WELL IF YOU DONT FUCKING LIKE IT YOU CAN JUST LEAVE!

I have it on good authority that one Ossett councillor is a .gs regular.

>>92609
Tell them to sort out the potholes on the roundabout at the town end of Kingsway.

>>92610
I came back to Beeston over the weekend and the mad mile roundabout was like driving through a trench.

You ought to see the state of the floor in front of my door. It's like I'm living in student accommodation again only instead of free shots they're trying to sell me on dubious questionnaires ranking a number of predefined options that just so happen to match the parties campaign platform.

I've finally bothered reading the material they've written.

THOSE FUCKING LEFTY LABOUR LOONIES WANT TO PULL DOWN GAWTHORPE MAUPOLE TO APPEASE BLM!

>>92613
>We learn by our mistakes
Not to take the man to task for one throwaway phrase, but I don't think anything is less true of the United Kingdom.

>>92614
He can't hear you. He's too busy on his quest FIGHTING NONSENSE.

>>92613
Well, they're talking about it. At least the Tory councils aren't entertaining such nonsense.

In the latest local election news:-

- Gawthorpe Maypole Committee (chairman: Labour's unsuccessful candidate in 2019) have issued a statement after receiving a "number of calls and messages from concerned residents" following on from The Ossetteer suggesting that the maypole may be taken down, expressing dismay that it has been weaponised for political gain. It has 182 likes on the local Facebook group.

- The Conservative candidate for South Ossett and Horbury has stood down after homophobic and racist posts made on Twitter in 2014 were uncovered.

- Monorail. Monorail. Monorail.

>In a further twist this afternoon at full council, the mayor has had to ask councillors to "stop putting sarcastic comments about monorails" into the meeting's private chat section

https://twitter.com/DavidSpereall/status/1374744205004791808

>>92634

Tom Burnmore's opinion reflects my own view on this matter.

lmao

Friendly reminder that the Liberal Democrats have actually had more power over the past decade than Labour have, at least nationally.

>>92636
Thanks, m8, I'm only six months old so I didn't know this. Did you know the Conservatives have had more power than both and today is a Monday?

>>92636
Green candidates beat the Lib Dems in 22 out of 32 wards at the last Manc elections.

>>92638
The Yorkshire Party beat the Lib Dems in every ward they both contested last time around in Wakey.

Ossett generally votes Tory, which I guess fits in with my girlfriend claiming the place is middle class. I just assumed it was something to do with Dewsbury; if you look at how Kirklees votes then there's generally a blue ring all the way around Dewsbury.

>>92639
>The Yorkshire Party
It's interesting how regionalist and non-English nationalist parties tend to be social democratic, while groups of smaller local independents tend to be gammon conservative crackpots.

>>92639
>>92640
Is the Yorkshire Party the same as the Northern Independence Party? If not, are they likely to work together at any point?

>>92639
>>92640
Is the Yorkshire Party the same as the Northern Independence Party? If not, are they likely to work together at any point?

>>92641
They've been going for a little while and are actually the sixth largest party in England, getting more votes in 2019 than UKIP and Change UK combined, which isn't bad going considering they only stand in Yorkshire. They've also got a few councillors.

>>92639
Looks like five angry ghosts.

>>92641
No you're thinking of the Independence Party of the North.

>>92645

SPLITTERS!

>Labour is to withdraw and destroy an election leaflet that made pledges about “dealing with Traveller incursions” after criticism over its use by a senior MP.

>Charlotte Nichols, the shadow minister for women and equalities, said she wanted to “unreservedly apologise” for the offence and hurt she had caused to Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. The MP tweeted pictures on Thursday of herself and activists distributing the leaflet for upcoming local elections in her Warrington North constituency in Cheshire. But after being challenged on social media, she initially said she was not aware of the meaning of “incursion” or its negative connotation and that the party was sourcing new materials.

>She said on Friday morning that she could “understand concerns raised about the language” used in the leaflet, adding that the terminology around “incursions” appeared to be widely used in legal and local government contexts and she was unaware of its “problematic definition”. After the criticism continued, Nichols tweeted a fresh statement hours later in which she unreservedly apologised, adding: “I have spoken to the local Labour party, the leaflet has been withdrawn and the leaflet will be destroyed. I regret that this leaflet has been distributed in the town. The leaflet is not in line with my personal values or those of the Labour party.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/apr/02/labour-destroy-local-election-leaflet-anti-travellers-pledge

No wonder Labour are unelectable. Can't even tell local communities they'll do something about gypsies pitching up in their area without managing to eat themselves alive over the issue.

>>92742
>Incusion
> n. An aggressive entrance into foreign territory; a raid or invasion.
> n. The act of entering another's territory or domain.
> n. The act of entering or running into.

Wots the ploblem?

>>92743
Wanting to address illegal traveller encampments is apparently racist.

BRING BACK THE SMOG.

>>92759
Any more leaflets like that and I'm liable to start building barricades under a green flag. God, imagine if XR had some real balls and we had some kind of climate Euromaidan, instead of just drifting into oblivion like a bunch of weak-necked cretins.

>>92762
You are also a human being with agency.

>>92763
Actually I'm a fucking retard who lives in the armpit of nowhere. I see your point though, I'll take it on board.

>>92764
If you want a flag though, I wouldn't bother with the Green one. Greenpeace's is shite too, you want a Sea Shepherd or a Hunt Sab Association flag. They look much cooler.

>>92762
Why are the Greens so shit in this country compared with, say, mainland Europe? Is it because elsewhere they're more pragmatic and realistic rather than focusing on airy-fairy wooly nonsense?

>>92765
I disagree. You can just get any old bit of green fabric and immediately have The Flag, for example I've got a t-shirt in my cupboard that's perfect so I could be flying the green flag in minutes if I wanted. You don't want to be faffing about with arts and crafts while the revolution's going on.

>>92765

No word of a lie I have been tempted to punch people in the face purely for wearing a sea shepherd t-shirt. You might not understand why but people who wear a swastikas also feel like other people getting aggressive with them is unreasonable too. The same obviously goes for Che but the fact that his face is used like a brand devoid of meaning is the greatest insult to him I could imagine.

>>92768

If Che was still around and was selling those shirts himself for profit then he would probably disagree. It's not clear if your motivation is out of hate or respect for them.

>>92759
If you have to zoom in right at the bottom to see which party printed that, it's a shit leaflet. Also, why on Earth are they targeting the Green Party? In what constituency does the election boil down to Conservatives vs Greens?

>>92770
The postcode gives you the answer you need.

>>92771
Hey, your MP is that frowny-faced woman from the House of Commons! She always looks so incredibly angry.

>>92759
I don't get who they're targeting with this and why they've chosen to focus on those particular points. I mean, the Greens aren't exactly doing well outside of a very specific demographic and those tempted would be more educated so can best be put off by the anti-science stuff.

>>92766
Proportional representation with the result that the mainland greens are also much more integrated with the establishment.

>>92771
Did they even run?
https://rds.eppingforestdc.gov.uk/mgElectionAreaResults.aspx?ID=589

It's best to use the candidates name rather than postcode to due how wards work.

>>92774
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epping_Forest_District_Council_elections#Results_since_2002

Okay I think I get it now in that the Conservatives only real opposition is a local group they'd rather ignore. That leaves the Green and the Lib Dems who both hold 3 seats.

>>92768
Why do the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society make you so angry? Are you a Japanese whaler or something?

>>92768

You could try to explain why?

