Is it time that we took a closer look at UKIP?

First topic message reminder :

The UKIP vote in Eastleigh rose from 3.6% in 2010 to 27.8% in the by-election on Thursday. It may have been because the party is mopping up the mid-term protest votes which traditionally went to the Liberal Democrats before they climbed into bed with the devil in May 2010. It may be because many people – wrongly - feel that the three main parties in Westminster are “all the same”, a feeling which the Tories have helped to create by transferring so much real power from democratic accountability to unelected and unaccountable corporations as they privatise everything on which they can lay their grubby hands. What I don’t believe is that this bubble of support for UKIP is because of the party’s reactionary, right-wing policies, which aim to take us back to the 1950s.

The one policy which everyone associates with UKIP is withdrawal from the EU. UKIP has claimed that by leaving the EU, the UK would save over £45 million a day plus £60 billion a year, conveniently ignoring any EU rebates and regional grants. I’m not sure where it gets those figures from, since the Treasury says that the UK paid £8.9 billion into EU budget in 2010/11 (out of £706 billion of public spending). The European Commission puts the UK's net contribution at £5.85 billion.

The EU is the UK's main trading partner, accounting for 52% of our total trade in goods and services; if Britain went for a clean break from the EU, its exports would be subject to EU export tariffs. Millions of jobs could be lost as global manufacturers move to low-cost countries within the EU, and Britain's foreign-owned car industry might well shift into the EU. However, withdrawal from the EU was the issue which UKIP exploited and which put it on the political map. With his half-baked promise of a referendum at some point in the future, the idiotic Cameron has increased UKIP’s credibility by showing that he’s afraid of it.

Cameron also said that UKIP is “full of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists", and perhaps on that last point he could now be right. The Eastleigh by-election showed that UKIP is appealing to racists, causing one person on Twitter to refer to it as “the BNP for the Notting Hill set”. UKIP may be more subtle than the BNP, but it wants to freeze immigration, pandering to the Alf Garnetts who see all foreigners as problems, and has even thrown in the contentious claim that “multiculturalism has split our society”.

In December 2011, the UK had 88,179 people in prison, more per head of the population than any other country in Europe, yet UKIP wants to double the number of prison places. UKIP says that the £2 billion cost of building new prisons is negligible compared to the cost of crime, but it hasn’t factored in the cost of keeping prisoners in jail, which amounts to at least £40,000 a year for each of them. Yet UKIP would refuse to accept European Arrest Warrants, which could well mean delays for the UK in extraditing suspects from other European countries.

The NHS would be no safer with UKIP than it’s been with the Tories, since the party believes that “other models are worth considering to see whether lessons can be learned from abroad”. On education, UKIP wants to bring back grammar schools, so that we can once again tell about 80% of eleven-year-olds that they’re failures, while at the same time giving parents education vouchers, which would be a way of subsidising private school fees.

The cornerstone of UKIP’s tax policies is to roll the employee national insurance and basic rate income tax into a flat rate of income tax of 31%. There would be no higher rate tax, since UKIP perpetuates the Tory lie that the 50% income tax rate cost the economy money; it hasn’t, it has brought in £2.7 billion a year. UKIP’s policy would be a massive tax cut for the rich, far bigger than the one that’s being introduced by the Tories in April. Even greater inequality would be created by abolishing national insurance for employers.

UKIP policies, like so many Tory ones, amount to an attack on our rights. UKIP would put an end to most legislation regarding matters such as weekly working hours, holidays, overtime, redundancy and sick pay, while leaving it up to each employer to decide whether to offer parental leave. It says it would also scrap most ‘equality and discrimination’ legislation.

If you need any more reasons not to vote for UKIP, it denies climate change and would make increased defence spending “a clear priority, even in these difficult times”. It opposes equal marriage, would hold a referendum in each county on ending the hunting ban and would allow smoking in allocated rooms in public houses, clubs and hotels. It’s no wonder that UKIP has been likened to “the political wing of a Home Counties golf club”.

You may not like the EU, and you may think that after 38 years it’s time to hold another referendum on our membership. However, before you vote for a party that makes that its flagship policy, look a little more closely at what else you would be voting for at the same time.

Sources used:-

http://www.ukip.org/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20448450

oftenwrong wrote:Ridicule can fracture the Coalition, frustrate the snake-oil salesman Farage, and expose the self-serving Posh Boys for what they are.

