baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
BREXIT FUCKING SECRETARY?!?! what the actual fucking fuck

"The Queen has been pleased to approve the appointment of Rt Hon David Davis MP as Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union."
Satire is either officially dead or the replacement for the 'real' news. Can't decide which.

Johnson the first person in history to be appointed as Foreign Secretary solely on the basis that EVERYONE in the UK hates him?
 
Last edited:

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Proposed new flag after Scotland leave the UK

statue-of-a-disappointed-man.jpg
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'm glad VR is coming in the next few years cos reality is looking increasingly shit with each passing day.
 

droid

Well-known member
Great stuff here, and I reckon the Corbyn coup has a right to be in this thread (though the PLP surely disagree).

Many if not most of the MPs in the Labour Party who want to get shot of Jeremy Corbyn have more in common with Tory MPs across the chamber in the House of Commons than with either Corbyn or most of the people who vote for them. They are the sturdy backbone of political Britain, and Jeremy Corbyn is -in the words of a New Statesman columnist- ‘a cancer‘.

This is not merely a matter of policy. You only have to look at the annual Spectator garden party pics and see the likes of Harriet Harman and Liz Kendall sharing a Pimms in the company of David Cameron and Theresa May to realise that for them, politics is both an elite profession and a social clique. It is a role and vocation for the cultivated and enlightened.

The hapless Angela Eagle was likely pushed forward to challenge Corbyn because, among other things, she went to a comprehensive before she went to Oxford. Hence the Parliamentary Labour Party coup plotters view her as the kind of figure who ought to know how to bridge the gap between elite political society and working class Labour voters, in a way that a braying calamity like Tristram Hunt, say, could not. The trouble is she hasn’t a notion. Leading media voices think she’ll do just fine, of course, but that’s because they haven’t a clue either.

Despite Jeremy Corbyn’s appeals, the time of kinder, gentler politics has passed. Gone are the days when a Labour politician could vote to bomb a country or to privatise elements of the health and education services or to punish welfare recipients, and feel insulated from public anger.

In this new climate of nastiness, when people sometimes seem more vocal in speaking out against such matter-of-course procedures as bombing the Middle East and impoverishing poor families, it is hard for people who, in bygone days, could pass themselves off as ‘conviction politicians’ who want to give shape to such nebulous concepts as ‘aspiration’. Their credibility has plummeted because they find it impossible to come straight out with it and say without qualification or prevarication that they’re against austerity. For them, when Jeremy Corbyn proposes that austerity is a political choice and not a self-evident necessity, it makes the task of convincing the Tory-voting parent in their head all the more difficult.

https://hiredknaves.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/the-end-of-the-garden-party/
 

Leo

Well-known member
Boris Johnson on standby to lead country while May is on holiday

Responding to the news, Tim Farron, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, said: “Putting Boris Johnson in charge of the country is like putting the Chuckle Brothers in charge of Newsnight...“Perhaps he can do something useful with his time in charge, like finding the £350m a week for the NHS that he promised,” Farron added.

In 2011, Nick Clegg’s elevated role when he was deputy prime minister slipped his mind.

When asked in an interview if he was in charge, he said: “Yeah, I suppose I am. I forgot about that. I’m holding the fort but I’m hoping to take the end of the week off with my kids.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/15/boris-johnson-senior-uk-minister-theresa-may-holiday
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
When you consider what a joke the lib dems are, and what a mess the labour party is, and what cunts the tories are, it's time for the diazepam.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.

I read it in the print version (my parents buy it, let me be clear) - the bulk of the article rolls out from the thesis in the standfirst that the media shouldn't pretend 'we' know less than 'we' do in matters of public policy, by giving equal weight to (i) the general consensus among experts in the field, and (ii) the opposite view as espoused by a committed minority of dissenters (with the strong implication that dissenters are largely mad).

Of course, this thesis works well for some issues (eg climate change), but in other cases (economic policy), many experts are bound to a hegemonic interpretation of events by funding and/or their own indoctrination.

Quality Times headline from today: "Socialists plot to drive Britain left". That article contains lots more denigration of the 'hard left', and its Stalinist inclinations to protect the NHS from creeping privatisation and its focus on "black, Asian and ethnic minority rights" (that is genuinely what it says).
 
Last edited:

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Thanks.

While there are of course compromised economists and think tanks, academic methodology and culture tends to generate the correct consensus.

For example, oil companies fund research and think tanks that say climate change isn’t man made, but nonetheless the consensus among climate scientists is that it is. This is similar to the economics profession.

Looking back over the last three decades, economic consensus has been largely right about the major issues.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Looking back over the last three decades, economic consensus has been largely right about the major issues.

Lots of people would disagree profoundly with that. For example, the cataclysm of 2008 was produced through an economic consensus of sorts - all the 'experts' were revealed to be completely clueless (or else bought off, as with the ratings assessments of Iceland etc before the crash). Plus, the current economic consensus that has been engineered since 1980 or so would have been seen as right-wing madness in the post-war period.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
364 economists signed an open letter opposing Thatcher’s 1981 budget. Though inflation was reduced, growth was only constantly above trend a year later and unemployment peeked in 1984 and was high for a long time afterwards. Bear in mind some of the negatives of the budget were offset by the expansion of consumer credit, the US recovery and the Employment Acts of the 80’s. These factors aside the economy could have been in even worse shape.

The Treasury’s 18 studies on Britain joining the Euro in 2003 convinced the government not to join.

The fiscal stimulus following the financial crisis was textbook economics.

The majority of economists opposed the Tory’s austerity policies.

The majority of economists opposed Scottish independence.

Economists said that Brexit would have short run and long run negative effects on the economy, we're already seeing the short run effects.
 
Top