General UK politics

But Scotland wants to stay which is why its time Scotland stands on its own feet rather than just thoughts.

Nishankly wrote:But Scotland wants to stay which is why its time Scotland stands on its own feet rather than just thoughts.

but my point is Scotland will get far more from staying in the UK than it will if it leaves the UK then goes cap in hand to the EU. lets not forget the UK put far more into the EU than it ever got back.

also the way things are going in Europe the EU could collapse in the next few years what will Scotland do then. the EU has never been as weak as it is now.

I suppose we will see if there will be a UK left when we're through with this

BarrileteCosmico wrote:I suppose we will see if there will be a UK left when we're through with this

the UK will be fine. as soon as we are fully out of the EU things will sort themselves out and all the scare mongering will be gone.

Unique wrote:lets not forget the UK put far more into the EU than it ever got back.

That argument is actually heavily disputed.

VivaStPauli wrote:

Unique wrote:lets not forget the UK put far more into the EU than it ever got back.

That argument is actually heavily disputed.

if every country got back more than it put in where would the money come from.

That doesn't mean the UK put in "far more than it ever got back"; especially if you were to factor in benefits such as freedom of movement, lasting peace, and access to the free market; which are quantifiable only to varying degrees.

The question about peace is: on what and on whose terms?

I get the sense many people (like Viva) are happy to capitulate in every sense to any hostile foreign agent.

These people used to be known as quislings, and were dealt the harshest punishments.

What hostile foreign agent is being capitulated to? I don't even get the thing that I'm about to disagree with this time.

I think he is calling you a traitor

...But why?

VivaStPauli wrote:What hostile foreign agent is being capitulated to? I don't even get the thing that I'm about to disagree with this time.

Tibetan monks, duh.

Recent polls show a majority of the French no longer feel safe, anywhere. It's these bloody Tibetans...

In a Pew Research Center survey in late 2016, 57% of registered voters said crime had gotten worse since 2008, even though BJS and FBI data show that violent and property crime rates declined by double-digit percentages during that span.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/21/5-facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/

What people feel about safety doesn't necessarily align with reality.

BarrileteCosmico wrote:

In a Pew Research Center survey in late 2016, 57% of registered voters said crime had gotten worse since 2008, even though BJS and FBI data show that violent and property crime rates declined by double-digit percentages during that span.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/21/5-facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/

What people feel about safety doesn't necessarily align  with reality.

You leave out the fact that the murder rate has gone up 10% in 2014-15 and experts say it has probably gone up more since then. Violent crime went up 3% in the same period.
It seems to me that people's sense of this change is a reasonable explanation for why they think crime is getting worse.
It certainly validates Trump's narrative.

More importantly they are asking people 'is there more crime' and then saying 'noo look at the RATE, it's going down!'
Maybe they should ask people if they think the rate is going up then for goodness' sake.


My opinion about this argument generally has been that whether something is better than 20 years ago has nothing to do with how good it is now or whether it is getting worse now.
The violent crime rate was 373 per 100,000, which is 1 per 268.
Assume the average person is close to 5 family members and 5 friends, just for the sake of argument, so multiply 1/268 by 11 and assuming all things are equal (they aren't, some communities will be more disproportionately affected then others) you have a 1 in 24 chance of having either been a victim of violent crime or knowing someone you are personally close to being a victim of a violent crime.

That doesn't impress me, especially considering all the minor crime that blights people's lives.

After hearing from an actual police officer that both the police and the media here are being told to cover up criminal cases related to people of foreign descent, I find it hard to trust these crime statistics that make everything look like it's been improving in recent time. I completely understand that they want to prevent these criminal cases from becoming fuel for the far-right nutheads, but holding information back from the public and the victims just seems shady, and will definitely lead to distrust in the police once people realize that they're doing it. I wonder if other countries do the same thing.

Thimmy wrote:After hearing from an actual police officer that both the police and the media here are being told to cover up criminal cases related to people of foreign descent, I find it hard to trust these crime statistics that make everything look like it's been improving in recent time. I completely understand that they want to prevent these criminal cases from becoming fuel for the far-right nutheads, but holding information back from the public and the victims just seems shady, and will definitely lead to distrust in the police once people realize that they're doing it. I wonder if other countries do the same thing.

its the same in Britain and Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal

Unique wrote:

Thimmy wrote:After hearing from an actual police officer that both the police and the media here are being told to cover up criminal cases related to people of foreign descent, I find it hard to trust these crime statistics that make everything look like it's been improving in recent time. I completely understand that they want to prevent these criminal cases from becoming fuel for the far-right nutheads, but holding information back from the public and the victims just seems shady, and will definitely lead to distrust in the police once people realize that they're doing it. I wonder if other countries do the same thing.

its the same in Britain and Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal

@Thimmy: You heard that from one guy. How is that more trustworthy than the entire rest of society?

