>>90871
I think if the polls get closer in distance, that scenario is a distinct possibility. The last hurdle for Biden is the debate tomorrow night. Unless he actually faints, throws up or falls over, he can just stand there, say nothing and let Trump rant. But while the polls are consistently showing a > 10% lead, time is running out for Trump and I think it will be quite clear cut on the night.

I don't think Trump will concede in any event, but I think the margin of his loss will be great enough that while there might be moaning, drama and extremism for 48 hours, it will pass.

So this would explain why Giuliani is throwing the kitchen sink at this election. Hand down pants. Pranked by Borat.

>>90873

>I don't think Trump will concede in any event, but I think the margin of his loss will be great enough that while there might be moaning, drama and extremism for 48 hours, it will pass.

I think you're underestimating the fanaticism of Trump's base and the volatility of America right now. I think it's highly likely to get extremely ugly in the red states, but (much like the BLM protests) I don't think that unrest will actually change anything of substance in D.C.

Most of the Republican establishment never wanted Trump and will be glad to see the back of him, which is why I think that a) the political transition will be noisy but straightforward and b) Trump's marginalised base will feel really, really marginalised. There will be riots, there might be an assassination or two, some bonkers militias will declare a free state and get killed in a gunfight with the feds, but it'll amount to nothing and it'll be mostly forgotten about by next summer.

>>90875
>I think you're underestimating the fanaticism of Trump's base and the volatility of America right now.

I'm really not - and if it's a close election, we'll see ugliness abound. There is also the factor that Trump won't take a loss lying down, he has plenty of room over the interim three months to be spiteful, angry and to aggravate people into misbehaving. I just don't think it will be a close election. I think Trump knows that too, which is why we're seeing him so angry this week.

At this point, I am starting to think he WANTS to lose.

Check out the picture on the bottom right - why present a journalist with a 2500 page "blank" binder. It's sociopathic.

>>90861
I don't think anyone really wants Major or Blair back. They want back the calmer times of the 1990s because they haven't given enough thought to how the events of the 1990s lead us to the events of the present. 1 month into a Major or Blair re-run they'd realise that neither of them have the midas touch and that everything is still shit, only now it's shit presided over by a grandfather instead of a gigalo.

>>90865
>in general people lack a feeling of dignity in modern society like they don't matter.
I think Michael Young (who coined the word "meritocracy", and not as an ideal) was before his time on this. He did do a book on it, but this comment piece is just as instructive: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
>In the new social environment, the rich and the powerful have been doing mighty well for themselves. They have been freed from the old kinds of criticism from people who had to be listened to. This once helped keep them in check - it has been the opposite under the Blair government.
>The more controversial prediction and the warning followed from the historical analysis. I expected that the poor and the disadvantaged would be done down, and in fact they have been. If branded at school they are more vulnerable for later unemployment.
>They can easily become demoralised by being looked down on so woundingly by people who have done well for themselves.
>It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that.
>They have been deprived by educational selection of many of those who would have been their natural leaders, the able spokesmen and spokeswomen from the working class who continued to identify with the class from which they came.
>Their leaders were a standing opposition to the rich and the powerful in the never-ending competition in parliament and industry between the haves and the have-nots.
>With the coming of the meritocracy, the now leaderless masses were partially disfranchised; as time has gone by, more and more of them have been disengaged, and disaffected to the extent of not even bothering to vote. They no longer have their own people to represent them.
...
>The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get.

Message too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>90866

I read a good article on the downwardly mobile middle class some while ago, that suggested they might be partly to blame for the modern day left becoming seemingly toothless. The downwardly mobile iddle has taken up the flag out of self-interest because it finds itself under pressure, but these are not people who object in principle to the unsatisfactory conditions of working minimum wage stacking shelves at Tesco. Merely that it is they/their children (who have degrees don't you know) who should have to do it. They believed in the meritocracy, they just never considered its window might shift.

>>90867

The debate over financial support for Tier 3 lockdown has really been pissing me off. The only reason we're discussing it is because we've spent the last decade gutting the welfare state, but there's a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that fact. We kept voting in a government that shredded the safety net, but it's only a problem now that middle-class people are hurtling towards the ground. We're studiously ignoring the elephant in the room - that we condemned millions of people to poverty, degradation and misery simply because we thought that we were better than them and would never have to share their fate.

