For those saying the 70's were better fuck were they. I grew up in the 70's I never got new clothes neither did anyone I knew they were picked up in jumble sales and constantly patched. The house had no central heating nor double glazing and we all huddled round the fire in the living room. A couple of slices of spam or luncheon meat with some mash was our evening meal. Yeah take us back to the 70's because we would all love that. For a treat we would get taken to the local swimming pool which was outside and unheated and that wasnt even a monthly treat.
Later generations would have a fit
Chilblains, power cuts, smoking, 3 TV channels, football hooliganism and car bodyworks which rotted away within a decade.
Whereas now we have a return to measles, scurvy and rickets. The power companies install meters that automatically cut the power to the poorest households. The output from three free channels was better than today's output from 300 free channels. Only yesterday in the Black Country FA Cup derby, the Baggies and the Dingles were kicking lumps out of each other. And whilst your Lancia Beta1600 GTE registered on August the 1st 1976 would have been no more than ferrous oxide on your drive by July 31st 1977, it looked better than a Nissan Juke!
Isn't the Earl Of Chatham Pitt The Elder? I remain of the view that Sunak does want to get things done and is probably more of that mind than concerned with dates. He's also relatively young and could be Prime minister again in the future. The fact that David Cameron is above Peel and Lloyd George on this list tells you it isn't worth much. Longevity is overrated.
Charles Grey would be a much better role model. PM for less than four years yet he had two monumental achievements. Does anyone care about Lord Liverpool nowadays? Lord Salisbury has his fans but he's 'dead' in terms of public opinion.
We don't really give political leaders do overs anymore. Corbyn managed it by exceeding expectations. Sunak is going to have his political career essentially done inside 10 years of entering parliament - whether he even makes it to ten years will depend on if he sticks around long after quitting as leader later this year.
Sunak may want to get things done but he doesn't seem very urgent about it, or if he is he is unable to, as the party looks completely paralysed and confused.
He is very young for an ex Prime minister. They all have a tendency to leave Parliament nowadays but if he were to stay who knows what the future might bring?
I don't see him sticking around to discuss potholes at constituency surgeries.
He'll be off to a californian startup, and running for Governor there 10 years after he leaves UK politics.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
When I was at school we had rampant homophobia in society. Football violence was not just an occasional thing; it was ever-present. Racism was endemic. Going just before my schooldays, we had blackouts and the three-day week. You were lucky if your school had a well-stocked library; now we have much of the world's information at our fingertips. The air was unhealthy (especially as I was born a couple of miles away from a power station...), etc, etc.
Times have got worse? In many ways they've got much, much better.
What it it that they say, that if you owe the bank a thousand pounds then you’re in trouble, but if you owe the bank a billion pounds then they’re in trouble!
Some creditors are about to get a whole bunch of devalued Chinese apartment blocks that no-one wants to live in.
When I was at school we had rampant homophobia in society. Football violence was not just an occasional thing; it was ever-present. Racism was endemic. Going just before my schooldays, we had blackouts and the three-day week. You were lucky if your school had a well-stocked library; now we have much of the world's information at our fingertips. The air was unhealthy (especially as I was born a couple of miles away from a power station...), etc, etc.
Times have got worse? In many ways they've got much, much better.
The only time better to be alive than today, is tomorrow. Everything has got so much better in all of our lifetimes, by any measurable economic statistic almost anywhere in the world.
Yes, there’s some evidence of relative wealth falling slightly among the young middle classes in developed countries in the past decade, but that’s almost entirely due to the inability of housebuilding to keep up with demand.
Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty (actual poverty, not inequality) has never been lower, even as the world’s population has never been higher.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
For those saying the 70's were better fuck were they. I grew up in the 70's I never got new clothes neither did anyone I knew they were picked up in jumble sales and constantly patched. The house had no central heating nor double glazing and we all huddled round the fire in the living room. A couple of slices of spam or luncheon meat with some mash was our evening meal. Yeah take us back to the 70's because we would all love that. For a treat we would get taken to the local swimming pool which was outside and unheated and that wasnt even a monthly treat.
Later generations would have a fit
Lucky to have a swimming pool. Many are closing.
We've done Ashfield politics today.
We have done reasonably well from the Towns Fund, which may distract from but does not address the salami slicing of the public realm and the butt-sitting on everything from tax reform to social care.
Things that *have* been done by Ashfield Independents over the last few years have been three new or newly invested in leisure centres (Kirkby, Sutton, Huthwaite), a new Sherwood Observatory / Planetarium (really), a big Adventure-based Youth Resource (that may have been done by County) and a Rugby Centre helped by Section 106 money.
It doesn't help with the bigger issues though, which is what will kebab the Tories Nationally, and the crimes of Zadrozny / Hollis may do for the AIs.
I look forward to a possible byelection in 2025 if Z wins then gets >1 year inside.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
Despair is an understandable reaction, but I would argue parties do not learn lessons from from people refusing to vote. They can get by just fine with apathy and low turnout, so long as the cycle continues to give them a shot at a future election.
Exactly.
People, and the way they behave, are to a significant extent products of the system they are operating in. If you don’t like the way the system operates, cast your vote for someone looking to change it.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
Did I say they were better days - my point was that the days of higher education being a means of social escape have now truly gone - and that’s before the cascade of university bankruptcies kicks off over the new few months
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
Did I say they were better days - my point was that the days of higher education being a means of social escape have now truly gone - and that’s before the cascade of university bankruptcies kicks off over the new few months
I'd argue *exactly* the opposite: the increase in numbers of people attending higher education (now, perhaps sadly, meaning uni most of the time) has massively increased 'social escape'.
As I've said before: back in the late 70s we had men being told they weren't worth educating, as they were going to work in the mines. That sort of attitude has hopefully, and thankfully, disappeared.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
Did I say they were better days - my point was that the days of higher education being a means of social escape have now truly gone - and that’s before the cascade of university bankruptcies kicks off over the new few months
I'd argue *exactly* the opposite: the increase in numbers of people attending higher education (now, perhaps sadly, meaning uni most of the time) has massively increased 'social escape'.
As I've said before: back in the late 70s we had men being told they weren't worth educating, as they were going to work in the mines. That sort of attitude has hopefully, and thankfully, disappeared.
It's a mixed picture. Overall social mobility now is lower than it was back then. There will be pockets of "winners and losers" within that, that can be referred to anecdotally.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
Did I say they were better days - my point was that the days of higher education being a means of social escape have now truly gone - and that’s before the cascade of university bankruptcies kicks off over the new few months
I'd argue *exactly* the opposite: the increase in numbers of people attending higher education (now, perhaps sadly, meaning uni most of the time) has massively increased 'social escape'.
As I've said before: back in the late 70s we had men being told they weren't worth educating, as they were going to work in the mines. That sort of attitude has hopefully, and thankfully, disappeared.
It's a mixed picture. Overall social mobility now is lower than it was back then. There will be pockets of "winners and losers" within that, that can be referred to anecdotally.
Is social mobility lower? Figures, please.
And if it is lower, is it because there are fewer people to move upwards?
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
School leaving age is interesting but we must remember that in those days you could leave school at 16 and get a job, and jobs that needed exams might specify O- or A-levels whereas now they call for degrees, as shown in NatWest and RAF job adverts from 1973:-
"called for ministers, senior civil servants and other leading figures appointed to lead public bodies to undergo “high quality and mandatory training” on how to behave and uphold standards in public life. Those who refused to take part in training would face sanctions."
And who was on this committee? Well, 2 of its members were Dame Margaret Hodge and Lord Neuberger.
Margaret Hodge: I wonder what standards she upheld when she was in charge of Islington Council and its children's homes became havens for paedophiles who abused children in care and when she then defamed one of the victims, for which she had to apologise. What sanctions did she face? Oh yes- she was made Minister for Children.
As for David Neuberger: until we know precisely what went on regarding his role in seeking to get rid of the trial judge for no good reason in the Bates/Post Office litigation, a period of silence from him on standards in public life would be welcome.
The aim of this committee is very noble but the fact that it includes 2 people whose judgment has been pretty bloody questionable suggests that it too lacks a certain self-awareness. Sinners can often be quite acute about what goes wrong but only if they accept that they have done wrong and are frankly open about their own failings. Precious little sign of it from these two, especially from Lord Neuberger.
You've given me flashbacks now.
Local "don't go there" house which "went on fire". The local police kept the fire brigade outside while they carted (like wheel-barrows-full) files and photographs out of the house. Only then were the fire brigade allowed to start saving it and the neighbouring houses.
It 100% wasn't reported to my 100% not a policeman father that said house was home to a 'councillor friendly' paedophile.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
Did I say they were better days - my point was that the days of higher education being a means of social escape have now truly gone - and that’s before the cascade of university bankruptcies kicks off over the new few months
I'd argue *exactly* the opposite: the increase in numbers of people attending higher education (now, perhaps sadly, meaning uni most of the time) has massively increased 'social escape'.
As I've said before: back in the late 70s we had men being told they weren't worth educating, as they were going to work in the mines. That sort of attitude has hopefully, and thankfully, disappeared.
It's a mixed picture. Overall social mobility now is lower than it was back then. There will be pockets of "winners and losers" within that, that can be referred to anecdotally.
Is social mobility lower? Figures, please.
And if it is lower, is it because there are fewer people to move upwards?
The drop is particularly down to the increased need for inheritance in order to buy a house, and the concentration of high paying jobs in London and SE.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
School leaving age is interesting but we must remember that in those days you could leave school at 16 and get a job, and jobs that needed exams might specify O- or A-levels whereas now they call for degrees, as shown in NatWest and RAF job adverts from 1973:-
About seven years ago, my nephew decided not to go to uni after A-levels, which he could have done, and instead got a job. Since then, he has thrived and is fairly successful, whereas many of his friends who went to uni struggled.
If employers are restricting themselves to people with degrees, then they'll be poorer. It's lazy recruiting. And there are plenty of jobs out there.
(As a reminder, I don't have a degree. I don't think my lack of one held me back, even in a technical field.)
"called for ministers, senior civil servants and other leading figures appointed to lead public bodies to undergo “high quality and mandatory training” on how to behave and uphold standards in public life. Those who refused to take part in training would face sanctions."
And who was on this committee? Well, 2 of its members were Dame Margaret Hodge and Lord Neuberger.
Margaret Hodge: I wonder what standards she upheld when she was in charge of Islington Council and its children's homes became havens for paedophiles who abused children in care and when she then defamed one of the victims, for which she had to apologise. What sanctions did she face? Oh yes- she was made Minister for Children.
As for David Neuberger: until we know precisely what went on regarding his role in seeking to get rid of the trial judge for no good reason in the Bates/Post Office litigation, a period of silence from him on standards in public life would be welcome.
The aim of this committee is very noble but the fact that it includes 2 people whose judgment has been pretty bloody questionable suggests that it too lacks a certain self-awareness. Sinners can often be quite acute about what goes wrong but only if they accept that they have done wrong and are frankly open about their own failings. Precious little sign of it from these two, especially from Lord Neuberger.
You've given me flashbacks now.
Local "don't go there" house which "went on fire". The local police kept the fire brigade outside while they carted (like wheel-barrows-full) files and photographs out of the house. Only then were the fire brigade allowed to start saving it and the neighbouring houses.
It 100% wasn't reported to my 100% not a policeman father that said house was home to a 'councillor friendly' paedophile.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
Average growth rate over the decade of more than 3% (with some wild swings in '73 and '74). And, as you point out, things improved over the decade in other respects, too.
Now we seem, albeit from a much higher level, to be going backwards. And that's more evident to young people than old.
A 69-year-old man from northwest Cambodia's Siem Reap province has been confirmed for H5N1 human avian influenza, becoming the second case of this year, the country's Ministry of Health said in a statement on Sunday. https://twitter.com/KhmerTimes/status/1751775056504762657
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
Did I say they were better days - my point was that the days of higher education being a means of social escape have now truly gone - and that’s before the cascade of university bankruptcies kicks off over the new few months
I'd argue *exactly* the opposite: the increase in numbers of people attending higher education (now, perhaps sadly, meaning uni most of the time) has massively increased 'social escape'.
As I've said before: back in the late 70s we had men being told they weren't worth educating, as they were going to work in the mines. That sort of attitude has hopefully, and thankfully, disappeared.
Mobility isn’t just a question of employment role, though, but economic status in the round.
If I were aged twenty now, it’s not impossible that I would be able to follow broadly the same education and career path, over coming decades, as I have done over decades past. But, due to student debt, pension changes and the impossibility of the housing market, my standard of living would almost certainly be hugely lower, which would impact on (effectively, prevent) the choices I have been able to make in the run up to retirement, and on my standard of living thereafter. I might end with the same CV but I would not feel nearly as socially mobile as I do, having been the first person in my family to make it to university, and achieved a decent standard of living in a very decent home, absent any inheritance.
