party from power, decimating them across every stronghold they had. And the Attlee government that followed swept aside all the squealing protests of the Tories and the wealthy to make gigantic, historic strides that still occupy a hallowed space in British politics today. The Labour government they elected was a giant, a titan which no subsequent party has managed to measure up to - and it was all possible because of those quietly determined voters, marching to cast their historic votes in 1945.

That generation will never cease to amaze me. For someone born far, far after they made history the way they did, I'll never quite be able to envision such a united generation again. And when their modern equivalents are happily being led like sheep by Murdoch and the elite which would see them starving and destitute in a society stripped of all its social protections and common humanity if they could get away with it...it baffles me how such a generation ever managed to unite as fully as it did in those historic days back in 1945.

The Beveridge Report was though commissioned in 1941 by the Conservative-led Coalition government. The population just had less faith in them to deliver it.

Labour were then out of government for 13 years after that, so implementing it did them not favours.

 

[DubaiSpur]

The Beveridge Report was though commissioned in 1941 by the Conservative-led Coalition government. The population just had less faith in them to deliver it.

Labour were then out of government for 13 years after that, so implementing it did them not favours.

A) Although it was announced by the Liberal National Minister of Health, Ernest Brown, Arthur Greenwood was the force behind the commissioning of the report - Labour man, who was in turn directed by Nye Bevan to ensure the selection of William Beveridge as the author given his known Fabian socialist views. B) The Conservatives were fiercely opposed to many of the recommendations of the Report, and were against many of them being implemented - Churchill cautioned against it, and they later voted against the National Healthcare Act when it was introduced, for example.

B) As for why Labour was subsequently defeated, that's a fascinating debate to have by itself, independent of the events of 1945. There are a range of reasons suggested for their 1951 defeat - the Conservatives accepting the NHS, nationalized industries, welfare provisions and national insurance provisions as irreversible, Labour's heavyweights retiring or stepping away from public life due to age and ill-health, and the concentration of Labour votes in assured seats instead of marginals.

Either way, even in their 1951 defeat, they earned more votes than the Conservatives, and the highest number of votes for any party in any British election until the Conservative victory of 1992. I don't think it's fair to say that their titanic reforms didn't help them, given that fact. The subsequent Conservative terms were helped by the lifting of post-war sanctioning and the generalized economic recovery that finally banished the hangover of the Second World War - events that would have benefited any party then in power, and not entirely down to any actions on the Tories' part.

 

[scaramanga]

I'll never stop being amazed by the that 1945 election. Churchill was at his titanic zenith in terms of his political stance - he had led an exhausted nation to victory over five painful years ,dragging it from fear and vulnerability in 1940 to an absolute mastery over Nazi Germany by 1945. His sheer dominance and force of will had driven the nation to recover from setback after setback and blast one of the most unequivocally evil regimes that had ever existed out of its lairs and into oblivion - in North Africa, in Italy, in occupied Europe and finally in Germany itself. The prospect of this titan actually losing an election while at such personal heights seems so ....*outlandish* given that historical context.

And yet, it happened. Across the United Kingdom - in leafy towns, in quiet villages, in the bomb-scarred cities, people quietly went out and cast their votes in 1945. And all they seemingly had with them were ideals and a sense of quiet determination. A determination that the suffering of the last six years would not be for nothing. That there would never again be a relapse into the bitterness of wealth inequality, destitution and poverty that had pockmarked the landscape of pre-war Britain. And that the ideals of the Beveridge Report - that no man should suffer from want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness - would not be forgotten or cruelly ignored by their social betters.

Together, they contributed to the greatest electoral upset in British history. They swept Churchill and his pompous Conservative Party from power, decimating them across every stronghold they had. And the Attlee government that followed swept aside all the squealing protests of the Tories and the wealthy to make gigantic, historic strides that still occupy a hallowed space in British politics today. The Labour government they elected was a giant, a titan which no subsequent party has managed to measure up to - and it was all possible because of those quietly determined voters, marching to cast their historic votes in 1945.

That generation will never cease to amaze me. For someone born far, far after they made history the way they did, I'll never quite be able to envision such a united generation again. And when their modern equivalents are happily being led like sheep by Murdoch and the elite which would see them starving and destitute in a society stripped of all its social protections and common humanity if they could get away with it...it baffles me how such a generation ever managed to unite as fully as it did in those historic days back in 1945.

It'll be at least two more generations before we repair that damage.

 

[DubaiSpur]

It'll be at least two more generations before we repair that damage.

