This is so ****ing real. I wish Greens were more competent than they are. A few years ago I made the mistake of taking all the parties on their manifestos and stated objectives, and voted Lib Dem; got a coalition, and an impotent one at that. Greens were close second, some of their priorities are pressingly relevant, but there's more to it than stated objectives. It's like getting builder quotes; you can't just look at what they say they'll do and what they say it'll cost, you've got to investigate their track record, and talk to them to get a feel for their character and disposition. Greens sound fine on paper (mostly) but as actual working professionals in politics, I think it'd be like letting the local cake bake committee run the Olympics. The ones I've met just seem totally untested, naive and unprofessional. Even their promotional literature has that about it. Amateurish. Like they're just having a go at it on the weekends or something. The same can be said for Reform, UKIP and EDL/BNP before them. Even if I was really into religious ethnostates and isolationism (which is a hard sell given their track record), these guys have all always seemed flamingly incompetent and amateurish. Cake bake committee. Who would put them in charge of anything? People who want to watch the world burn, perhaps. I'm still processing the searing disappointment of Starmer's " " "Labour" " " govt and I dimly recall the endless fiasco of BS and lies that was the Tories. Lib Dem...is it time to give them another go? Am I that incapable of learning my lesson? Maybe. The sad thing is, Lib Dems would probably muddle through and do a half-decent job of it if they actually achieved a majority, but there is no strand of the multiverse where that happens. For me it's more about competence than anything else; that's #1. That used to mean Tory, even if as a working class person you were cutting off your own nose by doing it. But the last run of Tories didn't even seem competent. So....spoiled ballot? Spoiled ballot or lib dems. Tough choice.
Yes, indeed I was. It would seem they separate culture from political ideology, their military still use the cross you claim to be a symbol of National Socialism. You have still to attack any of my arguments in this thread. Now, where have my arguments been disingenuous and my assertions false? Yes. That does date back 9 years. Correct. I never did and what I had for breakfast has lived rent free in your head going on 9 years now. If it's such an internal struggle for you to not resort to personal attacks, then perhaps you should refrain from engaging. You always have that option.
Cmon guys don't derail the thread with fluffed up feathers and side fights about the culture wars. It's about the election.
There is also the tinkerbell/'I believe in fairies' theory of politics... Smaller parties don't win, in part, because no-one thinks they can win... Why vote for a party you don't think will win? Especially in the FPTP system. They only start winning once a critical mass is reached of people who believe in fairies believe they can win. As soon as people think a party can actually win people are more likely to vote for them. We've seen it with the LDs, and we're starting to see it with the Greens.
It is. I reiterate. It's two different doors into the same club. There's really no difference save from surface level stuff and what the sign says.
Oh ok, we’re jumping straight for “terrorism” gambit. I’ve got some personal experience of that, should we compare notes? I’ll ask a few questions to get us started, let’s see if any of these get any bells chiming for you and we’ll take it from there. Did you spend formative years helping your father check the car’s wheel arches for bombs before you even touched it? Did you get armed military escorts on your school buses because an active terrorist group had made threats against school buses? Did you move somewhere where a targeted car bomb had killed two people less than a year before? Did you move to the outskirts of a town where only 8 months prior someone was gunned down by two men with assault rifles in front of their wife and infant child? Do you still, to this day, refuse to have dinner near a window and refuse to put your dining table near a window because you still remember when your father told you about how it made you an easy target for assassination? Did your father work at a facility which had experienced attempted terrorist car bombings? Because I did: every. single. one. My father served in the RAF; did multiple tours in Northern Ireland, and was posted - with his family - to both the Netherlands and Germany in the very early 90s. At that time, by the way, the IRA was very much active and very much a credible daily threat. If you think you’ve made some kind of point against “Welsh nationalism” by trying to use terrorists against