I have only ever been able to discern two underlying motivations in Theresa May’s career; a love of office and a hatred of immigrants. It is possible to love office without loving power; loving power means you want to do something with it, whereas loving office is just for prestige and personal economic opportunity. I do not imagine May’s hatred of immigrants is driven by actual racism, easy though it is to read that into her hostile environment, go home van, end free movement, career. It is rather that the incredibly successful Tory narrative remains the false attribution of working class poverty to immigration, rather than its actual cause, massive inequality and an entire legal structure and system of government geared to promoting the interests of the super wealthy.
I do not understand the notion that we have a constitutional crisis. The solution seems self-evident. England and Wales voted to leave the EU, by a large margin if you take those two countries, which share a legal system, alone. Let them leave the EU. Scotland voted by a still larger majority to remain in the EU. Let it become Independent, remain in the EU, and not need to thwart the will of the English and Welsh to leave. And let Ireland forget its bigots and be a united country.
Constitutional crisis over. Indeed, that there is no other viable solution, and the UK is no longer a viable political unit, I can guarantee you will be universally recognised by the year 2030 as having been a self-evident truth. The actual dissolution of the UK will come ten years before that.
The BBC TV News was hyping the success of the British economy under Theresa May a couple of days ago on the basis of figures from the Office of National Statistics showing that the economic inactivity rate had fallen to 21%, the lowest since records began. But that needs to be considered alongside the fact that purchasing power of average wages is still below where it was ten years ago, and a huge swathe of the population is in insecure, part time and low paid employment.
The decline of leisure is not something to be celebrated. The shrinking of the “economically inactive” figure to 21% means that many pensioners are forced to keep on working because they cannot make ends meet on the developed world’s most miserly pensions, that parents of young children are forced both to stay in jobs rather than provide all the love, protection and affection they may wish. Every time Theresa May is questioned on the heartless fiasco of universal credit, she states its aim is to “get people back into work”, by which she means choose between starvation and vicious drudgery; with no rights, no prospects and low paid hours handed down as a favour.
Whether or not May stays as head of the Tory government, or is replaced by some other heartless Tory bastard, I really do not care. I have not been blogging much recently, in sheer exasperation at the enormity of societal injustice and the utter irrelevance of the available political system. But I guess we have to get back to chipping away at the marble facade of power with our tiny social media picks. One day it will fall.
WELL said Craig.
I think probably this comment is more fitting on this thread.
Radio chatter has Theresa May favourite with the bookies to hold on, Boris Johnson also appears to be the bookies favourite to take over, in the event May loses.
So the Brexit process started with the Tories in turmoil, and it looks like it will end that way as well. Whether we leave or not is still, to be decided though.
The surrealism of Westminster hit me square in the face earlier when Victoria Derbyshire on the BBC was interviewing another faceless grey suited Tory on the £39 billon pounds exit bill.
Derbyshire said we owe the EU this exit money, the grey suit mildly disputed the fact, that it must pass through the House of Lords first, as they have a duty to look after the taxpayers money.
Although a no deal Brexit will be very damaging across these Isles. The SNP needs to take a step back at Westminster, and let the two main parties concentrate on playing their violins on the deck of the Titanic, whilst they head for the lifeboats through Scottish independence.
“Although a no deal Brexit will be very damaging across these Isles”.
Presumably you are unaware of the thousand-year history of Britain before it was gradually tricked into what has become the EU of today. Britain stands out as one of the most successful independent nations in the world.
Thanks to a little thing I call “sovereignty”, we do not have to negotiate or submit to the demands of the Brussels tyrants. We should just go, and to hell with them.
When Japan agrees to become a province of China, I shall concede that Britain cannot succeed on its own.
Erm..Tom,you might not have noticed wearing your rose tinted Union Jack goggles, but Britain is no longer a force to be reckoned with around the globe.
Indeed after it leaves the largest trading blocon the planet even its soft power won’t match trade we now do with the EU.
Westminster can’t even threaten to return to the halcyon days of imperialist superiority, as it now commands a wee diddy armed forces.
But you’re are correct on sovereignty, something Scotland will reclaim in whole sooner than later. Then of course Britain as an political entity will become that much smaller.
Tom what utter balderdash and straight out of the Leave Campaign’s pack of lies. Soverignty? How about creeping Fascism? I am not aware that we have been invaded by the EU so as far as I believe, our Government pass Legislation, make Laws, debate current issues etc. We are part of the EU – we have an input into the decisions made in Brussels – they do not control our borders, our economy or our Government – we need to be clear about this fact.
– –“…Figures from the Office of National Statistics [show] that the economic inactivity rate had fallen to 21%, the lowest since records began. The decline of leisure is not something to be celebrated“
Absolutely. And not just leisure; ‘uneconomic’ ie. unpaid activity includes political engagement and activism. Hobbies are productive. The best in sport used to be ‘amateur’; the competitors’ own pursuit of excellence rather than money. I curse the worship of ‘professionalism’, which generally amounts to the most shabby job that will tick regulatory boxes, in the shortest time with the cheapest materials.
It’s the Tory paradise; get everyone working like slaves and they’ll have no time to do anything political, or contribute to their local community. They’ll be so knackered after work that all they’re capable of is soaking up the corporate media’s propaganda. No time or energy to grow, make or repair anything? Great! You should be buying it all from our corporate cronies, or you deprive us of our cut of your labour.
No time to study, think, learn, or contemplate? Even better! Get back to work, oiks!
That’s probably why the term “chattering classes” was invented, to deride those who do give thought to how society is going.
An excellent series of comments on a welcome blog from Craig.
Thank you Iain; your activism for the Chagossians is exactly the sort of ‘uneconomic’ activity I’m referring to.
Don’t see why you didn’t mention her approving the killings of leakers Gareth Williams, Gudrun Loftus et al, and the sacrifice of the Iraqi immigrants the al;-hillis as Home Secretary to improve her chances to become PM. She;s a murderer. and you are forgetting too much.
I have no love for Theresa May or her policies, which on immigration have been cruel, callous and cack-handed.
However, a desire to control immigration is not the same thing as a hatred of immigrants. Equating the two is what
fascists encourage.
You missed what Craig wrote:
– “I do not imagine May’s hatred of immigrants is driven by actual racism […]. It is rather that the incredibly successful Tory narrative remains the false attribution of working class poverty to immigration, rather than its actual cause”
‘Hatred of immigrants’ implies racism to me. Why else use a word like ‘hatred’?
James O’Brien on his radio show the other day openly called her a racist. You can call her what you like but there is no doubt that Brexit has one sole aim, to stop Freedom of Movement – everything else in clearly secondary. That stems from her time as Home Secretary and the disasters she had over border control. When you become so dedicated to only one aspect to which everything is subservient then expect to be called out on it, and not in favourable terms.
