Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
The only person who died that day was a woman who was randomly shot at by a black police officer poking his gun through a grate and firing into the crowd. He got a commendation for it.
Rosanne Boyland and Kevin Greeson also died that day.
Thanks I hadn’t read about those two, she got crushed in the protest and he had a heart attack, though he might not have taken part in any violence.
Maybe you should keep reading more about January 6 and other events leading up to it.
So there’s a shed of evidence that shows that the actual attempts to break into the building were planned, and planned by Trump? It was a protest that got out of hand, like many throughout history. If there was any genuine attempt to take power you would have thought the most well armed population in the world would have bothered to bring some firearms with them.
They got carried away, did not really expect to overwhelm the security, entirely unplanned and without any kind of game plan once there.
Of course Trump knew whart he was instigating. He had no intention of leaving the White House. He knows his supporters - and knows how they will respond to his encouragment.
The truly scary state of affairs in the US is how many are prepared to give him a pass cuz libruls...
UK pop rose last year by about 650k. All of which was inward migration. This underpins growth and goes a long way to cure UK demographic problems but this large migration number is the driver of Reform. If LOTO Badenoch finds a way to peel off those votes she has a chance. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
It is ridiculous that we are relying on migration to cure our demographic problems. If it wasn't for immigration the country would be in an even greater mess.
If you look at GDP per capita, something has gone rather wrong since 2008 -
Population has grown from about 62.5m to 69.25m since 2008, and yet GDP per capita has remained stubbornly the same.
Which means we need to find extra housing, school places, doctors, dentists, roads, railways, prisons and all the rest for the extra 7m people (largely driven by immigration since 2008), which, given nobody these days can rent a house, get a GP's appointment, or buy a standard class ticket from London to Manchester at peak times without taking out a second mortgage, we have patently failed to do.
There is potentially a case to be made that we would be even worse off, demographically, without inward immigration. But the opposite is also true: young couples might have more children if they could afford to move out of their tiny (often rented) flats and into family homes.
Ultimately, as the population grows, our flatlining GDP per capita suggests that more and more people are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and importantly, do not feel any better off than they were 16 years ago.
We are gathering the ingredients for the perfect brew for a hard/far right government in about 2028/9
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the UK's goose is cooked.
This year I've had friends get mugged in broad daylight, seen spice addicts passed out in the street, seen people literally shitting in doorways. Graffiti and smashed windows suddenly everywhere. Shoplifters just walking in, taking what they like and walking out with impunity.
And that's London. The last place in the UK where it seems possible to have a career and earn a decent salary. That's to say nothing of the left behind places like Hartelpool that rioted over Summer. Places where you're born and die on the same sinkhole estate, while new arrivals on dinghies get put up in the Holiday Inn.
And Reeves wants to charge me 39% on my investments to live in this blissful utopia?
As you said earlier it feels like the country is in a bit of a death spiral at the moment, higher tax, more people leave, lower growth, even more people leave, etc.
It's worth remembering that even though Labour are awful a lot of this decline happened on the Tories watch. So as you say, when Labour make the spiral even worse, easy to see people turning to the hard right.
Social mobility is likely a lot easier in Hartlepool than London because of housing affordability.
Similarly I walked past the Wath Holiday Inn a few weeks before one of the riots took place there - the whole area is much improved with new housing estates, nature reserves, leisure facilities and trendy bars.
I'm curious as to what you term by 'a career and decent salary' actually is. £50k, £75k, £100k ?
I do enjoy reading about the urban squalor though as it allows me to appreciate the comfortable affluence I, and most of the people I know, have.
I'm sure these lads will tell you what a hotbed of social mobility and opportunity Hartlepool is.
What matters is whether the people who want to improve their socioeconomic status by improving their skillset and working hard can do so.
Because this sort of rioting always breaks out in places that are hotbeds of social mobility?
No, it breaks out where there are scum, likely drunken scum, who want a fight.
Its why there are disturbances on weekend evenings in town centres.
Given that you were just bewailing that London is full of muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters you must think that London is fast undergoing societal collapse.
Or are those attributes of 'the last place where you can get a career and decent salary' ?
I'd rather have the affordable housing even if it does mean a riot a few miles away every few years.
Because without affordable housing you don't have socioeconomic mobility, you have wage slavery.
There are two separate factors at play here, the doorway shitters and shoplifters of London feel tied to more recent immigration (the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here). See also the tent cities springing up around Park Lane. Not limited to London - See the numerous illegal immigrants busted in Bristol yesterday, living in a caravan city by the side of a motorway -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyl65knxzxo
Then you have the left behind WWC types in the video I linked to previously. No job, no aspiration, no hope. As Foxy points out, sure housing is cheap, but opportunities for social mobility are zero. You live and die on benefits in the same sink estate.
The situation is horrible for both those groups of people. And speaks volumes about the UK's decline.
Then you have people like me who are educated and well off. But being asked to fund increasing amounts for benefits and so on, without seeing a corresponding rise in growth or even basic law and order. As per the watch thread the other day, you can't even wear anything nice on the streets without fear of being mugged. And, as I say, I'm a decently sized bloke, not a smallish woman who is at risk of far worse.
Low level crime like graffiti, broken windows, shoplifting, street shitting, drug dealing etc is a blight that affects us all.
But as oft pointed out, the richest 1% or so make up 30% of the UK's income tax take. People like Leon are rightfully suggesting that maybe either clean it up or the richest people in our society will justifiably think maybe they can get better value for money elsewhere?
I personally have zero faith that if I pay more in tax, I will enjoy a better standard of living. And that is the problem. If Reeves told me CGT was going up to 39% tomorrow but also I'd live in a clean and orderly place where my mates don't have to meet their girlfriends at the tube and walk them home after dark, I'd consider it. Instead I'm being asked to pay ever more taxes against a backdrop of continual decay.
Which brings us back to Leon's original point, the doom spiral. Things get worse, more rich and educated people leave. Tax take declines, the economy falters. So even more people with the ability to get out leave.
It isn't just London that feels trapped in that doom spiral, it's the entire country. As I say, it largely happened on the Tories watch. I'm just not convinced Labour have the answer to it. Doubling my taxes to pay the train drivers on 70k a bit more isn't going to stop the low level decay. And Labour have absolutely no recipe for growth.
Sorry but that all reads like a conspiratorialist racist diatribe unmoored from reality. Maybe unplug from Twitter a bit and come back to earth.
There's things wrong with this country that need fixing, that too many are trapped working to pay rent and can't get an affordable home of their own being number one of them, but that's not remotely matching this third world bullshit you're spouting.
No jobs or aspirations? We have almost record low unemployment in this country.
Can't go out without being mugged? Don't know what its like where you are but I'll quite comfortably walk the streets with my phone out with no big fear of being mugged.
The country is not in a doom spiral. If you think it is, it says more about you than it does the country.
I take umbrage at being called a racist.
I pointed out that in London there seem to be more problems with recent immigrants, which you might expect in an area with... more recent immigrants. But also note similar problems occur in high poverty areas with WWC types. And note my sympathy for both groups, but also my despair at being forced to pay increasing taxes without an apparent solution.
So if you want to call me a racist, go ahead. I'll reply quite simply to that one - fuck off.
You seem to be sympathetic to scum who prefer crime to work.
But hostile to train drivers who have got themselves a skillset and work.
UK pop rose last year by about 650k. All of which was inward migration. This underpins growth and goes a long way to cure UK demographic problems but this large migration number is the driver of Reform. If LOTO Badenoch finds a way to peel off those votes she has a chance. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
It is ridiculous that we are relying on migration to cure our demographic problems. If it wasn't for immigration the country would be in an even greater mess.
If you look at GDP per capita, something has gone rather wrong since 2008 -
Population has grown from about 62.5m to 69.25m since 2008, and yet GDP per capita has remained stubbornly the same.
Which means we need to find extra housing, school places, doctors, dentists, roads, railways, prisons and all the rest for the extra 7m people (largely driven by immigration since 2008), which, given nobody these days can rent a house, get a GP's appointment, or buy a standard class ticket from London to Manchester at peak times without taking out a second mortgage, we have patently failed to do.
There is potentially a case to be made that we would be even worse off, demographically, without inward immigration. But the opposite is also true: young couples might have more children if they could afford to move out of their tiny (often rented) flats and into family homes.
Ultimately, as the population grows, our flatlining GDP per capita suggests that more and more people are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and importantly, do not feel any better off than they were 16 years ago.
We are gathering the ingredients for the perfect brew for a hard/far right government in about 2028/9
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the UK's goose is cooked.
This year I've had friends get mugged in broad daylight, seen spice addicts passed out in the street, seen people literally shitting in doorways. Graffiti and smashed windows suddenly everywhere. Shoplifters just walking in, taking what they like and walking out with impunity.
And that's London. The last place in the UK where it seems possible to have a career and earn a decent salary. That's to say nothing of the left behind places like Hartelpool that rioted over Summer. Places where you're born and die on the same sinkhole estate, while new arrivals on dinghies get put up in the Holiday Inn.
And Reeves wants to charge me 39% on my investments to live in this blissful utopia?
As you said earlier it feels like the country is in a bit of a death spiral at the moment, higher tax, more people leave, lower growth, even more people leave, etc.
It's worth remembering that even though Labour are awful a lot of this decline happened on the Tories watch. So as you say, when Labour make the spiral even worse, easy to see people turning to the hard right.
Social mobility is likely a lot easier in Hartlepool than London because of housing affordability.
Similarly I walked past the Wath Holiday Inn a few weeks before one of the riots took place there - the whole area is much improved with new housing estates, nature reserves, leisure facilities and trendy bars.
I'm curious as to what you term by 'a career and decent salary' actually is. £50k, £75k, £100k ?
I do enjoy reading about the urban squalor though as it allows me to appreciate the comfortable affluence I, and most of the people I know, have.
I'm sure these lads will tell you what a hotbed of social mobility and opportunity Hartlepool is.
What matters is whether the people who want to improve their socioeconomic status by improving their skillset and working hard can do so.
Because this sort of rioting always breaks out in places that are hotbeds of social mobility?
No, it breaks out where there are scum, likely drunken scum, who want a fight.
Its why there are disturbances on weekend evenings in town centres.
Given that you were just bewailing that London is full of muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters you must think that London is fast undergoing societal collapse.
Or are those attributes of 'the last place where you can get a career and decent salary' ?
I'd rather have the affordable housing even if it does mean a riot a few miles away every few years.
Because without affordable housing you don't have socioeconomic mobility, you have wage slavery.
There are two separate factors at play here, the doorway shitters and shoplifters of London feel tied to more recent immigration (the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here). See also the tent cities springing up around Park Lane. Not limited to London - See the numerous illegal immigrants busted in Bristol yesterday, living in a caravan city by the side of a motorway -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyl65knxzxo
Then you have the left behind WWC types in the video I linked to previously. No job, no aspiration, no hope. As Foxy points out, sure housing is cheap, but opportunities for social mobility are zero. You live and die on benefits in the same sink estate.
The situation is horrible for both those groups of people. And speaks volumes about the UK's decline.
Then you have people like me who are educated and well off. But being asked to fund increasing amounts for benefits and so on, without seeing a corresponding rise in growth or even basic law and order. As per the watch thread the other day, you can't even wear anything nice on the streets without fear of being mugged. And, as I say, I'm a decently sized bloke, not a smallish woman who is at risk of far worse.
Low level crime like graffiti, broken windows, shoplifting, street shitting, drug dealing etc is a blight that affects us all.
But as oft pointed out, the richest 1% or so make up 30% of the UK's income tax take. People like Leon are rightfully suggesting that maybe either clean it up or the richest people in our society will justifiably think maybe they can get better value for money elsewhere?
I personally have zero faith that if I pay more in tax, I will enjoy a better standard of living. And that is the problem. If Reeves told me CGT was going up to 39% tomorrow but also I'd live in a clean and orderly place where my mates don't have to meet their girlfriends at the tube and walk them home after dark, I'd consider it. Instead I'm being asked to pay ever more taxes against a backdrop of continual decay.
Which brings us back to Leon's original point, the doom spiral. Things get worse, more rich and educated people leave. Tax take declines, the economy falters. So even more people with the ability to get out leave.
It isn't just London that feels trapped in that doom spiral, it's the entire country. As I say, it largely happened on the Tories watch. I'm just not convinced Labour have the answer to it. Doubling my taxes to pay the train drivers on 70k a bit more isn't going to stop the low level decay. And Labour have absolutely no recipe for growth.
I was mugged on Denmark Hill train station in April 1998. No problems living in London in the last quarter of a century. I simply do not recognise the picture you paint. I'm rich and educated and don't want to live anywhere else.
Britain, to me - and specifically Greater Manchester - feels far, far safer than it did in the 80s and 90s; and somewhat safer than the 00s. Possibly just a factor of being older - so attracting less trouble? But I genuinely think the culture is less criminal and violent. Mind you, Manchester was genuinely quite hairy in the 90s.
You can probably guess someone's politics from whether they think the level of crime is higher or lower than it used to be a few years or decades ago.
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
The only person who died that day was a woman who was randomly shot at by a black police officer poking his gun through a grate and firing into the crowd. He got a commendation for it.
"That day".
The fact you choose to frame it that way so as to minimize the death of Officer Brian Sicknick rather suggests you don't give a shit about accuracy.
So he died of an injury from the event?
"On January 7, 2021, a United States Capitol Police (USCP) officer, Brian Sicknick, died after suffering two strokes the day after he responded to the attack on the U.S. Capitol during which he was assaulted with a chemical spray by two rioters.[2] His cremated remains were laid in honor in the Capitol Rotunda on February 2, 2021, before they were buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery.[3]"
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
Er, wasn't an independent statelet declared in Seattle? In which the leftist vigilantes ended up causing deaths? Days and days of successive riots in, I think, Portland, with destruction of various government buildings and any businesses not considered sufficiently one-of-us? Riots in Minneapolis resulting in basically the abandonment of a whole district? Riots in Chicago, New York? I wasn't there. But the impression I get is that consiserably more death and destruction has been caused by explicitly left womg riots over the past five years in the USA than right wing ones. The 'mostly peaceful' meme referring to a CNN report of oneof these which was clearly not mostly peaceful.
Yes, the one with the buildings on fire in the background and the cnn reporter talking about the mostly peaceful protests. If BLM was Pol Pot, jan 6th was Pinochet, one responsible for 8 million deaths the other 1,500. One considered far worse than the other, because of erm, politics.
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
The only person who died that day was a woman who was randomly shot at by a black police officer poking his gun through a grate and firing into the crowd. He got a commendation for it.
Rosanne Boyland and Kevin Greeson also died that day.
Thanks I hadn’t read about those two, she got crushed in the protest and he had a heart attack, though he might not have taken part in any violence.
Maybe you should keep reading more about January 6 and other events leading up to it.
So there’s a shed of evidence that shows that the actual attempts to break into the building were planned, and planned by Trump? It was a protest that got out of hand, like many throughout history. If there was any genuine attempt to take power you would have thought the most well armed population in the world would have bothered to bring some firearms with them.
They got carried away, did not really expect to overwhelm the security, entirely unplanned and without any kind of game plan once there.
Oh well that's ok then. Same for all those intimidated in Georgia and Arizona with crowds trespassing outside of Republican election officials houses including the speaker of the Arizona senate. All carrying AR15s.
As the speaker of the Arizona senate said "These are not Democrats, these are my people doing this to me"
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
Could you perhaps give us an example of a black group storming - if not the capitol - maybe something more minor, maybe a statehouse or something. And we can see how CNN covered it.
UK pop rose last year by about 650k. All of which was inward migration. This underpins growth and goes a long way to cure UK demographic problems but this large migration number is the driver of Reform. If LOTO Badenoch finds a way to peel off those votes she has a chance. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
It is ridiculous that we are relying on migration to cure our demographic problems. If it wasn't for immigration the country would be in an even greater mess.
If you look at GDP per capita, something has gone rather wrong since 2008 -
Population has grown from about 62.5m to 69.25m since 2008, and yet GDP per capita has remained stubbornly the same.
Which means we need to find extra housing, school places, doctors, dentists, roads, railways, prisons and all the rest for the extra 7m people (largely driven by immigration since 2008), which, given nobody these days can rent a house, get a GP's appointment, or buy a standard class ticket from London to Manchester at peak times without taking out a second mortgage, we have patently failed to do.
There is potentially a case to be made that we would be even worse off, demographically, without inward immigration. But the opposite is also true: young couples might have more children if they could afford to move out of their tiny (often rented) flats and into family homes.
Ultimately, as the population grows, our flatlining GDP per capita suggests that more and more people are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and importantly, do not feel any better off than they were 16 years ago.
We are gathering the ingredients for the perfect brew for a hard/far right government in about 2028/9
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the UK's goose is cooked.
This year I've had friends get mugged in broad daylight, seen spice addicts passed out in the street, seen people literally shitting in doorways. Graffiti and smashed windows suddenly everywhere. Shoplifters just walking in, taking what they like and walking out with impunity.
And that's London. The last place in the UK where it seems possible to have a career and earn a decent salary. That's to say nothing of the left behind places like Hartelpool that rioted over Summer. Places where you're born and die on the same sinkhole estate, while new arrivals on dinghies get put up in the Holiday Inn.
And Reeves wants to charge me 39% on my investments to live in this blissful utopia?
As you said earlier it feels like the country is in a bit of a death spiral at the moment, higher tax, more people leave, lower growth, even more people leave, etc.
It's worth remembering that even though Labour are awful a lot of this decline happened on the Tories watch. So as you say, when Labour make the spiral even worse, easy to see people turning to the hard right.
Social mobility is likely a lot easier in Hartlepool than London because of housing affordability.
Similarly I walked past the Wath Holiday Inn a few weeks before one of the riots took place there - the whole area is much improved with new housing estates, nature reserves, leisure facilities and trendy bars.
I'm curious as to what you term by 'a career and decent salary' actually is. £50k, £75k, £100k ?
I do enjoy reading about the urban squalor though as it allows me to appreciate the comfortable affluence I, and most of the people I know, have.
I'm sure these lads will tell you what a hotbed of social mobility and opportunity Hartlepool is.
What matters is whether the people who want to improve their socioeconomic status by improving their skillset and working hard can do so.
Because this sort of rioting always breaks out in places that are hotbeds of social mobility?
No, it breaks out where there are scum, likely drunken scum, who want a fight.
Its why there are disturbances on weekend evenings in town centres.
Given that you were just bewailing that London is full of muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters you must think that London is fast undergoing societal collapse.
Or are those attributes of 'the last place where you can get a career and decent salary' ?
I'd rather have the affordable housing even if it does mean a riot a few miles away every few years.
Because without affordable housing you don't have socioeconomic mobility, you have wage slavery.
There are two separate factors at play here, the doorway shitters and shoplifters of London feel tied to more recent immigration (the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here). See also the tent cities springing up around Park Lane. Not limited to London - See the numerous illegal immigrants busted in Bristol yesterday, living in a caravan city by the side of a motorway -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyl65knxzxo
Then you have the left behind WWC types in the video I linked to previously. No job, no aspiration, no hope. As Foxy points out, sure housing is cheap, but opportunities for social mobility are zero. You live and die on benefits in the same sink estate.
The situation is horrible for both those groups of people. And speaks volumes about the UK's decline.
Then you have people like me who are educated and well off. But being asked to fund increasing amounts for benefits and so on, without seeing a corresponding rise in growth or even basic law and order. As per the watch thread the other day, you can't even wear anything nice on the streets without fear of being mugged. And, as I say, I'm a decently sized bloke, not a smallish woman who is at risk of far worse.
Low level crime like graffiti, broken windows, shoplifting, street shitting, drug dealing etc is a blight that affects us all.
But as oft pointed out, the richest 1% or so make up 30% of the UK's income tax take. People like Leon are rightfully suggesting that maybe either clean it up or the richest people in our society will justifiably think maybe they can get better value for money elsewhere?
I personally have zero faith that if I pay more in tax, I will enjoy a better standard of living. And that is the problem. If Reeves told me CGT was going up to 39% tomorrow but also I'd live in a clean and orderly place where my mates don't have to meet their girlfriends at the tube and walk them home after dark, I'd consider it. Instead I'm being asked to pay ever more taxes against a backdrop of continual decay.
