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Toe-Cheeseland wrote:I'm Labour; less Tony Blair, more Tony Benn (ie socialist).

It seems the UK rejected your version of the Labour Party; quite resoundingly, too: dead in Scotland, retreated to the strongholds in England and Wales. Labour as it exists now is spent.

The aforementioned Mr. Blair summed it up best when he said last year that the Labour Party under Miliband was "too far left" and that a Labour Party away from the centre ground will "lose to the Tories every time".

I voted UKIP and was greatly disappointed to see Farage not get elected. I am not overly unhappy with a Conservative majority though, I just hope they act in a more conservative manner this time. For a Tory government to oversee net migration levels of 300,000 is an absolutely disgrace and I don't hold out much hope that they will do anything about it. Of course, the only real solution is for us to pull out of the EU and re-gain control of our own borders. I fear that the EU referendum will be a complete stitch up, but that remains to be seen.

United kingdom of kent

There's suspection of voter fraud against Nigel in South Thanet, as they won the council with more votes than Nigel got in the general election. Plus a ballot van went missing for a few hours.

Atleast he's still going to be party leader and he'll be back stronger than before.

That's not fraud. That's politics. Ballot vans are being driven late at night on unusual routes and often get lost. How easy do you think it is to find a dozen village halls at night? As for the council thing, the council is Thanet Council, and includes the rest of Thanet not just South Thanet.

Rhodesia

Thanet District Council and South Thanet cover different areas, with the latter covering more traditional Conservative territory. Secondly, many left-leaning voters (I'm thinking specifically Lib Dem voters) – it appears – voted Conservative to keep Farage out.

In all honesty, I've lost respect for Farage over the last week or so. That resignation fiasco and the whole "I'm astonishingly popular" made him look like the run-of-the-mill politicians he's been opposed to since coming to public attention.

Post self-deleted by Colonial rhodesia.

Sweden has won the Eurovision Song Contest for the sixth time. This puts them as the second most victorious country in the contest, behind Ireland who have won a total of seven times (the last time being in 1996). The Swedish entry "Heroes", sung by Måns Zelmerlöw, won with 365 points in a three-horse race with Russia and Italy. No surprises, the UK languished fourth from last with 5 points for whatever the hell entry we put in.

On the plus side it was jolly entertaining.

Greendale village

I still have no idea why Australia was in it.
I can see the arguments for having turkey and Russia in, for they have parts of their nation in Europe.
Israel's odd, but since Cyprus is in and they're nearby I suppose. Similarly for the Transcaucasian countries with regards to Turkey and Russia.
But Australia? They're on the other side of the bloody planet! We have hundreds of countries to add to the song contest on the basis of being nearby current contestants before we let them join!

That said, since I usually do something else whilst the Eurovision is on in the background, I pay very little attention to it - was there a more plausible justification for having Australia in it? Are we going to have all of the Neo-European countries too?

I think it's because, believe it or not, Australia is a big part of Eurovision.

It's the 6th biggest financial contributor to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) – of which it is also a member – and in 2014, 3 million Australians tuned in (undoubtedly higher this year given their debut). Last year, 8.9 million Brits tuned in to watch; the highest-ever viewing figures. This year was 6.6 million.

Also, as anyone from Australia can attest, Australia (well, SBS) makes a huge deal out of Eurovision.

Rhodesia wrote:Before the inevitable and unfounded scaremongering begins from the left, let's not forget that over the last 5 years, the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition delivered £30bn of cuts. The next 5 years requires £12bn – less than half what we've endured already.

Firstly, the deficit stands at roughly £84Bn. The number you quoted, £12Bn, is how much Iain Duncan Smith is looking to cut from social security alone. Since the Conservatives are often reluctant to cut state pensions and the like (a great deal of the Conservatives' support comes from the retired), this cut will likely come from disability support, housing benefits and child benefits.

Now, housing benefits for those in privately-rented housing often go into the pockets of landlords (like Tory MP Richard Benyon for example, who has received hundreds of thousands in absorbing housing benefits through rents over the past years). This could be fixed by providing more social housing for tenants who can't afford the rising, inflated costs of housing. Even better, since social housing construction is an excellent economic multiplier (for each pound the government spends on it, it produces more for the economy).

Disability support is vital for many disabled people to find and maintain work, cutting it is a surefire way of putting more people out of work; after causing the deaths of at least 52 disabled people, I dread to think what five more years of Iain Duncan Smith will do, particularly with a disabled family member of my own. His debacle of a policy with regards to declaring disabled people 'fit-to-work' has been shown to be not rooting out the supposed people living unnecessarily on disability allowance, but instead pushing genuinely vulnerable people out into the cold - the high amount of cases won against it seems to prove this, but the time and resources it takes to launch and upkeep an appeal shouldn't be necessary (In fact, apparently the Department of Work and Pensions is under investigation from the UN for abuses of disabled human rights).

