Politics

[Gemmill 44887]

Aye she's great. She's looked fit as owt on her way in and out of court too, bless her.

[desmondTUTU 0]

most pointless trial ever.

 

firstly the credit card was given to the sisters by the holder of the credit card. It is very hard for a conviction on that basis.

 

secondly if the coke story is true (50:50) no coke was found and nigella has not been charged with having any coke. the danger is that if the sisters start tale telling the jury will turn on them.

[The Fish 10857]

Why do I expect to see Dtt showing up on a daytime tv advert for Injury Claim lawyers?

[ewerk 30616]

Aye, anyone given a company credit card is free to use as they feel. No takesie backsies.

Edited December 12, 2013 by ewerk

[desmondTUTU 0]

Aye, anyone given a company credit card is free to use as they feel. No takesie backsies.

 

Another simplistic argument.

 

They kept raising the limit on the card they had given to the sisters after being requested to do so and they were allowed to take it on holiday with them to use.

 

Its hardly a fuel card they have been caught buying sandwiches on.

[tooner 243]

 

Another simplistic argument.

 

They kept raising the limit on the card they had given to the sisters after being requested to do so and they were allowed to take it on holiday with them to use.

 

Its hardly a fuel card they have been caught buying sandwiches on.

kettle.pot.black.

 

doubt they were told to shop at chanel DG or vuiton either though

[desmondTUTU 0]

If they get found guilty i will donate the missing £50 to the SBR charity for stellar.

[trophyshy 7083]

Kim Wrongun has executed his uncle. Proper politics that mind.

[Rayvin 5223]

Haha NK is such a batshit mental country!

[hostile_statue 0]

He was "worse than a dog" according to North Korean reports.

[Rayvin 5223]

All that makes me do is believe that his Uncle was a force for good and restraint and was disposed of for being too rational.

[trophyshy 7083]

He was "worse than a dog" according to North Korean reports.

They eat dogs so they'd know.

[Meenzer 15531]

Apparently one of his crimes was "dreaming different dreams".

[trophyshy 7083]

Apparently one of his crimes was "dreaming different dreams".

Now that's what I call a surveillance state.

[ChezGiven 0]

Kim Wrongun has executed his uncle. Proper politics that mind.

 

His surname works better with the hyphen.

[desmondTUTU 0]

Labour MP in tweet insult

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25363200

[ewerk 30616]

Reported to the police by a Conservative MP, ffs.

[Monkeys Fist 42456]

Reported to the police by a Conservative MP, ffs.

I like the fact that the most insulting thing you can call someone doesn't break any laws.

Call me whatever you like, but don't call me Tory

[Happy Face 29]

 

England is two countries. One is dominated by London, the other remains in its shadow. When I first arrived here from Australia, it seemed no one went north of Watford and those who had emigrated from the north worked hard to change their accent and obscure their origins and learn the mannerisms and codes of the southern comfortable classes. Some would mock the life they had left behind. They were changing classes, or so they thought.

 

When the Daily Mirror sent me to report from the north in the 1960s, my colleagues in London had fun with my naive Antipodean banishment to their equivalent of Siberia. True, it was the worst winter in 200 years and I had never worn a scarf or owned a coat. Try to imagine what it is like in darkest Leeds and Hull, they warned.

 

This was a time when working people were said to be “speaking out”, even “taking over”. Realist films were being made, and accents that had not been welcome in the broadcast media and sections of the entertainment business were now apparently in demand, though often as caricatures.

 

On that first drive north, when I stopped for petrol, I failed to understand what the man said; but within weeks, what the people were seemed perfectly clear. They were another nation with a different history, different loyalties, different humour, even different values. At the heart of this was the politics of class. As you crossed the Pennines, empire dropped away. The imperial passions of the south barely flickered. On Merseyside and Tyneside, apart from the usual notables, no one gave a damn for royalty. There was the all-for-one-and-one-for-all of a wagon-drawn workingclass society – unless, as became painfully clear in later years, you happened to be black or brown. That solidarity was, for me, the story, as if it was the missing chapter in England’s political heritage, a people’s history of modern times, suppressed by Thatcher and Blair and still feared by their echoes.