Laughter will succeed where breast-beating might not.

Some in the Tory party would be much happier to be in coalition with UKIP as they are further to the right than the Tories, so I wonder if will cause more strife between the L/Ds and the Tories.

A good question Redflag.....

I have previously thought that the UKIP philosophy is much closer to the ways that the Tories think than it is to the ways that the Lib-Dems think and this has shocked me as to why the Lib-Dems threw in with the Tories at all in the first place.

Once Cameron is forced by his 1922 committee grandees to lurch further to the right in order to attempt to grab back a load of votes lost to UKIP, I think we will find that the UKIPs will start to look more like true Tories afterwards.

That, would not be as such an unholy alignment as the Tory/Lib-Dem one was.

I guess, that if a UKIP member walks like a Tory, smells like a Tory and waddles like a Tory then he or she MUST be a Tory.

Regards....

Papaumau.

Perhaps the question to ask is:-
If the Tories, in-spite of protest to the contrary, move/lurch more to the right, towards Ukip's position, will Farage's ego allow him to tell Ukip voters to vote Tory at the next election or have the local elections massaged his ego into believing he could win enough seat to make a difference?

Papaumau wrote:A good question Redflag.....

I have previously thought that the UKIP philosophy is much closer to the ways that the Tories think than it is to the ways that the Lib-Dems think and this has shocked me as to why the Lib-Dems threw in with the Tories at all in the first place.

Once Cameron is forced by his 1922 committee grandees to lurch further to the right in order to attempt to grab back a load of votes lost to UKIP, I think we will find that the UKIPs will start to look more like true Tories afterwards.

That, would not be as such an unholy alignment as the Tory/Lib-Dem one was.

I guess, that if a UKIP member walks like a Tory, smells like a Tory and waddles like a Tory then he or she MUST be a Tory.

Regards....

Papaumau.

Thank you Papauma

The only reason that I can find to answer your question is to why the L/Ds jumped into bed with the Tories it had been 65 years since they had been in power so when Cameron offered them CRUMBS of power they jumped at it, but what I will never forgive them for is what they did to Gordon Brown they said they would only talk to Labour if Gordon step down which he did, while in my opinion they had no intentions of talking to the Labour party also they forgot all their party beliefs the trebling of Uni fees while they had promises the Uni students to get there votes they would do away with Uni fees then all the nasty bills they helped the Tories to wave through the H.O.C.

Plus they have kept repeating all the Tory LIES & SPIN about it being all the Labour parties fault on the deficit while KNOWING that it was the bloody banks that Allistair Darling had to go and borrow Billions to bail their SORRY ASSES out of the mess that THEY created through their bloody greed.

The question being presented to Tory Voters by UKIP seems to be, "Do you want to be just a Virgin, or become a Super-Virgin?

oftenwrong wrote:The question being presented to Tory Voters by UKIP seems to be, "Do you want to be just a Virgin, or become a Super-Virgin?

I have just found out a couple of reasons WHY some Tories and UKIP want the UK out of the EU it looks like it is been driven by the City of London, Transaction Tax is one and a cap on Bonuses is the other. Someone told me not so long ago that its the banks that run the country and of course I did not quite believe them, now I do they do not care how many normal jobs it costs the UK as long as they do not have their Bonuses capped or have to pay transaction tax, I think its about time we stood up to the bankers after having to pay the heavy price we are paying now FOR THEIR BAILOUT IN 2008/09

Yes Redflag, the Liberal Democrats used to stand much further to the left than many other parties did, ( including Tony Blair's New-Labour ), and yet just for a bit of rubbed off power they threw all of their principles aside and got into bed with the Tories.

Clegg will rue the day that he did that when he finds that at the 2015 general election his party will be decimated and driven into the dust beside the BNP and a few other also-defunct parties.

Regards.....

Papaumau.

"Clegg will rue the day that he did that when he finds that at the 2015 general election his party will be decimated ...."

Is that reduce BY 10% or reduced TO 10%, Papa?

Redflag wrote:-
I have just found out a couple of reasons WHY some Tories and UKIP want the UK out of the EU it looks like it is been driven by the City of London, Transaction Tax is one and a cap on Bonuses is the other.

