Blah Blah

I think it is quite clear those manifesto pledges were dropped because she will never get them through the house, and is merely saving her party the embarassment. Let's remember why May wanted this election. She needed an increased majority, mainly to outflank the power of backbench rebels. Although we are going for Brexit, the Tory party is still split over the issue. The only way of guaranteeing getting the Brexit she wants, was to increase that majority. Similarly, Hammond wanted the freedom to raise taxes, and scrap tax credits and enact a few other things that have been forced U-turns. Again, he needed an increased majority for the same reasons. Instead, those backbench rebels now have more power. There will have to be cross party consensus, or government will stagger and stumble. And on Brexit, even with the DUP on board, she is unlikely to have the support of those Scottish Tory MPs for a hard Brexit. I would not be surprsied if we do end up with another referendum, just on whether we stay in the single market or not.

But the money given to the Royal Family is a proportion of the money made by the Crown Estate, with the treasury keeping most of it. So while the Queen gets ?40 million, the treasury gets ?285 million. It's a myth that the money paid to the Monarchy is tax payers money. It is not.

It is over for May and Hard Brexit. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/09/ruth-davidson-planning-scottish-tory-breakaway-challenges-theresa/

I challenge this idea of pedestrians and 'right of way'. Most of us meander in a way that flows with everything around us. How many times have any of us been walking behind a slow moving pedestrian for example, unable to pass by, and feeling irritated by it. It's the irritation that leads to these arguments of right of way. We all think we should be able to get from a-b without having to slow down, or stop, or go around anything! Personally, if I see a 6 year trundling along the pavement on a bicycle, I step out of their way with a smile. Have I really been inconvenienced by doing that? Of course not. People need to just live and let live a little. There are far more important things to worry about.

Class is defined by background, culture and upbringing, which is linked to a self preserving establishment and heirarchy. And wealth is one measure amongst many others. That heirarchy exists in America as it does in any society. If you grow up in the Hamptons, you are going to have a whole range of opportunities that you will not have if you grow up in the Bronx. Ivy league universities are full of the kids of top lawyers, doctors, politicians and business CEOs. There is an establishment in America just as much as there is here. The origins may be different, but it exists all the same.

rahrahrah Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > This thread is so revealing of the mindset of many > Conservative supporters. It speaks volumes. You also have to factor in the London experience. Go to he North East for example, and you won't see much meritocracy there. So much of this debate is shaped by the London factor. Yes there is opportunity here, and that one kid who grew up on an estate and did well at state school, in site of the general standard of the school, and got himself into a top university, again against the odds, and came to London etc, is just that one kid in thousands. Look around in any profession and ask how many of those at the top went to public school. Right there is the answer. We live in a plutocracy.

If Corbyn parachutes his son into a safe seat then he loses all credibility imo. Momentum are on the rocks too, split down the middle between Lansman and the hard left who have essentially been sidelined, as being a member of Momentum now requires also being a member of the Labour Party - a direct move to keep out those expelled former party members who were slowly starting to take over Momentum. I too wish I'd stuck with Yvette Cooper Otta, and on having the chance to chat with her recently, only felt that more. She really made Teresa may squirm at PMQs in a way that Corbyn failed to do so. And she was right. You can not trust anything Teresa May says. Political expediency is a primary requirement of being a Tory MP. The real fear here is twofold. The Tories will make this an election on Brexit, as too will the Libdems. They both will pick up seats from Labour. Corbyn has decided that a range of other issues are more important, but yet again, I think he has misjudged the public mood. You can bet that the Tories will field pro brexit candidates in those marginals they seek to gain that voted leave. And then there is everything else that is at risk. We will see further decimation of public services, further privatisation of the NHS, further cuts to welfare and that pension triple lock is probably no longer safe either. With an increased majority and these things as part of a manifesto, there will be nothing to stop them. What the Tories write in their Manifesto is extremely important. Cameron and Osborne deliberately left detail out of theirs, which is why they ran into trouble over tax credits and why Hammond ran into trouble over NI rises for the self employed. I would expect both of those things to be back on the table with an increased majority. And there will be people who swing to vote Tory, to ensure they get Brexit, who will be asking why they voted for all the other stuff when the impacts hit them. In that sense Corbyn is right to raise all the other issues, but his style is to speak from a revolutionary stance, and people are turned off by that. I get the sense that no-one is really listening to him. And he doesn't like engaging with MSM either. On Farron and his evangelical views. It's hard to know if that will impact on him. I suspect it's likely to have more of an impact on younger voters than older ones.