A lot of people feel personally offended that the government is saying "if you lose your job, you should claim unemployment benefit", as if they're not really unemployed. They're acting like being mortgaged up to the eyeballs with an Audi on PCP is somehow morally different from having a massive telly on tick from Brighthouse. They were only too happy to tell manufacturing workers that they should just "up-skill" when their jobs went to China, but there's no way that they're going to retrain to become a healthcare worker or a lorry driver or a web developer. The whole thing just stinks of hypocrisy, callousness and the old deserving vs undeserving poor dichotomy.

I'm just a wet centrist social democrat Blairite bastard, but I'm glad to see the austerity chickens come home to roost. If anything good comes out of this shitter of a year, I hope it's a bit of empathy for people who have been shat on by life.

>>90868
>I'm just a wet centrist social democrat Blairite bastard, but I'm glad to see the austerity chickens come home to roost.

Agree with you on your point, but I think Blair's Labour played a significant role in paving the way for the austerity you describe.

>>90868

Couldn't agree more.

Trouble is the middle class tend to see their self-interest as aligning with capital, not the proletariat. This country's ingrained snobbery always cancels out any logical assessment of one's position in society, and therefore vulnerability to economic impact. Our preconceptions of class obscure the fact that earning £35k a year as a junior manager in the office puts you roughly on the same wage level as an experienced mechanic, which is undoubtedly a povvo job for people who only did BTECs. The difference is the mechanic likely has far greater job security.

Essentially this is the main con-trick the Conservatives have exploited to secure their position in office for the last ten years. You're one of us, not one of them.

I wish the government would just hurry up and build council houses with a view to immediately selling them off. Everyone's happy that way (well, except cunts with investment properties, but if the government would stop culling badgers and start culling them I wouldn't complain.)
The government could actually turn a profit if it manages to build the houses at reasonable rates, since prices are so obscene that selling a house at half it's market value would still leave you with a lot of money to build the house. (And you could either have the government notionally retain ownership of the underlying land, or [ab]use its power to buy up land cheaply.) People would be able to actually afford houses again. Some of the houses could still go into the general social housing stock rather than being sold. It's a win for both Tory and Labour principles. The problem with right to buy was never that people would buy up all the houses: It's that councils weren't allowed to build more. Drop the dogmatic opposition to social housing that Thatcher had and it's actually not a bad way of boosting home ownership.

>>90734

Blue milk in tea is too creamy, it overwhelms the flavour of the brew.

>>90735

The government is willing to do anything to make home ownership more affordable, so long as it doesn't bring down house prices. Baby Boomers have treated housing as an infallible store of value rather than somewhere for people to live and they substantially outnumber the young people who are stuck in shitty buy-to-let rents. At some point in the last couple of decades, being a slum lord became a respectable middle-class pursuit.

>>90737
>At some point in the last couple of decades, being a slum lord became a respectable middle-class pursuit.

Tonty Blair is behind this. Under New Labour it became a lot easier to obtain a buy-to-let mortgage, which led to a campaign to push being a landlord as acceptable and remove the stigma associated with it. The dot.com bubble happened so people became wary of stockmarket investing and pumped their money into property due to the continually rising prices and the reassurance of it being a tangible asset. Whilst this was going on there was continual property porn on the telly thanks to the likes of Kirstie Allsopp, Sarah Beeny and Kevin McCloud. Labour left housebuilding down to the market, but it turned out they'd rather limit supply and push prices up.

This is without even mentioning population growth. What is often overlooked in the housing crisis is that a lot of family homes have been converted into HMOs thanks to both the boom in the student population and the rise in net migration, which has cut the supply even further.

>>90737 The government is willing to do anything to make home ownership more affordable, so long as it doesn't bring down house prices.

Inflation used to do that. Remember inflation? It's been a while...

>The average asking price of homes coming on to the market in Britain has hit a record high, according to figures from the property website Rightmove, and for the first time estate agents are listing more homes as sold than they have for sale.

>The website’s monthly snapshot of new listings showed sellers are asking for an average price of £323,530, an increase of 1.1% since last month, and 5.5%, or £16,818 more than this time last year.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/oct/19/average-asking-price-for-homes-in-britain-hits-record-high

>>90841
I don't hate them, but their numbers adversely affect small animal populations when their numbers aren't controlled by a large, dominant natural predator. The same thing happened with coyotes in Yellowstone. Their numbers went down massively, and as a result smaller mammals flourished.

>>90841
They keep shitting in my garden.

