Politics at Westminster | BREAKING: UKIP

Mental promotion for someone that was clinging on to their job fairly recently
 
Jeremy Hunt moved to Health Secretary

nurse-volunteerism-for-a-fee.jpg
 
New health secretary is pro-homeopathy and anti-abortion. Woopdy doo.
 
Are we actually going to end the day with MORE upper-middle class white men in the cabinet?
 
What a bunch of amateurs this lot are. God forbid that Cameron should actually choose the correct, qualified person for important positions...
 
Alistair is coming across like a RAWKite desperately trying to justify Dalglish's second spell there. Jesus.
 
Are we actually going to end the day with MORE upper-middle class white men in the cabinet?

Looks like it.

And David Jones has just replaced Cheryl Gillan as Welsh Secretary.
 
The change in environment secretary confirms that the tories are going all out for that extra runway at Heathrow.
 
This is what annoys me about the left - it's the automatic assumption that the centre-right basically have no morals at all, even on the most basic level.

Essentially, you're saying that the Tories have a lack of empathy towards the disabled, labelling the entire government as psychopaths. There's one thing disagreeing with policy, it's another to accuse them of actively encouraging and welcoming the death of its citizens.

EDIT - that's not entirely fair, a lot of left-wingers don't hold these beliefs at all.

I was reading something last week about some Tory think tank which was looking into the reason that the economy isn't doing very well. Their answer was that British workers are lazy; don't work long enough or hard enough. These were Tory MP's with policy influence, not some comments on the internet.

Imagine if you will what that would actually feel like. There you are working away quite happily (well probably moaning a fair bit if we are being honest) in 2007, then the bankers collapse the economy and you get screwed. Then some Tory MP straight out of Oxbridge with a degree in politics and a whole half a decade working for an MP then as an MP, slating how hard you work and effectively blaming the people least responsible for the shit we are in for all their own woes.

Plenty enough reasons to think the nasty party is back.
 
I was reading something last week about some Tory think tank which was looking into the reason that the economy isn't doing very well. Their answer was that British workers are lazy; don't work long enough or hard enough. These were Tory MP's with policy influence, not some comments on the internet.

Imagine if you will what that would actually feel like. There you are working away quite happily (well probably moaning a fair bit if we are being honest) in 2007, then the bankers collapse the economy and you get screwed. Then some Tory MP straight out of Oxbridge with a degree in politics and a whole half a decade working for an MP then as an MP, slating how hard you work and effectively blaming the people least responsible for the shit we are in for all their own woes.

Plenty enough reasons to think the nasty party is back.

I don't think anyone in the Conservative Party with a remotely important voice has genuinely claimed that the workforce is lazy. They have claimed that those who don't work are often lazy, which is, in fairness, completely different.

Whilst there is a legitimate argument to suggest that it is the average man in the street who is suffering as a result of some poor financial decisions over the last decade or so, I don't believe anyone is actually blaming them for causing the problems we have. Everyone knows who caused the meltdown, and it wasn't your average bloke, simply because he doesn't have the power to do so.

The fact that the MP went to Oxford is completely irrelevant. So did Ed Miliband. That's just discrimination against academically successful people.
 
I don't think anyone in the Conservative Party with a remotely important voice has genuinely claimed that the workforce is lazy. They have claimed that those who don't work are often lazy, which is, in fairness, completely different.

Whilst there is a legitimate argument to suggest that it is the average man in the street who is suffering as a result of some poor financial decisions over the last decade or so, I don't believe anyone is actually blaming them for causing the problems we have. Everyone knows who caused the meltdown, and it wasn't your average bloke, simply because he doesn't have the power to do so.

The fact that the MP went to Oxford is completely irrelevant. So did Ed Miliband. That's just discrimination against academically successful people.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19300051
 
Not impressed with the new Minister for Beating the Poor with Sticks.
 
And the new Minister for Equality voted against gay adoption. Yay equality.

I'm not really looking for a debate that's going to get this thread massively off topic, but you can vote against gay adoption and still be in favour of gay rights as a whole. I'm personally in favour of it, but the two are different things.
 
I'm not really looking for a debate that's going to get this thread massively off topic, but you can vote against gay adoption and still be in favour of gay rights as a whole. I'm personally in favour of it, but the two are different things.

How? Adoption is part of the whole package of gay equality surely?
 
alastair said:
I'm not really looking for a debate that's going to get this thread massively off topic, but you can vote against gay adoption and still be in favour of gay rights as a whole. I'm personally in favour of it, but the two are different things.

True enough, Al, but I note that you haven't addressed my concerns with the Minister for Beating the Poor with Sticks. :D
 
I'm not really looking for a debate that's going to get this thread massively off topic, but you can vote against gay adoption and still be in favour of gay rights as a whole. I'm personally in favour of it, but the two are different things.

"I'm for gay rights...just not ALL rights, you see. Also, I think women should have rights, just not the right to vote."
 
It sorts of undermines the idea, and indeed the definition, of equality if you're against giving them equal rights with straight couples.
 
Cabinet reshuffle: 4/29 women, 29/29 white, 19/29 attended Oxford or Cambridge.
:lol:

That is irrelevant and discriminatory against the academically successful.

These people have worked hard to get where they are, they have risen metaphorically from the top of the Empire State building to the top of the Empire State building stood on a chair. No one can deny how much higher they now stand and how deserving they are of our respect.


:)
 
It sorts of undermines the idea, and indeed the definition, of equality if you're against giving them equal rights with straight couples.

The argument is that you should give gay people every right in the land that is afforded to heterosexual couples, but the issue of adoption can affect more than just the couple itself. There is still research being done into the effect that being raised by a gay couple can have on a child, either positive or negative.

The reason I'm pro gay adoption is basically on the premise that two loving parents regardless of sexuality is surely a better place for a child than one of these dreadful orphanage type places.

That is irrelevant and discriminatory against the academically successful.

These people have worked hard to get where they are, they have risen metaphorically from the top of the Empire State building to the top of the Empire State building stood on a chair. No one can deny how much higher they now stand and how deserving they are of our respect.


:)


You can make a point if the cabinet is 95% privately educated, fine. But I don't see why discriminating against Oxford educated MPs is acceptable. They did well at school and fill a position of high office having worked all their lives to get there. A fair proportion of them probably came from the comp down the road.
 
Love all the hate for Tories in here, as if Labour are actually any different.

Same shit, different face.

Except that there really is an asymmetry between the parties. It doesn't stem from Labour being all nice salt-of-the-earth people and the tories all being shits; it stems from a mismatch between ideology and institutional power.

Labour in its modern form may still have helping the weakest as its core ideological goal, but it also has to win a share of middle England to be electorally viable. It also has to curry favour with corporations and the right-wing media; and the corporations were happy enough with Labour for most of the period under Blair.

So a Labour government can generally be expected to spread resources around - to the poor, to unions and the public sector, and to the regions, but also to the middle-class and business.

The Tories, on the other hand, have middle England as their natural constituency. They've had to walk back the rhetoric a bit on social issues, and generally seem less evil, but they're showing that in power they will still basically act as if the weakest sectors of society don't exist.