But the NUT voted in previous days not to affiliate with the Labour Party, because of the current leadership and there is evidence elsewhere of union support dropping away. There is also the issue of falling party donations. Do labour even have the money to effectively fight a General Election right now. Some think not. We seemed short of resources for the EU referendum campaign. Corbyn and his allies are in a world of their own. They don't look at polling, electoral data or any of the other things that every other party does to guage public support. Labour has continued to lose voting share in all regions but two since Corbyn took over. They think half a million members means a socialist revolution is coming - yet don't have any interest in the fact that 40% of that membership are in London and are predominently middle class. There is no mass rush to membership in the rest of the country. It will take a heavy electoral defeat to get the message through to them, and even then, they will blame everyone else but themselves. Momentum are already in a mess - split down the middle. On one side, the Lansman camp, who own Momentum and have ruled that to be a member of Momentum, you must also be a member of the Labour Party, and the other side, the hard left with it's numberous members expelled from the Labour Party, setting up a splinter group called Grassroots Momentum. Corbyn will be forced out, but that means a genuinely credible progressive left candidate, like Clive Lewis for example could stand. Dan Jarvis, Emily Thornberry, etc might come forward too. Corbyn has served his purpose, which is to open up the debate on how we make economics fairer and genuinely regenerate the economy for everyone. But he is not the person to deliver that.

If you keep U-Turning you never arrive anywhere. Agree that the LibDems will pick up marginals. Agree that Labour will be annihilated. Agree that Corbyn will try to stay on (backed by the membership) but he will be forced out, because the party will split and very few will stand with him, and no court will give the party name and ownership to him. As a Labour member, this is the only way to be rid of him, and as much as I hate the prospect of May till 2022, with Corbyn at the helm, we would have been looking at 2025 at least. So Labour finally gets itself a chance of a credible leader and rebuilds.

Sothwark completely messed up on the contract they negotiated - it's what happens when you put council employees up against hardened corporate contract negotiators and Lendlease fought tooth and nail to keep that contract secret (some of it was subsquently ruled to be published from court action). The whole thing is a disgrace from start to finish. And to think that some still serving council and cabinet members - like Fiona Colley, gave media interviews praising this whole development and the deal done with it - thinking far more about the increased level of council tax coming to the council coffers from these properties, along with the commercial business rates, than the wellbeing of ordinary borough residents that have been dsplaced. This is why it matters greatly, that local people continue to challenge every aspect of planning applications for the remainder of the Elephant and Castle redevelopment area, along with the Aylesbury estate redevelopment and the coming Old Kent Road area redevelopment plan. The worst thing about all of these redevelopments, is that they are creating stagnant ghost towns, where there is no community, no children playing, nothing - just bland investment flats and yet more shops. It's density and profit over meaningful architcture that actually improves peoples lives - and we've been there before.

Livingstone is compeletely wrong in his so called facts. Hitler did not involve himself with the Haavara aggreement until 1937, by which time Jews in Germany had already been stripped of all rights. It is completely crazy to see the Nazi's signing this agreement as anything other than a way to get Jews out of Germany - nothing to do with Zionism at all. Here are two good articles by people far more expert than Livingstone the armchair historian. https://medium.com/@josephweissman/but-ken-livingstone-is-right-google-the-haavara-agreement-ddca87ab123b http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/adolf-hitler-zionism-zionist-nazis-haavara-agreement-ken-livingstone-labour-antisemitism-row-a7009981.html And yes ????, I am utterly dismayed by the way my party is being ruined by idiots like Livingstne and Corbyn. What was I thinking when I voted for that completely inept idealogue.

I think what's interesting, is how quickly Trump has been pulled into line. Because of his inexperience, he has no option but to take the word of well established pentagon experts and military personel. So we are going to see exactly the same geo political policy from the Trump administration as we saw under Bush and Obama etc. All the hot air about Hilary Clinton being a hawk, was just that, hot air. The reality is that US politics, and Washington, is a well oiled machine, run by a whole number of people who make any radical diversion from the status quo impossible. The issue with Trump, is not what will he do, but just how impotent will he be. He is no idealogue, so that force of nature, that appalled so many of us during the persidential campaign, won't follow through in Washington, imo. In reality, he is another Bush, a puppet for those who are really in power. Think what Rumsfeld was to Bush, and you get my drift. The balls are elsewhere. As for the air strike. That was just a warning shot over the bows. Russia and America are not going to be the touchpaper of WW3. There will be a lot of posturing and at worst, a proxy war, of the likes seen in Afghanistan in the 80's, where both sides arm opposing forces. And while the media likes to label every rebel group in the region as IS, this is not at all true. There are enough rebel forces for the superpowers to arm and support if they want to remove Assad. For us in the West, the impacts will be the same as always. Refugee flight, and an endless stream of war zone footage and distressed civilians, none of which is quite relatable enough for people to really care that much about. I'm thinking of a line from 'Hotel Rwanda' which goes that 'when (western) people see dead Bosnians, they see someone like them. When they see dead Africans, they just see another dead African'. If anything meaningful is ever going to happen in international terms, it will require Russia and China to be on board (unlikely) and it will require far more than 30 'Stop the War' protesters outside of Downing Street every time the USA (but not Russia or Assad) engage in military internvention.