>>90843

So wolves actually eat foxes, or just compete for food etc? I wouldn't have thought they're very tasty.

I can see us just having a lot more urban foxes if they had more competition in the countryside. The thing they share with other animals considered vermin is that they're just as happy to adapt and live by scrounging out of our bins as they are hunting in the wild.

The last thing we want is them teaming up with rats and pigeons to plot our downfall. Crafty bastards, so I've heard.

>>90841

>Why does everyone hate foxes? It's not as if they're endemic like non-native hares or whatever it is in Australia.

If they get into a chicken shed, they tend to go into a frenzy and keep killing birds until they're exhausted or there's nothing left to kill. It would be one thing if they nicked the odd bird, but the sight of dozens of decapitated chickens is utterly enraging.

I don't understand why someone would dress up like a twat and chase after a fox with a pack of dogs, but I do understand why a farmer would go out lamping or support his local hunt.

>>90846

Weasels do the same thing, and they're only the size of a squirrel. If you want to imagine terror, imagine a weasel upscaled to the size of a dog.

>>90777
Not him, what are your thoughts on the smart-arses on the internet who like to stick up for it all just to be a holier than thou prick?

>>90778
Better them than the smart-arses who endlessly whine about other people's efforts, just to be some holier-than-holier-than-thou prick. It's just another form of the same thing but thinks it's somehow more "authentic" simply because grumpy sods always think they are.

>>90780

That's not it, though, is it lad. Their grievance is not that you're not making unsatisfactory efforts, it's that you're actively standing in the way of genuine progress with disingenuous bullshit.

Just like you immediately derailed any discussion of the subject matter of that study, by focussing instead on whether or not the language was used right. All you do is distract, misdirect, and divide.

(A good day to you Sir!)

>>90780
Okay, so they're still smart-arses on the internet who like to stick up for it all just to be a holier than thou prick then. To be honest, I thought as much.

>>90781

"I'm complaining about people complaining but god forbid if anyone complains about me complaining about people complaining, they're hypocrites and their motives are obviously suspect. I'm going to do the right thing by complaining about them."

>>90707

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but that's mainly because I was distracted by Kate Andrews. She could privatise my vital infrastructure IYKWIM.

>>90709
I said no because I'm asexual but I bet it doesn't account for that at all.

>Transgender women will still be allowed to play women’s rugby at all non-international levels of the game in England for the foreseeable future, the Guardian can reveal, after the Rugby Football Union decided that more evidence was needed before implementing any ban.

>The RFU’s position is sharply at odds with World Rugby, which last week ruled that trans women could no longer play elite women’s rugby after a major review of the latest science concluded that the risk of “significant injury” was “too great’”. However, the RFU’s view, which is understood to be supported by several other countries, is that more work is needed to assess whether there are safe ways to allow trans women to keep playing the sport they love.

>Last week World Rugby became the first international sports body to ban trans women from the women’s game following an eight-month review. It concluded that it was not possible to balance inclusivity with safety and fairness ‘in light of growing evidence that the testosterone suppression required by previous transgender regulations did not significantly impact muscle mass, strength or power”. World Rugby said that biological males, whose puberty and development is influenced by androgens/testosterone, are “stronger by 25% to 50%, are 30% more powerful, 40% heavier, and about 15% faster than biological females. That combination of mass, strength, power and speed means that in a direct physical contest, cis women in all these domains will be at significant risk of injury.”

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/oct/14/rfu-clears-trans-women-to-play-womens-rugby-at-all-levels-in-england

>>90762
Fuck off, this is not 'the trans thread' now.

>>90763
Most of the thread being about transport says otherwise.

>>90571
>He was elected chairman of the Leicester East constituency Labour Party (CLP) in January 2020
Fuck sake.

>>90588
His older sister is also an MP - love a political dynasty.

>>90587
>her decision could have been overruled by a two-thirds majority
>the result could have been 18 to 10 — which would have passed the threshold
Have they got Diane counting the votes again?

>>90590
Presumably the rules specify whether fractional votes should be rounded up or down.

>>90591
If they say anything other than rounding up they're wrong.

>>85261
>If you wanted to help people like this, just give them stuff, don't fuck with the supply or value of money.
The people who say this line almost inevitably proceed to balk when you suggest going all robin hood. Assuming good faith, the fundamental problem is that this misses political economy. If I announce that I'm sticking up taxes and jacking up spending, the response - both on the markets and with the confidence of the general public - is going to be much higher than if I instruct the Bank of England to make some alterations to monetary policy which will have similar (if broader and less predictable) redistributive effects without overtly stating as much.