Stopping Freedom of movement has absolutely nothing to do with racism.
a point that only gets better the more often it is made.
Clark, I have no doubt that the Conservative Party does attribute working class poverty to immigration as a deliberate policy. However, objectively you must concede that there is a point at which a nation loses more than it gains by unlimited immigration of unselected foreigners.
The more poor people there are looking for work, the lower pay can be driven and the more frightened employees will be of upsetting their bosses in any way.
so in your example, you see the problem as ‘poor’ immigrants and not unscrupulous bosses taking advantage ?
I don’ see “the” problem as anything uniquely. The world is far more complicated than that. There are many ways in which life could be improved; some of them are complementary, some are mutually exclusive, and most coexist more or less easily.
Unscrupulous bosses certainly do take advantage, always have done, and will always try to. (More or less by definition). A civilized government should limit their ability to take advantage, by making and enforcing laws and also by taxing their ill-gotten gains to give back to the poor.
Unfortunately, there are such severe problems in our world – and so much unscrupulous propaganda being put about – that many people become obsessed with single issues. Those who make it their business to study such matters have determined that the maximum permanently sustainable population of the British Isles is about 14 million. Today it is more than four times that many, which immediately faces us with a problem. Adding more hungry mouths to the present total is not a good start.
But she clearly does not have a desire to control immigration. When Cameron said he would get immigration down to the tens of thousands, she as Home Secretary, with direct personal responsibility for doing so, oversaw it rising to record levels.
And yet she deliberately created the evil hostile environment, deported people who were living here legally and had done since childhood, and stoked the hard right anti-immigration factions whose views strongly contributed to Brexit happening.
I don’t think she is racist. I do think she is extremely dull-witted and simply could not see any other means of trying to reduce immigration; and didn’t care about the impact on real people, only on what it meant for her personal political career.
She is dull witted but has a low cunning. I would suggest that here actions play as well for the centrist-metropolitan-corporatists who style themselves on the left as much as the right. Cocking up immigration allows caricatures to be made.
Well said.
Gordon Brown in 2008 left a national debt of 500b (including 200b banks bailout) TODAY in just 10 years the debt stands at 1750b, AFTER austerity and asset sales. This Greece level debt will bankrupt the country when interest rates rise, just the annual increase in debt service amounts to ……… Only Macdonnell is aware of this gigantic con hence the owners of capital are after Corbyn.
….including 200b banks bailout….
I wish. More like £850 billion
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/163850bn-official-cost-of-the-bank-bailout-1833830.html
Do the math ….
At the time (2008):
average cost of building a new school (1300 pupils) = £35 million
50 staff @ £25K/annum = £1.25m
Cost of building a new school and staffing it for 50 years = £97.5m
Cost of building 1025 new schools and staffing them for 50 years = £100billion
Make the same calculations for 200 hospitals = ~ £100billion
1 million affordable homes @ £100k each = £100billion
…. I’ve run out of ways to spend it, the sums are so enormous, and I’ve barely spent a third of what ‘we’ gave to the bankers. The biggest lie of the entire scandal is that it wasn’t deliberate.
Math doer, check your maths, Gordon Brown doubled the UK national debt ! …..he gave a lot of lolly to bail out the bankers, he is famous for it, can’t you remember he saved the bloody world !
I think it’s you who is misremembering. The deficit is famously the responsibility of poor and disabled malingerers. That’s why they are having to pay it all off.
Gordon Brown started with a National Debt of £500 billion and increased it to £1 trillion then skulked back to Scotland.
I’m sure we’d respond to any extradition request favourably.
So what?
The UK’s National “Debt” is just Sterling savings.
Ask yourself`: who owns Gilts, NS&I products, and Premium Bonds etc – and why?
You’ll find that the National “Debt” simply fulfils the savings desires of the private sector; whether that’s holders of private pensions, banks’ Tier 1 capital, foreign exporters’ earnings that they don’t wish to exchange for their own currency, or indeed the sterling deposits of anyone who wants to bank overnight an amount that exceeds the £85K Govt guarantee.
It’s nothing to be scared of.
Anyway, the BoE owns a quarter of it already, and could buy up the lot if the Chancellor ever instructed it to.
But then, of course, institutional savers would be begging the Treasury to issue more bonds! As they were in Australia a few years back, when the govt foolishly insisted on running ongoing budget surpluses!
Geoffrey – seriously delusional. The deficit accrued with most countries around the world suffering the consequences of a major global recession – created by yes, the Bankers (seriously tempted to change the B to a W here). Gordon Brown was given serious credit by the IMF and other international monetary organisations for the measures he took to protect manufacturing in the UK and other areas of economic activity. His policies have been adopted around the world. Had he not taken these measures, Britain would have been in a prolonged, serious depression. So, get the old facts right will you?
Geoffrey, what utter rubbish. it is this Government who has tripled the deficit to over £1tn
Hmmn, well whatever the cost of the bailout actually was, I doubt it was deliberate – in the sense of being planned – but the recession was caused by bankers being greedy, reckless and overconfident in systems like Credit default swaps and sub prime mortgages – systems governed by mathematics that they did not understand, and, when you add the rapid transactions enabled by entrusting computers to deal with buying and selling these bonds with alarming rapidity together with deregulation of the financial system itself, the crash was inevitable. More criminal negligence than deliberate intent.
Luckily the radical reform of the system prevents this from ever happening again, eh? what do you mean nothing has changed…
Rebuttal: bank de-regulation. https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/13413667.Bank_deregulation_did_for_Labour/
The cost of bail-out was written up right then and there.
The cock-up theory world view is thread bare in the post wiki-leaks era. If legislators gave a fuck, they could have an army of civil servants advising them about consequences and alternative policy, instead of how best to sell unpopular policies as something else, something other than what the policy is actually designed to do. They don’t do that. That’s a choice. That’s a positive decision, not a bolt from the blue. What these fuckers do is the feature, it is not a bug.
Not to mention the buckshee £20 billion he “earned” by selling off broadcast frequencies to phone companies – which are still getting back their outlay by overcharging all their customers. A clever way of taxing the future, eh?
Just as Dubya left a US national debt of about $11 trillion and change, which has now grown to nearly $22 trillion.
Scorched earth.
The only risk from the $22tn US Govt “Debt” is that the present or future govt will use its expansion as an excuse to cut welfare benefits and health expenditure.
Similarly to the UK, the US National “Debt” is just the dollar savings of its citizens, and anyone else who holds dollars they don’t yet wish to spend.
If those dollar savers ever decide to spend what they currently hold in US Treasuries, those initial and subsequent transactions will be taxed in the usual way, and the deficit will reduce accordingly. But that decision is up to them, and there’s not a great deal the US Govt can do about it, other than increase taxes – which just removes money from circulation, and effectively destroys it. Or cut spending, which will cause a recession.