Whereas another person whose parents die early in an expensive London home could find themselves financially set up for life at an early age, in a way that was uncommon back in the 1980s. Indeed I have a friend whose father (still alive) bought an Islington house for £20,000 that is now worth getting on for £2 million.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
School leaving age is interesting but we must remember that in those days you could leave school at 16 and get a job, and jobs that needed exams might specify O- or A-levels whereas now they call for degrees, as shown in NatWest and RAF job adverts from 1973:-
About seven years ago, my nephew decided not to go to uni after A-levels, which he could have done, and instead got a job. Since then, he has thrived and is fairly successful, whereas many of his friends who went to uni struggled.
If employers are restricting themselves to people with degrees, then they'll be poorer. It's lazy recruiting. And there are plenty of jobs out there.
(As a reminder, I don't have a degree. I don't think my lack of one held me back, even in a technical field.)
You cannot get into JLR, or certainly couldn't when I had the misfortune to work there, unless you have a degree
They get round it by letting anyone work there as a contractor irrespective of educational status.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
School leaving age is interesting but we must remember that in those days you could leave school at 16 and get a job, and jobs that needed exams might specify O- or A-levels whereas now they call for degrees, as shown in NatWest and RAF job adverts from 1973:-
About seven years ago, my nephew decided not to go to uni after A-levels, which he could have done, and instead got a job. Since then, he has thrived and is fairly successful, whereas many of his friends who went to uni struggled.
If employers are restricting themselves to people with degrees, then they'll be poorer. It's lazy recruiting. And there are plenty of jobs out there.
(As a reminder, I don't have a degree. I don't think my lack of one held me back, even in a technical field.)
Recruitment is lazy. Too often seeking graduates and preferably from Oxbridge (or, to be cynical, the hiring manager's alma mater). It is self-fulfilling that Russell Group degrees are better than ex-polys if the latter are automatically filtered out at the recruitment stage. It is also bad for British employers.
Rather fun. The crux is “‘nous’ is too formal - use ‘on’ instead”.
Imagine that in English. “It’s too formal to say ‘We are going to the shops.’ Instead, for a more relaxed spoken vibe, say ‘One is going to the shops.’”
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
Did I say they were better days - my point was that the days of higher education being a means of social escape have now truly gone - and that’s before the cascade of university bankruptcies kicks off over the new few months
I'd argue *exactly* the opposite: the increase in numbers of people attending higher education (now, perhaps sadly, meaning uni most of the time) has massively increased 'social escape'.
As I've said before: back in the late 70s we had men being told they weren't worth educating, as they were going to work in the mines. That sort of attitude has hopefully, and thankfully, disappeared.
It's a mixed picture. Overall social mobility now is lower than it was back then. There will be pockets of "winners and losers" within that, that can be referred to anecdotally.
Is social mobility lower? Figures, please.
And if it is lower, is it because there are fewer people to move upwards?
The drop is particularly down to the increased need for inheritance in order to buy a house, and the concentration of high paying jobs in London and SE.
Or lack of grammar schools, which were one of the engines of social mobility.
So what happened is that a problem arose and it was resolved.
The problem gets the media reports but its solving doesn't.
Good news doesn't sell papers.
So let's accept that 'nothing works, everything is broken' is wrong, it should be: 'lots of stuff that should work, that used to work, doesn't'.
Management of Pension Credit is one niche example: The Pension Service don't have enough staff (apparently) to review Pension Credit payments where the recipient has increased their income or assets and should no longer qualify for PC, so the state carries on paying them when they are no longer eligible.
Some others are: - Ambulances - awful response times. - Armed forces - not enough staff to crew the Navy's ships. - Education - where to begin. - Councils - going bust and cutting services left, right and centre. - Justice - huge lead times for court cases. - Immigration service - losing track of immigrants, slow processing times.
I could go on...
Sure it is not all broken but overall, things have gone backwards in recent years.
Some things have gone backwards and some things have improved.
We all know which gets the media attention.
And why have the things that have gone backwards gone backwards ?
Multiple reasons and varying from one problem to another.
The world is dynamic, continually changing - this causes problems and these need to be resolved.
And resolved to a level which enough of the population are willing to accept - not a 'perfect solution' which those directly affected might want.
Yes, multiple reasons: David Cameron Theresa May Boris Johnson Liz Truss Rishi Sunak
Things are broken. It is the fault of the Conservative Party. And everyone knows it.
Clearly the most influential politicians this country has ever had as they've managed to break the entire world.
Sir is howling at the moon in denial. The Tories are going to get utterly demolished and rightly so.
In denial about what ?
The Conservatives are going to lose and rightly so.
But this country isn't broken - it has its problems as it always has done and as other countries do. And these problems will be dealt with one way or another as they always have been. Not to everyone's satisfaction but they rarely are.
In denial about how broken the country is for most people. We're British so we don't like to complain. But the effects are hard to deny and that is why the Tories aren't just going to lose, they are going to get demolished.
The more that Tories deny how broken they have made things, the bigger the demolition will be. And as deny seems to be what Sunak does best, the longer he stays on the worse it will be.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
Did I say they were better days - my point was that the days of higher education being a means of social escape have now truly gone - and that’s before the cascade of university bankruptcies kicks off over the new few months
I'd argue *exactly* the opposite: the increase in numbers of people attending higher education (now, perhaps sadly, meaning uni most of the time) has massively increased 'social escape'.
As I've said before: back in the late 70s we had men being told they weren't worth educating, as they were going to work in the mines. That sort of attitude has hopefully, and thankfully, disappeared.
It's a mixed picture. Overall social mobility now is lower than it was back then. There will be pockets of "winners and losers" within that, that can be referred to anecdotally.
Is social mobility lower? Figures, please.
And if it is lower, is it because there are fewer people to move upwards?
The drop is particularly down to the increased need for inheritance in order to buy a house, and the concentration of high paying jobs in London and SE.
Or lack of grammar schools, which were one of the engines of social mobility.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
Did I say they were better days - my point was that the days of higher education being a means of social escape have now truly gone - and that’s before the cascade of university bankruptcies kicks off over the new few months
I'd argue *exactly* the opposite: the increase in numbers of people attending higher education (now, perhaps sadly, meaning uni most of the time) has massively increased 'social escape'.
As I've said before: back in the late 70s we had men being told they weren't worth educating, as they were going to work in the mines. That sort of attitude has hopefully, and thankfully, disappeared.
It's a mixed picture. Overall social mobility now is lower than it was back then. There will be pockets of "winners and losers" within that, that can be referred to anecdotally.
Is social mobility lower? Figures, please.
And if it is lower, is it because there are fewer people to move upwards?
The drop is particularly down to the increased need for inheritance in order to buy a house, and the concentration of high paying jobs in London and SE.
Or lack of grammar schools, which were one of the engines of social mobility.
Did you actually read the article?
Not at all, I simply gave you a view. Does it say anything of worth ? Be a good chap and do us all a summary.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
Did I say they were better days - my point was that the days of higher education being a means of social escape have now truly gone - and that’s before the cascade of university bankruptcies kicks off over the new few months
I'd argue *exactly* the opposite: the increase in numbers of people attending higher education (now, perhaps sadly, meaning uni most of the time) has massively increased 'social escape'.
As I've said before: back in the late 70s we had men being told they weren't worth educating, as they were going to work in the mines. That sort of attitude has hopefully, and thankfully, disappeared.
It's a mixed picture. Overall social mobility now is lower than it was back then. There will be pockets of "winners and losers" within that, that can be referred to anecdotally.
Is social mobility lower? Figures, please.
And if it is lower, is it because there are fewer people to move upwards?
The drop is particularly down to the increased need for inheritance in order to buy a house, and the concentration of high paying jobs in London and SE.
Or lack of grammar schools, which were one of the engines of social mobility.
Millions of expats given vote by Tories ‘will punish party for Brexit’
Labour and Liberal Democrats expected to reap benefit from franchise rule changes and frustration over visa restrictions
Labour’s vote will be boosted by a change in voting rules introduced by the Conservative government that will enfranchise an extra two million British expats at the next general election, according to academic research.
Rules came into effect on January 16 allowing all British citizens living abroad to register to vote in a general election. Previously, people who left the UK more than 15 years ago lost this right but the Conservatives pledged to scrap the rule in their 2019 manifesto and enacted the policy through the Elections Act 2022.
Labour opposed the rule change, but in an ironic twist, academics at the University of Sussex suggest the party will gain from it at the expense of the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats are also likely to benefit, according to the research...
...Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University and Britain’s leading polling expert, said it was ironic that changes introduced by the Conservatives were likely to damage them at the polls. He told The Times: “Whatever benefit the Conservatives might have gained in the past from enfranchisement of overseas British citizens — and, in truth, no one can be sure how far that has been the case — there must be question marks about how much support the party can now hope to garner from expatriates living in the European Union, many of whom could well feel that their lives have been made more difficult by Brexit.”
When I was at school we had rampant homophobia in society. Football violence was not just an occasional thing; it was ever-present. Racism was endemic. Going just before my schooldays, we had blackouts and the three-day week. You were lucky if your school had a well-stocked library; now we have much of the world's information at our fingertips. The air was unhealthy (especially as I was born a couple of miles away from a power station...), etc, etc.
Times have got worse? In many ways they've got much, much better.
People aren't going back 40 years or more, they're going back 20 years. On practically every measure you look at things have gone backwards in the last 20 years. A few exceptions, but the NHS is a mess, you can't get a dentist, the trains are broken, money is worth less than it was, job insecurity and poor wages etc etc etc etc.
I have no problem with a glass half full approach. I do that. Mostly. But the strident denials of how bad things are is why the Tories are heading for oblivion. You can't tell people black is white and retain political credibility.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
Did I say they were better days - my point was that the days of higher education being a means of social escape have now truly gone - and that’s before the cascade of university bankruptcies kicks off over the new few months
I'd argue *exactly* the opposite: the increase in numbers of people attending higher education (now, perhaps sadly, meaning uni most of the time) has massively increased 'social escape'.
As I've said before: back in the late 70s we had men being told they weren't worth educating, as they were going to work in the mines. That sort of attitude has hopefully, and thankfully, disappeared.
It's a mixed picture. Overall social mobility now is lower than it was back then. There will be pockets of "winners and losers" within that, that can be referred to anecdotally.
Is social mobility lower? Figures, please.
And if it is lower, is it because there are fewer people to move upwards?
The drop is particularly down to the increased need for inheritance in order to buy a house, and the concentration of high paying jobs in London and SE.
Or lack of grammar schools, which were one of the engines of social mobility.
Why should it ? The grammar school system today is nothing like 50 years ago. Then schools were much more of a social mix as a much larger number of people were "drafted". I grew up on a council estate and went to grammar school if I hadnt my horizons would have been collecting tattoos and stoning catholics.
Two of my kids went to grammar school in Warwickshire. Totally different to my time. Its the well off ( like me ) coaching their kids to get in to a limited number of places in a school full of the better off. There will be no social mobility in that as its just the wealthy keeping their off spring in the game.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
Did I say they were better days - my point was that the days of higher education being a means of social escape have now truly gone - and that’s before the cascade of university bankruptcies kicks off over the new few months
I'd argue *exactly* the opposite: the increase in numbers of people attending higher education (now, perhaps sadly, meaning uni most of the time) has massively increased 'social escape'.
As I've said before: back in the late 70s we had men being told they weren't worth educating, as they were going to work in the mines. That sort of attitude has hopefully, and thankfully, disappeared.
It's a mixed picture. Overall social mobility now is lower than it was back then. There will be pockets of "winners and losers" within that, that can be referred to anecdotally.
Is social mobility lower? Figures, please.
And if it is lower, is it because there are fewer people to move upwards?
The drop is particularly down to the increased need for inheritance in order to buy a house, and the concentration of high paying jobs in London and SE.
Or lack of grammar schools, which were one of the engines of social mobility.
I'm not slow to criticise anti-semitism, which runs rife amongst the Corbynistas, but I'm struggling to see what's wrong with that post?
Comparing the Israeli campaign in Gaza to the Holocaust?
Ah, I missed Gaza as the final word. Just didn't spot it.
I thought she was just saying we should remember all holocausts and genocides and the criticism was that she was diluting the meaning of it in remembering the original Holocaust by so doing.
Somehow it seemed as thought the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer—except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs.
Clearly it's not literally true that everything is broken. And many things have benefitted from technical progress. But a lot of things have got shabbier or worse. Many of them in the public realm; libraries, parks, streets, banks, local media, people on the streets...
And we can trade numbers about whether things are bad or very bad. But things haven't, in general, been good for quite some time. (One of the theories of 2016 was that things hadn't been going well for a lot of people for quite some time, and they haven't improved since then.)
Hunch: as a nation, we've spend a couple of generations feasting on seedcorn and we need to accept that's not sustainable. I'm not sure that's going to be pretty.
Millions of expats given vote by Tories ‘will punish party for Brexit’
Labour and Liberal Democrats expected to reap benefit from franchise rule changes and frustration over visa restrictions
Labour’s vote will be boosted by a change in voting rules introduced by the Conservative government that will enfranchise an extra two million British expats at the next general election, according to academic research.
