Politics & Stuff

[Fulham Broadway 17,306]

11 minutes ago, Beorn said:

Couldn’t care less. It’s beside the point. Are you going to provide scientific evidence showing the welsh people are unintelligent (compared to other people groups)? Or are you going to continue to make unfounded racist comments behind your computer like a coward ?

It was stating they were thick for voting Brexit. My opinion. Don't get personal with the insults or you're gone.

Several members have already asked for you to be removed. 

[Fulham Broadway 17,306]

The New Popular Front (NFP), a left-wing alliance formed at the last minute to fight the election, appears to have won the most seats. But it does not have an absolute majority.

This means it's still not clear who will run France.

Much will depend on the balance of power within the NFP. Its constituent groups range from social democrats to hardcore anti-capitalists. Some moderate socialists could be tempted to peel off and join Macron's group to form a centre-left government.

If no working majority can be cobbled together, then President Macron can ask the largest party to lead a minority government. 

[Vesper 30,106]

[Vesper 30,106]

How Nigel Farage took over my hometown – and why Keir Starmer should be worried

With the highest leave vote in the country, Boston and Skegness became known as Farageland, so it was no surprise to Zoe Beaty that it was where Reform’s Richard Tice won a seat. It is also why Labour needs to stop treating Farage like a joke

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/nigel-farage-reform-boston-skegness-starmer-labour-b2575183.html

Almost exactly 20 years ago, on June 14, 2004, I sat in my mum’s living room, turned on the TV, and watched footage of my hometown, Boston, in Lincolnshire, burning. The previous day, more than 100 people had rioted in the town, reports said. Hours after England crashed out of the Euros, tightening racial tension over immigration in the market town snapped, and erupted. Police cars were set on fire. Nearly every shop window was smashed. At school the next day we tried to grasp what happened and deduce which of us now had family members on the run from the law.

The riots were a response to a rumour, allegedly spread by the BNP, that the council was banning the flying of English flags during the football tournament. It was entirely false but that didn’t matter, and soon enough national news reports on Boston showed a portrait of a town alight with anger, a poster child of English nationalism, growing racism, discomfort and unrest.

In the years that followed I watched my home town attract more headlines – for high rates of teenage pregnancy, as the murder capital of the UK, the least integrated town in the country, the most obese and one of the poorest. By the time Brexit came around over a decade later, Boston’s migrant population – who almost exclusively do necessary “back-breaking” field and factory work in Lincolnshire’s vast food and agriculture industry – had grown by more than 460 per cent and the borough was synonymous with anti-immigration rhetoric. It resulted in the highest leave vote in the country in the referendum: just over 75 per cent, with a turnout of 74.2 per cent. Boston and neighbouring Skegness became known as Farageland.

Then came this week’s headline. While the majority of the country was swept up in Labour’s landslide victory, in Thursday’s general election Richard Tice, chairman of Reform UK, won one of five seats for the party in the constituency of Boston and Skegness, ending a 27-year Conservative hold.

A shock? Yes, that Matt Warman, who served as MP in the constituency for nine years, was ousted from one of the very safest Conservative seats in the UK. But the fact that it was Reform who were responsible, less so. In fact, in the four hours it took me to drive home yesterday, I had several messages from friends and family saying exactly that. “It’s no surprise,” was the gist of most of our post-match analysis; if you lived there, you could see it coming.

For years, fringe right-wing parties have often been treated as a bit of a joke by mainstream politicians. At the launch of Labour’s manifesto last month, Keir Starmer declared he was bidding to run the UK, “not a circus”. “If you want politics as pantomime, I hear Clacton is nice this time of year,” he ribbed.

Despite obvious warnings – the substantial rise in race hate crime post-Brexit, the growing presence of the far right in Europe; Marine Le Pen’s fandom for UKIP – Farage and the rest of his cast were rarely treated as a real political threat until the very last minute. Now it’s beginning to look like the joke’s firmly on Westminster.

According to analysis, despite winning just five seats in the election, Reform received more than four million votes: that’s 600,000 more than the Liberal Democrats, who took 71 seats in total. Without the first past the post system – which Farage immediately denigrated upon winning his first election, on his eighth try – Reform would now be the third biggest party in the UK, after winning almost 15 per cent of the popular vote.

