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Meanwhile, corruption in plain sight. Is this what "taking back control" was all about?

 

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1 hour ago, Surfer said:

Meanwhile, corruption in plain sight. Is this what "taking back control" was all about?

 

Screen Shot 2021-06-03 at 08.46.43.png

Banana Republic.

How the UK has fallen.

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22 hours ago, Creative Midfielder said:

Oh go on 😀

@Rock the Boat 's posts frequently provoke a certain amount of ridicule but that one was so ridiculous it deserves a full rinsing 😂

So utterly delusional that even Jools, Swindo or Paul Moy would struggle to match it 🤣

I called the Referendum result correctly

I said Boris would get Brexit done - and he did.

I called the last General Election result correctly.

I said project fear in post-Brexit Britain would be total B0ll0x - and it is.

I said we would win the battle for vaccine rollout while you lot were p!ss!ng yourselves that the EU would stop our vaccine procurement.

If you think I am delusional you lot are living in la-la land. 

Which you are.

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2 hours ago, Rock The Boat said:

I called the Referendum result correctly

I said Boris would get Brexit done - and he did.

I called the last General Election result correctly.

I said project fear in post-Brexit Britain would be total B0ll0x - and it is.

I said we would win the battle for vaccine rollout while you lot were p!ss!ng yourselves that the EU would stop our vaccine procurement.

If you think I am delusional you lot are living in la-la land. 

Which you are.

😂😂 Just keep taking the tablets and maybe have a word with the doc about upping the dosage a little  😂😂

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16 hours ago, Rock The Boat said:

I called the Referendum result correctly

I said Boris would get Brexit done - and he did.

I called the last General Election result correctly.

I said project fear in post-Brexit Britain would be total B0ll0x - and it is.

I said we would win the battle for vaccine rollout while you lot were p!ss!ng yourselves that the EU would stop our vaccine procurement.

If you think I am delusional you lot are living in la-la land. 

Which you are.

The first three are fact the rest just conjecture through your Union Jack glasses.

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10 minutes ago, Well b back said:

Of course as we all knew there would be a simple explanation as to why there were donations from companies that no longer existed. 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57365728

If it was that simple why did people outside the party find it rather than the accountants or auditors themselves.

😀 Astonishing, I think that because so many Tory voters clearly do still believe in fairy tales, there is a general assumption that the rest of us will accept the same nonsense 😂

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The Father Ted "it was just resting in my account" excuse. 🤣

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This is how Boris does his business I did have to laugh as he knows people forget. In June last year he said ‘ the world must be vaccinated and any country that vaccinated under 50’s before all over 50’s were vaccinated around the globe would be immoral ‘. Of course at the time it seemed only America and China would have vaccines and made no secret of the fact they would not be letting any leave their shores. 
To date we have followed the US by exporting zilch and of course criticised places that have. Now Boris wants to be the world leader in leading the vaccination of the world. It is not something I object to as I said we should be vaccinating the world, but he is making out he is the saviour of the world and again takes for granted that nobody has remembered his comments a year ago or realised how the real heroes such as Andrew Pollard and Sarah Gilbert have been hidden away and silenced. I hope this happens but for the right reasons, not just to be billy big bol*****.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57373120

 

 

 

 

 

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Do you have any data on how many vaccines we have passed on to other countries. The last I heard it was FA.

I'm also amused at Sunak trying to claim the high ground over the new "tech tax" when we were the ones dragging our feet.

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6 minutes ago, Herman said:

Do you have any data on how many vaccines we have passed on to other countries. The last I heard it was FA.

I'm also amused at Sunak trying to claim the high ground over the new "tech tax" when we were the ones dragging our feet.

We did send some vaccines to Australia (about 700k) and at the height of the problem in India there was talk of sending some along with the other aid but I can't find any thing that verifies whether the doses were sent.

https://fullfact.org/online/vaccine-export-eu/

 

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https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/boris-johnson-ignoring-instructions-to-tighten-anti-corruption-laws-council-of-europe-says/ar-AAKL29G?ocid=msedgntp

Boris Johnson ignoring instructions to tighten anti-corruption laws, Council of Europe says

The British government has ignored instructions to strengthen UK anti-corruption laws, Europe's integrity watchdog has said – in a scathing report published after series of sleaze scandals rocked government.

 

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5 hours ago, A Load of Squit said:

We did send some vaccines to Australia (about 700k) and at the height of the problem in India there was talk of sending some along with the other aid but I can't find any thing that verifies whether the doses were sent.

https://fullfact.org/online/vaccine-export-eu/

 

So we sent or talked about sending vaccines to two of the three countries BoJo is most desperate to do a trade deal with?😍

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14 minutes ago, PurpleCanary said:

So we sent or talked about sending vaccines to two of the three countries BoJo is most desperate to do a trade deal with?😍

Probably sent a score to Liechtenstein then.

