Politics

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J.R.
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Re: Politics

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rockfreak wrote:Can we create a new thread for Cat matters. I didn't realise what I'd started. This will then free up the Politics thread for Guardian and Telegraph readers to continue throwing rocks at each other. How do we do this, Mr Forum Moderator?

Just suggest a thread title and possible content and I'll set it up for you.

It has been covered on here back in the distant past, however !
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Re: Politics

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Simply, "Old Blues' Cats".
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Re: Politics

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My/(our) cat experiences have been well documented elswhere on this site.
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Re: Politics

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Goodbye Cats, hello Politics again. Today is Anti-TTIP day. I've just done my bit handing out leaflets in Gravesend, and in 600 towns across the UK people are attempting to draw attention to the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership which our politicians are trying to slide through on the sly. This is an EU and US arrangement in which private companies attempt to strengthen their hold on our public sector and then sue nation states if they attempt to reverse it. In other words, it will be a darn sight more difficult, and expensive for the taxpayer, to take something like Railtrack back into public ownership in future. If interested, just tap in TTIP on Wikipedia to read about the pros and cons, or access www.38degrees.org.uk if you feel moved to sign the petition.
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Re: Politics

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No mention yet from the Tories on here of the apparent split in the Conservative ranks.

'Call-Me-Dave' has REALLY got to get his thinking cap on now !
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Re: Politics

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J.R. wrote:No mention yet from the Tories on here of the apparent split in the Conservative ranks.

'Call-Me-Dave' has REALLY got to get his thinking cap on now !
This wouldn't be the first time the Tories have torn themselves apart over Europe. UKIP and many in today's Tory party are as one over Europe. Immigration is merely the Trojan horse issue to be used to detach us from Europe and bring in the kind of free market, deregulated, regressive taxation, privatised regime that even Mrs Thatcher might have baulked at. They themselves are not affected by immigration. I therefore propose extending the EU immigration laws to the industry of politics. I hear that Polish politicians do a very good job, speak good English, turn up on time, live several to a house and don't fiddle their expenses. Let's encourage them to come over here and put up for vacant electoral seats.
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Re: Politics

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rockfreak wrote:
J.R. wrote:No mention yet from the Tories on here of the apparent split in the Conservative ranks.

'Call-Me-Dave' has REALLY got to get his thinking cap on now !
This wouldn't be the first time the Tories have torn themselves apart over Europe. UKIP and many in today's Tory party are as one over Europe. Immigration is merely the Trojan horse issue to be used to detach us from Europe and bring in the kind of free market, deregulated, regressive taxation, privatised regime that even Mrs Thatcher might have baulked at. They themselves are not affected by immigration. I therefore propose extending the EU immigration laws to the industry of politics. I hear that Polish politicians do a very good job, speak good English, turn up on time, live several to a house and don't fiddle their expenses. Let's encourage them to come over here and put up for vacant electoral seats.

Interesting thoughts, David.

There are a couple of Poles who drink in my local watering hole. Lovely guys, and they would be the first to tell you they came here in the first place to escape the repression of their new 'free' government. Maybe they are not quite so pure and white as the driven snow, after all !!
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Re: Politics

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J.R. wrote:
There are a couple of Poles who drink in my local watering hole. Lovely guys, and they would be the first to tell you they came here in the first place to escape the repression of their new 'free' government. Maybe they are not quite so pure and white as the driven snow, after all !!
Any government "represses" those who disagree with its policies - just look at some of the posts here.

We have a "musical" around situation here:
a) France is flying Roma (Romanian gypsies) back to Romania on the grounds that they are close to being or are actual criminals BUT two weeks ago the free music at our favourite watering hole was really excellent - a Roma family with mainly eastern European music. Cost - whatever you put in the hat.
b) a few weeks ago some five singers plus a few students for chorus sang 11 opera arias in a local barn. After hearing the three tenors and twenty others I don't think I have ever heard Nessum Dorma sung better!!! It cost €10 or about £8 per person and the singers and students were all British "refugees"/principals from the Royal Opera House and equivalent institutions. That would have been £100+ per person in London though we would have had glass and not plastic glasses for our interval beverage!
c) You could class me as a refugee from the UK weather and the leaders of the four major parties -I went to CH so perhaps I'm not quite so pure and white as the driven snow, after all !!

Ergo, NOT ALL refugees are rubbish but .....................
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Re: Politics

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I missed last nights TV programme regarding the Romanian gypsies in the UK, and their arranged marriages.

It seems that they are in conflict with our laws because their 'matchmakers' arrange marriages of 14 year old girls !!

