Motion - the country is completely broken

I’d say it was brexit on top of austerity, they both took a battering ram to our public services and screwed up any resemblance of balance in either society or the economy.

Couple that with how social interaction has changed and knowledge is consumed due to social media and the internet, it’s been a recipe for disaster.

I still think we’re a way off the full realisation needed to resolve it - it might take a generation or two. We do seem to be at least turning a slight corner though - worrying how much real damage it takes nowadays for it to have an effect, opinions are so deeply partisan and embedded.
 
gordondaviesmoustache said:
It‘s a combination of factors, but Brexit has been the catalyst and has left us far worse placed to cope with the other things such as Covid and the wider impact of Ukraine. An act of national hubris and insanity that has fucked things up for our children. It was never going to work and so any talk of its implementation being the cause is completely wrong. Divorce is almost never painless, why would this be any different, especially given our institutions are plainly not fit for purpose, especially our parliamentary system, which is an absolute fucking joke.

The control we’ve taken back has ruined, not freed us.

As I’ve posted previously elsewhere our post WW2 decline was arrested and reversed when we were part of the EEC/EU and now it’s started again and will inevitably continue apace.

So, yes. We’re basically fucked. A monumental and wholly unnecessary act of national self-sabotage.

The only positive that could come out of it, long term, is a realisation of our actual, not perceived status in the world.
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Edward Heath made a party political broadcast after we joined the then "Common Market" and, although I was but a teenager back then, I recall his words very well; that it wasn't just for our benefit, but for our children, and our children's children.
Later, the single market was trumpeted by Thatcher, and lauded widely as freeing business from 'red tape' - and, lo and behold, it did.
And so, where are we now? Back at the bottom of the heap, having tumbled down and got covered in covid, red tape, after being so gullible as to believe that we were being lead towards the sunlit uplands.
I witnessed a female Brexit spokesperson - Alexandra Phillips - on Politics Daily the other day, defending the present position, the fact that no new trade deals of note had been signed yet, and imploring that we shouldn't judge things now, but in 10 years! All this after we were promised an instant £350m a week extra towards the NHS? (Forgive me if I erred with the figure but I think that's what was so brazenly promised by Johnson, et al.)
If only someone could grab the country and shake it from it's stupor, so that it's eyes would open and recognise that we must change now, and never allow such a disatrous sequence to be embarked upon ever again - not for us, or our children, but for our childrens' children.
 
The right wing establishment resorting to every dirty trick that is possible to keep a right wing government in power is what we are up against. They will have the nation talking about dinghies instead of the abyss the nation is in under 12 years of diabolical corrupt Tory government.
 
bluethrunthru said:
There should be a general strike until the Govt calls a General Election at which point all parties can put forward their manifesto and we can switch off and switch back on the country - new Govt to pass legislation on true PR- one person one vote that counts - and we go again and by next summer the country has what its population wants.

V2.0 by next summer the country will be ablaze and like with the countries debt we will find Rishi Sunak forgot to insure it
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What use is a manifesto by any political party when all them do U-turns on what they have said when they feel like it? A party manifesto should be a legally binding document with hard and fast timescales for the implementation and delivery of each and all manifesto commitments. They are currently a work of fiction by all parties regardless of colour or hue.
 
meltonblue said:
I’d say it was brexit on top of austerity, they both took a battering ram to our public services and screwed up any resemblance of balance in either society or the economy.

Couple that with how social interaction has changed and knowledge is consumed due to social media and the internet, it’s been a recipe for disaster.

I still think we’re a way off the full realisation needed to resolve it - it might take a generation or two. We do seem to be at least turning a slight corner though - worrying how much real damage it takes nowadays for it to have an effect, opinions are so deeply partisan and embedded.
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It was austerity first and foremost. Without austerity, there’s no Brexit and that is why, for all the slimy useless politicians we are currently subjected to and all the ones we’ve had in the past, Cameron, Osborne and Clegg should go down as the worst of the worst. Without their terrible decision making and complete lack of backbone, we’d not be here. Mind you, the British public need to take some responsibility as well given that we’d had 5 years of austerity and they voted the charlatans in again…….
 
This country will not heal whilst the press are allowed to gaslight large proportion of the populace into thinking Harry and Meghan are their greatest issues. This sick corrupt government needs enemies to feed off and its propaganda machine, the mainstream media are happy to oblige. Just now its:

H and M
anyone that strikes
asylum seekers
Putin

All the real shit stuff that is hitting us - cost of living/economy trashed/child poverty/homelessness/NHS crisis is almost being normalised.
 
I have just seen a list of Tory front-benchers. Most are claiming over £1m in expenses, some over £2m. (And before anyone says, I doubt Labour are all claiming 50p either.) The total front bench 'expenses' add up to over £44 million, and that's a lot of lattes, even in London.

When you get comparisons to the 'Prime Minister's wage' in the public sector, they always forget the PM is entitled to almost limitless expenses, a free manor house for the weekends (which by the way costs nearly a million a year to run) lifetime police protection and a chauffeur driven car as well. To say nothing of access to heavily-subsidised bars and restaurants. The argument is wholly disingenuous.