Firstly, that 'damage' included things like the dissolution of the empire. I wonder how India and the rest of the former colonies would react to the idea of some future generation made entirely of snotty Tories asking them to return to the Empire because they wanted to undo the 'damage' of the Attlee government. 'I know we're now a fairly irrelevant island with no military or technological heft to speak of, but we're taking you back, India. Please deindustrialize, give up your massive military and turn your nukes in at the Heathrow Customs desk - the new viceroy will be along in a month or two. Tootles!'

Secondly, it always amuses me that right wing folks fail to realise an essential truth about public welfare systems and social safety nets. What they don't seem to understand is that they're part of a social compact between the powerful and the relatively powerless in a society - they operate as safety valves, keeping public discontent at growing inequality and social stratification at bay because of their utility as symbols of the idea that society is still about everyone in it contributing equally to its progress, not about atomised individuals stepping on everyone else to survive.

Eventually, you cut them enough and people start realizing that there are an awful lot of them compared to the relatively tiny number of toffs and wealthy people, that there's no need for them to live in grinding conditions when they could feasibly change things themselves and that the toffs are really completely helpless and useless without the mass of people below them contributing to the society they live in. Then, short of a war taking all the surplus people away for a while (as happened in WW1 and WW2), or a great government program designed to reintroduce social safety nets to people at large to head off growing public discontent (i.e, the New Deal)....you'll find that people aren't exactly going to lie down and die, and would instead prefer to listen to the very socialists, fascists and communists who would have been marginalized and (rightfully) scorned in less socially brutal times. You can head them off by blaming immigrants or Europeans for their woes, but they'll explode eventually - one way or the other.

If Attlee's 'damage' hadn't been done, I wonder what would have happened to the toffs and the rich when a generation of young people with military training and fervent belief in the ideals of the Beveridge Report returned home. I'd wager there wouldn't be many Jacob-Rees Moggs around in the aftermath. But instead of seeing that and preserving the social welfare systems that built up a better, fairer, more united, more centrist, more reasonable Britain, the Tories want to dismantle it all and thus contribute to growing extremism at both ends of the scale.

 

[the dza]

Labour might have lost the election after 1945, but in establishing the post-war consensus, Tory governments that followed still had to protect the welfare state, NHS, council housing etc else they would not be considered electable.

That obviously changed with Thatcher, so much so that the Labour government that followed her still complied with much the same politics.

I think the upheaval in the world and the rejection of centrists will see things swing left again. I hope so anyway. Things may have to get worse (Trump, Brexit and whatever else follows that) before they get better.

 

[DubaiSpur]

Labour might have lost the election after 1945, but in establishing the post-war consensus, Tory governments that followed still had to protect the welfare state, NHS, council housing etc else they would not be considered electable.

That obviously changed with Thatcher, so much so that the Labour government that followed her still complied with much the same politics.

I think the upheaval in the world and the rejection of centrists will see things swing left again. I hope so anyway. Things may have to get worse (Trump, Brexit and whatever else follows that) before they get better.

The funny thing is, I've seen communists (actual communists) on the web actually argue for Trump, Brexit and a massive Tory victory in any future general election.

Their reasoning is that the NHS, social welfare systems and the ideas of the public good that social safety nets create are all band-aids that hide the exploitative, brutal nature of unbridled capitalism. They actually want all those band-aids to be ripped off by short-sighted right wing governments so people can see for the first time the true nature of the power balance they're immeshed in - then, the communists can point out their own worldviews to a far more receptive audience.

Same thing with the alt-right and the fascists - they want those social safety nets gone too, although in their case it's so that they can blame the immigrants and the brown/black folk, not the capitalists. and, of course, the conservatives (in most countries - the UK, the Republicans in the US, the Liberal Party of Australia, the Conservative Party of Canada and so on) are playing right into their hands.

The Attlee government's post-war consensus, the New Deal in the United States, the Lester Pearson-led universal healthcare and welfare legislation in Canada....these were all the best things that ever happened to the idea of liberal democracy. Each one peeled back weakens the whole, to the point where one day it will collapse without warning.

 

[Gilzeantoscore]

The Beveridge Report was though commissioned in 1941 by the Conservative-led Coalition government. The population just had less faith in them to deliver it.

Labour were then out of government for 13 years after that, so implementing it did them not favours.

They won the very next election, albeit with a reduced majority, however if you look at the voting figures they still smashed the Tories.

 

[scaramanga]

Firstly, that 'damage' included things like the dissolution of the empire. I wonder how India and the rest of the former colonies would react to the idea of some future generation made entirely of snotty Tories asking them to return to the Empire because they wanted to undo the 'damage' of the Attlee government. 'I know we're now a fairly irrelevant island with no military or technological heft to speak of, but we're taking you back, India. Please deindustrialize, give up your massive military and turn your nukes in at the Heathrow Customs desk - the new viceroy will be along in a month or two. Tootles!'

