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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The political role of the purples: As a stalking horse
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The political role of the purples: As a stalking horse
It’s reasonably common, in these cynical times that we live in, to hear someone dismissively remark that politicians are mainly interested in power. It’s a comment that is both often true and also the basic point of politicians.
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Sort of like a political black hole, with the Tories closest to the event horizon.
[Also first, and aren't you glad I got in before our resident frotting frother]
IS GROWING
IS FINDING ITS APOSTROPHE
I quite like the second one.
The party for stupid sloganeers... PUKI! We're named after what we make the electorate do! ;-)
You gov on economy..
I would have thought this program offers some explanations or ideas as to why there is room for a socially conservative party to gain traction
"Journalist Peter Hitchens examines the social and cultural revolution that has taken place in Britain over the last four decades. How did many of the old stigmas, particularly those surrounding the family, simply disappear? Peter argues that, while many of the old taboos have been done away with, all we've done is replace them with another set.
As the sociologist Patricia Morgan suggests, "nature abhors a vacuum", if you remove stigma from one thing it attaches itself to something else.
Peter challenges "the Godfather of the sociology of the swinging sixties", Laurie Taylor and the former editor of the Archers, Vanessa Whitburn, to explain how the enormous social changes of the 1960s and ensuing years happened, and he questions left wing author Owen Jones and former Conservative cabinet minister John Redwood on whether, as a society, we should be satisfied with the outcome.
Peter pays a visit to St Mellons in Cardiff, the estate made famous in a speech by John Redwood in 1993. Mr Redwood thought he'd focused on the duties of fathers, but the wider world saw it as an attack on single mothers. Peter asks why there was such a fuss and whether it would be possible to make that speech today. He suggests that we have got to a stage where there is such pressure to conform that no-one dares express views that are outside accepted mainstream thinking.
In throwing off the chains of the past, have we saddled ourselves with a form of liberal bigotry? "
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03yn83q
The budget shows how the Conservative leadership are (correctly) looking to square that circle. Rather than pandering to the wishes of the UKIP leadership, they're looking to address the concerns of potential UKIP voters. That can be done without alienating other swing voters and without throwing money around, as the budget showed.
If the Conservatives are to succeed in this approach, they need to realise that the budget was just a start. They will need more policies of the same type, designed to appeal to moderately paid Hardworking Families (TM) - particularly those where the days of Hard Work are now behind them.
But I expect that the Conservatives think that was job done. They have no stickability.
OT FPT:
Worth a listen - Today went to Berwick and Suffolk to ask them both what they thought about Scottish independence - with very different responses:
https://audioboo.fm/boos/2014129-the-english-view-on-the-scottish-independence-debate
Heading towards a paper loss of near £5,000.
Crikey, I'm good.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-26666191
They're due out tomorrow morning.
You see it in terms of alcoholism, drug abuse, single parent families and the like.
But most people are able to have a few drinks without turning into an alcoholic, or to have pre-marital sex, without it becoming a problem.
It Peter Hitchen's world, as in the world of hardline Muslims, the flexibility for individuals to choose their own path is more proscribed: because 'permissiveness' causes problems (and it does), we should shy away from it.
But prescriptive conservatism is not without its problems.
Who wants to live in a world where homosexuality is still illegal? And the war on drugs has hardly been an enormous success.
We - and I include Peter Hitchens in this - need to accept that there are risks and costs associated with both permissiveness and conservative prescription.
Personally, I veer towards the libertarian - or what you might describe as the old UKIP party of freedom view. Peter Hitchens is the new UKIP, the UKIP of social conservatism; where there may be more votes, but which would be a miserable place for many people with minor vices to live in.
The war on drugs has failed utterly and completely. legalise, tax and regulate.
http://labourlist.org/2014/03/labour-braced-for-as-many-as-20-welfare-cap-rebels-on-wednesday/
I think the worries over China and Ukraine are dragging things down rather than specifically the annuity providers woes. I have seen a couple of articles about overselling in this market so you may have been right and you just need to wait for global things to stabilise.
As UKIP wins more Council seats it can achieve local power. What is forgotten is how well UKIP may (or may not) poll in the May local elections. In the last Council elections UKIP achieved 25% of the votes and won 147 council seats.
With the problems of the first past the post election system at Westminster, UKIP are following the Lib Dem approach of first winning local seats. Then building on this to target the areas they have had most local success for electing UKIP MPs.
The test of UKIP momentum in the May elections will be how well they do in local elections not how well they do in the EU elections.
There never has been a war on drugs, that's the point. People don't get nicked for taking or possessing drugs. I, and all my mates, grew up taking drugs, getting caught with them,Going to places where they were openly taken, and the only people that ever got arrested were two massive international dealers/smugglers.
One friend got caught with 10k of coke and scales etc in his house and got let off saying he was depressed and paranoid about getting raw deals!
Every bar in the city of London has people sniffing coke in it on a Friday night. Do the police know this? yes. Would they dream of raiding and searching? No
That's the point. There never has been a war on drugs, it's why Hitchens wrote a book called 'The War We Never Fought'
Breaking news
The G8 summit will not take place in Russia this year, UK Prime Minister David Cameron has said.