>>92778
>>92779
I'm not him, but I know a girl who's a big fan of them. They're like vegan daft militant wogs, or the more obnoxious PETA members. I've never felt an urge to punch them, but I know the desire to punch other people who are excessively militant. I would happily punch someone in an "I'm an atheist; debate me" T-shirt or one saying "Women are NOT your property", or even Black Lives Matter before they became properly hardcore and impressive and were still just Twitter whiners. It's all about the tone for me.

>>92778
Sea Shepherd is a good example of a relatively small group of people using violence to enforce their views on others. That's not a value judgment, one side sees it as doing the right thing, another (quite large side) doesn't care, and maybe another is inconvenienced.

It's whataboutism but Mediterranean Marine rescue is, at this point, mostly a civilian endevaour. Should saving a few humans take precedence over attempting to preserve a species? Because the former is an every day kind of thing, the latter is not... but it is final.

>>92785
>Sea Shepherd is a good example of a relatively small group of people using violence to enforce their views on others.
This line of reasoning is blown out of the water when you expand your definition of personhood to anything sentient, which means whales and dolphins absolutely count. Fairly safe to assume they're not okay with being hunted. This all complicates the question of who's instigating violence.

If you're worried about humans drowning then feel free to address that question to all the people involved in any sort of commercial boating who could be rescuing them instead of making a bit more money, or the people whose laws or wars are putting those humans in that position. Whataboutism may be valid in some instances but not this one.

>>92778
>>92779
If I saw an American proudly walking around with a "I support the IRA t-shirt" I might punch them in the face too.

They engage literal piracy, and the people who support them either live in a fairy-tale, where they don't appreciate the awful shit they get up to because it is out of sight (they use mines, ram vessels and throw acid on crew), or they don't care, the sea shepards are daft militant wogs, either way I hold people who support them responsible and don't consider their part benign.

>>92787
>They engage literal piracy, and the people who support them either live in a fairy-tale, where they don't appreciate the awful shit they get up to because it is out of sight (they use mines, ram vessels and throw acid on crew)
Again, they're doing that because the people they're doing it to are, in their morally and scientifically entirely justified point of view, going around indiscriminately murdering people. The outrage at a human being murdered and blasé reaction to the death of a whale is some pure anthropocentrism.

>>92786
Do you ever consider the consequences of the mite holocaust you cause every time you take a shower? How about what the thresher does to all those adorable field mice when you are eating your cereal. What about all of the carbon gasses from the electricity you are using and your car? What about all that waste plastic you have used over your lifetime?

Seems like the most Nobel thing to do if you want to avoid doing any harm is just kill yourself right now, Just stopping at saving a few dozen whales a year seems like pissing in the ocean really on the scale of the horrors you inflict just by existing.

>>92788
>scientifically justified
mmm.

>>92789
Noble, not Nobel and no, killing whales is on orders of magnitude larger than that, especially given the scientifically verified (>>92790 yeah, it is extremely well studied - not by Japanese "scientific" ships though) complexity of their communications and social structures on orders that reflect our own, when at similar scales. If you consider consciousness sacred, and not just humanness, then that all makes sense.

>>92789
That's a bit silly lad, whales for instance are incredibly important to our ecosystem, you can't compare that to taking a shower.

>>92789
Not him but that's a pretty shite argument. Whales are massively more intelligent than anything you listed and eating their meat isn't nearly as necessary as using plastic or fossil fuels, two things which are almost impossible for most people to avoid.

>>92786
>expand your definition of personhood to anything sentient

Why do we always do this; act like there's no difference between sentience and personhood? A whale might be very smart but it's still a dumb animal. I feel like people confuse the two because they've forgotten that humans are actually pretty amazing as a species* and we need the distinction for rights that are very much established self-evidently by our mastery of the planet.

>bloo-bloo the Whales travel in small family herds inhaling low nutrition products

So do the people blocking the aisles at the supermarket but I presume they are also capable of much more. Unless you're seriously going to argue that you should be allowed to have sex with a whale then no, it does not hold personhood. It does not hold the potential for personhood. It is as best a lifeform with a higher potentiality for suffering so we should be mindful that we aren't cruel.

Anyway, this whole discussion is also a bit moot as we in the west obviously do care about some things more than people and our ethics are very scalable. If a daft militant wog group burns some boys alive then nobody cares but if you kidnap some girls and suddenly there's outrage, if you have children starving to death in a country then who cares but if you blow up an old statue then the gloves are off. I'm not sure if we're wrong sometimes but even human life isn't really absolute for us.

*when we're not deliberately sinking our own boats to migrate for economic reasons.

>>92794
Your argument is that killing whales is moral so long as I don't argue that I should have sex with it? What libertarian carpet-baggersense is this?

>>92794
>it does not hold personhood. It does not hold the potential for personhood
Personhood is culturally relative and has at times in the recent past not included slaves, gypsies or jews. I'm not really sure who you think you're convincing with this line of reasoning.
>I presume they are also capable of much more
They're capable of suffering, as you say, what more do you need? People don't count as people unless they're Elon Musk? Fuck off.

>>92795
Hang on I'll make it simple for you:

1. Stretching personhood to anything sentient is moronic - we use two different words for a reason. We literally have two different words to talk about different things. To say an animal has personhood is to assign it attributes it does not have because it recognises itself in the mirror. This isn't fucking Star Trek.

2. Killing an animal for its meat and what-have-you can be fine under most ethical systems which is what whales are. If you want to say that all killing a whale is wrong for cruelty or because they hold a special significance beyond their individual life then that it another conversation entirely.

>>92797
>we use two different words for a reason
Yeah and that reason is that English is an illogical mishmash of all sorts of things, what a terrible argument.
>Killing an animal for its meat and what-have-you can be fine under most ethical systems
The number of ethical systems there are is unquantifiable, that doesn't make any sense.

but yeah
> If you want to say that all killing a whale is wrong for cruelty or because they hold a special significance beyond their individual life then that it another conversation entirely.
that is what we've all said. Nobody here has said it's about eating whale meat. Who eats whale meat? Fucking hell.

>>92796
>Personhood is culturally relative and has at times in the recent past not included slaves, gypsies or jews. I'm not really sure who you think you're convincing with this line of reasoning.

But comparing the historical treatment of any of these groups with animals is offensive for an objective reason.

>They're capable of suffering, as you say, what more do you need? People don't count as people unless they're Elon Musk? Fuck off.

Capability to experience suffering is a piss-poor metric for anything beyond animal cruelty. You're now arguing that most vertebrates (amongst others) hold personhood.

>>92800
>But comparing the historical treatment of any of these groups with animals is offensive for an objective reason.
What's that then?

>>92798
>Yeah and that reason is that English is an illogical mishmash of all sorts of things, what a terrible argument.

No, they're barely on the same metric dear.

Sentience is the capacity to experience through senses. It is a biological term.
Personhood is the recognition of a thing as having the attributes of a person, in a philosophical context this being attached to sapience.

>>92802

And the important difference between sapience and sentience being... ?

Fuck it yes, human beings are better and fundamentally different than all other animals, which are stupid and serve only as a source of food and entertainment for me, the only way any of the other creature on this planet will get off this rock is on the back of our technology. Whales are too stupid to not drive themselves up a fucking beach repeatedly and I would gladly eat one.

If the whales don't like it, let them come and debate me. Stop presuming to speak on their behalf, you don't know what's best for them they do.

>>92803
Sentience is to know oneself as distinct from the world and perceive the interactions - your cat is sentient, a jellyfish is not.
Sapience is to know things and conduct high-level abstract reasoning - you are sapient, your cat is not (when we're looking).

