Inflation is rampant
Petrol is through the roof
Food prices are astronomical
We are looking towards catastrophic energy hikes
Where is our government??? Do the Tories give a shit??
Johnson is parking about in fighter jets and police raids. Nobody cares!!
Winter is coming!! Good luck!! You voted for them!!
I didn’t vote for them, Opher. I haven’t voted in a UK general election since 1987.
And the answer to your question is, they don’t care a shit. Nor do the other lot, either.
I think you are right Neil – all they care about is wealth and power – but – when you have a choice between two evils it is always best to select the lesser evil and there is a big difference between them!
Well Opher, I don’t see much of a difference between them. And if I have two evils to choose between, I will pick neither if doing that is at all possible.
Huge differences Neil. The Tories give tax cuts to the rich, cut public services, cut welfare and hammer local authorities. They privatise so rich chums can make more money out of us. Education, health, police, libraries – low pay, huge cuts and poor service.
Under Labour the needy are better catered for, public services are greatly improved, pay is better and services are better. Having spend thirty-six years working in schools the differences are enormous.
I want properly funded education and health and that’s what we got under Labour. The minute the Tories got in the whole business was starved. It was like a knife cutting through. The quality of education went through the floor. They disguised it by turning it into a knowledge-based exam sausage machine and that is not education. Same in the NHS and police – my son and his wife worked in them. For the Tories if you are not rich you are fodder to be exploited and shat on.
Opher, you’re looking at it from the point of view of a lifelong public sector worker. It’s not surprising that you have a built-in bias for Labour. I come from the opposite side – I’ve done a few years of government work (defence, local authorities, NHS), but at least 80% of my career has been in the private sector. Labour has always been hostile to people like me. And over the last 30 years and more, the Tories have become more and more hostile too. A plague on both their houses, I say.
But you must see the importance of public services to ordinary people Neil??? The Tory use private education, health etc.
Oh, I see the value of these services. But why do they have to be politicized? Politicizing education, for example, means children are taught what the state want, not what their parents think is best for them. (Yes, it was Thatcher that did that…) And politicizing health care has made a complete mess of it – witness the state of the NHS (through no fault at all of the people on the front lines).
A decent government would act like the referee in a football match. It would keep the game (economy) flowing, and make sure that no-one got any gain from foul play, and that those that indulge in serious foul play are appropriately punished. And that’s all. It would be utterly honest, and make each decision fairly and justly to the best of its ability. It wouldn’t try to change the rules of the game, and it wouldn’t discriminate for or against any particular group of people. And it wouldn’t take away the clubs’ (and players’) earnings and use them for its own pet projects.
Oh I agree. Political meddling is a real pain. But the crucial thing is the funding.
If we got rid of the political meddling, Opher, all honest working people would be able to fund these things for themselves. Either through savings of one kind or another, or through insurance.
No, I disagree here. These are best funded centrally and coordinated centrally. That is far more efficient. Politicians should enable that but not interfere. Leave that to the experts.
No, Opher. You can try to justify centralized control with arguments like “economies of scale,” but any system of centralized control has two huge disadvantages. (1) The central power can be taken over by sub-human scum. (2) A centralized system cannot react quickly to changing circumstances, meaning that when it fails, it fails in a big, big way. Right now, we have both of these happening at once.
As to “experts,” they are a big part of the problem. Unaccountable technocrats are very dangerous to rights and freedoms.
BTW, here’s my latest rant, which might interest you: https://libertarianism.uk/2022/09/03/thoughts-on-together-agm-and-1st-anniversary-panel-discussion/.
In one sense I agree with you. We have greedy psychopaths trying to gain total control. That is why we need scrutiny and accountability and all attempts by those in power to remove those things should be resisted. These Tories have totally abused their power, refused all scrutiny and are never accountable. That is the problem. That is what needs addressing. I’m just about to read your rant!
You see Neil, on reflection, this group sounds to me like an unholy alliance of anti-vaxers, Brexiteers and Climate Change deniers. That’s nothing to do with freedom and individual rights.
When a pandemic comes along it is the government’s responsibility to protect the public. That might well mean curtailing freedoms for a while. To me, there might be an argument about the degree and length of time but as long as the curtailing is as short as possible, is returned to full rights and is not too draconian it’s alright with me.