The party came second in 103 seats, despite only being reformed in 2021, and have found voters in all age groups – 8 per cent of those aged 18 to 24 picked Reform on the ballot; 9 per cent of those aged 25 to 34. “We’re coming for Labour,” Farage told his audience in Clacton, Essex, the seaside town he now represents in parliament.

Like everyone else from Boston and Skegness, I’m well aware by now that these threats aren’t just part of Farage’s circus show. In fact, it looked shockingly easy, first for Farage during the Brexit campaign, and now Tice, very recently, to pull large swathes of these towns further over to their agenda.

A recent trip back to visit my family provided a small snapshot of why. On a walk around the town centre I ended up by the local police station, adjacent to a now-empty B&M store in the shadow of the Stump, Boston’s famously foreboding church. The walls of the abandoned building were wrapped in bright, grossly optimistic adverts for the government’s Levelling Up fund, which promised £14.8m investment for the square; below them were several dank mattresses and threadbare tents where rough sleepers dwell.

The thing is, Boston is lacking in much more significant things than a nice-looking new square. And for years – since way back in 2004, well before Brexit and for all the years after – promises made by successive governments have left gaping holes where they’ve failed to materialise. Beyond the headlines, Boston is a complex case study of the effects of austerity, a growing population and what happens when there’s a profound lack of infrastructure to support it. Weak, or non-existent regulations on houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) and gangmasters – a person who oversees the work of manual labourers – early on left hefty dents; schools have long been extremely oversubscribed, and the local hospital, the Pilgrim, is stretched way beyond its capacity.

Despite many locals’ insistence that leaving the EU was the right thing to do, Brexit hasn’t improved anything and has simply further harmed the area’s biggest economy, agriculture. Coupled with rising rents and a cost of living crisis, Boston’s high street, like many in the country, has been decimated. Crime in Boston is 50 per cent higher than in the rest of Lincolnshire.

It’s not easy living somewhere that feels unsafe. Farage set up shop – literally, in a former second-hand shop – in the town before the 2015 election. He saw that the fear and resentment that grows in environments like Boston presents an opportunity. An opportunity to weaponise already harmful prejudice for political gain and a personal agenda.

In his party’s latest incarnation as Reform, immigration has once again been the central campaigning issue, and racism and prejudice is even less cloaked (as revealed by Channel 4’s undercover investigation, which the party denounced as “election interference”). While Farage took to the podium yesterday giving his “100 per cent promise” to rid Reform of “bad apples” after the party had to suspend multiple candidates for racist and homophobic comments, in my mind, much of the racist rhetoric has simply been rebranded as “common sense”.

Reform also sold the election to Boston on the idea that it represents “real issues that affect real people, that don’t affect the metropolitan middle class, who aren’t in the real world” (apart from its two metropolitan upper-middle class leaders). And it’s this that we can’t afford to ignore: however cynical, a party that successfully engages a growing class of dangerously disillusioned people wields an awful lot of power. In the end, Reform helped Labour to win more than 400 seats, but the upstart’s solid performance in huge swathes of red wall seats means his warning to Sir Keir that it was now “going after Labour votes” should be heeded.

It seems quite mad to me that Boston – which wholeheartedly rejects the bourgeoisie, and where child poverty increased to 30 per cent last year – would choose a privately educated multimillionaire property developer who had never set foot in the area until mere weeks ago to represent them. Whether Tice and Reform can deliver plausible answers to big questions this small town needs is another thing entirely. I hear that Tice, from London, has “promised” to move to the area, which feels like a start (and something to hold him to).

But the result also says a lot about waning trust in (and apathy towards) mainstream politics. The last decade has left people feeling unseen in the fog of political scandal, one after another. And in four seats – and very nearly in 103 more across the country – neither Labour nor the Conservatives have done enough to rectify that.

While there were no riots and no one on the run this time, for Boston and Skegness the general election was certainly a protest. On a local Facebook group, with a thread of hundreds of people celebrating and debating the win, one ominous comment stands out. “From little acorns, mighty oak trees grow,” it says. On Thursday, the seed was planted.