TNG is especially guilty of confusing the two terms but they're not the same thing.

>>92804

This is basically how we felt about black people up until about a century ago.

I don't know who's dafter at this point; the one who thinks dust mites and whales are the one and the same or the other lad who thinks killing whales is a slippery slope down towards holocaust. Get to bed the pair of you, before I turn the wifi off.

>>92807
Nobody said it was the slippery slope to the holocaust.

>>92805
Okay. But whales and dolphins exhibit both.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2016.00087/full
The other lad is just stuck in some sort of post-Christian man-at-centre-of-universe thinking. "They can't be people if they don't look like me".

FUCK YOU, WHALE.

>>92807

It's not even a slippery slope, you don't even need the numbers to know our genocides against other species vastly and unquestionably outweigh the holocaust. If you think it doesn't count just because an elephant has never written a book, then you're just a fucking arsehole, frankly.

>>92807
Mites and whales are the same lad here.

The reasons people pick for not killing whales seem entirely arbitrary to me. If it is about pain or fear than that seems to be more universal than animals who can recognize themselves in the mirror, or learn sign language. Even single cellar organisms seem to exhibit panic (in the form of flight) when an amoeba starts digesting them. So what exactly is should be the cut off? where we shouldn't give a shit so we can function guilt free? Because mankind eating a billion chickens annually but agressively protesting less than a thousand whales seems like a weird standard. What's your pet, what's vermin, what's your food, what you wouldn't do but would tolerate all seems about as arbitrary and as well formed ideas as a religion to me and about as indoctrinated.

I presume sea shepherd supporters to by and large be militant vegans who can't win the culture war in their own society so have taken to the sea, and switching the city for the sea doesn't make me anymore more convinced by their arguments. And other than not hunting whales to extinction which is valid, I don't see a reason why we shouldn't just eat them. If anything I find the argument that we shouldn't eat other animals more of a presumption of superiority of humanity than just eating them, it is treating us as somehow divorced from everything else even our own base drives. And if you are going to feel guilty about the things that end up on the plate I don't see why you shouldn't feel guilty about the 'indirect consequences' of other aspects of society that disrupt and destroy the natural world, if it is just a 'having it on a plate feels like pulling the trigger' than I am sorry that is just a baseless emotion argument because you haven't thought about the full ramifications of just having civilisation has had. I would go as far as to say there isn't a single object in your house that is guilt free. Plastics come from oil which randomly leaks and poisons everything, anything plant based meant destroying the habitat of some animals before placing down a mono-culture and spraying pesticides all over it. Metals mean smelting which meant releasing poison into the sky. All of this is by the 'don't kill Whales' standards much much worse and you are participating in that cycle just by existing now. Quite honestly the only way to live guilt free would be to kill yourself, and I don't see a difference between industrialized destruction of the natural world and hunting whales to see why I should care other than that whales have a better PR team.

>>92813
"People only care about whales but not chickens because of all the PR whales have" is a bad take at most times of year,

>>92813

The main problem with humans, as a predatory species, is that we're too thick to know when we're stepping over the lines. We do think we're above and outside nature, and that's the problem- We don't realise nature will turn right back around to put us in our place eventually. Even in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic we haven't sussed it out yet.

Eating ten billion chickens a year is fine because we have big chicken factories where we breed the daft little twats with no purpose in life but to become food. It's bleak and we probably should feel guilty about it, but we do have to eat, and chicken is both plentiful and delicious. Eating whales, an already endangered species which we have driven into near extinction purely by the callousness of our other actions, never mind the hunting, that's what I'd call excessive. It's not like we need the meat when we've got ten billion chickens- We're really only doing it because it gets our primitive monkey dicks hard to slap our environment in the face like that, as an act of dominance and adversarial self affirmation.

I wish we lived in an anthropomorphic society where there would be at least be incredibly powerful erotic dynamics between predator and prey species.

>>92813
>I presume sea shepherd supporters to by and large be militant vegans who can't win the culture war in their own society so have taken to the sea, and switching the city for the sea doesn't make me anymore more convinced by their arguments.
And "The Masked Singer" is a more important piece of art than The Illiad.
>What's your pet, what's vermin, what's your food, what you wouldn't do but would tolerate all seems about as arbitrary and as well formed ideas as a religion to me and about as indoctrinated.
No more or less arbitrary than how we define personhood, as has already been covered in this thread. How about just eating fruit, vegetables and mycoprotein? They're all essentially fruiting bodies that the plants want to be eaten as part of their life cycle. That's not arbitrary.
>civilisation is terrible
This is just whataboutism. If things are bad, you try to improve them. You don't decide that it's therefore fine to make everything worse.

>>92815

Is Beastars good, then?

>>92815
This. There's whole cycles of inter-dependency and interactions that leave us vulnerable to all sorts of unintended and often unforeseen consequences.
Whales for instance are important even when they die, as the carcass slowly sinking through the ocean is central to a lot of other species. If we drove whales to extinction we'd likely see a whole load of other food chains collapse.

>>92817

I haven't watched it because the art style is too unsexy, so I couldn't possibly say.

>>92814

Get your pagan rituals out of the festival Christian's have co opted you sickened me. Easter is the celebration of having new things to murder not the preservation of them.

>>92815

As I said I see the value in not driving them to extinction, but not all whales are endangered, and I think we should eat those.

Also I presume you wanked yourself stupid to zootopia?

>>92816
>No more or less arbitrary than how we define personhood, as has already been covered in this thread

Okay vegan. If you want me to presume you to be bat shit keep talking about how things that aren't human should be people, and make the arbitrary connection between groups of people being treated as a person for the sake of legal convenience and a wild animal like they are the same whilst you are at. I know you think you have some sort of argument here but you actually don't anyone who isn't already in the choir can see a clear distinct difference between a human and a multi ton water cow. Even if you pluck a chicken it isn't a man.

> How about just eating fruit, vegetables and mycoprotein? They're all essentially fruiting bodies that the plants want to be eaten as part of their life cycle. That's not arbitrary.

Firstly let us be clear you have jumped tracks from talking about animals to talking about fruit which should be argument enough of why this point is irrelevant to talking about how we treat whales relative to other animals that might feel.

Secondly there is nothing natural about fruit we have selectively breeding those fruit to not be poisonous to us (not all fruit was 'intended' for animal consumption) and so malformed they don't even produce their own seeds anymore and to produce giant distorted versions of their fruit and we produce it all year round by building factorie over the environment and poisoning anything natural that tries to encroach on them. And that is before we get into modern GM. You are right that isn't arbitrary, that is is the systematic engineering of a new species and the natural world to solely service us.

>This is just whataboutism

My argument was that giving a shit about whales is entirely arbitrary. Whataboutism is the entire point of my argument. This isn't a silver bullet.

>>92818

>whales are important even when they die their bodies feed other animals

Well then do I have good news for you about the methodologies of 19th century whaling...

>>92820
>but not all whales are endangered, and I think we should eat those.
Why?
Whaling isn't even profitable, it's subsidised by the governments of Whaling countries and they still manage to run up stockpiles of unsold whale meat that winds up in dogfood or forced on schoolkids to get shot of it. Whales aren't like chickens where we can't resist stuffing ourselves to obesity with them, people don't actually enjoy eating whale in commercially viable quantities.
That's the thing hippies always miss: In a purely commercial sense whaling is a gigantic waste of everybody's time and money.

If you just want people to eat everything and anything you'd have a better job trying to get more people to eat pigeons.

