Be Excellent To Each Other

Considering he was born in Welling, I would expect he has solely British citizenship, so to withdraw it would leave him stateless, which is not permitted as per your quote.

Potentially so, but I can see why you can't have someone who's not permitted residency in any country. Unless it's Tom Hanks.

Potentially so...? Crikey, that's one high bar you've got there, man. Begrudgingly have to agree with you though; the civilised "we" can't just leave people stateless, however odious and malign to us all they might be.

Only 45% of them

A UKIP MP then. I was inevitable I guess. So sick of seeing all these right wing fuck faces all over the media these days, whether it's UKIP or the fucking Tories promising that it's safe for racists to vote for them because they are some despicable cunts too just like UKIP. Just make it all stop.

Margate isn't quite the story here either. A somewhat unique constituency, with a sitting MP resigning his seat to give rise to a by election. On that point, Kudos to UKIP where it is due - they didn't need to do this, but it does mean that the gamble that they took here gives them significantly more credibility for winning in an open contest, rather than switching the seat.

The bigger story is the Heywood seat, where a sitting Labour MP died (the official opposition, in a safe seat, in a by election 9 months before a General election). Any historical statistics say that should have been an increased majority (Sympathy, dissatisfaction with government) and it went to a recount. If this was 12 months ago as opposed to today, I don't think Milliband would have survived that.

Fuck that. They are winning votes by appealing to simpletons with horrible views. The main two parties should not be pandering to that bullshit and shame on the Tories for doing so.

They don't have a lot of choice, UKIP are winning seats and they at least need to look at why that is happening, you don't get a seat in parliament from the votes of simpletons with horrible views alone!

I think it's a somewhat unique situation. I'm not saying UKIP won't win more seats but Carswell was immensely popular with his constituents. There's a very large extent to which they have gone along with him rather than UKIP as such. Right from the outset he was a shoe-in.

It's not going to stop though, Mark. In fact, the Right is building up a massive head of steam, seems to me.

I can't vote for that.

You're not in the least concerned about UKIP splitting the right-wing vote and letting Labour claim seats they wouldn't otherwise have won, then? That happened a number of time in the US with the Tea Party, and to my mind the parallels are clear. I imagine there's a few Tory MPs this morning wondering if opposing AV was the smartest move they could have made.

Margate isn't quite the story here either. A somewhat unique constituency, with a sitting MP resigning his seat to give rise to a by election. On that point, Kudos to UKIP where it is due - they didn't need to do this, but it does mean that the gamble that they took here gives them significantly more credibility for winning in an open contest, rather than switching the seat.

The bigger story is the Heywood seat, where a sitting Labour MP died (the official opposition, in a safe seat, in a by election 9 months before a General election). Any historical statistics say that should have been an increased majority (Sympathy, dissatisfaction with government) and it went to a recount. If this was 12 months ago as opposed to today, I don't think Milliband would have survived that.

Unless you're a labour MP

You're not in the least concerned about UKIP splitting the right-wing vote and letting Labour claim seats they wouldn't otherwise have won, then? That happened a number of time in the US with the Tea Party, and to my mind the parallels are clear. I imagine there's a few Tory MPs this morning wondering if opposing AV was the smartest move they could have made.

I'll concede it's a concern, but there are mitigating factors. For one, opinion polls are already putting the Tories in the lead, even allowing for UKIP, which from my perspective is a double bonus. Obviously it's good that the Tories are leading per se; I can only expect this lead to increase as we head towards GE when the trickle down effects of the now full-blooded, ever strengthening economic recovery make themselves more apparent and pre-GE 'inducements' are no doubt put in place on top.

However, it's also good that the combined right-of-centre and moderate-right vote is so large as well.

Talking to people, my political barometer tells me that some critical mass has been achieved, and the zeitgeist has really moved on, even in 12 months. For me, it's something of a thrill to find myself to the left of that zeitgeist; something that has not happened since the mid to late 1980s! (What it must feel like for you guys must be quite something )

There is no question; benefits culture and the like is coming to an end. That might be ugly, unfortunate, but it's a fact. Too many people I know have simply had enough and they don't want to hear any more excuses from the Political Class telling them that they know better. Those days are waning fast.

One opinion poll has shown them ahead after Cameron announced his tax break and then they immediately fell behind again. Maybe hold off on your Daily Mail wankfest for a bit.

