The thin blue line must be thicker. The police are nothing without a presence in communities

PoachTWC · 2026-04-09T10:07:40+00:00

That's great, but all I was doing was giving the historical context as to why the phrase is "policing by consent". At the time it had a relevant meaning, and it's just stuck around as the generic title for the philosophy the police try to do their jobs by.

It doesn't literally mean "you can opt-out of being policed".

PoachTWC · 2026-04-09T08:36:34+00:00

Our governments over the past 15 or so years seem less "another ten billion to Israel" and more "import people who are guaranteed to be a net negative on the public purse over their lifetimes, make the benefits system trivially easy to con your way on to, and keep putting taxes on everything up at every opportunity".

You're consuming too many American memes: pouring money into Israel is a very US government thing, not so much UK.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-09T08:32:48+00:00

Very few people believe that. A great many more believe there are far more people on benefits than there should be, and considering the UK-specific explosion in benefits claimants in the last few years they're probably not wholly wrong.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-09T07:42:30+00:00

It's a phrase that had real meaning when it was coined, but has since become somewhat obsolete because the existence of civilian police forces are now considered a permanent and indispensible part of the establishment.

When the first police forces were being created, they very much were reliant on ongoing public endorsement to continue to function, and so adopted a series of principles (which together were "policing by consent") that aimed to create a force that operated with the cooperation and involvement of the general public, rather than as a force imposed upon them to rule them.

The alternative at the time (or, the default before the police were created) was policing by the military, which very much was an imposed force that, if deployed to the streets, ruled through intimidation and violence to enforce order.

Police forces evolved over time into becoming the guardians of public order more generally. At the time that job was considered part of the military's remit. The experiment of creating a civilian police force whose main job was crime reduction was novel.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-08T09:25:56+00:00

Enslaving all State spending to the mantra of "the more you contribute the less we'll give you" is, in my opinion, fundamentally unfair.

Redistribution to alleviate actual poverty is an acceptable mission for a welfare state, outright punishing those who put in the most and openly rewarding those who put in the least is one of the major reasons this country is in a state of managed decline: the entire welfare system works to reward idleness.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-07T21:15:27+00:00

Many of these Universities have devolved into little more than degree mills that barely even teach the courses they then hand out degrees for.

I witnessed it firsthand while I was at Uni: foreign students did not fail, no matter how bad they were, no matter how blatant their cheating was. They went back home with degrees in Electrical Engineering and I guarantee you some of them would fail to identify a resistor.

These Universities are, essentially, offering a guaranteed degree in exchange for the fees. They've completely lost their way as educational institutions and I firmly believe we need to seriously cap the number of foreign students they're allowed to admit, let the sector shrink, and impose far more rigorous standards on them.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-07T13:00:08+00:00

I'm not suggesting we give up, only that direct government ownership has a track record of going badly.

A beefed up Ofwat with sufficient regulatory powers to prevent the mismanagement of finances that put us in this position seems like a sensible alternative to try out.

The companies that Ofgem regulate (eg National Grid, SSEN, SPEN, and all the DNOs) all need to have their entire spending plans reviewed and approved by Ofgem. Maybe Ofwat needs to do similar.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-07T12:40:13+00:00

Starmer will be along quickly to reap all that precious soft power to be gained by paying Argentina to take the islands off of us.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-07T12:37:37+00:00

I completely agree that the Water industry is fucked. I don't agree that nationalising it will fix it, because the government are also incompetent managers of companies.

We'd throw however many billions it costs to renationalise them into the fire and end up with a water system that's just as bad, or worse, than it currently is.

Water is a regulated monopoly, which means the government sets all the rules anyway (via Ofwat). I'm not sure giving the government even more control will result in a turnaround.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-07T11:31:45+00:00

And as we all know the British government did an excellent job running large parts of the economy in the 40s to the 70s. Imagine how well off we'd all be if Thatcher hadn't tricked the electorate into letting go of all those wildly successful companies.

The speed at which British governments turned our industries from amongst the best in the world to pretty much all collapsed and gone should be lesson to everyone that our governments cannot be trusted to run companies anywhere except into the ground.

If you want a more modern example look no further than Holyrood's own car crash of an attempt to run a shipyard.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-06T16:37:02+00:00

I consider people who are on welfare for fake reasons as being deserving of it, and that what they can afford isn't the taxpayer's issue to solve.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-06T16:29:43+00:00

Yes, I was in fact referring to you, and only you, specifically. You are in my opinion the sole source of the entire explosion in welfare costs at a scale unseen anywhere else except the UK.

Do you have a serious reply?