 

 

 

[cosmicway 1,333]

The Clacton wind did not reach France.

[cosmicway 1,333]

9 hours ago, Vesper said:

How Nigel Farage took over my hometown – and why Keir Starmer should be worried

With the highest leave vote in the country, Boston and Skegness became known as Farageland, so it was no surprise to Zoe Beaty that it was where Reform’s Richard Tice won a seat. It is also why Labour needs to stop treating Farage like a joke

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/nigel-farage-reform-boston-skegness-starmer-labour-b2575183.html

Almost exactly 20 years ago, on June 14, 2004, I sat in my mum’s living room, turned on the TV, and watched footage of my hometown, Boston, in Lincolnshire, burning. The previous day, more than 100 people had rioted in the town, reports said. Hours after England crashed out of the Euros, tightening racial tension over immigration in the market town snapped, and erupted. Police cars were set on fire. Nearly every shop window was smashed. At school the next day we tried to grasp what happened and deduce which of us now had family members on the run from the law.

The riots were a response to a rumour, allegedly spread by the BNP, that the council was banning the flying of English flags during the football tournament. It was entirely false but that didn’t matter, and soon enough national news reports on Boston showed a portrait of a town alight with anger, a poster child of English nationalism, growing racism, discomfort and unrest.

In the years that followed I watched my home town attract more headlines – for high rates of teenage pregnancy, as the murder capital of the UK, the least integrated town in the country, the most obese and one of the poorest. By the time Brexit came around over a decade later, Boston’s migrant population – who almost exclusively do necessary “back-breaking” field and factory work in Lincolnshire’s vast food and agriculture industry – had grown by more than 460 per cent and the borough was synonymous with anti-immigration rhetoric. It resulted in the highest leave vote in the country in the referendum: just over 75 per cent, with a turnout of 74.2 per cent. Boston and neighbouring Skegness became known as Farageland.

Then came this week’s headline. While the majority of the country was swept up in Labour’s landslide victory, in Thursday’s general election Richard Tice, chairman of Reform UK, won one of five seats for the party in the constituency of Boston and Skegness, ending a 27-year Conservative hold.

A shock? Yes, that Matt Warman, who served as MP in the constituency for nine years, was ousted from one of the very safest Conservative seats in the UK. But the fact that it was Reform who were responsible, less so. In fact, in the four hours it took me to drive home yesterday, I had several messages from friends and family saying exactly that. “It’s no surprise,” was the gist of most of our post-match analysis; if you lived there, you could see it coming.

For years, fringe right-wing parties have often been treated as a bit of a joke by mainstream politicians. At the launch of Labour’s manifesto last month, Keir Starmer declared he was bidding to run the UK, “not a circus”. “If you want politics as pantomime, I hear Clacton is nice this time of year,” he ribbed.

Despite obvious warnings – the substantial rise in race hate crime post-Brexit, the growing presence of the far right in Europe; Marine Le Pen’s fandom for UKIP – Farage and the rest of his cast were rarely treated as a real political threat until the very last minute. Now it’s beginning to look like the joke’s firmly on Westminster.

According to analysis, despite winning just five seats in the election, Reform received more than four million votes: that’s 600,000 more than the Liberal Democrats, who took 71 seats in total. Without the first past the post system – which Farage immediately denigrated upon winning his first election, on his eighth try – Reform would now be the third biggest party in the UK, after winning almost 15 per cent of the popular vote.

The party came second in 103 seats, despite only being reformed in 2021, and have found voters in all age groups – 8 per cent of those aged 18 to 24 picked Reform on the ballot; 9 per cent of those aged 25 to 34. “We’re coming for Labour,” Farage told his audience in Clacton, Essex, the seaside town he now represents in parliament.

Like everyone else from Boston and Skegness, I’m well aware by now that these threats aren’t just part of Farage’s circus show. In fact, it looked shockingly easy, first for Farage during the Brexit campaign, and now Tice, very recently, to pull large swathes of these towns further over to their agenda.