Secondly, the next 5 years don't 'require' cuts at all. That's merely the ideological method used for closing the deficit spouted by the Tories, New Labour, the Lib Dems, and UKIP. If we wanted to close the deficit of £84Bn, the tax gap of roughly £119.4Bn would be a splendid place to start.

Amongst other things, raising high-income and corporation taxes whilst lowering VAT would be a better way of dealing with the deficit rather than removing the supports that so many people rely on to the extent that our support system looks poised to return to levels unheard of since the days of workhouses, the General Strike and the Great Depression.

With regards to the protests against Tory rule, one could start by asking why they might be driven to protest? I strongly suspect it's because these next 5 years under a Tory regime will lead to their, or their loved ones', lives becoming much, much harder than they already have been made. On the other hand, I'm no expert on the mindset of a conservative, but when a socialist (I'll exempt New Labour from this) government is elected, I suspect that they know that they'll have an OK going over the coming years.

At any rate, if you wanted to protest against the NHS, controlling rents, or removing the bedroom tax (which meant that the family of a girl who died from cancer were billed for their now spare bedroom) you are well within your human rights to do so (For now, anyway, pending the survival of the Human Rights Act and whatever remains if they get rid of it and put some stuff in a new bill of rights). I'd say, that if you wanted to protest against a majority (of seats) from barely 36.9% where 63.1% of the population didn't vote for them, you are perfectly justified. This applies to the similar vote shares that the Labour Party got during the 00s for example too. A more proportional system is by far more democratic.

Now, with regards to Labour's election performances: in Scotland, half of the voters chose the SNP, who are closer in many ways to the socialist aspirations for this land (though with the obvious, and prominent exception of the SNP being anti-union, whilst I'm pro-solidarity) then 24.3% chose Labour.
As a total, 30.4% of the UK voters chose Labour.

Now, the swing to the SNP is mainly because the Scottish voters have been taken for granted by Labour, who saw that they had no real alternative for not having Tories so Labour moved to the right to compete for fabled 'middle-England', then as soon as a left-wing party (or at least a nationalist party with left-wing window dressing) comes along, Labour were screwed. UKIP also did well as portraying itself as the anti-establishment, protest vote and likely got a higher vote than before for similar reasons to the SNP (ie. taking voters for granted). I also reckon that since Labour differed very little from the Tories in pushing the same austerity narrative and failing to make it common knowledge that the Tories have increased the national debt more in the last five years than every Labour government combined, many people were taken by the austerity narrative (also being pushed by the Murdoch press and the BBC) and then decided that if austerity is the only way, better do it quickly (as you claimed).

Of course, the truth is, we (I don't know about yourself in particular; you could be a disabled single-mother who has had her support removed, or you could be David Cameron) are still enduring the effects of those £30Bn cuts. It's not the moment of cuts that's bad in and of itself; it's the effects over time that are severely detrimental to people's lives. If you burn someone's house down, they still remain in the cold after you burn down the house, no matter if you burn the house in an hour or a day - even worse when the house has little prospect of being rebuilt.

Most of the protestors looked like students and professional activists. There is a reason they took place in the centre of London after an organised demo against the expected Conservative minority government fell through rather than spontaneously in the Northern towns.

Your proposal to have bridged the deficit by raising taxes by 10% of GDP would of course have achieved its goal, but at the expense of making a lot of people worse off financially. Different people, perhaps, but people nonetheless. It would also have depressed spending in the wider economy, holding down economic growth and unemployment, which would have harmed the poor the most.

Ultimately, those who receive the most from and pay the least to the state are always going to lose the most when the state shrinks in size, and it shrunk in size because so did the economy, not because of ideology detached from reality. You can only squeeze those who produce so so much; there is a broad consensus in this country that 40% of the national income being taken through tax is enough and 50% or 60% would be too much. Reasonable people can differ, but I think 40% of all national income is enough for a reasonable relief of what poverty exists in the UK, and if people were used to more, perhaps they shouldn't have been. If the money can be better spent, it should be, but the most effective way to combat poverty is to get people off welfare and into work, and the coalition succeeded at that very well.

Finally, I suspect we are not going to see enormous cuts in this term, for the simple reason that economic growth, if it is as good as is projected, will bridge the deficit on its own. The government has no reason to risk its popularity by cutting more than necessary. Now, the Tories have made some spending commitments of their own - on foreign aid, on the NHS budget, and on tax cuts for low income workers - which will need to be funded, and some of that money is likely to come out of the defence budget. Not particularly Thatcherite; I would say more New Labour style. Perhaps some will also continue to come from disability benefits. But it must be borne in mind that this is as much driven by a belief that many claiming disability benefit are not actually incapable of work as it is by a desire to save money.

