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[British Politics] is going to the polls.
Flippy_D
Digital ConquistadorLondonRegistered User regular
Digital ConquistadorLondonRegistered User regular
It's time.
The First Debate
A New Hope
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0QsSoV0SRo
The Second Debate
The (Murdoch) Empire Strikes Back
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqis1mkS2CE&feature=player_embedded
The Final Debate
Return of the Jedi?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7h9BbTYkgk
The First Debate
A New Hope
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0QsSoV0SRo
The Second Debate
The (Murdoch) Empire Strikes Back
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqis1mkS2CE&feature=player_embedded
The Final Debate
Return of the Jedi?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7h9BbTYkgk
Flippy_D on
0
Posts
In all seriousness though, tell me if you think the OP needs something extra.
The BBC also acts as a ballast on other news channels by setting the tone and reporting standards. It's not perfect, but take it away in favour of profit driven showing aaaand you get America.
Whether everyone else would is a different question. Look at the 6music debacle. I bet you don't give a shit about 6music, but other people do.
edit: What flippyd said.
Really does capture the "playground" feel that british politics has.
Exactly, the question becomes, why does it need that many channels when its goal is to be an independent station that provides SOME entertainment? If I want tonnes of channels I have Sky, thats why I pay a big, expensive Sky subscription.
EDIT: Im not saying do away with the BBC, but it doesnt need to be all it is now. There are asian networks already for instance.
(Then I el oh el).
Oh well
It seems fairly in flux. The Guardian
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Well, out the main channels, BBC Alba is not a full-time BBC channel, it just produces some programmes in Gaelic.
and BBC Worldwide channels are not technically part of the BBC; they're not paid for with license fee moneies. They are a separate company that uses advertising revenue to fund the channels
They're trying to scare their readership. The Spectator loves "BRITAIN IS GOING TO THE DOGS". Every time I read it I facepalm :<
Im pretty sure every debate is on a publicly accessible channel.
That's not its goal.
If you think the BBC should be something other than it is, it's really down to the BBC Trust rather than the government directly. Also bear in mind that lots of channels doesn't necessarily mean lots of content, and that the minority language and children's channels are probably the most in line with the BBC's public service mandate.
Speaking of the BBC, Paul Lewis is interviewing each of the would-be Chancellors for Money Box, Alastair Darling is up already (link goes straight to the player, which autoplays):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/your_money/8627003.stm
Oh UKIP, you crazy maddened xenophobic fools, how you light up my day with your mental-ism.
They do kind of have a point about the computer simulation thing.
They're not an EU agency. They were going to end up taking some serious flak whether they allowed planes to fly or not, though.
but they're listening to every word I say
Nick Clegg is leader of the Liberal Democrats.
I'd rather see the loss of £200 million+ than the loss of x number of lives.
I see their reasoning. If not for the EU, the BNP could have been sacrificing immigrants to the volcano and its god wouldn't have gotten angry and forced it to erupt.
In the election campaign here in Britain, there is a big blood-splattered hole we are all supposed to ignore. We are at war. It is a war that 64 percent of Brits believe is "unwinnable" and should end now. It is a war that has killed 281 British people and an untold, uncounted number of Afghan civilians. It is a war that costs £4.5bn a year. It is a war to keep Hamid Karzai in power - even though he announced last week: "I swear I am going to join the Taliban." Yet the three biggest political parties are shouting their slogans over the hole as if it does not exist.
So what are they refusing to see? Hamid Karzai was picked by the US and British governments as the Afghan leader most likely to serve their interests, and his regime exists solely because of massive military support from them. Yet - in a sign of how Afghan opinion has tipped after eight years of war - even he now speaks with rage against them. He says the US and Britain's planned military assault on Kandahar this summer must not go ahead because the local population strongly oppose it. He warns there is "a fine line between resistance and revolt" and soon "this revolt will turn into a resistance and I will join it."
Now Karzai is following his own script, the authors of this war have dropped all pretence that they wanted an independent democratic government in Afghanistan. For example, Rudi Giuliani, who was one of the leading neoconservatives making the case for invasion, just said: "Karzai's there because of us, he's our creation, we put him there... I'm not sure we want to engage in the fiction that we're dealing with a democratically elected [leader]... that'd be a major fiction." He said that now Karzai fleetingly follows his people's demands rather than ours, there "might be grounds for shooting" him, and "we need to think about what comes after." He then added, with no irony: "This guy's a thug."
So - we are currently sending young people to kill and die in order to prop up a sort-of-kinda-elected President who (like his people) opposes almost all our actions and is threatening to defect to The Enemy. You might think that is worth discussing. Yet when Afghanistan comes up in this election, the sole subject of complaint is that our helicopters don't work as well as they should.
Why would Karzai, and so many Afghans, and Brits like me, turn like this, after welcoming the toppling of the vile Taliban in 2001? Here's a moment that distils why. Last month, General Stanley McCrystal, the NATO commander, was talking about how he guards the massive military convoys that move through the country. He said: "We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat."
That wasn't considered a story. It didn't dominate the headlines. It was considered a normal thing to say. But imagine somebody bragging that he had shot "an amazing number" of British people, but "none has ever proven to be a threat." How would we react? Ah, the main political parties say, but all these complications and casualties are worth it, because there is a wider driving purpose to the war. They say we must stay for one reason: to fight jihadism. If we don't fight them there, we'll have to fight them here. If we don't deprive them of bases, they'll be hitting our places.