A recent trip back to visit my family provided a small snapshot of why. On a walk around the town centre I ended up by the local police station, adjacent to a now-empty B&M store in the shadow of the Stump, Boston’s famously foreboding church. The walls of the abandoned building were wrapped in bright, grossly optimistic adverts for the government’s Levelling Up fund, which promised £14.8m investment for the square; below them were several dank mattresses and threadbare tents where rough sleepers dwell.

The thing is, Boston is lacking in much more significant things than a nice-looking new square. And for years – since way back in 2004, well before Brexit and for all the years after – promises made by successive governments have left gaping holes where they’ve failed to materialise. Beyond the headlines, Boston is a complex case study of the effects of austerity, a growing population and what happens when there’s a profound lack of infrastructure to support it. Weak, or non-existent regulations on houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) and gangmasters – a person who oversees the work of manual labourers – early on left hefty dents; schools have long been extremely oversubscribed, and the local hospital, the Pilgrim, is stretched way beyond its capacity.

Despite many locals’ insistence that leaving the EU was the right thing to do, Brexit hasn’t improved anything and has simply further harmed the area’s biggest economy, agriculture. Coupled with rising rents and a cost of living crisis, Boston’s high street, like many in the country, has been decimated. Crime in Boston is 50 per cent higher than in the rest of Lincolnshire.

It’s not easy living somewhere that feels unsafe. Farage set up shop – literally, in a former second-hand shop – in the town before the 2015 election. He saw that the fear and resentment that grows in environments like Boston presents an opportunity. An opportunity to weaponise already harmful prejudice for political gain and a personal agenda.

In his party’s latest incarnation as Reform, immigration has once again been the central campaigning issue, and racism and prejudice is even less cloaked (as revealed by Channel 4’s undercover investigation, which the party denounced as “election interference”). While Farage took to the podium yesterday giving his “100 per cent promise” to rid Reform of “bad apples” after the party had to suspend multiple candidates for racist and homophobic comments, in my mind, much of the racist rhetoric has simply been rebranded as “common sense”.

Reform also sold the election to Boston on the idea that it represents “real issues that affect real people, that don’t affect the metropolitan middle class, who aren’t in the real world” (apart from its two metropolitan upper-middle class leaders). And it’s this that we can’t afford to ignore: however cynical, a party that successfully engages a growing class of dangerously disillusioned people wields an awful lot of power. In the end, Reform helped Labour to win more than 400 seats, but the upstart’s solid performance in huge swathes of red wall seats means his warning to Sir Keir that it was now “going after Labour votes” should be heeded.

It seems quite mad to me that Boston – which wholeheartedly rejects the bourgeoisie, and where child poverty increased to 30 per cent last year – would choose a privately educated multimillionaire property developer who had never set foot in the area until mere weeks ago to represent them. Whether Tice and Reform can deliver plausible answers to big questions this small town needs is another thing entirely. I hear that Tice, from London, has “promised” to move to the area, which feels like a start (and something to hold him to).

But the result also says a lot about waning trust in (and apathy towards) mainstream politics. The last decade has left people feeling unseen in the fog of political scandal, one after another. And in four seats – and very nearly in 103 more across the country – neither Labour nor the Conservatives have done enough to rectify that.

While there were no riots and no one on the run this time, for Boston and Skegness the general election was certainly a protest. On a local Facebook group, with a thread of hundreds of people celebrating and debating the win, one ominous comment stands out. “From little acorns, mighty oak trees grow,” it says. On Thursday, the seed was planted.

 

 

 

The tents and rough sleepers are the result of super tax evasion by the rich and super taxation of the poor people, the middle class people and the industries.
What has it got to do with the Reform political platform ?
You may be a reformer but Reform - UKIP and co has - never had any relation with the such problems.
 

[YorkshireBlue 3,265]

1 hour ago, cosmicway said:

The tents and rough sleepers are the result of super tax evasion by the rich and super taxation of the poor people, the middle class people and the industries.
What has it got to do with the Reform political platform ?
You may be a reformer but Reform - UKIP and co has - never had any relation with the such problems.
 