Rhodesia

Hms vanguard wrote:

Your proposal to have bridged the deficit by raising taxes by 10% of GDP would of course have achieved its goal, but at the expense of making a lot of people worse off financially. Different people, perhaps, but people nonetheless. It would also have depressed spending in the wider economy, holding down economic growth and unemployment, which would have harmed the poor the most.

My proposal for making tax evaders and avoiders pay their fair share of taxes would've affected the wealthier in society, as they tend to have the money and resources to find loopholes in the tax code. It wouldn't suppress consumer spending nearly as much as the increases in VAT that affect the poor more as the greater propensity for consumption comes from the poorer in society. As a contrast, tax cuts for the wealthy (or their equivalent in being cack-handed towards tax evasion/avoidance) often have a weak fiscal multiplier, particularly since the beneficiaries are much more prone to save the difference rather than spend and circulate it.

Hms vanguard wrote:

Ultimately, those who receive the most from and pay the least to the state are always going to lose the most when the state shrinks in size, and it shrunk in size because so did the economy, not because of ideology detached from reality. You can only squeeze those who produce so so much; there is a broad consensus in this country that 40% of the national income being taken through tax is enough and 50% or 60% would be too much. Reasonable people can differ, but I think 40% of all national income is enough for a reasonable relief of what poverty exists in the UK, and if people were used to more, perhaps they shouldn't have been. If the money can be better spent, it should be, but the most effective way to combat poverty is to get people off welfare and into work, and the coalition succeeded at that very well.

The coalition succeeded at juking the unemployment rate statistics, for example, by expanding the amount of people put into forced labour 'workfare' schemes which often ended up supplanting properly employed workers with taxpayer-funded, labour-rights stripped people. They also succeeded in putting people into zero-hours, low-paid work - this represents a growth in underemployment in order to cover the more prominently seen face of unemployment.

The oft-repeated rhetoric of the best way of getting people out of poverty is for them to have a job is too simplistic and not shown to be enough; consider that we now have the greatest number of in-work families living in poverty, and this seems set to rise as most of the support they rely on to make ends meet, that is, tax credits, housing benefit, and child benefit, seems to be facing the castration knife. This isn't helped by the fact that average wages are down 2% from 2010 and have been suppressed compared to rises in productivity since the 1980s, so a vast amount of consumer spending has, in fact, been borrowed from future consumption on credit (whilst at the same time funnelling more money to creditors - bankers, pay-day lenders and the like). For too long our businesses have subscribed to the notion of cutting labour costs by dismissing or, more often, underpaying workers, in order to stay competitive rather than investing in machines - this comes to a substantial degree from the shareholder culture where companies are run with the idea that short-term dividends for short-term shareholders (and bonuses for their managers) is paramount, and this comes before paying employees a decent wage or investing in the long-term health of the company in the form of machinery or worker skills.

If one needs proof of the ideological and short-sighted nature of austerity, one need only see how cuts in legal aid have led to higher overall costs because cases have to be re-tried repeatedly because of doubts of how just they could truly be (It's also worth mentioning that the legal aid budget was outstripped thrice by the tax cuts granted in 2013; if you can afford to give more to the wealthy (despite it being an appallingly weak fiscal multiplier) then you can afford justice.

Furthermore, one can see how cuts in flood defences, which for every £1 created £8 for the economy, led to the floods in Somerset costing millions more than they otherwise would've.

But really, the fact the government felt the need to go overboard with the cuts when debt as a proportion of GDP is roughly around 55% shows that austerity is ideological; we were able to afford the NHS, a social housing construction programme, and the funds and materials to rebuild this war-torn country after WW2 with a debt as high as 200% of GDP, and the resulting economic growth and mobilisation brought that figure down rapidly compared to austerity (where Osborne created more debt than every Labour government combined). I think it's also worth mentioning that the increase in debt back around 2008 was due to the trillion Pound bailout - where a gargantuan amount of private debt and financial ineptitude was shoved onto the government just so the banks could keep going. I'm not going to question the wisdom of ensuring that the banks kept going, but I will very much question the idiocy of failing to properly regulate them to prevent the kind of housing bubbles, derivatives and irresponsible, short-sighted, profit-lusting machinations that led to the 2008 crash (and will therefore lead to yet another crash within a decade).

Hms vanguard wrote:

Finally, I suspect we are not going to see enormous cuts in this term, for the simple reason that economic growth, if it is as good as is projected, will bridge the deficit on its own. The government has no reason to risk its popularity by cutting more than necessary. Now, the Tories have made some spending commitments of their own - on foreign aid, on the NHS budget, and on tax cuts for low income workers - which will need to be funded, and some of that money is likely to come out of the defence budget. Not particularly Thatcherite; I would say more New Labour style. Perhaps some will also continue to come from disability benefits. But it must be borne in mind that this is as much driven by a belief that many claiming disability benefit are not actually incapable of work as it is by a desire to save money.