What really counts for Americans is that the US Govt keeps on spending money into the economy – sadly consecutive US Govts have been way too generous to the military and in tax giveaways for the corporate and individually wealthy. America could be a great place if it had different priorities.
Your ignorance of Banking Structures is worthy of ridicule. You have no idea what Government Bonds are or why they are the basis of the Banking System. You should go to see Maduro or maybe find some loony African country like Zimbabwe. The Internet is full of quacks like you peddling gibberish. You sound moronic the way you talk about $22 Trillion in DEBT in a global GDP of $80 Trillion.
Why don’t you mortgage everything you have and do so repeatedly to raise your standard of living so you can compete with Mark Zuckerberg ?
Insults are no substitution for evidence.
If you do not understand how and why the catastrophic loss (self-inflicted or otherwise) of productive resources in a country is what leads to its hyper-inflation, then you really shouldn’t drag Zimbabwe or Venezuela (or Weimar, that other tired example) into a discussion about monetary sovereignty.
Do please enlighten us as to how Bonds are the “basis” of the banking system.
(Ex-EU, the BoE can revert to its Ways and Means Account, and have no need to issue Gilts – aka welfare for the rich – whatsoever.)
You also make no attempt to differentiate between public and private debt, which is a category error.
Why do you seek to do the City of London and Wall St’s work for it, and advocate the impoverishment of the private sector (you and me) at the altar of “sound money” and deficit hawkery?
“Similarly to the UK, the US National “Debt” is just the dollar savings of its citizens, and anyone else who holds dollars they don’t yet wish to spend”.
Sorry, Mr Shigemitsu, that kite don’t fly. Its fatal flaw lies in the studiously vague phrase “its citizens”. In fact, as you well know, most of the money is owed to wealthy corporations and individuals, whereas the vast majority of citizens have no savings at all. Indeed, it is well known that about half of US citizens could not find $400 for an unexpected expense.
More and more, the world’s money is owed by the vast majority of ordinary people to a tiny handful who have far more than they could ever spend. Those creditors are essentially playing Monopoly on a vast scale – but it’s not a game, it’s people’s lives they are playing with.
“…most of the money is owed to wealthy corporations and individuals, whereas the vast majority of citizens have no savings at all.”
Thank you for being civil. Bond issuance is absolutely “welfare for the rich”. I’m completely aware of that.
But public debt does not need to be “paid back”. There will be no biblical style “Day of Reckoning”.
Corporations, Banks, Pension Funds, Foreign exporters, Insurance companies etc choose to put their funds into US Treasuries/Gilts because they are looking for somewhere super-safe to keep their savings (and in the case of Pension Funds, the public’s savings), foregoing higher premiums for riskier investments, and the govt is doing them a favour allowing itself to be used as “borrower of last resort”.
Even if the National Debt were to be “repaid” – though I can’t see why bond holders would want that – all that happens is that a private sector asset/govt liability at the US (or HM) Treasury, i.e. a govt bond, would be transferred to a private sector asset/govt sector liability at the central bank (Fed or BoE) i.e currency.
That’s simply an asset swap because its *still a liability* in the Whole of Government accounts (see “I Promise to Pay” etc…).
Besides which; if the holders of US Treasuries, or UK Gilts, preferred to hold their assets in cash, they wouldn’t have bought Gilts in the first place, would they?
I hate household analogies because they are usually grossly misleading, but just this once I’ll suggest that if you had £50K savings on deposit at Barclays Bank, a) you would not be bothered in the least that Barclays were “in debt” to you for £50K, and b) would be rather pissed off with them if they insisted on closing your 2% Ultra-safe deposit account, putting it in a current A/c at only 0.75%, or, even worse, handing you your £50K in £20 notes to stuff under your bed. That’s the analogy of the Treasury “paying off” the National Debt.
As far as the yields go, they’re created at a keystroke like all other govt spending, they’re taxed as capital gains income, and if spent, they circulate around the economy, and if not spent, they are out of circulation and non-inflationary.
Personally, I don’t see the need for Gilt issuance – I would rather that the UK govt used the mothballed BoE Ways and Means Account as an “overdraft”, but under EU rules, this is disallowed.
But losing sleep over the level of annual budget deficits and the National Debt in a national whose “debts” are in its own sovereign, non-convertible, fiat currency? Apart from the fact that lying Tories use it as a disingenuous excuse to catastrophically reduce public spending, then no, its not a problem. Ask Japan.
People can lose a sense of scale with big numbers, to put it in a perspective that most people can intuitively grasp;
A million seconds is 12 days.
A billion seconds is 31 years.
A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
The UK national debt today is around £30k for every citizen in the UK. Add to that about £7k private debt per person, allied with 15 million people living below the poverty line, a demographic time bomb ticking in the form of baby boomers reaching pension age and it starts to look like we just lost WW2.
The UK National Debt become bemusing when Interest Rates hit 5%. In 1922 the UK devoted 40% Government Spending to Debt Service costs for the 1914-18 War.
http://www.ifs.org.uk/tools_and_resources/fiscal_facts/public_spending_survey/debt_interest_payments
You have to REPAY. – Interest + Principal. At present Interest Rates are low and so is Sterling
http://uk.investing.com/rates-bonds/uk-10-year-bond-yield-streaming-chart
The UK was on the Gold Standard in 1922, thereby restricting how much Sterling could be issued.
It isn’t any longer. The UK, like most of the world (notably not the Eurozone) has its own sovereign, fiat, non-convertible, free-floating currency. That makes a world of difference.
The govt instructs the BoE to create Gilt yields at a keystroke, just as it does for all other public spending. There may well be better things it could do with that money, but it’s not an either/or, and if you’re receiving a private or workplace pension, you’ll be glad of that (safely guaranteed) income.
Besides which, due to QE, the Treasury currently pays 25% of those yields, via the BoE, to itself!
As an aside, the Govt could even QE the entire National Debt, buying up all remaining Gilts on secondary markets, if the Chancellor told it to.
“Paying” back the National “Debt” simply swaps one govt liability for another (@HM Treasury/Gilts vs. @BoE/Currency) – so you haven’t actually removed any liability from the Govt at all.
Of course you could tax it all away, and, in the process, destroy the entire savings of the private sector!
Good luck dealing with the resulting deep depression and the massive hike in private sector debt that would result.
“The UK national debt today is around £30k for every citizen in the UK.”
This is not a problem – the UK govt, as monopoly issuer of the currency which it issues it at a keystroke at its central bank, could buy up all the Gilts it wants to, target whatever rate of interest it deems appropriate, paying whatever yields it decides.
The National Debt simply represents the cumulative savings desires of the private (non-govt) sector, and they are quite happy to leave their Sterling savings somewhere ultra-safe.
“Add to that about £7k private debt per person, allied with 15 million people living below the poverty line”
This is a real problem, and unconnected with the first statement.
