Someone needs to tell the Independent Group that the end of history has been cancelled

I harbour the suspicion that the TIGGERS will not actually form a political party. They'll remain an independent group in parliament and will operate to take a) destroy Corbyn as the leaderr, b) replace him and then take back Labour for the Blairite faction for the next election, and c) rejoin a welcoming Labour Party as heroes.

But should Corbyn survive this current mouth-frothing anti-Semite hounding by the British media (all de facto neoliberal), the other Blairites may well resign too and then form a new political party along with these eleven - thus dividing the popular vote for Labour and shoe-horning in another Conservative government. Probably.

That's my conspiracy theory anyway.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politi...JlyPpsKQVN3a4dNPWZHCTn1n9_qZpi-EaYEA4U0_C29B0

 

Time to ask The Donald to drain the Westminster swamp, methinks. Maybe we should Remain, then shut down
Westminster altogether? Might as well, if all it has become is a rubber stamp for Brussels.

They've just awarded themselves another pay rise, according to today's headlines. That must make it about a 25% increase they've had in the last 4 years. Alright right for some? COME THE REVOLUTION, BRUVVERS!

 

The Eurovision Song contest is in Tel Aviv this year Cerb. And the UEFA football competition includes Israeli teams and have since 1990. Ergo "Europe" means nothing really - other than an ideological neoliberal alignment. That's just one reason why I treat it with such great suspicion. That and the fact that it is entirely anti-democratic and operates entirely on behalf of a European neoliberal elite and trans national corporations.

But if a second referendum is eventually allowed in the UK then democracy (such as it is anyway) will be finished here too.

Then it will be time to climb aboard a boat and head for somewhere peaceful (and sunny) that isn't still part of the dying hegemon.

 

Weird stuff going on, SH, and lots of it.

If ya want someone to carry your cases, I'm yer man. We could bugger off to Russia if only it wasn't so bloody cold there all the time. It seems to be the only sane place on the planet.

 

A Caribbean Island with lots of rum might work...

 

Jonathan Cook article on the anti-Semite campaign against Corbyn

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/...PN7GES1aNrktOMhqth7VYt5y4k_2RxsfiJm6PqRU2IBAQ

 

The problem is this is all much worse than just getting rid of Corbyn and getting the three post 97 parties back as you speak about in another thread.. What Cook correctly talks about is people being labelled as anti-Semite for even, in the case of Jackie Walker questioning whether the charge against her is true when she has as yet not even been found guilty. I don't know the name for this but it is without question how totalitarian states work and that would now appears to be Britain...but not only Britain. the US is even worse on this, laws against being involved in BDS having gone through their courts, English courts chucked them out but similar in France with Macron now wanting to call antizionism antisemitism meaning someone could be jailed for being critical of Israel. To some extent it appears to have happened very quickly but we should be very concerned. My own feeling about when you said it would be back to the 3 old Parties was no...if they get rid of Corbyn it will be fascism regardless of which of them is in power and this certainly fits in with that.

 

Maybe. I agree with the your totalitarian implication. But what we have seen in the US since Trump got elected should inform us how things are going. Truth and evidence no longer matter. Spinning a narrative is everything.

Getting rid of a Corbyn left government is the purpose behind these manipulations. Imo, have three different parties that are simply heads of the same Hydra is what is being engineered. Let's hope it doesn't succeed.

 

You just talked me into it. I shall be Man Friday to your Robinson Crusoe.

 

So much indisputable up-summing in so few words.

 

Trump is a political aberration - no other Republican candidate behaves
like this character. Few privately respect him.
As for our racist and economically clueless Corbyn - maybe it would be
good if he DID get elected: Young English people might get a taste of
Socialism like others have had.

 

Maybe young English people would find parts of what Corbyn has to offer refreshing - instead of suffering more of the same market led plundering that successive neoliberal leaning British governments have offered us since 1979 - opting for the tosh braindead illusion that "markets regulate themselves" (they never have, never do and never will - markets are human and voracious and greedy).

having said that I am uncomfortable with Corbyn's and the Left's faithfulness to Marxist ideology. Ideology is a dangerous thing. But then I am very, very uncomfortable with the Conservatives and the Right allowing pillage of the British people on an almost industrial scale.

Wouldn't it be nice to have politicians who wished to actually serve the people instead of themselves and their close interests, for a chnage.

 

Agreed. Few say there should be unregulated markets - it's where we draw the line.
Markets are greedy, yes, but Socialism/Communism is utterly rapacious and deadly.
The problem with the Left in Australia is they go after banks and large corporations -
the added regulations raise the cost of competing against them - and these entities
grow even bigger.
And transparency is the crucial issue - we are different people to what we were post
WWII. We need transparency with taxes (ie excessive complexity stymies this),
legal system and political parties. By the end of this century we will have what I call
Machine Government - thinking machines which could sweep away political systems.

 

That's the difference between conviction politicians of which we have very few, and career politicians of which we have many.

