Find me a liberal American President who’d do and say that. Slow train comin’?
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This is good news, Custy, but isn’t this a bit gratuitous for US-bashing?
Plus, we all know that you brits do all in reverse and the evil ones are the Labour…
I wasn’t trying to US bash to be honest. I was pointing out what can happen when politics isn’t ruled by religion. And offering a glimmer of hope to de-facto theocracies, in that change it is a comin’ :-)
Fair then. :-)
The whole world will rejoice when the US right will be made of sane people.
I wouldn’t call it US-bashing either, but it needs to be recognised that the American political “left” is still some way to the “right” of most of the world. The American “right” is out there where the trains don’t run. 8)
It isn’t US bashing to point out truths about the US.
I’ve seen Custador turn a similarly critical eye toward his own country.
Well said! Where can we in the US find one of those? Does he have a long lost American brother?
Coming from a man who once was all on board with Section 28, this is quite a turnaround. I wouldn’t say the Tories are enlightened, though, so much as opportunistic and flexible. I doubt they are as concerned with liberty and equality as they are with flooding column inches with a social rather than economic issue but being Scottish, I’m obviously biased since they treated the Scots like lab rats last time around. That’s all political though; in terms of religion and secularism this is a very encouraging step, since if even Conservative politicians feel comfortable with annoying the hardcore religious bigots, their influence is clearly waning into irrelevance. Who will they have left to vote for, the BNP?
Well, Scots certainly have no reason to love the Tories – But Alex Salmond is still going to land you in the Dark Ages if he gets his way. I’ve nothing against Scottish independence if that’s what Scots want (although if I remember the last poll right, most don’t), but at least let them have it under a leader who has a clue about simple economics!
I do wonder where people get the idea that Salmond knows nothing about economics. Is it just that the papers keep saying it, so it must be true? I won’t pretend to know a whole lot about economics, but I have a friend who does, who is fiscally conservative and has extensive knowledge of the area, given it was a crucial part of his studies at university. He is as baffled as I am at the charges, and having met John Swinney considers him to be one of the most intelligent people he’s come across.
I think it was when he asserted that Scotland could sustain itself purely on North Sea oil. Which does rather assume that the UK would give up those oil fields to Scotland if it gained independence – No certainty given that they’re in international waters and the UK, not Scotland, holds the rights to them. It also assumes they’re a sustainable source of income – Again, not true. They’ve got a pretty short shelf-life, apparently. But in any case, they don’t produce enough revenue to sustain Scotland on their own. Even with whisky, farming and tourism, Scotland takes huge subsidies from England.
I’ve always found it fascinating (in a watching-a-train-wreck sort of way) how conservatives in this country can yammer on about how they believe in minimal governmental interference in people’s lives as a basic plank in their political platform, when they don’t.
Yup.
What they really want is minimal government interference with their bank accounts. And the ability to regulate everyone else’s bedrooms.
On the other hand he wants to scrap the Human Rights Act, and leave the EU.
The Human Rights Act (HRA) is a direct clone of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which we’d still be bound by even without the HRA. The only reason the HRA was introduced was to save people the time of taking things to the European courts when they could be dealt with by domestic courts and be confident of getting similar results. And he doesn’t want to leave the EU. Some of his party’s right-wing do, but he doesn’t. As for the merits of doing so, I am undecided at this juncture. Membership has many benefits, but it’s worth noting that the Eurozone nations have been royally Rogered by one member nation in which tax evasion seems to be a national sport – The Euro is at a very high risk of imploding, and I would not be at all surprised if the EU eventually went the same way.
Well, after figuratively bum-raping the lot of us over the last year and a bit Cameron probably figures it was time that he made honest bitches of us …
(in other words, yes it’s good news that they’re thinking about treating us equally for a change, but we shouldn’t let it cloud our judgement and our ability to realise we’re still all being financially sodomised by these bastards)
None of the cuts have come into effect yet. What we’re feeling right now is the backlash of thirteen years of profligate spending and borrowing by Labour, together with the deregulation of lending by Labour and the privatisation of essential treasury funcykons bu offloading them to the Bank of England. By Labour. I’m not a Tory, but it seriously pisses me off to read anti-Tory rhetoric blaming them for problems Labour caused.
I didn’t say it was due to the cuts because, for the most part, you’re right to say they haven’t come in yet; I would add that, as someone with a partner on benefits and in the care of the NHS, and whose employer’s biggest clients are councils up and down the country, I can tell you unequivocally that the cuts don’t just include the ones we all know about – many were made in anticipation of those (particularly by councils) – we’ve been feeling this for nearly a year already).
So far the Tories have simply laid out in front of us a selection of enormous, painful looking dildos for us to look worryingly at while they gently “prepare us” with a brillo-pad wrapped finger or two. I agree that the overwhelming blame for this lies with anyone involved with the deregulation of banking – and that’s not a partisan thing (I’ve no love for Labour or Conservatives, and the Lib Dems lost me when they bent over in forming the coalition).