Secondly, it always amuses me that right wing folks fail to realise an essential truth about public welfare systems and social safety nets. What they don't seem to understand is that they're part of a social compact between the powerful and the relatively powerless in a society - they operate as safety valves, keeping public discontent at growing inequality and social stratification at bay because of their utility as symbols of the idea that society is still about everyone in it contributing equally to its progress, not about atomised individuals stepping on everyone else to survive.

Eventually, you cut them enough and people start realizing that there are an awful lot of them compared to the relatively tiny number of toffs and wealthy people, that there's no need for them to live in grinding conditions when they could feasibly change things themselves and that the toffs are really completely helpless and useless without the mass of people below them contributing to the society they live in. Then, short of a war taking all the surplus people away for a while (as happened in WW1 and WW2), or a great government program designed to reintroduce social safety nets to people at large to head off growing public discontent (i.e, the New Deal)....you'll find that people aren't exactly going to lie down and die, and would instead prefer to listen to the very socialists, fascists and communists who would have been marginalized and (rightfully) scorned in less socially brutal times. You can head them off by blaming immigrants or Europeans for their woes, but they'll explode eventually - one way or the other.

If Attlee's 'damage' hadn't been done, I wonder what would have happened to the toffs and the rich when a generation of young people with military training and fervent belief in the ideals of the Beveridge Report returned home. I'd wager there wouldn't be many Jacob-Rees Moggs around in the aftermath. But instead of seeing that and preserving the social welfare systems that built up a better, fairer, more united, more centrist, more reasonable Britain, the Tories want to dismantle it all and thus contribute to growing extremism at both ends of the scale.

At the risk of over simplifying here, that sounds like you're advocating a position of "Give us your stuff or we'll take it by force"

That sounds far less like a contract than it does a mugging.

 

[DubaiSpur]

At the risk of over simplifying here, that sounds like you're advocating a position of "Give us your stuff or we'll take it by force"

That sounds far less like a contract than it does a mugging.

That is politics in a nutshell, yes. Much like 'lower our taxes or we'll leave', 'cut regulations or we'll fire everyone', 'stop enforcing laws or we'll stash our money offshore' and so on are implied and explicit threats made by businesses and various wealthy people against the society they operate in. For the sake of balance, it's also like 'pay us taxes or we'll throw you in jail/kill you' is - only that particular threat is backed up by the state's monopoly on the use of force.

Politics has always been a means by which one group or class can achieve power or wealth at the expense of another group or class. In more amenable, civil times, the more powerful group of people willingly cedes some measure of wealth and security to the less powerful group to prevent them from making more stringent demands backed up with stronger threats. Most of the time, the more powerful in any society are its wealthy, its businesses and its politically-connected. And when they cede some measure of human dignity and security to the poor and the lower classes, they retain the majority of power and influence within their class - but the lower classes accept this because of the social compact that they have implicitly agreed to (the more powerful indicate that they will provide some human dignity and social security to the lower classes in exchange for the lower classes accepting the economic and social inequality between them and the rich/powerful).

In the best societies, this compact is not only accepted by the more powerful, it is actively embraced by them - while, concurrently, the lower classes contribute to this compact by doing their own bit in terms of helping to fund social services and welfare nets that *all* can use; powerful or poor. This is useful not only to the lower classes, but to the wealthy and powerful as well (if they are ever in need of healthcare, they have a free option - if they are ever in need of social assistance, they can get it and so on). It also begets the ideal that everyone is a part of a larger society that shares and suffers in equal measure - and such ideals keep people together in trying times.

In societies destined for conflict, by contrast, the powerful and wealthy start revoking the terms of the social compact by continually lessening the amount of societal influence and human security they afford the poor and less well-off, while increasing the inequality between them and the rest of society.

At that stage, the rest of society starts asking some very basic questions. Questions like 'why are we agreeing to abide by the inequality present in society given that the powerful who enjoy it have done nothing for us?' and 'what do the powerful actually contribute to society? They give us nothing, and they take more and more of the pie - what do they offer to the ostensible 'society' we all live in?'

Eventually, such questions beget some very simple lines of thought. Most of them end in bloodshed.

