Holy feck. Are you really this naive?
Your example of the free market arriving at the best and optimum working practices for all is a total ideologically based fantasy, demonstrably disproven by reality.
Westminster Politics
- Thread starter altodevil
- Start date
-
In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) is joined by CEO Duncan Drasdo and Financial Director Andy Green from the Manchester United Supporters Trust for a special episode on all things behind the scenes at Old Trafford including a brief history of MUST and their aims today, views on INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe so far, and the Old Trafford regeneration.
Your example of the free market arriving at the best and optimum working practices for all is a total ideologically based fantasy, demonstrably disproven by reality.
What an incredibly bizarre statement. Did you even think about what you were typing? Even the merest glance at the real world shows us its not only false, but the exact opposite of what actually happens. People work on zero hours contracts when they want known hours, they work in the gig economy when they want to be considered employees, they work for companies that pay below living wage even though it leaves them in poverty, and so on. Hell, the entirety of the post-industrialisation era shows that what you're suggesting simply doesn't happen in the real world. Its why we ended up with powerful unions and why we have parliamentary representation of labour.
The naivety the likes of Finneh shows in everything he says shows that some people simply don't understand the real world. Yet still get's an equal say in it.
I think it's "I'm alright Jack" more than naivety.
Many people who are on zero hours contracts like being on them. It gives them flexibility to choose when they want to work and to also top up their bank savings when they want to. They're not tied down to 36 hours a week when they'd, like all of us, rather have a lie in. I used to be on a zero hours contract and it was the best job I had. I could get three shifts one week so I could work 45 hours and then get three weeks off where I wrestled with the rats surrounding my cardboard house for food scraps because I was getting feck all work unless I was willing to kill myself for the benefit of some jumped up entrepreneur who gave his incompetent brother a management role and skimmed our wages from time to time.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-51731753
More bullying claims against Patel, you’d like to think she’s on borrowed time but she’ll probably be given a promotion instead.
More bullying claims against Patel, you’d like to think she’s on borrowed time but she’ll probably be given a promotion instead.
Feck the Tories, Elitists and anyone else who says socialism is wrong. Hopefully that helpsSometimes I'm not sure with you
Sure she did. From Guido Fawkes and Joris Bonson.
If you want to see something crazy, ask @finneh what he thinks should happen if a restaurant refuses to serve a black family.
I don't disagree with you, it's the means of protecting the worker that I disagree with as not only do they fail to achieve the aim of protecting the worse off in society, but often actively harm the poorest.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...FjACegQIARAB&usg=AOvVaw3U5E1bpQJB7kSRPAzS3fm0
My view as is articulated above in that these regulations generally hurt the poorest and benefit the middle classes and wealthiest by reducing competition. The WTD is no different in limiting hours for the poorest (e.g. my operative on £28k pa who isn't allowed to earn another £4k pa Vs a banker who can work 80 hours without penalty).
The intentions are good but as is often the case the outcomes are undesirable.
I mean, they're not wrong are they or am I missing the point? You get more from a pension than you've paid in?
Last edited:
Erm I think that depends how much you earn?...
Sorry, but I'm asking if the majority of people do or not? Meant to put a question mark at the end of that rather thank make it look like a statement.
Depends on a number of things, the chief of which is how long you live after starting to receive your full pension!
Because people now tend to live longer after they reach (state) pensionable age, some may get back what they paid in, but the whole thing use to be predicated on the basis of most people dying within ten years of retirement, now the predictions are more like the majority surviving 20 years, hence the need to increase the official retirement age.
What a lot of people don't get is that what they paid in over the years has gone. All of it, and more, spent on current pensions at the time of their paying in. All they got for it, apart from the warm glow that comes from looking after others, is a promise that future generations would pay for their own pension when the time came. Just a promise, that's all.
That is right.
Pension funds essentially rely on two things for growth.
Compounding - the amount of time the money is invested over.