A growth rate of 0.2% is hardly 'good', the UK's trend growth rate (ie. where it ought to be in a fairly healthy position) is ten times that. Nevertheless, the highest growth rate since the recession was 1% in early 2010, back with Labour. Now, if we'd focused on growth, rather than cutting, cutting, cutting, perhaps we would've been able to bridge that gap sooner and with as few cuts as possible - bearing in mind that as soon as Osborne's host of cuts in that 'emergency' budget of his the economic growth rate collapsed, leading to the slowest recovery ever.

With regards to the notion that many people are claiming disability to save money rather than because they're disabled, the sheer proportion of successful appeals should put paid to that. It should also be borne in mind, that ideological and blind cuts to the disability support will affect genuine claimants - since many have already died or been rendered destitute by the cuts that have already happened, it should be clear that there can be no cuts to disabled people.

Well sh!t, son.

Would anyone be interested in an NSG Senate style regional role play? I.e. We'd all be members of a national parliament, obviously set within the British Empire?

Aye; if puppets are allowed, apart from my main, liberal socialist country, we can have my Propertarian Capitalist 'country' (Sultanlan), totalitarian pseudo-Communist People's Republic based upon Postman Pat (PR of Greendale Village) and my hyper-religious mediaeval Principality (Mistacre).

Of course, I reckon that since there seems to be a substantial amount of right-wing, conservative countries then Sultanlan and Mistacre could take a backburner since their roles could be filled by other, real members (Otherwise it'd devolve into a sorry state of me essentially talking and arguing with myself in different ideological guises - entertaining for some, not for me).

Haha. Well I keep to old-school Paternal Conservatism myself. We could do something like that, we'd need issues to debate of course.

Well, the premise would be like this:

Not sure how many of you are familiar with how the NSG Senate (NSGS) works but it's basically a 'model parliament' where each nation/player is a member of the legislature. Anybody can form their own political party (of many variations) and the aim is for us all to work together to govern our as-yet-unnamed country. Government formation and national policy like taxation and spending, defence pacts, international unions, etc.

My take on that idea would work in the same way, albeit we'd be MPs in a Commonwealth realm. The idea I had was of 'British South America' (BSA). Now, we could either 1) begin the role-play circa mid-1800s and the arrival of home rule for BSA or; 2) be set in the modern day. It goes without saying that BSA would be a constitutional monarchy and, therefore, the founder would be an apolitical Governor-General. The WA delegate would be the Prime Minister and would, effectively, have to govern like one: with the support of the House of [Representatives/Commmons/Assembly] (with would be all the WA members). Or, failing WA members, the PM of 'BSA' would be just who we decide it to be but again, they would have to have the support of the House.

As for the nations/players, we could move puppets in or, as kind of tying into the experiment, we could name our nations for districts we'd 'represent'. For example, rather than move "Pu99et nat10n" in, we could create a puppet called "[Capital City]-Central" or "North West-[Rural Area]" (of course, names would have to vetted for appropriateness).

Anyone who isn't familiar with the concept, check out the NSGS threads (though they're pretty jumbled).

So what say you?

British calfornia

Hello everyone! :D

United kingdom of kent

I like the idea Rhodesia, sounds like it would be rather fun. So would you establish problems for the Parliment to confront etc...

United kingdom of kent wrote:I like the idea Rhodesia, sounds like it would be rather fun. So would you establish problems for the Parliment to confront etc...

Yes. We could/would also legislate on things like budgets, criminal codes, international trade pacts, etc.; just like the NSGS.

Loyalist north america

Loyalist north america

greetings from across the pond

The latest WA resolution is worth a look

What are you chaps reading at the moment? I've just finished Bitter Harvest, the memoirs of Ian Smith. It was a fascinating read, but also quite depressing. The duplicitous actions of the British government really were shameful - time and time agian we betrayed the Rhodesians. Even Thatcher didn't do anything to rescue the situation and acquiesced to Mugabe and his thugs.

Rhodesia and Loyalist north america

Kingdinium wrote:What are you chaps reading at the moment? I've just finished Bitter Harvest, the memoirs of Ian Smith. It was a fascinating read, but also quite depressing. The duplicitous actions of the British government really were shameful - time and time agian we betrayed the Rhodesians. Even Thatcher didn't do anything to rescue the situation and acquiesced to Mugabe and his thugs.

Tell me about it...

Rhodesia wrote:Tell me about it...

I knew you'd be au fait with it all! I knew that Britain had acted like bastards before reading the book, but his memoirs really emphasise just how many times Britain turned their backs on the Rhodesians. Truly disgraceful.

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