richardg
Admonishtrator
You're twsiting things again and making false accusations. I never said I was OK with anything, did I.Rational people LOL. Might know you'd be OK with it.
You're twsiting things again and making false accusations. I never said I was OK with anything, did I.Rational people LOL. Might know you'd be OK with it.
You're twsiting things again and making false accusations. I never said I was OK with anything, did I.
Maybe it sounds close to being one to you, and is one to Decameron. But to rational people with a balanced point of view, it is a long way from being one.
There is a lot of work to be done, we could start by getting rid of Johsnon. That would give things a decent boost right there. Someone that is a bit more diplomatic and more able to see more pieces of the jigsaw at the same time and someone with less ego.Well denial of the point made, that the UK is indeed failing very many more people as a result of deliberate policy, leaves you where on it exactly?
True, how many people voted for the tories though? Less than 15 million?Rational people with a balanced point of view wouldn't vote for Boris Johnson. It seems balance and reason are being lost to social media-fuelled hysteria, propaganda and toxic rhetoric.
True, how many people voted for the tories though? Less than 15 million?
I didn’t mention a failed state, that was you.Never mind. I'm not arguing with you about what a failed state is.
It was Decameron, not me.I didn’t mention a failed state, that was you.
Agree with you totally, except there is no such thing as ‘public money’ other than that which this government decides to allocate. It can allocate whatever it wants, it is the fact that it decides to allocate it to the rich and withhold it from the poor is the issue that, for me, makes this government morally bankruptPossibly because at a time when the richest are coining it thanks to the politicians they pay for and billions of pounds of public money is being shovelled into donor's pockets - Johnson talks of ‘building back better’ and 'levelling up'.
Meanwhile the reality is huge growth in food banks and poverty being fuelled directly by deliberate policy. Sounds pretty close to a state that is failing to me. The fact that some of those affected bought Johnson's folksy boosterism matters not one jot.
There is a lot of work to be done, we could start by getting rid of Johsnon. That would give things a decent boost right there. Someone that is a bit more diplomatic and more able to see more pieces of the jigsaw at the same time and someone with less ego.
I have no names to suggest, though.
I wasn’t responding to Decameron, I was was responding to you where you said there was an official definition of what a failed state is. Dec no doubt has his own opinion of what constitutes a failed state, and I have mine, but I’ve not heard of an official definition.It was Decameron, not me.
You're right of course*, as a member of EFTA Switzerland could join and had signed the EEA agreement but did not to join. But Switzerland has a raft of bilateral agreements that enable participation in the internal market, so the effect is not very different.Switzerland is not an EEA member - it was refused in a 1992 referendum. The vote split was interesting:
With the exception of the two Basel cantons, the French speakers all said yes, the rest said no. What the map doesn't show is Liechtenstein, which voted yes, and is thus in the EEA, which would have pleased Hilti (its biggest employer).
The TV interviews at the time were revelatory - the French speakers saw EEA membership as opening up to the world, the German speakers saw it as letting in more nasty foreign influence (a thankfully dwindling proportion of Swiss see the country as Paradise on Earth, surrounded by greedy, grasping, jealous foreigners).
Yes, the problem isn’t just Johnson. He might be at the head of the corruption and lies, but the body is rotten down to the toesThe problem with that is removing Johnson (desirable as that is) leaves those who paid for him still controlling the new head. The policy decisions are not all Johnson's and frankly he is such a weather vane, I doubt he agrees with all of them anyway. Johnson had one ambition that had little to do with policy and was all about getting the PM's job.
The people funding the Tories have an agenda to be delivered, whether that's Sunak, Gove or (FFS Truss) is irrelevent. Meet the new boss....
About 40% of the electorate IIRC. A very scary statistic.
With this system, the last general elections (December 12, 2019) were trumpeted to be a triumph for Boris Johnson because the Conservative Party won a very comfortable majority of seats – 365 out of 650 seats (or 56.2%). But, if a proportional system was used (as in the European Parliament elections, see Table 1), the results and their interpretation change drastically: the Conservative Party, with 43.6% of the votes, would obtain only 284 seats, and the coalition (Labour, the SNP, the LibDem and the Greens) would have won a majority of seats (209+25+75+18=327 out of 650).
Speaking of,I didn’t mention a failed state, that was you.
^ You said earlier, ‘about 40% of the electorate’. You should know by now pedants abound.
It could be worse. Some folk do these calculations based on the entire population when it suits their point.
Note: The issue I would take with that source you quoted is ‘the coalition’. The LibDems would side with the tories and no party can form a coalition with a nationalist party that wants to break up the UK. The tories would still have won under those circumstances. Very disappointing but I would still prefer PR.