Probably the only people in favour would be a certain segment of the telegraph readers. The forces would hate it, the NHS would hate it. I mean who wants to babysit a bunch of teenagers who don't want to be there?It seems to be becoming clear the "national service" proposal is a nonsense gimmick of a policy ("mandatory but not compulsory" - what?).
Just a sound-bite to try and appeal to what the Tories imagine is their core-vote - except I think they've misjudged it and are trying to appeal to what they dimly remember about elderly people in the 1970s - people who are mostly no longer with us.
Alf Garnett would be just short of 100 years old now. Getting on a bit even for a Tory voter.
So. Nigel Farage is back to fuck more shit up? Putin approves. Of course he is running on an immigrant build the wall agenda...
I suspect this is what is going on :The immigrant topic would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad and maddening. The tories of all people campaigned on net migration reductions, haven't achieved that despite fucking the UK in the ass repeatedly with Brexit and austerity, then along comes another election and they're campaigning on it again. Then "Labour" starts banging on about it as well!
How is it that they're still going on about this? You either want to build a country which is prospering and therefore will both require and attract labour from abroad, or you don't. Unless you believe you've come up with a perfect plan to home-grow a labour force which has been educated in ways to perfectly tailor for the economy's needs in every year regardless of the circumstances.
Literally the only thing the immigrant topic achieves in the long term is to erode trust in established parties and make the electorate go for an extremist candidate to "shake things up".
Does UK have an analogue for Fox News? Something seems to be poisoning the minds of the brits.
So weaponization of the free press. I guess we have to rethink democracy in this new environment. Press/journalism needs some safe guards.GB News, The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express, The Sun, to name a few.
It's in no ones political interests to solve the immigration "problem".The immigrant topic would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad and maddening. The tories of all people campaigned on net migration reductions, haven't achieved that despite fucking the UK in the ass repeatedly with Brexit and austerity, then along comes another election and they're campaigning on it again. Then "Labour" starts banging on about it as well!
How is it that they're still going on about this? You either want to build a country which is prospering and therefore will both require and attract labour from abroad, or you don't. Unless you believe you've come up with a perfect plan to home-grow a labour force which has been educated in ways to perfectly tailor for the economy's needs in every year regardless of the circumstances.
Literally the only thing the immigrant topic achieves in the long term is to erode trust in established parties and make the electorate go for an extremist candidate to "shake things up".
GB News, The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express, The Sun, to name a few.
That's a slippery slope. If anything, I'd suggest something needs to be done about social media - which isn't 'free press', but a festering sore on humanity.So weaponization of the free press. I guess we have to rethink democracy in this new environment. Press/journalism needs some safe guards.
Good God. He and Trump must be buddies.I know that none of you are watching the UK election debate on the BBC but Farage just said (and I'll slightly paraphrase, but it is slightly) "I'm not racist but it is the fault of the black people"!
I don't know who it is that the Tories are trying to appeal to with their monomaniacal fixation on immigration and/or asylum-seekers.
I mean, I wasn't, and still am not, a fan of the EU (I was an extremely luke-warm remain voter, mainly just irritated at being asked the question when I can't really work out what I think of it all - ideally, as far as I can tell, all of it, the EU, the UK, and the US, need to be torn down and rebuilt from the bottom-up, as none of them, considered as political systems, are fit-for-purpose).
Maybe I'm an out-of-touch metropolitan elite liberal (as I regularly get accused of being on-line, invariably by people who are quite obviously massively better-off financially and in multiple other ways than I am), but I just have far more important priorities that I'd like to see something done about, than immigration numbers (though, granted, it would be nice if we could reject the small minority of convicted violent sex offenders and deranged terrorists and their ilk - the system doesn't seem to be very good at checking for that sort of thing...maybe that's deliberate, the better to bring the whole system into disrepute?).
I mean I've noticed changes in this city - successive waves of Eastern Europeans (Poles in particular - there was a time when the whole neighbourhood - that for most of my life had always been significantly South Asian - seemed to be suddenly full of slightly-alarming-skinhead-looking white guys, with tattoos and often with 'eagle' insignia on their clothing, that I only realised weren't traditional UK skinheads when I heard them speaking Polish...or maybe Lithuanian?), then there was a brief period of frequently hearing Greek or Spanish being spoken in the street in a way I hadn't previously. Suddenly there are shops full of Polish branded food.
But I can't see why I'm supposed to be particularly bothered by it - beyond a slight bemusement at how one notices these trends months before the slow-on-the-uptake-but-overexctable national press does - all it merits is a shrug.
(My own grandparents were a mix of South Asian, European Jewish, and Irish, this city has always been that way, because it was the hub of a vast exploitative global empire, so what else would one expect? Change is in the nature of the place)
I'm not saying there are no issues around how immigration is handled - it could probably be a bit better managed, like everything else in this country, but I just don't understand who it is who puts immigration, or even 'stopping the boats' at the top of their priority list.
Why is that treated as such an all-important issue? Is it coming from the bottom-up, i.e. I'm out-of-touch with the masses of voters out there who are seething with rage about immigration (for cultural reasons? experience of economic competition?), or is it top-down, being driven by our crappy plutocrat-controlled media (that relentlessly goes on about the issue)? I honestly don't know.
From my perch over in the US it looks like immigrants are scapegoated by the Tories as the source of all the country's problems despite it actually being them. It's been so effective even Labor has basically had to adopt many similar positions.
And so will the dems over here!
Don't kid yourself..
The whole migrant crisis has turned very pro-dem people into wondering if it should support republicans..
The moment a Dem goes anti-immigration they'll have good support.. like the left in Europe.. Sweden particularly turning around on migrants and diversity.
So that's what it's like to be a politician with actual balls! Good on him.
Latest electoral calculus is hilarious.Really wonder what will happen to the Tory Party if their dire opinion polling turns out to be accurate. If they end up with barely 100 seats they won't be the same party any more. They'll tack right-ward - to try and recapture Reform voters - both out of electoral calculation and because it'll be largely the hard-right figures in the party who will be left as MPs.
That was such a red herring. Just for an emotional twist of the dagger while betraying the best interests of his own country.Ask Farage where is the 300M that UK is no longer sending to EU every week.
Well, Russian funding, deceptively until discovered, supporting Brexit supporters. The Russians have endlessly taken advantage of democracies to fragment the populations to take people's eye off the important issues. They really deserve a humiliating defeat in Ukraine for all the villainy they have perpetrated against wester democracies. And about 20 years of sanctions and restrictions from western powers.I dont understand how characters like Farage gets to strut around like nothing. In the aftermath of WW2 he would have been dangling from a lightpost three seconds flat. Fucking good people need to wake the fuck up. WAKE UP.