The EU has many faults. Its predominant economic policy is one of austerity, which has never worked and never will. Its Common Agricultural Policy is wasteful and mainly subsidises big landowners, many of whom, incidentally, are in the UK. Its expenses’ system is open to abuse as Farage, who has a poor attendance record at the EU Parliament, proved when he claimed £2 million just to give to UKIP:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/24/mps-expenses-ukip-nigel-farage

According to the Channel 4 Fact Check, whether we stay in or leave the EU makes little difference economically:-
http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-is-nigel-lawson-right-about-quitting-the-eu/13388
As oftenwrong has asked on another thread, in that case, what’s the advantage of forcing a change?

If the right-wing of the Tory Party wants something, it’s a fair bet that it’s to the detriment of most people in this country. Yes, Redflag is correct, the Tories don’t want a financial transactions tax in this country and are in the pockets of all those bankers who caused the global meltdown. 60,000 people in the world starve to death every day, and Londoners take to the streets to try and save their hospitals, but what are the priorities of Cameron and Boris Johnson? Rushing off to Brussels to express outrage that bankers' bonuses may be restricted to double or triple their salaries.

The economic effects of withdrawal from the EU may be neutral, bit if we did leave it would make it much easier for the Tories and UKIP to fulfil their dream of scrapping all employment rights and most of our human rights. I like having the right to live in other EU countries (and so does Nigel Lawson, who lives in France), and if there ever is a referendum on our continued membership of the EU, I shall vote to stay in. I suspect that in a campaign, when the voters are encouraged to focus on the issues rather than just the gobby ramblings of Farage, the majority will opt for the status quo.

Like a lot of people I enjoy going to the Continent on holiday. Whether Britain is part of the rip off international EU will make not a jot of difference to anybody going abroad. The facts are simple, The EU doesn't work it can never work simply because 27 nations trying appease their own voters can never agree on something that will be seen to benefit another country first. The agricultural policy is a complete joke, in France anybody with a small holding gets a grant, over here you have to be big enough to be an exporter of goods. Get out of the EU now any subsidies we're paid are dwarfed by the costs of being a member. The get out costs will be minimal and then we'll have a world market to sell/buy to without asking somebody else first. So the way forward is get out now, it won't have any effect on employment laws and the human rights law could be redrawn with sovereignty in this Country. I for one will definitely vote for out given a chance, whoever offers it.

tlttf wrote:-
Like a lot of people I enjoy going to the Continent on holiday.

Oh dear, typical ‘Little Englander’ mindset. Hasn’t anyone told you that the UK is part of the continent of Europe?

The EU doesn't work it can never work

It’s the largest free trade area in the world. In 2010, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills concluded that increased trade in Europe since the early 1980s may have raised income per head by around 6% in this country.

The agricultural policy is a complete joke, in France anybody with a small holding gets a grant, over here you have to be big enough to be an exporter of goods.

Utter rubbish. Try posting some facts for once, instead of talking out of your rear end. CAP subsidies go to the very richest people in Britain. The Duke of Westminster, Gerald Grosvenor – number 8 on this year’s 'Sunday Times' Rich List – receives some £820,000 a year. The Duke of Buccleuch, Richard Scott – number 434 on this year’s 'Sunday Times' Rich List – receives some £405,000. Indeed, the money seems to go to organisations who don’t even do any farming: Serco receives some £2 million. Talk about scroungers.

http://liberalconspiracy.org/2013/05/06/why-are-ukip-silent-supporters-of-the-biggest-eu-rip-off-of-all/

Interesting to read on the UKIP website that your favourite party “wants to ensure there is no sudden loss of Common Agricultural Policy farming subsidies, such as single farm payments.”

Get out of the EU now any subsidies we're paid are dwarfed by the costs of being a member.

LOL. Aren’t we lucky to have the benefit of your expertise, which is clearly far superior to that of the lovely Cathy Newman and the Channel 4 Fact Check team? Apparently, the economic effects of membership of the EU, as opposed to withdrawal, are so minimal as to be hardly worth discussing. Yes, we are net contributors to the EU (though UKIP liars only ever mention gross contributions), but many analysts have claimed that the UK gets an overall economic dividend from membership. For example, the 2000 NIESR study concluded that UK GDP would be 2.25% lower in the long run if we were outside the EU. This figure is similar to estimates of gains calculated by other countries.

http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-is-nigel-lawson-right-about-quitting-the-eu/13388

it won't have any effect on employment laws

Yes it would, they are currently protected by the EU. One of the main reasons that far-right scum in UKIP and the Tory Party want to leave the EU is so that they can abolish all employment rights, leaving workers totally at the mercy of their bosses, just as they were in Dickensian times.

