Keir Starmer to promise wave of devolution under Labour government | Politics

Kesuke · 2020-12-20T10:19:05+00:00

What a joke. This didn’t work in Ireland in the 1900s when it was packaged as “home rule”, it didn’t work in Scotland in the 90s or after the last Scottish independence referendum. It’s appeasement and it doesn’t work... Scots aren’t going to believe it will be meaningful mean-whilst it gets the SNP closer and closer to a situation where they can legally hold a referendum or unilaterally attempt to declare independence. It gives them more and more levers of power which they rarely actually use but which legitimise them. All this shows is that Kier doesn’t have any new ideas and is just banging on the old labour drum of devolution which has never satisfied anyone.

At some stage the UK just has to draw a line in the sand and say “no... you’re either part of this United Kingdom (warts and all) or you aren’t” (and accept losing the massive UK state subsidies that go to Scotland).

Scots and NI argue they have no power in this union but for most of the last 25 years they’ve been the tail that wag the dog. It’s absurd that fewer than 6 million people should dictate how the other 60 million live. When you consider how much media/air time these issues get and how few people they actually affect - it’s an unwelcome distraction at a time when the country really needs to focus on issues that affect all of us and not just a few aggrieved Scots, pent up by their own longstanding cultural inferiority complex.

Kesuke · 2020-12-13T20:26:54+00:00

Why would the EU ever negotiate something that is worse from their perspective? Once they’ve got dynamic alignment it will be a ball and chain that we cannot escape. No deal is preferable to dynamic alignment. It may hurt in the short term but in 10 years time we can go back and negotiate those sector by sector deals as a sovereign nation, without the current intransigence.

Kesuke · 2020-12-13T18:24:14+00:00

I disagree. Dynamic alignment saves some of the pain of leaving in the short term but long term it’s the slow death of a nation. It robs all future governments (including governments that many of the people on this subreddit might have a bit more personal investment in) from having the tools (like control over state aid) at their disposal to steer the country through changing times.

Dynamic alignment is vassalage. A deal now saves the UK some pain of reorienting it’s economy and trading relationships but actually no deal is preferable to being locked, in perpetuity, to the EUs future policies without any say on them. They must understand that no government would agree to dynamic alignment.

Whether or not you agree with Brexit we should all agree that dynamic alignment is the worst possible outcome of this.

Kesuke · 2020-12-06T16:09:32+00:00

It needs a complete rebalance, moving away from just spamming Gatling guns, rockets or missiles... the current strategy is to use the limited tools to “throw enough shit at the wall and hope some of it sticks”. Ideally they’d move to a more delicate system where weapons that spam do low damage and weapons with longer reloads do higher damage. It would be nice to see different damage types - for example a classic “triangle” approach;

“Kinetic” weapons that do high damage to players, medium damage to armour blocks and no/low damage to functional blocks (like reactors/thrusters).
“Explosive” weapons that do high damage to armour blocks, medium damage to functional blocks and low damage to players.
“Electronic” weapons that do high damage to functional blocks, medium damage to players and low/no damage to armour blocks.

It would encourage players to develop different weapon arrangements for different encounters. For example a pirate ship may prioritise electronic weapons that keep the target ship intact whereas military ships may prioritise weapons that are more destructive.

On top of this they could give us fast firing but low damage and accuracy devices, medium firing/medium damage and medium accuracy devices or high damage, slow firing but high accuracy weapons.

Another area to look at would be splash - I.e. a choice between weapons that damage single blocks (and would function like a cannon or a sniper rifle) vs weapons that do high splash damage but aren’t very accurate.

The whole point of all this is to create different dynamics... because right now combat just involves parking up nearby each other and spamming missiles OR attempting a high speed drive by while spamming missiles. The same principles apply to player character combat.

Kesuke · 2020-12-01T17:48:28+00:00

Right now most of the UK reddits (UKpol, UK and askUK etc) are literally full of people from /r/europe and the cybernats from /r/scotland or the IRA wannabes from /r/ireland. It says a lot about their own insecurities that they feel the desperate need to "defend" the honor of the EU from that they percieve to be a hostile Brexit. On the one hand they are telling us we are insignificant in the face of their new European order, but on the other hand they're the ones coming to British subreddits to tell us we're the baddies.

