UK Election June 08

[Stavros]

In the last week the gap between the Tories and Labour has continued to narrow -the last time I posted Martin Baxter's predictions it suggested a 76 seat majority whereas polling up to last Saturday reduces this to 72.

It remains to be seen if the attack in London and the 'debate' about policing and Theresa May's 'urgent' call for a review of security policy will work to the Tories advantage. But while Labour has always been seen as weak on policing, and the reduction of police numbers began under the last Labour government, Labour will be on stronger ground if it focuses on what it is that resources are used for.

Boston, in the USA has shown that better community policing can bring local people and law enforcement into a better and non-confrontational relationship, though there is a clear need for accountability on the part of LE to maintain confidence in communities that they matter, so that in the end the outcome is a reduction of crime- the stark difference being confrontational policing that views 'difficult' inner-city and often poor districts as war zones where might is right.
http://harvardpolitics.com/united-st...ity-relations/

The reduction of police numbers is relevant if it means that community policing is either non-existent or so stretched as to be ineffective. Whether or not it would prevent fanatics from killing people I don't know, but I would expect a closer engagement of policing with the public to be a good thing, and it would be a human intelligence aspect that the fetish for controlling the internet cannot match. It has been claimed Theresa May wants internet controls as severe as those in China, but I suspect that peer-to-peer and encrypted communications are now standard though it also seems that once decisions have been made, the organizers and perpetrators of massacres go silent.

Whatever the arguments are, an election Theresa May called on leadership and Brexit, has spun out of her control, and it proves that 'events' can rapidly undermine political strategy -but that in this case there does not appear to have been a 'Plan B', which confirms in the comparison with the EU Referendum, that we have a generation of politicians who, if not entirely useless, are unable to think through their own policies to imagine a world without them.
Theresa May's internet policy may be here (doesn't really tell you much)
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...-a7774221.html

[peejaye]

There is talk of a cover-up regarding the Manchester bomber & what we aren't being told & you may of seen one of the London Bridge terrorists was very well known to the Police! It's very worrying but I have to say our society as become far too tolerant.
If one ever dares to look at child pornography or attempts to download it; you would expect a knock on the door from the Police the next day however it seems some of these fanatics are looking at extremist & ISIS paraphernalia & little is done about it!
I really can't see an answer to it.

Re. The Election; The BBC have gone into overdrive, Jo Coburn of the Daily Politics made a complete buffoon of herself yesterday basically ignoring everything Corbyn as said recently and focussing only on what he said 30+ years ago & today on BBC Breakfast the presenter allowed Boris Johnson to rant on for 5 minutes branding Corbyn a terrorist without a hint of interruption! I want my license fee refunding!

[Stavros]

There is talk of a cover-up regarding the Manchester bomber & what we aren't being told & you may of seen one of the London Bridge terrorists was very well known to the Police! It's very worrying but I have to say our society as become far too tolerant.
If one ever dares to look at child pornography or attempts to download it; you would expect a knock on the door from the Police the next day however it seems some of these fanatics are looking at extremist & ISIS paraphernalia & little is done about it!
I really can't see an answer to it.

Re. The Election; The BBC have gone into overdrive, Jo Coburn of the Daily Politics made a complete buffoon of herself yesterday basically ignoring everything Corbyn as said recently and focussing only on what he said 30+ years ago & today on BBC Breakfast the presenter allowed Boris Johnson to rant on for 5 minutes branding Corbyn a terrorist without a hint of interruption! I want my license fee refunding!

The point about Butt is not that he was on a tv programme and known by the police and security services for his affiliations, but did he break the law? The laws on pornography are clear, but so too are the laws on terrorism, and one of the things extremists do when organized, is sail as close to the edge of the law as they can, which is how Anjem Choudary managed to stay out of prison for so long. The alternative, as Nigel Farage argued on Fox News the other day, is internment, a policy that was tried and failed in Northern Ireland.

If you think back to the 1960s and 1970s MI5 regularly (still do, in fact) infiltrated the assortment of Marxist, Trotskyist, Maoist and Anarchist groups, mostly aware that for all their talk of revolution the closest they were ever going to come to it was throwing stones at the police on anti-Vietnam demos. But then there was the Angry Brigade who went further and launched small scale bombs at targets like embassies, and when arrested were imprisoned, then went on hunger strike which led to them being 'force-fed', described as a form of torture and eventually a practice that was ended. The point being that we have always had fringe groups who want to overthrow the state, but rarely do anything about it, similarly in West Germany where it didn't matter until Baader-Meinhof crossed the line and killed a policeman.

As for Boris Johnson, I also listened to him this morning and it was clear he had no real answer to the questions other than to depict Jeremy Corbyn as irresponsible. Neither he nor Mishal Hussein (and note how he once made a point of saying her full name) pointed out that Corbyn's opposition to anti-terror legislation has been due to what he believed was the infringement of individual liberty in those Bills, which may also be why both Boris Johnson himself and Theresa May also voted against some of that legislation.