Rules came into effect on January 16 allowing all British citizens living abroad to register to vote in a general election. Previously, people who left the UK more than 15 years ago lost this right but the Conservatives pledged to scrap the rule in their 2019 manifesto and enacted the policy through the Elections Act 2022.
Labour opposed the rule change, but in an ironic twist, academics at the University of Sussex suggest the party will gain from it at the expense of the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats are also likely to benefit, according to the research...
...Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University and Britain’s leading polling expert, said it was ironic that changes introduced by the Conservatives were likely to damage them at the polls. He told The Times: “Whatever benefit the Conservatives might have gained in the past from enfranchisement of overseas British citizens — and, in truth, no one can be sure how far that has been the case — there must be question marks about how much support the party can now hope to garner from expatriates living in the European Union, many of whom could well feel that their lives have been made more difficult by Brexit.”
Well duh! Wasn't this obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain (so not a Tory)? The people who voted against Brexit and for whom the post Brexit deal has been the most harmful to their daily lives want to punish the party who did this to them shock.
Rather fun. The crux is “‘nous’ is too formal - use ‘on’ instead”.
Imagine that in English. “It’s too formal to say ‘We are going to the shops.’ Instead, for a more relaxed spoken vibe, say ‘One is going to the shops.’”
What do they say in the 'Received Pronunciation' areas of the Isle de France?
That's the one not to use if you want to be credible .
Somehow it seemed as thought the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer—except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs.
Clearly it's not literally true that everything is broken. And many things have benefitted from technical progress. But a lot of things have got shabbier or worse. Many of them in the public realm; libraries, parks, streets, banks, local media, people on the streets...
And we can trade numbers about whether things are bad or very bad. But things haven't, in general, been good for quite some time. (One of the theories of 2016 was that things hadn't been going well for a lot of people for quite some time, and they haven't improved since then.)
Hunch: as a nation, we've spend a couple of generations feasting on seedcorn and we need to accept that's not sustainable. I'm not sure that's going to be pretty.
Quite, and at present there is no political consensus to change direction.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
Did I say they were better days - my point was that the days of higher education being a means of social escape have now truly gone - and that’s before the cascade of university bankruptcies kicks off over the new few months
I'd argue *exactly* the opposite: the increase in numbers of people attending higher education (now, perhaps sadly, meaning uni most of the time) has massively increased 'social escape'.
As I've said before: back in the late 70s we had men being told they weren't worth educating, as they were going to work in the mines. That sort of attitude has hopefully, and thankfully, disappeared.
It's a mixed picture. Overall social mobility now is lower than it was back then. There will be pockets of "winners and losers" within that, that can be referred to anecdotally.
Is social mobility lower? Figures, please.
And if it is lower, is it because there are fewer people to move upwards?
The drop is particularly down to the increased need for inheritance in order to buy a house, and the concentration of high paying jobs in London and SE.
Or lack of grammar schools, which were one of the engines of social mobility.
Anyone who lives near grammar schools knows that outside of a tiny few, they mostly cater to the children of extremely motivated parents, and are effectively private schools by proxy, with the money going on premiums on catchment house prices and the required tutoring to pass the selection.
They *may* once of have allowed social mobility for a minority, though arguably the flipside is that they cemented immobility for a majority condemned to sink schools. I think our culture has changed around schooling in the fifty odd years since the end of the tripartite system though.
Millions of expats given vote by Tories ‘will punish party for Brexit’
Labour and Liberal Democrats expected to reap benefit from franchise rule changes and frustration over visa restrictions
Labour’s vote will be boosted by a change in voting rules introduced by the Conservative government that will enfranchise an extra two million British expats at the next general election, according to academic research.
Rules came into effect on January 16 allowing all British citizens living abroad to register to vote in a general election. Previously, people who left the UK more than 15 years ago lost this right but the Conservatives pledged to scrap the rule in their 2019 manifesto and enacted the policy through the Elections Act 2022.
Labour opposed the rule change, but in an ironic twist, academics at the University of Sussex suggest the party will gain from it at the expense of the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats are also likely to benefit, according to the research...
...Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University and Britain’s leading polling expert, said it was ironic that changes introduced by the Conservatives were likely to damage them at the polls. He told The Times: “Whatever benefit the Conservatives might have gained in the past from enfranchisement of overseas British citizens — and, in truth, no one can be sure how far that has been the case — there must be question marks about how much support the party can now hope to garner from expatriates living in the European Union, many of whom could well feel that their lives have been made more difficult by Brexit.”
Well duh! Wasn't this obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain (so not a Tory)? The people who voted against Brexit and for whom the post Brexit deal has been the most harmful to their daily lives want to punish the party who did this to them shock.
Just how dumb are Sunak and his team of advisors?
Sunak doesn't know Britain, part 94.
It probably is the case that the expats Sunak knows- the ones on the global corporate circuit, for whom Europe is too small a stage and have people to deal with the admin- are still Conservative.
And it is probably true that, in Thatcher's days, expats were more likely to be Conservative, so there's a bit of "uncomprehending Maggie Cosplay" as well.
It's just that the generation below has different dynamics, and the Conservatives are currently making a point of being the party of not wanting to understand the generation below.
When I was at school we had rampant homophobia in society. Football violence was not just an occasional thing; it was ever-present. Racism was endemic. Going just before my schooldays, we had blackouts and the three-day week. You were lucky if your school had a well-stocked library; now we have much of the world's information at our fingertips. The air was unhealthy (especially as I was born a couple of miles away from a power station...), etc, etc.
Times have got worse? In many ways they've got much, much better.
People aren't going back 40 years or more, they're going back 20 years. On practically every measure you look at things have gone backwards in the last 20 years. A few exceptions, but the NHS is a mess, you can't get a dentist, the trains are broken, money is worth less than it was, job insecurity and poor wages etc etc etc etc.
I have no problem with a glass half full approach. I do that. Mostly. But the strident denials of how bad things are is why the Tories are heading for oblivion. You can't tell people black is white and retain political credibility.
Some things have improved. There has been a great shift to renewable energy, for example. Online services on gov.uk are genuinely well designed (even if the back end of things like passport renewal are still subject to delay).
But on the whole - public services have got worse. I hold Cam and The Quad most responsible for this. For all his bluster, vanity and moral incontinence, I don't think Boris came close to being as damaging to the fibre of the country as Cameron was - DC is second only to Thatcher on this measure, and may actually be worse. Growing up in South Yorkshire coal country as I did, I saw the undiluted negative effects of Thatcherism, but swathes of the rest of the nation perhaps did not. We are nearly all impacted by Cameron and Osbourne's austerity one way or another.
Not that this matters. For all that Sunak weirdly positions himself as fighting from opposition, the nation's political memory is much longer and less nuanced, and they are not fooled into thinking that we've had anything other than Conservatives in power for 14 years - and things have just got worse.
Millions of expats given vote by Tories ‘will punish party for Brexit’
Labour and Liberal Democrats expected to reap benefit from franchise rule changes and frustration over visa restrictions
Labour’s vote will be boosted by a change in voting rules introduced by the Conservative government that will enfranchise an extra two million British expats at the next general election, according to academic research.
Rules came into effect on January 16 allowing all British citizens living abroad to register to vote in a general election. Previously, people who left the UK more than 15 years ago lost this right but the Conservatives pledged to scrap the rule in their 2019 manifesto and enacted the policy through the Elections Act 2022.
Labour opposed the rule change, but in an ironic twist, academics at the University of Sussex suggest the party will gain from it at the expense of the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats are also likely to benefit, according to the research...
...Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University and Britain’s leading polling expert, said it was ironic that changes introduced by the Conservatives were likely to damage them at the polls. He told The Times: “Whatever benefit the Conservatives might have gained in the past from enfranchisement of overseas British citizens — and, in truth, no one can be sure how far that has been the case — there must be question marks about how much support the party can now hope to garner from expatriates living in the European Union, many of whom could well feel that their lives have been made more difficult by Brexit.”
Well duh! Wasn't this obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain (so not a Tory)? The people who voted against Brexit and for whom the post Brexit deal has been the most harmful to their daily lives want to punish the party who did this to them shock.
Just how dumb are Sunak and his team of advisors?
My experience suggests that a few will vote Labour and the rest will be too sozzled to care.
Millions of expats given vote by Tories ‘will punish party for Brexit’
Labour and Liberal Democrats expected to reap benefit from franchise rule changes and frustration over visa restrictions
Labour’s vote will be boosted by a change in voting rules introduced by the Conservative government that will enfranchise an extra two million British expats at the next general election, according to academic research.
Rules came into effect on January 16 allowing all British citizens living abroad to register to vote in a general election. Previously, people who left the UK more than 15 years ago lost this right but the Conservatives pledged to scrap the rule in their 2019 manifesto and enacted the policy through the Elections Act 2022.
Labour opposed the rule change, but in an ironic twist, academics at the University of Sussex suggest the party will gain from it at the expense of the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats are also likely to benefit, according to the research...
...Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University and Britain’s leading polling expert, said it was ironic that changes introduced by the Conservatives were likely to damage them at the polls. He told The Times: “Whatever benefit the Conservatives might have gained in the past from enfranchisement of overseas British citizens — and, in truth, no one can be sure how far that has been the case — there must be question marks about how much support the party can now hope to garner from expatriates living in the European Union, many of whom could well feel that their lives have been made more difficult by Brexit.”
Presumably these rules also apply for referenda - or can be made to do so quite easily. Seems to me that's quite an interesting proposition for any future Scottish independence or Reverse Brexit vote.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
The argument isn't "were things better in the 70s?" Of course in the grand scheme society is more equitable, so no they weren't. But we also had some elements which were better. The school dentist for one, prevention being cheaper than cure (or multiple tooth extraction on the NHS). We had things which were worse too, like the police fitting up suspects. It isn't binary.
I would nonetheless argue society was more at ease with itself than it is now. Does that make the 1970s better than today? Except for that metric, no!
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
Did I say they were better days - my point was that the days of higher education being a means of social escape have now truly gone - and that’s before the cascade of university bankruptcies kicks off over the new few months
I'd argue *exactly* the opposite: the increase in numbers of people attending higher education (now, perhaps sadly, meaning uni most of the time) has massively increased 'social escape'.
As I've said before: back in the late 70s we had men being told they weren't worth educating, as they were going to work in the mines. That sort of attitude has hopefully, and thankfully, disappeared.
It's a mixed picture. Overall social mobility now is lower than it was back then. There will be pockets of "winners and losers" within that, that can be referred to anecdotally.
Is social mobility lower? Figures, please.
And if it is lower, is it because there are fewer people to move upwards?
The drop is particularly down to the increased need for inheritance in order to buy a house, and the concentration of high paying jobs in London and SE.
Or lack of grammar schools, which were one of the engines of social mobility.
Anyone who lives near grammar schools knows that outside of a tiny few, they mostly cater to the children of extremely motivated parents, and are effectively private schools by proxy, with the money going on premiums on catchment house prices and the required tutoring to pass the selection.
They *may* once of have allowed social mobility for a minority, though arguably the flipside is that they cemented immobility for a majority condemned to sink schools. I think our culture has changed around schooling in the fifty odd years since the end of the tripartite system though.
Around 40% of Kent kids go to grammar school, I think. So if there's a strong social mobility effect, it ought to show up.
When I was at school we had rampant homophobia in society. Football violence was not just an occasional thing; it was ever-present. Racism was endemic. Going just before my schooldays, we had blackouts and the three-day week. You were lucky if your school had a well-stocked library; now we have much of the world's information at our fingertips. The air was unhealthy (especially as I was born a couple of miles away from a power station...), etc, etc.
Times have got worse? In many ways they've got much, much better.
People aren't going back 40 years or more, they're going back 20 years. On practically every measure you look at things have gone backwards in the last 20 years. A few exceptions, but the NHS is a mess, you can't get a dentist, the trains are broken, money is worth less than it was, job insecurity and poor wages etc etc etc etc.
I have no problem with a glass half full approach. I do that. Mostly. But the strident denials of how bad things are is why the Tories are heading for oblivion. You can't tell people black is white and retain political credibility.
No. But what we get is the glass-is-smashed-on-the-pub-floor approach, that everything is terrible and hopeless and shit; that things were so much better back in the day.
It's rubbish, and just as bad and destructive as the everything's-utterly-rosy approach.
As an example, if you think the trains weren't broken twenty years ago, you need to think again. Remember the decade-long chaos caused by the terrible WCML Upgrade? The many crashes we had in the 80s and 90s? The deaths of railworkers? It's another example of the smashed-glass thinking.
No, thing's aren't perfect. Yes, people are struggling - partly for reasons outside of the government's control, mostly for reasons within its control. But the idea that the past was some nirvana is hilariously bad.
"I got student grants!" is fine to say: until you realise the person saying that was exceedingly lucky to get into uni in the first place. They were not usual; and the people who did not go to uni paid for those grants. Perhaps that was a worthwhile expenditure for the good of the nation; or perhaps not, as that generation (nearly my generation now...) appear to be the ones who fu**ed up the country, according to the smashed-glassers.