This country is a fucking joke. We need a completely new constitution with terms of employment for politicians clearly set out. My suggestion would be to copy best practice from Europe.
 
Saddleworth2 said:
This country will not heal whilst the press are allowed to gaslight large proportion of the populace into thinking Harry and Meghan are their greatest issues. This sick corrupt government needs enemies to feed off and its propaganda machine, the mainstream media are happy to oblige. Just now its:

H and M
anyone that strikes
asylum seekers
Putin

All the real shit stuff that is hitting us - cost of living/economy trashed/child poverty/homelessness/NHS crisis is almost being normalised.
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Agree. Overriding tory strategy is to fuck the NHS up to the point that privatisation seems a sensible solution. The fact they have run it into the ground is to be ignored. And of course they will say that it's too expensive while refusing to investigate the blatant corruption of the pandemic and refusing to properly fund the tax office so tax avoidance runs rampant.
 
BrianW said:
I have just seen a list of Tory front-benchers. Most are claiming over £1m in expenses, some over £2m. (And before anyone says, I doubt Labour are all claiming 50p either.) The total front bench 'expenses' add up to over £44 million, and that's a lot of lattes, even in London.

When you get comparisons to the 'Prime Minister's wage' in the public sector, they always forget the PM is entitled to almost limitless expenses, a free manor house for the weekends (which by the way costs nearly a million a year to run) lifetime police protection and a chauffeur driven car as well. To say nothing of access to heavily-subsidised bars and restaurants. The argument is wholly disingenuous.

This country is a fucking joke. We need a completely new constitution with terms of employment for politicians clearly set out. My suggestion would be to copy best practice from Europe.
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Where have you got those numbers from? They seem much higher than I'd expect, and may include official expenses for govt business.
 
MillionMilesAway said:
Where have you got those numbers from? They seem much higher than I'd expect, and may include official expenses for govt business.
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Posted on Twitter by someone called Carl Folker. I agree they seem high, but even if exaggerated by 50% they are still piss-poor value for money. Carl Folker has a blue tick. Journalist?

According to the Daily Mirror, Liz Truss spent 500k on taxpayer-funded flights in three months! (Google it)

Chequers costs nearly £1m a year to run, just so the PM can have a holiday home.

Given those last two figures, one wonders what the total bill actually is.
 
BrianW said:
Posted on Twitter by someone called Carl Folker. I agree they seem high, but even if exaggerated by 50% they are still piss-poor value for money. Carl Folker has a blue tick. Journalist?

According to the Daily Mirror, Liz Truss spent 500k on taxpayer-funded flights in three months! (Google it)

Chequers costs nearly £1m a year to run, just so the PM can have a holiday home.

Given those last two figures, one wonders what the total bill actually is.
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Thanks - My thought was that the highest expenses claimed for an MP was about 200k.

Folker's account has gone, it appears.

If they're quoting Truss flight costs as part of it, that guarantees that they are rolling in the expenditure, and not the expenses.
 
Bill Walker said:
2 hours is a very long time to wait for an ambulance code 1
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That’s the state of the nhs mate, I’ve been to an RTC two hours after it happened to look after a casualty because the ambulance never got allocated, they are fucked, fire service are now regularly left to attend all but the most serious casualties sometimes waiting hours for ambulances and in sone instances had to travel in the back to help, we trialled years ago attending cardiac arrests because many times we could get there quicker and we were fucking good at it, despite the piss poor training and turn out methods, yet they wouldn’t pay us extra so it was stopped.
 
BrianW said:
I have just seen a list of Tory front-benchers. Most are claiming over £1m in expenses, some over £2m. (And before anyone says, I doubt Labour are all claiming 50p either.) The total front bench 'expenses' add up to over £44 million, and that's a lot of lattes, even in London.

When you get comparisons to the 'Prime Minister's wage' in the public sector, they always forget the PM is entitled to almost limitless expenses, a free manor house for the weekends (which by the way costs nearly a million a year to run) lifetime police protection and a chauffeur driven car as well. To say nothing of access to heavily-subsidised bars and restaurants. The argument is wholly disingenuous.

This country is a fucking joke. We need a completely new constitution with terms of employment for politicians clearly set out. My suggestion would be to copy best practice from Europe.
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I am always wary about talking too much about MP's expenses, as I would fully expect the elected representative for Inverness or Foyle to have higher expenses than the representative for Haringey etc, and it is acceptable for the elected representative for a constituency more than 90 minutes commute from Westminster to be allowed to claim overnight expenses (reasonable daily travelling time to receive benefits being 90 minutes).
Though far stricter scrutiny is required, and value for money should be required to be proven for international travel (I don't object to my money being spent on the Prime Minister to fly to a meeting of world leaders to discuss climate change, or even to return early from holidays if a crises develops while they are abroad, but I do object to MP's flying them and their families to the Seychelles for two weeks under the guise of a 30 minute meeting to discuss offshore accounts etc).
With regards to SPADS and researchers, again, it is justifiable for our elected representatives to have staff checking facts, figures and cost analysis regarding proposed legislation, but these should be selected on the merit principle following an open and transparent selection process to avoid nepotism and allegations of such.
 
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