Senate The UK Politics discussion

Have you seen our choices? You think Milliband's Balls or David George Cameron Osbourne are bad?

Our Labor party - misspelled to be "progressive" like the Yanquis - is more inept and less fit to govern than Labour and our tories are even more out of touch.

No, I would be utterly miserable in an Australian politics thread. At least you have the LibDems.

 

I actually like that we're elligible for honours again. It's proper.

But honestly, they have no idea of current living pressures for Australians and it's borderline farce here at the moment. Best of two utterly awful choices.

 

I've heard from several people that Australia has become very expensive; a lot of friends of mine have commented how it's put them off ever going back on holiday there.

 

Compared to the UK? Not with this exchange rate (other than things like property, which is very expensive here).

 

Air travel is super expensive but I thought Oz still had a lower cost of living once you're there... But this here link seems to contradict that assumption. I'm just as surprised to see Ireland rank lower than UK... I guess these figures don't factor healthcare..?

 

For now. I can see them getting all but wiped out in the election. Clegg upset his core supporters & is deeply unpopular, UKIP & other smaller parties will take advantage and steal some seats. Labour could also, but I don't think they'll do particularly well.

 

Well it isn't as bad as you make out... I mean at least we don't actually have a UKIP that could reasonably gain any power (although I guess our conservatives are moving that way).

Think of it this way - instead of allowing UKIP to form on the right of the conservatives the Liberals simply moved right. So the good thing is that when people finally realise how crazy they are they can simply move back... and you don't have to unseat any nutter party like UKIP...

 

LD's will end up splitting; still think the likely outcome is a minority coalition between CON/LD, but will have to rely on other parties support by introducing populist policy.

 

Lib-Dem's will take a hammering, but I suspect they won't fall below 30 seats (they will lose about half their seats)

At local level they tend to be a bit like "knot-weed" and always prove difficult to shift.

In other matters, I wonder how the EU will deal with those annoying Greeks for not doing as they were told and voting for Syriza;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30975437

I'm sure there will be some sort of "fudge" to keep the show on the road, LOL!

 

I suspect either a Con/LD continuity government or probably more likely a Conservative minority government (perhaps with some support from the DUP)

I think both Cameron and Clegg would love another ConDem coalition, but I don't think either Party will go for it this time (unless there's some sort of economic meltdown within the EU and we have another crisis election like in 2010) and there's also an outside chance Clegg could lose Sheffield Hallam to Labour (what a moment that would be on election night ) which would end any chance of a Con/LD coalition.

Labour/SNP looks viable but would the PLP really go for that? Going into government with the party committed to breaking up the UK? Very unlikely I would suggest.

BTW, this is a great website for playing around with different outcomes in terms of national share of the vote;

http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/userpoll.html

Notice how Labour can be the largest party and even get a majority while they are behind the Tories.

Notice also how high UKIP have to get before they gain even one MP.

Of course this is based in uniform swing and it's very likely they election of 2015 will be the least uniform ever, but it's a guide.

 

From the people I've spoken to (which grunted is a very small sample) those who like me who are disillusioned with the lib dems are likely to vote Green this time round, none of us can face the vacuous Tories or labour but hate the prospect of UKIP and feel the Green is the safest alternative vote.


Either way I live in an area of sheer stupidity and can see us becoming a backwards UkiP location next year which means I can see UKiP being the driver of the reduction in the price of my house and making it even harder to move.


I hate elections

 

I don't think UKIP will gain more than 3-5 seats (of course they already have two. One - Douglas Carswell - They will retain and the other one - Mark Reckless - They could lose)

So overall, UKIP are looking at perhaps 4-7 seat's at best, IMO.

What will happen is that they will soak up lot's of votes in safe Conservative seats and maybe a few safe Labour seats in Northern England. But these seat's will remain with the status quo.

Greens are in a similar, yet potentially even weaker position. The only "minor" party that really could take quite a large proportion of seats is the SNP from Labour.

Now, if we had a proportional voting system things would get *very* interesting, but we don't, LOL!

 

FatBurt
Grunting at liberals and worrying about house prices? You write for the Daily Mail AICMFP.

 

Brits are uniquely invested in their house's (an Englishman's home is his castle, etc...) as Maggie knew only to well - Hence flogging off all the social housing, LOL!.