I'm not slow to criticise anti-semitism, which runs rife amongst the Corbynistas, but I'm struggling to see what's wrong with that post?
Comparing the Israeli campaign in Gaza to the Holocaust?
Ah, I missed Gaza as the final word. Just didn't spot it.
I thought she was just saying we should remember all holocausts and genocides and the criticism was that she was diluting the meaning of it in remembering the original Holocaust by so doing.
Yes, it was deliberately tendentious to mention Gaza.
The historical facts are substantially well-established and unequivocal in respect of the Holocaust, whilst anything but for Gaza.
Starmer was correct to penalise her. It would be nice if her constituency did likewise, but I expect she knows her audience.
Millions of expats given vote by Tories ‘will punish party for Brexit’
Labour and Liberal Democrats expected to reap benefit from franchise rule changes and frustration over visa restrictions
Labour’s vote will be boosted by a change in voting rules introduced by the Conservative government that will enfranchise an extra two million British expats at the next general election, according to academic research.
Rules came into effect on January 16 allowing all British citizens living abroad to register to vote in a general election. Previously, people who left the UK more than 15 years ago lost this right but the Conservatives pledged to scrap the rule in their 2019 manifesto and enacted the policy through the Elections Act 2022.
Labour opposed the rule change, but in an ironic twist, academics at the University of Sussex suggest the party will gain from it at the expense of the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats are also likely to benefit, according to the research...
...Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University and Britain’s leading polling expert, said it was ironic that changes introduced by the Conservatives were likely to damage them at the polls. He told The Times: “Whatever benefit the Conservatives might have gained in the past from enfranchisement of overseas British citizens — and, in truth, no one can be sure how far that has been the case — there must be question marks about how much support the party can now hope to garner from expatriates living in the European Union, many of whom could well feel that their lives have been made more difficult by Brexit.”
Well duh! Wasn't this obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain (so not a Tory)? The people who voted against Brexit and for whom the post Brexit deal has been the most harmful to their daily lives want to punish the party who did this to them shock.
Just how dumb are Sunak and his team of advisors?
My experience suggests that a few will vote Labour and the rest will be too sozzled to care.
Someone should do some polling. I’m not convinced it’ll be as bad for the Tories as made out. Brits abroad are disproportionately old, especially those who’ve been out for over 15 years.
I wonder if we’ll get to see the expat results after the election. That’s one of the fun bits of some foreign elections, particularly the French presidential.
After a lot of soul-searching, I am now clear in my own mind that Labour is the right choice for the communities across the country where Iceland operates – and the right choice for everyone in business who wants to see this country grow and prosper.
I say this not because I have had a radical change of heart. I say it because Labour under Keir Starmer has progressively moved towards the ground on which I have always stood, at the same time as the Conservatives have moved away from it. Indeed, the Tories’ abandonment of what I have always regarded as basic Conservative principles has not only fuelled my personal disenchantment, it is also reflected in the total collapse of public confidence we can see in every opinion poll.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
School leaving age is interesting but we must remember that in those days you could leave school at 16 and get a job, and jobs that needed exams might specify O- or A-levels whereas now they call for degrees, as shown in NatWest and RAF job adverts from 1973:-
About seven years ago, my nephew decided not to go to uni after A-levels, which he could have done, and instead got a job. Since then, he has thrived and is fairly successful, whereas many of his friends who went to uni struggled.
If employers are restricting themselves to people with degrees, then they'll be poorer. It's lazy recruiting. And there are plenty of jobs out there.
(As a reminder, I don't have a degree. I don't think my lack of one held me back, even in a technical field.)
Recruitment is lazy. Too often seeking graduates and preferably from Oxbridge (or, to be cynical, the hiring manager's alma mater). It is self-fulfilling that Russell Group degrees are better than ex-polys if the latter are automatically filtered out at the recruitment stage. It is also bad for British employers.
I'm quite proud I recruited a handful of young people who did not have degrees, and the two I'm still in vague contact with are still in the industry. The issue was getting people without degrees into the door, as the recruitment agencies would just spam us with CVs of young turks from Unis. I took someone without a degree who wrote in saying: "I can code..." as having a lot more get-up-and-go than someone with a degree who just sent their CV into an agency.
I also felt I had a little duty to, as I had no degree myself, and it felt odd insisting that a degree was absolutely necessary.
Recruitment agencies were hideously poor, and seemed, from our perspective at least, utterly lazy. Perhaps we just used bad recruitment agencies, or perhaps tech is hard for recruitment agencies to get right.
When I was at school we had rampant homophobia in society. Football violence was not just an occasional thing; it was ever-present. Racism was endemic. Going just before my schooldays, we had blackouts and the three-day week. You were lucky if your school had a well-stocked library; now we have much of the world's information at our fingertips. The air was unhealthy (especially as I was born a couple of miles away from a power station...), etc, etc.
Times have got worse? In many ways they've got much, much better.
Times have got better in so many ways - but what's changed is the likelihood of kids having better lives in terms of opportunities and prospects than their parents. That's a major problem and it's not just the case in this country. If the Russians were not set on wreaking havoc on their borders, you'd say that the best places to be young in Europe now are in the old Iron Curtain countries, rather than those in the West.
Millions of expats given vote by Tories ‘will punish party for Brexit’
Labour and Liberal Democrats expected to reap benefit from franchise rule changes and frustration over visa restrictions
Labour’s vote will be boosted by a change in voting rules introduced by the Conservative government that will enfranchise an extra two million British expats at the next general election, according to academic research.
Rules came into effect on January 16 allowing all British citizens living abroad to register to vote in a general election. Previously, people who left the UK more than 15 years ago lost this right but the Conservatives pledged to scrap the rule in their 2019 manifesto and enacted the policy through the Elections Act 2022.
Labour opposed the rule change, but in an ironic twist, academics at the University of Sussex suggest the party will gain from it at the expense of the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats are also likely to benefit, according to the research...
...Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University and Britain’s leading polling expert, said it was ironic that changes introduced by the Conservatives were likely to damage them at the polls. He told The Times: “Whatever benefit the Conservatives might have gained in the past from enfranchisement of overseas British citizens — and, in truth, no one can be sure how far that has been the case — there must be question marks about how much support the party can now hope to garner from expatriates living in the European Union, many of whom could well feel that their lives have been made more difficult by Brexit.”
Well duh! Wasn't this obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain (so not a Tory)? The people who voted against Brexit and for whom the post Brexit deal has been the most harmful to their daily lives want to punish the party who did this to them shock.
Just how dumb are Sunak and his team of advisors?
My experience suggests that a few will vote Labour and the rest will be too sozzled to care.
Someone should do some polling. I’m not convinced it’ll be as bad for the Tories as made out. Brits abroad are disproportionately old, especially those who’ve been out for over 15 years.
I wonder if we’ll get to see the expat results after the election. That’s one of the fun bits of some foreign elections, particularly the French presidential.
When I was at school we had rampant homophobia in society. Football violence was not just an occasional thing; it was ever-present. Racism was endemic. Going just before my schooldays, we had blackouts and the three-day week. You were lucky if your school had a well-stocked library; now we have much of the world's information at our fingertips. The air was unhealthy (especially as I was born a couple of miles away from a power station...), etc, etc.
Times have got worse? In many ways they've got much, much better.
People aren't going back 40 years or more, they're going back 20 years. On practically every measure you look at things have gone backwards in the last 20 years. A few exceptions, but the NHS is a mess, you can't get a dentist, the trains are broken, money is worth less than it was, job insecurity and poor wages etc etc etc etc.
I have no problem with a glass half full approach. I do that. Mostly. But the strident denials of how bad things are is why the Tories are heading for oblivion. You can't tell people black is white and retain political credibility.
What really matters, whether people think things are broken or not, is that by every conceivable measure our standard of living is now poorer than it was at the last election and going back further than that. Near full employment is fine but if people are not rewarded for work then what is the point.
If Sunak thinks cutting or getting rid of IHT will help him he is deluded. It will play out terribly. Tax cuts for the wealthy while the rest continue to struggle.
Truss was right about the problem we faced, lack of growth, she was wrong about the solution to it.
When I was at school we had rampant homophobia in society. Football violence was not just an occasional thing; it was ever-present. Racism was endemic. Going just before my schooldays, we had blackouts and the three-day week. You were lucky if your school had a well-stocked library; now we have much of the world's information at our fingertips. The air was unhealthy (especially as I was born a couple of miles away from a power station...), etc, etc.
Times have got worse? In many ways they've got much, much better.
People aren't going back 40 years or more, they're going back 20 years. On practically every measure you look at things have gone backwards in the last 20 years. A few exceptions, but the NHS is a mess, you can't get a dentist, the trains are broken, money is worth less than it was, job insecurity and poor wages etc etc etc etc.
I have no problem with a glass half full approach. I do that. Mostly. But the strident denials of how bad things are is why the Tories are heading for oblivion. You can't tell people black is white and retain political credibility.
No. But what we get is the glass-is-smashed-on-the-pub-floor approach, that everything is terrible and hopeless and shit; that things were so much better back in the day.
It's rubbish, and just as bad and destructive as the everything's-utterly-rosy approach.
As an example, if you think the trains weren't broken twenty years ago, you need to think again. Remember the decade-long chaos caused by the terrible WCML Upgrade? The many crashes we had in the 80s and 90s? The deaths of railworkers? It's another example of the smashed-glass thinking.
No, thing's aren't perfect. Yes, people are struggling - partly for reasons outside of the government's control, mostly for reasons within its control. But the idea that the past was some nirvana is hilariously bad.
"I got student grants!" is fine to say: until you realise the person saying that was exceedingly lucky to get into uni in the first place. They were not usual; and the people who did not go to uni paid for those grants. Perhaps that was a worthwhile expenditure for the good of the nation; or perhaps not, as that generation (nearly my generation now...) appear to be the ones who fu**ed up the country, according to the smashed-glassers.
If you drove Brexit, funding the Leave camping with Rubles from Vladimir Putin, if you work for a Tufton Street think tank or the Daily Mail you are indeed responsible for the swift decline of Britain. If you are guilty of none of these crimes against humanity you did not break Britain.
When I was at school we had rampant homophobia in society. Football violence was not just an occasional thing; it was ever-present. Racism was endemic. Going just before my schooldays, we had blackouts and the three-day week. You were lucky if your school had a well-stocked library; now we have much of the world's information at our fingertips. The air was unhealthy (especially as I was born a couple of miles away from a power station...), etc, etc.
Times have got worse? In many ways they've got much, much better.
People aren't going back 40 years or more, they're going back 20 years. On practically every measure you look at things have gone backwards in the last 20 years. A few exceptions, but the NHS is a mess, you can't get a dentist, the trains are broken, money is worth less than it was, job insecurity and poor wages etc etc etc etc.
I have no problem with a glass half full approach. I do that. Mostly. But the strident denials of how bad things are is why the Tories are heading for oblivion. You can't tell people black is white and retain political credibility.
Some things have improved. There has been a great shift to renewable energy, for example. Online services on gov.uk are genuinely well designed (even if the back end of things like passport renewal are still subject to delay).
But on the whole - public services have got worse. I hold Cam and The Quad most responsible for this. For all his bluster, vanity and moral incontinence, I don't think Boris came close to being as damaging to the fibre of the country as Cameron was - DC is second only to Thatcher on this measure, and may actually be worse. Growing up in South Yorkshire coal country as I did, I saw the undiluted negative effects of Thatcherism, but swathes of the rest of the nation perhaps did not. We are nearly all impacted by Cameron and Osbourne's austerity one way or another.
Not that this matters. For all that Sunak weirdly positions himself as fighting from opposition, the nation's political memory is much longer and less nuanced, and they are not fooled into thinking that we've had anything other than Conservatives in power for 14 years - and things have just got worse.
Also note the post-industrial changes which followed Thatcher shutting down primary industry. We may have had closure of the pits and steelworks and other major industry, but we then had a major effort at regeneration to both redevelop the land and bring in new employment opportunities. Not remotely the same in terms of job quality or community cohesion, but better than the nothing which followed.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
The argument isn't "were things better in the 70s?" Of course in the grand scheme society is more equitable, so no they weren't. But we also had some elements which were better. The school dentist for one, prevention being cheaper than cure (or multiple tooth extraction on the NHS). We had things which were worse too, like the police fitting up suspects. It isn't binary.
I would nonetheless argue society was more at ease with itself than it is now. Does that make the 1970s better than today? Except for that metric, no!
I was born in 73, so I missed some of the 70s, and was young through the rest of it. But I'd argue that the massive amount of strikes, the three-day week, blackouts, football violence, endemic racism, homophobia and sexism, does not show a country that was 'more at ease with itself'.
When I was at school we had rampant homophobia in society. Football violence was not just an occasional thing; it was ever-present. Racism was endemic. Going just before my schooldays, we had blackouts and the three-day week. You were lucky if your school had a well-stocked library; now we have much of the world's information at our fingertips. The air was unhealthy (especially as I was born a couple of miles away from a power station...), etc, etc.