me, I’m afraid you’re quite ****ing far off the mark. Now. It’s also funny you should mention being “spat on”, because that’s kind of what’s been happening to Wales for close to a thousand years. Figuratively and literally. Should we talk about the ghost towns where no one lives for 6 months of the year because all the holiday homes have priced everyone else out for decades? Perhaps we should talk about Aberfan, and the Coal Board’s refusal to pay for cleanup of the slag heap that eventually collapsed and crushed children to death in their school? On that note, can we talk about the slag heaps that still exist, long after the wealthy owners have made their money and ****ed off, the ones that Westminster long refused to help clean up? Should we talk about the village of Tryweryn, and how the people living there were forcibly evicted so that a dam could be built in order to supply Liverpool with water? What about the Welsh Not? When children were humiliated and beaten if they dared to speak their native language at school? Maybe we could talk about how “welching”, as in “welching on a deal”, was a term of abuse towards Wales that derived from the historic spelling of “Welsh”? We can keep going even further back, if you like. We can talk about Henry VIII’s forced assimilation of Wales into England and disenfranchisement of anyone who could not speak English from basically all public/civic life - all because Henry VIII wrote “because I say so” on a bit of parchment and signed it. Let’s go further! Let’s talk about Edward I’s brutal conquest, and the insult of appointing his own son as “Prince of Wales” after crushing out the last Welsh Prince of Wales. An insult of a title that still exists to this day, nine centuries later - something that we’re supposed to be proud of and name ****ing bridges after. Maybe we can talk about centuries upon centuries of extraction of natural resources and wealth in order to profit others? Coal, water, gold, slate, tin, copper - the bill goes as far back in history as you care to look. We learn from history so that we don’t repeat it. But the problem with learning about history is that it makes it easier to see when history is repeating itself; it makes it easier to see that the abuse, exploitation, belittling, and cultural eradication of Wales and its people never ****ing stopped. Yeah, a lot of Welsh people are pissed off with our political “settlement”, and we have every right to be pissed off. But being angry doesn’t make things better, and I’m not stupid enough to think that it will. If you want to talk about the shortcomings in the UK’s political landscape, how all governments at all levels could work together better, how people can be more involved or work towards making these systems work for people, then I’m absolutely here for it. It sucks for everyone in the UK, including England. But if your rebuttal to national pride and a desire for a better political system is to bring up a bunch of murderous terrorists then I’m in no ****ing way interested.
I’m for devolution of parliament too. Let’s have the UK represented by separate parliaments of England, NI, Wales, Scotland, The UK Smaller Isles, The UK Overseas Compact. The the House of Lords and the House of Parliament can … well they can just **** off I guess. Have the Kingdom stuff run by civil servants.
I don’t have to to justify why UKIP’s proposed emblem hearkens back to Nazi imagery because that emblem was already rejected by the electoral commission with the reasons “Likely to mislead voters as the words spelt out in the emblem are unable to be read” and “Offensive”. But a chainsaw-wielding griffon for the Libertarian Party was just fine. But right now, all I’m asking is a simple question: Why is the swastika banned in Germany except for very narrow and very specific purposes?
Is anybody here actually contemplating voting for UKIP? If not, the entire argument is a sideshow. The iron cross isn't exclusively a Nazi symbol. It is widely recognised as one by modern Brits. UKIP are trending further right in a desperate and doomed bid to regain momentum. It won't work. They're a joke party. So what are you even working on, Byron, other than the fact that you really don't like walle? It's derailment. Who are we voting for, then?
This was addressed in post #42 The answer I gave may not be to your liking. It might not even be accurate.But since their military still uses the cross you claim to be a National Socialist symbol (which I have pointed from the get go that they do with you ignoring it) there's more weight to my answer/explanation, than it is to your claim that the cross would be a symbol of National Socialism the way the Swastika are. Added. But the cross they use today does not look exactly the same. That much is true. Neither did the Swastika they used, but I'm sure you would still call it a Swastika.
