Rayvin

Yeah he sounds dangerously unstable. How are these people coming to power all of a sudden ffs...

How fucking long would it take to get that together. Impressive.

Oh god... can you imagine

I can't stand the guy but fucking good speech from Osborne. Totally counter to my line of thought but he's made a good case: George Osborne, the former chancellor, is speaking now, from the backbenches. (Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, is responding for the government, but in a debate like this he does not have to speak at the start.) Osborne says the concept of an emergency debate suggests this has taken the Commons by surprise. But the Syrian civil war has been going on since 2011. He says MPs are “deceiving” themselves if they think they have no responsibility for what happened. What is happening came out of a vacuum - a vacuum of Western leadership. He says he takes responsibility as a former leader. And parliament must take responsibility too. He says in 2012 and 2013 there was no majority in the Commons for providing the opposition with lethal arms. And in 2013 the Commons voted against military action, even though Assad had broken a 100-year taboo and used chemical weapons. Labour’s Graham Jones asks if Osborne thinks a war in 2013 would have been winnable. Osborne says a red line had been crossed. And the vote in the Commons had an impact. It encouraged Washington to have cold feet. He says he last spoke from the backbenches in 2003, in favour of the war in Iraq. His generation of politicians knows the price of intervention. Now it has become almost impossible to intervene anywhere. But now the opposite problem has arisen. "We are beginning to learn the price of not intervening." Islamic State has emerged. And Russia has emerged as the dominant player in the region, for the first time since the 1970s, he says. "Let us be clear now. If you don’t shape the world, you will be shaped by it."

Link is broken?

I think it's a proxy war between the US and Russia but who knows.

Where do they get this nonsense from...

Well said.

Look at Syria mate, that's what 'not being friends' seems to deliver to us.

Thanks for that PL. Nice to see some balance. Really sad though...

Timely article suggesting the cold war never really ended. Which certainly seems to be the case: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/13/cold-war-never-ended-west-russia

Not sure about that. I mean, Trump himself may personally be closer to Putin as a personality but I think the bigger issue at stake here is that there is an opportunity to break away from the new cold war that was forming. He is indeed.

Under investigation for what? The Putin bit bothers me less - if the US and Russia become friendly it'll probably do the world a lot of good. Anything has to be better than what we're seeing now ffs.

Just read the reports on this in detail. Sounds utterly horrifying. Assad is a total psychopath who clearly couldn't give a shit about the populace in his country. This US-Russia bollocks is getting fucking old tbh, it's wrought only devastation wherever it rears its head. How is Assad going to unify the country after this ffs. How are the people who carried this out going to live with themselves. I'm half tempted to suggest that Russia may as well absorb the fucking place because anything that Syria once was, it surely no longer is.

Yes, doesn't make sense to lose him even if we're anticipating bringing in better quality in the summer.

I don't want a socialist utopia though, I want a pragmatic and effective state that doesn't put corporate interests and the super wealthy ahead of those at the bottom. I want a return to social mobility, better standards of education and, if I could have everything, greater expenditure in the sciences. Hardly socialism 101. I'm not far left ffs, I just don't believe the centre is in any way interested in achieving these things.

I'm sure the centre will sweep back to power again one day off the back of a compelling vision of mediocrity and general beigeness.

Have you flagged this up to demonstrate that the far left are backing Russia following my discussions with Gloom? If so, thanks - it's useful to see. I take the point.

Fair point actually. I think it spills into the Trump thread because the issue has become global rather than UK only, but sure, happy to continue in here instead.

Good post - the Trump v China thing is going to be fascinating. If he makes friends with Russia, the Chinese are going to feel really isolated.

I'm not going to google shit because I've expressed multiple times in the past the exact sentiments you've just put over. The thing is this though, I thought exactly like this until the referendum because I was insulated in my bubble of relative affluence. Just because you and I were well off and enjoying things (my family wasn't actually especially well off but then I credit the fact that I ended up in University to Labour so I won't suggest that they didn't work for me on some level) doesn't mean that the working and unemployed classes were. Labour pushed the Neoliberalist mantra by offering tweaks to the social order with the idea of benefiting those at the bottom. Those tweaks were exposed as meaningless when the world came tumbling down in 2008. You know I don't think the crash was Labour's fault, I've said it a million times on here. I'm not actually critical of what Blair and Brown were doing in the sense that they thought it was working (and it seemed to be at the time). Where I am critical now, with the benefit of hindsight, is in considering that anyone thinks that returning to that is what we need. They didn't 'fix' anything, they just papered over the cracks. If we get another New Labour aligned with Blair's position, we'll enjoy a decade of benefit while they're pointing at good things and hiding the serious underlying issues and then end up back in the shit again as these changes don't do enough. That said, you make an interesting point in a sense, and I wonder if, had the Tories never been allowed near power, we might not be where we are. The thing that makes me think we would be anyway though, is that this issue isn't limited to just the UK. It's happening all over the place. The economic situation is the only common denominator really, unless you look at immigration I suppose. How about this - globalisation (as you have identified many times) is the main problem. The centre are the most serious backers of globalisation on the political spectrum (the right hate the immigrants and the left hate the corporations) so the centre has been punished for the excesses of the globalists. The left could accept globalisation if it took more people with it, I believe. The right can't ever accept it, logically. So yes, I would head back to the centre if I could somehow be persuaded that they were actually going to change things enough to help more people. I don't believe they want to do this though, and that's my issue.

You're right but let's be honest, Trump was a shocking candidate who seemed to go out of his way to make it hard to vote for him. The stuff that came out about Trump would have sunk any other normal politician in the world. The fact that he was within 2.8m votes of Clinton despite this surely suggests that the sentiment backing his side has more popular support than Hillary's. I would suggest that a good number of the people voting for Hillary did so because Trump was just so offensive. Had the far right put forward someone with charm, intelligence and charisma, Clinton would have been buried, IMO. Policies would have been the same though.

Sorry but, Corbyn is only answerable for the last year and a bit of Labour. The previous 20 years they had opportunities to 'deliver' what you're talking about. This is all on them. All of it. If you think that the current shitstorm is at Corbyn and the left's feet instead of those who abdicated all responsibility for the socially vulnerable, you're utterly blind. And the real issue we have here is that people like me can't go back to the lies and failures of the centre left. People like you have too much to lose by going to the left. The answer should be for both sections to split - the problem with that is, as soon as we do it (and we effectively seem to have done so already), the Tories are unopposed. You guys bang on about Corbyn being too far left to garner much support but realistically, I don't think the centre leftists would be faring much better - because people like me, the poor, and sure as fuck UKIP supporters, wouldn't be voting for your policies any more than Corbyn's. So I say again - we're fucked. And we're fucked because the centre failed and turned on the left instead of the right. Probably, I would argue, because the right is safer to their bank accounts.

Who is voting for the centre? The politically intransigent risk averse middle class who can't comprehend what is happening. Have I missed anyone out? There's a larger section of our society in the 'poor' category than there used to be. According to the IFS at least.