Be Excellent To Each Other

So, the whole thing hangs on the premise that "0.04% of Labour Councillors are racists", just because they're the ones who've been caught out and expelled. The other 99.6% are all okay and you can bet the farm on that. Yeah, righto.

This absolutely isn't statistics, man. Not even at all.
It's laughable wishful thinking, borne of increasing desperation. Sorry.

But you're doing the same thing by saying that the fact that the other parties haven't sacked any means that they're not equally (or more) made up of racist councillors.

A party that's felt the need to examine its own and get rid of those that don't meet its standards is one that's doing its job. Should it have been paying more attention all along and got rid of them when their views first came to light? Absolutely. Doesn't change the fact that it's a tiny minority and they've been dealt with.

Saying "Well there's probably more" and trying to say that Labour as a result has a racism problem is crazy.

It's like deciding that I can't have cancer, because I've not been tested.

Schroedinger's racists

You do this sort of stuff a lot you know. It's very condescending

Mate. You're the one making assumptions about these 3 councilors being the only xenophobe tendency types in Labour, not me. I'm just the guy doing the laughing and pointing here (and am not saying there are NO racists, or 0.04% for that matter, in the Tory party because you know, that would be a bit silly).

I do like Schroedinger's racists though - bravo! *applause*

Flip's sake DavPaz, it's like you're following me round with a red fucking pen as against my posts. You don't like "swivel-eyed". I'm not allowed to smiley my own posts. I'm not allowed to say x or y.
Mate. If you carry on with this I'm seriously going to try and do ALL of these things in each and every post I make, just to see if you explode.

So... you're close to exploding?

Oh, wait. You said I'd explode.

Carry on.

David Silvester, the UKIP counciller who blamed flooding on gay marriage, was elected as a member of the Conservative Party who defected. Just last week, the Conservative party suspended a councillor over antisemtic comments. The week before that, one was caught growing cannabis. There's any number of such stories, because a corpus of ~5000 minimally vetted local politicians is sadly always going to contain some dickheads.

But sure, three suspended Labour councillors is statistically significant and a reasonable grounds to judge the entire party while the above examples from the Conservative party are isolated examples. Unless you want to conclude the Conservative Party is full of homophobic drug-dealing racists, that is.

So really, you're being swivel-eyed about this DavPaz.

I had to look it up. It... really only seems to apply to you Cavey.

The fanatical part that is. I haven't read closely enough to know if they're extreme.

/scratches head

Really? Mate, if you think that I, as your archetypal, middle aged 'small c' conservative, in my leafy little village, toddling off to Church each Sunday and helping to organise the village fair and suchlike, is "extreme and fanatical", well, you'd need to write off pretty much all of Cheshire and Shropshire as such, for one.

Of course, my post to DavPaz was a joke and good-natured parody, as he'll recognise. But, all joking aside, I do think it IS interesting that I am so perceived; this is an extremely left-leaning board and so I guess this is the genuine perception. Fascinating.

Anyone defending / agreeing with the Conservative party about anything is seen as a mentallist by the Beex circle-jerk.
Much like you think about anyone defending the Labour party

Well, I do admit to loathing Labour with a burning passion.
But what does always amuse me is when my detractors always start every sentence with "I'm not a Labour supporter but"; the Lady doth protests too much etc. I know what I am, what I'm doing and why I'm doing it - and will gladly tell anyone who wants to know, in very clear terms.

No. I don't. Because I think judging the actions of a party by 3/4000 of it's councillors is a bit silly. Do you see?

And how did you not understand that's what I was saying?

7087

Ironing.

Pretty sure it wasn't a response to you

Indeed. You raving Tory Maniac

Doc, I was responding to Russ' post.
Also I agree that making judgements about 99.6% of a party as based on 0.04% is flawed, which is what I've said. (In terms of my original post about Labour, I was more thinking of Livingstone's implosion - he is a major policy-making figure with gravitas, not x% or whatever - and Corbyn's very slow response to correct IMO)

Yup, that's better, normal service is restored.

lulz

Indeed, what about the other 0.36%?

(so sorry)

Heh.
Well yeah, there is that. Hoisted by one's own petard etc.