 

Career politicians are there doing their job. They might have a career supporting
workers and welfare, or jobs and country. That's fine.
The problem with conviction politicians is that you need to be careful what you
wish for - they are loose cannons that could be aiming at you.

 

We obviously have a different opinion of what 'career' means. Someone who has a career is focused upon furthering it for their own personal gain, whereas a conviction politician is altruistic, and puts country before party.

 

Banks need stringent regulating, not soft hand regulation - which is what we've seen. And I'm speaking here as an old international banker - I know how they think and operate.

Trans-national corporations are also very rapacious and too powerful. I have no problem at all with them being regulated too - although their trans-national nature makes this extremely difficult.

 

Let's face it, Cerb. Politicians are paid employees of the State and should respect the job they are hired to do. Most of them double or triple their income by fiddling their expenses - and add more by comfy non-executive directorships and other money-spinning non-Parliamentary jobs.

In other words they are almost all of them crooked in that they take money for doing a job they don't do, simply leveraging their position and power to rake in more money. It's a pocket-stuffing profession and ex any sort of ethics.

The only way to curb this is to have strong laws on corruption and free-wheeling profiteering that are rigorously imposed. Will that ever happen? I doubt it.

 

Agreed, SH - in fact they're so irrationally greedy I sometimes wonder if they know something we don't know, and they're 'making hay while the sun shines'? I wonder whey we'll hear May say she has confidence in Grayling, after he's squandered millions of taxpayer pounds? I'll bet that she will. Ah well, as I keep saying - que sera sera.

 

Mahatma Gandi was altruistic. Someone on Australia's ABC said he was
writing a book about this guy - Gandi could have been the cause of more
people dying than Uncle Mao and Uncle Joe. I found no web sites on this.
His idea of country before party was India going back to its roots in the
pre-industrial era.
By "career" I mean someone who supports a given party and follows the
agenda of that party, be it for country people, supporting business, backing
workers and trade unions --- whatever. Doesn't mean that person is corrupt,
it means they agree with a political narrative.
Sometime what one Prime Minister called "the vision thing" is not what a
nation needs. When heavy industry is leaving, the auto industry is gone,
education performance is declining, welfare spending is up and up and so
on - maybe we can put aside that fast rail network and get back to basics.

 

Studies of corruption have shown that about 3% of a given group will be corrupt.
Doesn't matter if it's a church, a trade union, a Senate or a company. Last week
I looked at the number of prosecuted pedophile priests in the Roman Catholic
Church - turned out to be 3.5%.
My friend is dismayed at political and corporate corruption. It's all rotten to the core
as far as he is concerned. He doesn't see that his society can find and prosecute
such cases. In many countries you cannot.

 

Obviously you haven't been following the British MP's expenses story. Or taken note that a great many MP's have second and third jobs.

I believe I said earlier that I find you a little bit naive (no disrespect intended many forum members are likewise).

In the UK powerful and influential paedophiles are virtually untouchables. A good example of this is how the Jersey Haut de la Garenne paedo story was closed down (following the intervention of the British government for security reasons) after six months and the senior detective investigating it was replaced by a compliant officer willing to toe the official line. Ditto the Westminster paedophile affair which was deflected by the focus being put on famous TV and radio stars like Jimmy Saville and Rolf Harris.

The world really isn't how you see it. It's darker and more cynical by far.

 

Yeah, we heard about that British expenses story. A lot were caught up in that.
I had to trawl through a few stories to figure out the heart of the issue - and that
was that (from memory) entitlements were never fully defined, so people pushed the
envelope. It wasn't honest but technically not fully corrupt either.
In Australia we are very specific about expenses. Clearer rules and transparency
should curb that. Fact is - both you and me would probably push the
envelope too, given half a chance.

 

It didn't stop. MP's are now claiming as much as their Parliamentary salary again - some a lot more - and this time it's not being properly reported by the media.

Technically not fully corrupt? Is that like being a little bit pregnant?

When individual people fiddle their expenses at work and get caught, it is considered as fraud and the police often become involved with a view to prosecution. But when a whole professional class engage in the same fraud - even worse in fact.... not tens of pounds or hundreds, but tens of thousands and in some cases hundreds of thousands of pounds - you call it "technically not fully corrupt" - as in 'never mind' it's just an infringement.

Double standard anyone?

I agree British laws should be far more stringent about this (and many others things too). But these are the people who make the laws and they sure as hell aren't going to queer their own pitch are they.

 

You can be technically correct but morally wrong.
Several cases in Australia prove the point.
One woman MP used a helicopter to travel around,
claiming it was the best way to reach her electorate.
Another traveled first class for the same purpose.
A third demanded a plane in holding pattern over
Sydney land immediately because she was a very
important parliamentary person.
The rules had to be tightened and recipients of our
taxation largess lost their job - the latter lost the
prospect of becoming the next Prime Minister.

ps it's funny that we expect more from our political
elites, and a lot less from ourselves. With the wacky
exception of Trump, a politician can lose his or her
job for having an affair these days - the general
public are becoming totally adulterous and drug addled.