UK General Discussion

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Not really, didn't it show continued declines in places where its spoken day-to-day? Anyway, I suspect the figures for the Llŷn might be genuinely upsetting.

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this country has pretty much become america with a monarchy.

No, not at all.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/shortcuts/2012/dec/11/david-davies-tory-tornado-homophobic

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Following a long Welsh tradition, some people like to call him David Davies of Monmouth.

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Things relating to a certain issue have taken a turn for the surreal:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/dec/13/anglican-church-protests-gay-marriage-ban

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Andrew Mitchell stitched up?

Possibly (ah, how this hilarious story keeps on getting both stranger and funnier), but about 90% of the reason for the sudden demise of his career was his own gloriously incompetent reaction to the claims.

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Sir Irvine Patnick (Conservative MP for Sheffield Hallam 1987-1997) has died at the age of 83. This is actually headline news, despite the fact that he was just a backbencher (of a fairly undistinguished hard-right type at that). The reason being the fact that he spread lies about the victims of the Hillsborough disaster.

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Operation Yewtree latest: Jim Davidson arrested.

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Not everyone born after 1950 (or whatever the new magical date is) is well off, and many that are not will not claim for things that they are eligible for. The fundamental advantage of universal benefits over any and all forms of targeting is that they actually reach everyone they're supposed to; as far as I'm concerned this more than outweighs any disadvantages. You also save money on admin, overhead and other such geegaws.
If people who don't need the help receive it anyway, well, they can view it as getting something back for their taxes. If not, perhaps they could consider paying the money back, or donating it to some good cause or other. All of which is rather corporatist/right-wing social democratic and therefore deeply unfashionable, but I'd argue less inherently discredited than the theoretical underpinnings of Burstow's idea. This is without touching on Burstow's additional (and unintentionally hilarious) assertion that this idea could pay for a 'reform' of the care system. Whatever can be argued about the winter fuel payment in general, that part of his big idea is pure magical thinking.

The politics of this are at least mildly interesting; do the LibDems really think that there are that many votes to be found by swinging to the right of the Tories? Most of the neoliberal (a term of abuse, generally, and always overused, but a useful shorthand in this case; Thatcherite doesn't quite capture matters) types who can be expected to be enthusiastic about this kind of thing are diehard Tories; the bedrockiest section of the bedrock, actually.

Burstow, incidentally, came into the LibDems via the SDP.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Alasdair Milne, a career BBC bureaucrat who's tenure as Director General in the 1980s was cut short for political reasons, has died at the age of 82.

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Which perhaps we can be thankful for given his views on women at the BBC.

I wouldn't describe myself as a fan of Milne (hey, he banned Brimstone & Treacle), but at least he wasn't an utter disaster like Checkland or Birt.

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Trouble is, the government hasn't actually followed it in certain rather important areas. No Top Down Re-Organisation Of The NHS and so on.

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Well we know that, as I said, Brown demanded to remain PM

Oh, gosh, how utterly, utterly unreasonable!

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Anyway, there was never any chance of a minority Labour/LibDem coalition after the election because the LibDem leadership is right-wing and does not like the Labour Party, and because large sections of the Labour Party do not like doing deals with bourgeois parties.^* The LibDems entered negotiations with Labour in a spirit of (practically openly admitted to) bad faith, and the Labour leadership of the day in a spirit of some kind of resigned desperation. It was never a starter, and there's no point in anyone (of any political stripe) pretending otherwise.

_{*Obviously it's never put like this, but that is very much the mentality.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

All major political parties supported lax regulation of financial services before 2007 (I understand that it is possible that one of them was very keen on even looser regulation than actually existed, but that's by-the-by), and that general approach certainly didn't start with Brown's tenure as Chancellor. Australia (especially Australia in both possible interpretations of 'especially' in this context) and Canada have come through the past half decade better than most industrialised countries because of their resource based economies, etc, etc, blah, blah, blah.

Basically, Moynihan was right. We can hold whatever views we like, but let's not go around making 'facts' up.

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A report into Britain's most successful sex offender includes the figure of 214 offences, including 34 rapes. And, for obvious reasons, those figures probably have to be seen as minimum estimates.

BBC self-flagellation over the issue continues: Savile's one man crime wave presented via maps and graphs.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A big issue is also who the victims (mostly) were; people who found complaining difficult, and people who's complaints were very easy to ignore. So the classic pattern of institutional abuse, except that it was basically one criminal and multiple institutions.

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Meanwhile, we have our own sex-offender-from-a-long-time-ago, hiding-in-plain-sight case here. And the same "is anybody surprised" kind of vibe.

Yeah, heard about that the other day. Also stuff going on wrt the SWP and a certain 'Comrade Delta' - starting to edge its way out of the Trot sections of the interwebs as well.

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A big issue is also who the victims (mostly) were; people who found complaining difficult, and people who's complaints were very easy to ignore. So the classic pattern of institutional abuse, except that it was basically one criminal and multiple institutions.

Still a pretty damn large number of victims for whom that isn't true, I understand.

Lord, yes. Which (presumably) is where some of the more obviously unique factors start coming in, I guess.

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Fyck all this politics sh!t. Who else watched Utopia?

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Fyck all this politics sh!t. Who else watched Utopia?

Is it good?

Excellent, at least so far.

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A supposed 'national treasure' and director of a large number of truly terrible films is dead.

Hilarious detail from an obit:

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Politics at its most pointlessly tedious. Yawn.

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It's a calculated remark: he has many Muslim constituents (they mostly voted for the Tory in 2010, which is how he won in the first place) and his majority is tiny. Arsehole.

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I saw 'facepalming' and 'LibDem HQ' when scanning through the thread, and, you know. But, yeah, that's the story.