Rayvin

I was feeling a bit low earlier today but, you know what, I feel better about my life now Desperate stuff.

I thought she'd promised she wouldn't flake out again anyway.

What does that leave the government open to? I'm losing track of the chaos here.

Couldn't care less about the result, did any of ours stand out?

"And here are the three Labour MPs who voted with the government against amendment 7. Ronnie Campbell Kate Hoey Graham Stringer" Fucking mongs.

This effectively means what? Weakens May's hand I guess in her 'My deal or No Deal' gambit.

Absolutely that's what it is. The culture war has gone mainstream. I'm just gonna say I predicted the shit out of that about 2 years ago

Holy fucking hell. Fuck this country man, just fuck it.

Neither have you though. And you're the ones who really need to be proving that this is going to work, tbh.

I'm just bloody minded about it now. A slow managed decline is arguably worse anyway, since people will just kind of accept it. A catastrophe will be painful and might shock people into some kind of coherent and appropriate response. Storming the houses of parliament perhaps.

But why should we even risk that... why are we risking any of our country's future on the biggest 'maybe' of the modern era? And look how badly we handled negotiating with the EU. Why would we be any better with anyone else?

No Deal. It's the only thing that will mean those leading the charge for this will actually have to suffer the consequences.

I read each of the Labour candidate manifestos in the leadership run up (the first one) with the view initially that I was going to vote for Yvette Cooper, having heard some good things about her from someone who used to work with her. Then it became clear that Corbyn's manifesto was just so much better, and so much more likely to resolve the country's issues, that it became impossible for me to vote for anyone else. It's not extreme left, it's moderate left. I see it as a move towards a mixed economy model as with the scandinavian countries. He only lost me because of Brexit which, I will confess, is a largely selfish issue for me (as much as I believe that in this case, my own interests are fairly well aligned with everyone else's).

Which values did he change besides his fairly nebulous Brexit position?

I've always voted Labour but I've rarely been happy about it. I actually shared your view on Miliband but voted for him anyway because i felt the Tories would be more dangerous (I stand by that vote). Now, I'm probably going to give up voting as well. One of my favourite pieces of research with respect of voting intentions is the one that shows if you have people vote on policies rather than parties, and then match the outcome to the party that most closely delivers the most popular policies, the Greens would win with about a 60% share of the electorate. The Tories drop to around 10%. I was very disillusioned with Labour until Corbyn, who was someone I could see making a difference and at least pulling the party to the left. Now I'm disillusioned with him because of his ludicrous Brexit stance. I would genuinely be happy with a dictatorship of some form now, as long as it was benevolent.

It was more for Zerosum who I don't think is really a CT-esque figure. I mean I live in hope that one day CT will hold his hands up and acknowledge that he got something, somewhere, wrong. But yeah...

What the actual fuck.

Ok this has passed me by a bit. Who organised this nonsense? Please, please tell me it isn't a government initiative...

Unemployment benefits are always in the region of a couple of billion aren't they? Where are you getting hundreds of billions from? Pensions maybe? The £27bn spent on bank bailouts to consider too, perhaps. Also, this is the other thing with this. More or less, the crash was driven by the markets - banks took insane risks in lending, individual people couldn't repay their debts, banks freaked out and stopped lending, and subsequently the economy shrank (as it always does when less money is being pumped in, hence the idiocy of austerity). Where does the government come into that statement CT, apart from on not regulating the fuckers properly? "The overall picture is of a pre-recession Labour government whose borrowing and spending were sustainable and a post-recession Labour government that made more or less the right moves to stave off an even more calamitous downturn. This is not to say that Gordon Brown et al got everything right. The Labour government presided over an era of irresponsibility in UK banking. However, the numbers show that their approach to spending and borrowing was actually sound. The irony is that Labour gets a lot of criticism for a crime of which they are innocent (spending too much) and hardly any at all for one of which they are guilty (not regulating the banks). Reckless government borrowing and spending can indeed pitch countries into an economic crisis. But to co-opt this narrative to explain the UK's current situation is economically illiterate. The striking figures on leverage in the UK banking system show that the ones taking historically unprecedented risks with their finances were not politicians, but banking chiefs. Excessive government borrowing did not get us into this mess. Falsely believing that it does covers all manners of sins when it comes to government spending cuts. Understanding the real causes behind the recession frees our political conversation. No longer should we be arguing about how deep the cuts should be, but whether we should be cutting at all. Borrowing more and spending more are not the kamikaze strategies the Government would have us think. More government borrowing and spending now won't make things worse. In fact, the numbers suggest, there's a good chance it's the only thing likely to make things any better." https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-myth-excessive-government-borrowing-got-us-into-this-mess-8601390.html

We all get lied to in the end. That's what makes politicians universally hated.

Broadly agree with this. Thatcher to start.

But that's like saying because we spend money on an army, we should be able to withstand any invasion. It's about balancing risk and reward.

Don't quite get the logic of this statement mind. Why should we have been able to withstand it? It's not like it was an ordinary event.

Depends what you mean by withstand I guess. But this affected most of the world, were they all overspending? Was everyone's debt too high? It was at the level it was because it was good for growth and social development. Then the Americans and bankers triggered a global collapse and everyone suffered.

@NJS I'm afraid that's exactly how I see it as well. They saw it as an opportunity to reduce the size of the state, so they went about doing it. And austerity cost us a quicker recovery. Not gonna say they were punishing the poor although that was the consequence. But they weren't concerned about them either.