>>92820
>Okay vegan. If you want me to presume you to be bat shit keep talking about how things that aren't human should be people, and make the arbitrary connection between groups of people being treated as a person for the sake of legal convenience and a wild animal like they are the same whilst you are at.
You're the one saying that the lines are arbitrary. They're no less arbitrary when drawn between humans and other animals, no matter what your Masked Singer fan crowd might think.
>Firstly let us be clear you have jumped tracks from talking about animals to talking about fruit
You didn't jump the tracks when you started talking about "single cellar" organisms? Or all that dross about how civilisation is bad?
>Secondly there is nothing natural about fruit we have selectively breeding those fruit to not be poisonous to us
Right. I'm going to take a cue from you earlier on, where you dismissed something on the grounds it's not popular, and dismiss you on the grounds that your syntax is fucking awful and I can't be bothered to grapple with your insane run-on sentences. Your brain is broken.

>>92820

>Also I presume you wanked yourself stupid to zootopia?

Not to the film itself, but the community has produced a wealth of highly tasteful erotica, as I am sure you can imagine.

Just look at this little tart though. To put it in terms you lot would understand, she's my Vorderman.

>>92824
>Vorderman

Eyes are pointing the wrong way.

>>92810
That article doesn't actually say anything as far as I can tell. Yes Whales have families and teach one-another to do things, how novel, but they self-evidently lack sapience. There's no artificial (i.e. whale constructed) governance from whale parliament or artificial constructs like whale taxation to pay for whale schools. It's not like blacks in the American South where society had to gear itself on the contradiction despite it being in plain sight and remove passages from slave bibles.

What you need to do is find a new word between sentient and sapient rather than try to claim Whales as people.

>>92815
You should really drop the tedious misanthropy already - it's very 2019.

>>92833
>There's no artificial (i.e. whale constructed) governance from whale parliament or artificial constructs like whale taxation to pay for whale schools.
Firstly, that's not part of the definition of sapience (either the one you gave or ones I find elsewhere) and secondly, you wouldn't know if they did have those things.

>>92834

Not them but the person you think they are. I would know they don't have a parliament the same way i know there isn't a tea pot in orbit, because they evidently aren't that smart. I know you saw one documentary on how whales care for their young and sing and think they are very special but they really aren't. Chickens have a word for land predator and a different word for air predator. It doesn't make them smart enough to care about them over a different animal which I will either eat or kill because it is an inconvenient.

>>92836

You know there isn't a tea pot in orbit because they evidently aren't that smart? I know you read a sentence that included some of those words once and it made sense, but that one doesn't.
Chickens have instinctive noises they make in certain situations, whales and dolphins have languages, dialects, and use them to transmit information about various things, including tool use. This is social learning and hard evidence that they do have culture and social structures in the same way we do. You're just wrong about this.

>>92836

You're telling me there isn't a single teapot on the ISS? Bollocks.

>>92841
The ISS is the INTERNATIONAL Space Station. They don't drink tea. They're not as civilised as us.

>>92837
>You know there isn't a tea pot in orbit because they evidently aren't that smart? I know you read a sentence that included some of those words once and it made sense, but that one doesn't.

Found the Whale, fuck off back to your parliament.

> Whales and dolphins have languages, dialects, and use them to transmit information about various things, including tool use. This is social learning and hard evidence that they do have culture and social structures in the same way we do.

no.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1FY5kL_zXU

Again you are very generous in your use of "what we do" for social structures, dolphins do not have an accredited Hydro dynamical Engineer who is sub contracted to the state water company on by a private organisation so they don’t come under head count but instead expenses do they?

>>92843
>dolphins do not have an accredited Hydro dynamical Engineer who is sub contracted to the state water company on by a private organisation so they don’t come under head count but instead expenses do they?
Nor did humans for effectively 100% of all time, what's your point?

>>92842
They have Russians on board, there's bound to be an illegal samovar somewhere on the ISS. For testing vapour mechanics in low gravity or some such.

>>92844
That dolphins do not have social structures in the same way we do.

>>92846
So humans weren't people until whenever all that was invented. Great fucking logic there.

>>92842
There's not only tea in space but they also installed an espresso machine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISSpresso

In fact the Russians even used tea to find a crack in the shell.

>>92848

Is it weird that I instantly recognised that she was in space from her hair and the way her subcutaneous fat was distributed but translated the rest of the image as a basement flat in Hounslow being renovated?

>>92849

I see what you mean - the space espresso machine looks a bit like a consumer unit at first glance. I don't know what possessed the Russians to paint their half of the station like a 1970s school.

It comes to something when one of the most sensible posters on this website is a bloody furry. You lot need to have words.

>>92850
I prefer Hager, honestly. If cost matters I might go Wylex though the flex on Hager lids is nice for installation. Shame they fucked over independent shops. MK for posh jobs, of course.

>>92852

You are Big Clive and I claim my £5.

>>92853
Genuinely hope he is, I adore him with all my heart.

>>92854

I think he would be our best (quasi) celebrity claim to date. Sorry Charlie, but you lost your edge when you married Connie.

You mean Tony from Tile It All doesn't post here?

>>92856
What about Big John from Karelia Cars?

Toppest rofl

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-56724875

>>93048

>if this effects you

What is this country coming to.

The Labour flyer has come through, Lynn Masterman with her Ossett Masterplan. Apparently £95.3million has been invested into schools in Ossett over the past five years, which seems extremely high unless they're counting things like salaries in this.

IF YOU WANT A PIKEY FOR A NEIGHBOUR, VOTE LABOUR.

>>93111
>Conservaive

>>93111
>This was in 2011
Desperation ferishists must be going wild.

>>93113
What?

>>93114
They sound pretty desperate for things to crow about. People needing a wee is a common(ish) sexual fetish.

>>93111
>It was some years ago now
Hang on while I get my calculator out, lads. This is going to take a bit of quick maths.

Votes cast. Yorkshire Party for West Yorkshire mayor and Labour for Ossett councillor.

I can only vote for the Police and Crime Commissioner. However, given I don't think that position should exist in the first place it looks like I'm spoiling my first ballot.

>>93360
I thought they were getting rid of those?

Voted SDP-Lib Dem for mayor and SDP in London. Quite an ingenious system really, my vote won't matter multiple times.
Voted Tory for local.

Got a free pencil out of it.

>>93360
I'm surprised you don't get more joke PCC candidates. Or one who promises to do nothing and delegate all authority to whatever we had before.

The number of joke candidates in the London mayoral election is staggering. Brian Rose, Laurence Fox, Shaun Bailey, etc.

>>93362
Can we have a rule that you don't post who you voted for if you're a cunt, then I don't have to get angry.

>>93361
Why would the Tories get rid of them? They introduced them. It was, however, in the Tory manifesto to change the electoral system from supplementary vote to FPTP, because, y'know, they are cunts.

>>93363
I'm pretty sure Brian Rose is a cartoon character that crossed into our reality.

>>93364
>Can we have a rule that you don't post who you voted for if you're a cunt, then I don't have to get angry.

You can't return the pencil because of Covid.

>>93365
He looks like he could be Dominic Raab's big brother.

First choice Pink, everything else Green. Fuck it.

>>93363
Two Youtubers. One of them's basically just trying to monetise trolling Laurence Fox, which I can't criticise. https://laurencefox.org/ Though I will criticise his lack of a chin.

>>93367
He also drinks his own piss and has David Icke on his youtube show pretty frequently. I don't think he will be extending 5g coverage to the underground.