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17 minutes ago, keelansgrandad said:

I think the Vatican is the next big target.👼

He'll probably send them condoms

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26 minutes ago, Rock The Boat said:

They should have sent one to your mum.

Don't think you have got the right idea about condoms. The man wears them👌

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9 minutes ago, keelansgrandad said:

Don't think you have got the right idea about condoms. The man wears them👌

Yes, the 'one'was a bit puzzling as well - one condom wouldn't seem to have much effect in the grand scheme of things but perhaps RTB rinses and re-uses them 🤨

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On 06/06/2021 at 21:24, keelansgrandad said:

Don't think you have got the right idea about condoms. The man wears them👌

It's been a while since you were dating!

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3 hours ago, keelansgrandad said:

Agreed. How can anyone use Robinson in a balanced argument?

I'm not sure anyone has accused RTB of being balanced before, normally its rather the opposite......😂

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In other news, for those with normal attention spans, here is an interesting article from the Independent on changing class allegiances:

I didn’t believe it at first. It has taken a long time to absorb and understand it. It seems so contrary to everything we have always known about politics in Britain that it requires a big adjustment of our world view. The link between class and voting has been reversed. People are now more likely to vote Tory if they are working class than if they are middle class – and the other way round for Labour.

It was not until the elections last week that this fact suddenly became a staple of political analysis. But when Hartlepool, a name that might as well mean “Always Labour” in ancient Norse, fell to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, everyone knew that something was up. And when Labour gained Chipping Norton in the local council elections on the same day, and the mayoralties of the West of England and of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, we knew that the world had been turned upside down.

Realisation had been dawning for some time. When Labour won Canterbury and Kensington in 2017, it felt as if the ground was moving beneath our feet; and when it lost so many working-class seats in the north and Midlands in 2019. I knew that the association between class and voting had weakened since 2005. At each election since then the correlation declined, until it seemed to disappear altogether in 2019, with some pollsters such as YouGov suggesting it had gone into reverse.

To be honest, I was enjoying myself too much making fun of Corbynites to appreciate the deeper significance of the change. Some of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters suffered from cognitive dissonance if you pointed out that the Labour vote had become more middle class when he was leader than it had been when Tony Blair – Mondeo Man, Tory-lite sucker-up to the rich – was in charge.

We Blairites had little to be happy about in those years so we had to make our own entertainment. But there was always a serious point. New Labour was more pro-working-class than its critics ever allowed, as Chris Clarke has shown in an impressively detailed analysis, seat by seat and election by election. Yes, Tony Blair won more affluent seats than his predecessors and his successors, but he also won more deprived seats than they did. New Labour was more successful in winning the votes of the existing working class than Corbyn, who was devoted to an ideal of the proletariat while promoting policies that consisted largely of huge subsidies to the middle classes.

Corbynites didn’t really understand when we pointed out that free tuition fees, ending the means test for free childcare, and free school meals for all would benefit the better off more than the poor. It was richly fitting that in handing out all these goodies to the middle class, the drafters of the 2017 manifesto – alarmingly described by Keir Starmer as his foundation document – forgot to put in a promise to reverse the Conservative cuts in welfare benefits.

It was extraordinary that the Labour Party was in the hands of people who described themselves as “class struggle socialists”, as Nadia Whittome, the new MP for Nottingham East did in a New Statesman interview this year, only to find themselves struggling for the votes of the bourgeoisie.

Still, Corbyn isn’t around any more, so that game is over, and it is time for some serious analysis of what is happening in the substructure of politics. I was struck by something that David Gauke, the former cabinet minister expelled by the Conservative Party, said about how his party had changed. He said he thought “the probability is” that the party won’t swing back to “the kind of Toryism that existed pre-Brexit”. He thought there had been a fundamental change, one that was reflected in US politics as well.

54%

Of people think they’re working class, up from 45% in 1948

I began to track what I called the Great Class Inversion, noticing that opinion polls since the 2019 election suggested that the working class was now more likely to vote Conservative than Labour, and that Labour was doing better among middle-class voters than working-class ones. We seemed to have passed the class-divide crossover point.

That couldn’t be right, could it? Perhaps it was an illusion created by the social grade classification used by pollsters. Most of the polling companies use the traditional market-research categories, in which the A, B and C1 groups (non-manual jobs) are loosely called middle class, while C2 and D (non-manual) and E (casual workers and unemployed) are lumped together as working class. They are crude, but the distinction between manual and non-manual workers is the main one. The picture is a bit fuzzy, and varies from pollster to pollster, but generally in recent months the Conservatives have a slightly bigger lead among C2DE voters than among ABC1 voters.

One of the polling companies, Opinium, uses a simpler classification, dividing workers into “blue collar” (manual workers) and “white collar” (non-manual workers). In its three polls in April, it found an average Labour lead of 2 points among white-collar workers, and a Tory lead of 9 points among blue-collar workers.