Cavey, do you not remember that Labour's previous leader is ethnically Jewish? And how he was constantly attacked by the Tory press using dog-whistle antisemitism (his father was called "the main who hated Britain" for being an eastern European Jewish refugee) during his time as leader?

Edit: the Tory press even this to have Ed Miliband smeared as some kind of crazy, weird foreigner for having two kitchens, FFS. Blatant dog-whsitle antisemitism.

Whataboutery aside, it's just another example of Labour somehow missing an open goal with the Whittingdale story (and other stuff as well). Every time they have an opportunity, it gets ballsed up. It's hopeless. The SNP are more credible then them right now.

Oh come on, that's going too far.

All emergency wards have been staffed above normal levels during the strikes, by actual consultants. So a better service is given. The doctors are categorically not in it for the money, as most can make far more elsewhere. The only part about money is not to want to reduce the money paid to emergency services, whilst increasing their hours.

Every independent review has shown that Hunt is refusing to compromise and is going against the best interests of the NHS. Even his own party members have raised motions to get him to reconsider, and the one person who backed his contract categorically stated that it should not be imposed against their will.

So on the one hand you have the entirety of the NHS, including those who are not affected by the changes. You also have all the medical associations and the vast majority of senior healthcare professionals, as well as MPs across all parties.

But apparently all of them are lying and Jeremy Hunt is the poor little underdog telling the truth? Even with the backing of the majority of the media, public support is in favour of the doctors.

But sure, fall for his every word. It's easier that way.

Ted Cruz has quit. Trump v Clinton is almost certainly going to be a thing.

@Curio

Yup that's me man, I fall for Jeremy Hunt's every word. It's gotta be better than the doctor's unions propaganda and bullshit after all; someone needs to make a stand against paying ever spiralling wage costs from the public purse. (And as I showed you from that 2006 link you, ahem, chose not to comment on, that someone ain't ever gonna be Labour, eh. +31% in one year, six figure salaries that we've now paid in perpituity 10 years and counting, in times when y'know, we totally could not afford to do so for reasons of their other catastrophic mismanagement of the economy, spending and banking regulation. Still, amazingly enough, the BMA thought their members were worth all that extra money - so that's a nice objective clarification in support of your case, with no nasty arguments either. 'Crass appeasement and utter capitulation' in action, huh. Lol)

Still, "it's not fair" etc etc yada yada

This is going to be hellish.

Speaking of which, I felt it was a bit off colour for Obama to make a joke about Guantanamo Bay recently.

Hmmm...

Hmmmmmmmmm...

Is there a general trend if politicians these recent years to rise further to the fore when they are further from centre than their (recent) predecessors, do you think? Of do we just have a particularly rich assortment of nasty idiots, morons and buffoons on the political scene recently? I know personality politics has always existed, but I can't think of a time in my lifetime when there were so many prominent figures that were all at least a bit odd, and at the worst end of them racist bigots.

I think it's a mixture of factors:

There's been an economic recession whuch is still ongoing (albeit it might be on the up and up l). In times like this people tend to look with more suspicion at "them" and what "they" get compared with their own lot. This particularly affects low paid workers whose jobs are more at threat from immigrant labour. It's pretty easy to jump on this and get a good support going. The vast majority of people vote on stuff that affects them or stuff they perceive to affect them, so jobs and immigration go hand in hand. And the feeling it is "their space"

There's also more coverage of what is going on in the US so we're more aware of it. I think that here in the UK we forget that America is still going through its troubled late adolescent stages. After doing the space race and being King of the Hill for a bit, it gasn't had much to shout of as a country for a while, so smaller things become more important. THe many poorer people feel short changed by what they see as the Establishment and someone who isn't The Establishment can offer a way of getting one back.



I think living in the states cannot be easy for many: employment rights are poor, health care is expensive so might as well not exist for many, outdated ideas from religious ideologies have a lot of weight in the laws, education is expensive, you'll get shot and one can drive a stick shift

A politician is possibly a reflection of the people.

You had lost me until this bit:



This is language that I can understand.

Sometimes I switch it up and type in North Welsh dialects.