The group who find it hardest to live on benefits, are single people receiving JSA with no dependents. But for most of those, the new benefits cap, won't have an impact, except where housing is concerned is a small number of cases. For families with say, two dependents, the cap does start to bite, especially in areas of more expensive housing. People with more than two children are those who will be hardest hit. The disabled have also been hit hard with the removal of many extra benefits that pay for mobility and care packages. Programmes on TV tend to seek out those with no sense of personal responsibility and we can't pretend that isn't a problem. There are people who just keep having kid after kid, who think the state should pay for it all, and it is a generational problem in some ways. The question is, what does it take to change that way of thinking? How do you make someone resigned to a life on benefits, start to understand that benefits are not free money, but paid for by others who go out to work and pay tax, many of them just as poor as them. And how do you do that in a way that doesn't also penalise the far greater number of claimants who do want to try and get back into work if they can. The cap gets one thing right, in that it does not apply to those in part time work. That in itself should incentivise some to seek work. And I can perfectly understand why it's hard to have sympathy with anyone spending money on cigarettes and alcohol while on benefits. There is plenty of free help avaiable on the NHS to help people give up cigarettes.

How about addressing why those shops become vacant and stay vacant. At least half a dozen shops have been lost because of landlords whacking up the rents.

Actually scruffy mummy, many of us do lead community initiatives that genuinely benefit the community. Spending 21k on street furniture to promote shops when funding on much need front line services has been cut is questionable. That 21k btw comes from our taxes. If traders want advertising, they can pay for it themselves out of their own business costs.

The shared space areas though (the crossing, the pulse plaza, the canal path) aren't the problem, because everyone understands they are shared spaces. The problem is a designated cycle lane across a busy pedestrian area, where cyclists expect a right of way and pedestrians don't see the cycle lane. That's what doesn't work. So you either have to have a clearly designated cycle lane (different colour, on tarmac etc) or you have a the pavement as a shared space with no marked cycle lane. It's a psychological thing.

These guys are in Lambeth and have everything. http://www.directphotographic.co.uk/

Nigello. A cycle lane is for cyclists to use. If the council are stupid enough to put that on a pavement with a brick colour that matches the rest of the pavement, you can hardly blame the cyclist if a pedestrain walks into them without looking can you?

Can't get rid of the rats. They are everywhere in London, and every sewer and drain/ manhole is a gateway for them anyway. There's an interesting documentary about rats on Netflix at the moment. It's not for the faint of heart :D

Southwark are facing a ?15 million overspend on their social care budget alone, having used up all their surplus, offsetting central government cuts of 40% over the past few years. That is why many council services have been cut back. It does seem rather odd that money is available for lamp post banners and the like.

This has gone one and on since the lane was created and the council haven't listened to a single point. Now the lane is in such bad repair anyway on the kerbs that you would have to be a complete idiot to not see that the design and materials are not fit for purpose. For the record, I have had four collission with pedestrians who walked straight into my front wheel without looking. Even though I always cycle at walking pace, it did not stop the collision.

James is right in what he says. And also, the referendum campaign itself cut accross party lines, so it seems perfectly logical that it would do so in subsequent parliamentary business too. What Labour have to do now though is fiercely affect the kind of brexit we end up with. Labour should makes access to the single market a key demand and win the economic argument for it. The tories line will be whatever it takes to appeal to brexit views on immigration, so Labour should argue for other ways that disincentivise immigration, over sacrifising single market access. Then voters will have a clear choice between Conservative, Labour and Libdem (offering hard/soft and no brexit) in future elections, if that issue really matters to them. Farage is just a vile hypocrit anyway. And the election of Trump will also have a bearing on where we go as well. 18% of our exports are to America,and they have a trade deficit with us (of around $7billion). Trump isn't going to stand for that, nor does he want America importing goods - he wants to bring back mass US manufacturing (although how he will do that given the much higher production costs over China is anyones guess). So we could find ourselves in a position where we not only face tariffs into the EU, but also increased Tariffs on some of our exports to the US. That's 62% of our exports at risk of costing (10-20%) more to the customer. This is serious stuff.