General politics discussion thread

[patiirc]

many jobs can circumvent the minimum wage requirements and are hence forth not included so can pay lower wages afaik

 

Which jobs? We talking about waiters and such? I don't agree with tips being used to make pay up to minimum wage levels, and it became illegal to do so in October 2009. What other jobs circumvent the requirements?

 

Piece-Work, Price Work, Apprenticeships, Commissions, Self- Employed workers and this lot dont qualify and that's not as including Cash in Hand Jobs or anything off the books as well. So yeah quite a fair old whack not getting a minimum

 

5. Northern Ireland Peace Process has been on going in one form of another for years.

 

And actually started getting somewhere once Mo Mowlam became Northern Ireland Secretary. It wasn't difficult to spot the difference.

 

Yeah, of course it was that wtf? Im using wiki cos I cant be arsed going more indepth but here is a brief overview from 1993 Joint Declaraton of Peace. So again explain how it was all Labour's doing. I'm all ears and still waiting.

 

 

6 Quantify Child Poverty . People say they have taken x to y, but what does that actually mean in real terms... Milk Vouchers and Child Allowance had been arround for ages and ages and ages? So what else had been done to lift these supposed things. Do the children know they were in poverty and what set of standards was this poverty measured?

 

Bla bla blah ba ba. You would argue with any stats I gave you no matter how awesome they were. Do you have a degree in Pol Sci? Philosphy? Well I do, so I know better than to think that 'real terms' is actually a meaningful phrase or to get bogged down in meta-argument with somebody who has no intellectual acuity to speak of.

 

I wouldnt argue per se with any stats you give, I'd like to see a) how something completely untangible is defined and stats are collated from it and then b) how that relates to some governmental success?

 

I'd have a discussion for sure, and the going down the whole 'Ive got a political degree thing' really isnt a good start and doesnt hold much sway in this thread and isnt worth going down that road. Seriously.

 

"We have taken kids out of poverty", is a something of nothing statement that is nearly impossible to prove especially when you consider on what grounds poverty is defined in the first place. How is poverty quantified in the UK compared to other countries. What poverty are we considering. Purely financial poverty or are we looking at emotional poverty as well.

 

This report says that the Government effectively chucked money at it, but in the process redefined what Child Poverty was to get a better result and this was from 2003. It also alludes to how hard it is to define and measure the whole thing in the first place and that because of the micro studies used then it cant be considered to be truly representative of anything other the than the micro studies!

 

With even statisticians and economists confirming that an accurate idea is effectively impossible. And the stupidly high amount of variables and untangibles needed to even begin to equate any sense of accurate picture defining that Child Poverty has been reduced is bit of a misnoma

 

So yeah, come up with some 'awesome' stats and I'd have a discussion for sure, going down the whole 'Ive got a political degree thing' really isnt a good start and doesnt hold much sway in this thread and it isnt worth going down that road. Seriously.

 

'No intellectual acuity'? I see the holier than thou is back.. So I guess that means your going straight to insults rather than actually answering the points that you make. I think my bullshit-o-meter has exploded.

 

So instead of bleating about intellectual you are according to a bit of paper or letters after your name, Ive got those as well, they dont really count for much, how about you know you actually try flush out your points of discussion rather than acting like a spoilt brat because no one can understand you? ( and this is coming from me, who certain posters consider unintelligible) What are you some kind of emo?

 

Cheers

[Bashar]

Piece-Work

 

Incorrect.

 

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Emp...ing/DG_10027910

 

This is exactly why you're not worth taking seriously, you quote from direct.gov but can't even check your bullshit against the same website.

 

 

This report says that the Government effectively chucked money at it, but in the process redefined what Child Poverty was to get a better result and this was from 2003.

 

Possibly, possibly - tl:dr. But I did read the outline, it begins:

 

Child poverty in Britain fell in Labour

[Happ Hazzard]

The minimum wage isn't worth much in real terms more than

[Bashar]

The minimum wage isn't worth much in real terms more than

Edited March 2, 2011 by Bashar

[patiirc]

Piece-Work

 

Incorrect.