But the right never gets this - the lack of a historical worldview is bloody shocking in that regard. To them, they can turn the poor and lower classes into powerless, penniless beggars and they would still apparently take it while tugging their forelock, because...erm, deference, I guess? The centre-left and the more authentic left both realize that a social compact is necessary to prevent wealth and power inequalities from destroying societies - some measure of power sharing must happen to keep society functioning as a united whole. To be fair, the centre-right do as well, albeit with a heavier dose of 'bootstraps' involved. But the true right (and the libertarians towards the end of the spectrum) would prefer instead to atomize the individual, and destroy the idea of society.

Well, that leads to unpleasant places. The moderate left will disappear. And where the moderate left once stood, you will instead have communists and fascists, who want much more than just an amelioration of the state of the less powerful and a preservation of the social compact.

All this has happened before, and will happen again.

 

[scaramanga]

That is politics in a nutshell, yes. Much like 'lower our taxes or we'll leave', 'cut regulations or we'll fire everyone', 'stop enforcing laws or we'll stash our money offshore' and so on are implied and explicit threats made by businesses and various wealthy people against the society they operate in. For the sake of balance, it's also like 'pay us taxes or we'll throw you in jail/kill you' is - only that particular threat is backed up by the state's monopoly on the use of force.

Those threats are very different to threats of violence/theft.

"Do what I want or I will walk away" is not a threat of physical harm - it's not nearly like the one I mentioned.

In a healthy world countries should be competing for businesses and wealthy individuals to take up residence and taxation should be a part of that equation.

Politics has always been a means by which one group or class can achieve power or wealth at the expense of another group or class. In more amenable, civil times, the more powerful group of people willingly cedes some measure of wealth and security to the less powerful group to prevent them from making more stringent demands backed up with stronger threats. Most of the time, the more powerful in any society are its wealthy, its businesses and its politically-connected. And when they cede some measure of human dignity and security to the poor and the lower classes, they retain the majority of power and influence within their class - but the lower classes accept this because of the social compact that they have implicitly agreed to (the more powerful indicate that they will provide some human dignity and social security to the lower classes in exchange for the lower classes accepting the economic and social inequality between them and the rich/powerful).

In the best societies, this compact is not only accepted by the more powerful, it is actively embraced by them - while, concurrently, the lower classes contribute to this compact by doing their own bit in terms of helping to fund social services and welfare nets that *all* can use; powerful or poor. This is useful not only to the lower classes, but to the wealthy and powerful as well (if they are ever in need of healthcare, they have a free option - if they are ever in need of social assistance, they can get it and so on). It also begets the ideal that everyone is a part of a larger society that shares and suffers in equal measure - and such ideals keep people together in trying times.

In societies destined for conflict, by contrast, the powerful and wealthy start revoking the terms of the social compact by continually lessening the amount of societal influence and human security they afford the poor and less well-off, while increasing the inequality between them and the rest of society.

At that stage, the rest of society starts asking some very basic questions. Questions like 'why are we agreeing to abide by the inequality present in society given that the powerful who enjoy it have done nothing for us?' and 'what do the powerful actually contribute to society? They give us nothing, and they take more and more of the pie - what do they offer to the ostensible 'society' we all live in?'

Eventually, such questions beget some very simple lines of thought. Most of them end in bloodshed.

But the right never gets this - the lack of a historical worldview is bloody shocking in that regard. To them, they can turn the poor and lower classes into powerless, penniless beggars and they would still apparently take it while tugging their forelock, because...erm, deference, I guess? The centre-left and the more authentic left both realize that a social compact is necessary to prevent wealth and power inequalities from destroying societies - some measure of power sharing must happen to keep society functioning as a united whole. To be fair, the centre-right do as well, albeit with a heavier dose of 'bootstraps' involved. But the true right (and the libertarians towards the end of the spectrum) would prefer instead to atomize the individual, and destroy the idea of society.

Well, that leads to unpleasant places. The moderate left will disappear. And where the moderate left once stood, you will instead have communists and fascists, who want much more than just an amelioration of the state of the less powerful and a preservation of the social compact.

All this has happened before, and will happen again.

I understand, of course, that there is a need for those of us who can to provide for those who cannot (I stress cannot as an absolute, it may never be confused with will not, might not, don't fancy it, etc). I absolutely believe though, that the incentive to work must be kept at a premium and there needs to be a significant gap between working life and not working life to ensure that incentive remains.

I also believe heavily in altruism and the positive effect it has on society. None of that, however justifies me giving away half of everything I earn to the tax man - it's just preposterous.

Imagine a clean slate, imagine taxation has never existed and the socialist ratchet has yet to get its filthy claws into my wallet. Then try to imagine a working, sensible tax system. I'll bet giving away half of one's earnings, money I could otherwise be spending on my son, is not in that system - it's just ridiculous.