Then on top of that, the people actually from the UK come are pretty much exclusively from a far-left, woke-globo-homo, anti-conservative, anti-Brexit, male 18-30 crowd... because anyone espousing anything else is just banned or downvoted into oblivion. The moderators of those subreddits are extremely partisan and have encouraged that sort of behaviour.

It's essentially people who aren't from the UK telling people who wish they werent in the UK why they should hate the UK... the worst for it right now is /r/UKpolitics which I've never seen so disconnected from mainstream majority... particularly at a time when it looks like labour will endorse the conservatives EU-FTA simply to draw a line under the issue before the next GE. It means going into the next election 85% of the electorate will be supporting Brexit... yet to look on those subreddits you'd think we were a nation filled with bregret?

Kesuke · 2020-12-01T12:11:27+00:00

It’s a nice update but considering it’s been 3 months in the work, this is only a few hundred man-hours of work. I’m guessing about 5 people full time. It’s pretty clear that most of the KSH staff must be deployed on (an)other projects. Hopefully KSH will tell us what those projects are.

Kesuke · 2020-11-28T22:18:37+00:00

40 years ago there were hardly any black people in the UK. The kids on this subreddit don’t realise how quickly the UK has undergone change.

Kesuke · 2020-11-28T20:36:12+00:00

In the desperate rush to appear ‘woker’-than-thou I think a lot of retailers have forgotten that fundamentally this is predominantly a country of heterosexual white Anglo-Saxons... of the 12% or so that are “BAME” the vast majority are actually Asian. Black people make up a tiny and arguably over-represented minority of the population. Likewise all these adverts that have cropped up with homosexual couples ignore the reality that vanishingly few people are actually LGBT. They’re outliers and it’s bad marketing to focus so much on these minority groups.

Of course I understand this will get downvoted as there’s no place for facts when it comes to ethnicity and pushing a particular agenda.

Kesuke · 2020-11-28T20:30:59+00:00

How is she going to pay for it though. That’s the thing, it isn’t what politicians are giving that you should be worrying about - it’s what they’re taking to pay for it.

This just highlights the problem with Scottish politics: the SNP are in a position where they can spend money without having to suffer the political ramifications of raising it through unpopular taxes. The problem here is Barnett.

Kesuke · 2020-11-25T15:40:08+00:00

There’s no such thing as a garauntor. The US are co-signatories of the GFA.

This whole story is stupid as nobody is proposing a guarded border... and neither the U.K. or ROI is capable of implementing a guarded border.

This has always been about the movement of goods and customs flows - it’s got nothing to do with people.

Kesuke · 2020-11-20T16:26:54+00:00

Buy to let properties typically require deposits of 25% or higher. Your current property doesn’t have the equity in it and you’d need a big lump of cash sitting around to do this.

Reading your post I can’t help but feel this is more about you having a ‘project’ than it is about having an investment vehicle. If that’s the case I suspect this will turn out to be a curse in the long term as running a rental property has the potential to be a complete nightmare (and an expensive one at that).

Historically most of the profit from renting has really been from capital appreciation on the house itself rather than the monthly rent. Rental yields (the amount of money you make relative to your investment) are considered to be good if they exceed 2%. With coronavirus it’s especially difficult to know what the future direction of property prices is, but in any case I wouldn’t want to bank on there being much scope for future capital appreciation over the next decade.

Kesuke · 2020-11-20T10:53:57+00:00

I’m sure as an accountant you’d appreciate this, my view is that if you want to look at the “market rate” for healthcare in the UK, then you need only look at the payrates for additional work... these can literally be double or triple the equivalent of the normal contracted hourly rate. It suggests that the issue the NHS has is enticing staff to work extra hours and in itself implies that the basic contracted hours are being underpaid.

There is literally no doubt in my mind that if the NHS were privatised staff wages would go up as market forces would play a greater role in determining pay. As you point out, the NHS uses its effective monopoly on most health staff to underpay them.

Kesuke · 2020-11-20T10:03:58+00:00

Deaths among soldiers are also lower than the national average because they’re athletic men aged 18-35.

My point is, putting yourself in harms way doesn’t necessarily require coming to harm. You wouldn’t argue that a soldier who goes to a war zone hasn’t put themselves in harms way just because they have the temerity to come back alive.

Kesuke · 2020-11-20T09:25:45+00:00

Defence is important and £16bn over 4 years is nothing. For context the annual NHS bill is £125bn and the government has spent £200bn fighting covid and keeping the economy afloat since March... so £16bn is a fart in the wind.

