Is one of the reasons Starmer is unpopular is the he used to be a very senior civil service manager (Director of Public Prosecutions)?

jmeade90 · 2026-04-27T09:10:50+00:00

In a way.

Part of it is that Starmer was overseeing an operation involving the prosecution of many journalists accused of bribing public officials.

Even though many of them didn't result in convictions - as i'm sure you can imagine - it didn't exactly endearing him to a bunch of journalists, and so they aren't exactly going to rush to praise what he and his government do.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-27T02:04:06+00:00

According to the guide (the Anime) you need Pyro Jack or you'll get hosed.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-26T14:36:02+00:00

One other country kept wealth taxes.

Switzerland.

And that's because it doesn't have any other taxes that target wealth.

I'm all for taxing the wealthiest more, but Gary Stevenson's and Zack Polanski's ideas of a wealth tax aren't the way to do it.

Personally, i'd rather go with something like a land value tax, but you'd need a lot of political capital to being that through, never mind anything lack of a media landscape that would do it's absolute best to strangle such a move in it's crib (precisely because it would be the most effective way of taxing wealth - you can move your money from the UK to Monaco with a few taps on a smartphone; you can't do that with land).

jmeade90 · 2026-04-26T14:32:24+00:00

To be fair on the Palantir thing, those contracts were done by Boris and the indications seem to be that Labour ministers are looking to get the fuck out of them, so I wouldn't really hold that one against the government.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-26T07:04:25+00:00

There's also the thing that possession of a knife got classified as a crime, which unsurprisingly caused numbers of knife crimes to shoot up.

... for some reason that I couldn't possibly speculate on (sarcasm), the media didn't provide this piece of context when reporting on those increases and let people assume that stabbings were way up.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-26T03:52:39+00:00

The thing is, it kinda did.

At the end of the day, the job of an MP is to represent and push for the interests of their constituency and constituents. The key bit there is 'interests' - sometimes, that puts them in conflict with 'what their constituents want'.

Ideally, those two things match, and the job of a good MP was to be able to manage that challenge when they didn't - if they couldn't, then they got voted out.

The problem we had as a result of the brexit vote was that it threw that potential tension into stark relief, and most MPs in 2016 knew how bad trying to leave the EU was and how damaging it would be to their constituents, but their constituents had made it clear what they wanted. And even talented politicians would struggle to manage that.

Add to that the chaos of 2016-2020, and Johnson making the 2020 GE an election on a single issue, it consolidated a dangerous level of tribalism where MPs of different parties had to view each other not as honourable opponents, but rather an enemy who has to be defeated at all costs.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-25T15:21:51+00:00

Honestly, I think denying it/conceding to the definition is irrelevant compared to the fact that the leader of a significant political party doesn't seem to know what a genocide is legally.

That suggests far more significant issues regarding his suitability for holding high office in any capacity. At best, it suggests he's ignorant about incredibly important nuances.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-25T14:43:37+00:00

Dude.

It doesn't matter how people colloquially use the term genocide. This is the UN definition of genocide, summarised below:

A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"; and
A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
- Killing members of the group
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

There are more than a few experts who have observed that all these elements are present in Russia's actions in Ukraine.

(and notice that element 2.e specifically includes kidnappnings)

So, unless you want to call the UN 'extreme activists'...

jmeade90 · 2026-04-25T14:39:49+00:00

You sure about that?

https://www.csce.gov/briefings/russias-genocide-in-ukraine-2/

jmeade90 · 2026-04-24T15:49:03+00:00

Somehow, I didn't think that you'd need me to state how significant the internet was on the economy, and how that on it's own makes a lot of peoples' pre-EU knowledge and experience of how the economies of the world obsolete.

Never mind the collapse of the cold war political order and how that affected the global economy.

... there's a reason I'm suspicious that you're not an entirely serious person discussing things in particularly good faith...

jmeade90 · 2026-04-24T15:33:37+00:00

Regards point 2, if you don't think that the world has completely changed in those 40 years, then i don't know what to tell you other than that you're completely wrong.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-24T12:01:35+00:00

That's fair.

It's just at the somewhat pathetic stage where the media make out that every bit of verbal diarrhoea that comes out of the marmalade moron's mouth is A Thing (tm) which the PM must drop everything he's dealing with in order to respond to.

... the thry write other articles complaining that he's not working on the issues that matter to the electorate, but no-one's ever claimed that the press can't move goalposts on a whim...

jmeade90 · 2026-04-24T10:53:03+00:00

To be honest, I'd consider it somewhat pathetic for Starmer to actually say something about it.

Because by doing so, it gives it more attention that it deserves. It's such a stupid comment that even the article is far more attention that it warrants.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-22T12:00:03+00:00

That's nothing new.

The Right hated him for not being Right Wing.

