UK General Discussion: Rishecession

[Estrella]

18:08, nothing. Not sure what everyone's still waiting for.

[Estrella]

The Telegraph is such a frustrating paper - competent at investigative journalism, and basically c**p at most other stuff.

It's a shame: it used to be a paper with a firm and very right-wing editorial line but with high quality journalism across the board (including very good sports coverage) so perfectly readable even if you strongly disagreed with its politics, but, well, long ago and far away now. It's an extreme example, but the general pattern holds across our newspapers.

The Mail is genuinely mad these days (was it ever not?), see todays front page on the government induced sterling crisis:

https://twitter.com/bbcnews/status/1574517854560362496?s=21&t=btG9hchqAlFpHj...

Any mention of Black Wednesday and (((Soros)))?

[Estrella]

Oh sod it, here's another:

https://twitter.com/dinosofos/status/1575389891453648901

Genuinely worth the small amount of time this takes. You won't regret it.

I suppose local consent is, in essence, a self-eating cake.

[Estrella]

When she was originally selected her mother agreed to campaign for her but her father refused. I suspect he ordinarily votes for candidates to the left of Labour - Leeds has historically been reasonably strong for the alphabet left.

Yes, this makes sense. Reading between the lines of what has been said of his politics, he appears to be either a Trot or a Tankie, whereas her mother is - or at least was - a Liberal Democrat: stood as a paper candidate for them in a hopeless ward about twenty years ago. They are divorced.

Engineering and Maths professors have a weird tendency to gravitate towards fringe politics. I don't understand why.

Probably for the same reasons the sorts of people who visit this forum have a tendency to gravitate towards fringe politics.

[Estrella]

https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1578480177499119616?s=20&t=vF8DUm5p8jv6...

Foreign florists? I see the Tory government is finally standing up to the true villains of this world - the Dutch!

I knew I couldn't trust the Dutch! They like tulips too much for their own good!

No one who calls whipped cream "slagroom" with a straight face is welcome in my house.

That word sounds like it comes out of a leaked dossier on the next Tory sex scandal. Secret slagroom at party conference?

[Estrella]

Is it possible that instead of the drawn-out counting that preceded the fall of Johnson, one day we'll just find out out of the blue that Sir Graham got the required number of letters and it's over?

[Estrella]

Latest news from day two of Daily Star's deathmatch between Prime Minister The Right Honourable Elizabeth Truss MP and a head of lettuce: someone put up a disco ball, there's soft piano music playing in the background, the lettuce has been stylishly outfitted with googly eyes and a blonde wig and there's a surprisingly wholesome community developing in the comments.

Judging by the latest news, the odds are definitely with the lettuce.

[Estrella]

An Irish headline from a decade and a half ago comes to mind.

[Estrella]

The Tories are obviously fxcked under the current leadership, but even if they managed to find a saint to lead them, it won't help. Basically every Tory of any significance is under the delusion that just one more attempt to undermine their enemies, just one more backstabbing of their friends, just one more defenestration of someone their don't like will make the voters think "well, now that [insert politician here] is gone, I'm coming back." It won't. The completely psycho way they're going about doesn't make them look like reasonable statesmen getting their hands dirty in a desperate situation when the Party needs to be saved, it makes them look like pigs rolling in the mud and enjoying it.

[Estrella]

Good morning everyone. Let's go out on a limb:

[Estrella]

Nicola Murray: I really thought I could be Prime Minister.
Helen Hatley: ...did you?

[Estrella]

I know this has been the butt of a joke but seriously: CAN King Charles dissolve parliament and call for a general election? How would the British public receive such an action? I just cannot get over how ridiculous this is that there is now going to be a second unelected PM in like two months.

There's no written law that says he can't, but the British constitution consists of a lot more than just written laws. The only thing stopping him is tradition, but that tradition is the constitution.

What use is he if he can’t intervene in such a situation? This is like the one rare situation in which a king would be advantageous.

No, this is where a republican head of state would be advantageous. A head of state with no legitimacy to intervene in politics is pretty useless in a situation like this.

[Estrella]

https://twitter.com/PeoplePolling/status/1583343851150114817?s=20&t=-pD-dqLP...

How many lost deposits would that be?

[Estrella]

This thread now has nearly twice as many pages as there were are days in the Truss premiership.