I have a great deal of criticism to lay at Johnson for the incompetence of his actions and utter waste of billions of our money (going to his cronies). Still, I have absolutely no problems with lockdowns, mask-wearing and vaccinations. I think those who refused to wear masks or be vaccinated were fools. The science leads the debate not ignorant Trumpists.
Brexit was a stupid, racist piece of garbage that has cost this country hundreds of billions, severely damaged its economy and reduced our standing in the world. The work of stupid self-serving vandals like the lying Johnson, Gove, Cummings and that selfish, greedy billionaire Aaron Banks. They’ve wrecked the joint.
The Climate change deniers have their heads in the sand while the world around them burns. Once again science leads the debate and is irrefutable. The oil industry put up their stupid denials just like the tobacco industry did with lung cancer.
I think you have bought into an unholy alliance of vested interests. This is allied to populist politics and a number of people, like the loathsome Farage, are making a fortune out of it at the expense of us all.
The future looks very bleak.
This isn’t about individual freedom at all! It’s about putting money in the pockets of a tiny minority. I think people like Rees-Mogg made millions out of Brexit.
Opher, I’ll reply here, as we have some issues on the other site concerning authors (not me) who have been re-using copyrighted photographs. Now there’s a perfect example of, as you say, “putting money in the pockets of a tiny minority.” Apparently, they are now using lawyers to go aggressively for anyone on the web who has ever used one of their photographs.
I really don’t understand why you use the slanted words you do (“anti-vaxers,” “deniers”) of people you don’t even know. Together is a human rights and civil liberties organization; it does not support one or another political party or ideology. It does, however, demand hard evidence and proof beyond reasonable doubt of the case for any restrictions on rights or freedoms. An “unholy alliance of vested interests,” it is not. Its job is simply to fight for the rights and freedoms of every individual.
As to myself, I chose to be a conscientious objector to taking the vaccine. That is my right and my decision. And as it is now clear that the vaccines make all but zero difference to transmission of the virus, there is no reason at all for anyone to require vaccination for reasons of “other people’s health.” I am also a proud Brexiteer. For me, Brexit was absolutely vital in order to get away from the EU and ECJ. That reduces the size of the task we have to sort out this mess (though it is still a very big job).
Moreover, I am not a “climate change denier.” I do not deny that the climate changes. Nor do I deny that some human activities (urban heat island effect, land use changes) can affect the climate. What I do not accept is the idea that human emissions of greenhouse gases are causing, or will cause, catastrophic change in the climate. It is very uncertain, for a start, just how much temperature change would come about from a given amount of emissions. It is even more uncertain how much damage (or gain) would be caused by a given change in temperature. Based on history, I’d expect a moderate warming of 2 to 4 degrees C to be beneficial to human civilization; quite the opposite of catastrophic. It is less certain still how much, if any at all, effect cutting greenhouse gas emissions would have. After all, we’ve been paying green taxes and cutting emissions for decades already, so if these measures were working, surely we ought to be able to see an improvement already? And you say “Climate change deniers have their heads in the sand while the world around them burns,” but I see no evidence of the world burning. We’ve had a good summer this year, and the wildlife and the people have both liked it a lot. You also say “science leads the debate and is irrefutable.” That isn’t true. The science of “global warming” is very iffy indeed – in fact, most of it isn’t even science, because it doesn’t make falsifiable predictions and then test them. The COVID science is almost worse.
You talk of government’s responsibility to “protect the public.” That can be interpreted in different ways. For me, if government wants to justify forcing someone to change their lifestyle, it should have to meet the same standard of evidence and proof that it would to convict them of a criminal offence. If someone actually has COVID symptoms, then the case that they ought to shut themselves away for a few days ought to be easy to make. But requiring symptom-free people, particularly those who have already had the disease, to make, and to continue to make, sacrifices just because they “might” catch the disease and pass it on to others, needs quantitative justification. That has never been forthcoming. All this is bound up with the perversion of the precautionary principle that the UK government made back in 2002. They turned “look before you leap” into “if there is a risk, government must act.” That in itself is a violation of human rights as far as I am concerned, since it destroys the presumption of innocence, and inverts the burden of proof.
As to the oil industry, they are part of the scam, Opher! They just want to rake in money, they don’t care whether they get it from oil, “carbon capture and storage” or anything else.