Times have got worse? In many ways they've got much, much better.
People aren't going back 40 years or more, they're going back 20 years. On practically every measure you look at things have gone backwards in the last 20 years. A few exceptions, but the NHS is a mess, you can't get a dentist, the trains are broken, money is worth less than it was, job insecurity and poor wages etc etc etc etc.
I have no problem with a glass half full approach. I do that. Mostly. But the strident denials of how bad things are is why the Tories are heading for oblivion. You can't tell people black is white and retain political credibility.
No. But what we get is the glass-is-smashed-on-the-pub-floor approach, that everything is terrible and hopeless and shit; that things were so much better back in the day.
It's rubbish, and just as bad and destructive as the everything's-utterly-rosy approach.
As an example, if you think the trains weren't broken twenty years ago, you need to think again. Remember the decade-long chaos caused by the terrible WCML Upgrade? The many crashes we had in the 80s and 90s? The deaths of railworkers? It's another example of the smashed-glass thinking.
No, thing's aren't perfect. Yes, people are struggling - partly for reasons outside of the government's control, mostly for reasons within its control. But the idea that the past was some nirvana is hilariously bad.
"I got student grants!" is fine to say: until you realise the person saying that was exceedingly lucky to get into uni in the first place. They were not usual; and the people who did not go to uni paid for those grants. Perhaps that was a worthwhile expenditure for the good of the nation; or perhaps not, as that generation (nearly my generation now...) appear to be the ones who fu**ed up the country, according to the smashed-glassers.
If you drove Brexit, funding the Leave camping with Rubles from Vladimir Putin, if you work for a Tufton Street think tank or the Daily Mail you are indeed responsible for the swift decline of Britain. If you are guilty of none of these crimes against humanity you did not break Britain.
Rather fun. The crux is “‘nous’ is too formal - use ‘on’ instead”.
Imagine that in English. “It’s too formal to say ‘We are going to the shops.’ Instead, for a more relaxed spoken vibe, say ‘One is going to the shops.’”
What do they say in the 'Received Pronunciation' areas of the Isle de France?
That's the one not to use if you want to be credible .
Prejudiced - Moi?
I've been told that the word 'nous' is very rarely used in spoken French; it has been supplanted by 'on'.
Research on the topic is however thin on the ground.
When I was at school we had rampant homophobia in society. Football violence was not just an occasional thing; it was ever-present. Racism was endemic. Going just before my schooldays, we had blackouts and the three-day week. You were lucky if your school had a well-stocked library; now we have much of the world's information at our fingertips. The air was unhealthy (especially as I was born a couple of miles away from a power station...), etc, etc.
Times have got worse? In many ways they've got much, much better.
People aren't going back 40 years or more, they're going back 20 years. On practically every measure you look at things have gone backwards in the last 20 years. A few exceptions, but the NHS is a mess, you can't get a dentist, the trains are broken, money is worth less than it was, job insecurity and poor wages etc etc etc etc.
I have no problem with a glass half full approach. I do that. Mostly. But the strident denials of how bad things are is why the Tories are heading for oblivion. You can't tell people black is white and retain political credibility.
Some things have improved. There has been a great shift to renewable energy, for example. Online services on gov.uk are genuinely well designed (even if the back end of things like passport renewal are still subject to delay).
But on the whole - public services have got worse. I hold Cam and The Quad most responsible for this. For all his bluster, vanity and moral incontinence, I don't think Boris came close to being as damaging to the fibre of the country as Cameron was - DC is second only to Thatcher on this measure, and may actually be worse. Growing up in South Yorkshire coal country as I did, I saw the undiluted negative effects of Thatcherism, but swathes of the rest of the nation perhaps did not. We are nearly all impacted by Cameron and Osbourne's austerity one way or another.
Not that this matters. For all that Sunak weirdly positions himself as fighting from opposition, the nation's political memory is much longer and less nuanced, and they are not fooled into thinking that we've had anything other than Conservatives in power for 14 years - and things have just got worse.
Also note the post-industrial changes which followed Thatcher shutting down primary industry. We may have had closure of the pits and steelworks and other major industry, but we then had a major effort at regeneration to both redevelop the land and bring in new employment opportunities. Not remotely the same in terms of job quality or community cohesion, but better than the nothing which followed.
The industrial decline pre-dated and post-dated Thatcher. She did not 'shut down' primary industry alone; in fact, she encouraged companies like Nissan in. Corby steelworks, as an example, closed in February 1979 - four months before Thatcher.
Like Beeching, Thatcher gets blamed for things that were nothing to do with her.
Rather fun. The crux is “‘nous’ is too formal - use ‘on’ instead”.
Imagine that in English. “It’s too formal to say ‘We are going to the shops.’ Instead, for a more relaxed spoken vibe, say ‘One is going to the shops.’”
What do they say in the 'Received Pronunciation' areas of the Isle de France?
That's the one not to use if you want to be credible .
Prejudiced - Moi?
I've been told that the word 'nous' is very rarely used in spoken French; it has been supplanted by 'on'.
Research on the topic is however thin on the ground.
Spoken French has six distinct registers. Most conversation takes place in registre normal/registre populaire/registre familier. On/nous substitution is very common in registre populaire and registre familier.
Watch some episodes of Plus Belle La Vie to see this in action.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
School leaving age is interesting but we must remember that in those days you could leave school at 16 and get a job, and jobs that needed exams might specify O- or A-levels whereas now they call for degrees, as shown in NatWest and RAF job adverts from 1973:-
About seven years ago, my nephew decided not to go to uni after A-levels, which he could have done, and instead got a job. Since then, he has thrived and is fairly successful, whereas many of his friends who went to uni struggled.
If employers are restricting themselves to people with degrees, then they'll be poorer. It's lazy recruiting. And there are plenty of jobs out there.
(As a reminder, I don't have a degree. I don't think my lack of one held me back, even in a technical field.)
Recruitment is lazy. Too often seeking graduates and preferably from Oxbridge (or, to be cynical, the hiring manager's alma mater). It is self-fulfilling that Russell Group degrees are better than ex-polys if the latter are automatically filtered out at the recruitment stage. It is also bad for British employers.
I'm quite proud I recruited a handful of young people who did not have degrees, and the two I'm still in vague contact with are still in the industry. The issue was getting people without degrees into the door, as the recruitment agencies would just spam us with CVs of young turks from Unis. I took someone without a degree who wrote in saying: "I can code..." as having a lot more get-up-and-go than someone with a degree who just sent their CV into an agency.
I also felt I had a little duty to, as I had no degree myself, and it felt odd insisting that a degree was absolutely necessary.
Recruitment agencies were hideously poor, and seemed, from our perspective at least, utterly lazy. Perhaps we just used bad recruitment agencies, or perhaps tech is hard for recruitment agencies to get right.
The issue with tech recruitment usually comes down to HR departments at tech companies who have no understanding of the tech, and non-tech staff at the agencies that can do little more than scan CVs and run them through a keyword search.
Trying to recruit tech people for a non-tech company is a nightmare, and depends far too much on word of mouth and candidates finding email addresses at the company directly.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
The argument isn't "were things better in the 70s?" Of course in the grand scheme society is more equitable, so no they weren't. But we also had some elements which were better. The school dentist for one, prevention being cheaper than cure (or multiple tooth extraction on the NHS). We had things which were worse too, like the police fitting up suspects. It isn't binary.
I would nonetheless argue society was more at ease with itself than it is now. Does that make the 1970s better than today? Except for that metric, no!
I was born in 73, so I missed some of the 70s, and was young through the rest of it. But I'd argue that the massive amount of strikes, the three-day week, blackouts, football violence, endemic racism, homophobia and sexism, does not show a country that was 'more at ease with itself'.
Did you read my post before ignoring the main thrust of it? "Society is more equitable" now is not a suggestion we should celebrate "strikes, three day weeks, blackouts, football violence, endemic racism, homophobia and sexism".
On the flip side one could list social problems that were less ubiquitous 50 years ago. The mental health crisis and knife crime to note two .
It is not a binary choice. We can mix and match good stuff from across the generations. It is just my view that all the good work improving life over the last half century is being slowly unravelled, and in part wilfully by bad actors with a voice to government.
Picking a fight with his own party over the flavour of vapes is definitely the big strategic move Rishi Sunak needs to transform his political fortunes…
I am really starting to despair amid the deconstruction of the post-war consensus that was built to prevent global war and crimes against humanity such as the Holocaust and the use of nuclear weapons. The UN is a mostly toothless organisation that is effective tool of Western hegemon, but it still does good work around the globe and often does integral work for the most needy.
That a day after the ICJ decides it is worth investigating South Africa's case against Israel for genocide Israel and its allies decide to defund a UN organisation making sure aid is getting to Gazans is mind blowing. Not only is it a refusal to deal with the serious allegations made by South Africa and the mandates made by the court to prevent a genocide going forward, it is an act of direct retribution against the UN for the findings. If this was Russia or China doing something similar the world would, rightly, be outraged and yet, once again, because it is the US and other Western powers it is something that has to be swallowed. It is setting a precedent that the UN and other international organisations to promote international law are not only ignorable but, at the end of the day, can be removed by the power of the member states if it dares to question their actions. That is not a far step away from no sense of international law or duties and, again, presents a situation where if the West wants the moral high ground (to deal with Russian atrocities, or genocide in China) that there will be none.
The collapse of an "international rules based order" is not something to be cheered, even if you currently disagree with the UN. These institutions are imperfect but they came out of the horrors of the world wars and the Holocaust. As they are chipped away at, the protections that came with them will soften for everyone. The UK is already down the road to breaking international law in an attempt to keep out immigrants, and the US and EU are doing the same. How long before the deaths at the borders / in the Mediterranean / Channel are not enough, and the prevailing policy becomes shooting boats down or concentrated detention centres? How long before food shortages, exacerbated by climate change and conflict, become an excuse to decide who are "good volk" and who are "useless eaters"? The move to the far right across the globe is chugging along and the erosion of institutions like the UN will only embolden that shift.
We should ask, again, if this were anyone else in any other situation, would we be cheering this on? If Russia was targeting UN aid and defunding UN operations in Ukraine - would it rightly not be denounced by all as an attempt to compound the horrors of war with a social horror as well? It's disgusting and should not be accepted by right thinking people.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
The argument isn't "were things better in the 70s?" Of course in the grand scheme society is more equitable, so no they weren't. But we also had some elements which were better. The school dentist for one, prevention being cheaper than cure (or multiple tooth extraction on the NHS). We had things which were worse too, like the police fitting up suspects. It isn't binary.
I would nonetheless argue society was more at ease with itself than it is now. Does that make the 1970s better than today? Except for that metric, no!
I was born in 73, so I missed some of the 70s, and was young through the rest of it. But I'd argue that the massive amount of strikes, the three-day week, blackouts, football violence, endemic racism, homophobia and sexism, does not show a country that was 'more at ease with itself'.
The UK back then was generally far more violent than it is now. Growing up in London in the late 70s and early 80s was fantastic and exciting, with so much going on, but it was not peaceful - large scale fighting at most football matches and many gigs, rioting, racist and homophobic attacks, punks v skins v mods v casuals etc, all with the odd IRA bombing campaign thrown in on top. But we were young and it was how things were. It's the being young bit that people looking back miss most of all. That will never change.
I am really starting to despair amid the deconstruction of the post-war consensus that was built to prevent global war and crimes against humanity such as the Holocaust and the use of nuclear weapons. The UN is a mostly toothless organisation that is effective tool of Western hegemon, but it still does good work around the globe and often does integral work for the most needy.
That a day after the ICJ decides it is worth investigating South Africa's case against Israel for genocide Israel and its allies decide to defund a UN organisation making sure aid is getting to Gazans is mind blowing. Not only is it a refusal to deal with the serious allegations made by South Africa and the mandates made by the court to prevent a genocide going forward, it is an act of direct retribution against the UN for the findings. If this was Russia or China doing something similar the world would, rightly, be outraged and yet, once again, because it is the US and other Western powers it is something that has to be swallowed. It is setting a precedent that the UN and other international organisations to promote international law are not only ignorable but, at the end of the day, can be removed by the power of the member states if it dares to question their actions. That is not a far step away from no sense of international law or duties and, again, presents a situation where if the West wants the moral high ground (to deal with Russian atrocities, or genocide in China) that there will be none.
The collapse of an "international rules based order" is not something to be cheered, even if you currently disagree with the UN. These institutions are imperfect but they came out of the horrors of the world wars and the Holocaust. As they are chipped away at, the protections that came with them will soften for everyone. The UK is already down the road to breaking international law in an attempt to keep out immigrants, and the US and EU are doing the same. How long before the deaths at the borders / in the Mediterranean / Channel are not enough, and the prevailing policy becomes shooting boats down or concentrated detention centres? How long before food shortages, exacerbated by climate change and conflict, become an excuse to decide who are "good volk" and who are "useless eaters"? The move to the far right across the globe is chugging along and the erosion of institutions like the UN will only embolden that shift.
