https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.bel...-30867020.html

Willie McCrea, soon to be Lord McCrea.

Billy Wright's mate btw.

May is a horrible oul ****.

So, we could be looking at a snap election in the Autumn?

And if we do of course the Tory spin machine will continue to claim corbyn is some sort of socialist interloper. How far down must we drag the uk before the populace realises austerity is a Tory party policy? You can lead a horse to water but what can you do if that horse then decides to jump into the water and drown itself?

Corbyn is vocally and explicitly in favour of hard Brexit, which will crash the economy and destroy public services.

Who called the referendum in the first place mate? Trying to lay blame on the Labour Party for the state of the UK right now is ridiculous.

But, but, Corbyn! He’s far from an ideal leader given his reluctance to call a spade a spade but compared to May he’s our only hope.

Cite?

He has no cite other than random daily mail propaganda. It’s ridiculous. Tory austerity and poor government in general have got the UK to the point where the Torys only strategy is to demand purity tests from labour MPs. All the while they’re leading you guys down a path which results in an idiocracy similar to the US. If it weren’t for the uncertainty regarding passporting Brexit would have their full support.

I'm watching Jeremy Thorpe in this 1975 debate on the UK leaving the EEC. Thorpe starts at 27:00.



He's an excellent speaker. Very funny.

Mutatis mutandis the EEC debate is the same as today's EU debate. "Make a deal with Canada/Prime Minister Trudeau would rather make a deal with the whole EEC" "Choose the Norway option/Norway don't have a say in the EEC but have to accept all it's rules". It's astonishing.

Someone that is behind in the polls to the worst government since forever and that supported the insane triggering of Article 50 does not justify hope.

I had a discussion a few months ago on here about the SNP imposing austerity on local authorities and blaming it, as they do with everything, on 'Tory austerity'.

Scottish govt this week have confirmed what I'd been saying at the time, that the SNP are the ones to blame for this. It's a decision they've made and hasn't been imposed on them.

Here are their own figures:


Note that they have chosen 2013/14 as their start date as the police and fire budgets had been removed at this point

Link to the report
https://digitalpublications.parliame...-14-to-2018-19


https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinio...rity-1-4744450

*Cliffs - Scottish govt budget decreased by 1.8% over the period concerned but they reduced local authority budgets by 7.1%.

As the author of the article above pointed out, it wouldn't be so bad if they said there were discussions to be had around spending decisions etc but they haven't, they just claim the cuts are due to Tory austerity and deny it's a decision they've made.

Weakest Prime Minister in living memory (mine anyway) is far more popular as PM than Corybn. Shambles.

Brexiteer cabinet mutiny to bring down the nasty party?

Austerity politics has brought public services to it's knees. Record levels of poverty and inequality will be the tories legacy.

Chairman May.......time for the chop!

Now's the time for a pro-Brexit centrist enlightened-libertarian party to step up...

The Oxymoron party? Moron party for short.

What do you think that means? It would probably not be so far from New Labour or Cameron's Tories in practice, just a bit less muddled ideally.

Its just word pie, a bunch of words that contradict each other.

You cant have a centrist libertarian party.

You cant have libertarians that are enlightened.

Enlighted as I understand it in this context generally includes the realisation that taxes for social programs give benefits with externalites to all individuals that can make them valuable even from an individualistic perspective, thereby pushing financial liberalism more central than right. Libertarian is obviously left wing on liberalism. If it doesn't make sense to call that lot roughly centrist, then why not?

Libertarian is not more left wing than liberalism.

No, it IS left wing liberalism - it's not more.

I.e. it is not authoritarian. Unless I've got the wings wrong in some people's opinion, because I see that you can sort of have an authoritarian left wing to the liberalism scale, but I think that is either mixing up some axes, or its that horseshoe theory thing.

Comedy gold.

Libertarian is ultra right wing economically and ultra left wing socially.

Conservatives/traditional right want less gov intervention in the economy, but more authoritarian/rules intervention in social life.

Labour/traditional left Want more gov intervention in economy, but less rules/more freedom socially.

There has been some movement by the right towards more liberal positions socially but their is a big back lash in their base against this.

Libertarian can never be centrist, its extreme in all its positions.

Here's an amusing version of the political compass. I'm talking about the upper right green square. It's just as centrist as any 'wing's' center leaning area except for the very middle, which presumably no one ever hits. We've had New Labour, the Tories, and the Lib Dems in those other 3 centrist boxes at various points, but I think we have missed out the chance to vote for balanced liberal personal responsibility.

You claiming black is white does not make it white.

Libertarian policy of radical small government, small as possible, can not be centrist, you are arguing against a truism.

That's only like saying Labour is 100% pure Marxism. Of course you can take a gradient.