Which brings us back to Leon's original point, the doom spiral. Things get worse, more rich and educated people leave. Tax take declines, the economy falters. So even more people with the ability to get out leave.
It isn't just London that feels trapped in that doom spiral, it's the entire country. As I say, it largely happened on the Tories watch. I'm just not convinced Labour have the answer to it. Doubling my taxes to pay the train drivers on 70k a bit more isn't going to stop the low level decay. And Labour have absolutely no recipe for growth.
I was mugged on Denmark Hill train station in April 1998. No problems living in London in the last quarter of a century. I simply do not recognise the picture you paint. I'm rich and educated and don't want to live anywhere else.
Britain, to me - and specifically Greater Manchester - feels far, far safer than it did in the 80s and 90s; and somewhat safer than the 00s. Possibly just a factor of being older - so attracting less trouble? But I genuinely think the culture is less criminal and violent. Mind you, Manchester was genuinely quite hairy in the 90s.
You can probably guess someone's politics from whether they think the level of crime is higher or lower than it used to be a few years or decades ago.
Not me. I'm on the right, but think things have got better, cos of capitalism. Obviously things could have gone better, broadly by doing fewer left wing things. ;-) But since 1979 more has gone right than wrong.
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
Er, wasn't an independent statelet declared in Seattle? In which the leftist vigilantes ended up causing deaths? Days and days of successive riots in, I think, Portland, with destruction of various government buildings and any businesses not considered sufficiently one-of-us? Riots in Minneapolis resulting in basically the abandonment of a whole district? Riots in Chicago, New York? I wasn't there. But the impression I get is that consiserably more death and destruction has been caused by explicitly left womg riots over the past five years in the USA than right wing ones. The 'mostly peaceful' meme referring to a CNN report of oneof these which was clearly not mostly peaceful.
There's an interesting difference between left wing and right wing rioting (and there has definitely been both).
The left wing ones have been essentially days of rioting and smashing shop fronts and hurling things at police. But it's been weirdly pointless, a little bit like the anti-globalisation riots in London back in 1999. Or the riots in the UK in -0 what 2011. Or the 1994 Los Angeles riots. There's been disorder and death. But without any obvious goal. Beyond rioting itself.
The right wing ones, on the other hand, seem to have been more focused on actually effecting change. And have squarely targeted lawmakers - such as the Capitol riot.
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
The only person who died that day was a woman who was randomly shot at by a black police officer poking his gun through a grate and firing into the crowd. He got a commendation for it.
Rosanne Boyland and Kevin Greeson also died that day.
Thanks I hadn’t read about those two, she got crushed in the protest and he had a heart attack, though he might not have taken part in any violence.
Maybe you should keep reading more about January 6 and other events leading up to it.
So there’s a shed of evidence that shows that the actual attempts to break into the building were planned, and planned by Trump? It was a protest that got out of hand, like many throughout history. If there was any genuine attempt to take power you would have thought the most well armed population in the world would have bothered to bring some firearms with them.
They got carried away, did not really expect to overwhelm the security, entirely unplanned and without any kind of game plan once there.
Trump will have his day in court over this, eventually. You won’t enjoy it.
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
The only person who died that day was a woman who was randomly shot at by a black police officer poking his gun through a grate and firing into the crowd. He got a commendation for it.
Rosanne Boyland and Kevin Greeson also died that day.
Thanks I hadn’t read about those two, she got crushed in the protest and he had a heart attack, though he might not have taken part in any violence.
Maybe you should keep reading more about January 6 and other events leading up to it.
So there’s a shed of evidence that shows that the actual attempts to break into the building were planned, and planned by Trump? It was a protest that got out of hand, like many throughout history. If there was any genuine attempt to take power you would have thought the most well armed population in the world would have bothered to bring some firearms with them.
They got carried away, did not really expect to overwhelm the security, entirely unplanned and without any kind of game plan once there.
Of course Trump knew whart he was instigating. He had no intention of leaving the White House. He knows his supporters - and knows how they will respond to his encouragment.
The truly scary state of affairs in the US is how many are prepared to give him a pass cuz libruls...
He’s a deeply unpleasant individual who I am sure would do whatever he could to stay in power. But, and it is a big but. January 6th trespassing of congress was not a premeditated event. The protest got out of hand. The security overwhelmed (not their fault, if it sounds like I’m blaming them, I’m not), and once in there they didn’t know what to do. Almost everyone involved got carried away not really appreciating the gravity of it. Of course you always have your agitators who are up for a fight. If it had been a more sympathetic group of people we would have had long discussions about righteous historic grievances etc etc which meant they couldn’t control their anger.
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
Er, wasn't an independent statelet declared in Seattle? In which the leftist vigilantes ended up causing deaths? Days and days of successive riots in, I think, Portland, with destruction of various government buildings and any businesses not considered sufficiently one-of-us? Riots in Minneapolis resulting in basically the abandonment of a whole district? Riots in Chicago, New York? I wasn't there. But the impression I get is that consiserably more death and destruction has been caused by explicitly left womg riots over the past five years in the USA than right wing ones. The 'mostly peaceful' meme referring to a CNN report of oneof these which was clearly not mostly peaceful.
Yes, the one with the buildings on fire in the background and the cnn reporter talking about the mostly peaceful protests. If BLM was Pol Pot, jan 6th was Pinochet, one responsible for 8 million deaths the other 1,500. One considered far worse than the other, because of erm, politics.
That analogy is simultaneously batshit and offensive.
The BLM protests were old fashioned riots. Dangerous to individuals, but localised. Jan 6th was a storming of government in order to prevent a legal election result being implemented, with death threats to legislators.
It's not just a matter of totting up casualties, it's about a threat to government.
UK pop rose last year by about 650k. All of which was inward migration. This underpins growth and goes a long way to cure UK demographic problems but this large migration number is the driver of Reform. If LOTO Badenoch finds a way to peel off those votes she has a chance. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
It is ridiculous that we are relying on migration to cure our demographic problems. If it wasn't for immigration the country would be in an even greater mess.
If you look at GDP per capita, something has gone rather wrong since 2008 -
Population has grown from about 62.5m to 69.25m since 2008, and yet GDP per capita has remained stubbornly the same.
Which means we need to find extra housing, school places, doctors, dentists, roads, railways, prisons and all the rest for the extra 7m people (largely driven by immigration since 2008), which, given nobody these days can rent a house, get a GP's appointment, or buy a standard class ticket from London to Manchester at peak times without taking out a second mortgage, we have patently failed to do.
There is potentially a case to be made that we would be even worse off, demographically, without inward immigration. But the opposite is also true: young couples might have more children if they could afford to move out of their tiny (often rented) flats and into family homes.
Ultimately, as the population grows, our flatlining GDP per capita suggests that more and more people are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and importantly, do not feel any better off than they were 16 years ago.
We are gathering the ingredients for the perfect brew for a hard/far right government in about 2028/9
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the UK's goose is cooked.
This year I've had friends get mugged in broad daylight, seen spice addicts passed out in the street, seen people literally shitting in doorways. Graffiti and smashed windows suddenly everywhere. Shoplifters just walking in, taking what they like and walking out with impunity.
And that's London. The last place in the UK where it seems possible to have a career and earn a decent salary. That's to say nothing of the left behind places like Hartelpool that rioted over Summer. Places where you're born and die on the same sinkhole estate, while new arrivals on dinghies get put up in the Holiday Inn.
And Reeves wants to charge me 39% on my investments to live in this blissful utopia?
As you said earlier it feels like the country is in a bit of a death spiral at the moment, higher tax, more people leave, lower growth, even more people leave, etc.
It's worth remembering that even though Labour are awful a lot of this decline happened on the Tories watch. So as you say, when Labour make the spiral even worse, easy to see people turning to the hard right.
Social mobility is likely a lot easier in Hartlepool than London because of housing affordability.
Similarly I walked past the Wath Holiday Inn a few weeks before one of the riots took place there - the whole area is much improved with new housing estates, nature reserves, leisure facilities and trendy bars.
I'm curious as to what you term by 'a career and decent salary' actually is. £50k, £75k, £100k ?
I do enjoy reading about the urban squalor though as it allows me to appreciate the comfortable affluence I, and most of the people I know, have.
I'm sure these lads will tell you what a hotbed of social mobility and opportunity Hartlepool is.
What matters is whether the people who want to improve their socioeconomic status by improving their skillset and working hard can do so.
Because this sort of rioting always breaks out in places that are hotbeds of social mobility?
No, it breaks out where there are scum, likely drunken scum, who want a fight.
Its why there are disturbances on weekend evenings in town centres.
Given that you were just bewailing that London is full of muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters you must think that London is fast undergoing societal collapse.
Or are those attributes of 'the last place where you can get a career and decent salary' ?
I'd rather have the affordable housing even if it does mean a riot a few miles away every few years.
Because without affordable housing you don't have socioeconomic mobility, you have wage slavery.
There are two separate factors at play here, the doorway shitters and shoplifters of London feel tied to more recent immigration (the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here). See also the tent cities springing up around Park Lane. Not limited to London - See the numerous illegal immigrants busted in Bristol yesterday, living in a caravan city by the side of a motorway -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyl65knxzxo
Then you have the left behind WWC types in the video I linked to previously. No job, no aspiration, no hope. As Foxy points out, sure housing is cheap, but opportunities for social mobility are zero. You live and die on benefits in the same sink estate.
The situation is horrible for both those groups of people. And speaks volumes about the UK's decline.
Then you have people like me who are educated and well off. But being asked to fund increasing amounts for benefits and so on, without seeing a corresponding rise in growth or even basic law and order. As per the watch thread the other day, you can't even wear anything nice on the streets without fear of being mugged. And, as I say, I'm a decently sized bloke, not a smallish woman who is at risk of far worse.
Low level crime like graffiti, broken windows, shoplifting, street shitting, drug dealing etc is a blight that affects us all.
But as oft pointed out, the richest 1% or so make up 30% of the UK's income tax take. People like Leon are rightfully suggesting that maybe either clean it up or the richest people in our society will justifiably think maybe they can get better value for money elsewhere?
I personally have zero faith that if I pay more in tax, I will enjoy a better standard of living. And that is the problem. If Reeves told me CGT was going up to 39% tomorrow but also I'd live in a clean and orderly place where my mates don't have to meet their girlfriends at the tube and walk them home after dark, I'd consider it. Instead I'm being asked to pay ever more taxes against a backdrop of continual decay.
Which brings us back to Leon's original point, the doom spiral. Things get worse, more rich and educated people leave. Tax take declines, the economy falters. So even more people with the ability to get out leave.
It isn't just London that feels trapped in that doom spiral, it's the entire country. As I say, it largely happened on the Tories watch. I'm just not convinced Labour have the answer to it. Doubling my taxes to pay the train drivers on 70k a bit more isn't going to stop the low level decay. And Labour have absolutely no recipe for growth.
Sorry but that all reads like a conspiratorialist racist diatribe unmoored from reality. Maybe unplug from Twitter a bit and come back to earth.
There's things wrong with this country that need fixing, that too many are trapped working to pay rent and can't get an affordable home of their own being number one of them, but that's not remotely matching this third world bullshit you're spouting.
No jobs or aspirations? We have almost record low unemployment in this country.
Can't go out without being mugged? Don't know what its like where you are but I'll quite comfortably walk the streets with my phone out with no big fear of being mugged.
The country is not in a doom spiral. If you think it is, it says more about you than it does the country.
I take umbrage at being called a racist.
I pointed out that in London there seem to be more problems with recent immigrants, which you might expect in an area with... more recent immigrants. But also note similar problems occur in high poverty areas with WWC types. And note my sympathy for both groups, but also my despair at being forced to pay increasing taxes without an apparent solution.
So if you want to call me a racist, go ahead. I'll reply quite simply to that one - fuck off.
If you don't want to be called a racist then maybe look in the mirror.
Judging people by the colour of their skin, treating people differently based on the colour of their skin, making remarks like "the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here" etc . . . there's a word for that and it begins with "r" and ends with "acism".
As for your garbage about the WWC who can't get a job, we have full employment. Anyone who can't get a job hasn't got one as they don't want one, not that they can't get one.
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
The only person who died that day was a woman who was randomly shot at by a black police officer poking his gun through a grate and firing into the crowd. He got a commendation for it.
Rosanne Boyland and Kevin Greeson also died that day.
Thanks I hadn’t read about those two, she got crushed in the protest and he had a heart attack, though he might not have taken part in any violence.
Maybe you should keep reading more about January 6 and other events leading up to it.
So there’s a shed of evidence that shows that the actual attempts to break into the building were planned, and planned by Trump? It was a protest that got out of hand, like many throughout history. If there was any genuine attempt to take power you would have thought the most well armed population in the world would have bothered to bring some firearms with them.
They got carried away, did not really expect to overwhelm the security, entirely unplanned and without any kind of game plan once there.
Trump will have his day in court over this, eventually. You won’t enjoy it.
For January 6th? You just cannot get past the bit where he said to protest peacefully and patriotically. You can’t just skip over it and pretend he never said it.
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
Er, wasn't an independent statelet declared in Seattle? In which the leftist vigilantes ended up causing deaths? Days and days of successive riots in, I think, Portland, with destruction of various government buildings and any businesses not considered sufficiently one-of-us? Riots in Minneapolis resulting in basically the abandonment of a whole district? Riots in Chicago, New York? I wasn't there. But the impression I get is that consiserably more death and destruction has been caused by explicitly left womg riots over the past five years in the USA than right wing ones. The 'mostly peaceful' meme referring to a CNN report of oneof these which was clearly not mostly peaceful.
There's an interesting difference between left wing and right wing rioting (and there has definitely been both).
The left wing ones have been essentially days of rioting and smashing shop fronts and hurling things at police. But it's been weirdly pointless, a little bit like the anti-globalisation riots in London back in 1999. Or the riots in the UK in -0 what 2011. Or the 1994 Los Angeles riots. There's been disorder and death. But without any obvious goal. Beyond rioting itself.
The right wing ones, on the other hand, seem to have been more focused on actually effecting change. And have squarely targeted lawmakers - such as the Capitol riot.
Left wing riots (in the USA, at least) are alarming because they are aimrd at stopping society functioning. The right wing ones (ones? I only remember Jan 6th, tbh) are alarmimg because they have been aimed at stoppng democracy functioning.
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
The only person who died that day was a woman who was randomly shot at by a black police officer poking his gun through a grate and firing into the crowd. He got a commendation for it.
Rosanne Boyland and Kevin Greeson also died that day.
Thanks I hadn’t read about those two, she got crushed in the protest and he had a heart attack, though he might not have taken part in any violence.
Maybe you should keep reading more about January 6 and other events leading up to it.
So there’s a shed of evidence that shows that the actual attempts to break into the building were planned, and planned by Trump? It was a protest that got out of hand, like many throughout history. If there was any genuine attempt to take power you would have thought the most well armed population in the world would have bothered to bring some firearms with them.
They got carried away, did not really expect to overwhelm the security, entirely unplanned and without any kind of game plan once there.
Oh well that's ok then. Same for all those intimidated in Georgia and Arizona with crowds trespassing outside of Republican election officials houses including the speaker of the Arizona senate. All carrying AR15s.
As the speaker of the Arizona senate said "These are not Democrats, these are my people doing this to me"
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
The only person who died that day was a woman who was randomly shot at by a black police officer poking his gun through a grate and firing into the crowd. He got a commendation for it.
Rosanne Boyland and Kevin Greeson also died that day.
Thanks I hadn’t read about those two, she got crushed in the protest and he had a heart attack, though he might not have taken part in any violence.
Maybe you should keep reading more about January 6 and other events leading up to it.
So there’s a shed of evidence that shows that the actual attempts to break into the building were planned, and planned by Trump? It was a protest that got out of hand, like many throughout history. If there was any genuine attempt to take power you would have thought the most well armed population in the world would have bothered to bring some firearms with them.
They got carried away, did not really expect to overwhelm the security, entirely unplanned and without any kind of game plan once there.
Trump will have his day in court over this, eventually. You won’t enjoy it.
For January 6th? You just cannot get past the bit where he said to protest peacefully and patriotically. You can’t just skip over it and pretend he never said it.
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
The only person who died that day was a woman who was randomly shot at by a black police officer poking his gun through a grate and firing into the crowd. He got a commendation for it.
Rosanne Boyland and Kevin Greeson also died that day.
Thanks I hadn’t read about those two, she got crushed in the protest and he had a heart attack, though he might not have taken part in any violence.
Maybe you should keep reading more about January 6 and other events leading up to it.
So there’s a shed of evidence that shows that the actual attempts to break into the building were planned, and planned by Trump? It was a protest that got out of hand, like many throughout history. If there was any genuine attempt to take power you would have thought the most well armed population in the world would have bothered to bring some firearms with them.
They got carried away, did not really expect to overwhelm the security, entirely unplanned and without any kind of game plan once there.
Trump will have his day in court over this, eventually. You won’t enjoy it.
For January 6th? You just cannot get past the bit where he said to protest peacefully and patriotically. You can’t just skip over it and pretend he never said it.
Sure you can in the same way you can look at states calling themselves "democratic people's republics" and you can know they're not democratic and the people have no say in how its run.
Judge people not just by some of their words in isolation, but in everything they say and do, and on that metric Trump is guilty as sin. Even if he threw in token words about "peaceful".
I see Trump has now returned to a slight favourite amongst the betting firms. He was value a couple of weeks back at comfortably above evens and as much as I'd to see him dead, it was too good to turn up.
If Harris is getting to 6/4 or better without a clear gap in the polls emerging, I'd take it at this time.
I see Trump has now returned to a slight favourite amongst the betting firms. He was value a couple of weeks back at comfortably above evens and as much as I'd to see him dead, it was too good to turn up.
If Harris is getting to 6/4 or better without a clear gap in the polls emerging, I'd take it at this time.
I hope Harris wins but her team must be a bit disappointed they haven't been able to generate a bigger lead so far.
UK pop rose last year by about 650k. All of which was inward migration. This underpins growth and goes a long way to cure UK demographic problems but this large migration number is the driver of Reform. If LOTO Badenoch finds a way to peel off those votes she has a chance. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
It is ridiculous that we are relying on migration to cure our demographic problems. If it wasn't for immigration the country would be in an even greater mess.
If you look at GDP per capita, something has gone rather wrong since 2008 -
Population has grown from about 62.5m to 69.25m since 2008, and yet GDP per capita has remained stubbornly the same.
Which means we need to find extra housing, school places, doctors, dentists, roads, railways, prisons and all the rest for the extra 7m people (largely driven by immigration since 2008), which, given nobody these days can rent a house, get a GP's appointment, or buy a standard class ticket from London to Manchester at peak times without taking out a second mortgage, we have patently failed to do.
There is potentially a case to be made that we would be even worse off, demographically, without inward immigration. But the opposite is also true: young couples might have more children if they could afford to move out of their tiny (often rented) flats and into family homes.
Ultimately, as the population grows, our flatlining GDP per capita suggests that more and more people are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and importantly, do not feel any better off than they were 16 years ago.
We are gathering the ingredients for the perfect brew for a hard/far right government in about 2028/9
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the UK's goose is cooked.
This year I've had friends get mugged in broad daylight, seen spice addicts passed out in the street, seen people literally shitting in doorways. Graffiti and smashed windows suddenly everywhere. Shoplifters just walking in, taking what they like and walking out with impunity.
And that's London. The last place in the UK where it seems possible to have a career and earn a decent salary. That's to say nothing of the left behind places like Hartelpool that rioted over Summer. Places where you're born and die on the same sinkhole estate, while new arrivals on dinghies get put up in the Holiday Inn.
And Reeves wants to charge me 39% on my investments to live in this blissful utopia?
As you said earlier it feels like the country is in a bit of a death spiral at the moment, higher tax, more people leave, lower growth, even more people leave, etc.
It's worth remembering that even though Labour are awful a lot of this decline happened on the Tories watch. So as you say, when Labour make the spiral even worse, easy to see people turning to the hard right.
Social mobility is likely a lot easier in Hartlepool than London because of housing affordability.
Similarly I walked past the Wath Holiday Inn a few weeks before one of the riots took place there - the whole area is much improved with new housing estates, nature reserves, leisure facilities and trendy bars.
I'm curious as to what you term by 'a career and decent salary' actually is. £50k, £75k, £100k ?
I do enjoy reading about the urban squalor though as it allows me to appreciate the comfortable affluence I, and most of the people I know, have.