I’m tired of poor arguments and whataboutery, and I do my utmost best to ignore it. But I’m not going to ignore it when I am accused of personal insults. Yes, UKIP are an electoral joke, and any party that has to explain to people why their proposed new logo “actually doesn’t look like a Nazi symbol at all, no really guv, it’s a Crosse Pattée and also depicts the holy Eucharist (totes not a shield) and the Holy Spear - don’t look nuffin’ like any Nazi stuff I ever seen” should absolutely be treated as a joke. But the problem is that they’re not a joke in terms of the political landscape of the UK in general. We mocked Nigel Farage’s UKIP for so long, the very idea of leaving the EU was laughable. That is, until we woke up on Friday 24th June 2016 and stopped laughing. The fact that UKIP even proposed using a symbol that is so closely associated with the Nazis in the cultural consciousness means that they still represent a strong threat, regardless of their chances of gaining any kind of electoral success at any level. This is a party that has: a Christian nationalist leader, an anti-Muslim spokesperson, courted prominent figures of far-right hatred such Stephen “Tommy Robinson” Yaxley-Lennon and Katie Hopkins, organised “Mass Deportation Tour” protests… Against that context they do not get to brush off that logo with “yeah but no but actually it’s totally not a Nazi thing”, and neither does anyone else. Not when the Electoral Commission rejected it on the grounds of, among other reasons, being “offensive”. And especially not when a terrorist attack was carried out yesterday in London that resulted in the stabbing of two “visibly Jewish” people, and in March a Jewish volunteer ambulance service was destroyed in an arson attack. The logo attempt pre-dates both of those, but in terms of the wider political culture this is not new. As I said earlier, and as I’ve said so many times before… context matters. All of which is entirely relevant in a thread where the question asked was effectively “who should I vote for and why”.
Interesting, lets hash this out then. I never accused you of personal insults. I said attack. Which was in context of the nation flag of England. Post #35 Added The insult was made by "bawjaws" in post #32 with you *liking his post thus agreeing with the insult.
You'll be surprised by how many highly professional and competent people run the greens tbh. Like my local ward is ran basically by a bunch of Labour lifers that decided that Labour isn't really delivering for the normal people. In terms of how well they are organised and political acumen, Zac Polanski's greens is not the greens of Caroline Lucas or Adrian Ramsay. Also really the only party that offers a path towards the billionaire tax (and for context if you don't want to do maths, you're closer in wealth to the poorest person on the planet than even poorest of the multimillionaires, so siding with the wealthy is ultimately counterproductive for 99.99 of the population)
Ive got to the point of disillusionment with politics in the UK, that I am tempted to just take my usual approach to the annual flutter on Grand National horses/riders - picking the ones with the best/funniest names and the best costumes! Applying this logic to my local candidates, the front runners are the Lib Dem candidate as she has dyed purple hair, and the Labour candidate as his Surname is Malarkey. Croydon has been royally screwed for quote a while, by a revolving door of Labour and Conservatives blaming each other for all the current "inherited" problems, so I dont have much confidence in the Mayoral elections changing anything. I normally vote defensively, to try and make sure that the worst options dont get a chance to win anything, regardless of my personal views on their policies. e.g. stopping UKIP or Reform. Not sure if that will be enough this time.
Not trying to diminish any local issues you’re facing, but you’re certainly not alone there - you see the same up and down the country at all levels of government. Whatever long-term plans or projects are put in place are thrown out by the next lot that takes office. It’s usually either a partisan bid to make themselves look better than the last lot, or a fundamentally flawed ideology that has no basis in facts or evidence. The can has been kicked so far down the road that there’s barely more than a coin-sized scrap of shredded metal left.
Yeah, its a national problem, with all of the infighting, candidates/elected officials are heavily incentivised to focus on short term planning, or short term revisionism, knowing full well that in 4-6 years time, its likely to all go back again! Spend the first year publically reverting all of the previous legislation, then spend the next few years generally doing naff all, (best case fighting for local people, worst case just generating as much money as possible based on a position of power and levereage), then spend the last year furiously digging up dirt on rivals, and trying to win favour to get voted in again, then rinse and repeat.