We should ask, again, if this were anyone else in any other situation, would we be cheering this on? If Russia was targeting UN aid and defunding UN operations in Ukraine - would it rightly not be denounced by all as an attempt to compound the horrors of war with a social horror as well? It's disgusting and should not be accepted by right thinking people.
You support the Houthis attacking ships in the Red Sea. Don't you pretend to care about the collapse of an "international rules based order".
And do you not think the claims against the UNRWA are serious?
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
The argument isn't "were things better in the 70s?" Of course in the grand scheme society is more equitable, so no they weren't. But we also had some elements which were better. The school dentist for one, prevention being cheaper than cure (or multiple tooth extraction on the NHS). We had things which were worse too, like the police fitting up suspects. It isn't binary.
I would nonetheless argue society was more at ease with itself than it is now. Does that make the 1970s better than today? Except for that metric, no!
I was born in 73, so I missed some of the 70s, and was young through the rest of it. But I'd argue that the massive amount of strikes, the three-day week, blackouts, football violence, endemic racism, homophobia and sexism, does not show a country that was 'more at ease with itself'.
Did you read my post before ignoring the main thrust of it? "Society is more equitable" now is not a suggestion we should celebrate "strikes, three day weeks, blackouts, football violence, endemic racism, homophobia and sexism".
On the flip side one could list social problems that were less ubiquitous 50 years ago. The mental health crisis and knife crime to note two .
It is not a binary choice. We can mix and match good stuff from across the generations. It is just my view that all the good work improving life over the last half century is being slowly unravelled, and in part wilfully by bad actors with a voice to government.
From what I know, mental health problems were hidden back then.
I utterly agree that it's not a binary choice, and we can pick the best things. But you cannot do that if your attitude is that everything today is shit. Because it is not.
Millions of expats given vote by Tories ‘will punish party for Brexit’
Labour and Liberal Democrats expected to reap benefit from franchise rule changes and frustration over visa restrictions
Labour’s vote will be boosted by a change in voting rules introduced by the Conservative government that will enfranchise an extra two million British expats at the next general election, according to academic research.
Rules came into effect on January 16 allowing all British citizens living abroad to register to vote in a general election. Previously, people who left the UK more than 15 years ago lost this right but the Conservatives pledged to scrap the rule in their 2019 manifesto and enacted the policy through the Elections Act 2022.
Labour opposed the rule change, but in an ironic twist, academics at the University of Sussex suggest the party will gain from it at the expense of the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats are also likely to benefit, according to the research...
...Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University and Britain’s leading polling expert, said it was ironic that changes introduced by the Conservatives were likely to damage them at the polls. He told The Times: “Whatever benefit the Conservatives might have gained in the past from enfranchisement of overseas British citizens — and, in truth, no one can be sure how far that has been the case — there must be question marks about how much support the party can now hope to garner from expatriates living in the European Union, many of whom could well feel that their lives have been made more difficult by Brexit.”
Well duh! Wasn't this obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain (so not a Tory)? The people who voted against Brexit and for whom the post Brexit deal has been the most harmful to their daily lives want to punish the party who did this to them shock.
Just how dumb are Sunak and his team of advisors?
My experience suggests that a few will vote Labour and the rest will be too sozzled to care.
Someone should do some polling. I’m not convinced it’ll be as bad for the Tories as made out. Brits abroad are disproportionately old, especially those who’ve been out for over 15 years.
I wonder if we’ll get to see the expat results after the election. That’s one of the fun bits of some foreign elections, particularly the French presidential.
Would love to see it,Tim. My guess would be:
Labour 20% Tories 10% Libdems 5% Gaga 65%
You can get all the Gaga some of the time - and those are the ones to focus on.
Millions of expats given vote by Tories ‘will punish party for Brexit’
Labour and Liberal Democrats expected to reap benefit from franchise rule changes and frustration over visa restrictions
Labour’s vote will be boosted by a change in voting rules introduced by the Conservative government that will enfranchise an extra two million British expats at the next general election, according to academic research.
Rules came into effect on January 16 allowing all British citizens living abroad to register to vote in a general election. Previously, people who left the UK more than 15 years ago lost this right but the Conservatives pledged to scrap the rule in their 2019 manifesto and enacted the policy through the Elections Act 2022.
Labour opposed the rule change, but in an ironic twist, academics at the University of Sussex suggest the party will gain from it at the expense of the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats are also likely to benefit, according to the research...
...Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University and Britain’s leading polling expert, said it was ironic that changes introduced by the Conservatives were likely to damage them at the polls. He told The Times: “Whatever benefit the Conservatives might have gained in the past from enfranchisement of overseas British citizens — and, in truth, no one can be sure how far that has been the case — there must be question marks about how much support the party can now hope to garner from expatriates living in the European Union, many of whom could well feel that their lives have been made more difficult by Brexit.”
Well duh! Wasn't this obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain (so not a Tory)? The people who voted against Brexit and for whom the post Brexit deal has been the most harmful to their daily lives want to punish the party who did this to them shock.
Just how dumb are Sunak and his team of advisors?
My experience suggests that a few will vote Labour and the rest will be too sozzled to care.
Someone should do some polling. I’m not convinced it’ll be as bad for the Tories as made out. Brits abroad are disproportionately old, especially those who’ve been out for over 15 years.
I wonder if we’ll get to see the expat results after the election. That’s one of the fun bits of some foreign elections, particularly the French presidential.
Would love to see it,Tim. My guess would be:
Labour 20% Tories 10% Libdems 5% Gaga 65%
I reckon the LibDems will do better than that. Most ex-pats won't be paying attention to the domestic detail of the campaign and many won't know the position on the ground in their seats. And the LibDems are clearly still the anti-Brexit party.
Think "Gibraltar" and it's easy to conjure up an image of a tabloid-reading all-day-breakfast Brit. Yet in Euro-elections the LibDems got 18% of the Gibraltar vote in 2009, 67% in 2014 and 77% in 2019.
The ex-pats in Europe will be heavily LibDem, is my prediction. Those in Australia, NZ and Canada, not so much!
Rather fun. The crux is “‘nous’ is too formal - use ‘on’ instead”.
Imagine that in English. “It’s too formal to say ‘We are going to the shops.’ Instead, for a more relaxed spoken vibe, say ‘One is going to the shops.’”
What do they say in the 'Received Pronunciation' areas of the Isle de France?
That's the one not to use if you want to be credible .
Prejudiced - Moi?
I've been told that the word 'nous' is very rarely used in spoken French; it has been supplanted by 'on'.
Research on the topic is however thin on the ground.
Spoken French has six distinct registers. Most conversation takes place in registre normal/registre populaire/registre familier. On/nous substitution is very common in registre populaire and registre familier.
Watch some episodes of Plus Belle La Vie to see this in action.
When I was at school we had rampant homophobia in society. Football violence was not just an occasional thing; it was ever-present. Racism was endemic. Going just before my schooldays, we had blackouts and the three-day week. You were lucky if your school had a well-stocked library; now we have much of the world's information at our fingertips. The air was unhealthy (especially as I was born a couple of miles away from a power station...), etc, etc.
Times have got worse? In many ways they've got much, much better.
People aren't going back 40 years or more, they're going back 20 years. On practically every measure you look at things have gone backwards in the last 20 years. A few exceptions, but the NHS is a mess, you can't get a dentist, the trains are broken, money is worth less than it was, job insecurity and poor wages etc etc etc etc.
I have no problem with a glass half full approach. I do that. Mostly. But the strident denials of how bad things are is why the Tories are heading for oblivion. You can't tell people black is white and retain political credibility.
Some things have improved. There has been a great shift to renewable energy, for example. Online services on gov.uk are genuinely well designed (even if the back end of things like passport renewal are still subject to delay).
But on the whole - public services have got worse. I hold Cam and The Quad most responsible for this. For all his bluster, vanity and moral incontinence, I don't think Boris came close to being as damaging to the fibre of the country as Cameron was - DC is second only to Thatcher on this measure, and may actually be worse. Growing up in South Yorkshire coal country as I did, I saw the undiluted negative effects of Thatcherism, but swathes of the rest of the nation perhaps did not. We are nearly all impacted by Cameron and Osbourne's austerity one way or another.
Not that this matters. For all that Sunak weirdly positions himself as fighting from opposition, the nation's political memory is much longer and less nuanced, and they are not fooled into thinking that we've had anything other than Conservatives in power for 14 years - and things have just got worse.
Also note the post-industrial changes which followed Thatcher shutting down primary industry. We may have had closure of the pits and steelworks and other major industry, but we then had a major effort at regeneration to both redevelop the land and bring in new employment opportunities. Not remotely the same in terms of job quality or community cohesion, but better than the nothing which followed.
The industrial decline pre-dated and post-dated Thatcher. She did not 'shut down' primary industry alone; in fact, she encouraged companies like Nissan in. Corby steelworks, as an example, closed in February 1979 - four months before Thatcher.
Like Beeching, Thatcher gets blamed for things that were nothing to do with her.
To an extent but some insiders have since mused that perhaps the Thatcher government went too far, including Sir Geoffrey Howe and Sir Alan Budd.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
The argument isn't "were things better in the 70s?" Of course in the grand scheme society is more equitable, so no they weren't. But we also had some elements which were better. The school dentist for one, prevention being cheaper than cure (or multiple tooth extraction on the NHS). We had things which were worse too, like the police fitting up suspects. It isn't binary.
I would nonetheless argue society was more at ease with itself than it is now. Does that make the 1970s better than today? Except for that metric, no!
I was born in 73, so I missed some of the 70s, and was young through the rest of it. But I'd argue that the massive amount of strikes, the three-day week, blackouts, football violence, endemic racism, homophobia and sexism, does not show a country that was 'more at ease with itself'.
Did you read my post before ignoring the main thrust of it? "Society is more equitable" now is not a suggestion we should celebrate "strikes, three day weeks, blackouts, football violence, endemic racism, homophobia and sexism".
On the flip side one could list social problems that were less ubiquitous 50 years ago. The mental health crisis and knife crime to note two .
It is not a binary choice. We can mix and match good stuff from across the generations. It is just my view that all the good work improving life over the last half century is being slowly unravelled, and in part wilfully by bad actors with a voice to government.
From what I know, mental health problems were hidden back then.
I utterly agree that it's not a binary choice, and we can pick the best things. But you cannot do that if your attitude is that everything today is shit. Because it is not.
The key question at the next election for voters is "am I (and the nation) happier and more prosperous now than I was in 2010 or 2019?" Either date will do.
Some black swans like a war with Iran or Russia may benefit the incumbent, but as things stand that is the question.
How did typography in the USA get stuck in time in 1992, where upper case serif typefaces were considered sophisticated? See also Air Force 1.
7,600 passengers. That’s insane, and quite a target. I hope they’re not planning on travelling the Red Sea in the near future.
There's one police officer for every 400 people in the UK, so proportionally they'd have a police force of 19, (and 21 armed forces personnel).
I wonder how many plumbers they have on board...
It’s not a lot different to a massive resort hotel, at which I’ve worked previously.
You have staff from every trade there, including some quite senior security people, and a ‘secure area’ that the navy would call the brig, where a few people can be safely isolated if required.
The scale of the whole thing is totally nuts though.
The Post Office scandal - on top of many others - has so severely dented my belief in the capacity or willingness of the state or its institutions, including the legal system, to avoid doing harm or put right its mistakes, that I seriously wonder whether there is any point to politics at all.
Why should I trust the state when I see how badly it behaves? Why should I bother doing the right thing when it does not even try to do likewise? When those who behave like scoundrels are rewarded and praised? And the rest of us treated like mugs?
I will not be voting for the Tories. But as of now I am disinclined to vote for anyone at all. They all seem rotten, self-serving and incompetent. They have done a great deal to break the bonds of trust which should exist in a well-ordered society. They are doing very little to earn it, to earn mine anyway. Until they do, I am not at all inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They either don't want my vote or take me for granted. So, frankly, they can fuck right off and come back when they have learnt as a bare minimum how to behave with a modicum of integrity, competence and basic decency.
I can understand why you say that, and feel that way myself at times, but I'll also counter it. The 'state' generally does reasonably well. Things certainly are not as good as they can be thanks to the current government, but we're nowhere near (say) South Africa's levels of chaos. Not that we should be aiming for comparisons that low, but there is a comparison to be made.
Employment is high. The economy is, if not good, not terrible. The bins get collected. Most of us can see a doctor in a reasonable timeframe - for free. Things generally work, albeit somewhat chaotically. The 'state' makes mistakes - but it always has. And there are an awful lot of good workers within, and without, the state; people who work hard and diligently for both themselves and others. Yet we hear about the scoundrels.
Also, I'd say most politicians are good people, albeit flawed, as are we all. Some are sometimes put into positions they do not have the capability to do well, but there are few I would count as truly venal. And some who are absolute stars (IMO George Howarth being one such). But we rarely get to hear about them, as they just get on with their jobs.
I'd also add that I think there are very few states that are doing really well at the moment, particularly of the large economies, and not a single country has zero problems or issues. Neither is it realistic to expect that.