“… a demographic time bomb ticking in the form of baby boomers reaching pension age”
The main problem here will be the availability of *real* resources (labour, materials, energy, land). The UK govt can purchase anything priced in sterling, and create as much *currency* as it needs – up to the limit of the real economy to absorb that spending without overheating and causing inflation. Those limits of the *real* economy, especially labour, are the issue – not the availability of sterling, which is, theoretically at least, unlimited. As automation increasingly replaces manufacturing and administrative employment, the educational, caring and medical services will be the providers of most jobs in future – you can never have too many teachers, carers and nurses!
” and it starts to look like we just lost WW2.”
Come on, that’s just doom-mongering.
Indeed. The US treasury lost $21 trillion dollars, missing from the Pentagon budget over the last twenty years although the fight back has it that only $6 trillion is missing. If true, enough to re-tool and avert the worst of what is coming down upon us with regard to extinction, warming and ecocide, provide a health care system for poor Americans, redress inequality and re-set the power imbalance (which is going to bring America and the UK down, not least because they can no longer restrain the impulses of their industrial war makers.) Of course, none of those desirable things happened, the rest will be history.
They ( the right-wing , head-banging Tories ) have almost achieved what even they would have deemed impossible – they are returning the UK to a Dickensian State , where the rich enjoy all the fruits of the labour of the masses with no responsibilities for their well-being . And as for the Welfare State – ”Are there no Prisons ? And the Union Workhouses ? Are they still in operation ? ”
We actually reached the stage some years ago where many young lads don’t get their first job until they land in prison, putting together parts for some shady company or other, and no job to get out to. And the greed is so intense, the resistance to somebody like Corbyn changing things so strong, that the only solution is to burn the country down so neo-liberalism has too few pieces to rebuild from. Then we start again.
George Orwell was born in Bihar, India. The name Bihar comes from the root, Vihar, meaning temple. An auspicious place. A place where we can understand the idea of time; the past, present and future as one. Mr Orwell certainly achieved this feat; perhaps destined to by virtue of the circumstances of his birth. He was, or at least his writings were, prophetic. He could see the reality of how the world was, because of how the people were and consequently he could see how the future would unravel, logically. He was not wrong then and he is not wrong in these darkened days in which we are dying.
In his masterpiece, 1984, he introduces us to a dystopian reality that has encompassed the globe; three fascistic power blocs of the northern hemisphere, Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia fighting each other for the resources of the southern hemisphere. London was the capital of Airstrip One, an offshore island and part of the superstate of Oceania (North America). She was at endless war with her neighbours, rivals and enemies in the battle for global domination, Eurasia (Europe and Russia) and East Asia (China and the states that border her today).
The debacle which has enveloped the United Kingdom and the European Union over the former’s decision to withdraw from the club has created the opportunity for two thirds of this fiction to become real facts, eventually and inevitably forcing the hand of the Peoples Republic to realise a historical belief and vision, espoused many years before on the BBC’s Dateline London programme by a journalist (London correspondent, probably), that if it looks Chinese, then it is Chinese. Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos would return to the bosom of the motherland, as Austria, the Sedatenland etc was annexed to the German fatherland.
All this because Russia and the Europeans would have come together, probably quite naturally, in response to Great Britain and Ireland having joined as the fifty first, second, third and fifty fourth states, of the United States. These four ancient nations will find no other way to resolve the #Brexit conundrum and they will see this as the only logical option – an English speaking block, based on common free trade ideals, that guarantees their sovereignty. It would appeal to each of the four nations, the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish, perhaps for different reasons but they would be accepting because their national ego’s will be satisfied with this international recognition of each of their sovereign rights.
There is a certain historical inevitability about the whole thing. As a man who spent the formative years of his life in India, he will be aware of the darkness of the age in which we live, an age that the Hindus know as the age of Kali, Kal Yug. An age of darkness and destruction, of deviance and distrust. It is an age that has come before and that will come again, as the golden ages have come and must pass into history. Each has their time and their place. The creatures born in such an age must accept it and refuse to capitulate to it’s mesmerising illusions. Of course they won’t – it is all too mesmeric, the illusion too beautiful. The illusion of self, of nation, of country, of right and of wrong. It is the illusion of the physical, of the material, of the possibilities of each that will drive nations together into the power structures from which there will be no escape until the Armageddon, theoretically believed in by many of the participants, will arrive and the age will turn, again.
if, after Brexit, people want democratic representation the they’d better start electing congress[wo]men and senators and get themselves involved in the primaries.
Unemployment, economically inactive is based on a survey – Labour Force Survey -not real figures. The lazy Labour party/SNP/LIBdems/Greens/Palid Cymru/DUP etc. have constantly not attempted to look at the figures and have allowed the Tories to get away with their deception. Rising wages – pull the other one- there has been over 20 000 well paid jobs lost in the last year alone. Record employment – pull the other one – 20 000 lost jobs that haven’t been replaced. Record number of EU nationals going to another country – jobs not filled as the record number of NHS job vacancies shows.
You reap what you sow. An incompetent, leading a vicious and vindictive party in charge of a country going down the tubes fast. The civil war in the Tory party over Europe has caused the political paralysis in government brought on by the incessant vicious blame game. The UK is heading for a slump worse than the 2007/08, no matter how the Tories attempt to deceive by ‘you’ve never had it so good’, ‘everything in rosy’ in Tory gaga land rhetoric. It’s not and the people are being deceived by this government.
The Good Friday Agreement and the Northern Ireland Act 1989 always pointed to the north of the island of Ireland not leaving the EU. But the vast majority of UK politicians never told the UK population that this was the case. Furthermore, the establishment do not want to leave the EU which will result in a border poll in Ireland and a new Scottish independence referendum. Brexit has become more and more to mean the break up of the UK.
The May government is not only a lame duck but the country will have to suffer them due to the anti democratic fixed term ruling. Utterly, abysmal attempt for the Tories to hold on to government. More and more are seeing through this sham of how the country is governed.
Another great article! Thank you Craig. I hope though that the descent into vulgar Shakespearean English though is temporary. My dear late mother described it as “factory floor talk” or, because most of the local factories were potteries, “pot bank talk”. Rabbie Burns had no need of such talk.
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Platt —
Wondering. . . . Politely. Did you ever think of catching on to yourself?
Sláinte
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Hi. What happened to the Mosul post I saw briefly yesterday or the day before ?
What was the gist?
I’m not British/English/UK –whatever– and the other day, earlier this year, I learned about the Windrush-generation saga.
(I was going to type ‘scandal’, but remarkably it hasn’t become one).
I couldn’t believe the story to be true, even now still think I must have misunderstood.
Anyway, my point — I DO think she’s a racist.
Will you please stop saying that Wales voted to leave the EU by a large margin. It’s simply not true. 854,572 (52.5%) voters in Wales chose to leave the EU, compared with 772,347 (47.5%) supporting Remain. I myself live in county where there was a large Remain vote, namely Ceredigion where 54.6% voted to remain and 45.4% to leave. Unfortunately this accounts for only 39742 souls.