Perhaps we ought to have a separate board on this forum for fiction. Your posts wouldn't be at all out of place on it.

Obviously the main consideration ought to be where a chap spends his holidays. Those greasy Continentals charge far too much for an Ice Cream!

Finally through the nonsense being written about me by ONE person a compliment, to be called a little englander by a screaming left footer. How very, very English does that make me.

I suggest people check their facts regarding the aggi policy and see that apart from the rich few nobody in this country gains, in fact it's lose, lose, lose all the way. Lets not forget how much the Duchy of Cornwall manages to claim from the grant Ivan. Scrap the lot and charge the rich landowners a tax on their properties they can hardly move the land abroad can they?

Why do UKIP get so much attention?

.......probably because an ignorant Alf Garnet right-wing mentality still pervades, and holds strong, in the UK.

For those who are progressive and capable of thought (as opposed to being told what to think), UKIP seem like a relic from the past. One can imagine Farage and his cohorts in a 70's time warp sitting around chortling at sitcoms like 'Love Thy Neighbour' then going to a pub where everybody smokes and drinks rotten ale.

I imagine much of their appeal is built around right-wing little englanders nostalgia for a time when we were politically incorrect, and saw little wrong with laughing at other cultures, ethnicities, homosexuality, liked a woman to bear children and stick to the kitchen while us blokes went off to drink real ale and smoke cigars.

UKIP are an ugly antique.

Farage strikes me as being the type who would think there is nothing wrong with a chap giving his secretary the occasional pat on her behind.

He must inwardly seethe at being shackled by political correctness and thus having to tread carefully in modern waters censoring his real opinions in order to appear slightly reasonable.

How rich do the UKIP Supporters want to be? Globalrichlist.com will show you how much you have compared to the rest of the world. The company behind it, Poke London, wants to question the idea promoted by the creators of Rich Lists, that British readers are comparatively poor.

To get into the top 1 per cent of world earners, you need a salary equivalent to £23,000.
The UK average is £26,500.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/live-in-the-uk-and-earn-23000-thats-rich-no-honestly-it-is-8581876.html

tlttf wrote:Like a lot of people I enjoy going to the Continent on holiday. Whether Britain is part of the rip off international EU will make not a jot of difference to anybody going abroad. The facts are simple, The EU doesn't work it can never work simply because 27 nations trying appease their own voters can never agree on something that will be seen to benefit another country first. The agricultural policy is a complete joke, in France anybody with a small holding gets a grant, over here you have to be big enough to be an exporter of goods. Get out of the EU now any subsidies we're paid are dwarfed by the costs of being a member. The get out costs will be minimal and then we'll have a world market to sell/buy to without asking somebody else first. So the way forward is get out now, it won't have any effect on employment laws and the human rights law could be redrawn with sovereignty in this Country. I for one will definitely vote for out given a chance, whoever offers it.

That is a common misconception tlttf.

I think , ( being a European as well as a Brit and a Scot ), that a future greater Europe WILL eventually sort itself out and will become one of the most powerful trading blocs in the world.

What I like to do is to compare the present disparate entities in Europe with that other powerful trading bloc across the pond and I see no reason why Europe cannot - like America - eventually become a United States of Europe AND when it does it will get its act together and afterwards, I would - as a Brit - much rather be friends with that monster than one of its enemies.

Such moves are a bit like natural evolution, where the development towards a single entity of different states may be as slow as how man came from the apes and eventually went into space.

It may take a long time, but it WILL happen.

Regards....

Papaumau.

tlttf wrote:-
I suggest people check their facts regarding the aggi policy

Good idea, why don’t you? This is what you wrote previously:-

The agricultural policy is a complete joke, in France anybody with a small holding gets a grant, over here you have to be big enough to be an exporter of goods.

That’s just a lie. The only reason that French (and Spanish) farmers get more subsidies is because there are more of them! In the UK, only 1.6% of the population is employed in agriculture. The rules concerning subsidies apply to all farmers, regardless of whether they’re in France or any of the other 26 EU countries, so kindly stop trying to mislead everyone.