>>93365

Good electioneering from Tiger Patel.

>>93365
He is literally Alan B'stard.

>>93372
Surely this is deliberate?

Apparently 'Super Thursday' is a thing.

>>93374
The only thing remotely noteworthy about this round of elections is the Hartlepool by-election. Whilst it could prove to be a serious upset, it's hardly going to flip parliament one way or another. This latest trans-atlantic import seems totally unearned unless I'm missing something.

>>93375
Scottish Parliamentary elections are easily the most important one's today that could end up having us yearn for the easy days of Brexit. You might even get both a unilateral announcement of IndyRef2 and Starmer's resignation this Saturday. Won't that be fun.

>>93365

I made a post a bit ago about how I kept seeing youtube ads for this cunt. They're hilarious, it's all these shots of him walking about trying to look normal, but he just gives off the impression of a robot in a very expensive but very badly fitted suit that prevents him being able to move his arms.

I wonder if he knows that half the ads he paid for were wasted on people who live 200 miles north of London. I'm reasonably sure YouTube knows I'm watching from Ossett, and that the London mayoral campaign is about as relevant to me as a sports bra ad. Then again, it's probably not very good at targeting me because watching youtube at work is the first time in a decade I've had to actually be exposed to the ads.

>>93377
I didn't realise just how American he was. Here's hoping he runs again so we can have a proper /iq/ thread:

>>93378

Do they actually expect brits to respond to an advert edited like that? I was just waiting for him to tell me to ask my doctor about lexapro today.

>>93378
He can't even be arsed to pronounce 'borough' correctly. When he says he was surrounded by 10 police officers immediately after showing footage of two officers conversing with him, it seemed very...well, the editor must know.

He doesn't even talk about a platform, just that he has the answers, he's going to do something about it, it's a crisis, so what mate? "Can we swap places? I always wanted to be a black cabbie", this is actually satire, I think the editor is actually satirising his client.

>>93376
I'm really holding out for the SNP to get a Theresa-May-in-2017 shock. Winning the election, but feeling like they've lost it. The last parliament was a complete and utter waste of time and their vacuous, leader centred election campaign wiped out whatever goodwill they could've bought with their passable manifesto. (Well, if I could bring myself to pretend they would deliver more than 1% of it anyway.)

I feel like the only nationalist in Scotland who's made the jump from the SNP to Labour.

>>93378

I just can't get over the fucking suit. There's something very noticeably out of place about it. It's the kind of suit that screams "I picked this suit because I wanted you to be impressed with my suit", which is invariably not as nice of a suit as the wearer wants you to think; and this is a particularly egregious example.

It's got the same vibe as when Chris Eubank used to ham it up with the monacle and tweed, except you knew Chris Eubank was deliberately overdressing because he was an eccentric working class 'ard cunt dressed as a member of the aristocracy. This guy's just a cunt dressed as a cunt.

>>93381
>I feel like the only nationalist in Scotland who's made the jump from the SNP to Labour.

The way Scottish Labour's leadership have been playing you might well wake up tomorrow as the leader of the party.

>>93382
It's the waistcoat and pocket square for me. I'm convinced his fashion choices are a mixture of what an American thinks British people should wear and his conviction that he's a superhero.

>>93378
>BRIAN ROSE: YOUR NEXT
>MAYOR OF LONDON
It's like a threat with very poor grammar.

And why are all the wacky independent candidates like this? Where are the Black Panthers and communists? Every independent candidate for mayor of Greater Manchester is some anti-lockdown conspiracy theorist who wants to take a brave stand against injecting Chinese robots into your brain to cure a disease that doesn't even exist and is just a side effect of 5G masts anyway. They're all absolutely the wrong kind of mental, and I hate it because I really wanted to vote for a mental this time.

>>93384
>And why are all the wacky independent candidates like this? Where are the Black Panthers and communists?
The Burning Pink candidate was running with the sole policy of getting rid of the role and delegating the decision-making process to citizen's assemblies. She's a bit of a character though so maybe you'd lump her in with the other odd ones. As to "where", they were very clearly quite frustrated that the media ignored or snubbed them for the entire campaign period.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-57013769

Look whose come out of the woodwork. You could almost think she's controlled opposition.

>>93384
I've noticed this problem in online communities as well, I think you don't get these candidates because they simply don't exist. When's the last time you saw a Maoist poster? Or even an Anarcho-Capitalist?

>>93385
>Burning Pink

Who thought this name was a good idea?

>>93386
The ancaps are too busy mooning crypto to bother with this. Plus there's the deposit and signature requirements, which might cause trouble because they'd have to sell their hodlings and they have no friends.

>>93386
I think the Electoral Commission wouldn't let them register 'Beyond Politics', so they spent two minutes looking at their logo and thought oh it's pink and on fire and it has the same initials, let's go with that.

Has anything actually happened yet? For some reason there's an inflatable Chris Tarrant in Hartlepool.

>>93389
Labour's blown it.
Jill Mortimer (C) 15,529 (51.88%, +22.96%)
Paul Williams (Lab) 8,589 (28.69%, -8.99%)
...
C maj 6,940 (23.19%)
15.97% swing Lab to C
Electorate 70,768; Turnout 29,933 (42.30%, -15.62%)

Soon the joke won't be "Any other leader would be 20 points ahead", it will be "Any other leader would be on at least 20 points".

>>93390
The Survation poll that had the Tories on 50% and Labour on 33% was actually overoptimistic for them. Fucking hell, what a time to be alive.

I've never looked forward to an edition of The Observer less.

I guess the silver lining is that I might not ever have to hear anyone entertain the Northern sodding Independence lot again.

Council results aren't going too well either. Thankfully BBC has an expert on to talk about his trombone lessons.

>>93396
From what I've read, in the North East in particular there's been issues with Labour councillors being extremely complacent and doing very little for the local communities as they assumed wearing a red rosette is all they needed to do so the Tories have been carefully selecting candidates that are known locally for being very active in the community.

I've lived in a Labour stronghold area and the council always had problems with self-serving cronyism.

>>93390
How can 15,529 people be so stupid?

The area has suffered immensely under a decade of Tory rule. I guess the locals are happy with losing their A&E, police stations and port.

>>93398
Lad, we're not doing that again.

>>93397
This is somewhere that Labour categorically needs a purge. There's so much shit in the local parties, calling themselves left, centre, right, whatever, that does nothing because they're too daft, or worse actively harms in order to sustain their own personal interests. It's bad locally, but the underlying problem does have an effect nationally too. And when I say "purge" I'm not talking about ignoring their emails, I mean Stalinist stuff, up against the wall, do not collect £200 on your way directly to Hell, you fucking leaching cunt.

Ahem, that's, erm, a thought I had anyway. Hide all the primary school teacher-esque MPs too, they don't need to be killed like the other lot, but stop them talking.

>>93399
I'm sorry if facts make you uncomfortable.

>>93400
I don't know what it's like elsewhere but where I live you've no chance of standing for Labour unless you're involved with Unite.

They've started the BBC News segment on Hartlepool in a dog groomers. Then they're talking to old people in a cafe about how Labour let you down. Now they're talking to a man painting car parking spaces about how the political map is being repainted.

I still maintain that being "the party of trade unions" in a country where nobody gives a shit about trade unions is a very poor tactic.

>>93403
>Then they're talking to old people in a cafe about how Labour let you down.
Which is kind of funny given they haven't been in power for 11 years.

>>93405
They don't have to be in power to let you down.

>>93406
If taking an anti-racist stand is letting you down, may you always be let down.