Likewise, England. In England, the majority of the population is urban. Every major city but one voted remain, many by a large margin. Unfortunately, the turnout was low in the cities, because people did not take the Cameron exercise in lunacy seriously enough and/or thought the proposal would be easily defeated, so “why bother to vote”. Alongside that, a very sneaky emotive campaign of targeted deceit stirred the guts and numbed the heads in areas (rural, mainly white, mainly geriatric) with a stronger europhobe tendency.
But all this is well documented. That Murray continues to tout this England and Wales myth shows just how much people are prepared to bend the truth to suit their agenda. And there’s few an agenda more blinding than one involving nationalism, whether racial or “civic” [sic].
so that’s ok then the only people who voted Leave were rural white geriatrics who don’t count and can be discounted.
Very well said Craig.
Only thing I would want to add is that mention should be made of the silent torture chamber that has been constructed for people who are unfortunate enough to be unemployed or disabled and claiming Social Security. The DWP and the jobs-worths in the Job Centre really are torturing people with the constant threat of sanctions at every turn. They hound many to death through suicide. In effect, the government are killing people, they know they are killing people — and yet they continue. Says it all about just what lowest of the low bastards they are.
‘The shrinking of the “economically inactive” figure to 21% means that many pensioners are forced to keep on working because they cannot make ends meet on the developed world’s most miserly pensions’
While MPs pick up one the biggest public pensions on the planet when they retire.
‘that parents of young children are forced both to stay in jobs rather than provide all the love, protection and affection they may wish.’
And don’t forget the mutual backslapping from the Tories in the HoC a couple of weeks ago because 50% of disabled people are now in (no doubt poorly) paid work. From a government who’s policies towards disabled people was described as inhumane by the UN, praising themselves for turning the country into a sweat-shop of poverty stricken and vulnerable people.
There are currently more people employed in the UK than there have ever been. The rate of employment is at it’s highest since 1971.
How can it possibly be false to say that the addition of a large amount of workers who are prepared to work does not affect the the pay of the existing workforce ?
“There are currently more people employed in the UK than there have ever been. ”
What does that even me Geoffrey? There are more cars in Britain than there’s ever been, more food banks than there’s ever been.
It’s an assertion of more of something that’s it.
Some might say it is a measure of success, ROS, I keep on hearing politicians calling for more jobs. Well we now have them.
Geoffrey.
There are more people, so obviously more are going to be in work including low paid (working poor) and part-time.
It doesn’t automatically equate to being a success of the government.
But the percentage does. ROS . At least it shows that the politicians have done what they keep on saying is so important ie jobs,jobs,jobs etc.
Geoffrey
December 12, 2018 at 14:02
“Some might say it is a measure of success, ROS, I keep on hearing politicians calling for more jobs. Well we now have them.”
nonsense. Learn something about statistics. Read very carefully what they are claiming, and then look again. It’s easier to spot when you keep in mind they are a bunch of lying criminal bastards.
Some tasters to get you on the path… ‘Employed’ people are more and more having to seek help via benefits and food banks. Those forced out of job seekers allowance, for any number of ridiculous reasons, are not counted. Those on zero hours contracts not counted, even when working zero hours. Those that do jump through all the hoops on job seekers will find themselves in forced work regardless of their qualifications or hours/wage requirements. Many are encouraged to become self employed, they don’t count, even if they make nothing. What do you mean you turned a job offer down because you can’t work nights and it’s 40 miles away, no more benefits for you, scum, oh and you don’t count. What? You’re working 3 part time jobs?? Then you are 3 people at work.
Statistics, the politicians mathematics. Particularly at times of year that suit them best, such as when many are in seasonal employment.
Flatulence, the price of labour has been driven down,though Craig says that this a Tory lie.
Geoffrey.
You persist on hanging onto a minor technicality, ie jobs are up so it must be a good thing the government has done.
You’re technicality doesn’t however expand on the quality of these jobs, in this time of deep austerity where even the UN berates the British government on its disgraceful treatment of those less fortunate. I find it highly unlikely that well paid jobs are bountiful.
No it’s more than likely that those jobs are a mish mash of low paid, Zero hour contracts, part-time based, which are then topped up with benefits, and trips to the food banks lets not forget wages have been stagnating for years.
However it does the British government harm to have the obedient media give airtime to those figures, without anyone actually digging deeper into them.
Should read (No) harm, apologies.
I think the media is on your side ROS , I have seen and listened to various reports today, and the fact there is record employment and percentage employed I have hardly heard mentioned……. !
Good News RoS
Unemployment in Scotland has fallen to a record low, according to official figures.
At 3.7%, the jobless rate is below that of the UK, which sits at 4.1%.
BBC
Don’t think so Geoffrey, at least not where I’m sitting – many many jobs are being made redundant – I lost my job to Brexit. The Government, typical of a Tory Government just chose to misquote or manipulate the data – very adept in fact – changing the rate of inflation from the RPI to the CPI is a good example. The rate of inflation in this country is far far higher than the Government stats.
Craig,
I agree with over 75% of that, and can’t be bothered quiblling where I disagree.
Theresa May, has made the UK, a country I used to be proud of (still am of most of the people I know – regardless of their political views) a complete and utter total laughing stock, throughout the entire world. Now, I have no problem with comedy, and I at least on occasion myself, try to be funny. It often doesn’t go down well, but some people seem to be lacking a sense of humour. I can understand that with such morons as Theresa May, supposedly in control – as the leader of our country.
She has got no respect from absolutely anyone. No one even finds her funny, though some of the earlier CGI stunts of her were. The latest Lord of the Rings thing, I didn’t find funny at all, but it did in fact reveal a degree of her depravity, on the same kind of level as both Blair and Cameron, with her largely covered up influence and responsibility for genocide – in her case in The Yemen.
Theresa May has to go. I am not suggesting that any of the alternatives would be any better. I have long thought the entire lot of them should be permanently fired, and most prosecuted, and jailed.
We need to start again, but first of all we need to clean house, which also includes jailing most of the warmongering media – including nearly all of the BBC etc, and all of the rags. They are all lying murderous corrupt scum. None of them tell the truth about anything important, and most are at least complicit, with the ongoing horrors across most of the world.
We can’t do any of that when we are controlled by the EU, which is an unelected dictatorship, still largely controlled by the CIA, as are most Western Governments throughout the world.
Tony
CM – At this time of the year SAD is on the increase and ennui too – but in a few days the daylight hours will be on the increase again and raise moods!
We must remember the addage that it is darkest before the dawn.
I thought i saw Trezza cracking slightly, a certain waver in her voice, as she probably believed it to be her last pmq and a blessed release to go and enjoy her zillions, having done her bit to deliver the no-deal, that was always the plan A. The only way that can now happen is to blame the EU and walk away. She took the City’s message to Merkel directly yesterday – give them exceptionalism or else!