Interest rates or return on capital invested.
If basic interest rates are low, say 2% for say 20 years then capital growth would be modest. And recently that has been the case.
Prior to that, interest rates were much higher.
And if that was the case early on in ones working life then their pension pot would have had a much better outcome.
If this virus really hits the UK(Which I'm assuming it will)then every argument about why we needed cuts to public services and how awful it would have been Labour had won(Soviet Union 2.0 etc etc) will be thrown out the window and we see the full force of the state. Hopefully anyway as the alternative is just everyone in Britain dying.
In fairness the other guy is doing it while wearing a blue tie.
Last edited:
Does Patel ever stop fecking grinning
Tories think we're all alcoholics.
Tories think we're all alcoholics.
Didn't know Dorries was health minister. Know she used be be a nurse but feck me...she is and idiot.
These types of things are common. For understandable reasons, they are not framed as such by media. So they circulate on twitter screenshots, changing nobody's mind.
(Speculation) - The bigger problem in the UK I think is the respect the BBC has. Since people seem to expect an unbiased broadcaster to do its job, their framing really matters. From very limited experience, the US is a bit better since the media landscape is totally polarised and people are vaguely aware of who is on which side. So if you frame something in an unfamiliar way, especially if its different than both main sides, it can get traction. But, again, this happens 1 on 1, not at scale, and so is politically useless.
So far, it looks like some of the claims of the election are panning out then, the Tories are spending a lot more under Johnson than those that came before. Labour need to come to terms with this pretty quickly. Corbyn's comments about how this is just putting right the years of austerity may be true, but he's fighting the last war not the current one. Johnson will be little more harmed by that than by someone claiming that Corbyn is responsible for PFI or the Iraq war. The rhetoric of austerity, at least, is gone, arguably its gone for real. Now Labour need to decide how to frame this Tory Government and respond to it.
In truth I think it was clear during the election campaign that it was "tax and spend" vs "tax and spend". The Tories were just better at attacking the tax and spend policies of Labour as economically illiterate whilst also advocating a similar economic divergence. This is true in the US also with Trump.
It's why for me it was the most extreme "turd sandwich vs giant douche" election I've seen (I know you'd differ on this front).
There's no success being seen in candidates like Bernie/Corbyn, but also no success with the likes of Paul in the US and Raab in the UK (both very flawed in their own right of course).
It irritates me that people with a radical policy vision (either way) seem to be getting outgunned by tempestuous populists. Although the candidates on each side aren't exactly beacons of electability.
Last edited:
Posted this since it's as much about our politics as it is about Corona.
That’s an absolutely shocking read.
Yes it is, but it was 100% predictable.
Now, just imagine the reaction had Jeremy Corbyn missed one, let alone FIVE, Cobra meetings.
Sir Keir would have a lot more to say.
Forget about ideology, it’s a damning indictment that people like Johnson are able to wander into positions of such power. Anyone who knows him could tell you he is exactly the kind of uncaring self-absorbed cretin who would miss key meetings even in his role as PM during the biggest peacetime crisis, yet he is able to become Mayor of London, Foreign Sec, PM etc virtually all by virtue of the privilege he was born into.
who could have ever guessed that boris doesn't give a shit about anything but himself
Comments below the first one are insightful - Times is a left-wing rag, for example. I've always felt the long-term way to combat media bias isn't to point out mistakes or examples of it, but to build an entirely parallel media ecosystem like the right has.
Boris must be one of the most popular PMs we've had at the moment I'd have thought. I can't recall any being in the positive before, Thatcher in the Falklands excepted, although I do have a shit memory so I might be wrong.One would expect Starmer to get a new leader bounce soon though, they usually do.
It would have been shocking
That he had not replaced cobra meetings with weekly tea parties for his terrorist friends
Kinda pointless talking about Corbyn though... He got decimated in an election and he's finished in Westminster politics
someone in the shadow cabinet needs to come out as a maoist to keep up