Frankly so long as whoever's in power isn't a complete idiot about it the risks would seem to be overstated. The 1970s were a total anomaly with disproportionate mindshare and almost every other country that has had major problems has already been a basket case before they went all macroeconomic populist. I'm not saying we should be the first ones to go out and try it and see what happens, it might still do bad things, but serious and sober minded people seem to be capable of thinking the UK could become Venezuela just because someone at the BoE had a shit day in the absence of any historical precedent.

>>85214
While I agree that government should be looking at ways to shift away from our London-centric model I do question how effective it will be. At least in terms of how solutions are now being approached. The London economy is built precisely around it being a global capital with the manufacture parts moved out to places like Derby (for Rolls-Royce aerospace). Yes, the rents outrageous but much of the work done in the capital is location specific and can't easily be transplanted without just hobbling the city.

To go back to the point of the HMRC, they have been doing a fair amount of moving the administrative workers out to regional hubs but there still needs to be a core contingent of policy managers in London. It's looking at the problem backwards when the issue isn't that everywhere else is shit but that London is incredibly successful and now suffers from national policy built on fairness but which becomes unfair regionally.

The alternative I suggest would be to embrace Georgism and attach the majority of tax collection to property value. That might still hurt London by it would at least have the knock-on effect of closing down the property game.

>>85261
>If you wanted to help people like this, just give them stuff, don't fuck with the supply or value of money.

I've long argued that governments should help address the stress of a downturn by buying everyone a pint. It's a bit like that tax holiday we had at the start of the Great Recession where sales tax was removed only rather than just a signal to consume it is one telling you to take some tlc.

Maybe we could go further and have public holiday camps with a special bank holiday in times of trouble. People could choose what kind of place they go (so I don't rub elbows with the riff-raff) but all would offer some greater public function like education or a special singles camp for bonking.

They're doing a trial in Germany. 120 people receiving 1,200 Euros a month for 3 years.

https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/grundeinkommen-studie-startet-das-1200-euro-experiment-a-413dcee7-1d58-4d19-abd1-8d241972ffd4

>>90428
Seems like with the furlough at almost 30% of the population in many areas, we've been doing a widescale beta test the past five months.

The crazy Swiss are at it again.

>Geneva is to raise its minimum wage to almost £3,500 a month, reported to be the highest in the world, after locals approved the measure in a surprise vote result sparked by reports of growing coronavirus-linked poverty in the Swiss city.

>The canton’s 500,000 voters passed the increase proposed by local unions and leftwing parties, after twice rejecting it in 2011 and 2014.

>The minimum hourly wage will rise to just under £19.50 an hour, more than twice the rate in neighbouring France, with a guaranteed minimum monthly salary of 4,086 Swiss francs (£3,457) based on a 41-hour working week, or 49,000 Swiss francs (£41,430) a year, in one of the world’s most expensive cities to live.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/30/geneva-raises-minimum-wage-covid-poverty-switzerland

>>90471

Seconded. For a light-but-insightful companion, I'd suggest Haven't You Heard? by Marie le Conte.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Havent-You-Heard-Gossip-politics-ebook/dp/B07SPLCYSV/

>>90472
Oh agreed - I have that book too and almost recommended it in that >>90471 post. I think both of them are very clever and do some of the best political writing around.

Opinium have Labour ahead.

>>90531
And so close to the next election.

>>90532
If they keep up this trend, they'll be around 200 points up by 2024.

>>90525

>>90526
I wasn't sure if you were ending your post with a self-defeating statement ironically for comedic value as that would have supported the arguments I made >>90517 here. We don't have much of a sense of humour those of us on the right.

>>90524
It doesn't help that Scottish Labour has always been terribly run. Fat and lazy after decades of dominating Scottish politics, they took the brunt of the blame for how uninspiring the first 3 terms of the Scottish parliament were, sending a bunch of non-entities to staff it because all of their big hitters (except Dewar, who died.) wanted a real job in Westminster.
Full of genuinely pathological loathing for the SNP (It's hard to think of any English precedent. The CPGB-ML has warmer words for the Conservatives than Scottish Labour has for the SNP) they destroyed their credibility as an opposition by constantly crying wolf, and with the the stupid old "Elections are won on the centre ground, which is eternally where Blair was in 1997" axiom in mind they've traditionally attacked the SNP from the right, opposing popular policies like free tuition and prescriptions on the grounds of being "something for nothing".

