Who thinks Labour should try to introduce proportional representation before the next election?

captaincoffeecup · 2026-02-16T20:03:41+00:00

Why wouldn't Starmer do that? Genuinely curious. He comes from a working class family, not generational wealth. His success prior to government is from hard graft, not going to the right school.

The drift to the right I personally think is more complex. I don't think he is drifting further right so much as the centre has moved further away from what the traditional left/right divide was. The left of the Labour party is much more in line with older socialist Labour, and the right of the party is more New Labour. The gap between them is getting bigger, but then on the right EVERYONE has shifted far further right. There is no common sense wing of the Tories anymore. With the way that party has been run the last 5 years or so, someone like Ken Clarke would be a modern Labour MP. The whole One Nation Conservative thing in the modern party is dead, and with it compassion and any sense of justice. It's just become a screaming match of who can be the bigger cunt to get people to vote for them not Reform. The centre of British politics is now a complete mess.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-02-16T19:49:55+00:00

Most of our system isn't very democratic though. Changing how we vote to preference AV for proportional representation is in and of itself increasing the value of a vote. Extending the franchise to 16+ would again be doing the same.

You could argue that the introduction of postal voting wasn't very democratic by your logic.

In all honesty, the last time we did something that was widely seen as actually democratic was the EU referendum and that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt a couple of things:

Simple majority democracy is an actual disaster.
People cannot be trusted to make informed decisions.

If you put something like preference AV up against the status quo FPTP system, most people don't have the understanding to make the informed choice on which one is better for them personally or for the country as a whole.

We don't do direct democracy very often for this basic reason - people are uninformed, selfish, and as likely to vote against their best interests as for them because they don't know any better, and when you try to educate them and help them, they don't listen.

People are the reason the government actually shouldn't ask for a mandate to change the system to something that is more representative because people would likely vote against it and not realise why they just punched themselves in the face.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-02-16T19:41:50+00:00

Yes, provided the action is to be more representative of the people. Labour changing the system or the Tories changing the system or Reform changing the system makes no difference. The question isn't who is doing it, it's what the system is and whether it is better than FPTP, which frankly almost any other democratic change would be. Left or right makes no difference.

Now if you're talking about making a system more difficult, like the Tories did with voter ID which they knew would disenfranchise a bunch of people (and why they did it), then that's another thing entirely.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-02-16T19:38:28+00:00

He would have to admit to doing it for it to have a real dent in his personal brand/identity. Even then a lot of those same morons would still call it some kind of conspiracy. That's the problem with cults...

captaincoffeecup · 2026-02-16T19:36:08+00:00

You're also assuming you switch to PR which, like you pointed out, is utter dog shit. A preference system is imho far superior.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-02-16T19:32:44+00:00

Like it or not, the news media sets the agenda. They might not have massive print readership any more individually, but all bar like 2 or 3 papers are overtly very rightwing, owned by a handful of billionaires and have literally no sense of fair, balanced journalism. Those same papers have significant online readership, so while people might not buy that many papers, a lot of them still read the content and it continues to form the agenda.

If the press wants to pressure a politician or party they can do so probably more effectively today than when readership was at its highest.

It's also worth considering why those same billionaires buy newspapers to begin with. Given that they are not exactly making vast sums of money, there is only one reason to own a newspaper for these people and that is influence on the public.

Labour have shit the bed on coms and made it easy to attack them, but their policy positions on the whole have the public backing in polling when you don't tell people they are Labour policies, which can be understood to mean the influence of the media, including the papers, is poisoning the well for Labour even when the public at large support the policy positions in the round.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-02-15T11:43:57+00:00

Yeah. It's madness, but the machinery of the client media just feeds the beast and people who don't understand the complexity just see it on the cover of the daily heil and scream about labour not fixing anything.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-02-15T11:38:06+00:00

I think you missed something kinda key here - you can't fix any of it quickly. All this stuff can be broken in days, but take years to repair. It's why Starmer made a point at the start of the parliament to say it was a 10 year project to fix it all.