 

SNP and Labour are one and the same and if boils down to a coalition they'll work together and no one will know the difference except the Scots who'll get all the cushy stuff (like now )

Everything after that is a short change for the UK (and this include Wales and Ireland) Scotland have a strong nationalistic pride which isn;'t (currently) seen elsewhere and I can see this being to the detriment of the ~UK as a whole if Labour get in and soft arse milliband takes the reins (we would have been better off with the other brother)

Daily mail no, grunted = my god I can't spell



but yes the value of my home is important to me, not because it denotes where I am on the class scale but denotes whether or not I can afford to move to a house next year that allows for a family of four who owns a modicum of stuff rather than a family of four who live out of the storage space the attic provides.


This is the one major thing that ALL new build in the UK ignore, storage space. I've been looking for a new house for over two years and not one of them has a decent amount of storage space

 

Actually, there are many fundamental difference between Labour and the SNP, not least the SNP are committed to the break up of the United Kingdom. I certainly can't see Labour going into a coalition with the SNP. They might go for some looser arrangement though, like confidence and supply.

That would make for an unhappy government, Ed having to call Alex into Downing St and grovel everytime he want's to pass some middling bit of legislation... Fun and games.

 

I can see Ed and Nicola (not Alex anymore) having fun and games


Actually no



//needs brain bleach

 

Yes but one would think the resounding defeat of their ill-advised attempt to go 'independent' (despite high minded wankery from the Cousins on the virtues of such an act) would presumably put the SNP goal of a bonnie wee independent Sco'land to bed. Stripping out that pillar, they are still a centre-left party at heart which I believe is FatBurt's point. I think you're right that Salmond will seek concessions and push for devolution as part of any hypothetical coalition, but on most issues from health to welfare to education they should be aligned.

 

http://www.economist.com/news/brita...ght-lobby-muslims-better-leadership-it-can-do

Bagehot

Multicultural and aggrieved

The government is right to lobby Muslims for better leadership. But it can do little


Jan 24th 2015 | From the print edition




EVEN as Eric Pickles, the communities minister, was drafting a plea to British imams for stronger, moderate leadership on January 16th, some were demonstrating the need for it. In their Friday sermons, many condemned the Paris killings of the previous week. Yet their condemnation was often qualified. Though only a tiny minority are jihadist sympathisers, Britain’s 2.8m Muslims are less temperate than they like to be considered.
In mosques in Birmingham, London, Derby and elsewhere, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons were condemned more fiercely than the massacre of its staff. In Birmingham and probably elsewhere, imams preached that the killers could not have been Muslims. Set aside the drivel put out by some British and American media after the killings—including a risible suggestion, aired on Fox News, that Birmingham is a Muslim city where infidels fear to go—and there is still cause to worry about the mood and drift of Britain’s fastest-growing religious community.
This is the context in which Mr Pickles’ amiable letter was sent. It praised British Muslims’ contribution to society. It did not spell out, but might have done, that they are well represented in ecumenical groups, are starting to produce admirable role models—especially in sport—and that they are no more radicalised than other European Muslims. Relative to the size of their community, there are reckoned to be more Belgian jihadists in Syria than there are Britons. Nonetheless, Mr Pickles and his co-author Lord Ahmad, a Muslim peer, requested more help from the imams in “explaining and demonstrating how faith in Islam can be part of British identity”. That was also well judged.
British Muslims are diverse, in provenance and belief, and becoming more so, as immigrants from Somalia and Afghanistan dilute the existing South Asian stock. Many are prospering: the 50,000-strong Shia Ismaeli community is one of Britain’s best-connected. Yet many Muslims are poorly integrated into the liberal mainstream, culturally and, in the ghettos of Birmingham and Bradford, actually. In the typically defensive attitude of Muslim leaders, they can also seem resolved to remain so. That is the context in which Mr Pickles’ letter was received. “Is Mr Pickles seriously suggesting, as do members of the far right, that Muslims and Islam are inherently apart from British society?” tutted a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, a large umbrella group. Plainly, he was not suggesting that.
The Muslims living in the Sparkhill area of Birmingham, where Bagehot spent a day, are by their own admission a community apart. Sparkhill’s population is less than 10% white and 70% Muslim. The Irish pubs and grocers that once dominated the area have mostly closed. A rare survivor, Bournes, a family purveyor of “Irish turnips” and Clonakilty pudding, stands out among the curry shops like a memsahib in a harem.
Bagehot finds this wonderful. It has made Sparkhill more colourful and no less welcoming or law-abiding than nearby white working-class areas. Yet the local leaders and businessmen he spoke to, working in jewellery and kebab shops, tended to view the Muslim preponderance as a problem.
They considered it indicative of British Muslims’ failure to crack on—richer Hindus have dispersed to Birmingham’s leafier suburbs. A couple also worried about the ignorance that introspection can breed, as reflected in the fact that around 40 Brummie Muslims are in prison for terrorism offences. That appears to make Birmingham Britain’s likeliest place to be radicalised, noted Jahan Mahmood, an historian. Some worried about how Sparkhill looked to outsiders. “I can see how people might come here, freak out, and say, ‘England is not English any more’,” said Mohammed Ali, a local artist, over a plate of masala cod and naan.
If the poverty of Sparkhill’s Muslims were the only reason for their inwardness, prosperity would fix it. Yet there are reasons—not least, Sparkhill’s many flash motors and other displays of wealth—to suggest that cultural conservatism is another factor. It is especially evident among second-generation British Muslims who, having abandoned their parents’ native language, food and clothing, often find in Islam a uniquely powerful immigrant identity. Mr Ali, a bearded 37-year-old whose relish for communal harmony coexists with conservative Muslim views, is a typical case. “Our parents were too busy working hard to think about religion much,” he says. “Our generation is saying: ‘I choose to be Muslim, this is how I make sense of the madness.’ ”
The suddenness of this cultural embrace shows. Britain’s born-again Muslims often have a sketchy grasp of their religion, and can be gulled. “There is a lot of confusion,” said Sajid Iqbal, a Pakistani journalist who has spent over a decade observing his British co-religionists. “Extremists are not nearly so well recognised as they are in Pakistan.” And there are plenty of them.
Getting their niqab in a twist
Over 40% of British mosques are run, and most British imams schooled, in the Deobandi tradition, which tends to be hostile to integration. Hence the spread of the niqab, which some Deobandi preachers consider obligatory for women, in places such as Leicester where it was until recently uncommon. According to WikiLeaks, the American State Department’s former chief adviser on Muslim relations, Farah Pandith, considered Leicester’s Muslim community the most conservative in Europe.
Such cultural conservatism is tolerated in multicultural Britain, and many Muslims appreciate it. “This is the best country, you are free to pray, free to go to the mosque,” said Lal Muhammad, an Afghan selling phone cards in Sparkhill. Nor, as the Paris attacks suggest, is France’s unbending secularism necessarily superior. That suggests Mr Pickles’ polite request was, though worth making, not terribly likely to succeed. The inwardness and resentfulness of too many British Muslims will endure—at least until the second immigrant generation gives way to the third.
From the print edition: Britain