You want to listen to yourself sometimes, you massive fucking twat.

It is hard to decide what was more repugnant at the Tory Party Conference recently: the sight of a packed auditorium in Birmingham applauding the prime minister's pledge to cut the benefits of 10million families, or the applause that greeted his pledge to scrap human rights legislation.

Trying to fathom the mindset of those who get their jollies at the prospect of reducing millions of their fellow citizens to destitution is quite a challenge. But, nonetheless, if we are to understand the attributes of your average Tory, it is one that has to be taken on. In this regard the legendary words of Nye Bevan in 1948 have yet to be bettered. Bevan asserted that:

no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.

The 'bitter experiences' the former Labour minister for health recounts were rooted in a poverty stricken childhood in South Wales, when working class families such as his lived a precarious existence on the precipice of disaster and destitution without an NHS or welfare state to protect them. Those things arrived in Britain courtesy of the 1945 Labour government, of which he was a key member, and in 2014 are in the process of being rolled back.

Who the hell do I vote for?

I will never vote for UKIP, Labour or Conservatives. In the past I have voted for Liberal or Green Party. Which I think will be a lost vote down here (it's going to be UKIP or Conservative in May)

Where does the liberal protest vote go?

Malc

There is no question; benefits culture and the like is coming to an end.

Caring capitalism was a blip, from 1945 to the end of the 70s, he says: a one-off created by the second world war and the founding of the welfare state. “Capitalism is going to continue to increase inequality. And people are preparing now for what follows capitalism. If people are informed and activated, it will be something that’s more liberal and fair; if they’re not, it will be draconian and terrifying. I think people in power are preparing for the latter. That’s why $4.2bn worth of military equipment has been transferred to local police authorities in America over the last 15 years. Why London authorities are buying water cannons and why Thomas Piketty’s book is causing such a stir.”

If he is right, the implications for capitalism are utterly negative: we face a low-growth capitalism, combined with high levels of inequality and low levels of social mobility. If you are not born into wealth to start with, life, for even for the best educated, will be like Jane Eyre without Mr Rochester.

Is Piketty the new Karl Marx? Anybody who has read the latter will know he is not. Marx's critique of capitalism was not about distribution but production: for Marx it was not rising inequality but a breakdown in the profit mechanism that drove the system towards its end. Where Marx saw social relationships – between labour and managers, factory owners and the landed aristocracy – Piketty sees only social categories: wealth and income. Marxist economics lives in a world where the inner tendencies of capitalism are belied by its surface experience. Piketty's world is of concrete historical data only. So the charges of soft Marxism are completely misplaced.

Piketty has, more accurately, placed an unexploded bomb within mainstream, classical economics. If the underlying cause of the 2008 bank catastrophe was falling incomes alongside rising financial wealth then, says Piketty, these were no accident: no product of lax regulation or simple greed. The crisis is the product of the system working normally, and we should expect more.

One of the most compelling chapters is Piketty's discussion of the near-universal rise of what he calls the "social state". The relentless growth in the proportion of national income consumed by the state, spent on universal services, pensions and benefits, he argues, is an irreversible feature of modern capitalism. He notes that redistribution has become a question of "rights to" things – healthcare and pensions – rather than simply a problem of taxation rates. His solution is a specific, progressive tax on private wealth: an exceptional tax on capital, possibly combined with the overt use of inflation.

The policy logic for the left is clear. For much of the 20th century, redistribution was handled through taxes on income. In the 21st century, any party that wants to redistribute would have to confiscate wealth, not just income.

You would expect the Wall Street Journal to dissent, but the power of Piketty's work is that it also challenges the narrative of the centre-left under globalisation, which believed upskilling the workforce, combined with mild redistribution, would promote social justice. This, Piketty demonstrates, is mistaken. All that social democracy and liberalism can produce, with their current policies, is the oligarch's yacht co-existing with the food bank for ever.

Piketty's Capital, unlike Marx's Capital, contains solutions possible on the terrain of capitalism itself: the 15% tax on capital, the 80% tax on high incomes, enforced transparency for all bank transactions, overt use of inflation to redistribute wealth downwards. He calls some of them "utopian" and he is right. It is easier to imagine capitalism collapsing than the elite consenting to them.

like all anyone needs to do to earn that sort of wage is to just be an honest and hard worker

Goodness.

Fuck you, successful people. You don't deserve it.