I'm sure these lads will tell you what a hotbed of social mobility and opportunity Hartlepool is.
What matters is whether the people who want to improve their socioeconomic status by improving their skillset and working hard can do so.
Because this sort of rioting always breaks out in places that are hotbeds of social mobility?
No, it breaks out where there are scum, likely drunken scum, who want a fight.
Its why there are disturbances on weekend evenings in town centres.
Given that you were just bewailing that London is full of muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters you must think that London is fast undergoing societal collapse.
Or are those attributes of 'the last place where you can get a career and decent salary' ?
I'd rather have the affordable housing even if it does mean a riot a few miles away every few years.
Because without affordable housing you don't have socioeconomic mobility, you have wage slavery.
There are two separate factors at play here, the doorway shitters and shoplifters of London feel tied to more recent immigration (the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here). See also the tent cities springing up around Park Lane. Not limited to London - See the numerous illegal immigrants busted in Bristol yesterday, living in a caravan city by the side of a motorway -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyl65knxzxo
Then you have the left behind WWC types in the video I linked to previously. No job, no aspiration, no hope. As Foxy points out, sure housing is cheap, but opportunities for social mobility are zero. You live and die on benefits in the same sink estate.
The situation is horrible for both those groups of people. And speaks volumes about the UK's decline.
Then you have people like me who are educated and well off. But being asked to fund increasing amounts for benefits and so on, without seeing a corresponding rise in growth or even basic law and order. As per the watch thread the other day, you can't even wear anything nice on the streets without fear of being mugged. And, as I say, I'm a decently sized bloke, not a smallish woman who is at risk of far worse.
Low level crime like graffiti, broken windows, shoplifting, street shitting, drug dealing etc is a blight that affects us all.
But as oft pointed out, the richest 1% or so make up 30% of the UK's income tax take. People like Leon are rightfully suggesting that maybe either clean it up or the richest people in our society will justifiably think maybe they can get better value for money elsewhere?
I personally have zero faith that if I pay more in tax, I will enjoy a better standard of living. And that is the problem. If Reeves told me CGT was going up to 39% tomorrow but also I'd live in a clean and orderly place where my mates don't have to meet their girlfriends at the tube and walk them home after dark, I'd consider it. Instead I'm being asked to pay ever more taxes against a backdrop of continual decay.
Which brings us back to Leon's original point, the doom spiral. Things get worse, more rich and educated people leave. Tax take declines, the economy falters. So even more people with the ability to get out leave.
It isn't just London that feels trapped in that doom spiral, it's the entire country. As I say, it largely happened on the Tories watch. I'm just not convinced Labour have the answer to it. Doubling my taxes to pay the train drivers on 70k a bit more isn't going to stop the low level decay. And Labour have absolutely no recipe for growth.
Sorry but that all reads like a conspiratorialist racist diatribe unmoored from reality. Maybe unplug from Twitter a bit and come back to earth.
There's things wrong with this country that need fixing, that too many are trapped working to pay rent and can't get an affordable home of their own being number one of them, but that's not remotely matching this third world bullshit you're spouting.
No jobs or aspirations? We have almost record low unemployment in this country.
Can't go out without being mugged? Don't know what its like where you are but I'll quite comfortably walk the streets with my phone out with no big fear of being mugged.
The country is not in a doom spiral. If you think it is, it says more about you than it does the country.
I take umbrage at being called a racist.
I pointed out that in London there seem to be more problems with recent immigrants, which you might expect in an area with... more recent immigrants. But also note similar problems occur in high poverty areas with WWC types. And note my sympathy for both groups, but also my despair at being forced to pay increasing taxes without an apparent solution.
So if you want to call me a racist, go ahead. I'll reply quite simply to that one - fuck off.
You seem to be sympathetic to scum who prefer crime to work.
But hostile to train drivers who have got themselves a skillset and work.
Ah, the deserving vs undeserving poor. Didn't realise I'd accidentally wandered into a time portal and returned to Victorian times.
Here I have you telling me on one side that I'm sympathetic to 'scum', while I have Barty on the other side telling me I'm a horrible ranting racist.
Maybe I'm just someone who would like to see a better society with more opportunities for all, but remain unconvinced that successive governments increasing the tax burden on the richest in society hasn't actually had that effect?
The Thatcherite "on yer bike, anyone with enough ambition can become a millionaire" is pure nonsense.
The best way to imagine it is like lottery tickets. If you're born on a sink estate in Hartlepool or Middlesbrough, you might have one lottery ticket. In the sense of the amount of opportunity you get to get out of that environment, become skilled, earn a high wage, escape the poverty you were born into. Whereas if you're a nice, well to do middle class type like myself, you were born with a thousand lottery tickets. Educated parents to help you learn, to give you the aspiration to go to uni, get you your first internship, etc. And if you're born mega rich, congratulations. You get a million lottery tickets. Start as many businesses as you like, you can't go bust, so keep playing the game until you win.
My point is that I neither feel as if my tax dollars are being translated into more lottery tickets for the poor and left behind, nor do I feel as if the tax increases of the last decade are resulting in a better standard of living for me - less crime, fewer doorway shitters, and so on. So there's no quid pro quo either.
Which leads us again to Leon's doom spiral point. If things get worse, the people paying the lion's share of the tax leave, which means that there's less tax money to go around, so things get even worse, so more people leave, etc.
You may not recognise the doom spiral, but many wealthy people do. Which is why the UK is on course to lose more millionaires by 2028 than any other country in the world other than China.
I completely fail to see why the ‘patriotic’ right continually talks Britain down. I do not recognise the crime addled country that is portrayed. I had last weekend out in Liverpool, pub crawling and eating out and the whole place was literally buzzing. Nowhere felt intimidating. Just a cracking place to wander round and spend money. I work in Telford, the place has its ups and downs but again, generally it’s a pretty decent place to live and most folk rub along together fine.
Indeed. I'm in London, somewhere a couple here portray as some den of villainy. Crime is the lowest I can remember. I feel safer than ever. The city is also cleaner than any time since I was born, or since my parents were born.
Leicester city centre is a bit more mixed. Several major shops have closed or moved to Fosse park at motorway junction. On the other hand the night time economy is thriving. There are more homeless in doorways, but less random violence. I would say it is safer at night than when I moved here 3 decades ago.
I suspect every town and city has more, better and more varied bars and restaurants than it did three decades ago.
"A recent study in the American Economic Review looked at economic performance under populist rule over a much longer period, spanning a full 120 years. After a three-year honeymoon, such leaders were found to produce a 1% annual drag on growth. After 15 years, countries led by both left- and right-wing populists were left with national incomes 10% lower than expected."
From that radical left journal, the Harvard Business Review. (Some mistake surely?- Ed)
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
Er, wasn't an independent statelet declared in Seattle? In which the leftist vigilantes ended up causing deaths? Days and days of successive riots in, I think, Portland, with destruction of various government buildings and any businesses not considered sufficiently one-of-us? Riots in Minneapolis resulting in basically the abandonment of a whole district? Riots in Chicago, New York? I wasn't there. But the impression I get is that consiserably more death and destruction has been caused by explicitly left womg riots over the past five years in the USA than right wing ones. The 'mostly peaceful' meme referring to a CNN report of oneof these which was clearly not mostly peaceful.
Yes, the one with the buildings on fire in the background and the cnn reporter talking about the mostly peaceful protests. If BLM was Pol Pot, jan 6th was Pinochet, one responsible for 8 million deaths the other 1,500. One considered far worse than the other, because of erm, politics.
That analogy is simultaneously batshit and offensive.
The BLM protests were old fashioned riots. Dangerous to individuals, but localised. Jan 6th was a storming of government in order to prevent a legal election result being implemented, with death threats to legislators.
It's not just a matter of totting up casualties, it's about a threat to government.
Well, yes, ish. But hiw dangerous depends on how big a threat. An attempted coup is obviously not to be taken lightly but it was actually quite easily contained and dealt with and the numbers involved relatively small. Alarming that it happened but not alarming because the state was able easily to contaon it. The opposite was true of the BLM protests.
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
The only person who died that day was a woman who was randomly shot at by a black police officer poking his gun through a grate and firing into the crowd. He got a commendation for it.
Rosanne Boyland and Kevin Greeson also died that day.
Thanks I hadn’t read about those two, she got crushed in the protest and he had a heart attack, though he might not have taken part in any violence.
Maybe you should keep reading more about January 6 and other events leading up to it.
So there’s a shed of evidence that shows that the actual attempts to break into the building were planned, and planned by Trump? It was a protest that got out of hand, like many throughout history. If there was any genuine attempt to take power you would have thought the most well armed population in the world would have bothered to bring some firearms with them.
They got carried away, did not really expect to overwhelm the security, entirely unplanned and without any kind of game plan once there.
Oh well that's ok then. Same for all those intimidated in Georgia and Arizona with crowds trespassing outside of Republican election officials houses including the speaker of the Arizona senate. All carrying AR15s.
As the speaker of the Arizona senate said "These are not Democrats, these are my people doing this to me"
UK pop rose last year by about 650k. All of which was inward migration. This underpins growth and goes a long way to cure UK demographic problems but this large migration number is the driver of Reform. If LOTO Badenoch finds a way to peel off those votes she has a chance. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
It is ridiculous that we are relying on migration to cure our demographic problems. If it wasn't for immigration the country would be in an even greater mess.
If you look at GDP per capita, something has gone rather wrong since 2008 -
Population has grown from about 62.5m to 69.25m since 2008, and yet GDP per capita has remained stubbornly the same.
Which means we need to find extra housing, school places, doctors, dentists, roads, railways, prisons and all the rest for the extra 7m people (largely driven by immigration since 2008), which, given nobody these days can rent a house, get a GP's appointment, or buy a standard class ticket from London to Manchester at peak times without taking out a second mortgage, we have patently failed to do.
There is potentially a case to be made that we would be even worse off, demographically, without inward immigration. But the opposite is also true: young couples might have more children if they could afford to move out of their tiny (often rented) flats and into family homes.
Ultimately, as the population grows, our flatlining GDP per capita suggests that more and more people are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and importantly, do not feel any better off than they were 16 years ago.
We are gathering the ingredients for the perfect brew for a hard/far right government in about 2028/9
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the UK's goose is cooked.
This year I've had friends get mugged in broad daylight, seen spice addicts passed out in the street, seen people literally shitting in doorways. Graffiti and smashed windows suddenly everywhere. Shoplifters just walking in, taking what they like and walking out with impunity.
And that's London. The last place in the UK where it seems possible to have a career and earn a decent salary. That's to say nothing of the left behind places like Hartelpool that rioted over Summer. Places where you're born and die on the same sinkhole estate, while new arrivals on dinghies get put up in the Holiday Inn.
And Reeves wants to charge me 39% on my investments to live in this blissful utopia?
As you said earlier it feels like the country is in a bit of a death spiral at the moment, higher tax, more people leave, lower growth, even more people leave, etc.
It's worth remembering that even though Labour are awful a lot of this decline happened on the Tories watch. So as you say, when Labour make the spiral even worse, easy to see people turning to the hard right.
Social mobility is likely a lot easier in Hartlepool than London because of housing affordability.
Similarly I walked past the Wath Holiday Inn a few weeks before one of the riots took place there - the whole area is much improved with new housing estates, nature reserves, leisure facilities and trendy bars.
I'm curious as to what you term by 'a career and decent salary' actually is. £50k, £75k, £100k ?
I do enjoy reading about the urban squalor though as it allows me to appreciate the comfortable affluence I, and most of the people I know, have.
I'm sure these lads will tell you what a hotbed of social mobility and opportunity Hartlepool is.
What matters is whether the people who want to improve their socioeconomic status by improving their skillset and working hard can do so.
Because this sort of rioting always breaks out in places that are hotbeds of social mobility?
No, it breaks out where there are scum, likely drunken scum, who want a fight.
Its why there are disturbances on weekend evenings in town centres.
Given that you were just bewailing that London is full of muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters you must think that London is fast undergoing societal collapse.
Or are those attributes of 'the last place where you can get a career and decent salary' ?
I'd rather have the affordable housing even if it does mean a riot a few miles away every few years.
Because without affordable housing you don't have socioeconomic mobility, you have wage slavery.
There are two separate factors at play here, the doorway shitters and shoplifters of London feel tied to more recent immigration (the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here). See also the tent cities springing up around Park Lane. Not limited to London - See the numerous illegal immigrants busted in Bristol yesterday, living in a caravan city by the side of a motorway -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyl65knxzxo
Then you have the left behind WWC types in the video I linked to previously. No job, no aspiration, no hope. As Foxy points out, sure housing is cheap, but opportunities for social mobility are zero. You live and die on benefits in the same sink estate.
The situation is horrible for both those groups of people. And speaks volumes about the UK's decline.
Then you have people like me who are educated and well off. But being asked to fund increasing amounts for benefits and so on, without seeing a corresponding rise in growth or even basic law and order. As per the watch thread the other day, you can't even wear anything nice on the streets without fear of being mugged. And, as I say, I'm a decently sized bloke, not a smallish woman who is at risk of far worse.
Low level crime like graffiti, broken windows, shoplifting, street shitting, drug dealing etc is a blight that affects us all.
But as oft pointed out, the richest 1% or so make up 30% of the UK's income tax take. People like Leon are rightfully suggesting that maybe either clean it up or the richest people in our society will justifiably think maybe they can get better value for money elsewhere?
I personally have zero faith that if I pay more in tax, I will enjoy a better standard of living. And that is the problem. If Reeves told me CGT was going up to 39% tomorrow but also I'd live in a clean and orderly place where my mates don't have to meet their girlfriends at the tube and walk them home after dark, I'd consider it. Instead I'm being asked to pay ever more taxes against a backdrop of continual decay.
Which brings us back to Leon's original point, the doom spiral. Things get worse, more rich and educated people leave. Tax take declines, the economy falters. So even more people with the ability to get out leave.
It isn't just London that feels trapped in that doom spiral, it's the entire country. As I say, it largely happened on the Tories watch. I'm just not convinced Labour have the answer to it. Doubling my taxes to pay the train drivers on 70k a bit more isn't going to stop the low level decay. And Labour have absolutely no recipe for growth.
Sorry but that all reads like a conspiratorialist racist diatribe unmoored from reality. Maybe unplug from Twitter a bit and come back to earth.
There's things wrong with this country that need fixing, that too many are trapped working to pay rent and can't get an affordable home of their own being number one of them, but that's not remotely matching this third world bullshit you're spouting.
No jobs or aspirations? We have almost record low unemployment in this country.
Can't go out without being mugged? Don't know what its like where you are but I'll quite comfortably walk the streets with my phone out with no big fear of being mugged.
The country is not in a doom spiral. If you think it is, it says more about you than it does the country.
I take umbrage at being called a racist.
I pointed out that in London there seem to be more problems with recent immigrants, which you might expect in an area with... more recent immigrants. But also note similar problems occur in high poverty areas with WWC types. And note my sympathy for both groups, but also my despair at being forced to pay increasing taxes without an apparent solution.
So if you want to call me a racist, go ahead. I'll reply quite simply to that one - fuck off.
You seem to be sympathetic to scum who prefer crime to work.
But hostile to train drivers who have got themselves a skillset and work.
Ah, the deserving vs undeserving poor. Didn't realise I'd accidentally wandered into a time portal and returned to Victorian times.
Here I have you telling me on one side that I'm sympathetic to 'scum', while I have Barty on the other side telling me I'm a horrible ranting racist.
Maybe I'm just someone who would like to see a better society with more opportunities for all, but remain unconvinced that successive governments increasing the tax burden on the richest in society hasn't actually had that effect?
The Thatcherite "on yer bike, anyone with enough ambition can become a millionaire" is pure nonsense.
The best way to imagine it is like lottery tickets. If you're born on a sink estate in Hartlepool or Middlesbrough, you might have one lottery ticket. In the sense of the amount of opportunity you get to get out of that environment, become skilled, earn a high wage, escape the poverty you were born into. Whereas if you're a nice, well to do middle class type like myself, you were born with a thousand lottery tickets. Educated parents to help you learn, to give you the aspiration to go to uni, get you your first internship, etc. And if you're born mega rich, congratulations. You get a million lottery tickets. Start as many businesses as you like, you can't go bust, so keep playing the game until you win.
My point is that I neither feel as if my tax dollars are being translated into more lottery tickets for the poor and left behind, nor do I feel as if the tax increases of the last decade are resulting in a better standard of living for me - less crime, fewer doorway shitters, and so on. So there's no quid pro quo either.
Which leads us again to Leon's doom spiral point. If things get worse, the people paying the lion's share of the tax leave, which means that there's less tax money to go around, so things get even worse, so more people leave, etc.
You may not recognise the doom spiral, but many wealthy people do. Which is why the UK is on course to lose more millionaires by 2028 than any other country in the world other than China.
What a load of crap.
There is no shortage of jobs in Hartlepool, or Middlesbrough or around the country which is not failing. Unlike times in the past anyone who wants a job has one.
You're describing a fictional country based on stereotypes. You and Leon are wrong.
We're spending more tax money on welfare because we give payments to our ageing population, not because of unemployed WWC or migrant shitters.
UK pop rose last year by about 650k. All of which was inward migration. This underpins growth and goes a long way to cure UK demographic problems but this large migration number is the driver of Reform. If LOTO Badenoch finds a way to peel off those votes she has a chance. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
It is ridiculous that we are relying on migration to cure our demographic problems. If it wasn't for immigration the country would be in an even greater mess.
If you look at GDP per capita, something has gone rather wrong since 2008 -
Population has grown from about 62.5m to 69.25m since 2008, and yet GDP per capita has remained stubbornly the same.
Which means we need to find extra housing, school places, doctors, dentists, roads, railways, prisons and all the rest for the extra 7m people (largely driven by immigration since 2008), which, given nobody these days can rent a house, get a GP's appointment, or buy a standard class ticket from London to Manchester at peak times without taking out a second mortgage, we have patently failed to do.
There is potentially a case to be made that we would be even worse off, demographically, without inward immigration. But the opposite is also true: young couples might have more children if they could afford to move out of their tiny (often rented) flats and into family homes.
Ultimately, as the population grows, our flatlining GDP per capita suggests that more and more people are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and importantly, do not feel any better off than they were 16 years ago.
We are gathering the ingredients for the perfect brew for a hard/far right government in about 2028/9
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the UK's goose is cooked.
This year I've had friends get mugged in broad daylight, seen spice addicts passed out in the street, seen people literally shitting in doorways. Graffiti and smashed windows suddenly everywhere. Shoplifters just walking in, taking what they like and walking out with impunity.
And that's London. The last place in the UK where it seems possible to have a career and earn a decent salary. That's to say nothing of the left behind places like Hartelpool that rioted over Summer. Places where you're born and die on the same sinkhole estate, while new arrivals on dinghies get put up in the Holiday Inn.
And Reeves wants to charge me 39% on my investments to live in this blissful utopia?
As you said earlier it feels like the country is in a bit of a death spiral at the moment, higher tax, more people leave, lower growth, even more people leave, etc.
It's worth remembering that even though Labour are awful a lot of this decline happened on the Tories watch. So as you say, when Labour make the spiral even worse, easy to see people turning to the hard right.
Social mobility is likely a lot easier in Hartlepool than London because of housing affordability.
Similarly I walked past the Wath Holiday Inn a few weeks before one of the riots took place there - the whole area is much improved with new housing estates, nature reserves, leisure facilities and trendy bars.
I'm curious as to what you term by 'a career and decent salary' actually is. £50k, £75k, £100k ?
I do enjoy reading about the urban squalor though as it allows me to appreciate the comfortable affluence I, and most of the people I know, have.
I'm sure these lads will tell you what a hotbed of social mobility and opportunity Hartlepool is.
What matters is whether the people who want to improve their socioeconomic status by improving their skillset and working hard can do so.
Because this sort of rioting always breaks out in places that are hotbeds of social mobility?
No, it breaks out where there are scum, likely drunken scum, who want a fight.
Its why there are disturbances on weekend evenings in town centres.
Given that you were just bewailing that London is full of muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters you must think that London is fast undergoing societal collapse.
Or are those attributes of 'the last place where you can get a career and decent salary' ?
I'd rather have the affordable housing even if it does mean a riot a few miles away every few years.
