Reply With QuoteHe wont be the future PM but the one who replaces him will be little better. My respects to your father.
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My Dad, who died last January, aged 96, fought at and and survived D Day. Maybe he could have found something better to do, but didn't. Couldn't our current and possible future PM show some semblance of duty that my Dad and thousands of others showed? Shame on him, Sunak is a disgrace. Incapable of representing our nation at such a poignant event.
Last edited by SwalePie; 08-06-2024 at 01:39 AM.
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He wont be the future PM but the one who replaces him will be little better. My respects to your father.
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When the Tories plumped for Truss as leader I thought Sunak was the best of a bad bunch. However, he has gone down in my estimation in the last week. Unfortunately, where I now live in Scotland it’s a straight fight between SNP and Conservative. The latter have just jetted in their Scottish MSP leader, Douglas Ross, in place of the sitting MP who, though seriously ill and recovering from spinal surgery, apparently still wanted to stand.
Where is Screaming Lord Sutch when I need him?
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I seriously struggle to get my head around politics. People take sides and refuse to acknowledge the opposition saying things will be better with the others etc etc. The country is a mess, both main parties seem as bad as each other, both openly lie, its always been like that , it's just more obvious in todays world. Why people can't see that amazes me. I can't name anything any party has done that has dramatically helped me in recent years. The whole lot of them on all sides are incompetent. Yet i will get many replies now telling me im wrong and tories this and labour that. As a friend once said, if voting made a difference, they wouldn't let you do it.
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As I've often heard, it doesn't matter who you vote for, the government gets in.Originally Posted by itsagrandoldteam
Both parties are now going to do all the things they didn't manage to do over the last 30 years though neither admit to having successfully grown the "money tree".
The level of competency throughout, not just National government but industry, customer support, policy making, financial institutions etc etc is at the lowest I can recall. We have bred a nation of illiterate, innumerate, introverted, narcissistic folk with worthless and useless degrees that have deprived the country of essential basic skills. And now we have the "man at the top" whose recorded interview is more important than the men who saved this nation and the other men at the top of the USA, and France. Who on earth can have advised him? How on earth can he have listened? "Oh, I have more important things to do". If he was already standing on a coffin then he's just provided the final nails.
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Good post. But what people need to remember is there's no opting out of politics. It's simply what you, your family get in life. And if you're not engaging in it in some way, you can bet your life that others are and they'll win, you'll lose.
Voting is only one thing, but where we need to start there is to stop voting for the 2 parties that have made this country a mess, as you put it. Now, one party has taken that vandalism to a whole new level in the last 14 years, but everything we know about the last 100years tells us that they'll be back to dominate the next 50 if the electoral and party system stays as it is.
Do we wish that on the next 3 or 4 generations?
IMO we need to start voting for other options which will break up the 2-party FPTP system. Despite how appalling they've been, the media and entire establishment is on the tories' side and they'll ensure they'll be back in situ in 4,5 or 10 years time for another long stretch of waging economic war against the population.
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I'm afraid I've come round to agreeing with you, even though I will still vote.
What we're seeing is the product of a culture that arguably really began to take hold in the nineties, but probably had its roots much earlier.
Ever fewer people are getting involved in politics because they had lived a life, gained experience, seen what they believe could be improved, formed a strong ideology and passionately committed themselves to pursuing positions of authority where they could deliver that improvement.
We now have t eenagers and people in their twenties pursuing "a career in politics", and what a deplorable term that is. They believe, having grown up in the era of Blair and Cameron, that success is all about reflecting what the latest focus groups tells them the public want to hear. If that changes, they change. Ask them to name a principle they would die for and you'd probably just get a blank or quizzical look.
This produces what we have today: vacuous politicians, with insufficient experience to be effective in senior positions, in most cases not actually knowing what they want to achieve beyond climbing the greasy pole for their own career benefit.
This is manna from heaven for (indeed the situation carefully created by) the shadowy vested interests who really control a lot of western countries. A veneer of democracy where people notionally choose one party/leader or another, but most of the choices on offer are hopelessly compromised, willing to sell their souls to get into high office, with no real principles and nowhere near enough nous to take on the deep state bureaucracy even if they wanted to.
Occasionally, a politician or even just a public voice from the true/sincere left or right wing slips through the net and poses a vague threat to the status quo, but you only have to look at the rabid response of the machine to any such (isolated) individuals to realise what they're up against.
George Galloway was right - we are basically being offered two cheeks of the same backside in the Conservative and Labour parties as they exist today. From my point of view, I suppose if I have to accept a Labour government then I couldn't pick a better one than Keir Starmer's offering of bland conservativism with a red badge, but basically it will be 'business as usual' for the 'blob' (or whatever other term you wish to choose to describe the unelected powers who really control the country and most of its politicians).
We look down our noses at countries like Russia and China, criticising the way they overtly suppress any real opposition or choice, yet you could easily argue that the only difference between their systems and ours is that theirs makes less effort to disguise what's really going on.
Last edited by jackal2; 08-06-2024 at 11:44 AM.
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I think this sentence from your post is more important than what went before it about some generational shift.
Almost 5 decades of neoliberal ideology has been working though to its logical conclusion - the private sphere is everything, the public, democratic sphere to be run down as far as possible - and if, unbelievably, we keep voting for it corporations rule without hardly any check on their power at all .
So politicians, acting on behalf of big business, find themselves on the side they despise - so they've been bringing politics and the state into disrepute. They'd prefer us all to give up on ever being to affect meaningful change through the democratic route.
5 decades ago, politicians like Whitelaw, Wilson, Healey etc went into politics because it was where real power and status was located. By the 2020s, the likes of Johnson, Truss, Sunak don't even believe in the jobs they are are doing. Now they're merely the servants of the billionnaire class, whose greatest fear (apart from socialism) is democracy actually working - of the people ever having any actual power.
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If you didn’t notice the difference between the 13 years of the last Labour government and the 14 years of this Tory one you’re really not paying enough attention.
And I’m not pretending life was perfect under Blair and Brown or that they didn’t make any mistakes, but it was vastly better than the spiteful incompetence and deranged lunacy of the last 14 years.
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Saddam's WMD and the suspicious and possibly convenient death of David Kelly take some beating. Gordon Brown's Gold Sale was somewhat a financial disaster: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business...ld-disastrous/
And who was left uncertain as to whether the real power rested with Blair or his spin doctor, Campbell? The years have rose-tinted the glasses.
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