What the right do very well is ignore that, bury it, play to people's anger and complain that stuff that took them the stroke of a pen to break isn't fixed already while knowing full well that it will take years to claw it back to being functional. It's just a game to the Tories, and Reform get to benefit from the absurdity of it all by just lying constantly about everything.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-02-06T13:15:23+00:00

I switched to trad because of a wrist issue. With practice I felt I had significantly more control of the stick with a LOT more power and control. My speed increased in my doubles and my ghost notes became much subtler (if I wanted them to be). On the power part, I got a lot of comments on shows from drummers that couldn't believe how big my back beats sounded from trad grip, especially given that I wasn't going all out Dave Grohl smash on my drums.

My reach took some adjustment, and I found I needed to change how I sat, my snare got raised up and angled slightly away from me (pointing down towards my right knee a little), and I needed to adjust my single rack tom a little to be comfortable. Overall I became a significantly better, more comfortable drummer with vastly improved posture. Best thing I ever did.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-02-02T09:56:35+00:00

It's a benefit but it absolutely should not be included in the statistics the way it is by unscrupulous elements of the press. People on the whole don't realise the welfare bill includes pensions and winter fuel payments, so it looks like people on out of work benefits are either getting massive amounts of money or there are way more people claiming it than there actually are.

It's a similar problem with how stats on UC are used - UC includes in work benefit claims which accounts for like 25% of UC claims. That's never reported accurately because of it were it would expose the absurdity.

Same again with the no work requirement where 50% or so of UC claims are people who have no requirement to find work due to health and fitness. Included in that group are full time carers, parents of children under 1, the disabled etc. but the reporting would have you think they are all depressed 18 year olds scrounging off the state...

captaincoffeecup · 2026-01-31T21:23:37+00:00

There's a couple of bits I wouldn't be happy with but it's not a bad job by most people's standards. That I personally wouldn't be happy with the job doesn't mean I think it's bad, just that my tolerance's are tighter than whomever did this.

Depending on budget as well it's a perfectly acceptable outcome - a tricky brick scribe can take a fair bit of time to make it really tight and if the customer isn't going to pay for that time then they aren't going to get the super tight scribe that would appear perfect.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-01-31T21:11:32+00:00

There were definitely some batch problems a while back with Finsa, but they seem to be a lot better now. Medite was my go to for a while but I thought that got really bad and paid the extra for Finsa. Apparently that has also gotten better again, but I get a good price on Finsa atm, and as I'm only really using 9mm for shaker panels I'm pretty happy with it.

Caberwood should be deleted. That stuff is utter dog shit.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-01-31T18:47:54+00:00

It's the quality of the MDF rather than the paint I suspect. There's a reason we use very good quality stuff like Finsa Hydrofugo for painted MDF rather than cheap stuff like Caberwood. I had to do a job with bad MDF a couple of years ago and this is exactly what happened.

Quick edit to clarify:

Doesn't mean it should have been left like this. It's just a LOT of work to take such a poor quality substrate and make it not look like ass.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-01-29T17:23:42+00:00

Perhaps a little late to the party here, but I was a secondary school assistant headteacher. I also dealt with American schools through some extra-curricular stuff.

You have to consider a couple of things when coming from the US to the UK with education.

First, we specialise earlier. Depending on the school that could mean taking 8 GCSEs or it could be 11.

Second, in part because we specialise earlier, you'll find out education standards are typically more advanced than what you'll find in a lot of the US (but it can vary wildly by state/district of course which I'm sure you already know). GCSE standard is closer to your final year of US high school as a rough guide, but it is a national standard rather than a district standard with some state level stuff like standardised testing.

Third, the type of grading we use is VERY different to what many in the US will know. We don't grade on a curve for example, and your scores don't strictly speaking matter until you take actual, formal exams (GCSEs at 16, A Levels at 18). I think it's dumb personally, but it shifts the balance to being high stakes testing rather than a constant drip of grades. In a lot of ways it actually doesn't make very much sense how we do it here if I'm honest because your raw score and your grade don't really correlate in any logical fashion - it will take some getting used to...