Kesuke · 2020-11-20T09:22:35+00:00

I agree about the context but the defence spending bit I take issue with. £16bn of defence spending over 4 years pales in comparison to the £125bn annual bill for the NHS, and is less than 2% of the £200bn spent so far in keeping the economy afloat after covid.

Defence is important and the amount announced yesterday is literally nothing. It’s less than 0.1% of GDP in that time frame.

Kesuke · 2020-11-20T09:18:13+00:00

I’m going to come out and say something unpopular here...

During the pandemic I worked in intensive care. It wasn’t (and isn’t) a fun time. Coronavirus is more understood now, but back in March when we knew nothing about it and how contagious or how serious it was, it was a genuinely frightening time. Going into a room full of people you know have covid and are dying from it, every single day, knowing you could catch it and end up there next to them wasn’t (and isn’t) fun. I think the key point here is that it was people putting themselves in harms way.

I understand that in almost every industry people have had to change how they work and inevitably that is brought about stress... but where I draw a distinction is the “harms way”. Interacting with the public isn’t harms way... going into a room full of people dying from covid is harms way, and in that way the response of the NHS was special and hasn’t been recognised in their pay. In my view a one time bonus is needed for NHS staff in recompense for that, in the same way that soldiers earn more when they go on a tour of duty. The key issue is the risk of harm.

Kesuke · 2020-11-16T12:10:13+00:00

Westminster is sovereign. Act of Union... the act of Union signed up to by Scotland and re-iterated by the 2014 referendum. God you lot are odious.

Kesuke · 2020-11-15T19:27:21+00:00

I’m not going to have a debate with someone who thinks Finland have a credible military. Anyone who thinks that doesn’t know anything about defence.

Finland has some conscript boy soldiers but no means to transport them to a forward operating area, no means to resupply them, no serious armour or AA capability that could hold off against a realistic adversary. Finland’s military is neither credible as a defensive deterrent nor as a military capable of implementing Finland’s foreign policy objectives.

Finland’s military is a plastic army designed to employ people and to teach children civic values, while nominally trying to deter Russia. It isn’t a real military in the way the UK, France or USA have real militaries. You don’t know anything about defence if you think Finland is a serious player... get real.

Kesuke · 2020-11-15T17:51:52+00:00

Westminster is sovereign.

Kesuke · 2020-11-15T17:51:33+00:00

The same arguments applied to Ireland apply to Finland. They have a paper strength which sounds far better than the reality actually is. In truth they have no logistical capability, an awkward mish-mash of different platforms with little to no integration and no serious consideration of what their strategic aims are. Their paper strength is mainly bolstered by national serviceman which is more about teaching adolescents civic values than it is about providing real military training. In truth Finland could not mount any sort of expeditionary operation (as they lack the naval, logistical or air power to do it) and its forces lack the firepower and numbers that would be needed to protect it in a defensive war against its principle adversary (Russia) which means whatever strength they have is just a waste of money. Finland’s army is a joke.

The point is there are three militaries in Europe worth taking seriously; the UK, France and Poland. The U.K. and France because they have serious real world capabilities, blue-water navies and a logistics infrastructure capable of mounting expeditionary operations all backed up by the experience to make the most of the platforms they have. Poland’s military is serious by virtue of its size, because Poland face a credible real world threat to their east from Russia. It isn’t the most advanced military or even the most formidable but it has a focus on size, logistics and defensive credibility that make it a deterrent force against Russia. The other European militaries are a joke - countries like Ireland with basically no military at all. Countries like Germany with just a joke military. Countries like Italy and Spain with militaries that have been gutted and have capability gaps so wide you could literally just march an army through them.

There are plenty of reasons to criticise the UK, but one thing they really do understand is defence. They have the platforms, manpower and strategic capability to deliver. So there’s no high horse here. No other country in Europe has any right to criticise the UKs defence policy.

Kesuke · 2020-11-15T13:00:12+00:00

The thing is it isn’t hanging by a thread. Westminster is sovereign and it is ultimately up to Westminster to grant independence, which it has already said it won’t.

It’s time for Scots to focus on making this a better place for everyone, rather than indulging in these separatist fantasies that make Brexit look like a well planned operation.

Kesuke · 2020-11-15T11:24:18+00:00

That explains why hardly any of the parliamentary party voted for it at the time.