Because without affordable housing you don't have socioeconomic mobility, you have wage slavery.
There are two separate factors at play here, the doorway shitters and shoplifters of London feel tied to more recent immigration (the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here). See also the tent cities springing up around Park Lane. Not limited to London - See the numerous illegal immigrants busted in Bristol yesterday, living in a caravan city by the side of a motorway -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyl65knxzxo
Then you have the left behind WWC types in the video I linked to previously. No job, no aspiration, no hope. As Foxy points out, sure housing is cheap, but opportunities for social mobility are zero. You live and die on benefits in the same sink estate.
The situation is horrible for both those groups of people. And speaks volumes about the UK's decline.
Then you have people like me who are educated and well off. But being asked to fund increasing amounts for benefits and so on, without seeing a corresponding rise in growth or even basic law and order. As per the watch thread the other day, you can't even wear anything nice on the streets without fear of being mugged. And, as I say, I'm a decently sized bloke, not a smallish woman who is at risk of far worse.
Low level crime like graffiti, broken windows, shoplifting, street shitting, drug dealing etc is a blight that affects us all.
But as oft pointed out, the richest 1% or so make up 30% of the UK's income tax take. People like Leon are rightfully suggesting that maybe either clean it up or the richest people in our society will justifiably think maybe they can get better value for money elsewhere?
I personally have zero faith that if I pay more in tax, I will enjoy a better standard of living. And that is the problem. If Reeves told me CGT was going up to 39% tomorrow but also I'd live in a clean and orderly place where my mates don't have to meet their girlfriends at the tube and walk them home after dark, I'd consider it. Instead I'm being asked to pay ever more taxes against a backdrop of continual decay.
Which brings us back to Leon's original point, the doom spiral. Things get worse, more rich and educated people leave. Tax take declines, the economy falters. So even more people with the ability to get out leave.
It isn't just London that feels trapped in that doom spiral, it's the entire country. As I say, it largely happened on the Tories watch. I'm just not convinced Labour have the answer to it. Doubling my taxes to pay the train drivers on 70k a bit more isn't going to stop the low level decay. And Labour have absolutely no recipe for growth.
Sorry but that all reads like a conspiratorialist racist diatribe unmoored from reality. Maybe unplug from Twitter a bit and come back to earth.
There's things wrong with this country that need fixing, that too many are trapped working to pay rent and can't get an affordable home of their own being number one of them, but that's not remotely matching this third world bullshit you're spouting.
No jobs or aspirations? We have almost record low unemployment in this country.
Can't go out without being mugged? Don't know what its like where you are but I'll quite comfortably walk the streets with my phone out with no big fear of being mugged.
The country is not in a doom spiral. If you think it is, it says more about you than it does the country.
I take umbrage at being called a racist.
I pointed out that in London there seem to be more problems with recent immigrants, which you might expect in an area with... more recent immigrants. But also note similar problems occur in high poverty areas with WWC types. And note my sympathy for both groups, but also my despair at being forced to pay increasing taxes without an apparent solution.
So if you want to call me a racist, go ahead. I'll reply quite simply to that one - fuck off.
If you don't want to be called a racist then maybe look in the mirror.
Judging people by the colour of their skin, treating people differently based on the colour of their skin, making remarks like "the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here" etc . . . there's a word for that and it begins with "r" and ends with "acism".
As for your garbage about the WWC who can't get a job, we have full employment. Anyone who can't get a job hasn't got one as they don't want one, not that they can't get one.
Dear lord, you are ignorant.
It's interesting that you jump to 'colour of skin' when in fact many of the people I've noticed engaged in antisocial behaviour have eastern european accents. And are white.
I'm reporting the facts as they are. Fascinating that you're jumping to skin colour.
The elderly wreckhead with his can of kestrel super, with a distinct London accent, who has panhandled outside my local corner shop for the last decade has been replaced by a dishevelled woman of indeterminate origin who cannot speak a word of English. She just holds her hand out and mutters gibberish - no idea what language she actually speaks.
As I say, the change in London is palpable, and no doubt driven by more recent immigration. Deny it all you like, but shouting racist at anyone you don't like won't change the facts.
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
The only person who died that day was a woman who was randomly shot at by a black police officer poking his gun through a grate and firing into the crowd. He got a commendation for it.
Rosanne Boyland and Kevin Greeson also died that day.
Thanks I hadn’t read about those two, she got crushed in the protest and he had a heart attack, though he might not have taken part in any violence.
Maybe you should keep reading more about January 6 and other events leading up to it.
So there’s a shed of evidence that shows that the actual attempts to break into the building were planned, and planned by Trump? It was a protest that got out of hand, like many throughout history. If there was any genuine attempt to take power you would have thought the most well armed population in the world would have bothered to bring some firearms with them.
They got carried away, did not really expect to overwhelm the security, entirely unplanned and without any kind of game plan once there.
Trump will have his day in court over this, eventually. You won’t enjoy it.
For January 6th? You just cannot get past the bit where he said to protest peacefully and patriotically. You can’t just skip over it and pretend he never said it.
Lol. Eventually, when it was too late and after many had pleaded with him to say something.
UK pop rose last year by about 650k. All of which was inward migration. This underpins growth and goes a long way to cure UK demographic problems but this large migration number is the driver of Reform. If LOTO Badenoch finds a way to peel off those votes she has a chance. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
It is ridiculous that we are relying on migration to cure our demographic problems. If it wasn't for immigration the country would be in an even greater mess.
If you look at GDP per capita, something has gone rather wrong since 2008 -
Population has grown from about 62.5m to 69.25m since 2008, and yet GDP per capita has remained stubbornly the same.
Which means we need to find extra housing, school places, doctors, dentists, roads, railways, prisons and all the rest for the extra 7m people (largely driven by immigration since 2008), which, given nobody these days can rent a house, get a GP's appointment, or buy a standard class ticket from London to Manchester at peak times without taking out a second mortgage, we have patently failed to do.
There is potentially a case to be made that we would be even worse off, demographically, without inward immigration. But the opposite is also true: young couples might have more children if they could afford to move out of their tiny (often rented) flats and into family homes.
Ultimately, as the population grows, our flatlining GDP per capita suggests that more and more people are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and importantly, do not feel any better off than they were 16 years ago.
We are gathering the ingredients for the perfect brew for a hard/far right government in about 2028/9
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the UK's goose is cooked.
This year I've had friends get mugged in broad daylight, seen spice addicts passed out in the street, seen people literally shitting in doorways. Graffiti and smashed windows suddenly everywhere. Shoplifters just walking in, taking what they like and walking out with impunity.
And that's London. The last place in the UK where it seems possible to have a career and earn a decent salary. That's to say nothing of the left behind places like Hartelpool that rioted over Summer. Places where you're born and die on the same sinkhole estate, while new arrivals on dinghies get put up in the Holiday Inn.
And Reeves wants to charge me 39% on my investments to live in this blissful utopia?
As you said earlier it feels like the country is in a bit of a death spiral at the moment, higher tax, more people leave, lower growth, even more people leave, etc.
It's worth remembering that even though Labour are awful a lot of this decline happened on the Tories watch. So as you say, when Labour make the spiral even worse, easy to see people turning to the hard right.
Social mobility is likely a lot easier in Hartlepool than London because of housing affordability.
Similarly I walked past the Wath Holiday Inn a few weeks before one of the riots took place there - the whole area is much improved with new housing estates, nature reserves, leisure facilities and trendy bars.
I'm curious as to what you term by 'a career and decent salary' actually is. £50k, £75k, £100k ?
I do enjoy reading about the urban squalor though as it allows me to appreciate the comfortable affluence I, and most of the people I know, have.
I'm sure these lads will tell you what a hotbed of social mobility and opportunity Hartlepool is.
What matters is whether the people who want to improve their socioeconomic status by improving their skillset and working hard can do so.
Because this sort of rioting always breaks out in places that are hotbeds of social mobility?
No, it breaks out where there are scum, likely drunken scum, who want a fight.
Its why there are disturbances on weekend evenings in town centres.
Given that you were just bewailing that London is full of muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters you must think that London is fast undergoing societal collapse.
Or are those attributes of 'the last place where you can get a career and decent salary' ?
I'd rather have the affordable housing even if it does mean a riot a few miles away every few years.
Because without affordable housing you don't have socioeconomic mobility, you have wage slavery.
There are two separate factors at play here, the doorway shitters and shoplifters of London feel tied to more recent immigration (the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here). See also the tent cities springing up around Park Lane. Not limited to London - See the numerous illegal immigrants busted in Bristol yesterday, living in a caravan city by the side of a motorway -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyl65knxzxo
Then you have the left behind WWC types in the video I linked to previously. No job, no aspiration, no hope. As Foxy points out, sure housing is cheap, but opportunities for social mobility are zero. You live and die on benefits in the same sink estate.
The situation is horrible for both those groups of people. And speaks volumes about the UK's decline.
Then you have people like me who are educated and well off. But being asked to fund increasing amounts for benefits and so on, without seeing a corresponding rise in growth or even basic law and order. As per the watch thread the other day, you can't even wear anything nice on the streets without fear of being mugged. And, as I say, I'm a decently sized bloke, not a smallish woman who is at risk of far worse.
Low level crime like graffiti, broken windows, shoplifting, street shitting, drug dealing etc is a blight that affects us all.
But as oft pointed out, the richest 1% or so make up 30% of the UK's income tax take. People like Leon are rightfully suggesting that maybe either clean it up or the richest people in our society will justifiably think maybe they can get better value for money elsewhere?
I personally have zero faith that if I pay more in tax, I will enjoy a better standard of living. And that is the problem. If Reeves told me CGT was going up to 39% tomorrow but also I'd live in a clean and orderly place where my mates don't have to meet their girlfriends at the tube and walk them home after dark, I'd consider it. Instead I'm being asked to pay ever more taxes against a backdrop of continual decay.
Which brings us back to Leon's original point, the doom spiral. Things get worse, more rich and educated people leave. Tax take declines, the economy falters. So even more people with the ability to get out leave.
It isn't just London that feels trapped in that doom spiral, it's the entire country. As I say, it largely happened on the Tories watch. I'm just not convinced Labour have the answer to it. Doubling my taxes to pay the train drivers on 70k a bit more isn't going to stop the low level decay. And Labour have absolutely no recipe for growth.
Sorry but that all reads like a conspiratorialist racist diatribe unmoored from reality. Maybe unplug from Twitter a bit and come back to earth.
There's things wrong with this country that need fixing, that too many are trapped working to pay rent and can't get an affordable home of their own being number one of them, but that's not remotely matching this third world bullshit you're spouting.
No jobs or aspirations? We have almost record low unemployment in this country.
Can't go out without being mugged? Don't know what its like where you are but I'll quite comfortably walk the streets with my phone out with no big fear of being mugged.
The country is not in a doom spiral. If you think it is, it says more about you than it does the country.
I take umbrage at being called a racist.
I pointed out that in London there seem to be more problems with recent immigrants, which you might expect in an area with... more recent immigrants. But also note similar problems occur in high poverty areas with WWC types. And note my sympathy for both groups, but also my despair at being forced to pay increasing taxes without an apparent solution.
So if you want to call me a racist, go ahead. I'll reply quite simply to that one - fuck off.
If you don't want to be called a racist then maybe look in the mirror.
Judging people by the colour of their skin, treating people differently based on the colour of their skin, making remarks like "the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here" etc . . . there's a word for that and it begins with "r" and ends with "acism".
As for your garbage about the WWC who can't get a job, we have full employment. Anyone who can't get a job hasn't got one as they don't want one, not that they can't get one.
Dear lord, you are ignorant.
It's interesting that you jump to 'colour of skin' when in fact many of the people I've noticed engaged in antisocial behaviour have eastern european accents. And are white.
I'm reporting the facts as they are. Fascinating that you're jumping to skin colour.
The elderly wreckhead with his can of kestrel super, with a distinct London accent, who has panhandled outside my local corner shop for the last decade has been replaced by a dishevelled woman of indeterminate origin who cannot speak a word of English. She just holds her hand out and mutters gibberish - no idea what language she actually speaks.
As I say, the change in London is palpable, and no doubt driven by more recent immigration. Deny it all you like, but shouting racist at anyone you don't like won't change the facts.
No you're not reporting the facts as they are, that's the point.
The facts as they are is that crime and unemployment are down, but that's not your version of "facts" which are divorced from reality.
And I didn't jump on the racist remarks without you first making comments about people who 'don't look like they were born in this country'.
Tell me please, in a non-racist manner, what to you someone who was born in this country looks like?
UK pop rose last year by about 650k. All of which was inward migration. This underpins growth and goes a long way to cure UK demographic problems but this large migration number is the driver of Reform. If LOTO Badenoch finds a way to peel off those votes she has a chance. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
It is ridiculous that we are relying on migration to cure our demographic problems. If it wasn't for immigration the country would be in an even greater mess.
If you look at GDP per capita, something has gone rather wrong since 2008 -
Population has grown from about 62.5m to 69.25m since 2008, and yet GDP per capita has remained stubbornly the same.
Which means we need to find extra housing, school places, doctors, dentists, roads, railways, prisons and all the rest for the extra 7m people (largely driven by immigration since 2008), which, given nobody these days can rent a house, get a GP's appointment, or buy a standard class ticket from London to Manchester at peak times without taking out a second mortgage, we have patently failed to do.
There is potentially a case to be made that we would be even worse off, demographically, without inward immigration. But the opposite is also true: young couples might have more children if they could afford to move out of their tiny (often rented) flats and into family homes.
Ultimately, as the population grows, our flatlining GDP per capita suggests that more and more people are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and importantly, do not feel any better off than they were 16 years ago.
We are gathering the ingredients for the perfect brew for a hard/far right government in about 2028/9
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the UK's goose is cooked.
This year I've had friends get mugged in broad daylight, seen spice addicts passed out in the street, seen people literally shitting in doorways. Graffiti and smashed windows suddenly everywhere. Shoplifters just walking in, taking what they like and walking out with impunity.
And that's London. The last place in the UK where it seems possible to have a career and earn a decent salary. That's to say nothing of the left behind places like Hartelpool that rioted over Summer. Places where you're born and die on the same sinkhole estate, while new arrivals on dinghies get put up in the Holiday Inn.
And Reeves wants to charge me 39% on my investments to live in this blissful utopia?
As you said earlier it feels like the country is in a bit of a death spiral at the moment, higher tax, more people leave, lower growth, even more people leave, etc.
It's worth remembering that even though Labour are awful a lot of this decline happened on the Tories watch. So as you say, when Labour make the spiral even worse, easy to see people turning to the hard right.
Social mobility is likely a lot easier in Hartlepool than London because of housing affordability.
Similarly I walked past the Wath Holiday Inn a few weeks before one of the riots took place there - the whole area is much improved with new housing estates, nature reserves, leisure facilities and trendy bars.
I'm curious as to what you term by 'a career and decent salary' actually is. £50k, £75k, £100k ?
I do enjoy reading about the urban squalor though as it allows me to appreciate the comfortable affluence I, and most of the people I know, have.
I'm sure these lads will tell you what a hotbed of social mobility and opportunity Hartlepool is.
What matters is whether the people who want to improve their socioeconomic status by improving their skillset and working hard can do so.
Because this sort of rioting always breaks out in places that are hotbeds of social mobility?
No, it breaks out where there are scum, likely drunken scum, who want a fight.
Its why there are disturbances on weekend evenings in town centres.
Given that you were just bewailing that London is full of muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters you must think that London is fast undergoing societal collapse.
Or are those attributes of 'the last place where you can get a career and decent salary' ?
I'd rather have the affordable housing even if it does mean a riot a few miles away every few years.
Because without affordable housing you don't have socioeconomic mobility, you have wage slavery.
There are two separate factors at play here, the doorway shitters and shoplifters of London feel tied to more recent immigration (the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here). See also the tent cities springing up around Park Lane. Not limited to London - See the numerous illegal immigrants busted in Bristol yesterday, living in a caravan city by the side of a motorway -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyl65knxzxo
Then you have the left behind WWC types in the video I linked to previously. No job, no aspiration, no hope. As Foxy points out, sure housing is cheap, but opportunities for social mobility are zero. You live and die on benefits in the same sink estate.
The situation is horrible for both those groups of people. And speaks volumes about the UK's decline.
Then you have people like me who are educated and well off. But being asked to fund increasing amounts for benefits and so on, without seeing a corresponding rise in growth or even basic law and order. As per the watch thread the other day, you can't even wear anything nice on the streets without fear of being mugged. And, as I say, I'm a decently sized bloke, not a smallish woman who is at risk of far worse.
Low level crime like graffiti, broken windows, shoplifting, street shitting, drug dealing etc is a blight that affects us all.
But as oft pointed out, the richest 1% or so make up 30% of the UK's income tax take. People like Leon are rightfully suggesting that maybe either clean it up or the richest people in our society will justifiably think maybe they can get better value for money elsewhere?
I personally have zero faith that if I pay more in tax, I will enjoy a better standard of living. And that is the problem. If Reeves told me CGT was going up to 39% tomorrow but also I'd live in a clean and orderly place where my mates don't have to meet their girlfriends at the tube and walk them home after dark, I'd consider it. Instead I'm being asked to pay ever more taxes against a backdrop of continual decay.
Which brings us back to Leon's original point, the doom spiral. Things get worse, more rich and educated people leave. Tax take declines, the economy falters. So even more people with the ability to get out leave.
It isn't just London that feels trapped in that doom spiral, it's the entire country. As I say, it largely happened on the Tories watch. I'm just not convinced Labour have the answer to it. Doubling my taxes to pay the train drivers on 70k a bit more isn't going to stop the low level decay. And Labour have absolutely no recipe for growth.
Sorry but that all reads like a conspiratorialist racist diatribe unmoored from reality. Maybe unplug from Twitter a bit and come back to earth.
There's things wrong with this country that need fixing, that too many are trapped working to pay rent and can't get an affordable home of their own being number one of them, but that's not remotely matching this third world bullshit you're spouting.
No jobs or aspirations? We have almost record low unemployment in this country.
Can't go out without being mugged? Don't know what its like where you are but I'll quite comfortably walk the streets with my phone out with no big fear of being mugged.
The country is not in a doom spiral. If you think it is, it says more about you than it does the country.
I take umbrage at being called a racist.
I pointed out that in London there seem to be more problems with recent immigrants, which you might expect in an area with... more recent immigrants. But also note similar problems occur in high poverty areas with WWC types. And note my sympathy for both groups, but also my despair at being forced to pay increasing taxes without an apparent solution.
So if you want to call me a racist, go ahead. I'll reply quite simply to that one - fuck off.
You seem to be sympathetic to scum who prefer crime to work.
But hostile to train drivers who have got themselves a skillset and work.
Ah, the deserving vs undeserving poor. Didn't realise I'd accidentally wandered into a time portal and returned to Victorian times.
Here I have you telling me on one side that I'm sympathetic to 'scum', while I have Barty on the other side telling me I'm a horrible ranting racist.
Maybe I'm just someone who would like to see a better society with more opportunities for all, but remain unconvinced that successive governments increasing the tax burden on the richest in society hasn't actually had that effect?
The Thatcherite "on yer bike, anyone with enough ambition can become a millionaire" is pure nonsense.
The best way to imagine it is like lottery tickets. If you're born on a sink estate in Hartlepool or Middlesbrough, you might have one lottery ticket. In the sense of the amount of opportunity you get to get out of that environment, become skilled, earn a high wage, escape the poverty you were born into. Whereas if you're a nice, well to do middle class type like myself, you were born with a thousand lottery tickets. Educated parents to help you learn, to give you the aspiration to go to uni, get you your first internship, etc. And if you're born mega rich, congratulations. You get a million lottery tickets. Start as many businesses as you like, you can't go bust, so keep playing the game until you win.
My point is that I neither feel as if my tax dollars are being translated into more lottery tickets for the poor and left behind, nor do I feel as if the tax increases of the last decade are resulting in a better standard of living for me - less crime, fewer doorway shitters, and so on. So there's no quid pro quo either.
Which leads us again to Leon's doom spiral point. If things get worse, the people paying the lion's share of the tax leave, which means that there's less tax money to go around, so things get even worse, so more people leave, etc.
You may not recognise the doom spiral, but many wealthy people do. Which is why the UK is on course to lose more millionaires by 2028 than any other country in the world other than China.