 

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Emp...ing/DG_10027910

 

This is exactly why you're not worth taking seriously, you quote from direct.gov but can't even check your bullshit against the same website.

 

 

This report says that the Government effectively chucked money at it, but in the process redefined what Child Poverty was to get a better result and this was from 2003.

 

Possibly, possibly - tl:dr. But I did read the outline, it begins:

 

Child poverty in Britain fell in Labour

[Happ Hazzard]

House prices and rents have gone up by more than 200% in the last 15 years. And housing tends to be most people's main outgoing.

 

As I said, hardly anyone worked for

[mikey]

Apart from saving the NHS from 'rationing' and twenty year waits for operations, hugely reducing crime, preventing employers paying

[Bashar]

I don't support the Labour Party particularly, I just don't think the Labour government was a disaster on every conceivable level or that the Welfare State is a failed experiment. I think that this is naked propaganda which is worth fighting against, regardless of what I think about Tony Blair.

 

I appreciate that the 1997 election wasn't a personal referendum on Kenneth Clarke, but if you really want to take the higher ground here then you could argue against the substantive point I made; namely that Britain had been in post-recession doldrums for a good few years at this point and things were going to start improving at some point.

 

Rents have not gone up by an average of 200% over 15 years. No I haven't got another graph for you Mr Hazzard, can you back up your assertion this time? I doubt it. Although I do not like the housing price bubble, I do not think it massively affected the lower paid who would not have been able to afford to buy housing at market levels in the 1990s.

[Chris B]

Who says British culture is worthless?

Plenty of people. Mostly Guardian-types or other liberals. It's usually disguised by use of weasel-words but there has been a clear agenda for the past 30 years or more of downgrading traditional British culture and promoting foreign cultures as equal to or better than our home-grown culture that has been exported so succesfully around the world that it has largely been internalized and is often not even recognised as being British.

 

But, again, who? You keep saying 'plenty of people' and 'Guardian-types' and so on, but never actually back it up. The way you're talking about it, it sounds like it's something that is a hugely regular thing - whereas I think it's a typical fear, but not one that can actually be backed up.

 

Oh, and why aren't foreign cultures 'equal to or better' than ours? Why isn't the British cultural legacy the fact that it's been exported world-wide?

 

What do you class as 'indigenous Britons'? How far back do you have to go?

People who have no known ancestry from anywhere other than Britain?

 

Would you go up to Native Americans or Palestinians and ask them how far back they go and question whether they are in fact indigenous?

 

So, you wouldn't include the Romans, Celts or Vikings?

 

Don't you think there were shameful elements of the British Empire? I think there were some advantages to the countries that took part, but (again, looking at things from the Irish point of view, because it's an example I know very well), I can see a lot of disadvantages for anyone that was on the 'colonised' rather than 'colonising' side of the fence.

I don't think the British empire is any more shameful than people in general were at the time. The world was open for the taking and we did as good a job of taking than any other nation. Then we were among the first countries to try and stop the worst excesses of colonialism, we did more than any other country to stop slavery. The likes of China and India today owe a hell of a lot to the British in putting them in the situation where they are becoming the dominant countries in the world. The US do as well.

 

Do many people suggest that it was much other than a product of the times? Surely it's seen as shameful BECAUSE it's a product of the times, and it's the people who wish it was a current situation that are seen as being in the wrong?

[David]

I don't support the Labour Party particularly, I just don't think the Labour government was a disaster on every conceivable level or that the Welfare State is a failed experiment. I think that this is naked propaganda which is worth fighting against, regardless of what I think about Tony Blair.

I don't support the Labour party at all and even I wouldn't call their spell in Government "a disaster on every conceivable level". Sure, they got plenty of things wrong, most notably the Iraq war, but to say they were a disaster is ridiculous.

 

As for the welfare state, I like to look on that as a little bit of proof that we have progressed as a society over the years, where we simply don't abandon our poor and old people because they aren't quite up to the level of providing a meaningful contribution to society.