“…the false attribution of working class poverty to immigration, rather than its actual cause, massive inequality and an entire legal structure and system of government geared to promoting the interests of the super wealthy.”
The cause of working class poverty is today what it has been since the 16th Century origin of the Capitalist mode of production: the Capitalist mode of production.
However, the neo-liberal/globalist/post-Fordist (call it what you will) period from the mid-1970s onwards (in effect, the fightback of the CMP against the gains made by the working class post-WW2) with its “open borders for capital, goods and labour-power” has pitted the working classes of one nation-State against another as capital searches for the lowest common denominator re wage levels, living conditions, etc.
Rather than see this for what it is, the ill-educated, snowflake, “leftist”/”progressive” movements of PC virtue-signallers that have increasingly polluted political discourse over the last 20 years or so have turned on the national working class “populist” reactions to this extra layer of competition (Brexit, Trump et al) and defamed them as “racist”, “fascist” and all the rest of it (once again, I recommend the excellent article Return of the Repressed by Wolfgang Streeck in the March/April 2017 issue of New Left Review (https://newleftreview.org/II/104/wolfgang-streeck-the-return-of-the-repressed) for a succinct overview of both the “Leftist” and Rightist reaction to these non-aligned, anti-globalist working class movements).
Result? A combination of plummeting education standards since the 1970s (resulting in widespread ignorance of political theory) and the ideological warfare fought by the Western liberal “intelligentsia” in all their manifestations (State personnel, the media and “educators”, in short, Chomsky’s “10%”) against Communism over the past 100 years means that the “resistance” to the Capitalist mode of production is currently “led” either by largely theory-free “populist” movements or “intellectuals” who think that Communism = gulags and anyone who doesn’t support gender-free toilets is a “fascist”.
Frank Zappa once opined: “Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.” He wasn’t wrong.
The cause of working class poverty is today what it has been since the 16th Century origin of the Capitalist mode of production: the Capitalist mode of production.
You really should see the consequences of Real Existing Socialism in the GDR and the joys of Plattenbau and the success of Leuna and places in Sachsen-Anhalt. You clearly see no poverty in Berlin or the former GDR or Poland or Romania or Czechia or Slovakia or Bulgaria because these were the outposts of Socialism in its full resplendent glory which is why there is such a huge exodus from the UK of the professional classes to get prosperous on the Black Sea or in the Neue Bundeslaender
Two classes and only two classes are possible under the Capitalist mode of production (CMP): those who live off surplus value in one or more of its forms (profit, interest, rent), i.e. capitalists, and those who must sell their labour-power in order to survive, i.e. the working class. The working class can be further subdivided into intellectual and manual fractions, the former more often being referred to as the “middle class”/”white-collar workers” and the latter as just “the working class/”blue-collar workers”.
The intellectual working class constitute the c.10% of the population that the State educates to a high level to fill positions in the State apparatuses and the professions. Although they sell their labour-power just as surely as do the manual working class in order to survive, they have always felt themselves a cut above the latter; hence their resort to the epithet “middle” class (as if there was some mysterious and never quite explained “third way” of surviving between living off capital or labouring) and promulgating the myth of “intelligence” to support their supposed superiority over the unwashed masses.
Another characteristic of this class fraction, beyond their superiority complex, is their avarice. At the first sign of serious trouble up to and including war they are the first to scarper, the poor bloody “working class” being left to fight and suffer as usual. So, today, there are more Somali-born doctors just in Chicago alone than there are left in the whole of that poor country, and similar statistics could be repeated for every profession/war zone worldwide going back decades.
The “educators” amongst them have, for the past century (and no doubt without ever having troubled themselves to read a single original word of Marx and/or Engels), taught our children that the USSR, Eastern Europe, China et al were/are Communist States, (unaware even that the phrase “Communist State” itself is a non sequitur) and that bad things will happen to those who seek a society based on equality as these supposedly did/do.
The ‘tech leaders’ amongst them in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are behind the current wave of censorship that is a real threat to free speech, lying through their teeth to Congress, Parliament and everyone else about their motives and actions
Finally, the threat to the living conditions of these wonderful people in the UK have been behind the calls for a second, “people’s” vote on Brexit that have been omnipresent since 2016 under the guise of some sort of “democratic imperative”. Reflecting the trouble that the ‘technocrats’ gave Lenin post the 1917 Revolution: some things never change.
Your comment merely betrays the twin facts that (a) you have a weak grasp of political theory and (b) you were consequently sucked in by descriptions of Eastern Europe pre-1989 as “Socialist”/”Communist”.
“The cause of working class poverty is today what it has been since the 16th Century origin of the Capitalist mode of production: the Capitalist mode of production”.
Yeah – because before the 16th century the workers of the world were opulently wealthy. Michael Hudson explains that the kings of Assyria and Babylon, thousands of years ago, saw fit to declare forgiveness of all consumer debts and debt servitude at the coronation of each new king. They did not do that out of kindness, but because otherwise their societies would have collapsed – as ours will do fairly soon.
Why were debt jubilees required? Because most of the population were barely surviving from year to year.
All political dispensations have, as one of their main purposes, to take from the poor and give to the rich. If the rulers are smart – which ours haven’t been for centuries – they occasionally give a little back.
Your thoughts on this Craig?
https://medium.com/the-jist/was-eu-tax-evasion-regulation-the-reason-for-the-brexit-referendum-980ba88a8077
United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland signed the Accession Treaty to the EEC. All Treaties since 1922 have been signed as United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland and before that as United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland. I really wonder how Craig Murray as English Ambassador to Uzbekistan got along with the Scottish Ambassador to Uzbekistan. Then again how someone born in Norfolk came to such a position as to regard Scotland as other than part of Great Britain is a mystery known only to Norfolk
Norfolk you say? that explains an awful lot, then?
“Then again how someone born in Norfolk came to such a position as to regard Scotland as other than part of Great Britain is a mystery known only to Norfolk”
Its called changing your mind only fools keep digging when in a hole.
Norfolk doesn’t know either.
Paris Riots, make BREXIT seem like a Vicar’s Tea-Party
“What You’re Not Being TOLD About The Yellow Vest’s in Paris”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqNbKeRQQl4
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Thanks, Tony.
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It’ll be interesting to see how the Scots react if they ever experience immigration at the scale the English have.
Ever being the key word here.
The Home Office has removed countless people from Scotland, or point blankly refused them residency, for goodness knows how long, why do thing England has such a large population, while Scotland’s remains much smaller or did that no occur to you?