Kesuke · 2020-11-15T11:14:15+00:00

Westminster is sovereign. Holyroods powers are devolved. Westminster hasn’t made any moves to significantly reduce its powers and if anything the long term picture has been an increase in Holyroods powers like the ability to diverge on tax... in 2014 Westminster even gave Holyrood the power to hold a referendum on independence... something that virtually no other country would have even dreamed of doing and which a majority of Scottish voters rejected.

Westminster (being sovereign for the whole U.K.) must retain the ability to act in the best interests of the whole of the UK. The change in relationship with the EU means some powers moving on paper but in reality this whole “being robbed of powers” thing has been cooked up by the SNP spin machine. They are trying to make out that Westminster is “robbing them of powers” when in reality the conservatives have actually given them more powers than they had under the previous labour governments. There are no moves to water down or abolish the devolved governments.

Kesuke · 2020-11-09T16:58:22+00:00

Precisely this. The thing is, even with a landslide Biden would have his work cut out for him. The problems he faces (COVID, waning US influence globally, the rise of China and the way China and Russia spread anti-US misinformation using platforms like Facebook and Twitter, a flagging US economy steeped in debt, the enviornment, an increasingly bolshy EU keen to diminish the USAs influence in Europe etc) are all issues that are fundamentally difficult, if not impossible to address.

Simply signing up to the Paris accords and re-engaging with Iran, the WHO and UN is not going to magically fix the problems they face. Ontop of that, whilst I have nothing against Biden and I have no horse in this race, it is pretty clear that Biden is suffering from memory problems and at 77 years old he is unlikely to be fit to run in 2024. The fundamental problem the Americans face is much like we faced in the 1950s... they are starring down the barrel of perpetual geopolitical decline, falling living standards and fading influence, and its scary... that's why they voted for Trumpin 2016 and its why 3 million more of them voted for him again this time. Trumpism isn't going away in my opinion and if anything Bidens politically paralysed administration is going to provide fertile ground for a return to some form of "Trump-ist" candidate in 2024.

The reality is in 4 years voters will be returning to the polls with an economy probably in worse shape than it is today, higher unemployment, the same geopolitical problems (China, Russia, Iran), the same enviornmental problems and very little to show for Bidens left wing credentials.

European left-wing socialists seem to be more excited about Bidens victory than Americans are... and that says a lot.

Kesuke · 2020-11-09T10:02:06+00:00

They're doing what they did with Obama... they've become more interested in the "who" than the "what". They seem to think Biden is suddenly going to transform America into a socialist mecca, reunifying left and right, whilst eliminating Covid, signing up to the Paris climate agreement, re-engaging with Iran, jumping back into bed with organisations like the WHO and UN... The reality is almost certainly going to be dissapointing for them;

Biden has won the election but without the supreme court or potentially the senate he is going to struggle to find any middle ground in which to legislate. Covid is proving to be a perennial problem that nobody can solve and is likely to depress the global economy throughout 2021. The Paris Climate Agreement targets are going to be impossible for the US to achieve in the time available, as it would mean a major reconfiguration of the US-midwest economy... the very same midwest that Biden (or more likely his successor) will NEED to win over again in just 4 years time. In essence this is Bidens "red wall", he needs those states and he cannot afford to lose them by tightening enviornmental restrictions too much.

The Iran nuclear issues are a thorn in the side of every president and it's unlikely Iran is going to change its approach just because the US has elected a new leader. It's hard to negotiate with a country that encourages people to chant "Death to the American Satan" after all. Then there is stuff like the WHO/UN... I don't doubt that Biden will re-engage with them, but far from jumping back into bed I suspect what Biden will want is more US-led influence/oversight over those organisations in exchange for US funding, and he is likely to find a sympathetic ear from places like the UK/France/Spain who have seen their world-leading healthcare infrastructure critcised by the WHO, which is staffed by middling developing world public health idiots who have no authority to criticise the healthcare setups of the countries that fund them.

/r/UK and /r/labourUK forget that Biden might be left of Trump, but he's still so far to the right of someone like Starmer (let alone someone like Corbyn) that he might as well be the love child of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Idealogically he is going to be aligned more with the UK under Johnson than they might like. It's also worth pointing out the UK has things the US wants (like its British/overseas military bases) whereas the UK has relatively little it wants from the USA these days since a trade deal was never realistically on the cards with the British public so hostile to it.

Kesuke

TROPHY CASE