There's no other country I'd prefer to live in, if I was rich, or if I was poor.
I used to be a real w***** when it came to British pride. I would only buy politically British consumer goods including cars, ( wearing a little union flag under the bumper of my new Cologne built Ford Capri. I worshipped the BBC (I detest them now). I hated the notion that foreign asset strippers could defile our industrial crown jewels, and here we are with Tata dismantling our last remaining virgin steel works. Yes, I was a real buyer of pups.
From 2016 I was told by self-styled patriots like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Richard Tice and Arron Banks that people like me were traitors. Some of these people even made their fortunes betting against Britain.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be as disastrous as the PB faithful claim, and Starmer and Davey haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, but anything that gets rid of the self-serving grifters who have hijacked my country over the last decade can't come soon enough for me. My expectation however, is through sleight of hand or good fortune they will once again prevail, and take our once great nation further down the road to ruin.
I'm unsure quite what that's got to do with my post. I'm not talking about 'British pride'; but neither am I interested in 'British shame'. We're far from perfect, and I doubt I've ever suggested otherwise. We can improve a great deal - and hopefully the next (Labour) government will make progress.
But to listen to some people, you'd think we all lived in hovels with outside toilets, no running water and electricity powered by methane piped in from the local urchin farm. That there was mass unemployment and a gunman on every street corner.
That isn't a reason to vote Conservative, or indeed for anyone; just that people who are constantly utterly negative have probably lost all perspective.
Let me put it this way; one of the reasons the Post Office scandal has eventually struck the public's consciousness so strongly is that it seems so utterly against the way we think things should work in this country. And rightly so. But in many, many countries, what happened - and worse - would be accepted with a shrug and be seen as utterly unnoteworthy - "it's the way things are done."
We should not try to change that.
I suspect we are mostly on PB in the luxurious position of living in expensive, and comfortable homes. We are fortunate.
I have seen for myself (my wife was involved in parent and child foster caring for a number of years) and I saw poverty of an order I had no idea existed. We have ex-servicemen living in tents that Suella Braverman wanted to remove from them. We have families dispossessed of their homes and sent to local authority emergency accomodation. We live in a society that it more inequitable than it was a decade ago. To drive such inequality further is immoral. Maybe Labour can't do anything about it. The Conservatives on the other hand won't even try.
One nation feudal Tories in this iteration of the Conservative Party are a thing of the past.
I agree there is poverty. We need to change that. What I disagree with is this idea that ye olden days were any less shit. From everything I've heard, they were far worse. People are far too keen to wear rose-coloured spectacles about the past.
Again, that does not mean that we do not need to improve things.
When I was at school we had the working poor. They were my school friends. They lived in good quality local authority housing, they had free health care, the school dentist, local authority swimming pools, libraries, school libraries, an equitable education system, free school meals, playgrounds, playing fields, subsidised works canteens, affordable public transport and public utilities that did their best not to cut off late payers. Bosses who's salary was a few notches up from the workers as opposed to now when Captains of Industry have earned the average salary by the 10th of January.
Yes at the time we were the sick man of Europe, but we were also a fairer, happier society. The right of centre argument is all this "free" stuff is unsustainable. I would warrant the average FTSE CEO earning 30 pr 40 times the average salary is even more unsustainable. And I repeat, people like Robert Jenrick and Braverman couldn't give two hoots for the welfare of British citizens, they are too busy feathering their own meaningless ambitions. What kind of moral vacuum paints over Disney characters at a children's asylum centre, or removes tents from destitute PTSD suffering ex-soldiers?
When were you at school, for I think the "fairer, happier society" might well be wrong, particularly depending on the definitions of 'fair' and 'happy'.
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Sorry but as a student you used to get a grant for your living costs and while it wasn’t much it was enough to rent a room and buy food.
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
And how many 'students' were there? And what social backgrounds did they predominantly come from? Is the massive increase in higher education students, and the increasing diversity of their backgrounds, a bad thing in your eyes? Or just because you were 'lucky' to go into higher education, do you want to go back to those days?
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
The argument isn't "were things better in the 70s?" Of course in the grand scheme society is more equitable, so no they weren't. But we also had some elements which were better. The school dentist for one, prevention being cheaper than cure (or multiple tooth extraction on the NHS). We had things which were worse too, like the police fitting up suspects. It isn't binary.
I would nonetheless argue society was more at ease with itself than it is now. Does that make the 1970s better than today? Except for that metric, no!
I was born in 73, so I missed some of the 70s, and was young through the rest of it. But I'd argue that the massive amount of strikes, the three-day week, blackouts, football violence, endemic racism, homophobia and sexism, does not show a country that was 'more at ease with itself'.
Did you read my post before ignoring the main thrust of it? "Society is more equitable" now is not a suggestion we should celebrate "strikes, three day weeks, blackouts, football violence, endemic racism, homophobia and sexism".
On the flip side one could list social problems that were less ubiquitous 50 years ago. The mental health crisis and knife crime to note two .
It is not a binary choice. We can mix and match good stuff from across the generations. It is just my view that all the good work improving life over the last half century is being slowly unravelled, and in part wilfully by bad actors with a voice to government.
From what I know, mental health problems were hidden back then.
I utterly agree that it's not a binary choice, and we can pick the best things. But you cannot do that if your attitude is that everything today is shit. Because it is not.
I agree with you. However, I think there is an important nuance: the sense of the direction of travel, both here, and abroad (because one of the upsides of 'now' is that more of us are more connected with more [English-speaking] people around the world).
In the same way that a lot of mental health issues were hidden in the past, a lot of racism is hidden in the present. While both globally and locally, more people are "better off" than ever before, a lot of people are feeling that they are going to be worse off than they were - or certainly than their parents were. Still better off in an absolute sense, but off the peak. Global conflicts feel closer to home - even more so than during the 80s and 90s, partly because they are more visible. GenX's childhood nuclear nightmare comes back to haunt us.
And our politicians are comfortably the worst we've had in...well...I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say "living memory". Sure there may be exceptions, but the cadre as a whole are woeful.
This is where the overall sense of things being "universally awful" comes from, I think, regardless of the particular direction you happen to be looking.
None of that invalidates your fundamental point that there are always "things to stop, things to start, things to continue, things to expunge, things to keep", and that we are starting from a comparatively high base [albeit we are somewhere off that now].
Rather fun. The crux is “‘nous’ is too formal - use ‘on’ instead”.
Imagine that in English. “It’s too formal to say ‘We are going to the shops.’ Instead, for a more relaxed spoken vibe, say ‘One is going to the shops.’”
What do they say in the 'Received Pronunciation' areas of the Isle de France?
That's the one not to use if you want to be credible .
Prejudiced - Moi?
I've been told that the word 'nous' is very rarely used in spoken French; it has been supplanted by 'on'.
Research on the topic is however thin on the ground.
Spoken French has six distinct registers. Most conversation takes place in registre normal/registre populaire/registre familier. On/nous substitution is very common in registre populaire and registre familier.
Watch some episodes of Plus Belle La Vie to see this in action.
Will it get past my pornfilter?
Yeah, it's a soap set in Marseille. I always get my students to watch it with French subs on. It's excellent practice at listening comprehension because they speak really fucking fast and use a lot of vernacular.
When I was at school we had rampant homophobia in society. Football violence was not just an occasional thing; it was ever-present. Racism was endemic. Going just before my schooldays, we had blackouts and the three-day week. You were lucky if your school had a well-stocked library; now we have much of the world's information at our fingertips. The air was unhealthy (especially as I was born a couple of miles away from a power station...), etc, etc.
Times have got worse? In many ways they've got much, much better.
People aren't going back 40 years or more, they're going back 20 years. On practically every measure you look at things have gone backwards in the last 20 years. A few exceptions, but the NHS is a mess, you can't get a dentist, the trains are broken, money is worth less than it was, job insecurity and poor wages etc etc etc etc.
I have no problem with a glass half full approach. I do that. Mostly. But the strident denials of how bad things are is why the Tories are heading for oblivion. You can't tell people black is white and retain political credibility.
What really matters, whether people think things are broken or not, is that by every conceivable measure our standard of living is now poorer than it was at the last election and going back further than that. Near full employment is fine but if people are not rewarded for work then what is the point.
If Sunak thinks cutting or getting rid of IHT will help him he is deluded. It will play out terribly. Tax cuts for the wealthy while the rest continue to struggle.
Truss was right about the problem we faced, lack of growth, she was wrong about the solution to it.
Lack of growth is mostly the result of low investment or misdirected investment. UK productivity remains poor because, for example, the UK banking sector prefers to fund mortgages rather than corporate finance, and the tax system reinforces this bias.
There are several policies that could start to ease the situation, but it requires a longer term mindset than simply one 5 year Parliament. Investing in infrastructure would be a start, but the system of government administration that can commission and control such projects was blown up by the Tories in the name of "cutting red tape". Massive cost over-runs on HS2, for example, are a direct result of this.
In the same way Truss may have identified the right problem, but the proposals she made were basically a short term sugar rush to give the illusion of change without tackling any of the deep seated structural problems. So by undermining confidence, she made things worse.
Government by bullshitters reached its ultimate nadir in the Truss cabinet.
So it is slow and difficult process we face, and it will take a long time, even if we don´t make any further mistakes along the way.
@trussliz The Government should abandon its profoundly unconservative plans for the ban on tobacco sales to those born after 1st January 2009.
A Conservative government should not be seeking to extend the nanny state. It only gives succour to those who wish to curtail freedom.
This would be excellent as an approach if it were consistently held; but I detect little support from the Tory right for legalisation of the sale and use of other widely used and currently illegal substances. The wholesalers and importers are currently clogging up the courts and prisons with their 20 year sentences.
A genuinely sane but libertarian party with a set of policies to match covering a multitude of bases would be a real alternative. I don't think the Tory right is libertarian at all, merely opportunist simplifiers of complex problems.
Comments
All the back channel warnings to Iran havent much worked. There will be retaliation but will it be heavy enough to have future deterent value??
I'll tackle one of your examples: "an equitable education system". It wasn't. I've given this anecdote before, and I'll give it again: I used to know two men who grew up in the late seventies. Both worked in a mining area. Both were told by teachers that there was little point in getting an education, as they would just end up working down the mine. They were thrown on the education scrapheap by teachers. Then there's access to higher education, which is far more accessible than it was. That is a great social leveller.
In fact, I think what you're suffering from has been common throughout time: older people looking back on their youth and saying :" thing were better then. The youth of today..." etc, etc. when you were at school, many adults would have been saying exactly what you're saying now. Yet times have not objectively got worse. I and other have given examples of exactly how things have got better, and you ignore them.
I'm not saying this as some form of advert for the Conservatives - I want this lot gone, or as some form of we-need-to-do-nothing - we can always do better, and must. I'm saying that your style of unending misery and "everything's terrible" doesn't do a jot of good.
Times have got worse? In many ways they've got much, much better.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67562522
What it it that they say, that if you owe the bank a thousand pounds then you’re in trouble, but if you owe the bank a billion pounds then they’re in trouble!
Some creditors are about to get a whole bunch of devalued Chinese apartment blocks that no-one wants to live in.
Yes, there’s some evidence of relative wealth falling slightly among the young middle classes in developed countries in the past decade, but that’s almost entirely due to the inability of housebuilding to keep up with demand.
Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty (actual poverty, not inequality) has never been lower, even as the world’s population has never been higher.
Harvard phycology professor Steven Pinker has written several books on the subject.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rationality-What-Seems-Scarce-Matters/dp/B09313B59Z/
Now students get a loan which doesn’t even cover the rent required. Worse payments are expected at times that don’t match the loan payments so unless your family has £1000 or so available to lend to your son / daughter for a week you have a big problem.
If you were a higher education student back then, then you were lucky. Not because of student grants, but because you were a student. It was a route closed off to far too many, often because of background, not lack of talent.
But yet again, people look at the top end. What about the bottom end? How about school leaving ages? Raised to 16 in 1972.
Are you still sure they were better days?
People, and the way they behave, are to a significant extent products of the system they are operating in. If you don’t like the way the system operates, cast your vote for someone looking to change it.
As I've said before: back in the late 70s we had men being told they weren't worth educating, as they were going to work in the mines. That sort of attitude has hopefully, and thankfully, disappeared.
And if it is lower, is it because there are fewer people to move upwards?
Grim, but compelling, and certainly captured the feel of 70s West Yorkshire.
The drop is particularly down to the increased need for inheritance in order to buy a house, and the concentration of high paying jobs in London and SE.
If employers are restricting themselves to people with degrees, then they'll be poorer. It's lazy recruiting. And there are plenty of jobs out there.
