British Politics thread

http://makelabourawesomeagain.uk/

This guy's even more down wiv da kids than Ed Millivanilli was.

CJB wrote:

http://makelabourawesomeagain.uk/

This guy's even more down wiv da kids than Ed Millivanilli was.

"How do you do, fellow kids?"

When exactly did we start to agree with the PRC's politics to the point of denying a dissident his business visa? Strikes me as shameful.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jul/30/uk-denies-ai-weiwei-full-business-visa-based-on-disputed-criminal-history

Former Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath raped a 12-year-old boy after picking up the youngster when he ran away from home, it has been sensationally claimed.

k

I think it's time to accept that everybody who was famous in the 60's, 70's, and 80's was a paedo and/or a rapist.

CJB wrote:

I think it's time to accept that everybody who was famous in the 60's, 70's, and 80's was a paedo and/or a rapist.

It is increasingly bewildering for those of us who lived through several of those decades..... Thank god I was never famous!

Apart from Roman Polanski, very few celebrities/public figures have been made to pay a price for those crimes. At least in their life-time.

c

Erica Ambler wrote:

Salomé wrote:

Apart from Roman Polanski, very few celebrities/public figures have been made to pay a price for those crimes. At least in their life-time.

Interesting remark. Many 'right thinking' Americans and Guardianistas don't think Polanski has been punished at all.

Well he has not served any time for his crime (apart from the 42 days psych evaluation) .
But it has badly tarnished his reputation and has obviously severely limited his career opportunities across the big pond.

Whereas David Bowie's behavior towards Lori Maddox never earned him much scorn and is now all but forgotten (if people were aware of it at all).

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Erica Ambler wrote:

Salomé wrote:

David Bowie's behavior towards Lori Maddox never earned him much scorn and is now all but forgotten (if people were aware of it at all).

Lori doesn't seem too broken up about it. See  11:24:

Which isn't all that different to how Geimer feels about the Polanski case:

Quote :

In a documentary for A&E Television Networks entitled Roman Polanski (2000), Samantha Gailey Geimer stated "…he had sex with me. He wasn’t hurting me and he wasn’t forceful or mean or anything like that, and really I just tried to let him get it over with." She also claimed that the event had been blown "all out of proportion".

Not necessarily defending what Polanski did, I am more confused by the completely arbitrary reaction to similar behavior. Apparently some celebrities get a free pass for statutory rape, and others do not?

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From my perspective, Labour's issue is not that different from traditionally left-leaning parties all over the continent.
They have lost touch with their traditional base largely because they have scarcely any MPs left whose life experience is at all comparable to that of the lower-middle-class. It doesn't matter if the man or woman near the top of the pyramid comes from a more privileged background, but the base of any left-wing party should be grounded firmly in the working class. When that is no longer the case, it will render itself irrelevant in just a few election cycles.
This is further compounded by the fact that left-wing parties are (quite ironically) terribly conservative gatekeepers in terms of who they allow on their ballots.

v

All absolutely spot on, and they aren't going to be helped by electing the bearded communist as their leader.

From the outside looking in, Corbyn success is more a case of the alternatives being even worse?

ATM I think Labours issues are deeper than the man at the top, more so than any other major party they are devoid of competent or compelling representatives....indeed British Politics is at a peculiar place right now, with very few delivering anything approaching conviction or personality, the Tories are simply the best of a rather meagre bunch imo (character wise).

Quote :

Her political persona has never been that of a firebrand feminist, but during this campaign she has made an explicitly gendered pitch for the top job. First, there is the assertion that “it’s time Labour elected a woman leader”; second, her pledges include buffer zones around abortion clinics and better provision of women’s refuges, where contracts too often go to generic outsourcing companies rather than specialist providers. She names Jane Ellison as her favourite Tory MP, for the work they did together on opposing a crackdown on sex-selective abortion, which Cooper saw as a Trojan horse for attempts to restrict access to termination more generally. “I wish I was here as Labour home secretary having this discussion, because we would have done a Violence Against Women and Girls Bill,” she adds.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/08/discipline-over-dazzle-helen-lewis-interviews-yvette-cooper

By all means, focus on such nonsense. It's not as if your party just lost an election because of its idealogical anemia or anything.

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VAWAGB....... She needs to come up with better acronyms tho....

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He may not be the heir to Blair, but he definitely has the beard and ideology to be the heir to Yasser.