Politics Thread 5

[Moggy]

I’m actually surprised the number of deniers is that low. I thought there were far more idiots around than that.

1/8 people thinking the Holocaust is in some way exaggerated is strawberry floating terrifying. That's like 7 million people.

Of course it is. But the 1 in 20 deny it happened at all is lower than I would have guessed.

[Rocsteady]

This is evident naivety but I would have thought in the UK it would've been about 1 in a 100. I quite obviously know the right type of people.

[Lagamorph]

I’m actually surprised the number of deniers is that low. I thought there were far more idiots around than that.

1/8 people thinking the Holocaust is in some way exaggerated is strawberry floating terrifying. That's like 7 million people.

Of course it is. But the 1 in 20 deny it happened at all is lower than I would have guessed.

From what I read the exaggeration stat comes from them asking "how many Jews were killed in the holocaust" and any answer below 6 million was counted as underestimating. I can't exactly blame the average person for not knowing the exact figure when asked on the spot like that.

[Errkal]

I don’t know an exact number or even a ball park, I just know it was a strawberry float load and was strawberry floating wrong.

[KK]

Labour run council haven’t built one solitary council home in 8 years; while Conservatives can’t even be bothered to show up.

Since Brick by Brick was formed by Croydon Council in 2015, it has not yet completed a single new home Inside Croydon has found. In the Town Hall chamber on Tuesday night, the company presented its latest business plan, which proved to be a perfect match for all of its buildings: unfinished.

Brick by Brick’s document was meant to be discussed and debated by the council scrutiny committee. But when the report was made available, the councillors discovered that few of the vital figures could be relied upon. “Brexit uncertainty” has cast a dark cloud over the housing market and the prospects for Brick by Brick, apparently.

The meeting was unsatisfactory in other respects, too, not least because two of the opposition Conservative councillors who sit on the committee, Luke Clancy and Richard Chatterjee, didn’t even bother turning up or arranging substitutes to attend and provide the degree of scrutiny that £700million-worth of council property and borrowing requires. So much for “opposition”.

The Tories’ shadow cabinet member Lynne Hale was there, but she didn’t add much value.

What the business plan did manage to confirm, officially, was that Croydon under Labour council leader Tony Newman and his deputy, Alison Butler, will have built not a single council home between the time they took control of the Town Hall and 2022.

What they will have built however, using council-owned land and property and financed with hundreds of millions of pounds of public cash, will be hundreds of flats and houses for private sale.

According to Brick by Brick’s own business plan, it should be delivering 246 units in 2019.

Yet of these, just 72 will be “affordable” homes – that’s just 29 per cent. The council’s self-stated target for Brick by Brick is to provide 50 per cent affordable. The Mayor of London’s target figures for commercial developers is for 30 per cent affordable.

Brick by Brick explains this away by offering that other homes, to be delivered between 2020 and March 2022, will have a greater number of affordable properties in the mix. Even so, and by Brick by Brick’s own admission, it still will not meet its 50 per cent affordable target.

And not one of the Brick by Brick homes will be a council home. That’s despite around £36million of funding having been in the council budget in 2014 specifically to build council housing over the course of six years. That money was quickly re-directed by the Blairites in the new Labour council towards the Brick by Brick project. So effectively, by 2022, Croydon’s council homes fund will have helped to subsidise the building of 571 homes for the private market.

All on the gravy train...

[Winckle]

Source?

[KK]

Inside Croydon, which works with BBC London occasionally and has also featured in Private Eye.

(You’ll have to copy/paste the article into Google for the direct link, current phone I’m using is bust)

[Cuttooth]

This isn't just a British problem, it's been a gradual growing trend these past few years worldwide, though Germany, France and the USA have stood out because we're more familiar with the reporting from those countries. Seems to have krept up almost out of nowhere. It's not like there's widespread anti Jewish sentiment on TV or in the mainstream media.

Not sure it is out of nowhere though. Antisemitism didn't disappear with the liberation of concentration camps and the end of the Second World War. Antisemitic stereotypes (greed and controlling of money, controlling of mainstream media, controlling of the arts etc.) have endured for generations alongside general bigotry and racism towards all non-Christian white groups from within Western societies.

If you want to know why it feels like antisemitism and antisemitic violence is on the rise in Europe and the US, it's directly attributable to how fascist movements has risen following the recession a decade ago, and how moderate right wing politics has generally appeased the far-right and moved in that direction in that time.

Education is the key to preventing Holocaust denial. I remember my school going to, I think, the Imperial War Museum to see an exhibition on the Holocaust. Seeing piles of eyeglasses and hair of genocide victims, and listening to the first hand account of a Holocaust survivors was an incredibly powerful thing for me.

Things like the work of digital colourist Marina Amaral are also important in an age where those first hand accounts decrease more and more as it becomes further and further removed from living history.

[Preezy]

I am a Hypocaust denier - no way the Romans could have engineered such advanced under-floor heating.

[Tineash]

Heyyy guess who's a complete piece of gooseberry fool?

It's Sajid Javid!

She once threatened to leave him, though, if he did not stop reading Ayn Rand’s book The Fountainhead aloud to her. He admits he recited it to her—“I’m not claiming it was romantic,” but “she hasn’t left me so that tells you how often I read it to her now.”