Either way, in danger of veering off topic for what was only supposed to be a humourous aside. In summary, gay marriage yay :)
You’d rather we continued to increase sovereign debt by millions of pounds a day? We all had some benefit from the money Labour borrowed, and the cuts aren’t even about paying it back – they’re about not growing the ridiculous debt any more.
But yes. Yay for gay marriage.
No, I’d rather that the banks who pissed away our money, and then came begging for more, were held to account and made to pay it back. Since huge numbers of MPs from all sides of the house have connections to the banking sector, that’s never going to happen. We were all witness to the most collossal theft of public money …
Um… Say what now? The banks who pissed away our money? Oh boy… Of all the Pounds Sterling that exist, only 3% physically exists in the form of coins and notes. The other 97% is quite literally brought into existence by bank employees tapping numbers into a computer and saying “TADA! Now this money exists, I shall lend it to you!”
All that money represents is a promise – A promise that they will give you that money in cash or property of equivalent cash value should you ever ask for it. The whole system works on the hope that we won’t all ask for it at the same time. So, by deregulating lending, Labour enabled banks to create money at an incredible rate. “Need a 110% mortgage? No problem! We just take a 3% fee!” Followed by “Wow, look at house prices explode! There’s sooo much more asset-backed money now because the value of assets has ballooned, aren’t we great?” Well no, clearly they weren’t great.
The banks didn’t “piss away our money” – they CREATED money for us, and personal greed did the rest. This is what really pisses me off: People are all too ready to completely abdicate PERSONAL responsibility and the role that PERSONAL greed played in the current economic shit-storm. They’re also very quick to forget that we ALL received the benefit of stupidly, unsustainably high government spending, and totally ignorant of the fact that government spending was only ever that high because of the government borrowing money hand over fist.
Which, by a roundabout route, explains why the much touted strategy of quantitative easing that we’re about to embark upon (again) is half-past-retarded.
Okay, I don’t really need a lesson in economic theory, I understand how it works, just as I understand how the money that vanished was never truly there to begin with. However, the money that we (and by we I mean the government) gave them DID exist and has now ostensibly also vanished.
As for responsibility, I don’t doubt that there are some people who borrowed way beyond their means and their defaulting on loans is what created the toxic debt in the first place. However, were it not for the deregulation and the greed of the banks (who figured that lending money to people who can’t afford it is great because you’ll have a house to a repossess and sell at a profit as long as housing marketing doesn’t implode) then they wouldn’t have been able to borrow that money in the first place.
But, trying to get it back on topic … :) I’m cynical about Cameron’s motives and promises, just as I am with everything the man does … if equality comes about in terms of legal protections and rights regarding marriage, excellent. That still won’t stop me thinking he’s a two-faced hypocritical knob-end who doesn’t realise “we’re all in this together” comes across as deeply insulting when it’s said by a millionaire who’s married to a millionaire :)
That’s a little ironic and a lot hypocritical, dude. Social inclusion works both ways – You can’t simply dismiss somebody’s opinion because he happens to be rich. Especially when he’s arguing for tax strategies that hit his own demographic pretty hard (which suggests that he really does believe we’re all in this together).
You also need to examine banking deregulation – Did the Tory party do that? No, they didn’t.
And social mobility. Like it or not, it always decreases under Labour governments, probably they increase the welfare state to the point of creating a benefits trap that it’s not worth climbing out of. And it always increases under the Tories, because they don’t.
“That still won’t stop me thinking he’s a two-faced hypocritical knob-end …”
Nice to see such an opened minded poster …
Deregulation? Privitization? I thought Labour was center-left? I’m so confused.
No response needed, I’ll look it up.
Yes, I imagine it came as a shock to their voters too – They also thought Labour were centre-left. Personally I saw it coming when Blair scrapped Clause 4 of the party manifesto. PFI was no surprise to me. But that’s what’s so laughable about political zealotry in the UK: You’d need a microscope to tell Labour from the Tories these days.
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Don’t be fooled by Cameron. He’s pandering to the Liberal Democrat members of his coalition government. He voted against repeal of Clause 28 (a notoriously homophobic clause in an earlier Conservative government Act of Parliament which had the effect of preventing school teachers defending gay children from homophobic bullying and prevented plays and films with any gay content being shown in Local Authority premises or receiving any financial support from Local Authorities). He also voted against civil partnerships – a form of gay marriage in all but name.
He is also desperately trying to re-brand the Conservative Party to make it appear less of a nasty, divisive party of right wing racist, homophobic, sectarian bigots because, against probably the most unpopular Labour government ever, with the economy in ruins, he couldn’t even win a majority of seats in parliament, when a landslide win would normally be taken for granted.
Indeed … this smacks of a government trying to find the tiniest way of placating a restless public.
So he’s not allowed to change or progress in his views? Not that they’ve changed much – He was advocating gay marriage five years ago.
Of course he’s allowed to change his views, just as I’m allowed to be deeply cynical about his motives
Let me brag a little bit.In Denmark we are going to legalize gay marriage,not just civil marriage but also church marriage.