[Kenny McBride]

200% inflation in housing costs is way off the mark. In real terms, inflation in house prices from 1997 to now was round about 100% from base to peak, and about 150% in absolute terms. Since there's already been a "correction" (starting in 2007 and which appears to be ongoing), and the fact that 1997 was about the lowest the market got after the crash of the mid-90s, it's also about the most dramatic comparison possible. It's a bubble that will slowly deflate over the next few years and will probably not inflate in the same way again, since the mortgage market has changed (hopefully permanently) as a result of the banking disaster.

 

I'll just note that I despise the entire concept of a property bubble, but if you look at the facts, this wasn't a case of poor people being priced out of the market. In reality, it was a combination of poor people being drawn into a market they couldn't really afford by dirt-cheap mortgages that took less account of old-fashioned markers like ability to pay and increasing speculation based on the very fact that there was a boom. The real cost of buying a house actually didn't inflate at the same speed as the simple price of houses either, since interest rates were generally pretty low and mortgages were structured to let people keep their payments low for the first few years.

 

If you want to talk about Labour's economic crimes, try talking about PFI and the de-funding of public sector pensions. In my view, those are the most obscene things Blair and Brown did, financially. But then if you attack them, you have to attack the party that introduced PFI (and still wholeheartedly supports it) and which hates public sector jobs, never mind their pensions.

[bobbins]

They might allow some opinions that deviate from the party line a little bit, in order to make it seem like their views are reasonable and well-considered. But any posts that point out the utter ridiculousness of what their above the line contributors are saying are ruthlessly quashed and the posters banished forever.

 

I don't even think the Guardian care about Britain that much any more. Half the stuff on CiF is about the US or other foreign countries. It seems they are trying to target the worldwide latte liberal demographic, having given up on the British people who tend to see right through their rhetoric.

This is my favourite bit of the last few pages of Happ insanity. Complaining about rhetoric and weasel words, while describing what in anybody's reality is a fair and free forum of expression and discussion, as a ruthless quashing, banishing dictatorial regime.

[Happ Hazzard]

This is my favourite bit of the last few pages of Happ insanity. Complaining about rhetoric and weasel words, while describing what in anybody's reality is a fair and free forum of expression and discussion, as a ruthless quashing, banishing dictatorial regime.

How can it be "free" when posts are routinely removed, anything even remotely critical of the contributors is verboten, and any post critical of the Guardian as a whole gets the contributor a permanent IP ban?

[Loki]

Except, that doesn't happen.

 

I'm guessing you, or one of your friends has been banned, and I'd put good money on it being for something more than just being critical of the Guardian, otherwise they'd have about half the number of posters over there.

 

If you post there like you post here, I can see a scenario where you get banned, for sure. Mods on boards like that tend not to be as indulgent of trolls as they are here (megathanx Neil et al).

Edited March 2, 2011 by Loki

[Happ Hazzard]

Except, that doesn't happen.

 

I'm guessing you, or one of your friends has been banned, and I'd put good money on it being for something more than just being critical of the Guardian, otherwise they'd have about half the number of posters over there.

 

If you post there like you post here, I can see a scenario where you get banned, for sure. Mods on boards like that tend not to be as indulgent of trolls as they are here (megathanx Neil et al).

Define "trolls". Can someone that has been posting on a site for 9 years and has consistently had the same opinions throughout be termed a "troll"?

 

The term "Tory trolls" gets used a lot on CiF. It seems that anyone posting there that dares to have views which differ from the liberal hegemony is branded a troll and swiftly hounded out. And it seems the same happens in a lot of discussion, only liberal views are regarded to have any validity, yet liberals seem to be unable of arguing their points without reverting to massive generalisations such as "the world has moved on".

 

The world has moved on. Liberals in general and the Labour party in particular have been shown up for the charlatans know-nothings they are. Unfortunately it will take some people longer than others to realise they've been had and what they believed in was just part of an elaborate scam. Kind of like how there were Japanese soldiers hiding in the jungle until well into the 60s, think WW2 was still going on.