I am not going to challenge the facts advanced by anyone here but would just like to point out that one of the reasons for high foregin resident levels is that it would appear very rarely that anyone from the EU once they have got established here, gets deported even if they are eligible to be so under EU rules. I am particularly interested in how self employed EU citizens are treated. A member of my husband’s family left the UK in his early 20s and went to live in Greece where, for a variety of reasons, he did not pay any tax throughout his working life. In due course he took out Greek citizenship.
40 years later he returned to the UK with a much younger Bulgarian wife (not working), Bulgarian brother in law (self employed but in practice not working) and brother in law’s wife and young family. Today my relative receives a decent UK pension and a housing allowance (no idea how he did it) to cover him and his wife who is still well within working age but apparently allowed to claim as dependent because she is his wife. (In practice she is working in the black economy but claims to do voluntary work.) Bulgarian brother in law is also employed in black economy but claims to be unemployed and is living with family in a council house. I suspect that one of the reasons they have got away with it is because the Bulgarians speak poor English with impenetrable accents and chasing down and challenging their stories is just too difficult. Still the British state appears to be supporting all of them so cannot be as heartless as it is made out.
Interestingly brother in law was evicted from last flat for non payment of rent. The (modest) flat turned out to be owned by a Texas businessman living in Texas who had bought several such flats in London as an investment. I think the way our housing stock can be sold off to anyone anywhere in the world is disgraceful. At least I suppose the Texan was renting it out, there have been cases where honest hard working tenants living in housing association properties or even charitable trusts in London have found the block sold from under them so that a wealthy owner or a hedge fund can do it up and and rent it out to rich foreigners. Then there are all the flats which are never occupied at all. Any political party which promised to do something about that could get my vote.
“I am not going to challenge the facts advanced by anyone here but would just like to point out that one of the reasons for high foregin resident levels is that it would appear very rarely that anyone from the EU once they have got established here, gets deported even if they are eligible to be so under EU rules. ”
Britain already has the powers to know who’s overstaying their welcome and who isn’t. The British government doesn’t use it though.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/31/britain-take-back-control-immigration-eu-directive-brexit
“Why doesn’t the government implement these exit checks? Every person entering and leaving the country needs to have their passport scanned, EU and non-EU alike; only then we will have true control of our borders. Exit checks would not only act as a deterrent but would give us accurate migration data, identify overstaying individuals and give us correct figures when it comes to international students.”
My sister is an avid Remainer and a keen old school Socliast, pointed out to me recently that our system in UK for checking who is entering and leaving the country from the EU is and always has been, hopeless. She said if we registered people correctly on entry then we would probably be able to reject more people for entering, as ineligible. What I asked about the people from the EU who have arrived and not found work after 3 months, who we could legitimately send back to their home country, she looked shocked. Oh no, I don’t think we should send anyone back once they have been allowed to come in.
What is view of other Remainer-Socialists?
Acording to this the Home Office has alreadt removed over 5000 EU citizens. The EU’s Freedom of Movement is indivisible. EC law on free movement precludes a Member State from making the right of residence of an EU citizen in another Member State subject to a condition of having a permanent or temporary address.
Here’s a rough outline.
“EU citizens who meet the conditions set out in Directive 2004/38/EC have a right of residence, irrespective of whether they are homeless or not.”
On the other hand.
“The number of EU citizens being removed from the UK has increased fivefold since 2010, reaching 4,754 in 2016 – up from just 973 in the year the Conservatives came to power. The rapid rise followed a fall of more than 74 per cent in the previous six years, down from 3,779 in 2004.”
“The change stems partly from new immigration regulations introduced by the then Home Secretary Theresa May in May 2016.”
“The new criteria state that rough sleepers are “misusing” their EU treaty rights and make clear that no other criteria for removal must be met in order to deport someone for sleeping rough. The document says: “You may consider the administrative removal of EEA nationals or their family members who are sleeping rough, even if they have been in the UK for less than 3 months [and] are otherwise exercising Treaty Rights.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-home-office-deport-eu-citizens-homeless-rough-sleeping-european-commission-a8023896.html
The majority of EU citizens being expelled are guilty of minor legal infringements of Uk law and that is the grounds for their deportation, not being unemployed. The EU has a rather equivocal position – any Eu citizen can live and work in any EU state. Well what if they speak little or no English ,(or French in France, German in Germany etc) which dramatically reduces their chance of finding work. Should the state they have moved to support them, when they have no work and little chance of finding any and not contributed to the benefits they are receiving which are much higher than any at home.
The main issue it seems to me is we opened the borders to Eastern Europe while living standards between Eastern and Western Europe remained so disparate. Now we are depriving countries in Eastern Europe like Romania of their brightest best educated citizens.
One EU group which exploits the UK’s failed system of managing people who have not found a job here, are many of the UKs recent Romanian gypsy community. They are in a very unhappy situation but are they the UKs moral and financial responsibility because Romania treats them badly? Surely the pressure should be on Romania to improve their conditions?
My understanding is that while it is possible, in theory, to deport many EU nationals, it is prohibitively expensive to do so. The legal fees and appeals etc make it a total non-starter in all but extreme cases.
Remainers have been banging on about this since the referendum, but in truth it was never as simple as they claimed.
So is it that the UK legal system is tilted towards the rights of the migrants when it comes to deporting those who are unemployed?
Mary, I have a similar story. My fried brought his Portuguese girl friend and their daughter to live with him in the UK. My friend who is wealthy got bored of his girl friend after six months and dumped them on the state. She now gets housing benefit ,child tax credits etc, free education for daughter . The cost to the state must be at least £40,000 p.a..
The really sad thing is that she still hates it here but can’t afford to go home.
I doubt the cost to the state is £40K when the benefit cap for the very largest families is only £23K.
Anyway…. you assume money stops at first use; it doesn’t. Benefits are spent into the economy immediately, and because taxes are incurred in the normal way at each transaction, at any positive tax rate all the initial spend eventually returns to the Exchequer, where it’s effectively destroyed, so that the whole public spending process can continue, ad infinitum, without causing inflation.
Besides which – thanks to Thatcherite de-industrialisation, and the absence of a Government Job Guarantee Scheme – entire local economies depend on benefit spending, and those who do the very best out of it are corporations like ASDA, Aldi, Lidl, Sky, McDonalds,KFC, National Lottery, British American Tobacco, Diageo…etc, who I expect would scream blue murder if you took away such a lucrative source of revenue.
In any case, what do you propose doing with unemployable people – let them starve?
I’m starting to think benefits payments were merely a useful way for the Tories to stave off massive unrest just long enough for the rich to acquire every British asset worth having. It takes time to purloin so much, but now they almost have it all the benefits for so many are already being switched off. Sanctions they call it. The NHS would have been desirable but they’ll get by without that, and at least they’ll be satisfied with how much tax they’ll save towards it out of those taxes they just can’t dodge.
Those who stole enough can flee abroad now. And why not? Who really wants to live in this shithole they created for us?
I am including cost of education. I should think it is more.