When I mentioned one stat in the climate change thread the other day, you ranted about cherry picked data, even though I had made no suggestion it meant anything in the wider picture. Now you're using one pay rise from one year over a decade ago about a group of people who aren't even junior doctors to reason about the junior doctors. That's some good work.

Have some better data courtesy of the Economist:

When you picked the first 3 months of this, an El Nino year, to allude that this somehow substantiated global warming (and in the light of your earlier telling me I needed to go on a stats course), then yes, I did laugh loudly and heartily, Doc, 'some good work indeed'. You make it so easy; in your head you're scoring points or something, whereas more often than not, you're belming mate, sorry. (And I say that as someone who actually thinks you're a good egg, and I myself a self-confessed belm-merchant for much of the time also. The basic difference between you and me, Doc, is that I'm honest and realistic with myself and others about my somewhat finite cerebral powers?)

Let's briefly look at your latest example; you criticise me for providing a link to 2006 - but this was when GPs were awarded their loads-a-money contracts by the then Labour government, with >30% increase in their incomes in the first year alone? No wonder the BMA thought Labour were such nice chaps, not like the nasty old Tories who don't want to pay umpteen overtime for every last hour or whatever, and who aren't signing those kind of blank cheques.

The contrast could not be clearer, and this is the point of course. You seem to think it's some amazing revelation that GPs aren't junior doctors - no shit, Sherlock. There, in a nutshell, is the difference between Labour and the Tories, and it's relevant because this is the last time that Labour 'negotiated' a big step-change in ANY doctors' contract with the NHS, which we can now benchmark, and compare to Hunt's approach. Obviously, duh. (According to your rationale, him doling out a 31% annual pay rise would've been better....)

As for all that other guff (sorry, "better data"), this appears to be about global NHS spending (and their ludicrous mismanagement of spending obscene amounts on temporary staff which in any actual business would've been ringing massive alarm bells etc. - again, all as previously discussed), not even the subject at hand. SoI think you'll find that my data as regarding actual doctors' contracts is considerably more relevant to the points *I* am making; if you want to (yet again) widen the debate to encompass entire NHS budgets and in relation to EU or whatever else then knock yourself out, just don't tell me my far more relevant and on-topic information is invalid. Ta.

I'd have thought that good English was pretty important for a councillor.

He could have a translator, I guess.

I think it would but I dunno.

Wait - distributing anonymous leaflets or distributing Anonymous leaflets?

Good news in Scotland; the Tories have doubled their number of seats to 31 and are now (easily) the main Opposition. Labour are now finally out of the game in Scotland; the Tories have at last turned a corner with their (IMO) incredibly effective and youthful leader, Ruth Davidson. What a lass!

More importantly, though, the SNP have lost ground and no longer have a parliamentary majority, and with it any "claimed mandate" for yet another Neverendum. Oooh dear, another massive setback for Independence, and the trajectory seems even clearer than it has been. The only thing they (remotely) have left is Brexit; if that goes the way I expect it to (i.e. ~55% in favour of IN) - they're screwed for 20+ years, and no amount of 'Eckernomics' or bullshit cherry-picked propaganda will ever change that.

Still, as a Conservative Unionist notwithstanding, I must remind myself not to be too gleeful. If it wasn't for the hapless SNP and their, ahem, tactics (and antics), as culminating in that infamous Miliband in Salmond's top pocket poster that, at a single stroke, did more for the Tory vote than any newspaper headline or other media, we wouldn't have a majority WM Conservative government, as all the polls retrospectively showed. Great timing guys, bless ya.

Planning backed for listed building

Then

fire at listed building

Re: Hunt's weekend working row with the NHS; http://gu.com/p/4tqaz?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Tweet



Seems pretty reasonable to me.

yeah, but *look a blue car*

'For now' out of the game, I'd say - never say never, after all. And certainly there will be those who spin it as 'no mandate', and it's arguable, but given that the SNP have increased their number of seats (and have steadily done so since 2003 - they lost some from 99-03), they can claim success. Perhaps wiser to wait for next time when, if the trend continues, they'll be the first party to ever have a majority. In an election system that seems to be setup to make that unlikely.

Um, the SNP did have a majority, in the last parliament.
They just lost said majority.