Of course there are differences of deserving and undeserving between people.
Not only for the poor but for every socioeconomic demographic.
To deny this is to deny that people have any agency over their own lives.
And yes, your background and upbringing is a major factor in your life opportunities.
Something which can be, and is, ameliorated by the effects of public services and a welfare state.
But you seem to be complaining about both the deprivation of the poor and having to pay any taxes to help those less fortunate than yourself.
Perhaps, if instead of this whining negativity, you suggested something more constructive you might get a more sympathetic response.
Incidentally, if you don't like your area being filled with 'muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters' you could try moving somewhere else.
There are endless places in this country without such problems - as evidenced by the anecdotes of everyone else.
Your posting only Trump biased polls is really pissing me off.
Trump may well win, but based on your input it appears more of a foregone conclusion than reality.
William was funny once. These days he is just a garden variety Trumpian shill.
He always has been, see 2016.
It's his about turn over the EU that has changed.
Oh indeed, but an amusing Trumpian. Now it’s just cherry-picked dubious polling. Not great on a betting site.
1. He's smarter than you, and occasionally rather amusing
2. This site has a RIDICULOUS anti-Trump bias. I don't just mean most here want Trump to lose, I mean people consistently and only post polls, news, insights, opinions - that favour Harris and the Dems and, even more, show what an abject eejit Trump is and how he is BOUND to lose, because of this that and the other and blah blah bleurgh
PB is ideally neutral, in toto, so people can draw conclusions and make bets. If @williamglenn is boosting Trump then he is providing a salutary counter-service to us all
Trump is a perfect arsehole, he should be in an orange suit. A real wrong un.
He will be in an orange suit. In an earlier age he would have been up for breaking rocks until he expired.
Or for execution after a trial for treason, if the USA legal system could have got itself out of a twist.
What on earth did he do that was treasonous ?
Thanks for the reply.
I'd identify at least four areas I would regard as treasonous to the USA:
1- The Jan 6 insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Election, and the violence Trump unleashed. 2 - His attempts to manipulate the 2020 Election result by corrupting the electoral system. 3 - All the things around illegal retention of Classified documents, including deceiving the FBI when they eventually came to recover them, and what he did with them / the plans he had to do with them. 4 - His financial and other involvement with foreign Governments whilst in office as President.
I could perhaps add 5, his corrupting of the Supreme Court, but that is not really out yet,
He's facing charges on all of these, except I think 4. I've lost count of how many charges he now faces.
1) if it was black people protesting doing exactly the same thing you would have had a CNN reporter declaring it “mostly peaceful”.
That's just blatant racism.
Trying to remember a crowd of black people burst into the US Congress, leading to multiple deaths, threatening to hang the Vice President, and CNN called it mostly peaceful. Drawing a blank.
I assume your Klan buddies have a list of times it happened, but in my reality it hasn't.
The only person who died that day was a woman who was randomly shot at by a black police officer poking his gun through a grate and firing into the crowd. He got a commendation for it.
Rosanne Boyland and Kevin Greeson also died that day.
Thanks I hadn’t read about those two, she got crushed in the protest and he had a heart attack, though he might not have taken part in any violence.
Maybe you should keep reading more about January 6 and other events leading up to it.
So there’s a shed of evidence that shows that the actual attempts to break into the building were planned, and planned by Trump? It was a protest that got out of hand, like many throughout history. If there was any genuine attempt to take power you would have thought the most well armed population in the world would have bothered to bring some firearms with them.
They got carried away, did not really expect to overwhelm the security, entirely unplanned and without any kind of game plan once there.
Trump will have his day in court over this, eventually. You won’t enjoy it.
For January 6th? You just cannot get past the bit where he said to protest peacefully and patriotically. You can’t just skip over it and pretend he never said it.
Lol. Eventually, when it was too late and after many had pleaded with him to say something.
But again in your eyes that is ok then
Didn’t he say those things at the speech he gave before the march?
UK pop rose last year by about 650k. All of which was inward migration. This underpins growth and goes a long way to cure UK demographic problems but this large migration number is the driver of Reform. If LOTO Badenoch finds a way to peel off those votes she has a chance. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
It is ridiculous that we are relying on migration to cure our demographic problems. If it wasn't for immigration the country would be in an even greater mess.
If you look at GDP per capita, something has gone rather wrong since 2008 -
Population has grown from about 62.5m to 69.25m since 2008, and yet GDP per capita has remained stubbornly the same.
Which means we need to find extra housing, school places, doctors, dentists, roads, railways, prisons and all the rest for the extra 7m people (largely driven by immigration since 2008), which, given nobody these days can rent a house, get a GP's appointment, or buy a standard class ticket from London to Manchester at peak times without taking out a second mortgage, we have patently failed to do.
There is potentially a case to be made that we would be even worse off, demographically, without inward immigration. But the opposite is also true: young couples might have more children if they could afford to move out of their tiny (often rented) flats and into family homes.
Ultimately, as the population grows, our flatlining GDP per capita suggests that more and more people are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and importantly, do not feel any better off than they were 16 years ago.
We are gathering the ingredients for the perfect brew for a hard/far right government in about 2028/9
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the UK's goose is cooked.
This year I've had friends get mugged in broad daylight, seen spice addicts passed out in the street, seen people literally shitting in doorways. Graffiti and smashed windows suddenly everywhere. Shoplifters just walking in, taking what they like and walking out with impunity.
And that's London. The last place in the UK where it seems possible to have a career and earn a decent salary. That's to say nothing of the left behind places like Hartelpool that rioted over Summer. Places where you're born and die on the same sinkhole estate, while new arrivals on dinghies get put up in the Holiday Inn.
And Reeves wants to charge me 39% on my investments to live in this blissful utopia?
As you said earlier it feels like the country is in a bit of a death spiral at the moment, higher tax, more people leave, lower growth, even more people leave, etc.
It's worth remembering that even though Labour are awful a lot of this decline happened on the Tories watch. So as you say, when Labour make the spiral even worse, easy to see people turning to the hard right.
Social mobility is likely a lot easier in Hartlepool than London because of housing affordability.
Similarly I walked past the Wath Holiday Inn a few weeks before one of the riots took place there - the whole area is much improved with new housing estates, nature reserves, leisure facilities and trendy bars.
I'm curious as to what you term by 'a career and decent salary' actually is. £50k, £75k, £100k ?
I do enjoy reading about the urban squalor though as it allows me to appreciate the comfortable affluence I, and most of the people I know, have.
I'm sure these lads will tell you what a hotbed of social mobility and opportunity Hartlepool is.
What matters is whether the people who want to improve their socioeconomic status by improving their skillset and working hard can do so.
Because this sort of rioting always breaks out in places that are hotbeds of social mobility?
No, it breaks out where there are scum, likely drunken scum, who want a fight.
Its why there are disturbances on weekend evenings in town centres.
Given that you were just bewailing that London is full of muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters you must think that London is fast undergoing societal collapse.
Or are those attributes of 'the last place where you can get a career and decent salary' ?
I'd rather have the affordable housing even if it does mean a riot a few miles away every few years.
Because without affordable housing you don't have socioeconomic mobility, you have wage slavery.
There are two separate factors at play here, the doorway shitters and shoplifters of London feel tied to more recent immigration (the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here). See also the tent cities springing up around Park Lane. Not limited to London - See the numerous illegal immigrants busted in Bristol yesterday, living in a caravan city by the side of a motorway -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyl65knxzxo
Then you have the left behind WWC types in the video I linked to previously. No job, no aspiration, no hope. As Foxy points out, sure housing is cheap, but opportunities for social mobility are zero. You live and die on benefits in the same sink estate.
The situation is horrible for both those groups of people. And speaks volumes about the UK's decline.
Then you have people like me who are educated and well off. But being asked to fund increasing amounts for benefits and so on, without seeing a corresponding rise in growth or even basic law and order. As per the watch thread the other day, you can't even wear anything nice on the streets without fear of being mugged. And, as I say, I'm a decently sized bloke, not a smallish woman who is at risk of far worse.
Low level crime like graffiti, broken windows, shoplifting, street shitting, drug dealing etc is a blight that affects us all.
But as oft pointed out, the richest 1% or so make up 30% of the UK's income tax take. People like Leon are rightfully suggesting that maybe either clean it up or the richest people in our society will justifiably think maybe they can get better value for money elsewhere?
I personally have zero faith that if I pay more in tax, I will enjoy a better standard of living. And that is the problem. If Reeves told me CGT was going up to 39% tomorrow but also I'd live in a clean and orderly place where my mates don't have to meet their girlfriends at the tube and walk them home after dark, I'd consider it. Instead I'm being asked to pay ever more taxes against a backdrop of continual decay.
Which brings us back to Leon's original point, the doom spiral. Things get worse, more rich and educated people leave. Tax take declines, the economy falters. So even more people with the ability to get out leave.
It isn't just London that feels trapped in that doom spiral, it's the entire country. As I say, it largely happened on the Tories watch. I'm just not convinced Labour have the answer to it. Doubling my taxes to pay the train drivers on 70k a bit more isn't going to stop the low level decay. And Labour have absolutely no recipe for growth.
Sorry but that all reads like a conspiratorialist racist diatribe unmoored from reality. Maybe unplug from Twitter a bit and come back to earth.
There's things wrong with this country that need fixing, that too many are trapped working to pay rent and can't get an affordable home of their own being number one of them, but that's not remotely matching this third world bullshit you're spouting.
No jobs or aspirations? We have almost record low unemployment in this country.
Can't go out without being mugged? Don't know what its like where you are but I'll quite comfortably walk the streets with my phone out with no big fear of being mugged.
The country is not in a doom spiral. If you think it is, it says more about you than it does the country.
I take umbrage at being called a racist.
I pointed out that in London there seem to be more problems with recent immigrants, which you might expect in an area with... more recent immigrants. But also note similar problems occur in high poverty areas with WWC types. And note my sympathy for both groups, but also my despair at being forced to pay increasing taxes without an apparent solution.
So if you want to call me a racist, go ahead. I'll reply quite simply to that one - fuck off.
You seem to be sympathetic to scum who prefer crime to work.
But hostile to train drivers who have got themselves a skillset and work.
Ah, the deserving vs undeserving poor. Didn't realise I'd accidentally wandered into a time portal and returned to Victorian times.
Here I have you telling me on one side that I'm sympathetic to 'scum', while I have Barty on the other side telling me I'm a horrible ranting racist.
Maybe I'm just someone who would like to see a better society with more opportunities for all, but remain unconvinced that successive governments increasing the tax burden on the richest in society hasn't actually had that effect?
The Thatcherite "on yer bike, anyone with enough ambition can become a millionaire" is pure nonsense.
The best way to imagine it is like lottery tickets. If you're born on a sink estate in Hartlepool or Middlesbrough, you might have one lottery ticket. In the sense of the amount of opportunity you get to get out of that environment, become skilled, earn a high wage, escape the poverty you were born into. Whereas if you're a nice, well to do middle class type like myself, you were born with a thousand lottery tickets. Educated parents to help you learn, to give you the aspiration to go to uni, get you your first internship, etc. And if you're born mega rich, congratulations. You get a million lottery tickets. Start as many businesses as you like, you can't go bust, so keep playing the game until you win.
My point is that I neither feel as if my tax dollars are being translated into more lottery tickets for the poor and left behind, nor do I feel as if the tax increases of the last decade are resulting in a better standard of living for me - less crime, fewer doorway shitters, and so on. So there's no quid pro quo either.
Which leads us again to Leon's doom spiral point. If things get worse, the people paying the lion's share of the tax leave, which means that there's less tax money to go around, so things get even worse, so more people leave, etc.
You may not recognise the doom spiral, but many wealthy people do. Which is why the UK is on course to lose more millionaires by 2028 than any other country in the world other than China.
Of course there are differences of deserving and undeserving between people.
Not only for the poor but for every socioeconomic demographic.
To deny this is to deny that people have any agency over their own lives.
And yes, your background and upbringing is a major factor in your life opportunities.
Something which can be, and is, ameliorated by the effects of public services and a welfare state.
But you seem to be complaining about both the deprivation of the poor and having to pay any taxes to help those less fortunate than yourself.
Perhaps, if instead of this whining negativity, you suggested something more constructive you might get a more sympathetic response.
Incidentally, if you don't like your area being filled with 'muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters' you could try moving somewhere else.
There are endless places in this country without such problems - as evidenced by the anecdotes of everyone else.
He doesn't just bemoan paying any taxes to help the less fortunate, he bemoans those who are working getting paid a better salary for going to work.
"It is hard to exaggerate the depth of state failure in this country. When some of the criminals released early due to prison overcrowding are returned to custody because they pose a risk to public safety, then released again by mistake, a functioning justice system has ceased to exist. Britain’s inability to make a significant military response to war in the Middle East, noted by the former Tory defence minister Ben Wallace, confirms that national defence has been gravely compromised. Building the big society, in practice, meant gutting the state. Much of the responsibility for this situation must be assigned to David Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity programme, which Labour is continuing. But the problem, in the end, is not underfunding."
UK pop rose last year by about 650k. All of which was inward migration. This underpins growth and goes a long way to cure UK demographic problems but this large migration number is the driver of Reform. If LOTO Badenoch finds a way to peel off those votes she has a chance. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
It is ridiculous that we are relying on migration to cure our demographic problems. If it wasn't for immigration the country would be in an even greater mess.
If you look at GDP per capita, something has gone rather wrong since 2008 -
Population has grown from about 62.5m to 69.25m since 2008, and yet GDP per capita has remained stubbornly the same.
Which means we need to find extra housing, school places, doctors, dentists, roads, railways, prisons and all the rest for the extra 7m people (largely driven by immigration since 2008), which, given nobody these days can rent a house, get a GP's appointment, or buy a standard class ticket from London to Manchester at peak times without taking out a second mortgage, we have patently failed to do.
There is potentially a case to be made that we would be even worse off, demographically, without inward immigration. But the opposite is also true: young couples might have more children if they could afford to move out of their tiny (often rented) flats and into family homes.
Ultimately, as the population grows, our flatlining GDP per capita suggests that more and more people are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and importantly, do not feel any better off than they were 16 years ago.
We are gathering the ingredients for the perfect brew for a hard/far right government in about 2028/9
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the UK's goose is cooked.
This year I've had friends get mugged in broad daylight, seen spice addicts passed out in the street, seen people literally shitting in doorways. Graffiti and smashed windows suddenly everywhere. Shoplifters just walking in, taking what they like and walking out with impunity.
And that's London. The last place in the UK where it seems possible to have a career and earn a decent salary. That's to say nothing of the left behind places like Hartelpool that rioted over Summer. Places where you're born and die on the same sinkhole estate, while new arrivals on dinghies get put up in the Holiday Inn.
And Reeves wants to charge me 39% on my investments to live in this blissful utopia?
As you said earlier it feels like the country is in a bit of a death spiral at the moment, higher tax, more people leave, lower growth, even more people leave, etc.
It's worth remembering that even though Labour are awful a lot of this decline happened on the Tories watch. So as you say, when Labour make the spiral even worse, easy to see people turning to the hard right.
Social mobility is likely a lot easier in Hartlepool than London because of housing affordability.
Similarly I walked past the Wath Holiday Inn a few weeks before one of the riots took place there - the whole area is much improved with new housing estates, nature reserves, leisure facilities and trendy bars.
I'm curious as to what you term by 'a career and decent salary' actually is. £50k, £75k, £100k ?
I do enjoy reading about the urban squalor though as it allows me to appreciate the comfortable affluence I, and most of the people I know, have.
I'm sure these lads will tell you what a hotbed of social mobility and opportunity Hartlepool is.
What matters is whether the people who want to improve their socioeconomic status by improving their skillset and working hard can do so.
Because this sort of rioting always breaks out in places that are hotbeds of social mobility?
No, it breaks out where there are scum, likely drunken scum, who want a fight.
Its why there are disturbances on weekend evenings in town centres.
Given that you were just bewailing that London is full of muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters you must think that London is fast undergoing societal collapse.
Or are those attributes of 'the last place where you can get a career and decent salary' ?
I'd rather have the affordable housing even if it does mean a riot a few miles away every few years.
Because without affordable housing you don't have socioeconomic mobility, you have wage slavery.
There are two separate factors at play here, the doorway shitters and shoplifters of London feel tied to more recent immigration (the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here). See also the tent cities springing up around Park Lane. Not limited to London - See the numerous illegal immigrants busted in Bristol yesterday, living in a caravan city by the side of a motorway -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyl65knxzxo
Then you have the left behind WWC types in the video I linked to previously. No job, no aspiration, no hope. As Foxy points out, sure housing is cheap, but opportunities for social mobility are zero. You live and die on benefits in the same sink estate.
The situation is horrible for both those groups of people. And speaks volumes about the UK's decline.
Then you have people like me who are educated and well off. But being asked to fund increasing amounts for benefits and so on, without seeing a corresponding rise in growth or even basic law and order. As per the watch thread the other day, you can't even wear anything nice on the streets without fear of being mugged. And, as I say, I'm a decently sized bloke, not a smallish woman who is at risk of far worse.
Low level crime like graffiti, broken windows, shoplifting, street shitting, drug dealing etc is a blight that affects us all.
But as oft pointed out, the richest 1% or so make up 30% of the UK's income tax take. People like Leon are rightfully suggesting that maybe either clean it up or the richest people in our society will justifiably think maybe they can get better value for money elsewhere?
I personally have zero faith that if I pay more in tax, I will enjoy a better standard of living. And that is the problem. If Reeves told me CGT was going up to 39% tomorrow but also I'd live in a clean and orderly place where my mates don't have to meet their girlfriends at the tube and walk them home after dark, I'd consider it. Instead I'm being asked to pay ever more taxes against a backdrop of continual decay.
Which brings us back to Leon's original point, the doom spiral. Things get worse, more rich and educated people leave. Tax take declines, the economy falters. So even more people with the ability to get out leave.
It isn't just London that feels trapped in that doom spiral, it's the entire country. As I say, it largely happened on the Tories watch. I'm just not convinced Labour have the answer to it. Doubling my taxes to pay the train drivers on 70k a bit more isn't going to stop the low level decay. And Labour have absolutely no recipe for growth.
Sorry but that all reads like a conspiratorialist racist diatribe unmoored from reality. Maybe unplug from Twitter a bit and come back to earth.
There's things wrong with this country that need fixing, that too many are trapped working to pay rent and can't get an affordable home of their own being number one of them, but that's not remotely matching this third world bullshit you're spouting.
No jobs or aspirations? We have almost record low unemployment in this country.
Can't go out without being mugged? Don't know what its like where you are but I'll quite comfortably walk the streets with my phone out with no big fear of being mugged.
The country is not in a doom spiral. If you think it is, it says more about you than it does the country.
I take umbrage at being called a racist.
I pointed out that in London there seem to be more problems with recent immigrants, which you might expect in an area with... more recent immigrants. But also note similar problems occur in high poverty areas with WWC types. And note my sympathy for both groups, but also my despair at being forced to pay increasing taxes without an apparent solution.
So if you want to call me a racist, go ahead. I'll reply quite simply to that one - fuck off.
If you don't want to be called a racist then maybe look in the mirror.
Judging people by the colour of their skin, treating people differently based on the colour of their skin, making remarks like "the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here" etc . . . there's a word for that and it begins with "r" and ends with "acism".
As for your garbage about the WWC who can't get a job, we have full employment. Anyone who can't get a job hasn't got one as they don't want one, not that they can't get one.
Dear lord, you are ignorant.
It's interesting that you jump to 'colour of skin' when in fact many of the people I've noticed engaged in antisocial behaviour have eastern european accents. And are white.
I'm reporting the facts as they are. Fascinating that you're jumping to skin colour.
The elderly wreckhead with his can of kestrel super, with a distinct London accent, who has panhandled outside my local corner shop for the last decade has been replaced by a dishevelled woman of indeterminate origin who cannot speak a word of English. She just holds her hand out and mutters gibberish - no idea what language she actually speaks.
As I say, the change in London is palpable, and no doubt driven by more recent immigration. Deny it all you like, but shouting racist at anyone you don't like won't change the facts.
No you're not reporting the facts as they are, that's the point.
The facts as they are is that crime and unemployment are down, but that's not your version of "facts" which are divorced from reality.
And I didn't jump on the racist remarks without you first making comments about people who 'don't look like they were born in this country'.
