The salary for the head of cyber security is unreal, no chance will they attract anyone with any experienece and that is the problem when the Tories disembowel the public sector
The centrist wings of Labour and the Conservatives have far more in common than either has individually either the far right and far left wings within their own parties.
FPTP forces very disparate wings to bind together to have any chance of winning even a single seat. It’s no wonder it leads to such disfunctjonal parties.
The Tories getting slaughtered on Question Time for the second week running. Fiona Bruce asked for a show of hands for support for the so called Illegal Migration Bill (which is supposed to be hugely popular with the public) and one solitary auld fella in the audience raised his hand.
Are the opinions of the GB News crowd being hugely overrepresented? Every attack on the Tories by members of the audience was met with loud applause.
The Conservative Party has a centrist wing? I though Boris Johnson had purged it.
100% At this stage it seems to be a widely accepted situation that ideologically extreme outlets are simply pumping out an endless stream of negativity and antagonistic content because it engages and enrages an audience - but not an audience that always agrees with that stance either. The era of doom-scrolling shows people are sucked into outrage; it's now a business model. If it isn't GB News it's Fox and so on.
GB News by simple eyeball metrics a deeply minor, niche opinion - so they have no business appearing on any political round-table - and their right wing, Tory focused, anti-woke agenda doesn't remotely reflect popular opinion. But the noise they and their small audience whips up online would have you think otherwise, the appearance in the broad conversation an incorrect reflection of influence . Social media has increasingly become hostage to a cohort of angry types, the incensed-as-a-hobby. The entire Current Affairs forum here basically exists as a microcosm of this IMO.
I've a funny feeling the Tory culture wars may blow up in their faces and they may suffer a major defeat in the next general election. Thinking that the public are going to base their GE vote on how many dinghies arrive at Dover or whether trans women can enter ladies toilets might be very optimistic on their part. Culture wars are of extremely limited use to a despised government that has been in power for 13 years. I'm seeing a lot of attacks on the Conservatives in the Daily Mail comments and meanwhile GB News is just a parody of itself - a far right propaganda outlet pumping out lies and conspiracy theories.
The SNP kinda showed the reverse of this to some extent: Nichola Sturgeon called a bluff with her Gender Recognition Bill; that it getting shot down by Westminster would rile up the Scots towards another referendum. While gender fluidity is an issue I'd support, I also know it remains niche enough to elude the interest or emotion of much of the public - they simply didn't care & ultimately did for Sturgeon. As you say, the Tories are betting the opposite of this; that antagonism towards all things "woke" (however that gets defined 'cos it's a broad church these days) would get them votes. But the public has increasingly showed itself disinterested on issues GB News would have us believe are Things To Be Angry About.
Congratulations to the UK on joining the Trans Pacific Partnership. We are not allowed make our own agreements of course.
We don't need to make our own agreements because when you're in a club of 450 million people with high standards insisted upon, we will always benefit compared to us as an individual nation of five million people.
Oh, and being in the EU hasn't removed our sovereignty despite the nonsense you posted in your pre-edited post!
It obviously has. What independent country doesn't control their own fiscal and trade policy?
You're in total denial.
Like I say congratulations to the UK, an independent country charting it's own course.
It wouldn't be so bad if that charted course was not straight for the rocks..
That's the spirit. Keep up the bitter hopefulness of bad times for a country daring to regain it's sovereignty.
I wonder did British people have the same spiteful attitude to us when we left the UK in the first part of the last century?
The UK is doing just fine on it's own like we would.
We are allowed make our own agreements.
We agreed to join the common market and we get to agree on what happens in it.
No, it's not.
I'm British and I voted remain. What I now see is the utter sh!tshow expected from an ill-thought-out endeavour.
I think the main point is that it is a hated government that has been in power for 13 years. Staking all their chips on phoney 'culture wars' and thinking this will somehow win them a general election seems a colossal gamble. Much more likely that it will blow up in their face and they will suffer a landslide defeat.
I assume you haven't read this analysis
Are you seriously arguing that we are missing out on something with that agreement. Or do you want to hand over control to large multinational corporations?
It's a Brexit win for the people behind Brexit. The true reason for whipping up the xenophobia was to decouple the UK from pesky food and medicine standards which cost the vested interests money.
I just don't want to be governed by a government in Brussels. I don't want my country to be a province instead of the nation state it used to be.
If we were not members of the eu then our trade and fiscal policies would in all likelihood return to be tied to that of the uk. Ireland would have pretty much nothing to offer as a solo entity. However, we haven't surrendered our sovereignty. We still are a sovereign nation but have decided that following a set of group policies, which we helped form, serves us better.
We have agreed that by acting as a part of a larger entity gives us more control over our future, over our trade negotiations and so on. Do you deny this?
Honestly, I know that you would like an Irexit but it is unlikely ever to happen. Thankfully.
However, if you think that the British have made the right call by leaving the EU, there is nobody at all stopping you moving there and enjoying the benefits of freedom!
The UK is not doing fine on its own!
But as with the EU, you will need to follow rules set by this supranational organization. Unlike the EU, the benefits of this are minimal.
This is the crux of the matter, you can't have full and complete freedom to decide what you want to do when you want to do it and alo have partnerships.
This is life 101.
Damage is already done.
By showing how little they are willing to spend on security they've painted a huge target on the treasury. It's like they are looking for a scapegoat. Even a competant person doing it pro bono would likely still be hampered by lack of resources.
Cynically speaking about the only reason for anyone to take this job is for kickbacks for handing out big contracts.
You are describing the EU as it is now. Unfortunately this is not the end destination. The end destination is a United States of Europe with Brussels as it's capital.
Our politicians are self interested cheerleaders in the purging of our ability to make our own decisions bit by bit, decade by decade.
The propaganda is intense. Your told that your country is not capable of running it's own affairs so many times you get to believe it. You're beaten over the head with this narrative.
The answer to this is clearly to have some random Swedish person, for example, tell us what our own taxation policies should be...
I don't accept that we are incapable of self governance and managing our own affairs responsibly and prospering like other successful small open economies in the world.
If you wish to pursue this particular avenue of discussion then create a new thread for it either here (or in the Conspiracy Theories forum) but it is not relevant to a discussion of British politics
This will increase the UK's GDP by up to 0.08% #
After 10 years of rule taking.
# That 0.08% was based on an analysis before Brexit and the UK's stalled economic growth since. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, she said: “When I asked [civil servants], ‘How did we arrive at these figures?’ they said: ‘Oh well, it was just a scoping assessment and we did it two years ago. It was based on figures 10 years ago – 2014.’”
Countries like France, Portugal, Denmark and Sweden are almost as old as the entity we know as 'England'. The idea that they would vote themselves out of existence is extremely far fetched. Their own constitutions wouldn't even allow such a thing - it would be completely illegal for them to transfer sovereignty and governance to some supranational body and no longer be an independent or sovereign state (no more than the Irish constitution would allow us to vote ourselves out of existence as a state).
France are on their fifth republic - current one since 1958. Portugal returned to democracy in 1974, four years after the death of the dictator Salazar. Denmark suffered from the Nazi takeover during WW II.
England's democracy predates those events.
I'm not certain of the specifics of the Irish constitution but I would imagine there is no clause in it that would allow any Irish government to terminate sovereignty and to hand the governance and sovereignty of the state over to another country or entity.
England was lucky in that it was an island and had a very powerful navy, otherwise it would have almost certainly have been invaded and occupied several times (one wonders if the British monarchy would even exist today against the backdrop of that reality).
Well the festival of Brexit might have been a flop but England seems determined to create Fyre Festival 2 on the coast of Dover.