Other ways of defining class are possible. One of the better methods, I think, given how amorphous and subjective ideas of class are, is simply to ask people to which class they think they belong. There are two striking things about this kind of research. One is that more people describe themselves as “working class” now than did in the 1940s. In a survey this year, BritainThinks found that 54 per cent of people called themselves working class, compared with 45 per cent in a Gallup poll in 1948, when many more people were in manual jobs.

That survey was carried out by Deborah Mattinson, who has just been appointed director of strategy for the Labour Party by Keir Starmer as part of his post-election reshuffle. If Labour wants to understand the Great Class Inversion, it has chosen the right person.

The other striking finding of Mattinson’s research was that most people don’t see themselves as belonging to a class at all. When people are forced to choose between working or middle, the results don’t match the ABC1-C2DE division very well, although ABC1s are more likely to think of themselves as middle class and C2DEs as working class. But two-thirds of people, whatever their social grade or their forced-choice class, say they do not think of themselves “as belonging to any particular social class”.

Yet class is still important. That finding reminds me of the old joke about a student asking a fellow postgrad what her PhD was about. “How the class system works in America.” “I didn’t know there was a class system in America.” “That’s how it works.” However, class is clearly not just about what job you do. It is also about culture, identity, income and – perhaps above all – education.

As Gauke said, this is a deep trend that is probably only going one way, paralleled by what is happening in the US. There, as David Shor, the brilliant data analyst, points out, “college-educated professionals have basically become Democrats”. He says that “very rich people still lean Republican”, but that education is the big divide between the parties, and it is strongly linked to income and status. This is where class gets real.

So let us dispense with class altogether and look just at incomes. I thought that this might be where the Great Inversion theory would come unstuck. It may be that a lot of graduates in relatively low-paid “left-wing” jobs are Labour supporters, but that rich graduates are still likely to be Conservatives. Conversely, I thought, it is possible that a lot of low-paid people might not have a strong class identity and yet vote Labour.

This is the acid test, and I found the facts astonishing. In the 2019 election, which Boris Johnson won by a margin of 12 percentage points, the Conservatives had a 15-point lead among the poorest fifth of the electorate, while among the richest fifth their lead was only 9 points. This was a reversal of the position in the 2017 election just two years earlier, when Labour was just ahead of the Tories among low-income voters (by 1 point), while the Tories were 8 points ahead among high-income voters.

These figures are from the British Election Study, the biggest academic survey of voting behaviour. In an analysis by Matthew Goodwin and Oliver Heath for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the authors comment: “These changes mean that, at least in terms of electoral politics, the Conservatives can no longer be described as the party of the well-off, while Labour is no longer the party of those on low incomes. The Conservatives are now more popular among those on low incomes than they are among those on high incomes.

“Labour is now just as popular among the very wealthy as it is among those on low incomes. Both parties have thus seen major changes in their traditional support base. This reflects how some of the founding rules of British politics have been overturned. It also points to a more general realignment of British politics, with low-income voters increasingly drifting into a new political home in response to a specific set of concerns – most clearly articulated around the issue of Brexit, though not necessarily confined to it.”

 

The change is so shocking that it will take years for Labour in particular to come to terms with it. People on low incomes are less likely to vote for a party that thinks of itself as existing to benefit them than are people on high incomes, who might be expected to foot the bill.

All of the Labour Party’s assumptions and rhetoric are about “the many not the few”, with the many meaning those from the middle to the low end of the income scale. All of the assumptions of political commentary rest on the idea that the Conservatives are the party of the rich, of business and of the elite. But now, as Shor says of America, the elite is trending to the left.

But the biggest consequence is likely to be in changing the issues over which parties compete. If people on low incomes won’t vote for a party that thinks it exists to shift “the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people”, in Tony Benn’s words in the February 1974 Labour manifesto, perhaps the party will start to care about other things.

Perhaps that is why Corbyn didn’t notice that his manifestos involved shifting resources in favour of the better off, or that he had left out the promise to restore benefit cuts. Perhaps that is why Labour (here) and the Democrats (there) have allowed themselves to be diverted into the “culture war” issues that drive away some of their lower-income socially conservative supporters.

 

 

Edited by Rock The Boat

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1 hour ago, Rock The Boat said:

So nobody watched the video of Tommy Robinson meeting BLM. I guess too much for your echo chambers to handle.

😂😂😂😂

Why would anyone apart from you want to watch anything to do with Tommy Robinson?

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1 hour ago, keelansgrandad said:

😂😂😂😂

Why would anyone apart from you want to watch anything to do with Tommy Robinson?

Indeed, who would find an ignorant, violent, racist, bankrupt, convicted criminal remotely appealing? Oh! I know who.

Edited by horsefly

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Turns out it is a very good version of Ebony and Ivory. Just a shame it's a terrible song to start with. 

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