(As a reminder, I don't have a degree. I don't think my lack of one held me back, even in a technical field.)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-68125589
Now we seem, albeit from a much higher level, to be going backwards. And that's more evident to young people than old.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2822990/ilhan-omar-condemned-social-media-fiery-speech-supporting-somalia/
A 69-year-old man from northwest Cambodia's Siem Reap province has been confirmed for H5N1 human avian influenza, becoming the second case of this year, the country's Ministry of Health said in a statement on Sunday.
https://twitter.com/KhmerTimes/status/1751775056504762657
If I were aged twenty now, it’s not impossible that I would be able to follow broadly the same education and career path, over coming decades, as I have done over decades past. But, due to student debt, pension changes and the impossibility of the housing market, my standard of living would almost certainly be hugely lower, which would impact on (effectively, prevent) the choices I have been able to make in the run up to retirement, and on my standard of living thereafter. I might end with the same CV but I would not feel nearly as socially mobile as I do, having been the first person in my family to make it to university, and achieved a decent standard of living in a very decent home, absent any inheritance.
Whereas another person whose parents die early in an expensive London home could find themselves financially set up for life at an early age, in a way that was uncommon back in the 1980s. Indeed I have a friend whose father (still alive) bought an Islington house for £20,000 that is now worth getting on for £2 million.
What Texas is (and is not) doing to defy a Supreme Court setback
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/27/politics/texas-border-supreme-court-what-matters/index.html
They get round it by letting anyone work there as a contractor irrespective of educational status.
Quite how it could do that when it cannot even fight Al Shabab without the aid of the US remains to be seen.
But whipping up a nationalist fervour is not a good look.
Imagine that in English. “It’s too formal to say ‘We are going to the shops.’ Instead, for a more relaxed spoken vibe, say ‘One is going to the shops.’”
The more that Tories deny how broken they have made things, the bigger the demolition will be. And as deny seems to be what Sunak does best, the longer he stays on the worse it will be.
https://social-mobility.data.gov.uk/social_mobility_by_area/kent
Millions of expats given vote by Tories ‘will punish party for Brexit’
Labour and Liberal Democrats expected to reap benefit from franchise rule changes and frustration over visa restrictions
Labour’s vote will be boosted by a change in voting rules introduced by the Conservative government that will enfranchise an extra two million British expats at the next general election, according to academic research.
Rules came into effect on January 16 allowing all British citizens living abroad to register to vote in a general election. Previously, people who left the UK more than 15 years ago lost this right but the Conservatives pledged to scrap the rule in their 2019 manifesto and enacted the policy through the Elections Act 2022.
Labour opposed the rule change, but in an ironic twist, academics at the University of Sussex suggest the party will gain from it at the expense of the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats are also likely to benefit, according to the research...
...Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University and Britain’s leading polling expert, said it was ironic that changes introduced by the Conservatives were likely to damage them at the polls. He told The Times: “Whatever benefit the Conservatives might have gained in the past from enfranchisement of overseas British citizens — and, in truth, no one can be sure how far that has been the case — there must be question marks about how much support the party can now hope to garner from expatriates living in the European Union, many of whom could well feel that their lives have been made more difficult by Brexit.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-expats-vote-labour-lib-dems-next-general-election-tories-n8mzzrx5d
I have no problem with a glass half full approach. I do that. Mostly. But the strident denials of how bad things are is why the Tories are heading for oblivion. You can't tell people black is white and retain political credibility.
Two of my kids went to grammar school in Warwickshire. Totally different to my time. Its the well off ( like me ) coaching their kids to get in to a limited number of places in a school full of the better off. There will be no social mobility in that as its just the wealthy keeping their off spring in the game.
https://intelligentjello.substack.com/p/five-categories-of-ai-filmmaking
I thought she was just saying we should remember all holocausts and genocides and the criticism was that she was diluting the meaning of it in remembering the original Holocaust by so doing.
Somehow it seemed as thought the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer—except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs.
Clearly it's not literally true that everything is broken. And many things have benefitted from technical progress. But a lot of things have got shabbier or worse. Many of them in the public realm; libraries, parks, streets, banks, local media, people on the streets...
And we can trade numbers about whether things are bad or very bad. But things haven't, in general, been good for quite some time. (One of the theories of 2016 was that things hadn't been going well for a lot of people for quite some time, and they haven't improved since then.)
Hunch: as a nation, we've spend a couple of generations feasting on seedcorn and we need to accept that's not sustainable. I'm not sure that's going to be pretty.
Just how dumb are Sunak and his team of advisors?
That's the one not to use if you want to be credible
Prejudiced - Moi?
They *may* once of have allowed social mobility for a minority, though arguably the flipside is that they cemented immobility for a majority condemned to sink schools. I think our culture has changed around schooling in the fifty odd years since the end of the tripartite system though.
Richard Walker says Labour leader understands how cost of living crisis puts ‘unbearable strain’ on families
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/jan/29/iceland-supermarket-boss-and-ex-tory-donor-backs-starmer-for-pm
It probably is the case that the expats Sunak knows- the ones on the global corporate circuit, for whom Europe is too small a stage and have people to deal with the admin- are still Conservative.
And it is probably true that, in Thatcher's days, expats were more likely to be Conservative, so there's a bit of "uncomprehending Maggie Cosplay" as well.
It's just that the generation below has different dynamics, and the Conservatives are currently making a point of being the party of not wanting to understand the generation below.
But on the whole - public services have got worse. I hold Cam and The Quad most responsible for this. For all his bluster, vanity and moral incontinence, I don't think Boris came close to being as damaging to the fibre of the country as Cameron was - DC is second only to Thatcher on this measure, and may actually be worse. Growing up in South Yorkshire coal country as I did, I saw the undiluted negative effects of Thatcherism, but swathes of the rest of the nation perhaps did not. We are nearly all impacted by Cameron and Osbourne's austerity one way or another.
Not that this matters. For all that Sunak weirdly positions himself as fighting from opposition, the nation's political memory is much longer and less nuanced, and they are not fooled into thinking that we've had anything other than Conservatives in power for 14 years - and things have just got worse.
I would nonetheless argue society was more at ease with itself than it is now. Does that make the 1970s better than today? Except for that metric, no!
It's rubbish, and just as bad and destructive as the everything's-utterly-rosy approach.
As an example, if you think the trains weren't broken twenty years ago, you need to think again. Remember the decade-long chaos caused by the terrible WCML Upgrade? The many crashes we had in the 80s and 90s? The deaths of railworkers? It's another example of the smashed-glass thinking.
No, thing's aren't perfect. Yes, people are struggling - partly for reasons outside of the government's control, mostly for reasons within its control. But the idea that the past was some nirvana is hilariously bad.
"I got student grants!" is fine to say: until you realise the person saying that was exceedingly lucky to get into uni in the first place. They were not usual; and the people who did not go to uni paid for those grants. Perhaps that was a worthwhile expenditure for the good of the nation; or perhaps not, as that generation (nearly my generation now...) appear to be the ones who fu**ed up the country, according to the smashed-glassers.
The historical facts are substantially well-established and unequivocal in respect of the Holocaust, whilst anything but for Gaza.
Starmer was correct to penalise her. It would be nice if her constituency did likewise, but I expect she knows her audience.
I wonder if we’ll get to see the expat results after the election. That’s one of the fun bits of some foreign elections, particularly the French presidential.
I say this not because I have had a radical change of heart. I say it because Labour under Keir Starmer has progressively moved towards the ground on which I have always stood, at the same time as the Conservatives have moved away from it. Indeed, the Tories’ abandonment of what I have always regarded as basic Conservative principles has not only fuelled my personal disenchantment, it is also reflected in the total collapse of public confidence we can see in every opinion poll.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/29/britain-leadership-chaos-tories-labour-richard-walker-chairman-iceland
I also felt I had a little duty to, as I had no degree myself, and it felt odd insisting that a degree was absolutely necessary.
Recruitment agencies were hideously poor, and seemed, from our perspective at least, utterly lazy. Perhaps we just used bad recruitment agencies, or perhaps tech is hard for recruitment agencies to get right.
Labour 20%
Tories 10%
Libdems 5%
Gaga 65%
If Sunak thinks cutting or getting rid of IHT will help him he is deluded. It will play out terribly. Tax cuts for the wealthy while the rest continue to struggle.
Truss was right about the problem we faced, lack of growth, she was wrong about the solution to it.
Grow up.
Research on the topic is however thin on the ground.
Like Beeching, Thatcher gets blamed for things that were nothing to do with her.
Watch some episodes of Plus Belle La Vie to see this in action.
Trying to recruit tech people for a non-tech company is a nightmare, and depends far too much on word of mouth and candidates finding email addresses at the company directly.
On the flip side one could list social problems that were less ubiquitous 50 years ago. The mental health crisis and knife crime to note two .
It is not a binary choice. We can mix and match good stuff from across the generations. It is just my view that all the good work improving life over the last half century is being slowly unravelled, and in part wilfully by bad actors with a voice to government.
Picking a fight with his own party over the flavour of vapes is definitely the big strategic move Rishi Sunak needs to transform his political fortunes…
The Government should abandon its profoundly unconservative plans for the ban on tobacco sales to those born after 1st January 2009.
A Conservative government should not be seeking to extend the nanny state. It only gives succour to those who wish to curtail freedom.
That a day after the ICJ decides it is worth investigating South Africa's case against Israel for genocide Israel and its allies decide to defund a UN organisation making sure aid is getting to Gazans is mind blowing. Not only is it a refusal to deal with the serious allegations made by South Africa and the mandates made by the court to prevent a genocide going forward, it is an act of direct retribution against the UN for the findings. If this was Russia or China doing something similar the world would, rightly, be outraged and yet, once again, because it is the US and other Western powers it is something that has to be swallowed. It is setting a precedent that the UN and other international organisations to promote international law are not only ignorable but, at the end of the day, can be removed by the power of the member states if it dares to question their actions. That is not a far step away from no sense of international law or duties and, again, presents a situation where if the West wants the moral high ground (to deal with Russian atrocities, or genocide in China) that there will be none.
The collapse of an "international rules based order" is not something to be cheered, even if you currently disagree with the UN. These institutions are imperfect but they came out of the horrors of the world wars and the Holocaust. As they are chipped away at, the protections that came with them will soften for everyone. The UK is already down the road to breaking international law in an attempt to keep out immigrants, and the US and EU are doing the same. How long before the deaths at the borders / in the Mediterranean / Channel are not enough, and the prevailing policy becomes shooting boats down or concentrated detention centres? How long before food shortages, exacerbated by climate change and conflict, become an excuse to decide who are "good volk" and who are "useless eaters"? The move to the far right across the globe is chugging along and the erosion of institutions like the UN will only embolden that shift.
We should ask, again, if this were anyone else in any other situation, would we be cheering this on? If Russia was targeting UN aid and defunding UN operations in Ukraine - would it rightly not be denounced by all as an attempt to compound the horrors of war with a social horror as well? It's disgusting and should not be accepted by right thinking people.
And do you not think the claims against the UNRWA are serious?
If not, citation needed.
I utterly agree that it's not a binary choice, and we can pick the best things. But you cannot do that if your attitude is that everything today is shit. Because it is not.
Think "Gibraltar" and it's easy to conjure up an image of a tabloid-reading all-day-breakfast Brit. Yet in Euro-elections the LibDems got 18% of the Gibraltar vote in 2009, 67% in 2014 and 77% in 2019.
The ex-pats in Europe will be heavily LibDem, is my prediction. Those in Australia, NZ and Canada, not so much!
I wonder how many plumbers they have on board...
Some black swans like a war with Iran or Russia may benefit the incumbent, but as things stand that is the question.
You have staff from every trade there, including some quite senior security people, and a ‘secure area’ that the navy would call the brig, where a few people can be safely isolated if required.
The scale of the whole thing is totally nuts though.
In the same way that a lot of mental health issues were hidden in the past, a lot of racism is hidden in the present. While both globally and locally, more people are "better off" than ever before, a lot of people are feeling that they are going to be worse off than they were - or certainly than their parents were. Still better off in an absolute sense, but off the peak. Global conflicts feel closer to home - even more so than during the 80s and 90s, partly because they are more visible. GenX's childhood nuclear nightmare comes back to haunt us.
And our politicians are comfortably the worst we've had in...well...I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say "living memory". Sure there may be exceptions, but the cadre as a whole are woeful.
This is where the overall sense of things being "universally awful" comes from, I think, regardless of the particular direction you happen to be looking.
None of that invalidates your fundamental point that there are always "things to stop, things to start, things to continue, things to expunge, things to keep", and that we are starting from a comparatively high base [albeit we are somewhere off that now].
There are several policies that could start to ease the situation, but it requires a longer term mindset than simply one 5 year Parliament. Investing in infrastructure would be a start, but the system of government administration that can commission and control such projects was blown up by the Tories in the name of "cutting red tape". Massive cost over-runs on HS2, for example, are a direct result of this.
In the same way Truss may have identified the right problem, but the proposals she made were basically a short term sugar rush to give the illusion of change without tackling any of the deep seated structural problems. So by undermining confidence, she made things worse.
Government by bullshitters reached its ultimate nadir in the Truss cabinet.
So it is slow and difficult process we face, and it will take a long time, even if we don´t make any further mistakes along the way.
A genuinely sane but libertarian party with a set of policies to match covering a multitude of bases would be a real alternative. I don't think the Tory right is libertarian at all, merely opportunist simplifiers of complex problems.