The right-wing libertarian text has had a big influence on him. He read it repeatedly for inspiration at university and said the 1949 film version articulated “what I felt” when he first watched it as a teenager. The famous courtroom speech by the main character Howard Roark begins with a tribute to creativity and originality but soon morphs into a diatribe against collective endeavour and altruism. Railing against kindness, Rand’s Roark makes a chilling case for selfish individualism, ranting that: “The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption.” Later, he declares: “The ‘common good’ of a collective—a race, a class, a state—was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men.”

Javid’s strange obsession was no youthful quirk—as late as Christmas 2017, he was telling journalists that he re-read the courtroom scene twice a year.

Don't worry he insists that he's so stupid that he's missed the point of her books completely and he still just looooves altruism and gooseberry fool

And yet now, he insists, there is more that he disagrees with in the book than he agrees with. “I’m not a Randian, I never have been,” he says. “I don’t believe in her Objectivism [the philosophy that the only moral purpose of life is individual happiness]. Altruism is one of the reasons I’m in government—the most important part of my job is to help those who find it hard to help themselves.

[Drumstick]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47036119

US lobby groups for agriculture and pharmaceutical firms want UK standards changed to be closer to those of the US in a post-Brexit trade deal.
The meat lobby wants the sale of growth hormone-fed beef, currently banned in the UK and EU, to be allowed in the UK.

They can absolutely strawberry float the strawberry float off. I'll be going vegetarian if this happens.

[Moggy]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47036119

US lobby groups for agriculture and pharmaceutical firms want UK standards changed to be closer to those of the US in a post-Brexit trade deal.
The meat lobby wants the sale of growth hormone-fed beef, currently banned in the UK and EU, to be allowed in the UK.

They can absolutely strawberry float the strawberry float off. I'll be going vegetarian if this happens.

Dat Brexit bonus

[Benzin]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47036119

US lobby groups for agriculture and pharmaceutical firms want UK standards changed to be closer to those of the US in a post-Brexit trade deal.
The meat lobby wants the sale of growth hormone-fed beef, currently banned in the UK and EU, to be allowed in the UK.

They can absolutely strawberry float the strawberry float off. I'll be going vegetarian if this happens.

Not even sure that will help, imagine all the pesticides they use

[Jenuall]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47036119

US lobby groups for agriculture and pharmaceutical firms want UK standards changed to be closer to those of the US in a post-Brexit trade deal.
The meat lobby wants the sale of growth hormone-fed beef, currently banned in the UK and EU, to be allowed in the UK.

They can absolutely strawberry float the strawberry float off. I'll be going vegetarian if this happens.

Not even sure that will help, imagine all the pesticides they use

We'll all be forced to live like Tom and Barbara from The Good Life and grow our own stuff.

And it will be just as gooseberry fool as the rest of the 70s was.

[KK]

There certainly aren't any positives to introducing it (aside from lower prices for consumers) but I would imagine it would be easy to ignore should you choose not to eat it (unless labelling laws also change). Now, if the UK farming industry was to then change in an effort to "compete" with these lower prices, then you'd have to purchase free range and organic to get some of the same standards you used to enjoy as part of the budget and standard lines, in which case you are impacting the poorest in society again.

Places with a very middle to upper class customer base aren't going to be impacted as much - i.e. the type of person that would do 'Veganuary' - as they are clued up on this stuff and retailers know it.

It's like US imported products now which are sold in the UK but have a special sticker over the top with more transparent labelling. You can either have the mindset that it's consumer choice or maybe you believe it shouldn't be on sale at all. Of course if a product becomes popular enough (such as Flipz recently) another company may purchase the license and the ingredient list will be altered and it made here/Europe.

Not that the meat coming in from abroad is any good now, or that our £2.50 chicken is great either, but it is taking already poor standards and driving them even lower.

If it's any consolation I've been eating a lot of vegetarian/vegan alternative meat products this month and GOD DAMN JIMINY CRICKETS, SON some of it is bloody good.

[Cuttooth]

If it's any consolation I've been eating a lot of vegetarian/vegan alternative meat products this month and GOD DAMN JIMINY CRICKETS, SON some of it is bloody good.

The Vegetarian Butcher chicken pieces has me genuinely questioning whether I need real chicken in stir fries now. Horrendously high in salt though.

[KK]

Ken Livingstone on This Week to make an absolute pillock of himself.

He’s going to need a new arsehole after this showing.

Alan Johnson: ‘Stop reading the Morning Star, Ken...’
Ken Livingstone: ‘I read the Guardian’
Alan Johnson: ‘Well if you’re reading the Guardian then you must really be in a sad state.’

He didn’t mention Hitler, which was disappointing.

[Hypes]

Savage

[Cuttooth]

twitter.com/britainelects/status/1091762049099677697

What ever the leadership's plan is, it ain't working.

[Rex Kramer]

twitter.com/britainelects/status/1091762049099677697

What ever the leadership's plan is, it ain't working.

How is that even possible? Someone sits down and decides that the Tories are the best option at this point? strawberry floating hell Labour members, have a word with yourselves.