You seem completely confused over the difference between farm subsidies and raising taxes. The EU Common Agricultural Policy is meant to give security to farmers, so that they don’t sell their land to developers and continue to produce food for us to buy. I have no problems with a land value tax, which is quite irrelevant in this discussion, but then it’s hardly surprising if you go off at a tangent. First you tell us to vote for independents (whilst voting yourself for pro-EU Boris Johnson), then you tell us you support UKIP, showing that you’re just a mass of absurd contradictions.

Your darling UKIP is just another pro-establishment party, led by another public school toff who wants to creep around Rupert Murdoch and who is ready to do a deal with the pro-establishment Tories as soon as he can. So it’s hardly surprising that UKIP “wants to ensure there is no sudden loss of Common Agricultural Policy farming subsidies, such as single farm payments”. Does that meet with your approval?

UKIP, like all right-wing parties, exists only for the benefit of the rich. With the help of the media, and with its cynical hyping up of the immigration issue, UKIP has managed to mobilise brainless morons, who previously supported the BNP, to display allegiance to a party which wants to take away their employment rights, introduce a flat tax and make the rich even richer. What a sad reflection of the intelligence of so many British people, showing just how much they lack both political acumen and a sense of history.

Spot on, Ivan.

Is that the same pro-EU Boris that has just said we'd benefit from leaving the EU?

Ivan simply because people want what's best for this country and don't believe any of the main parties are willing to offer a choice on whether we leave a corrupt system that seeks to control everything doesn't make them naive or stupid (high opinion of yourself methinks), it doesn't mean they support BNP or that they want to be rid of worker rights, they simply want to be left out of an overly bureaucratic and expensive exercise in wastage. Lets worry about what's happening over. I'll definitely be voting UKIP in the European elections as I'm sure many more will, presently they seem to be the only party that listens to the worries of the majority of working people. That Ivan is why I hold a very strong sense of history being part of a nation that helped make it.

Thanks for agreeing that France gains the most from the Aggi policy than every other nation though why you have to dress it up is beyond me.

We have a by-election here in Scotland in Dee side due too an SNP MSP dying the by-election is being held on 20th June, and UKIP has announced they will be fielding a candidate in the by-election. they must be off there rockers Scotland does not vote tory here in Scotland and since UKIP are nothing more than a second hand Tory party so I think there £500.00 deposit has just went down the drain, or Farage is seriously de-ranged.

Why anyone with more than five brain cells even THINKS about UKIP is beyond me - still, what would I know?

boatlady wrote:Why anyone with more than five brain cells even THINKS about UKIP is beyond me - still, what would I know?

We all have had the wool pulled over our eyes at one time or another boatlady, and that is all that is happening at the moment with people voting UKIP the blimds will drop and they will see the light and the truth about UKIP.

I do hope so - really hate to hear all the bigoted Little Englander stuff all over the news

tlttf wrote:-
Is that the same pro-EU Boris that has just said we'd benefit from leaving the EU?

Boris Johnson has said nothing of the sort. Do you make every bloody thing up as you go along?

Boris Johnson certainly doesn’t like the EU wanting to cap bankers’ bonuses at two or three times their annual salary, but he says that he has "always been narrowly in favour" of Britain staying in the EU and "particularly of protecting British interests in the single market". He should also have mentioned that most of the trade we do with countries outside the EU is through trade agreements made by the EU.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/10046799/Britain-must-be-ready-to-walk-away-from-EU-says-Boris-Johnson.html

Taking up the negotiating position of “being prepared to walk away” if the Tories don’t get a new deal from the EU is not the same as saying “we’d benefit” from leaving. Try getting your story straight for once.

people want what's best for this country

Yeah, why not play the patriotism card - “the last refuge of the scoundrel”, as Dr Johnson put it? You must be getting desperate if that tired old cliché is the best you can manage.

leave a corrupt system

If you really want to do that, help to throw out this corrupt government. The Tories are selling off everything they can lay their hands on, usually in return for donations to their vile party:-

http://think-left.org/2013/05/09/for-the-benefit-of-the-conservative-party-for-sale-local-hospital-and-schools/

Venture capitalist John Nash gave £300,000 to the Tories, after which Iain Duncan Smith gave him a £73 million workfare contract. Then Cameron gave him a peerage and now Gove has made him a schools minister. A nice case of 'cash for peerages, contracts and a place in government', but I don’t suppose we can rely on the Mayor of London to bring in the Met to investigate it, can we?