>>93397
I think a good indicator of this comes from the result in Hartlepool where third parties managed to lose their deposits. If it was as simple as 'fuck labour' then you'd expect better showings, at least from those reticent to actually vote Tory, the only third candidate to do well was an independent campaigning on just this issue of the local administration being pants:
https://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/hartlepudlian-mum-businesswoman-plans-stand-2020590

>>93400
I can guarantee this won't happen and all criticism will be deflected to Starmer. He might not have helped but it's all too easy to sweep local party issues under the rug, especially when at the moment the Corbyn-wing of the party is cynically using this as vindication.

>>93407
Snappy little singers don't change anything, lad.

Many people in this country are disillusioned with Labour, feeling like the party took them for granted by wanting their vote but not their voice. What exactly has Starmer done to try and win them back and appeal to them? Fuck all. The utterly vacuous taking the knee sends the message to these people that Starmer is a continuation of the happy-clappy the shipping forecast nonsense instead of focusing on the issues that actually matter to them; Kier Starmer cares more about black people in America than the working class in Barnsley.

If the only way you can try to win these back is by saying "the Tories are bad" rather than why you're good then you're absolutely fucked.

>>93410
>The utterly vacuous taking the knee sends the message to these people that Starmer is a continuation of the happy-clappy the shipping forecast nonsense
How dare a Labour leader believe at least facially in vaguely improving the lot of the underprivileged. How very dare they.

>>93411
Taking the knee was a thoughtless gimmick to hop on a bandwagon. Most people saw right through it.

>>93397

https://lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/A-NEW-POLITICAL-LANDSCAPE-Oct-2020.pdf

Labour could be on for a bit of a comeback in Scotland. SNP's three seats so far won on 58%, 52% and 47%, so majority isn't off the table yet.

>>93413

>Keir Starmer is "obsessed with media reality" and has no message for voters, Dominic Cummings has claimed after a set of torrid election results for Labour. Boris Johnson's former chief of staff declared that the "centre ground" pursued by Sir Keir was "a pundit fiction" and "does not exist". And he claimed that like nearly all politicians in Westminster Sir Keir "obsesses on media reality not actual reality" and was failing to win support because of it.

>"He’s played the lobby game (badly) for a year without a message to the country, now the pundits will a) savage him, b) tell him he needs to focus on them more," the former Vote Leave chief said in a stream of tweets on Friday. "He’ll listen to the babble! What will he not do? Focus on public priorities [over] media priorities. We have a Downing Street and opposition who see their job as media entertainment service and neither knows how to be this better than Tony Blair or Mandelson. Neither will try to be… a government."

>Mr Cummings claimed that it was "measure of how bad Keir Starmer is" that "until I googled yesterday I didn’t know who Shadow chancellor is and when I looked at photo I had zero recognition". Referring to Anneliese Dodds, Mr Cummings said "she never touched my consciousness in a year". He said a sign of Sir Keir trying to improve would be a "sustained effort on violent crime" that went on "month after month after month". He also suggested bringing in "serious people from outside SW1 to help" and producing policies to help improve policies. "The optimal political strategy for Conservative and Labour is almost identical and would be described by pundits ... as ‘incoherent/mad’ because it does not fit SW1 ideas of left, right centre, but would be wildly popular.

>Neither will do it because both are oriented to media reality [ahead of] actual reality. If Labour had a leader 80% as good at comms as Blair and focused on actual reality, they'd win next general election easy. They don't/won't.” The former advisor said it was “impossible now to be confident what will happen” at the next election and that “both parties could easily be hated or held in contempt at same time”.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/keir-starmer-dominic-cummings-media-reality-centre-ground-b1843703.html
I doubt he's going to be a Labour advisor anytime soon but I do wonder how a focus on crime would work. Shaun Bailey has certainly tried the crime angle in London only to look a complete mug.

>>93400
I really do regret that Corbyn didn't bring in reselection and all that. Even if he rigged the process to pick a bunch of lefties, Tony Blair seemed like he was on the centre-left of the party when he was first selected as a candidate - that doesn't mean anything - but it would've given Labour a chance to roll the dice again and see if they get a better crop of MPs the second time around.
(Of course Labour could also have lost a lot of people with good local knowledge and reputations and wound up losing even more seats, but given the cul-de-sac they're down at the moment the gamble seems worth it.)

>>93416
Keith might be presiding over a shitshow, but it would be great if we could all stop pretending that Dominic Cummings is an expert on anything.

>>93418
In fairness he's more of an expert than 90% of other pundits, having actually directed a winning campaign. Even if he is also a weird little phrenology studying slate star codex reader with a funny shaped head who'd undoubtedly start trying to show you racial IQ charts the minute you gave him a pint.

>>93419
In retrospect, his success on Brexit seems more like a clock stopped at just the right time.

>>93416
Shaun Bailey's the candidate of the ruling party so it probably doesn't ring true when he says it. Also I think trying to pin every mugging on Khan like he was some kind of Spiderman villain is a mistake because people remember there was definitely a bit of crime during the several millenia preceding Khan's election, so you start to sound like you're harping on.

As for what Cumming's said I think he made some salient points. There's certainly a charisma vacuum at the top of the party and the lack of messaging was not 4d chess as certain people wished it to be, but, well actually I'm not sure what it was? Laziness seems impossible, complacency seems unthinkable and over-confidence is just not it, so it begs the question what were they doing? That's what's driving me mental regarding Labour right now; the massive amorphous nothing that comprises their politics. "Tory sleaze" was fine, but what about you Labour?

I'd also like to say that I largely agree with >>93420 before anyone thinks I'm a Mad Dom fanboy. It reminds me of that Nate Silver chap in America.

>>93423

>Laziness seems impossible, complacency seems unthinkable and over-confidence is just not it, so it begs the question what were they doing?

Institutional inflexibility. Labour are still to a great extent financially dependent on the trade unions, which limits the range of acceptable policy positions. Any big move by the leadership towards a populist platform will inevitably cause a hugely damaging round of bitter in-fighting that can't just be ignored. The Tories are mostly backed by elite donors who don't give a toss as long as their taxes don't go up, which means they can turn on a sixpence when needed.

>>93423
If Starmer got a message from god tomorrow telling him that his mission was to build a modern version of the postwar consensus the first thing he would do is consult with a gaggle of advisors who'd tell him it's out because rail re-nationalisation would put him left of the middle ground. They are a group of instinctively cautious people who feel like they're too intelligent to try and have a vision. They love policy detail, detail lets them put their big brains to work being very smart, and they love trying to game the centre ground, again because it makes them feel smart, but they don't dare to have a vision - a sort of sketch of how the country should look, the "how it looks when you order it online" photograph of what Labour will try to deliver.
Much like on actual policy achievements, you can chart the decline of Labour's aspirations in their visions for government: A peace that was worth fighting for and the abolition of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness! The white heat of the technological revolution will deliver a new scientifically planned Britain! We can get out of the economic crisis if we all work together! new Labour new Britain - a young country!
I joke about that last one, but it's perfectly fine as a vision - "Britain is a fine country with a proud history, but a few bits of government aren't keeping up with the modern world. Let us in and we'll spruce things up with some constitutional and public sector reforms to make us comfortable with ourselves in the 21st century"- that's a perfectly good vision from Blair, and whatever else I think of him, I think it's a vision he genuinely believed in.
Starmer has nothing like that to drive him. Meanwhile Boris Johnson has stolen a lot of the kind of platform that a fantasy-politics Labour party might've gone with - Britain is tough enough to stand alone in global markets, the government will spend vast sums of money to bring infrastructure, jobs, and prosperity to the north. Johnson is a transparent opportunist - I doubt he really believes in any of that, but he doesn't have to. He put the photo up online and people have bought it - and despite the fact that what we've actually got is the Wish knockoff version of that vision, people still prefer their Conversative government to Labour's blindness.

