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[Hiberno-Britannic Politics] Million To One Shot Now Odds On Favourite
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I mean, yeah. But nobody cared about that except the Fox News crowd.
nothing that coherent, I'm afraid.
Some of it was.
The rest of it was to do with Miliband's dad being too "socialist". As was illustrated in that Sun "expose" on him that ran with the screaming headline "THE MAN WHO HATED BRITAIN!"
You know... years after Miliband's dad had passed.
But the whole bacon sarnie thing was just optics.
Bear in mind that Sky was Murdoch-owned for most of its existence as well.
The BBC's historically been good but I think there's some compelling evidence that something's gone wrong with its political slant in recent years.
With the benefits of hindsight I think we can infer that quite a few people in the Labour party had significantly rumpled underwear also.
There is absolutely no comparison between Fox News and either Sky or the BBC, for all the recent faults of the latter.
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Fear is what's gone wrong with them. They're fully aware that the government in power would happily take them apart the moment they had enough justification to do so, and they're desperately trying not to give them that chance.
Failure to keep to their commitment to be impartial (ie; give coverage to the far-right swivel-eyed loons) would get the Murdoch Empire using the same rhetoric on them that they use on judges and MPs who had the sheer gall to acknowledge reality and/or 48% of the voting public and start calling them Enemies of Britain, and the government would start looking at ways to cut them down.
The BBC's currant approach is to huddle in the corner and say please don't hurt me, in the hope that they'll survive until things will change politically enough for them not to have to do that anymore.
(And despite all of this, they are the sole source of information that my parents get, and they still get the impression that this entire thing is a disaster, so they're not even close to the tabloids level.)
Someone must be trolling.
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In particular, Stagecoach (most visibly the operator of Virgin trains) seems to have really taken the piss this time around
(FT transport correspondent)
tl;dr: there is an ongoing dispute as to who has overall responsibility for funding the rail pension scheme, currently in deficit by some £6 billion. This is in part due to historic underfunding by rail franchise operators. It is a condition of the current bidding rules that prospective franchise operators take on responsibility for funding the pension scheme at a sustainable level.
The rail industry argues (with some justification) that swings in pension deficit over the life of a typical franchise are primarily the product of investment movements, and so the potential liability they'd be accepting is practically unlimited and not manageable over a franchise term.
However it appears that Stagecoach specifically has been pushing to transfer all of this risk (and other, unrelated risks per the article) back onto the government.
We’ll just take the profits, please, none of these risks or expenses thank you
That's the conservative way!
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Of course they are not equivalent, but I think they are comparable.
The BBC for all its faults is not in the same ballpark of awful as Fox News. I get it's pissed off a lot of people for it's skewed brexit coverage but delving into that sort of hyperbole just weakens legitimate criticism of them.
Comparing every mildly shitty news outlet to Fox/Daily Mail is the media criticism equivalent of Godwining the thread. Not everything bad is Nazis*.
*except these days when they sometimes are**
**which is all the more reason not to muddy the waters with hyperbole
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*explodes*
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Speaking of which...
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I'm sure that won't come back to bite him in the arse.
Oh, doubtless in this day and age.
But, hyperbole (& Godwin) aside, he has a point...
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In case you missed the news and are wondering what Sargon of Akkad has to do with UKIP, yes, he's an MEP candidate for them. Because that's the world we live in now, apparently.
Is it in bad taste to say "I wouldn't even vote for you"?
Something like "rape threats claimed to be satire", maybe
At the moment, of they confront these issues at all, they invariably get bogged down as interviewees play semantic games
Dorrell is not a sitting MP, though he’s considering standing in the European elections. He was an MP a while ago.
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I thought something seemed odd about that when I couldn't find mention of it anywhere in the news, I'd have thought losing an MP would have been a bigger deal.
It feels like it's now common enough to barely warrant a shrug.
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Ah, I forgot he (somehow( lost his seat in the last election, my bad.
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Nigel has the proper concern of being obsessed with the threat that everyone not British poses to UKEnglish society, those other guys are too focused.
That the BBC isn't viewed as such is in some ways much more worrying. With the likes of fox news the bias is clear and obvious (I'd hope anyway) but with the BBC being seen as impartial, any bias has a much greater effect on influencing the population. Not to mention the huge reach and market share it has.
One of the many problems with the BBC is how readily they follow the news agenda set by the (largely right wing) papers. They're a massive echo chamber that promotes the paper's agenda. Hell, I'm largely only aware of the newspaper headlines due to the BBC covering what's on the front pages...
The idea of the BBC is a good one but when something goes wrong (and it has gone wrong) it has massive effect.
They did, it's called question time.
If true, that's faster than the rate at which Labour were raising money at the height of the Momentum frenzy
The significance of the £500 is that is the threshold at which you have to carry out donor ID procedures and inform the electoral commission of the donation
The electoral commission only have direct oversight of what is reported to them. In any case, an investigation likely wouldn't reveal much unless the party kept detailed records of the source of the donations, which they aren't required to.
To cheer things up a bit, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is running the Boston Marathon to raise funds for the Manchester Arena bomb victims and their families. I think that's pretty great. I know mayors don't have the same issues/restraints as an MP but I appreciate things like this. It's nice to know someone in power gives a hoot.