Tell me please, in a non-racist manner, what to you someone who was born in this country looks like?
What, you really can't tell?
Imagine British people only. Think of all the social clues that tell you which part of the country a person was born in, or what social class they are. From their shoes to their accent.
Then imagine how that works for non-English people, too.
If someone comes up to me in the street and asks for change in a heavy Nigerian accent, it might give me a good idea that he's not the same as the panhandler who calls me "guv" and the next woman along "luv". Or when I spot two guys dressed as gopniks walking out of the local co-op with a handful of stolen steaks, congratulating each other in heavily accented English.
Our clues to our identity are wrapped up in our attire, speech patterns and cultural norms as much as they are in the colour of our skin.
I'm sorry you're too dense to understand this, and want to scream racist like some pathetic toddler when someone points out that London, with its higher population of low-income migrants, might have a greater problem with crimes committed by said migrants than an area with lower migration.
UK pop rose last year by about 650k. All of which was inward migration. This underpins growth and goes a long way to cure UK demographic problems but this large migration number is the driver of Reform. If LOTO Badenoch finds a way to peel off those votes she has a chance. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
It is ridiculous that we are relying on migration to cure our demographic problems. If it wasn't for immigration the country would be in an even greater mess.
If you look at GDP per capita, something has gone rather wrong since 2008 -
Population has grown from about 62.5m to 69.25m since 2008, and yet GDP per capita has remained stubbornly the same.
Which means we need to find extra housing, school places, doctors, dentists, roads, railways, prisons and all the rest for the extra 7m people (largely driven by immigration since 2008), which, given nobody these days can rent a house, get a GP's appointment, or buy a standard class ticket from London to Manchester at peak times without taking out a second mortgage, we have patently failed to do.
There is potentially a case to be made that we would be even worse off, demographically, without inward immigration. But the opposite is also true: young couples might have more children if they could afford to move out of their tiny (often rented) flats and into family homes.
Ultimately, as the population grows, our flatlining GDP per capita suggests that more and more people are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and importantly, do not feel any better off than they were 16 years ago.
We are gathering the ingredients for the perfect brew for a hard/far right government in about 2028/9
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the UK's goose is cooked.
This year I've had friends get mugged in broad daylight, seen spice addicts passed out in the street, seen people literally shitting in doorways. Graffiti and smashed windows suddenly everywhere. Shoplifters just walking in, taking what they like and walking out with impunity.
And that's London. The last place in the UK where it seems possible to have a career and earn a decent salary. That's to say nothing of the left behind places like Hartelpool that rioted over Summer. Places where you're born and die on the same sinkhole estate, while new arrivals on dinghies get put up in the Holiday Inn.
And Reeves wants to charge me 39% on my investments to live in this blissful utopia?
As you said earlier it feels like the country is in a bit of a death spiral at the moment, higher tax, more people leave, lower growth, even more people leave, etc.
It's worth remembering that even though Labour are awful a lot of this decline happened on the Tories watch. So as you say, when Labour make the spiral even worse, easy to see people turning to the hard right.
Social mobility is likely a lot easier in Hartlepool than London because of housing affordability.
Similarly I walked past the Wath Holiday Inn a few weeks before one of the riots took place there - the whole area is much improved with new housing estates, nature reserves, leisure facilities and trendy bars.
I'm curious as to what you term by 'a career and decent salary' actually is. £50k, £75k, £100k ?
I do enjoy reading about the urban squalor though as it allows me to appreciate the comfortable affluence I, and most of the people I know, have.
I'm sure these lads will tell you what a hotbed of social mobility and opportunity Hartlepool is.
What matters is whether the people who want to improve their socioeconomic status by improving their skillset and working hard can do so.
Because this sort of rioting always breaks out in places that are hotbeds of social mobility?
No, it breaks out where there are scum, likely drunken scum, who want a fight.
Its why there are disturbances on weekend evenings in town centres.
Given that you were just bewailing that London is full of muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters you must think that London is fast undergoing societal collapse.
Or are those attributes of 'the last place where you can get a career and decent salary' ?
I'd rather have the affordable housing even if it does mean a riot a few miles away every few years.
Because without affordable housing you don't have socioeconomic mobility, you have wage slavery.
There are two separate factors at play here, the doorway shitters and shoplifters of London feel tied to more recent immigration (the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here). See also the tent cities springing up around Park Lane. Not limited to London - See the numerous illegal immigrants busted in Bristol yesterday, living in a caravan city by the side of a motorway -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyl65knxzxo
Then you have the left behind WWC types in the video I linked to previously. No job, no aspiration, no hope. As Foxy points out, sure housing is cheap, but opportunities for social mobility are zero. You live and die on benefits in the same sink estate.
The situation is horrible for both those groups of people. And speaks volumes about the UK's decline.
Then you have people like me who are educated and well off. But being asked to fund increasing amounts for benefits and so on, without seeing a corresponding rise in growth or even basic law and order. As per the watch thread the other day, you can't even wear anything nice on the streets without fear of being mugged. And, as I say, I'm a decently sized bloke, not a smallish woman who is at risk of far worse.
Low level crime like graffiti, broken windows, shoplifting, street shitting, drug dealing etc is a blight that affects us all.
But as oft pointed out, the richest 1% or so make up 30% of the UK's income tax take. People like Leon are rightfully suggesting that maybe either clean it up or the richest people in our society will justifiably think maybe they can get better value for money elsewhere?
I personally have zero faith that if I pay more in tax, I will enjoy a better standard of living. And that is the problem. If Reeves told me CGT was going up to 39% tomorrow but also I'd live in a clean and orderly place where my mates don't have to meet their girlfriends at the tube and walk them home after dark, I'd consider it. Instead I'm being asked to pay ever more taxes against a backdrop of continual decay.
Which brings us back to Leon's original point, the doom spiral. Things get worse, more rich and educated people leave. Tax take declines, the economy falters. So even more people with the ability to get out leave.
It isn't just London that feels trapped in that doom spiral, it's the entire country. As I say, it largely happened on the Tories watch. I'm just not convinced Labour have the answer to it. Doubling my taxes to pay the train drivers on 70k a bit more isn't going to stop the low level decay. And Labour have absolutely no recipe for growth.
Sorry but that all reads like a conspiratorialist racist diatribe unmoored from reality. Maybe unplug from Twitter a bit and come back to earth.
There's things wrong with this country that need fixing, that too many are trapped working to pay rent and can't get an affordable home of their own being number one of them, but that's not remotely matching this third world bullshit you're spouting.
No jobs or aspirations? We have almost record low unemployment in this country.
Can't go out without being mugged? Don't know what its like where you are but I'll quite comfortably walk the streets with my phone out with no big fear of being mugged.
The country is not in a doom spiral. If you think it is, it says more about you than it does the country.
I take umbrage at being called a racist.
I pointed out that in London there seem to be more problems with recent immigrants, which you might expect in an area with... more recent immigrants. But also note similar problems occur in high poverty areas with WWC types. And note my sympathy for both groups, but also my despair at being forced to pay increasing taxes without an apparent solution.
So if you want to call me a racist, go ahead. I'll reply quite simply to that one - fuck off.
If you don't want to be called a racist then maybe look in the mirror.
Judging people by the colour of their skin, treating people differently based on the colour of their skin, making remarks like "the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here" etc . . . there's a word for that and it begins with "r" and ends with "acism".
As for your garbage about the WWC who can't get a job, we have full employment. Anyone who can't get a job hasn't got one as they don't want one, not that they can't get one.
Dear lord, you are ignorant.
It's interesting that you jump to 'colour of skin' when in fact many of the people I've noticed engaged in antisocial behaviour have eastern european accents. And are white.
I'm reporting the facts as they are. Fascinating that you're jumping to skin colour.
The elderly wreckhead with his can of kestrel super, with a distinct London accent, who has panhandled outside my local corner shop for the last decade has been replaced by a dishevelled woman of indeterminate origin who cannot speak a word of English. She just holds her hand out and mutters gibberish - no idea what language she actually speaks.
As I say, the change in London is palpable, and no doubt driven by more recent immigration. Deny it all you like, but shouting racist at anyone you don't like won't change the facts.
No you're not reporting the facts as they are, that's the point.
The facts as they are is that crime and unemployment are down, but that's not your version of "facts" which are divorced from reality.
And I didn't jump on the racist remarks without you first making comments about people who 'don't look like they were born in this country'.
Tell me please, in a non-racist manner, what to you someone who was born in this country looks like?
What, you really can't tell?
Imagine British people only. Think of all the social clues that tell you which part of the country a person was born in, or what social class they are. From their shoes to their accent.
Then imagine how that works for non-English people, too.
If someone comes up to me in the street and asks for change in a heavy Nigerian accent, it might give me a good idea that he's not the same as the panhandler who calls me "guv" and the next woman along "luv". Or when I spot two guys dressed as gopniks walking out of the local co-op with a handful of stolen steaks, congratulating each other in heavily accented English.
Our clues to our identity are wrapped up in our attire, speech patterns and cultural norms as much as they are in the colour of our skin.
I'm sorry you're too dense to understand this, and want to scream racist like some pathetic toddler when someone points out that London, with its higher population of low-income migrants, might have a greater problem with crimes committed by said migrants than an area with lower migration.
As a non-racist, I really can't, no.
And again the facts and figures are that crime and unemployment are down, but you just keep persisting with race-based anecdotes over actual real data.
UK pop rose last year by about 650k. All of which was inward migration. This underpins growth and goes a long way to cure UK demographic problems but this large migration number is the driver of Reform. If LOTO Badenoch finds a way to peel off those votes she has a chance. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
It is ridiculous that we are relying on migration to cure our demographic problems. If it wasn't for immigration the country would be in an even greater mess.
If you look at GDP per capita, something has gone rather wrong since 2008 -
Population has grown from about 62.5m to 69.25m since 2008, and yet GDP per capita has remained stubbornly the same.
Which means we need to find extra housing, school places, doctors, dentists, roads, railways, prisons and all the rest for the extra 7m people (largely driven by immigration since 2008), which, given nobody these days can rent a house, get a GP's appointment, or buy a standard class ticket from London to Manchester at peak times without taking out a second mortgage, we have patently failed to do.
There is potentially a case to be made that we would be even worse off, demographically, without inward immigration. But the opposite is also true: young couples might have more children if they could afford to move out of their tiny (often rented) flats and into family homes.
Ultimately, as the population grows, our flatlining GDP per capita suggests that more and more people are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and importantly, do not feel any better off than they were 16 years ago.
We are gathering the ingredients for the perfect brew for a hard/far right government in about 2028/9
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the UK's goose is cooked.
This year I've had friends get mugged in broad daylight, seen spice addicts passed out in the street, seen people literally shitting in doorways. Graffiti and smashed windows suddenly everywhere. Shoplifters just walking in, taking what they like and walking out with impunity.
And that's London. The last place in the UK where it seems possible to have a career and earn a decent salary. That's to say nothing of the left behind places like Hartelpool that rioted over Summer. Places where you're born and die on the same sinkhole estate, while new arrivals on dinghies get put up in the Holiday Inn.
And Reeves wants to charge me 39% on my investments to live in this blissful utopia?
As you said earlier it feels like the country is in a bit of a death spiral at the moment, higher tax, more people leave, lower growth, even more people leave, etc.
It's worth remembering that even though Labour are awful a lot of this decline happened on the Tories watch. So as you say, when Labour make the spiral even worse, easy to see people turning to the hard right.
Social mobility is likely a lot easier in Hartlepool than London because of housing affordability.
Similarly I walked past the Wath Holiday Inn a few weeks before one of the riots took place there - the whole area is much improved with new housing estates, nature reserves, leisure facilities and trendy bars.
I'm curious as to what you term by 'a career and decent salary' actually is. £50k, £75k, £100k ?
I do enjoy reading about the urban squalor though as it allows me to appreciate the comfortable affluence I, and most of the people I know, have.
I'm sure these lads will tell you what a hotbed of social mobility and opportunity Hartlepool is.
What matters is whether the people who want to improve their socioeconomic status by improving their skillset and working hard can do so.
Because this sort of rioting always breaks out in places that are hotbeds of social mobility?
No, it breaks out where there are scum, likely drunken scum, who want a fight.
Its why there are disturbances on weekend evenings in town centres.
Given that you were just bewailing that London is full of muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters you must think that London is fast undergoing societal collapse.
Or are those attributes of 'the last place where you can get a career and decent salary' ?
I'd rather have the affordable housing even if it does mean a riot a few miles away every few years.
Because without affordable housing you don't have socioeconomic mobility, you have wage slavery.
There are two separate factors at play here, the doorway shitters and shoplifters of London feel tied to more recent immigration (the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here). See also the tent cities springing up around Park Lane. Not limited to London - See the numerous illegal immigrants busted in Bristol yesterday, living in a caravan city by the side of a motorway -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyl65knxzxo
Then you have the left behind WWC types in the video I linked to previously. No job, no aspiration, no hope. As Foxy points out, sure housing is cheap, but opportunities for social mobility are zero. You live and die on benefits in the same sink estate.
The situation is horrible for both those groups of people. And speaks volumes about the UK's decline.
Then you have people like me who are educated and well off. But being asked to fund increasing amounts for benefits and so on, without seeing a corresponding rise in growth or even basic law and order. As per the watch thread the other day, you can't even wear anything nice on the streets without fear of being mugged. And, as I say, I'm a decently sized bloke, not a smallish woman who is at risk of far worse.
Low level crime like graffiti, broken windows, shoplifting, street shitting, drug dealing etc is a blight that affects us all.
But as oft pointed out, the richest 1% or so make up 30% of the UK's income tax take. People like Leon are rightfully suggesting that maybe either clean it up or the richest people in our society will justifiably think maybe they can get better value for money elsewhere?
I personally have zero faith that if I pay more in tax, I will enjoy a better standard of living. And that is the problem. If Reeves told me CGT was going up to 39% tomorrow but also I'd live in a clean and orderly place where my mates don't have to meet their girlfriends at the tube and walk them home after dark, I'd consider it. Instead I'm being asked to pay ever more taxes against a backdrop of continual decay.
Which brings us back to Leon's original point, the doom spiral. Things get worse, more rich and educated people leave. Tax take declines, the economy falters. So even more people with the ability to get out leave.
It isn't just London that feels trapped in that doom spiral, it's the entire country. As I say, it largely happened on the Tories watch. I'm just not convinced Labour have the answer to it. Doubling my taxes to pay the train drivers on 70k a bit more isn't going to stop the low level decay. And Labour have absolutely no recipe for growth.
Sorry but that all reads like a conspiratorialist racist diatribe unmoored from reality. Maybe unplug from Twitter a bit and come back to earth.
There's things wrong with this country that need fixing, that too many are trapped working to pay rent and can't get an affordable home of their own being number one of them, but that's not remotely matching this third world bullshit you're spouting.
No jobs or aspirations? We have almost record low unemployment in this country.
Can't go out without being mugged? Don't know what its like where you are but I'll quite comfortably walk the streets with my phone out with no big fear of being mugged.
The country is not in a doom spiral. If you think it is, it says more about you than it does the country.
I take umbrage at being called a racist.
I pointed out that in London there seem to be more problems with recent immigrants, which you might expect in an area with... more recent immigrants. But also note similar problems occur in high poverty areas with WWC types. And note my sympathy for both groups, but also my despair at being forced to pay increasing taxes without an apparent solution.
So if you want to call me a racist, go ahead. I'll reply quite simply to that one - fuck off.
If you don't want to be called a racist then maybe look in the mirror.
Judging people by the colour of their skin, treating people differently based on the colour of their skin, making remarks like "the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here" etc . . . there's a word for that and it begins with "r" and ends with "acism".
As for your garbage about the WWC who can't get a job, we have full employment. Anyone who can't get a job hasn't got one as they don't want one, not that they can't get one.
Dear lord, you are ignorant.
It's interesting that you jump to 'colour of skin' when in fact many of the people I've noticed engaged in antisocial behaviour have eastern european accents. And are white.
I'm reporting the facts as they are. Fascinating that you're jumping to skin colour.
The elderly wreckhead with his can of kestrel super, with a distinct London accent, who has panhandled outside my local corner shop for the last decade has been replaced by a dishevelled woman of indeterminate origin who cannot speak a word of English. She just holds her hand out and mutters gibberish - no idea what language she actually speaks.
As I say, the change in London is palpable, and no doubt driven by more recent immigration. Deny it all you like, but shouting racist at anyone you don't like won't change the facts.
No you're not reporting the facts as they are, that's the point.
The facts as they are is that crime and unemployment are down, but that's not your version of "facts" which are divorced from reality.
And I didn't jump on the racist remarks without you first making comments about people who 'don't look like they were born in this country'.
Tell me please, in a non-racist manner, what to you someone who was born in this country looks like?
What, you really can't tell?
Imagine British people only. Think of all the social clues that tell you which part of the country a person was born in, or what social class they are. From their shoes to their accent.
Then imagine how that works for non-English people, too.
If someone comes up to me in the street and asks for change in a heavy Nigerian accent, it might give me a good idea that he's not the same as the panhandler who calls me "guv" and the next woman along "luv". Or when I spot two guys dressed as gopniks walking out of the local co-op with a handful of stolen steaks, congratulating each other in heavily accented English.
Our clues to our identity are wrapped up in our attire, speech patterns and cultural norms as much as they are in the colour of our skin.
I'm sorry you're too dense to understand this, and want to scream racist like some pathetic toddler when someone points out that London, with its higher population of low-income migrants, might have a greater problem with crimes committed by said migrants than an area with lower migration.
As a non-racist, I really can't, no.
You have trouble differentiating someone from Wales from someone who was born in Newcastle from their accent? Or someone who is a middle-class professional in chinos and a gilet from a WWC type in tracky bottoms?
UK pop rose last year by about 650k. All of which was inward migration. This underpins growth and goes a long way to cure UK demographic problems but this large migration number is the driver of Reform. If LOTO Badenoch finds a way to peel off those votes she has a chance. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
It is ridiculous that we are relying on migration to cure our demographic problems. If it wasn't for immigration the country would be in an even greater mess.
If you look at GDP per capita, something has gone rather wrong since 2008 -
Population has grown from about 62.5m to 69.25m since 2008, and yet GDP per capita has remained stubbornly the same.
Which means we need to find extra housing, school places, doctors, dentists, roads, railways, prisons and all the rest for the extra 7m people (largely driven by immigration since 2008), which, given nobody these days can rent a house, get a GP's appointment, or buy a standard class ticket from London to Manchester at peak times without taking out a second mortgage, we have patently failed to do.
There is potentially a case to be made that we would be even worse off, demographically, without inward immigration. But the opposite is also true: young couples might have more children if they could afford to move out of their tiny (often rented) flats and into family homes.
Ultimately, as the population grows, our flatlining GDP per capita suggests that more and more people are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and importantly, do not feel any better off than they were 16 years ago.
We are gathering the ingredients for the perfect brew for a hard/far right government in about 2028/9
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the UK's goose is cooked.
This year I've had friends get mugged in broad daylight, seen spice addicts passed out in the street, seen people literally shitting in doorways. Graffiti and smashed windows suddenly everywhere. Shoplifters just walking in, taking what they like and walking out with impunity.
And that's London. The last place in the UK where it seems possible to have a career and earn a decent salary. That's to say nothing of the left behind places like Hartelpool that rioted over Summer. Places where you're born and die on the same sinkhole estate, while new arrivals on dinghies get put up in the Holiday Inn.
And Reeves wants to charge me 39% on my investments to live in this blissful utopia?
As you said earlier it feels like the country is in a bit of a death spiral at the moment, higher tax, more people leave, lower growth, even more people leave, etc.
It's worth remembering that even though Labour are awful a lot of this decline happened on the Tories watch. So as you say, when Labour make the spiral even worse, easy to see people turning to the hard right.
Social mobility is likely a lot easier in Hartlepool than London because of housing affordability.
Similarly I walked past the Wath Holiday Inn a few weeks before one of the riots took place there - the whole area is much improved with new housing estates, nature reserves, leisure facilities and trendy bars.
I'm curious as to what you term by 'a career and decent salary' actually is. £50k, £75k, £100k ?
I do enjoy reading about the urban squalor though as it allows me to appreciate the comfortable affluence I, and most of the people I know, have.