Their last chance to retake power was probably 2011, which they blew spectacularly for those two reasons. They've notionally wobbled left in 2016 and will probably stay there in 2020, but as the third party they're about as relevant as the Liberal Democrats and far more institutionally dysfunctional. Scottish Labour is a talent vacuum with no policy credibility (and no big ideas) staffed and run by non-entities who are so blinded by hatred for the SNP that they'll never figure out how they were outflanked by them. And I say this as a member.

>>90528
>And I say this as a member
Jesus Christ.

Never knew it was this bad up there. Got any other mad long posts? I love reading them when I am drunk.

As another thought, how can I become Scottish person? Basically, how long do I have to wait until my son can get free tuition?

>>90529
Three years.
https://www.saas.gov.uk/files/284/saas-guide-to-undergraduate-funding.pdf

Another Novichok poisoning.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-54002880

Heard a lad say earlier the Ruskies have won the cold war by pretending to have given up. A long long game.

>>90475

The mistake evidently is that the west assumed it to be an ideological battle, whereas it is just one of pure dominance of great powers. Russia is by no means in a position to control but that isn't their current goal. Their current goal is to make others positions untenable. It is a zero sum where weakening their opponent gains them strength.

>>90475
I think that former kipper candidate and pompous youtube loser, who I won't name, put a video out recently (that a mate sent to me), which was just loads of clips of that so-called ex-KGB dude going on about some batshit cultural subversion because of Commies. The entire conspiracy is as implausible as they come and basically adds fuel to that stupid Frankfurt School conspiracy theory which seems to think folks like Adorno were issuing instructions to spies within the state itself, rather than being rambling, a bit boring, but nonetheless fairly accurate at how modern capitalism is shaping social and productive relations. It's always handy to divert away from this basic truth and make it seem like a conspiracy to people who have never and will never bother to read Walter Benjamin.

>>90475

The cold war did end, but Putin leveraged the Russian intelligence and security apparatus to establish himself as gangster-in-chief. Putin's Russia has no ideology, it's just a tinpot oligarchy built on strongman populism.

>>90450
>North Korea
>Baby Trump was effectively lining himself up as a potential successor. He said almost nothing about family life.

He looks and sounds coked off his nut, it is one of the most unhinged things I have ever seen.

>>90451
The first thing he even did into the mic was sniff.

>>90451

This one is perhaps worse - she is his partner. What's weird about these two is that they were pre-recorded and made to an empty room of people.

>>90458
Oh and this picture is great. Way before she decided she was a Republican and got with MiniTrump, she was married to the governor of California (which she spoke of at length during this speech), who is a Democrat.

Nice picture. Monstrous woman.

>>90451

Fucking hell, I didn't expect it to be that bad. I feel almost exactly like I've been cornered at a party.

>>90445
>>90446
So presumably neither of you believe Javid's reasons for resigning were credible, if all of the things Sunak is doing that are making him the most popular Tory are entirely of his own volition?

>>90452
While both are obviously clever and capable people, I think Sunak comes across as a bit more down-to-earth; I'm quite sure it's all a clever political trick, Sunak went to much posher school/university than Javid, but he somehow seems a bit friendlier is how I describe it. That poshness means he probably gets on a bit better with Boris.

>>90449
I'm not saying he's ugly, just that his facial features are all weirdly exaggerated in a way you'd expect of a caricature.

>>90455
Just say he's got a great big laplander nose and have done with it. You know you want to.

>>90456
His nose is about the last thing I was thinking of.

>>90332
Government whips get an actual, ideally ceremonial, whip on taking the office.

>>90333
I'm sure he did - and its totally normal for that to be lying around on the under pressure ministers otherwise minimalist desk, when he invites a PA photographer into his office.

I know that Boris has many skeletons in the closet - there are plenty of stories/gossip that haven't hit the news yet - but he needs to fire the fucker right now.

Awful.

>>90267
Oh, no, he's above that. I'm told he has a spare terrarium, and when he really wants to freak someone out he puts that on his desk instead of the one with Cronus in.

>>90332

What should be truly disturbing about this is there's no computer on the desk. Not even a laptop.

But of course there isn't, why would he need one? We all know politicians don't do any real work.

>>90336
But if there were a computer on his desk, everyone would be meming about how that's the computer that did the results, innit.