That surely is a key question. Should we support unemployable people from other EU countries who have moved here?
What do you think happens to “unemployable” UK citizens elsewhere in the EU?
And since when is there a “UK legal system”?
Mary Paul, I am absolutely clear about this – No we shouldn’t.
I should be very interested to know what happens to unemployable UK citizens elsewhere in the EU. I assume that most if not all of them live in the richer Western European countries. I wonder how many of these countries exercise their right to send home UK citizens who have been unemployed for 6 months.
You can have a properly functioning welfare state, or open borders.
It’s not really possible to do both, so a nation needs to decide which it prefers.
Geoffrey,
Not too sure what you don’t understand, but as someone living overseas, married to a non-European and with a single child, my child, by stint of me being her father is legally obliged to be a British Citizen, which she is given she was registered a British citizen within weeks of birth and issued a Full UK Passport before obtaining the age of 5 months – so, if you wealthy mate impregnated his plaything and acknowledges he’s the father (maybe the child has a UK Passport) both the child and mother are entitled to a life in the UK. I say this as someone who’s prevented from living in his own Country, Wales, due to the anti-immigration hysteria of Ms May – the funny thing is, my wife’s not allowed to live with me and my daughter in Wales, but, if I dropped dead, would be allowed to live in the UK to look after my daughter – you see the kid has some legal rights, and these include a right to live in the UK with her mother should I die, but we get sweet FA if I’m actually alive!
Given your mate abandoned his own offspring and the mother of his child, he don’t sound that nice, and, why should his offspring suffer for his inadequacies, I mean, if he’s that rich he should be paying a sum to his child each month, and if he’s not, its him that’s actually costing the state and not his daughter or woman he abandoned.
But he has’nt abandoned them they have a flat just the corner from him. He tops them up financially, takes a great interest in the child. He has just passed over most of his expenses to the state. They were never married.
Geoffrey, your friend sounds like a shit – what sort of person would abandon their daughter, never mind the mother?
He is. He says he is just taking advantage of his rights. To be fair though he refers to the daughter as his, he is not her natural father.
And also to be fair as a passionate lefty remainer he thinks the UK can afford it and that he has engineered their financial future by bringing them to the UK.
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“M Paul” — Sorry. For me, all that Bulgarian and Greek talk read like ‘smoke’ and intended distraction.
Better to focus on taxes. Ignore UK$ War Crimes, eh?!
¡No pasarán!
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yes, like you I never thought May was a likely leader. she has failed utterly to demonstrate some deeper understanding of events.She is a flaccid participant in politics.She is there because she offers very little resistance or reasoned argument and I suspect a lot of Tory men like that. She flops one way then another. she makes promises then caves in to god only knows what pressures. She certainly has the stoicism of a proper pious christian. she does not deviate from her chosen ‘path’ but seems incapable of using whatever powers are granted her for any discernible moral purpose.
I suspect she will survive but it is doing nothing for anyone that she hangs on like a limpet.
Deepgreen – couldn’t agree with you more! In addition to which of course, she ran without doubt the worse election campaign in British History – couldn’t even meet the British Public or participate in a televised debate!
She also, while Home Sec. her department had a terrible habit of misplacing papers… nothing important of course, just the abuse of children. Did anyone ever find them ?
One of your best articles ever!
Succinct.
Cutting comment!
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Unlike yours.
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” The shrinking of the “economically inactive” figure to 21% means that many pensioners are forced to keep on working ”
The stats are based on people aged 16 to 64 so I can’t see how this can be deduced.
I’m probably in a minority feeling sorry for Theresa May, she’s been lumbered with a unenviable, near impossible, task which she’s clearly not up to. We wait with bated breath to see if her successor can do a better job.
“I’m probably in a minority feeling sorry for Theresa May,”
Aw, poor wee soul, you sound like the inconstant gardener. ?
I know, I’m a big old softee underneath.
Don’t feel sorry for her, she’s a cow.
With all due respect, I think you owe cows an apology. At best, May is a barracuda disguised as a cow.
Kempe – feel sorry for Treason May? Please! She is the architect of this whole Brexit fiasco and should bear full responsibility for it. Parliament exists for a reason – allegedly to uphold a democracy – going to Brussels without Parliament approval and sign a sneaky deal at the last minute is not democracy. Cancelling a vote because she knew she would lose it and thus Parliament would have to be dissolved, is the actions of a dictator not a Prime Minister heading up a purportedly democratc country. Oh how I can hear the cries of the MSM if Putin, the President of China or any other socialist country had taken such action – or even if a Labour Prime Minister had.
Bizarre or expected when a video game developed in Edinburgh called ‘Grand Theft Auto’ features fictional American sounded cities. That is of course the Hollywood blueprint albeit America, a land of immigrants, still exerts and manipulates immense soft power manufactured from dollars.
For some ‘Global Britain’ and the ‘Great’ campaign is the way forward for any UK administration after Brexit. To me this is rubbish! UK soft power waned to a vanishing point after the holocaust in Iraq; after the destruction of Libya; after our support for Israeli atrocities and the use of our own ‘special forces’ to enact a ‘proxy war theatre in Syria.
A Palestinian under Israeli occupation had an idea that Britain turned it’s face to the world and opened it’s arms. Those ‘heartless Tory bastards’ have ensured that face is now pinched shut. Our chance to embrace what the Chinese call “guanxi” or bond of friendship has been excluded from the top down, diffusing and dispersing at the level of working class poverty, a condition that keeps these bonds alive in an effort to survive.
Thankfully this vision of generosity, kindness, fair play, sangfroid and manners is in our village souls and we will will ‘chip away’ from the bottom until this horrid, revolting pyramid falls over.
Happy Holidays!
mark golding,
I am very much aware of the history of the video game industry, and was close to be being very involved. There is one person, who changed my mind about everything with regards to violent computer games, and violent films.
She wrote completely brilliantly about, well everything under the sun, in silicon valley, california on her blog. Her words, poetry and art were completely awesome.
I responded. We discussed. I eventually was convinced. Hardly played a violent videogame since, nor seen a violent film
Such intensive on-screen violence corrupts your soul.
She had a lot of fans, who loved what she wrote,
She used words, logic, art and more words, to demonstrate her love of peace, and the insanity of what was then going on and still is.
I never knew her real name, until after she stopped writing on her blog.
Her blog was just so wonderful.
Do not underestimate our “village souls”, nor our words, and do not give up.
It’s a work in progress.
Merry Christmas
Tony
Dundee, dude.
Dundee not Edinburgh. You can read up on some Dave Jones self confessed exploits of how he did it. Dave is living very well, unlike a number of his former employees including one or two who assured his success.
You’re altogether too optimistic, Craig. I truly wish I had your sunny view of the world.
Come back in 2030 and invoke Craig’s free guarantee!
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Snarky?
What is your purpose?
¡No pasarán!
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