I'm sure these lads will tell you what a hotbed of social mobility and opportunity Hartlepool is.
What matters is whether the people who want to improve their socioeconomic status by improving their skillset and working hard can do so.
Because this sort of rioting always breaks out in places that are hotbeds of social mobility?
No, it breaks out where there are scum, likely drunken scum, who want a fight.
Its why there are disturbances on weekend evenings in town centres.
Given that you were just bewailing that London is full of muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters you must think that London is fast undergoing societal collapse.
Or are those attributes of 'the last place where you can get a career and decent salary' ?
I'd rather have the affordable housing even if it does mean a riot a few miles away every few years.
Because without affordable housing you don't have socioeconomic mobility, you have wage slavery.
There are two separate factors at play here, the doorway shitters and shoplifters of London feel tied to more recent immigration (the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here). See also the tent cities springing up around Park Lane. Not limited to London - See the numerous illegal immigrants busted in Bristol yesterday, living in a caravan city by the side of a motorway -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyl65knxzxo
Then you have the left behind WWC types in the video I linked to previously. No job, no aspiration, no hope. As Foxy points out, sure housing is cheap, but opportunities for social mobility are zero. You live and die on benefits in the same sink estate.
The situation is horrible for both those groups of people. And speaks volumes about the UK's decline.
Then you have people like me who are educated and well off. But being asked to fund increasing amounts for benefits and so on, without seeing a corresponding rise in growth or even basic law and order. As per the watch thread the other day, you can't even wear anything nice on the streets without fear of being mugged. And, as I say, I'm a decently sized bloke, not a smallish woman who is at risk of far worse.
Low level crime like graffiti, broken windows, shoplifting, street shitting, drug dealing etc is a blight that affects us all.
But as oft pointed out, the richest 1% or so make up 30% of the UK's income tax take. People like Leon are rightfully suggesting that maybe either clean it up or the richest people in our society will justifiably think maybe they can get better value for money elsewhere?
I personally have zero faith that if I pay more in tax, I will enjoy a better standard of living. And that is the problem. If Reeves told me CGT was going up to 39% tomorrow but also I'd live in a clean and orderly place where my mates don't have to meet their girlfriends at the tube and walk them home after dark, I'd consider it. Instead I'm being asked to pay ever more taxes against a backdrop of continual decay.
Which brings us back to Leon's original point, the doom spiral. Things get worse, more rich and educated people leave. Tax take declines, the economy falters. So even more people with the ability to get out leave.
It isn't just London that feels trapped in that doom spiral, it's the entire country. As I say, it largely happened on the Tories watch. I'm just not convinced Labour have the answer to it. Doubling my taxes to pay the train drivers on 70k a bit more isn't going to stop the low level decay. And Labour have absolutely no recipe for growth.
Sorry but that all reads like a conspiratorialist racist diatribe unmoored from reality. Maybe unplug from Twitter a bit and come back to earth.
There's things wrong with this country that need fixing, that too many are trapped working to pay rent and can't get an affordable home of their own being number one of them, but that's not remotely matching this third world bullshit you're spouting.
No jobs or aspirations? We have almost record low unemployment in this country.
Can't go out without being mugged? Don't know what its like where you are but I'll quite comfortably walk the streets with my phone out with no big fear of being mugged.
The country is not in a doom spiral. If you think it is, it says more about you than it does the country.
I take umbrage at being called a racist.
I pointed out that in London there seem to be more problems with recent immigrants, which you might expect in an area with... more recent immigrants. But also note similar problems occur in high poverty areas with WWC types. And note my sympathy for both groups, but also my despair at being forced to pay increasing taxes without an apparent solution.
So if you want to call me a racist, go ahead. I'll reply quite simply to that one - fuck off.
If you don't want to be called a racist then maybe look in the mirror.
Judging people by the colour of their skin, treating people differently based on the colour of their skin, making remarks like "the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here" etc . . . there's a word for that and it begins with "r" and ends with "acism".
As for your garbage about the WWC who can't get a job, we have full employment. Anyone who can't get a job hasn't got one as they don't want one, not that they can't get one.
Dear lord, you are ignorant.
It's interesting that you jump to 'colour of skin' when in fact many of the people I've noticed engaged in antisocial behaviour have eastern european accents. And are white.
I'm reporting the facts as they are. Fascinating that you're jumping to skin colour.
The elderly wreckhead with his can of kestrel super, with a distinct London accent, who has panhandled outside my local corner shop for the last decade has been replaced by a dishevelled woman of indeterminate origin who cannot speak a word of English. She just holds her hand out and mutters gibberish - no idea what language she actually speaks.
As I say, the change in London is palpable, and no doubt driven by more recent immigration. Deny it all you like, but shouting racist at anyone you don't like won't change the facts.
No you're not reporting the facts as they are, that's the point.
The facts as they are is that crime and unemployment are down, but that's not your version of "facts" which are divorced from reality.
And I didn't jump on the racist remarks without you first making comments about people who 'don't look like they were born in this country'.
Tell me please, in a non-racist manner, what to you someone who was born in this country looks like?
What, you really can't tell?
Imagine British people only. Think of all the social clues that tell you which part of the country a person was born in, or what social class they are. From their shoes to their accent.
Then imagine how that works for non-English people, too.
If someone comes up to me in the street and asks for change in a heavy Nigerian accent, it might give me a good idea that he's not the same as the panhandler who calls me "guv" and the next woman along "luv". Or when I spot two guys dressed as gopniks walking out of the local co-op with a handful of stolen steaks, congratulating each other in heavily accented English.
Our clues to our identity are wrapped up in our attire, speech patterns and cultural norms as much as they are in the colour of our skin.
I'm sorry you're too dense to understand this, and want to scream racist like some pathetic toddler when someone points out that London, with its higher population of low-income migrants, might have a greater problem with crimes committed by said migrants than an area with lower migration.
As a non-racist, I really can't, no.
You have trouble differentiating someone from Wales from someone who was born in Newcastle from their accent? Or someone who is a middle-class professional in chinos and a gilet from a WWC type in tracky bottoms?
You really are a thicko, then.
No I'm just more well-travelled and better informed than you it seems. People move around and accents change, you can't judge people based on their clothes or their voice or their looks. The idea that people don't move, or change, is an entirely ignorant one.
When I first met my wife she'd not long migrated to this country and still had her accent, her racist neighbours told her on more than one occasion to "go back to where she came from". She's lost her accent now and now and now someone like you wouldn't judge her as being "not born in this country" while you would others, including people who actually were born in this country. Because: racism.
And you didn't just say sound, you said look. There's a meaning behind that and you know it.
UK pop rose last year by about 650k. All of which was inward migration. This underpins growth and goes a long way to cure UK demographic problems but this large migration number is the driver of Reform. If LOTO Badenoch finds a way to peel off those votes she has a chance. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
It is ridiculous that we are relying on migration to cure our demographic problems. If it wasn't for immigration the country would be in an even greater mess.
If you look at GDP per capita, something has gone rather wrong since 2008 -
Population has grown from about 62.5m to 69.25m since 2008, and yet GDP per capita has remained stubbornly the same.
Which means we need to find extra housing, school places, doctors, dentists, roads, railways, prisons and all the rest for the extra 7m people (largely driven by immigration since 2008), which, given nobody these days can rent a house, get a GP's appointment, or buy a standard class ticket from London to Manchester at peak times without taking out a second mortgage, we have patently failed to do.
There is potentially a case to be made that we would be even worse off, demographically, without inward immigration. But the opposite is also true: young couples might have more children if they could afford to move out of their tiny (often rented) flats and into family homes.
Ultimately, as the population grows, our flatlining GDP per capita suggests that more and more people are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and importantly, do not feel any better off than they were 16 years ago.
We are gathering the ingredients for the perfect brew for a hard/far right government in about 2028/9
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the UK's goose is cooked.
This year I've had friends get mugged in broad daylight, seen spice addicts passed out in the street, seen people literally shitting in doorways. Graffiti and smashed windows suddenly everywhere. Shoplifters just walking in, taking what they like and walking out with impunity.
And that's London. The last place in the UK where it seems possible to have a career and earn a decent salary. That's to say nothing of the left behind places like Hartelpool that rioted over Summer. Places where you're born and die on the same sinkhole estate, while new arrivals on dinghies get put up in the Holiday Inn.
And Reeves wants to charge me 39% on my investments to live in this blissful utopia?
As you said earlier it feels like the country is in a bit of a death spiral at the moment, higher tax, more people leave, lower growth, even more people leave, etc.
It's worth remembering that even though Labour are awful a lot of this decline happened on the Tories watch. So as you say, when Labour make the spiral even worse, easy to see people turning to the hard right.
Social mobility is likely a lot easier in Hartlepool than London because of housing affordability.
Similarly I walked past the Wath Holiday Inn a few weeks before one of the riots took place there - the whole area is much improved with new housing estates, nature reserves, leisure facilities and trendy bars.
I'm curious as to what you term by 'a career and decent salary' actually is. £50k, £75k, £100k ?
I do enjoy reading about the urban squalor though as it allows me to appreciate the comfortable affluence I, and most of the people I know, have.
I'm sure these lads will tell you what a hotbed of social mobility and opportunity Hartlepool is.
What matters is whether the people who want to improve their socioeconomic status by improving their skillset and working hard can do so.
Because this sort of rioting always breaks out in places that are hotbeds of social mobility?
No, it breaks out where there are scum, likely drunken scum, who want a fight.
Its why there are disturbances on weekend evenings in town centres.
Given that you were just bewailing that London is full of muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters you must think that London is fast undergoing societal collapse.
Or are those attributes of 'the last place where you can get a career and decent salary' ?
I'd rather have the affordable housing even if it does mean a riot a few miles away every few years.
Because without affordable housing you don't have socioeconomic mobility, you have wage slavery.
There are two separate factors at play here, the doorway shitters and shoplifters of London feel tied to more recent immigration (the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here). See also the tent cities springing up around Park Lane. Not limited to London - See the numerous illegal immigrants busted in Bristol yesterday, living in a caravan city by the side of a motorway -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyl65knxzxo
Then you have the left behind WWC types in the video I linked to previously. No job, no aspiration, no hope. As Foxy points out, sure housing is cheap, but opportunities for social mobility are zero. You live and die on benefits in the same sink estate.
The situation is horrible for both those groups of people. And speaks volumes about the UK's decline.
Then you have people like me who are educated and well off. But being asked to fund increasing amounts for benefits and so on, without seeing a corresponding rise in growth or even basic law and order. As per the watch thread the other day, you can't even wear anything nice on the streets without fear of being mugged. And, as I say, I'm a decently sized bloke, not a smallish woman who is at risk of far worse.
Low level crime like graffiti, broken windows, shoplifting, street shitting, drug dealing etc is a blight that affects us all.
But as oft pointed out, the richest 1% or so make up 30% of the UK's income tax take. People like Leon are rightfully suggesting that maybe either clean it up or the richest people in our society will justifiably think maybe they can get better value for money elsewhere?
I personally have zero faith that if I pay more in tax, I will enjoy a better standard of living. And that is the problem. If Reeves told me CGT was going up to 39% tomorrow but also I'd live in a clean and orderly place where my mates don't have to meet their girlfriends at the tube and walk them home after dark, I'd consider it. Instead I'm being asked to pay ever more taxes against a backdrop of continual decay.
Which brings us back to Leon's original point, the doom spiral. Things get worse, more rich and educated people leave. Tax take declines, the economy falters. So even more people with the ability to get out leave.
It isn't just London that feels trapped in that doom spiral, it's the entire country. As I say, it largely happened on the Tories watch. I'm just not convinced Labour have the answer to it. Doubling my taxes to pay the train drivers on 70k a bit more isn't going to stop the low level decay. And Labour have absolutely no recipe for growth.
Sorry but that all reads like a conspiratorialist racist diatribe unmoored from reality. Maybe unplug from Twitter a bit and come back to earth.
There's things wrong with this country that need fixing, that too many are trapped working to pay rent and can't get an affordable home of their own being number one of them, but that's not remotely matching this third world bullshit you're spouting.
No jobs or aspirations? We have almost record low unemployment in this country.
Can't go out without being mugged? Don't know what its like where you are but I'll quite comfortably walk the streets with my phone out with no big fear of being mugged.
The country is not in a doom spiral. If you think it is, it says more about you than it does the country.
I take umbrage at being called a racist.
I pointed out that in London there seem to be more problems with recent immigrants, which you might expect in an area with... more recent immigrants. But also note similar problems occur in high poverty areas with WWC types. And note my sympathy for both groups, but also my despair at being forced to pay increasing taxes without an apparent solution.
So if you want to call me a racist, go ahead. I'll reply quite simply to that one - fuck off.
If you don't want to be called a racist then maybe look in the mirror.
Judging people by the colour of their skin, treating people differently based on the colour of their skin, making remarks like "the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here" etc . . . there's a word for that and it begins with "r" and ends with "acism".
As for your garbage about the WWC who can't get a job, we have full employment. Anyone who can't get a job hasn't got one as they don't want one, not that they can't get one.
Dear lord, you are ignorant.
It's interesting that you jump to 'colour of skin' when in fact many of the people I've noticed engaged in antisocial behaviour have eastern european accents. And are white.
I'm reporting the facts as they are. Fascinating that you're jumping to skin colour.
The elderly wreckhead with his can of kestrel super, with a distinct London accent, who has panhandled outside my local corner shop for the last decade has been replaced by a dishevelled woman of indeterminate origin who cannot speak a word of English. She just holds her hand out and mutters gibberish - no idea what language she actually speaks.
As I say, the change in London is palpable, and no doubt driven by more recent immigration. Deny it all you like, but shouting racist at anyone you don't like won't change the facts.
No you're not reporting the facts as they are, that's the point.
The facts as they are is that crime and unemployment are down, but that's not your version of "facts" which are divorced from reality.
And I didn't jump on the racist remarks without you first making comments about people who 'don't look like they were born in this country'.
Tell me please, in a non-racist manner, what to you someone who was born in this country looks like?
What, you really can't tell?
Imagine British people only. Think of all the social clues that tell you which part of the country a person was born in, or what social class they are. From their shoes to their accent.
Then imagine how that works for non-English people, too.
If someone comes up to me in the street and asks for change in a heavy Nigerian accent, it might give me a good idea that he's not the same as the panhandler who calls me "guv" and the next woman along "luv". Or when I spot two guys dressed as gopniks walking out of the local co-op with a handful of stolen steaks, congratulating each other in heavily accented English.
Our clues to our identity are wrapped up in our attire, speech patterns and cultural norms as much as they are in the colour of our skin.
I'm sorry you're too dense to understand this, and want to scream racist like some pathetic toddler when someone points out that London, with its higher population of low-income migrants, might have a greater problem with crimes committed by said migrants than an area with lower migration.
As a non-racist, I really can't, no.
You have trouble differentiating someone from Wales from someone who was born in Newcastle from their accent? Or someone who is a middle-class professional in chinos and a gilet from a WWC type in tracky bottoms?
You really are a thicko, then.
No I'm just more well-travelled and better informed than you it seems. People move around and accents change, you can't judge people based on their clothes or their voice or their looks. The idea that people don't move, or change, is an entirely ignorant one.
When I first met my wife she'd not long migrated to this country and still had her accent, her racist neighbours told her on more than one occasion to "go back to where she came from". She's lost her accent now and now and now someone like you wouldn't judge her as being "not born in this country" while you would others, including people who actually were born in this country. Because: racism.
And you didn't just say sound, you said look. There's a meaning behind that and you know it.
I recall visiting Eastern Europe for work years before freedom of movement. So being English out there was quite rare. Everyone figured out in seconds I was English by how I dressed, long before I opened my mouth. Was everyone I met a racist? Or just using semiotics to make an accurate judgement on why my clothes and mannerisms were different to the general norms of the other people on the street?
What this very tedious argument you insist on having comes down to is that you leaped to condemn me as a racist and claimed I was passing judgement on the basis of 'the colour of people's skin' when in fact I made no such statement. Instead you rely on insinuations that aren't true.
I am not a racist, and the fact that you seem to believe anyone who can discern where a person is from based on their mannerisms, speech patterns, clothes, and attitudes, is automatically a racist, says far more about you than it does about me.
I will again point out that I see terminal decline in the UK, whether that's the poverty some recent immigrants seem to be living in, or the WWC in left-behind sink estates. And feel empathy for both. But am struggling to see how and where increased taxes will be spent to improve conditions for either.
That your mind goes into a weird racist argument on the back of that is down to you, bud.
And on that note, work in the morning beckons, so I will bid you good night.
If a smaller proportion are in a nation's work force, through retirement or disability, it is possible for a nation to have no gains in per capita productivity, even while there are gains in individual worker productivity.
Re the crime discussion, things don't meaningfully feel different to me versus a decade ago tbh. But that goes for a lot of things. I'm not invalidating anyone else's experiences though, just pointing out it's not universal. And certainly where I live (as opposed to where I am when I'm tying this in the cesspit called the south east... but that's always been a cess pit) there's basically no crime.
I would say so far the Lib Dems have done well, the Conservatives, considering many are writing them off, should be pleased, apart from Leeds and Scotland Reform not great. but Labour are not having a good night
UK pop rose last year by about 650k. All of which was inward migration. This underpins growth and goes a long way to cure UK demographic problems but this large migration number is the driver of Reform. If LOTO Badenoch finds a way to peel off those votes she has a chance. If she doesn't, she doesn't.
It is ridiculous that we are relying on migration to cure our demographic problems. If it wasn't for immigration the country would be in an even greater mess.
If you look at GDP per capita, something has gone rather wrong since 2008 -
Population has grown from about 62.5m to 69.25m since 2008, and yet GDP per capita has remained stubbornly the same.
Which means we need to find extra housing, school places, doctors, dentists, roads, railways, prisons and all the rest for the extra 7m people (largely driven by immigration since 2008), which, given nobody these days can rent a house, get a GP's appointment, or buy a standard class ticket from London to Manchester at peak times without taking out a second mortgage, we have patently failed to do.
There is potentially a case to be made that we would be even worse off, demographically, without inward immigration. But the opposite is also true: young couples might have more children if they could afford to move out of their tiny (often rented) flats and into family homes.
Ultimately, as the population grows, our flatlining GDP per capita suggests that more and more people are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and importantly, do not feel any better off than they were 16 years ago.
We are gathering the ingredients for the perfect brew for a hard/far right government in about 2028/9
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the UK's goose is cooked.
This year I've had friends get mugged in broad daylight, seen spice addicts passed out in the street, seen people literally shitting in doorways. Graffiti and smashed windows suddenly everywhere. Shoplifters just walking in, taking what they like and walking out with impunity.
And that's London. The last place in the UK where it seems possible to have a career and earn a decent salary. That's to say nothing of the left behind places like Hartelpool that rioted over Summer. Places where you're born and die on the same sinkhole estate, while new arrivals on dinghies get put up in the Holiday Inn.
And Reeves wants to charge me 39% on my investments to live in this blissful utopia?
As you said earlier it feels like the country is in a bit of a death spiral at the moment, higher tax, more people leave, lower growth, even more people leave, etc.
It's worth remembering that even though Labour are awful a lot of this decline happened on the Tories watch. So as you say, when Labour make the spiral even worse, easy to see people turning to the hard right.
Social mobility is likely a lot easier in Hartlepool than London because of housing affordability.
Similarly I walked past the Wath Holiday Inn a few weeks before one of the riots took place there - the whole area is much improved with new housing estates, nature reserves, leisure facilities and trendy bars.
I'm curious as to what you term by 'a career and decent salary' actually is. £50k, £75k, £100k ?
I do enjoy reading about the urban squalor though as it allows me to appreciate the comfortable affluence I, and most of the people I know, have.
I'm sure these lads will tell you what a hotbed of social mobility and opportunity Hartlepool is.
What matters is whether the people who want to improve their socioeconomic status by improving their skillset and working hard can do so.
Because this sort of rioting always breaks out in places that are hotbeds of social mobility?
No, it breaks out where there are scum, likely drunken scum, who want a fight.
Its why there are disturbances on weekend evenings in town centres.
Given that you were just bewailing that London is full of muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters you must think that London is fast undergoing societal collapse.
Or are those attributes of 'the last place where you can get a career and decent salary' ?
I'd rather have the affordable housing even if it does mean a riot a few miles away every few years.