But consider for comparison sake, the difference between Jeremy Corbyn, and Peter King, the Republican Representative of New York's 2nd District on Long Island, here is just a flavour of views that would cause multiple heart attacks in the offices of the Daily Mail:
King began actively supporting the Irish republican movement in the late 1970s. He frequently traveled to Northern Ireland to meet with senior members of the paramilitary group, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), many of whom he counted as friends.^[13][29] King compared Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Irish republican movement, to George Washington, and asserted that the "British government is a murder machine".^[30] However, he apparently did not meet Adams until 1984.^[31]

King became involved with NORAID, an organization that the British, Irish and U.S. governments had accused of financing IRA activities and providing them with weapons.^{[13][32][33][34]} Regarding the 30 years of violence during which the IRA killed over 1,700 people, King said, "If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the IRA for it."^[35]

He also called the IRA "the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_...rt_for_the_IRA

Jeremy Corbyn appears dull and pathetic when compared to Peter King, and that is before you get started on Muslims and their mosques...

[Jericho]

I'll just leave this here.

[Stavros]

I'll just leave this here.

I watched the whole of this yesterday, and I think it is a fair and useful attempt by Corbyn to re-establish the purpose of the Labour Party after Blair and the crash of 2008. At that time it was often stated that there were no new alternatives to the solutions to capitalism and its problems that had been tried before, a reference to the 'post-war Keynesian consensus' on the one hand, and Thatcherism on the other. I do think a debate on how far the State should intervene in the economy is a useful one, not least because for all their commitment to 'free markets', every Conservative government has intervened when it wanted, or needed to.

However, there have always been 'radical' free market apostles in the Conservative Party, and today they see a 'Hard Brexit' as another opportunity to prove markets are better than states, even though it appears they believe governments can and should be involved in these new global trade deals a UK free of the EU will be able to negotiate. It is indeed worthwhile offering an alternative because I think it is clear a lot of people in the UK want the State to do what markets cannot, or will not do, and that most people value the fair re-distribution of wealth over unlimited private profit.

What is fundamentally wrong with Corbyn's speech is its lack of truth -he offers no proper explanation for the decline of coal, for while it is true Mrs Thatcher presided over the decline of operating mines, coal was eclipsed in the 1960s by oil and gas because petroleum is cheaper, more efficient as a fuel, and in abundant supply. Hard though it might be to believe, it is also more environmentally friendly than coal, and kills fewer people working in the industry. Again, the decline of shipbuilding, dockyard labour, thousands of jobs in printing -these all went through lack of competition or technological change. But the real problem is that Corbyn is not thinking through the financial impact of the UK's exit from the EU, because it offers the nightmare scenario of a Labour government committed to spending billions on social programmes it cannot afford, simply because the money will not be there.

It would make sense if all the parties admitted what I think will become true over the next 5-10 years as we leave the EU: interest rates will rise, inflation will rise, VAT will rise, and direct taxation will rise. To offer 'no tax increases' or 'no tax increases for lower earners' is a false promise.

Lastly, Dianne Abbott has pulled out of another public speaking engagement. Although I think she has been a disaster for the campaign, I now wonder if she is genuinely ill. In the past she had a degree of energy, indignation and fluency that she has lacked for over a year now, and although only 63 years old, the wife of a friend of mine began developing Alzheimer's at the age of 60 (she has since died) and those signs, forgetting things, appearing to be lost in the present, apparent indifference, are signs of illness. I hope this is not true, but there could be more to this than campaign fatigue or some internal rows with members of the team.

[peejaye]

What about the £161m per week(The PRO-remain BBC's own figure)that we won't be sending to the "Millionaires Club" anymore once this whole situation is sorted?

[peejaye]

Love this;

[Stavros]

What about the £161m per week(The PRO-remain BBC's own figure)that we won't be sending to the "Millionaires Club" anymore once this whole situation is sorted?

The predictions that have been made of the money the UK will save by not have to pay into the EU have been fiction from the start of the EU Referendum until a moment ago.
The point is that as long as the UK is in some way engaged with the EU, be it on trade, be it on Euro-Policing, be it in the service sector, education, scientific research and so on, there will be costs to pay. The Hard Brexiteers even think that if the UK just 'walks away' at the end of 2019 that's it, but even then the UK will still be linked to the EU if not at the level of government, then through commercial contracts which are protected by international law. My guess is that the full financial 'benefit' of not being part of the EU, in terms of the annual membership fee and other financial costs, will not be known for at least ten years. In between then and now, some costs will not be incurred, but I don't know what that figure is, and neither does anyone else.

[Stavros]

Well I for one am glad that this election is over but for the voting itself. I can't see the Tories losing this, and I can't see Labour winning, but there will be surprises and some shocks. A lot depends on the turn-out which I think may be low generally, but high among the under-30s which theoretically benefits Labour. Labour's obstacle to power is its lack of support in Scotland although the SNP are forecast to lose 12 seats, but perhaps to the Conservatives rather than Labour. Baxter and Election Calculus retain their prediction of a 72 seat majority so it will be interesting to see if his team got it right. The fate of UKIP is an enigma, most of us think it is finished as a party but the seat to watch may be Hartlepool, though I hope they fail wherever they stand, even if it means the return of their saviour, Nigel Farage to the leadership.

I shall vote Green, which won't make a difference either way as my constituency, apart from voting for a Whig in the 1840s and, in a freak result for Labour in 1997 has been Tory since 1832, although the county was for Cromwell in the Civil War and the Constituency voted Remain in the EU referendum. Some say that after Brexit and the US elections, we should not be so safe in our predictions, and that people want change. But change is coming with Brexit, and isn't that enough for now?

[Jericho]

I believe that...Enough is enough.

The turn out will be high.
Labour will win.
We all live happily ever after.
Well, OK, maybe the last bit's a stretch!