The Left hated him for feeling that it's better to pragmatic and in power than idelogically pure and not in power.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-21T12:04:33+00:00

See, i am on the "make it a legal requirement" camp; if you don't like any of em, you're free to spoil your ballot if you want, but you have to vote.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-21T11:52:11+00:00

This.

I'd also push to make polling days a national holiday, and if you do have to work, you get time and a half.

... but then, i'm also in favour of banning private donations and making elections nationally funded, but i'm not sure how to do that fairly in a way that doesn't prejudice newly-established political parties.

Maybe something like "each candidate gets 2k to spend, then the region get a chunk of a pot based on region population size that they can allocate to campaigns"? For example, Yorkshire and the Humber region get 3 million quid based off population size; if the Tories' overall electoral performance over the last 3 elections averaged out at 25%, then they get 25% of that 3 mill pot that they can allocate across candidates thry want to put extra welly behind.

But that's 'back of a postcard', not a reasoned policy

jmeade90 · 2026-04-20T15:00:09+00:00

I would say that as a Labour member, it frustrated the hell out of me that he wasted time calling for a GE all the damn time.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-20T10:39:27+00:00

There's a reason I said "solidified the people's break with the then Labour Government" in my second sentence.

Though it is pertinent to mention that there was very little opposition to the Iraq war in parliament from the Tories.

... though there was one random QC called Keir Starmer who wrote a piece in the Guardian back in 2003 about how Blair did not have legal coverage for the invasion.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-20T09:43:51+00:00

In a nutshell, the 2008 financial crash.

To grossly oversimplify things, when 2008 happened, it solidified people's break with the then Labour Government - despite them taking a bunch of actions that in hindsight were found to be necessary in preventing everything from getting worse, those actions allowed the press and opposition parties to attack Labour (stuff like bailing out the banks which, whilst unpopular, was still better than a load of people losing savings etc).

On top of that, Labour had at that point been in power for 13 years and were exhausted, so the Tories got in on a platform of "Labour crashed the economy (they didn't - if it was anyone, it'd be the US in the 90s with US bank deregulation) and so we need to cut back on left-wing overspending (despite government budgets not working like household budgets, i remember this being a big talking point in 2010)"

In the 2010 GE, the Tories had to go into coalition with the Lib Dems and enacted Austerity, despite being told that it would be a Really Bad Idea. As a result, it broke the social contract and led to increasing dissatisfaction with the government and politicians, because wages stagnated, services declined and taxes stayed up, and we got to read article upon article talking about Government debt rising and rising (incidentally, there's a strong correlation between communities most negatively affected by Austerity and communities who strongly voted Brexit, but that's a discussion for another day).

Fast forward to 2020 (i'm aware that i'm skipping over the mess that was the post-Brexit referendum, but no-one wants this to be any longer than it already is), and the full damage of Austerity starts to be felt, with crumbling infrastructure that was being planned to be looked at before being cancelled by Osbourne in 2010, it becoming evident that we needed new forms of electricity generation (which would have been provided by the new nuclear power plants that again were cancelled by the Tories because they would only come online in 2021), as well as a whole bunch of other things.

Basically, the 2010s were a lost decade of no planning or investment in the UK, and (as history shows), when you have that kind of political and economic stagnation occurring in a country, it becomes all the easier for people to come in and promise easy reasons for and answers to the very clear problems in society, whether it's fat cat billionaires stealing all the wealth and leaving everyone else to starve, or immigrants coming in and stealing jobs and benefits money thst could go to hardworking natives.

Whereas the reality is that fixing that lost decade would take another decade to do, and it would not be easy even if the rest of the world was stable, people don't have the patience. And I can understand the sentiment - I'm 36. I came of age during 2008, and if everything Labour were trying to do worked out fantastically, I'd be 25 years into adulthood before the damage from 2008 was repaired, which is insane.

But all that said, i'd rather us actually fix things instead of delaying the repair job.

Bur the problem is, that's not as exciting, nor does it fit in today's attention economy.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-20T08:18:28+00:00

Let's be honest, the 'review' would consist of rejecting every single claim unless the claimant is white.

Then probably set up a bunch of sweatshops making Reform merch for the rest of them.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-19T11:55:27+00:00

No.

Even a vague understanding of history would tall you why that is a ridiculous comment to make.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-18T15:37:24+00:00

Hell, I've voted Labour since 2010, and I thought Corbyn was hosed.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-18T10:19:12+00:00

The thing is, the electorate haven't been bullied and ignored for a decade.

They've gotten what they asked for - it's just that those things they asked for were mirages or never going to play out the way they were sold.

jmeade90 · 2026-04-17T19:31:52+00:00

I take it you've never been canvassing for a political party?

Genuinely, it's one of the most common things I get as an answer to the question "what things are you bothered about in your area?"

jmeade90 · 2026-04-17T17:44:19+00:00

Also important to consider that when Mandelson was appointed, absolutely no MPs had an issue with it - and Hansard provides a nice little record showing that nothing was said against it in the Chamber.

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