Because without affordable housing you don't have socioeconomic mobility, you have wage slavery.
There are two separate factors at play here, the doorway shitters and shoplifters of London feel tied to more recent immigration (the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here). See also the tent cities springing up around Park Lane. Not limited to London - See the numerous illegal immigrants busted in Bristol yesterday, living in a caravan city by the side of a motorway -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyl65knxzxo
Then you have the left behind WWC types in the video I linked to previously. No job, no aspiration, no hope. As Foxy points out, sure housing is cheap, but opportunities for social mobility are zero. You live and die on benefits in the same sink estate.
The situation is horrible for both those groups of people. And speaks volumes about the UK's decline.
Then you have people like me who are educated and well off. But being asked to fund increasing amounts for benefits and so on, without seeing a corresponding rise in growth or even basic law and order. As per the watch thread the other day, you can't even wear anything nice on the streets without fear of being mugged. And, as I say, I'm a decently sized bloke, not a smallish woman who is at risk of far worse.
Low level crime like graffiti, broken windows, shoplifting, street shitting, drug dealing etc is a blight that affects us all.
But as oft pointed out, the richest 1% or so make up 30% of the UK's income tax take. People like Leon are rightfully suggesting that maybe either clean it up or the richest people in our society will justifiably think maybe they can get better value for money elsewhere?
I personally have zero faith that if I pay more in tax, I will enjoy a better standard of living. And that is the problem. If Reeves told me CGT was going up to 39% tomorrow but also I'd live in a clean and orderly place where my mates don't have to meet their girlfriends at the tube and walk them home after dark, I'd consider it. Instead I'm being asked to pay ever more taxes against a backdrop of continual decay.
Which brings us back to Leon's original point, the doom spiral. Things get worse, more rich and educated people leave. Tax take declines, the economy falters. So even more people with the ability to get out leave.
It isn't just London that feels trapped in that doom spiral, it's the entire country. As I say, it largely happened on the Tories watch. I'm just not convinced Labour have the answer to it. Doubling my taxes to pay the train drivers on 70k a bit more isn't going to stop the low level decay. And Labour have absolutely no recipe for growth.
Sorry but that all reads like a conspiratorialist racist diatribe unmoored from reality. Maybe unplug from Twitter a bit and come back to earth.
There's things wrong with this country that need fixing, that too many are trapped working to pay rent and can't get an affordable home of their own being number one of them, but that's not remotely matching this third world bullshit you're spouting.
No jobs or aspirations? We have almost record low unemployment in this country.
Can't go out without being mugged? Don't know what its like where you are but I'll quite comfortably walk the streets with my phone out with no big fear of being mugged.
The country is not in a doom spiral. If you think it is, it says more about you than it does the country.
I take umbrage at being called a racist.
I pointed out that in London there seem to be more problems with recent immigrants, which you might expect in an area with... more recent immigrants. But also note similar problems occur in high poverty areas with WWC types. And note my sympathy for both groups, but also my despair at being forced to pay increasing taxes without an apparent solution.
So if you want to call me a racist, go ahead. I'll reply quite simply to that one - fuck off.
If you don't want to be called a racist then maybe look in the mirror.
Judging people by the colour of their skin, treating people differently based on the colour of their skin, making remarks like "the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here" etc . . . there's a word for that and it begins with "r" and ends with "acism".
As for your garbage about the WWC who can't get a job, we have full employment. Anyone who can't get a job hasn't got one as they don't want one, not that they can't get one.
Dear lord, you are ignorant.
It's interesting that you jump to 'colour of skin' when in fact many of the people I've noticed engaged in antisocial behaviour have eastern european accents. And are white.
I'm reporting the facts as they are. Fascinating that you're jumping to skin colour.
The elderly wreckhead with his can of kestrel super, with a distinct London accent, who has panhandled outside my local corner shop for the last decade has been replaced by a dishevelled woman of indeterminate origin who cannot speak a word of English. She just holds her hand out and mutters gibberish - no idea what language she actually speaks.
As I say, the change in London is palpable, and no doubt driven by more recent immigration. Deny it all you like, but shouting racist at anyone you don't like won't change the facts.
No you're not reporting the facts as they are, that's the point.
The facts as they are is that crime and unemployment are down, but that's not your version of "facts" which are divorced from reality.
And I didn't jump on the racist remarks without you first making comments about people who 'don't look like they were born in this country'.
Tell me please, in a non-racist manner, what to you someone who was born in this country looks like?
What, you really can't tell?
Imagine British people only. Think of all the social clues that tell you which part of the country a person was born in, or what social class they are. From their shoes to their accent.
Then imagine how that works for non-English people, too.
If someone comes up to me in the street and asks for change in a heavy Nigerian accent, it might give me a good idea that he's not the same as the panhandler who calls me "guv" and the next woman along "luv". Or when I spot two guys dressed as gopniks walking out of the local co-op with a handful of stolen steaks, congratulating each other in heavily accented English.
Our clues to our identity are wrapped up in our attire, speech patterns and cultural norms as much as they are in the colour of our skin.
I'm sorry you're too dense to understand this, and want to scream racist like some pathetic toddler when someone points out that London, with its higher population of low-income migrants, might have a greater problem with crimes committed by said migrants than an area with lower migration.
As a non-racist, I really can't, no.
You have trouble differentiating someone from Wales from someone who was born in Newcastle from their accent? Or someone who is a middle-class professional in chinos and a gilet from a WWC type in tracky bottoms?
You really are a thicko, then.
No I'm just more well-travelled and better informed than you it seems. People move around and accents change, you can't judge people based on their clothes or their voice or their looks. The idea that people don't move, or change, is an entirely ignorant one.
When I first met my wife she'd not long migrated to this country and still had her accent, her racist neighbours told her on more than one occasion to "go back to where she came from". She's lost her accent now and now and now someone like you wouldn't judge her as being "not born in this country" while you would others, including people who actually were born in this country. Because: racism.
And you didn't just say sound, you said look. There's a meaning behind that and you know it.
Noticing how people look and sound and ascibing likely origins to them on that basis is not racist. It is normal human inquisitiveness.
Making judgements about their character, honesty or morals and expressing adverse views about them based on those observations is racist.
You seem to be confusing the two to make some sort of point I don't understand.
Can someone check this is right? Because Republicans won a majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2022, the court has now said that gerrymandering is totally fine, and the Republican-controlled state legislature has redrawn congressional districts so that Republicans will pick up 4 seats?
Just when this cricket match couldn’t get any more weird, there’s a 100 partnership for the 7th wicket from Pakistan, the previous six partnership having been worth 83 in total!
Can someone check this is right? Because Republicans won a majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2022, the court has now said that gerrymandering is totally fine, and the Republican-controlled state legislature has redrawn congressional districts so that Republicans will pick up 4 seats?
IIRC there’s only around three US States that have a body similar to our Boundary Commission.
A dozen or so States have a ‘bipartisan’ committee, which means two sets of politicians drawing the lines among themselves, the rest let the State government draw the lines which is where the real Gerrymandering happens. A change in the makeup of the State government often leads to the new US Congress districts going the same way a few years later.
There’s also no Electoral Commissions in the US, which leads to the most incredible amount of political micromanagement of the election process itself, down to early voting rules and the location of ballot boxes, all again done for naked political advantage.
Comments
The truly scary state of affairs in the US is how many are prepared to give him a pass cuz libruls...
But hostile to train drivers who have got themselves a skillset and work.
As the speaker of the Arizona senate said "These are not Democrats, these are my people doing this to me"
But they weren’t black.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52496514
Obviously things could have gone better, broadly by doing fewer left wing things. ;-) But since 1979 more has gone right than wrong.
The left wing ones have been essentially days of rioting and smashing shop fronts and hurling things at police. But it's been weirdly pointless, a little bit like the anti-globalisation riots in London back in 1999. Or the riots in the UK in -0 what 2011. Or the 1994 Los Angeles riots. There's been disorder and death. But without any obvious goal. Beyond rioting itself.
The right wing ones, on the other hand, seem to have been more focused on actually effecting change. And have squarely targeted lawmakers - such as the Capitol riot.
You won’t enjoy it.
Of course you always have your agitators who are up for a fight. If it had been a more sympathetic group of people we would have had long discussions about righteous historic grievances etc etc which meant they couldn’t control their anger.
The BLM protests were old fashioned riots. Dangerous to individuals, but localised. Jan 6th was a storming of government in order to prevent a legal election result being implemented, with death threats to legislators.
It's not just a matter of totting up casualties, it's about a threat to government.
Judging people by the colour of their skin, treating people differently based on the colour of their skin, making remarks like "the shitters and stealers I have witnessed do not look or speak like they were born here" etc . . . there's a word for that and it begins with "r" and ends with "acism".
As for your garbage about the WWC who can't get a job, we have full employment. Anyone who can't get a job hasn't got one as they don't want one, not that they can't get one.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2yrpxxzmpo
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-jack-smiths-unsealed-court-filing-that-says-trump-resorted-to-crimes-after-2020-election
Judge people not just by some of their words in isolation, but in everything they say and do, and on that metric Trump is guilty as sin. Even if he threw in token words about "peaceful".
If Harris is getting to 6/4 or better without a clear gap in the polls emerging, I'd take it at this time.
Here I have you telling me on one side that I'm sympathetic to 'scum', while I have Barty on the other side telling me I'm a horrible ranting racist.
Maybe I'm just someone who would like to see a better society with more opportunities for all, but remain unconvinced that successive governments increasing the tax burden on the richest in society hasn't actually had that effect?
The Thatcherite "on yer bike, anyone with enough ambition can become a millionaire" is pure nonsense.
The best way to imagine it is like lottery tickets. If you're born on a sink estate in Hartlepool or Middlesbrough, you might have one lottery ticket. In the sense of the amount of opportunity you get to get out of that environment, become skilled, earn a high wage, escape the poverty you were born into. Whereas if you're a nice, well to do middle class type like myself, you were born with a thousand lottery tickets. Educated parents to help you learn, to give you the aspiration to go to uni, get you your first internship, etc. And if you're born mega rich, congratulations. You get a million lottery tickets. Start as many businesses as you like, you can't go bust, so keep playing the game until you win.
My point is that I neither feel as if my tax dollars are being translated into more lottery tickets for the poor and left behind, nor do I feel as if the tax increases of the last decade are resulting in a better standard of living for me - less crime, fewer doorway shitters, and so on. So there's no quid pro quo either.
Which leads us again to Leon's doom spiral point. If things get worse, the people paying the lion's share of the tax leave, which means that there's less tax money to go around, so things get even worse, so more people leave, etc.
You may not recognise the doom spiral, but many wealthy people do. Which is why the UK is on course to lose more millionaires by 2028 than any other country in the world other than China.
North Notts
A presentation I saw last week about what the Council has been doing in Leicester City Centre over the last 20 years.
Positives and negatives, but engaged and an interesting account.
https://youtu.be/ASkX_aqLLSo?t=844
https://hbr.org/2024/10/when-populists-rise-economies-often-fall
"A recent study in the American Economic Review looked at economic performance under populist rule over a much longer period, spanning a full 120 years. After a three-year honeymoon, such leaders were found to produce a 1% annual drag on growth. After 15 years, countries led by both left- and right-wing populists were left with national incomes 10% lower than expected."
From that radical left journal, the Harvard Business Review. (Some mistake surely?- Ed)
And personally, I fond these guys:
https://images.app.goo.gl/Rn2UZR4NxkBiSYLn6
rather scarier than these clowns:
https://images.app.goo.gl/ey5uooejjbeH6bVj8
.
https://conservativehome.com/2024/10/10/gavin-rice-the-road-back-will-be-hard-but-not-impossible-if-conservatives-can-target-the-right-voters/
There is no shortage of jobs in Hartlepool, or Middlesbrough or around the country which is not failing. Unlike times in the past anyone who wants a job has one.
You're describing a fictional country based on stereotypes. You and Leon are wrong.
We're spending more tax money on welfare because we give payments to our ageing population, not because of unemployed WWC or migrant shitters.
It's interesting that you jump to 'colour of skin' when in fact many of the people I've noticed engaged in antisocial behaviour have eastern european accents. And are white.
I'm reporting the facts as they are. Fascinating that you're jumping to skin colour.
The elderly wreckhead with his can of kestrel super, with a distinct London accent, who has panhandled outside my local corner shop for the last decade has been replaced by a dishevelled woman of indeterminate origin who cannot speak a word of English. She just holds her hand out and mutters gibberish - no idea what language she actually speaks.
As I say, the change in London is palpable, and no doubt driven by more recent immigration. Deny it all you like, but shouting racist at anyone you don't like won't change the facts.
But again in your eyes that is ok then
The facts as they are is that crime and unemployment are down, but that's not your version of "facts" which are divorced from reality.
And I didn't jump on the racist remarks without you first making comments about people who 'don't look like they were born in this country'.
Tell me please, in a non-racist manner, what to you someone who was born in this country looks like?
Netflix has cancelled Kaos.
Bastards.
See, this is another reason not to bother with fiction. You can invest hours of your life in a story which just ... stops.
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844508132434989408?t=8S9DGRQEBwbrcszXcmotmQ&s=19
Conservatives win seat in Fylde
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844501596803395921?t=Ix-T8NcQUgYf_FPPCn7gvQ&s=19
Conservative hold in Runnymead
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844504961293689343?t=tlKQN22oA0OwlMPmciNegQ&s=19
Not only for the poor but for every socioeconomic demographic.
To deny this is to deny that people have any agency over their own lives.
And yes, your background and upbringing is a major factor in your life opportunities.
Something which can be, and is, ameliorated by the effects of public services and a welfare state.
But you seem to be complaining about both the deprivation of the poor and having to pay any taxes to help those less fortunate than yourself.
Perhaps, if instead of this whining negativity, you suggested something more constructive you might get a more sympathetic response.
Incidentally, if you don't like your area being filled with 'muggers, shoplifters and doorway shitters' you could try moving somewhere else.
There are endless places in this country without such problems - as evidenced by the anecdotes of everyone else.
Seems nothing will make him happy.
"It is hard to exaggerate the depth of state failure in this country. When some of the criminals released early due to prison overcrowding are returned to custody because they pose a risk to public safety, then released again by mistake, a functioning justice system has ceased to exist. Britain’s inability to make a significant military response to war in the Middle East, noted by the former Tory defence minister Ben Wallace, confirms that national defence has been gravely compromised. Building the big society, in practice, meant gutting the state. Much of the responsibility for this situation must be assigned to David Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity programme, which Labour is continuing. But the problem, in the end, is not underfunding."
https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/10/the-tories-have-a-chance-but-only-if-they-elect-a-leader-willing-to-disrupt
Imagine British people only. Think of all the social clues that tell you which part of the country a person was born in, or what social class they are. From their shoes to their accent.
Then imagine how that works for non-English people, too.
If someone comes up to me in the street and asks for change in a heavy Nigerian accent, it might give me a good idea that he's not the same as the panhandler who calls me "guv" and the next woman along "luv". Or when I spot two guys dressed as gopniks walking out of the local co-op with a handful of stolen steaks, congratulating each other in heavily accented English.
Our clues to our identity are wrapped up in our attire, speech patterns and cultural norms as much as they are in the colour of our skin.
I'm sorry you're too dense to understand this, and want to scream racist like some pathetic toddler when someone points out that London, with its higher population of low-income migrants, might have a greater problem with crimes committed by said migrants than an area with lower migration.
And again the facts and figures are that crime and unemployment are down, but you just keep persisting with race-based anecdotes over actual real data.
There's a word for that.
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844509063436275758?t=lPqSiZIRIymBenQTppi8gQ&s=19
Labour hold in North Lanarkshire
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844503160091763184?t=CO-BReJiJqjx3tIUTurwyw&s=19
Labour hold in Harlow
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844509764388299152?t=7P-545jEq99bb7f69rkESQ&s=19
You really are a thicko, then.
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844510348633596029?t=HmLA_K4raiK_EjpIhNybnw&s=19
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844510687965393294?t=mppWoWa73ODFpeehIpzdcg&s=19
When I first met my wife she'd not long migrated to this country and still had her accent, her racist neighbours told her on more than one occasion to "go back to where she came from". She's lost her accent now and now and now someone like you wouldn't judge her as being "not born in this country" while you would others, including people who actually were born in this country. Because: racism.
And you didn't just say sound, you said look. There's a meaning behind that and you know it.
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844511314254741509?t=G547oa1HuXpa21-Oi6JCew&s=19
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844513265591754996?t=6MIHAEeY7kWfnk4HVn5qlQ&s=19
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844514178033168629?t=9C0yt0AFlgmH-yfYgdz5HA&s=19
What this very tedious argument you insist on having comes down to is that you leaped to condemn me as a racist and claimed I was passing judgement on the basis of 'the colour of people's skin' when in fact I made no such statement. Instead you rely on insinuations that aren't true.
I am not a racist, and the fact that you seem to believe anyone who can discern where a person is from based on their mannerisms, speech patterns, clothes, and attitudes, is automatically a racist, says far more about you than it does about me.
I will again point out that I see terminal decline in the UK, whether that's the poverty some recent immigrants seem to be living in, or the WWC in left-behind sink estates. And feel empathy for both. But am struggling to see how and where increased taxes will be spent to improve conditions for either.
That your mind goes into a weird racist argument on the back of that is down to you, bud.
And on that note, work in the morning beckons, so I will bid you good night.
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844515198389907490?t=ZMEtglBmIqSEvRo8jxm26g&s=19
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844516996026618076?t=NMcwDLaX4eFAyulzexkduQ&s=19
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844520261434913264?t=6OMfY1g4yojzk4fzoHf9tg&s=19
Re the crime discussion, things don't meaningfully feel different to me versus a decade ago tbh. But that goes for a lot of things. I'm not invalidating anyone else's experiences though, just pointing out it's not universal. And certainly where I live (as opposed to where I am when I'm tying this in the cesspit called the south east... but that's always been a cess pit) there's basically no crime.
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844521657991401711?t=ZabjmOXrRf3_pHQ3P0ScVA&s=19
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844521024013889667?t=75QoI5dWrGuTE7AYfpa3LQ&s=19
Making judgements about their character, honesty or morals and expressing adverse views about them based on those observations is racist.
You seem to be confusing the two to make some sort of point I don't understand.
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844524362424000819?t=xTJ9b5Vs4DUhge0TkJAGKA&s=19
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844523803663048837?t=rcQmwTgCH2KE7dtvX1gEWA&s=19
Labour. 8759
Cons. 8080
Libs. 5040
Green. 3463
Reform. 1904
SNP. 1033
Ind. 676
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1844525184054632507?t=5FgYCV0vlww5bKckIiwXcg&s=19
Clay Cross was where Dennis Skinner came to prominence.
LDM: 52.3% (+19.4)
CON: 25.7% (-5.3)
LAB: 10.0% (-13.2)
GRN: 7.7% (-5.1)
RFM: 3.1% (New)
WPB: 1.1% (New)
Liberal Democrat GAIN from Conservative.
LDM: 39.2% (+19.3)
CON: 24.2% (-1.1)
LAB: 24.0% (-15.5)
GRN: 7.6% (+0.5)
IND: 3.7% (New)
TUSC: 1.4% (-0.1)
No RFM (-6.7) as previous.
Liberal Democrat GAIN from Labour.
I am sure you can all have fun with it all
But for me time to say goodnight
Pleasant dreams folks
Lib Dems and conservatives should be pleased tonight
It's an expensive show; it wasn't getting the eyeballs.
Which is a shame. I was curious to see where they went from here.
Sugar (Apple) is good.
Among those in the charts...
Diana Ross; Suzi Quattro; Alvin Stardust; David Bowie; The Hollies; The Love Unlimited Orchestra; The Wombles....
Because Republicans won a majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2022, the court has now said that gerrymandering is totally fine, and the Republican-controlled state legislature has redrawn congressional districts so that Republicans will pick up 4 seats?
NEW THREAD
A dozen or so States have a ‘bipartisan’ committee, which means two sets of politicians drawing the lines among themselves, the rest let the State government draw the lines which is where the real Gerrymandering happens. A change in the makeup of the State government often leads to the new US Congress districts going the same way a few years later.
There’s also no Electoral Commissions in the US, which leads to the most incredible amount of political micromanagement of the election process itself, down to early voting rules and the location of ballot boxes, all again done for naked political advantage.