Shades of Rotherham, if you ask me !!
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Re: Politics

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Worried about NHS privatisation? You might not have seen it in our media (because it's largely been ignored) but tomorrow, Saturday 6th September, sees the culmination of the "Darlomums" march from the north-east to London - a modern day Jarrow crusade led by an inspirational group of women from the north east to protest against the creeping private takeover of our health service. They've been gathering supporters along the route and the London leg tomorrow marches from Unite union HQ at Theobalds Road/Red Lion Square, WC1 at about 2pm (or probably a bit later if I know these affairs) and processing to Parliament Square for a rally at 3.30pm with songs by Billy Bragg and speeches by various people (any Labour MPs? Well you can live in hope). Always fun, noisy, good humoured and often musical. My generation (the war babies) were told by our working class parents of the change in healthcare that came after the war so I know where this sly, backdoor privatisation business is leading. At the time that David Cameron was assuring us, before the election, that "the NHS is safe in my hands", one of his right-wing Tory cronies was in America telling a group of private healthcare providers that "we shall show the NHS no mercy".
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Re: Politics

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rockfreak wrote:Worried about NHS privatisation? You might not have seen it in our media (because it's largely been ignored) but tomorrow, Saturday 6th September, sees the culmination of the "Darlomums" march from the north-east to London - a modern day Jarrow crusade led by an inspirational group of women from the north east to protest against the creeping private takeover of our health service. They've been gathering supporters along the route and the London leg tomorrow marches from Unite union HQ at Theobalds Road/Red Lion Square, WC1 at about 2pm (or probably a bit later if I know these affairs) and processing to Parliament Square for a rally at 3.30pm with songs by Billy Bragg and speeches by various people (any Labour MPs? Well you can live in hope). Always fun, noisy, good humoured and often musical. My generation (the war babies) were told by our working class parents of the change in healthcare that came after the war so I know where this sly, backdoor privatisation business is leading. At the time that David Cameron was assuring us, before the election, that "the NHS is safe in my hands", one of his right-wing Tory cronies was in America telling a group of private healthcare providers that "we shall show the NHS no mercy".

I cannot abide Cameron and get an uncharacteristic urge to punch that smug face whenever I have to suffer its presence on my television screen.

However it has to be said that the legacy of Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs), dramatically escalated by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, are every bit as damaging to the NHS as anything the Tories have done going back to Thatcher's time.
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Re: Politics

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I absolutely agree Andy. And that was the trouble with the Blairite Labour party - it wasn't a proper Labour party. Blair had majorities that Harold Wilson would have died for yet he completely failed to grasp the nettle and start rolling back the Thatcherite agenda. One lives in hope that we may someday get a government that governs for the 99% instead of the 1%.
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Re: Politics

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rockfreak wrote:I absolutely agree Andy. And that was the trouble with the Blairite Labour party - it wasn't a proper Labour party. Blair had majorities that Harold Wilson would have died for yet he completely failed to grasp the nettle and start rolling back the Thatcherite agenda. One lives in hope that we may someday get a government that governs for the 99% instead of the 1%.

Unfortunately, I don't think that'll happen at the approaching general election.

Many tories dissatisfied with the tories.
Many labour dissatisfied with the labour party.
The majority of LibDems dissatisfied with their party.
One up and coming radical party that will take a lot of otherwise hard core supporters votes from the three main parties.

It's all a gigantic recipy for another hung parliament which isn't good for the country.
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Re: Politics

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Mid A 15 wrote:[

I cannot abide Cameron and get an uncharacteristic urge to punch that smug face whenever I have to suffer its presence on my television screen.

However it has to be said that the legacy of Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs), dramatically escalated by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, are every bit as damaging to the NHS as anything the Tories have done going back to Thatcher's time.
David Cameron often seems out of his depth, not a leader. Personally I find him hard to dislike-he comes over as a a good family man, but not a strong enough personality for the job. I think Nick Clegg is the smug one.
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Re: Politics

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fra828 wrote:
Mid A 15 wrote:[

I cannot abide Cameron and get an uncharacteristic urge to punch that smug face whenever I have to suffer its presence on my television screen.

However it has to be said that the legacy of Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs), dramatically escalated by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, are every bit as damaging to the NHS as anything the Tories have done going back to Thatcher's time.
David Cameron often seems out of his depth, not a leader. Personally I find him hard to dislike-he comes over as a a good family man, but not a strong enough personality for the job. I think Nick Clegg is the smug one.
Please don't give the benefit of the doubt to David Cameron or any other modern day Tory. They are all unreconstructed scumbags. I don't say this sort of thing lightly, but the old one-nation Conservative party was called such for a good reason. Most of its people had seen two world wars, fought in one, and witnessed the depredations of the inter-war depressions, the unemployment and the slum housing. Even before World War 2 some of them were realising that things must change. When the Conservatives got back into power in 1951 it was a progressive Tory, RA Butler, who convinced Churchill that it would be wrong to drastically meddle with the 1945 Labour programme, and so for many years both parties motored on programmes of affordable housing, an NHS free at the point of delivery, a social welfare net and an aim of full employment. This changed with Thatcher. Her guru, the Chicago University economist Milton Friedman, said that he intended "Socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor". The results are now all around you. The old Conservative party with a small "c" died in 1979 and with it the number of decent, fair-minded people who used be in it. Ex-Tory MP Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote about it in his book "The Strange Death of Tory England". Figures like Harold Macmillan, Butler, Iain Macleod and Alec Douglas-Home wouldn't have got into today's Labour party because they'd have been too left-wing by a mile.
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