I notice you never have anything to say about the £2 million which Farage claimed as expenses from the EU and then gave to UKIP. You’d have been on here at 6am posting it if a Labour MEP had done any such thing, or even if the story was untrue, since that never seems to bother you.

it doesn't mean they support BNP

Twisting my words again. I sometimes wonder if you have an illness that makes you see something different from what is actually written down. By switching its emphasis from the EU (which is a low priority to most voters) to immigration, UKIP has attracted BNP types to its ranks.

it doesn't mean they want to be rid of worker rights

UKIP wants to scrap most employment rights, you can read as much on the party’s website. It’s reasonable to assume that UKIP voters either support that or are happy to accept it – along with a flat tax, which will only help the better off. UKIP is a party for the rich, full stop, even if it does manage to dupe dumbasses into voting for it.

the only party that listens to the worries of the majority of working people

Rubbish. All UKIP is doing is pandering to xenophobia with lies and distortions. It tried to pretend that 3 million Bulgarians were on their way to the town of Eastleigh, when there are only 7.5 million Bulgarians in the whole of Bulgaria.

Thanks for agreeing that France gains the most from the Aggi policy than every other nation though why you have to dress it up is beyond me.

Most things appear to be beyond you, I wasn’t agreeing with you at all. I said that French farmers are governed by the same CAP regulations as British ones, in response to your lie that “in France anybody with a small holding gets a grant, over here you have to be big enough to be an exporter of goods”.

I hold a very strong sense of history being part of a nation that helped make it.

LOL – the ‘Little Englander’ mindset again. I suppose Britain (or probably just England to you) is one of only a few countries in the world which did anything to shape the past (with colonisation, subjugation, exploitation and the slave trade). By the way, history isn’t the past, it’s the record (mostly written) of the past. If you had any sense of history, you’d have learned that turning to far right parties in times of austerity or depression creates a hell of a lot more problems than it solves.

LOL – the ‘Little Englander’ mindset again

What is a little Englander supposed to mean? If you lefties are not proud of your own country then I suggest you go and live somewhere else....maybe Brussels?
You have spent years trying to make people feel guilty and xenophobic for being patriotic and now many people have had enough of you and your poison. I really feel sorry for all you lefties, you are very sad, bitter and twisted people

Uninformed intemperate abuse so early in the day. I feel better already.

True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.

Clarence Darrow

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.[

Voltaire

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

Howard Zinn

A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.

Bill Vaughan


Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com

A little snack for those of us who enjoy thinking

blueturando wrote:

LOL – the ‘Little Englander’ mindset again

What is a little Englander supposed to mean? If you lefties are not proud of your own country then I suggest you go and live somewhere else....maybe Brussels?
You have spent years trying to make people feel guilty and xenophobic for being patriotic and now many people have had enough of you and your poison. I really feel sorry for all you lefties, you are very sad, bitter and twisted people

You have one HELLVA cheek blue, we could ask your lot to EFF off to the USA and join the Republican Party because that is the way you are acting, I was born in Newcastle Upon Tyne due to family circumstances I moved to Scotland at the age of 13 years and have lived here longer I'm still very proud of where I am from, but also class myself as a Scot.

The rant in your post you need to get off your High Horse and stop behaving like a SPOILT BRAT because you cannot get your own way, just remember it was Thatcher that opened the door to other Europeans to be able to come into the UK and it was Ted Heath that signed us into the EU another Tory leader, I suppose both of these where driven by greed by a Tory gov'ts.

blueturando wrote:-
What is a little Englander supposed to mean? If you lefties are not proud of your own country then I suggest you go and live somewhere else....maybe Brussels? You have spent years trying to make people feel guilty and xenophobic for being patriotic and now many people have had enough of you and your poison. I really feel sorry for all you lefties, you are very sad, bitter and twisted people

You don’t exactly add up. You posted that “you are not calling for a return to Thatcherite policies” (4 May), yet you love the old witch so much that you have a mugshot of her in your avatar! On 25 April, you were defending the principle of the flat tax, which would logically have come next if she’d got away with her poll tax. Everything that bloody woman did was designed to make the rich pay less and the rest of us pay more.

