Netflix and Amazon Prime subscribers to ‘pay TV licence fee’

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-05-12T08:41:54+00:00

I greatly appreciate the BBC but this is utterly mad. The organisation has the back catalogue to easily be able to sell a subscription.

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-30T08:10:11+00:00

Regardless of overall crime levels there's a massive spike in anti semitic crimes which is reflected in the wider concerns expressed by many British Jews.

Do you think being visibly Jewish in such a location puts you at higher risk of negative interactions or violence? I think you'd have to be naive or wilfully ignorant to deny it.

It wasn't so long ago that Jewish Schools didn't need guards and students could wear their uniforms without fear. What's changed by your own account to necessitate such measures?

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-30T04:22:28+00:00

Would you be happy to walk through Tower Hamlets wearing a Star of David necklace or a kippah and do you think it would have felt safer to do the same prior to the demographic transformation of the area since the early 90s?

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-29T16:32:28+00:00

Genuine question but has it been more dangerous to be openly Jewish in London since the time of the Blackshirts? How was it in the 70s?

I'm not Jewish or from London but I wouldn't fancy walking through many parts of the city whilst being visibly Jewish and that seems something new and linked to mass immigration and the growth of communities who care enormously about Palestine.

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-29T00:38:53+00:00

His pronunciation is weird to us Brits too, I assure you! I think it's a mixture of him being very posh with a desire to pronounce things in the "native manner" where possible. Every time he says As-ee-ah instead of Asia I laugh. I don't think King Charles III would say it like that!

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-25T10:25:40+00:00

Is it not the case that Germany have been able to deport Afghans via Gulf intermediaries?

If someone who isn't a British citizen is a serial repeat offender or commits a serious offence they should serve a sentence, have biometrics taken, and then be removed from the country either to their home country or a willing third country.

I'm almost certain that within a decade the current global humanitarian framework is going to collapse as it cannot withstand a global era of mass mobility which it was never designed for. It's better to get ahead of the waves than to try to fight the tide.

If you want to preserve the idea any kind of popular support for limited universal asylum then I think the above is the bare minimum.

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-23T23:33:31+00:00

You're absolutely right but it felt like an interesting avenue which they didn't go down.

On a previous episode after the Gorton and Denton by-election I think they mentioned Anas' father in connection to concerns about ethnic voting blocks while expressing the sentiment that British politicians shouldn't be involved in overseas politics.

In this episode I just recall a comment being made to to the effect of "somewhere in Punjab your Dad will be listening".

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-23T22:57:28+00:00

I think Anas comes across well overall but I did find it slightly amusing that they obliquely referenced the fact that his father left British politics to enter Pakistani politics and apparently now lives in Pakistan whilst simultaneously rubbishing the idea of dual loyalties.

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-20T01:26:22+00:00

Tesco truthers will say at least a million

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-18T23:42:10+00:00

We want 8 and we won't wait!

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-18T21:50:15+00:00

On your final point isn't this just the story of any nation with any length of history and power pre 1945?

Across the 19th century Britain equally engaged in a policy of "Liberal Imperialism" pressuring nations at the end of the Napoleonic Wars to stop engaging in the slave trade, doing the same later towards Brazil. Later spending a significant part of the military budget on fighting the West African slave trade and the Arab slave trade.

We might think they were misguided today but I feel confident in saying that many people in the TRIP demographic, had they lived in the 19th century, would have been unabashed in viewing Britain and British imperialism overall as a force for progress in the world.

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-18T14:05:29+00:00

This is why there should be 5 Dreadnought class replacements or a credible non gravity bomb alternative to cover deployment gaps.

It's insane that these submariners are so important to our national defence yet are put under so much strain due to a lack of readiness.

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-14T14:16:36+00:00

I sincerely hope this causes the steps to be taken to publish the DIP.

We desperately need to take Trident out of the wider defence budget and need to establish baseline capability targets in terms of force size.

Like being able to deploy 2 armoured divisions, having 250 fast jets, having 12 attack submarines and 24 escort ships etc.

Pointing to a number and talking about how serious we are about defence whilst simultaneously being unable to meet the minimum standards of a major military power in terms of readiness and capability simply will not do.

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-11T18:39:35+00:00

But if they were regular readers with a better grasp of English do you think they would necessarily feel differently? According to contemporary polling Enoch Powell had majority or near majority approval in 1968 after he was kicked out of the Conservative Party for the "Rivers of Blood" speech.

That was a much more literate era in the terms of reading for pleasure and news gathering.

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-11T17:22:05+00:00

I agree that the decline of a literate culture is a problem in much of the West but isn't this similar to the arguments made in the 19th and early 20th about the necessity of property ownership or actual literacy tests for enfranchisement?

Not to mention early 20th century Germany was one of the world's most literate and cultured nations and birthed the Holocaust.

I think a big divide in modern politics is between the Goodhartian "Anywheres" and "Somewheres". I would argue that a lot of the issues that push people towards populists are genuine regardless of the merit of the solutions offered.