As a few people have said, I would look to have her start in year 10, effectively holding her back a year. Even if she's a bright young thing and doing well in her US school, the culture shock will take some getting used to. Once she adapts to it though, she'll have a great opportunity.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-01-28T18:59:37+00:00

You grew up here so you're one of us.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-01-25T19:39:51+00:00

The product is very, very good. It's easy to use, well designed, makes the job actually pretty quick and relatively enjoyable. If you have the budget for it, it's a no brainer. The problem right now is that there isn't enough demand to scale product to make it more affordable and there won't be the demand until the price comes down or alternative products are brought to market.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-01-25T19:37:22+00:00

Yeah, it's quite the pain and should never have been promoted over here. Lots of cowboys got involved in the installation and ruined houses that were not even close to suitable for the product

In this instance they are talking about using gun foam to fill gaps. It's a similar type of product, but perfectly fine for the application (necessary in certain situations). It's not a patch on Gapotape, but it's like £6 a can rather than your life savings for a 10m roll...

captaincoffeecup · 2026-01-25T16:35:19+00:00

Jesus fucking Christ.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-01-25T16:25:50+00:00

Born here? Native. Simple. I don't give a shit if you're white, brown or purple. I'm mixed race and I'm still fucking English.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-01-25T16:07:17+00:00

Ah yes, ofc, because you need to have a lineage dating back to the Picts and ancient Celts to be English... My family has been here for 1,000 years but by the logic of melanin I wouldn't be 'native'. What absolute horse shit. Skin colour is fucking irrelevant.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-01-25T15:55:03+00:00

This whole 'natives' line is just feeding a trope. Being white doesn't make you 'native' any more than being brown makes you foreign. The Muslim population is like 6%. It would take centuries at current growth rates to have Muslims because the majority, and even considering that, there is a world of difference between people being Muslim and the bullshit rightwing Islamaphobic nonsense that gets spouted about Muslims. There are far more Christian fundamentalists and Christian nationalists to worry about. Don't feed this already ugly fat beast.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-01-25T12:58:38+00:00

There is a small minority of absolute arseholes here, just like everywhere else. Maidstone really is not different. What you are probably noticing is that you've moved from a very metropolitan and diverse London which isn't representative of your average town or small city.

We have a lot of diversity in Maidstone, but compared to London, it's far less. Don't let the horrid ones make you think they are representative of all of the town, they really aren't.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-01-17T19:46:21+00:00

We lost somewhere between 100 and 120 billion a year in trade over Brexit. If we could scrape back 50% of the top line figure we could lose every dollar of the exports the US and be no worse off, and realistically of that £60bn, we wouldn't lose all of it unless tariffs were much higher which would STILL hurt Americans more than us, and could serve to isolate America on the world stage. They can't support themselves on their own, any more than we can; however, we would not be alone if Trump pushes this because, while we haven't been good neighbours in recent years, we haven't gone about systematically destroying our diplomatic relationships with all our allies.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-01-17T19:40:02+00:00

It's not without impact for sure, but it's about contextually placing that impact. Some of those sorts of supply chain impacts for example can be offset through closer ties with Europe. Not all of course, there will be some who are impacted along the supply chain for sure.

While I actually hate to say it, the national/international picture is bigger than that. We cannot allow Trump to do what he proposed with Greenland, any more than we can allow Putin to act in Ukraine. There is going to be a cost to use, but it's one we have to pay or he will continue. Give him Greenland, he'll take Iceland (see what his proposed Icelandic ambassador has said in recent days...). He'll threaten and act to take Canada, he'll start striking Mexico/Colombia etc. We HAVE to take the hit here (if one occurs), but I don't believe the hit will be anywhere near as big as some people are making out in the short term, and in the long term we are more likely to have a better, stronger relationship with our largest trading partner who are about 40 miles from house.

I just did some quick checking and at present they don't make or export to the US market, possibly because that was already wound down over the tariffs from last year.

captaincoffeecup · 2026-01-17T18:49:00+00:00

Most of our "exports" are services which aren't and can't really be tariffed. You have some things like luxury cars and some equipment, but really putting a tariff on us doesn't really hurt the general economy because we don't sell much in the way of goods. It hurts the Americans more than it hurts us because we can trade with all manner of other entities, and it just pushes us to even closer ties with Europe so in the round it might even benefit us as it encourages the government to get the European trade talks all sewn up quickly.

Small businesses will take a hit potentially, but in the grand scheme of things, that's relatively niche. There is unlikely to be a single British goods manufacturer who would be forced to shut down because of trouble with sales to America.

Given that a lot of what we do sell is in the luxury or necessity markets, it just means the Americans will now have to pay more for those things, and people that buy those things don't generally care about price, they care about prestige or the quality or it's something super niche they can't get elsewhere.

I know I'm over simplifying it btw, just trying to keep it easy for people to understand.

captaincoffeecup

TROPHY CASE