“Go and live in another country” (usually North Korea) is the stock-in-trade retort of Tories to anyone who dares to criticise the semi-feudal arrangements in this country. Pathetic. This is my country as much as it’s yours, and if I want to see it changed to something fairer and more democratic, that’s my right. If you don’t like that, why don’t you, as Redflag has suggested, sod off to the USA? Why didn’t the Thatcherites go to Chile and help their fellow Friedman-lover Pinochet to butcher his people and introduce widespread privatisation, instead of inflicting their misery on us? Why? Because they’d say that this is their country, just as I’m saying it’s mine.

I’m not proud of the slave trade, the exploitation of an empire, the Amritsar massacre of 1919 or the Hola massacre of 1959. I’m not proud that over 900 lives were wasted on some worthless rocks in the South Atlantic (and which still cost us £1 million a day), just to save Thatcher’s political hide, or that we stole Gibraltar from Spain in 1713. I’m not proud to live in a country that has a hereditary head of state, an unelected upper house and an heir to the throne who can’t dress himself, plump up his own cushions or put toothpaste on his toothbrush. And I’m certainly not proud of our current government, which persecutes the poor, the sick and the disabled at the same time as rewarding the rich. However, I am proud of this country’s history of taking in asylum seekers, whether it be Louis Philippe in 1848, Karl Marx in 1849, or both the ‘Farage’ and ‘Blanc’ families (the latter then translated its name, I understand…) after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685.

Let’s get some definitions straight, shall we? Nationalism is the belief that your country is better than the rest. Well that excludes Britain. Whatever index you care to use, you’ll find that Canada and the Scandinavian countries top the world when it comes to quality of life factors, while Sydney is arguably the nicest city in the world. Patriotism, on the other hand, is the love of one’s country, and there’s nobody more unpatriotic than a Tory. Tories are responsible for most of our utilities falling into foreign hands, and now they’re trying to sell off the NHS to American companies. Tories are only interested in making a fast buck out of this country’s assets, they don’t give a damn about us otherwise.

In my book, the UK isn’t the monarchy, the aristocracy (mostly descendants of thieves who stole common land and threw peasants off their holdings about three hundred years ago), Eton or the City of London. It isn’t even the union flag, and I’m highly suspicious of anyone who drapes themselves in it and thinks that that somehow makes them more patriotic than others. To me, patriotism is love of all the ordinary people who keep the show on the road – the nurses, doctors, teachers, carers, dinner ladies, refuse collectors, postmen, police, those in the armed services etc.

So, do tell us, who has “had enough of us and our poison”? Would that be, in your opinion, the 27% of voters, who, according to the latest YouGov poll, still support the Tories (the lowest figure ever recorded by that polling organisation)? You have the neck to call lefties “very sad, bitter and twisted people”, when you support the nasty party! We all know that the Tories hate all public services, hate those who are unemployed through no fault of their own, hate those who work in the public sector and/or are in trade unions, and hate those who need to draw benefits for any reason. The Tories hate immigrants, teachers (who might encourage children to think and see through all the Tory shyte), those who’ve retired on ‘gold-plated’ public sector pensions, and homosexuals who want to marry (though why that should concern them is anybody’s guess). In fact, the Tories hate everyone except the 1% of the ultra rich, bankers and Old Etonians, and maybe some pensioners, since they’ve worked out that they are the only group of the population more inclined to vote for them, probably because of hardening of the arteries. The Tories are the “sad, bitter and twisted people”, mister.

Please don’t feel sorry for me, and I doubt if anyone on this forum wants your sympathy. I have no desire to be rich and to live on a gated estate in fear of being robbed of my assets. I may be wrong, but I think I have enough money to survive reasonably comfortably for the rest of my life so, unlike the Tories (who seem to know the price of everything and the value of nothing), money doesn’t really interest me. If it did, I’d go and earn some more instead of spending many hours here helping Shirina to provide somewhere for people like you to post their thoughts.