At first glance, this may sound persuasive. But look closer. Al Qaeda's attacks don't originate in these "bases", and don't require them: 9/11 was plotted in Hamburg and Florida; 7/7 was planned out in Yorkshire. Anything that could be done in a cave in Torah Borah could be done on a mountaintop in Yemen or a moor outside Manchester: it's highly mobile. If we charge in with Bazookas to conquer one of these places, they simply move to another - and goad us to follow. General Jim Jones, Barack Obama's National Security Advisor, says there are just 100 foreign jihadis in the whole of Afghanistan. They've simply packed up and gone elsewhere. So who are we fighting there? The CIA says they are "a tribal, localised insurgency" who "see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power" and have "no goals" outside the country.
But while the war is catching or killing very few jihadis, it is creating a huge number of them. After every bombing and every massacre, there is a swelling pools of relatives who scream at the camera that they now want to become suicide bombers. Those tapes are beamed back to Britain - where they are used to radicalize young Muslims. I have interviewed dozens of ex-jihadis - and they almost all named those videos as a key point in pushing them over from repellent religious bigotry into overtly planning violence. The 7/7 bombers themselves named it; the Detroit pantsbomber was howling about Afghanistan as he tried to detonate his scrotum.
If you really loathe and oppose jihadism, you have to soberly assess the best way to erode its power over time. Charging around with a blowtorch isn't putting out the fire. Indeed, the jihadists say quite clearly that they want the war to continue for as long as possible. Osama Bin Laden brags that it gives him extra recruits and will "bankrupt" the West.
The other arguments that used to be used to justify the war have become a polite after-cough. Women's rights? My friend Malalai Joya is the most popularly elected woman in Afghanistan. She has been expelled from the parliament and silenced in the media for pointing out that "things have not improved for women," because the occupiers have "transferred power to fundamentalist warlords who are just like the Taliban."
The defenders of the war are reduced to chanting "Back Our Boys!" To use the troops as rhetorical human shields to shut down democratic debate about whether they should carry on killing and dying is the worst insult to the soldiers I know. If the only way to Back Our Boys was to demand they stay on an unwinnable battlefield, no disastrous war would ever have been stopped, and we would still be fighting East of Suez. If you really want to back our boys, get them out of the crosshairs and into their homes.
You may think I'm wrong about all this. I respect that - but don't you at least think this should be part of the election debate? Don't you think you should be presented with a choice? Why has it been left to the small, unfairly marginalized Green Party to speak for 64 percent of the public on this?
In Israel earlier this year, the former Labour MP Lorna Fitzsimons reassured the massed ranks of the Israeli establishment that growing British disgust at the military occupation of Palestinian lands was nothing to worry about because "public opinion does not influence foreign policy in Britain. Foreign policy is an elite issue." She was saying - don't worry; Britain isn't a real democracy - its foreign policy serves the interests of geopolitics and corporations and elites, not those messy, fickle, inconvenient majorities. It's a view that spreads far beyond our policies towards Israel/Palestine. In a fascinating leaked CIA report on European public opinion, they say they are "counting on public apathy about Afghanistan" and boast that so far leaders have been "enabled... to ignore voters". They are worried the charge into Kandahar could cause disgust, but the British election will be over by then.
This muffled cry from the caves of Kandahar is a useful counter-point to this election. It reminds us that, while the small differences between the main parties at election time do matter, they often aren't the primary force that transforms the country. Almost every civilising change in Britain - from feminism to worker's rights to opposing bad wars - came from ordinary citizens banding together and demanding it all year, every year, whether there was an election or not, no matter how unlikely it seemed, until they prevailed. The British ambassador to Afghanistan Mark Sedwill says we will be there "for a generation" more. If you want to prove him wrong, then you have to demand it publicly - long after the terribly limited ballot papers are gathered into a fake middle and tossed away.
Personally I think grounding the planes was the right thing to do, but there are going to be plenty of people that will insist that at least some of the danger was theoretical, and there probably were areas of the sky that were closed that aircraft could have safely navigated.
This of course glosses over the other question of which bits of airspace they were.
There have been claims that its been safe to fly in some areas for days, so if they do have any validity then I'd expect the airlines to seriously push for some financial support from the EU due to this.
That is the spinniest article that has ever spun. Karzai isn't really threatening to join the Taliban. It is simply a joke.
Like "I swear if my boss bothers me again I'll shoot him!"
Nor is McCrystal saying the military randomly shot folks to protect the convoys, as implied. He said that "none of them proved a threat" not that they weren't a threat and they shouldn't have shot them, that they were, but they couldn't actually threaten the US military.
edit: context is key.
but they're listening to every word I say
I have 0.047 of a vote here in Stockport. Beat that!
edit
They have the average voter having .25 votes. That makes no sense
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
The power of voters in this constituency is based on the probability of the seat changing hands and its size.
While you might think that every vote counts equally, where you live in the UK has a huge effect on your power to influence the election.
The average UK voter has 5x more voting power than voters in Oldham West & Royton.
Average UK voter power
0.253
The average UK voter only has the power of 0.253 votes. This is because most of us live in safe seats, where the outcome is pretty much certain regardless of how we vote.
Oldham West & Royton ranks #498 out of 650 constituencies in the Voter Power Index.
UK constituency marginality
We can be almost certain that 60% of seats will NOT change hands in the general election (very safe or ultra safe seats).
Further information
Marginality
The more times a seat changes hands, the more marginal it is deemed to be.
1997
Lab2001
Lab2005
LabConstituency size
+4.26%
This constituency is bigger than average, which means a voter here is less likely to affect the national result.
Number of voters: 71,346
Average constituency: 68,433
2005 election data52% of votes discarded
51.63% of those who voted in Oldham West & Royton in 2005 did not vote for the winning candidate. These votes count for nothing in the First Past the Post system.
2005 General Election result
Winner takes all
Note: there have been boundary changes for this constituency since the last election. These are notional results.
You're from Oldham? You poor son of a bitch.
You're from the South. Have you been there lately? Jesus christ. Fecking southeners. You can't even run away from it, the sickness is inside you.