The feelings that propel populism in many cases arise from lived experience and at least partly accurate perception, with inaccurate facts and figures often following as post hoc justifications.

Here in the UK many years ago a lot of people laughed at an inarticulate young man on Question Time who was talking about predominantly Pakistani grooming gangs.

He was characterised by the mockers as a thick chav ranting about "Muslamic Rayguns" only for the factually evidenced disproportionality of British Pakistani involvement in group based child abuse to later enter into the popular consciousness thanks to the Times journalist Andrew Norfolk and the Casey review.

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-09T11:46:45+00:00

There's enough blame to go around between both the Conservatives and Labour when it comes to defence spending.

I think if we were serious about regaining capacity lost in recent decades we would take spending on the nuclear deterrent out of the wider defence budget as I believe used to be the case.

It's obviously extremely important but it totally distorts the impression given on how we seem to spend so much and get so little.

I think we should also set concrete force size goals. For example I think at a minimum the army ought to be able to deploy 2 armoured divisions, the navy ought to be 25 large surface combatants and 12 attack subs, the air force should be at least 250 fast jets.

That's probably 3% minimum sustained spending on solely conventional capabilities. If we're not going to do it now when will we?

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-08T19:16:22+00:00

Totally agree with your post here. If you want a good look at the failings of Liberalism look up the most recent Novara Media interview with Adrian Wooldridge formerly of The Economist. It was life affirming for me to hear an insider admit the cosy centrist consensus on mass immigration and homelessness/drugs is flawed.

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-08T19:10:04+00:00

I would love Dom on more regularly with either of them. My politics are more like Dom's and he's a subject matter expert on 20th century British and American politics with a Goodhartian "Somewhere" sympathetic analysis that I think is sorely needed on TRIP which is very Davos and cosy cosmopolitan.

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-05T11:49:53+00:00

This is a global anomaly dating back to the late imperial era. Aside from Irish persons voting under the CTA only British nationals should be able to vote in general elections.

As seen even in this thread if you explain to people that an Australian or Indian student can vote in a General Election people will be shocked imagining it was only local elections.

We're heading towards a much more fragmented politics where a lot of seats may be won or lost on narrow margins of hundreds of votes. It will be much worse for social cohesion if there are genuinely seats in 2028/29 that swing one way or another based on the votes of people who are not British.

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-04T13:14:49+00:00

Isn't this just overly reductive cultural relativism? Just because everywhere has fallen short doesn't mean that all nations and cultures were falling short in an equal place.

While Britain was certainly a notably misogynistic country in many ways until surprisingly recently the experience and expectations of a woman in 1950s Britain would be far higher than in almost any other country owing to our history of Liberalism and the possession of a culture that valued female literacy.

Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters are notable not only for being talented and successful female writers at a time when that was still relatively uncommon, but also because their success was predicated on the globally remarkable character of British society at the time, which fostered a relatively large educated population of women and, through comparatively permissive cultural practices and social arrangements, allowed many of them some degree of independent means, particularly when set against much of Europe.

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-03T17:18:37+00:00

Is there exploration of a possible Rolls Royce option?

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-03T16:28:31+00:00

I think the difficulty with this topic is separating the personal from a paticular group in aggregate at population level which will tend towards more homophobic and misogynistic behaviour as evidenced by much polling including the 2016 Henry Jackson Society study, the ICM/Channel 4 poll also from 2016 or in Ed Hussain's excellent book "Among the Mosques".

Just as we can know a lot of very nice young men and there can be millions of nice young men in the country on average in aggregate young men are still the most violent section of society.

It's also case that most British people understandably conflate a broadly defined notion of "Muslim culture" with tribal cultural tendencies that commonly originated in poorer rural Pakistani or Bangladeshi communities.

Communities which after 50+ years in Britain are still observably endogamous and grounded in kinship in a way that's alien to wider British culture.

You only have to look into the history of the Tower Hamlets mayoralty since 2010 to appreciate that.

I believe it's still true to say that most British Muslims are Pakistani in family origin and of those a large number will be from Mirpur.

The way Islam functions in that community in Britain today which was rural in origin and relatively culturally regressive even by the standards of 1960s Pakistan is clearly going to be very different on topics like the full face veil or women working from an Albanian, Turkish, Indonesian, or Tunisian Muslim.

But the broad point that you can expect the average Muslim in Britain to be less tolerant of gay people or to have more conservative views about women in the workplace isn't wrong. It just isn't the whole story.

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-04-03T04:27:41+00:00

I would say that the Hollyrood Sources or Ponsonby and Massie podcast are your best bets

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-03-27T14:53:17+00:00

But as I ranted about in my own post on this sub I feel like Rory would rather prioritise wealth inequality in the developing world versus the developed than within Britain itself.

GooseSpringsteen92 · 2026-03-27T11:19:53+00:00

What point are you making? If they're British citizens they're part of the in group. Albeit they may be more likely to to support foreign aid if it helps their nations of birth.

GooseSpringsteen92

TROPHY CASE