>>93426
If the unions would bankroll Blair, why wouldn't they bankroll a populist platform?

THE TORIES TAKE OSSETT.

>>93432
I'm sure there's nothing ominous at all about that majority figure.

It's not looking good for Starmer. Corbyn may have failed to capture the broader electorate, but had a very devoted and large minority of the electorate. Starmer on the other hand has very limp support and that support was predicated on him for some reason being considered more electable despite not clearly standing for anything. If he doesn't have that, then he has absolutely nothing going for him. By this point it's too late to even consider a shift to the left; he's made a concerted effort to spite the left.
It doesn't seem like there's much hope for Labour for the next decade or so. I don't think there's much hope for any alternative, either. The Conservative Party is a gang of nihilistic kleptocrats in charge of a country that has lost hope, imagination, and a sense of reality. It's not the party the country deserves, it's the party its supporters deserve, and the rest of us are along for the ride.

One of the Burning Pink lot had their house raided and various belongings confiscated today after spraying pink paint over the Guardian building. Unless it turns out that he confessed to some sort of genuine terror plot while in lockup for the paint, this would appear to be police going out of their way to punish him extra-judicially.

>>93440
>The Conservative Party is a gang of nihilistic kleptocrats in charge of a country that has lost hope, imagination, and a sense of reality.

How tedious. At the very least you could scare us by saying the Tories are going to ban gay people and the NHS.

>>93442
According to this report https://twitter.com/bearwitness2019/status/1390774090605203464 two groups of police attempted to do the same thing, metropolitan with a section 18, then later transport police with nothing more than skeleton keys - which presumably would be unlawful.

>>93429
I think you might be right that Labour are overthinking things. Maybe they're trying to be something to everyone and winding up being nothing at all instead? It's just one by-election, but seeing the Tory's poll higher than 50% is embarrassing. Since 2019 my point of solace has been that even though it was a complete route in terms of seats won, 33% of the country still voted for Labour, "only" nine points down on the Tory's 42%. You don't win UK elections with that much of the vote, but that's a good, solid base to move on from. Or rather it was, until Starmer's policy of no policies took hold. I don't want another leadership election, but if this carries on he's clearly not capable of being leader. I suppose this is making me sympathise somewhat with the centrist MPs who wanted Corbyn out post-Brexit referendum. However, the differences here are that that wasn't a defeat for Labour per se, and the clear for all to see reason for Corbyn's somewhat half-hearted support for the EU was that he had genuine political instincts one way and his party wanting him to go another. With Starmer I don't even know what his problem is.

>>93443
Did you sleep through the past year of botched lockdowns, half-arsed test and trace and public money being fed directly to MP's pals? I'm not judging you if you did as it has been quite boring, but it's good evidence in favour of otherlad's conclusion.

>>93443
He's not wrong though.

>>93447
>botched lockdowns, half-arsed test and trace and public money being fed directly to MP's pals

But the country doesn't care, accountability isn't in style anymore and people aren't paying attention to what the government are doing. Everybody is too caught up in identity politics, propaganda and conspiracy theories, and without any real opposition things will continue to deteriorate.

>>93440

I just hope that can be the end of it and both sides can admit they need to work together instead of bickering like little school kids. They've both had their turn and it's clear neither of them were right.

The trouble is it doesn't tell us anything meaningful politically, because the whole thing is entirely based on personality. We have no clear idea if Corbyn's policy was off-putting, we just know people thought he was a fuddy duddy old softy and they don't want that kind of person in charge. And as for Starmer's leadership, we don't even have the foggiest what the policies are or would be, we just know that the man himself is about as appealing as cold sick.

What they needs is someone with a Northern accent, who runs on a vaguely left-ish economic platform with lots of talk about jobs and making them pay properly, and just the right amount of token socially conservative pandering like teaching more British history in schools or something like that. He'd do interviews where he occasionally says something shocking (doesn't matter what about) but stands firmly by it (regardless what it is) just to show he's got backbone ans "speaks his mind". The election slogan would be "No Nonsense Politics."

>>93440
There isn't really anything that Labour can do right now, unfortunately, at least not that I can see. Any good left-wing policy that people would actually vote for is now a Conservative policy. The consensus seems to be that for Labour to take power, they need to be a party that loves Brexit and takin are conutry bak, but which also spends massively on coronavirus and the grim parts of the North. A party like that simply couldn't lose, right? Well, the good news is that a party like that isn't losing: they're already in power.

I saw this morning (so Friday morning; why aren't you also posting at 2am, you losers?) that the Green Party had made huge, massive, colossal gains. Obviously after only a couple of hours of vote-counting, this could be just a temporary mirage, but look at this result right here:
https://twitter.com/BritainElects/status/1390535393049731072

And look at Green boss Jonathan Bartley's Twitter feed in general right now:
https://twitter.com/jon_bartley
He seems very upbeat. His party has seemingly romped home. Maybe this is just them picking up votes that didn't go to Labour, but also Labour really are just on their way out, in the manner of the Whigs.

>>93459

Nail, head etc. The Johnson/Sunak government are dominating the nationalist-populist-Keynesian position that would give Labour half a chance of being electable. Starmer has been criticised for a lack of policies, but nobody seems to know what those policies should be. Unless and until the Tories swing back towards austerity, Labour have nothing to offer.

Labour just need to think outside the box, though as mentioned before, they lack the imagination.

Imagine the support they'd win back if the sole policy was slashing fag and alcohol duty in half. Pounds in pockets.

>Labour just need to think outside the box
They can't even think outside the comment box.

I'm just thinking to myself here, what if Labour's screwed?
The idea that always seems to go around thinks of things like this: The public love (say) dogs. In the last election Labour didn't prominently feature dogs, while the Conservatives did. The Conservatives are seen as the party of dog lovers, while people think Labour is really more of a cat party. So Labour needs to show people it's a party of dog lovers. If Labour starts putting out adverts showing Starmer walking his dog, policies showing they want to build more dog parks, etc, then Labour can recover.

But what if the idea Labour is a party for cat lovers and the Conservatives are the party for dog lovers is something deeply locked in - the way you're always going to think of the SNP as the party of Scottish nationalism - and if all Labour's attempts to show their cabinet with their dogs, and all of their PPBs about how wonderful dogs are and so on just have the effect of enhancing the salience of dog related issues during the election campaign - to the Conservatives advantage? What if dogs just always look uncomfortable in photos with Labour MPs?
And what if, with each passing election, Labour does a little worse than the last one, meaning that after 20 years of Labour trying to lose the cat association and gain the dog association, people think they're a party for everyone, but it's all for nothing because now Labour has 90 seats and would need the biggest swing in more than a hundred years to even be a viable minority government.

>>93484
That was, no pun intended, the most belaboured metaphor I've ever heard in my life.

>>93484
You're saying they need a Labourador?

>>93484

We've seen the major parties radically rebrand themselves several times, with varying degrees of success. Labour were unelectable during the Thatcher years, the Tories were unelectable during the Blair years. Neither party is likely to completely collapse, due to the sheer number of ultra-safe seats.