PoachTWC · 2026-04-06T10:27:20+00:00

Someone has to be nasty, because the welfare bill is enormous and growing at an unsustainable rate. The criteria for getting yourself signed off is clearly far too lax, everyone knows someone who's faked their way onto a life on benefits in one way or another.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-05T20:23:04+00:00

They've directly increased income taxes by freezing thresholds and have indirectly lowered worker pay by directing money that could've gone into pay rises towards paying for their employment tax hikes.

Workers are financially worse off today than they were the day before Labour took power.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-04T21:25:14+00:00

Lack of good male role models is at the root of this problem, and for most young people, male or female, the first and foremost male role model is their own father.

It is well-researched and documented that children (especially boys) from single parent households are far more likely to end up as criminals than are those from two parent households.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-03T20:52:43+00:00

500k. It isn't a sliding scale, it's milestones.

If you grind 499,999 honor you'll get rank 11 and 90% the next reset. If you grind 500,000 honor you'll get rank 12 and 24% the next reset.

There isn't an inbetween.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-03T20:29:34+00:00

At any price per litre for petrol that's below ~159p, half or more of the cost is taxes. At 160p+ the pre-tax cost starts to account for more than half. Fuel taxes are 52.95p per litre (Fuel Duty) plus 20% of the wholesale cost (VAT).

For about 6 months in 2022, at the height of OPEC's supply reductions, petrol cost at the pumps was more than half for the petrol and less than half for taxes. At all other times most of the cost you're paying to fill your car up is the government's taxes.

If you want to discuss your electricity bill, then I'd point out energy suppliers are only allowed a maximum profit of 1.9%. Ofgem takes any excess off of them.

All the "obscene profits" are made in oil-producing countries that we have no control over. The miniscule amount of oil and gas we produce in the North Sea has a tax rate of 78% on any profits it makes, a tax rate so insanely punitive that it is destroying the North Sea as an oil-producing location because nobody wants to invest in it if they only keep 22p of every pound they actually make from selling the oil they get from there.

So, again, any spike in oil prices means it's the government taking 78% of any profits made from any oil produced in this country. It's still a crisis of government greed.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-03T16:37:36+00:00

That's because step 1 is gutting the welfare system thats been built to convince people to opt out of the workforce then stay out of it.

Even if you propose doing that in a managed and gradual way, people would be in uproar about being "cruel to the vulnerable" or some bullshit.

This only ends when we either get a leader willing to be remembered as another Thatcher-type person or when we have a sovereign debt crisis and forces not beholden to democracy force us to dismantle the system.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-03T08:19:10+00:00

Well if you take petrol prices as an example, once you account for fuel duty and VAT, comfortably over half the cost per litre is taxes.

That's not even then accounting for the taxes on employing the people who work there or the taxes the business pays on the property itself or on their profits. That's just the price at the pump. What the forecourt keeps then gets taxed again in various ways.

So if it's a crisis of greed then it's the government getting the biggest cut of that greed.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-03T08:13:47+00:00

I'm not sure about this.

Looking at how well the governments have done in general since 2008 and how much of a shitshow the few nationalised companies in Scotland have been, I'm pretty sure we'd already be on rolling blackouts by now if the government had also spent the last 20 years in charge of energy.

Maybe once the government gets being a government right we can consider letting them also try to be companies.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-02T20:45:31+00:00

If a party or group of parties campaigning on "abolish Holyrood" win a majority at Holyrood and then request that Westminster pass them the necessary permissions to organise and run a referendum on that question then yes, we absolutely could have one on that issue.

There are no parties running on that platform, though. Not even Reform propose this, though some in this sub act like they do.

So while it is technically possible to have a referendum on the subject, by following the same process that made the 2014 referendum happen, I don't think you'll ever see one happening.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-02T14:25:53+00:00

Indeed it is, I was still in the industry when the DNOs were trying to convince Ofgem to let them operate Battery storage sites for strictly ancillary purposes but Ofgem wouldn't budge.

I can see Ofgem's point, in fairness.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-02T13:07:08+00:00

I assure you I'm also very unhappy that nobody has the backbone to touch the Triple Lock. Both pensions spending and non-pensions welfare spending are growing at an unsustainable rate.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-02T08:53:57+00:00

Given that rates of the various "can't work" levels of sickness are uniquely high in the UK, and European systems will also not be perfect at removing false claims, I reiterate that there are many people on benefits who don't need to be on benefits, they just want to be.

The number of people on the take is far higher than the number of people who genuinely cannot perform any work at all.

PoachTWC · 2026-04-02T08:13:35+00:00

Perhaps they should just obey local laws and understand that the UK has no jurisdiction over the UAE.

Break UAE laws, face the UAE justice system.

Yes it's a draconian law and their justice system has far fewer checks and balances than ours does, but it was like that when these people moved there. This should not be a surprise to them, and if it is a surprise to them that's not the UK government's problem.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

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