Let's not pretend alot of the rough sleepers didn't fuck there life up with drugs and crime, let's not blame everything on politics, unfortunately people are dumb and make stupid fucking decisions then blame others for there own down fall 

[cosmicway 1,333]

7 minutes ago, YorkshireBlue said:

Let's not pretend alot of the rough sleepers didn't fuck there life up with drugs and crime, let's not blame everything on politics, unfortunately people are dumb and make stupid fucking decisions then blame others for there own down fall 

Yeah ok - brain surgeon rough sleepers following a wage cut are not that many.
I mean in a very general sense.

[YorkshireBlue 3,265]

25 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Yeah ok - brain surgeon rough sleepers following a wage cut are not that many.
I mean in a very general sense.

Tbh in a general sense most homeless are ex criminals ex forces or junkies, the genuinely normal people that end up homeless are the exception to the rule.

[cosmicway 1,333]

Just now, YorkshireBlue said:

Tbh in a general sense most homeless are ex criminals ex forces or junkies, the genuinely normal people that end up homeless are the exception to the rule.

Rather true.
For me the big economic problem is the punitive taxation against the poor people and the punitive taxation against private businesses forcing them to close.
Some people use to publish in facebook lists of prices 40 years ago and compare them with today's prices.
But I remember those prices and the big difference with today is from government taxes. Some other reasons exist (inflation - raw materials) but it's mainly taxes.

[YorkshireBlue 3,265]

5 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Rather true.
For me the big economic problem is the punitive taxation against the poor people and the punitive taxation against private businesses forcing them to close.
Some people use to publish in facebook lists of prices 40 years ago and compare them with today's prices.
But I remember those prices and the big difference with today is from government taxes. Some other reasons exist (inflation - raw materials) but it's mainly taxes.

For me it's not even that, I'm just tired of everything going up, apart from wages, we have seen some stuff almost doubled or triple in price while wages stay the same, before Ukraine war my gas and electric was £120 a month, then it rose to £400+ a month, luckily for me I can afford it, but I know alot of people who couldn't and have struggled really bad, things are calming down ATM but still wages for people need to be looked at, for some of the lower earner it's more beneficial to be on benefits than actually go out and work, and that is a flawed system which ever way you look at it.

Edited July 8, 2024 by YorkshireBlue

[cosmicway 1,333]

1 hour ago, YorkshireBlue said:

For me it's not even that, I'm just tired of everything going up, apart from wages, we have seen some stuff almost doubled or triple in price while wages stay the same, before Ukraine war my gas and electric was £120 a month, then it rose to £400+ a month, luckily for me I can afford it, but I know alot of people who couldn't and have struggled really bad, things are calming down ATM but still wages for people need to be looked at, for some of the lower earner it's more beneficial to be on benefits than actually go out and work, and that is a flawed system which ever way you look at it.

Ukraine in any case counts as international crisis, it's not taxes.
But yeah, it's junta without jiunta and I don't believe the leftists when they say to me "mondieux, les pauvres, why don't they make consortium with Rolls Royce ?" - the Kouloglou character, search him.
I don't think you have the equivalent though, you have other stuff.

[Vesper 30,106]

Wimbledon: Ukrainian Tennis Star Elina Svitolina Bursts Into Tears As The Russian Murderous Attack On A Children's Hospital In Kyiv Outweighs The Joy Of A Dominant Victory

 

 

Edited July 8, 2024 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 17,306]

50 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Wimbledon: Ukrainian Tennis Star Elina Svitolina Bursts Into Tears As The Russian Murderous Attack On A Children's Hospital In Kyiv Outweighs The Joy Of A Dominant Victory

 

 

Absolute atrocity - the poor children. 

Whether deliberate or a mistake war is fucking stupid

[YorkshireBlue 3,265]

13 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Absolute atrocity - the poor children. 

Whether deliberate or a mistake war is fucking stupid

War is war, it's absolutely horrible, boots on the ground soldiers fighting is hard enough, but bombings and bombings in ways like this isn't war, it's murder, it's not war crimes it's just murder, killing children 100s of miles away with the push of a button should be a good reason to bring hanging back or burning at the stake.