The Cameron/Johnson project has allowed the Tories to connect strongly with a demographic who had been totally overlooked by Labour - older, less-educated, middle-income voters in the Midlands and North. Labour can't win back those voters any time soon, because they still feel a sense of betrayal and mistrust; the question for Labour isn't how to win back those voters, but how to find and connect with some other group that has been overlooked.

The problem for Labour right now is that Johnson has actually done very well out of the pandemic. The massive amounts of cash being pumped into the economy have left Labour with nowhere to go on spending. Rationally or not, most voters now credit Johnson with having "beaten" Covid because of the success of the vaccine programme; 150,000 dead will soon be forgotten when we're out sipping crisp, refreshing pints in the summer sun. Labour just don't have any obvious lines of attack for persuading undecided voters that they'd be a better option.

That's not a permanent state of affairs, because a lot can change between now and the next election. If Sunak tightens the purse strings too soon, the "same old Tories, same old austerity" attack line will become much more viable. It's entirely plausible that post-lockdown euphoria will give way to a long hangover of debt and austerity that'll make change more attractive. Mercifully for Labour, Brexit is now mostly in the rear-view mirror, allowing them to move on from one of their least productive bits of in-fighting.

If nothing else, demographic change is a slow but constant process that can radically alter the political landscape over time.

>>93484
The problem is that what many people see as being perfectly reasonable policies get decried by factions within the party as Tory-lite, which just makes Labour look like clowns.

Not wanting gypsies illegally pitching up in your area is Tory-lite. Being more patriotic is Tory-lite. Wanting to move away from identity politics is Tory-lite. Wanting to feel safer on the streets is Tory-lite. It's fucking brain rot.

>>93488
The problem is that the current PLP are complete one note clowns. You ask for "more patriotism" and you're not going to get Labour's plan to get British export industry going, you're going to get Keir Starmer holding a British flag like it might bite him. You ask for feeling safer on the streets and Starmer will play a badly tuned dogwhistle as the government passes indefinite detention rather than taking the Corbyn route of promising that some of his public spending hikes will go on getting more policemen.

The way they will approach it is fundamentally Tory-lite, trying to be the Tories and failing, they have no internal idea of an desire for local people to control their own areas, an authentic love for this an idea of this country (connected inextricably to a vision of what it should be like - which they don't have), marginally competent suggestions for how we're going to deal with the crime that does exist and get people to stop worrying about the crime that doesn't, and so on. With no internal idea of these things all they can do is ape someone else's ideas - and those people are the Tories.

>>93491

Exactly.

It should say something that they're completely hamstrung by the mere fact the Tories are spending money. It should be obvious to anyone with common sense that a Tory hike in public spending is going to have a radically different impact than a Labour hike in public spending, not least because half of it is just going directly into their mate's pockets while they all drink champagne on expenses and have a good old laugh about it- But Labour are in such a weak position that they can't even criticise that. If they did they'd just be inviting an open goal on all those old shock stories about single mums living in mansions with 19 kids getting £100,000 in benefits a year, and their only response to it would be a limp wristed promise to crack down on single mums living in mansions with 19 kids getting £100,000 in benefits a year.

It's as though the party itself internally and concsiously believes the Tories are the better party than them. Even when they do recognise the things that voters dislike about them, they don't have the backbone to stand up for themselves on the things they should be electable for instead. The only thing they can imagine is copying their superiors.

Consistently and without fail, they take the worst of both worlds approach.

I think Labour needs to pivot to becoming an organisation that actually helps people, whether in or out of power. It's consistent with their origins and overall image and is something that the Tories will never do.

People don't seem to want to vote for a government, they want to vote for a symbol. If Labour stood up for solidarity and meaningful hard work, they'd become a symbol they could vote for.

Corbyn was able to buoy people up with a vision that that might be possible by electoral means, but in the end, wasn't able to deliver. So what if Labour could deliver first, wouldn't the electoral victory come after?

>>93496
>whether in or out of power
So would they become a charity? How would your plan look in real life? I can imagine Labour running food banks, and that would be a great idea indeed, but what other help would they offer? They're not going to top up people's wages. They wouldn't be able to pay for extra teachers to just show up at schools and offer to help out alongside the actual teachers. I guess they could go around and tear flammable cladding off grim tower blocks, but would that really be a vote-winner throughout the population, or just the people who live in those blocks?

>>93498

Maybe some kind of organised volunteer network? I assume that a political party is up to the task of organising a volunteer network because if there not they have no business being in government.

Sorry for the typo my phone interacts weirdly with this site and wouldn't let me edit it

>>93496

The way this is supposed to work is through local government - your nice Labour councillor sorts out the fly tipping in your alley, they wangle a bit of extra money for the local primary school, they send out a newsletter every couple of months telling you about all the useful things they're doing locally, so you're more inclined to vote for the Labour candidate in the general election.

Unfortunately the Corbyn revolution broke the Labour grassroots, as outlined here >>92984 . The Labour party was still pretty tawdry in this respect before Corbyn because of all the bent old trots doing favours for "comrades", the complacency of Labour councils was one of the big reasons for the collapse of the Red Wall, but it's completely fucked now.

>>93505

>Unfortunately the Corbyn revolution broke the Labour grassroots

No it didn't, his party got demonstrably better results in local elections than this shit show.

Stop making it about Corbyn, it's nothing to do with him. He was but one bump in a long and much more serious death spiral.

>>93496
You've got it backwards, Labour began and in theory remains as the political wing of these movements. Maybe Labour could try elbowing its way into food banks more directly but that would only create a cunt-off with the organisations doing it and likely be incredibly unhelpful in delivering benefits.

>>93506
Be honest here, it's Corbyn that broke the red wall and it's his tenure that saw the fundamental splits in North/South come to light. His mealy mouthed response to the Brexit referendum set the stage for Labour being thrown into the mess its in when he could've just campaigned for Leave as everyone presumed he wanted to.

Tracy Brabin looks set to be West Yorkshire mayor. This means there will be a by-election in her current Batley & Spen constituency and this was how they voted in 2019:-

Labour: 22,594 (42.7%)
Conservative: 19,069 (36.0%)
Heavy Woollen District Independents (UKIP): 6,432 (12.2%)
Brexit Party: 1,678 (3.2%)

Looks like even more of the red wall is about to crumble.

>>93544
That damn Corbyn breaking down the wall from beyond the grave!

At least Chipping-Norton switched to Labour I guess?

If you'd like a free smile then know that everyone in the London Mayoral barring Labour, Conservatives and Greens lost their 10k deposit.

>>93555
I feel bad for Valerie but hope at least they went into it not expecting to win at all. Because obviously they weren't going to.

>>93556
If you want to feel bad then the Lib Dems lost their deposit because Rejoin EU and Renew decided to split their vote.

Look at poor Luisa trying to put a smile on it, why didn't you save her?
https://twitter.com/LuisaPorritt/status/1391461512355663876

>>93526

>Be honest here, it's Corbyn that broke the red wall and it's his tenure that saw the fundamental splits in North/South come to light

But it's not. His tenure as leader may have attracted a load of useless studenty champagne socialist twats to the party, the papers may have hated him, there's a dozen other things you can point the finger at, but none of them were the man himself. The only proper bungle I think Corbyn himself can be held directly responsible for was caving in to the remainer side of the party and adopting the second referendum policy. The Red Wall had been losing its taste for Labour since the mid 00's. In fact there's a solid argument to be made Corbyn's rise was symptomatic of that decline, not the cause of it.

>>93555
>Piers Corbyn

Now there's a name you'll have difficulty making friends with.

>>93564
What makes you say that?