 

lol that 44.7% of the population feeling so strongly about independence that they would vote for it and many of those who voted against independence only doing so in fear of frantically and expensively prophesized economic disaster by the westminister powers that be rather than any positive fondness for said union... is a "resounding defeat". i mean, i feel like if nearly half of people are willing to risk economic doom to leave a union, that union is probably on its way out

i mean, we have independence movements in certain US states. you know what percentage of the vote they get? negligable

all im saying is your whistling past the graveyard is pretty obvious and a little pathetic

 

lol, of course, it must have been for fear of something - how else could an American possibly rationalise a decision not to follow in their footsteps as their decision was Objectively Spiffy!

I suppose the dwindling support for the Republican movement in Australia is fear, too?

Sure sure, Maik. And all history hitherto has been a history of class struggle.

 

ender that's what the entire campaign was based on. do i need to dig up patronizing BT lady for you? the frantic spinning and doomsaying of yourself and others in the scottish indy thread in the days up to the election? the arguements weren't "awww but wont you miss the pretty queen (who you'll still have) and being british", it was "WE WONT LET YOU BE IN THE EU WITH US IF YOU LEAVE AND YOU CANT HAVE THE POUND AND YOUR ECONOMY WILL CRASH"

 

i dont know anything about republican movements in australia, ender. i dont care. nobody does. its australia

if y'all want a foreign hereditary monarch based on divine right as your head of state, i really dont care. its not very important in the modern world. i mean, if i were the sort of person who reads tabloids in the checkout line or had a subscription to People magazine, i might care, but im not

it's a little weird for an atheist like yourself to be so gung-ho about it, but w/e

 

I thought as an American it was your duty and your genetic urge to prescribe ignorant bull**** on how the World Should Be, especially so in your case from the lofty perch of your keyboard?

But please, continue. You've done much good and more, lifting no fingers in support of any causes and contributing a net loss to society. Tell me again how the Scots Should Have Done It.