Speaking in the Netherlands, Mr Cameron said it was "absolutely clear" the planned June meeting of world leaders in the Russian resort of Sochi would not happen due to events in Ukraine.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-26722668#"
Generally, I think the right question to ask is: have we set up poor economic incentives? That is, have we set up a tax and benefit system that encourages outcomes we know to be poor for people's physical and mental health, and for the long-term success of the country?
And I would argue that we have. I would suggest that by adding length of residence (or, ideally years of NI contribution) requirements to get housing benefit, child support, and an "NHS Card", one could discourage people from living lives that are clearly bad for them, while preserving my general desires for freedom (to work where they want or imbibe what they want or to sleep with whomever they want), and discouraging economic freeloading.
IDS, Frank Field and a few others have made this realisation. But they are in the minority.
But to come back to my earlier point: if Mr Hitchens advocated changing the tax and benefits system to 'nudge' people in the right direction (tax subsidies for marriage, for example), then I would find him rather easier to swallow. As it is, he seems to fail to realise that his conservatism is a fundamentally negative force: one that seems to embrace slow declinism.
If you put people in prison for taking drugs you'd have hundreds of thousands of lags. Maybe more.
The reason that people don't get put in jail for taking drugs is because if you take a normal person, and put him in Wormwood Scrubs for 18 months for being caught with heroin or the like, then when he comes out he will struggle to find a regular job, and will probably end up doing illegal stuff, like all the guys he's just spent the last 18 months in prison with. (I actually know a guy who spent time in Bedford jail for drug offences, who is now an incredibly successful software developer. He is one of the lucky ones.)
We learnt from the prohibition of alcohol in America that if you make something illegal which there is demand for, then you will create crime around the supply of that substance.
Make it legal, expensive, and controlled.
That's the point. That's why there never has been a war in drugs, and a book has been written called 'The War We Never Fought'
Yet people say this 'war' has failed!
In a way we stimulated the demand ourselves, by making drugs illegal. That made them cool and mysterious to young people wanting to test the boundaries.
When heroin was available on prescription, it was a drug for losers.
If it caused policing costs to double, prison costs to triple (assuming about a 90% reduction in drug taking), and 100,000 otherwise productive members of society to end up in prison, would that be an acceptable price?
If you think drugs should be legal, that's your business. I see young children who have never taken them, and would like the law to be so strict that they would never risk experimenting with them. I've sent too many people become messed up by them to gamble with soft approaches
If you had a child, and they were caught at 17 for possession of an eighth of an ounce of grass, would you like him to go to prison pour encourangement les autres?
Policing and prison costs would increase because the paperwork associated with booking an prosecuting criminals would rise proportionate with offences. Even assuming a 90+% reduction in drug usage, you would be assuming that the number of active criminals being pursued by the police would rise from 50,000 to 150,000.
And as someone commented in the Sunday Times as a Heroin addict he remained functional for 15 years. Only after he started drinking did his life fall apart.......
You can't really get a more effective model of a draconian police state than what exists in prisons. Considering we have been unable to prevent drug use even when people are locked up in cells most of the day, with their bedrooms regularly searched, why on Earth do you think it would be possible to do in broader society? The best way to reduce drug use is to (a) separate the supply of different drugs from each other, so you do not get drug dealers pushing low scale users into harder drugs and (b) to get the supply of drugs in a place where you can mandate health warnings on all purchases.
That's not true with illegal drugs. It's be the choice between Makers Mark at a dispensary or Dave's moonshine out the back of a van.
That is only because taxation is very high on both. Recently I read its now more profitable for gangs to smuggle cigarettes than cocaine because of the tax differentials.
And that is before we've even mentioned the trade in fake cigarettes, which have all kinds of horrible stuff in them and are incredibly dangerous.
Those opinions aren't right wing they are just bonkers.
I would encourage very harsh deterrents for possession of drugs. Maybe A week if hard labour for tirst time offenders or national service. They don't exist at the moment and haven't in my lifetime. yet people say a war on drugs has failed. We can dance around it and say Russell Brands got the right idea by legalising them and then showing compassion when kids get messed up. I'd rather do whatever stops them taking them in the first place
But, I suspect the direction of travel will be the same. Sweden is a good example of a dismal, authoritarian, nanny state that many politicians wish to emulate.
Yeah, he is really regreting it !?!?!?
In fact the state would be in competition with them, so would have to set the price at a level which meant that people would buy it legally as opposed it illegally.
I don't actually mind people smoking around me, personally. But it seems mad to have a public health policy to discourage it and then create a big fat loophole for people who happen to cross a border.
On drugs, the Swiss system of offering addicts heroin through GPs has worked pretty well in terms of slashing crime rates, and survived a referendum challenge.
It'll happen. You'll get the health warnings (you already do), and then the control of supply...
The Times records that at that period there were a grand total of 50 heroin addicts. Most of these were doctors or middle class professionals.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-26716281
The Quakers hoped that cocoa would take people away from alcohol. We could look for a modern alternative to heroin, nicotine, etc.
None of the advocates of the ban actually seemed to be interested in the views of people who work in that field.
The irony is that most these "transfers" of Russian speaking areas to Ukraine was intended to boost the "Russian content" of Ukraine !!