 

I had already glimpsed the power of this solidarity in the place where my parents had grown up and that I knew as a boy: the mining region of the Hunter Valley in New South Wales. Here, whole collieries had shipped out from Yorkshire, Tyneside and Durham. “Watch them; they’re communists,” I heard someone say. They were fighters for working-class decency: proper pay, safety and solidarity. The Welsh were the same. They brought with them the pain and suffering and anger of those who had industrialised the world and gained little but the resilient comfort of each other.

 

The Mirror published my reports of working lives: miners working in three-foot shafts, steelworkers in unimaginable heat. I would find a street, virtually any street, and knock on doors. What intrigued me then was that such human warmth and forbearance could survive the treadmill of northern cities. Moreover, the radical tradition of resistance in the north – from the cotton workers of the 19th century to the Great Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 – always threatened the game known in London as “the consensus”.

 

This was the nod-and-wink arrangement between Labour and Tory governments and the 5 per cent who owned half the wealth of all of the United Kingdom. The Labour MP-turned-media man Brian Walden described how it worked. “The two front benches [in parliament] liked each other and disliked their back benches,” he wrote. “We were children of the famous consensus ... turning the opposition into government made little difference, for we believed much the same things.”

 

My second film for television, made for Granada TV in Manchester, was called Conversations with a Working Man. It was the story of Jack Walker, a dyehouse worker from Keighley in Yorkshire, whose job was monotonous, filthy and injurious to his health, yet he derived a pride from “doing it well”. Jack believed passionately that working people should stand together. That an articulate trade unionist should express his views without intrusion by those who often claimed to speak for him, and should worry out loud about the stitched-up democracy in Westminster, was beyond the pale. The term “working class”, I was told, had “political implications” and would not be acceptable to the Independent Television Authority. It would have to be changed to “working heritage”. Then there was the problem of the term “the people”. This was a “Marxist expression” and also had to go. And what was this “consensus”? Surely, Britain had a vibrant two-party system.

 

When I read recently that over 600,000 Greater Manchester residents were “experiencing the effects of extreme poverty” and that 1.6 million were at risk of slipping into penury, I was reminded how the political consensus was unchanged. It is now led by the southern squirearchy of David Cameron, George Osborne and their fellow Etonians; the only change is the rise of Labour’s corporate management class, exemplified by Ed Miliband’s support for “austerity” – the new jargon for imposed poverty.

 

On Clara Street in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in the wintry dark of early morning, I walked down the hill with people who worked more than 60 hours a week for a pittance. They described their “gains” as the Health Service. They had seen only one politician in the street, a Liberal who came and put up posters and said something inaudible from his Land Rover and sped away. The Westminster mantras then were “paying our way as a nation” and “productivity”. Today, their places of work, and their trade union protection, always tenuous, have gone.

 

“What’s wrong,” a Clara Street man told me, “is the thing the politicians don’t want to talk about any more. It’s governments not caring how we live, because we’re not part of their country.”

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/11/the-power-of-the-history-of-the-north

 

 

Don't necessarily agree with his "Black or Brown" assertion, given that the working class has become assimilated far more rapidly than the establishment in both the North and the South, for every Bradford or Toxteth there has been a Brixton or Notting Hill, but otherwise spot on.

[ChezGiven 0]

I fucking hate Tories. This really drives home what a bunch of dishonest wankers they are.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/dec/16/welfare-cuts-government-coalition-benefits

[NJS 4386]

The worst thing is the number of people who think 99% are cheats and the tragic cases are the 1% when its the opposite.

 

I have no trouble now hoping their lives are affected by similar problems.

[Howmanheyman 33228]

I fucking hate Tories. This really drives home what a bunch of dishonest wankers they are.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/dec/16/welfare-cuts-government-coalition-benefits

That's a damning article but absolutely no surprises in it when it comes down to it. If I was a police officer I'd be tempted to arrest half the conservative party for inciting hatred towards the unfortunate. This is the Tories to a tee. Horrible bastards who manage to fool a certain type through their propaganda.

[desmondTUTU 0]

The worst thing is the number of people who think 99% are cheats and the tragic cases are the 1% when its the opposite.

 

I have no trouble now hoping their lives are affected by similar problems.

 

bizarre

[The Fish 10857]

[Brock Manson 0]

Surprised there are that many Christians, actually.

 

Although the actual number there adds up to 102 people. HF will be seething.