I have a vision, and neither you nor Cameron and his depraved government of asset-strippers, criminals and Murdoch stooges (the last two categories often synonymous) can take that from me. I dream of, and work towards, a society that cares for its most vulnerable people – the young, the sick, the disabled, the old – because a decent society worth living in must make them a priority, regardless of cost. The seventh richest country in the world is also the fourth most unequal, and I long for a government that will do something about that, while you want a flat tax that creates even more inequality.

All the evidence (not something you really like, I know, but it’s on a thread about inequality) is that everyone, rich and poor, benefits from a more equal society. A society where we pay workers a living wage, so that people can preserve their dignity and not have to ask the state to pay their rent even when they work full time. A society where, if a worker thinks he or she has been unfairly dismissed, it isn’t necessary to stump up a non-refundable fee of £1,200 to go to an industrial tribunal to get justice, which is one of the latest of the Tory ‘reforms’. I have my vision, my dream, and that’s my driving force here, on Twitter and out in the real world. I’m also a pragmatist and know that I will never see all of what I want, but only the Labour Party (and maybe the Green Party where it has any chance of winning) offers the hope of any moves in the right direction. The Tories and UKIP will never do that.

blueturando wrote:

LOL – the ‘Little Englander’ mindset again

What is a little Englander supposed to mean? If you lefties are not proud of your own country then I suggest you go and live somewhere else....maybe Brussels?
You have spent years trying to make people feel guilty and xenophobic for being patriotic and now many people have had enough of you and your poison. I really feel sorry for all you lefties, you are very sad, bitter and twisted people

Some people might be proud of certain aspects of 'our' country - council estates, the NHS, welfare, unions, socialism etc but reserve contempt and scorn for other aspects of 'our' country - royalty, smug middle england, the freemasons, public schools, greedy bankers, etc.........and vice versa of course.

The point being you can't really specify what it means to be, or what makes a person, 'patriotic' or 'proud'. We all see good and bad in different things.

Well, I was born in England, and I have as much right as anyone to say what my country should be like - I think we did good when we invented the NHS, social security and free education - I think it all got a bit dodgy when the dead bitch started selling everything off - and it keeps getting worse.
I'm not proud of England any more - seems to me we're selling the family silver, which might be OK if we were buying anything good with the proceeds - but as all we seem to be buying is bribes for millionaires, and a posing pouch for Cameron et al I'm just a bit pissed off (sorry Red)

Our daughter is apolitical in the sense that she is unconvinced that Politicians have any concern for the interests of anyone apart from themselves. However she comments interestingly that Nigel Farage has no chance whatever of succeeding inside the British political tradition.

Why? Because he wears an overcoat in full view of the cameras. British politicians do not wear overcoats in public. Think about it.

I'm thinking - may not sleep - hope you will explain tomorrow (or get your daughter to)

Birds of a feather ....

If you don't wear the exact uniform, you can't join the Club. (clue: see how many photos you can find which show Cameron wearing an overcoat, or Blair, or any of our Ministers, unless they're at a funeral.)

Cameron's Fishy Activities...

(blogsindependent.co.uk)

" A couple of pieces of haddock, please - and not a word about the overcoat if you don't mind..."

That's ONE gold star for Phil.



(Brian Blessed having a quiet chat)

boatlady wrote:Well, I was born in England, and I have as much right as anyone to say what my country should be like - I think we did good when we invented the NHS, social security and free education - I think it all got a bit dodgy when the dead bitch started selling everything off - and it keeps getting worse.
I'm not proud of England any more - seems to me we're selling the family silver, which might be OK if we were buying anything good with the proceeds - but as all we seem to be buying is bribes for millionaires, and a posing pouch for Cameron et al I'm just a bit pissed off (sorry Red)

No need to say sorry boatlady, your post is bloody spot on and I agree with every word you have said. At the moment I am trying to get the people of Scotland to STAY within the UK as I have said I was born in Newcastle and lived there until I was 13 years, and if Scotland votes to leave the UK I may have to apply for a house in Newcastle because I do not think we could manage as a country on its own, the only reason for SNP wanting to go it alone is Salmond does not want the title of First Minister he wants the title President or some other high falutin title.

clue: see how many photos you can find which show Cameron wearing an overcoat, or Blair, or any of our Ministers, unless they're at a funeral.)

Honestly, sometimes I'm so dense you'd think I was blonde

VOTE UKIP - YOU THUNK IT MAKES SENSE

I'm not so thunk as you drink I am, Sir!