[Estrella]

[Estrella]

Somehow I am not surprised Etonians make truck drivers look like well-educated arbiters of culture.

Eton College apologises after allegations pupils jeered visiting state schoolgirls

Eton College has apologised and “sanctioned” a number of pupils after allegations that a group of girls visiting from a nearby state school were subjected to misogynistic language, racial slurs and jeering.

The boys’ private school near Windsor, Berkshire, told the BBC that an investigation took place into the incident which occurred during a speech by Nigel Farage last week.

A person, who said they were a parent of one of the girls who attended the speech, wrote on social media anonymously that the students were booed inside the lecture theatre and were subjected to “racial slurs” and “generally misogynistic comments”. They said of the private school pupils: “Their behaviour was awful.”

The poster also said that Eton boys had cheered Farage’s “worst comments on migrants and Covid”.

[Estrella]

https://twitter.com/MelnykAndrij/status/1623652302404870153?s=20&t=poNLRj9pz...

Sorry, but...

Helping Ukraine and sinking Rishi's election campaign? What's there not to love?

[Estrella]

Is it normal for resignation honors to take this long?

[Estrella]

https://mobile.twitter.com/d_jaishankar/status/1627726566343032832

😂

Now all we need is a Burmese Premier of Northern Ireland breaking away a rather distant part of the broader realm into its own thing.

Ah, but would they be Prod Burmese or Taig Burmese?

[Estrella]

I have no idea what "Eat Out to Help Out" is supposed to mean in this context but I really hope people somewhere are making all the jokes that came to my mind when I read this phrase.

The scheme is long dead, but the phrase still kinda lingers.

[Estrella]

Council housing was originally built in Britain for people at the upper range of working class incomes, and this was then extended for general needs after the Second World War. The shift towards it being housing for the poor was a long and complicated one linked to slum clearance programmes and heavy subsidies for high-rise developments (a key figure there was Keith Joseph who knew what he was doing) and wasn't completed until the early 1980s.

What was Labour's position on the bolded? Because for all the stereotypes about how radical Old Labour was, it seems like they cared mostly about their unionized worker base and viewed the poor poor with contempt at best. Granted, it looks like this sort of went away after WW2, but didn't a lot of pre-war Labour figures agree with the Victorian "muh idleness"?

[Estrella]

Meanwhile in the editorial offices of the Morning Star circa 1975:

https://twitter.com/habibi_uk/status/1662504649813905409

Members of the University and Colleges Union (UCU), which has been holding its Congress at Glasgow's SEC, backed a motion accusing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of wanting the country to become an “armed, illiberal outpost of US imperialism”. The motion, which also called on Russian troops to withdraw from Ukraine and noted Vladimir Putin’s troops had committed war crimes in the country, passed during the UCU congress on Saturday, May 27. An amendment to tone down the motion, including deleting the comment about Zelenskyy and including a section calling for a peaceful resolution to the conflict “based on freedom and independence for Ukraine” was defeated.

Of course it's UCU, but I wonder if back in the day you'd be more likely to hear a speech praising the Soviet invasion of [insert country] from a professor type or a Scargill type.

edit: and apparently all of this is happening in the middle of a major university strike hahahaha

[Estrella]

The Sun should have the living financial daylights beaten out of them for this, but is it actually something they can be sued over if they didn't mention anyone by name?

[Estrella]

https://twitter.com/MarcusFysh/status/1724747149252960535

Completely random question, but why do some MPs get called Mr and others just get their name?

[Estrella]

Something interesting I've noticed was after an announcement by the Deputy Mayor for Housing Tom Copley about buying up existing private rent housing to become council housing was the scale of the backlash from the Y***BY crowd who seem to be organising more in politics; it really surprised me both in terms of the hostility and the tone of it.

It did make me realise I am actually a socialist (I think council housing is a good thing & authorities should use the means they have to get it) but showed something interesting about the YIMBY trend- I wondered how much of them are people who basically want to a party that is the UK version of the FDP.

I mean, they have a point. The housing crisis is affecting basically everyone, not just those who are eligible for a council house. Taking homes from the rental market instead of building new ones will help the poorest, but it won't cost much less and will hurt everyone else in the process. Ironically for a Labour policy, this is the sort of Cameronite austerity that's fine-tuned make sure you can say you've done something when in fact you've only made things worse, and didn't even save that much money.