@Unique: You say "Britain and Germany", yet your "source" only mentions Britain...

What do you mean by "the entire rest of society"? All I'm saying is that I'm not going to blindly trust these statistics that make everything look all honky dory. Especially not, when I know from personal experience that the reality doesn't necessarily add up with these statistics.

And that is fine, Thimmy, I'm not calling you a crackpot, I'm just saying that one police officer is just a single person, and he's contradicting all official statements.

It could of course be a vast conspiracy theory, but that one guy could also be talking shit, or be mistaken, or have a shitty superior that actually told him to cover something up, which in turn wouldn't mean it happens all over Sweden.

I don't mean to discount such discounts, if suddenly there's a dozen police officers saying that, instead of one, you'll find me changing my tune.

A good friend of mine's brother in law also works for the German federal police, and he also says that immigrant crimes are underreported. In his case, I know he used to be a f*cking skinhead as a kid, so I'm not taking him seriously. This anecdote is just to explain my skepticism a bit, to you. Because on the other hand, I know two cops in my town, which has a lot of asylum seekers, and they tell me crime didn't change much. Petty theft went a bit up, but they tell me it still went up less than you'd statistically expect from that many people.
They might also be bullshitting, but they at least are twice as many police officers as the other guy, and they're backed by official statistics. Of course the government and statisticians might lie to us, but, frankly, such a conspiracy would take more effort and discipline to maintain than I think our government possesses. There would be more leaks if there was such a conspiracy. We can't even tap foreign leader's phones without everybody finding out, and that's done by the bloody spooks.

Carswell quits UKIP

So basically UKIP have No MPs anymore and recently lost their key donor. Interesting to see how the party moves on from here.

Meanwhile

Time to come together & put our differences aside. If @edballs and @michaelgove can, anyone can. #MoreinCommon#TheLastLeg special on NOW pic.twitter.com/qQoGBGUzcD

— Channel 4 (@Channel4) June 16, 2017

What did I just watch

The idea that Corbyn is a truly authentic man who has stuck to his principles through thick and thin is prevalent even amongst his fiercest critics. It is also his greatest weapon when it comes to keeping the left (and the youth vote) onside while in reality triangulating as ably –  if not more so –  as any Blairite. Labour’s policy on immigration in this election was well to the right of the 2015 manifesto. Miliband was pilloried by the left for proposing ‘controls on immigration’, which slogans on mugs aside, amounted to a two year ban on EU migrants receiving benefits. Corbyn’s manifesto went even further than May herself by pledging to end free movement of people from the EU come what may in the Brexit negotiations.  While the effect of this was to almost entirely drain the ‘immigration debate’ from the election in a way unimaginable even six months ago, this was only due to the total capitulation of both Corbyn and the broader left on the issue. The immigration policy in Labour’s 2017 manifesto was more extreme in concrete terms than what most of the Leave side were proposing in the referendum -  in essence assuring full withdrawal from the single market, whatever the consequences -  and yet Corbyn’s supporters on the left accepted it because they refuse to believe that Corbyn himself, as a man of principle, can really mean it.
While every word Miliband (or indeed virtually anyone else who is not Corbyn) is treated with suspicion, despite the pro-single market arguments of the contemporary Blair being inherently far less punitive on immigration than Corbyn’s position, Corbyn is given the benefit of the doubt every time, even when the policy is written down in black and white. This is triangulation of the highest order, enabling Labour to appeal to hardline anti-migrant Ukip voters while also keeping the trust of the ‘cosmopolitan’ urban left. It is doubtful any other Labour leader would have been capable of achieving this. Yet the faith in Corbyn’s supposedly unshakeable core beliefs is such that his party’s policies on immigration barely register amongst people who would be incandescent with rage if another Labour leader even vaguely gestured towards them.

http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/2017/06/13/reassessing-corbynism-success-contradictions-and-a-difficult-path-ahead/

Donald Corbyn.
That feel when your populism has to appease the 'far right' because only the elite like globalism.

Labour now has an 8 point lead over Tories in latest poll

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-poll-tories-yougov-latest-lead-conservatives-jeremy-corbyn-vs-theresamay-a7828081.html

So is Theresa May the worst PM in the last 50 years or what?