The banker loving, baby-eating Tory party thread (regenerated)

[peterms]

Lord Snooty and His Pals, continued.

 

[HanoiVillan]

 

[mjmooney]

41 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

 

I thought we'd established that all of today's ills are a consequence of the permissive society of the 1960s? 

[blandy]

2 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

I thought we'd established that all of today's ills are a consequence of the permissive society of the 1960s? 

No. Still Thatcher's fault, the witch.

[Chindie]

It's Labour's fault. They sold the gold and let the foreigners in and caused the global financial crash and spent all the money and made taxes go up and made petrol expensive and caused terrorism and...

It's always Labour's fault.

Copyright Conservative Party

[bickster]

1 hour ago, mjmooney said:

I thought we'd established that all of today's ills are a consequence of the permissive society of the 1960s? 

You are the only former Pope, I claim my £5 (Can't be arsed to remember his actual name)

[mjmooney]

52 minutes ago, bickster said:

You are the only former Pope, I claim my £5 (Can't be arsed to remember his actual name)

Pope Suburban XXXVII. 

[bickster]

3 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

Pope Suburban XXXVII. 

Sounds like a car made by a Japanese Car Manufacturer

[Xann]

Quote

If you believe chancellor Philip Hammond, this new tax year will bring significant tax cuts for millions of workers, and all “thanks to our careful management of the public finances”. But analysis by the Resolution Foundation shows that these gains are steered firmly in one direction: added together, the new tax and benefit changes will enrich the wealthiest fifth of households by an average of £280, while the poorest fifth will lose £100 from their already squeezed income.

New tax year giveth for the rich, but taketh away for low earners

Those in the highest income band – that’s people earning as much as £100,000 – will enjoy the biggest winnings. In fact, more than a third of the £2.8bn package of tax cuts this year will go the richest 10% of households.

It’s said that Brexit will trigger an earthquake for the economy, but for some the rumbling has already started. Recent figures from the Office for National Statistics show that income inequality all too predictably rose last year – a society of haves and have-nots embedded by a decade of austerity that’s been heaped on the shoulders of the poor and disabled. The Equality Trust calculates that between 2013 and 2018, the richest 1,000 people in the UK increased their wealth by £274bn, while ordinary families experienced an unprecedented wage squeeze and social security cuts.

But it is not merely the scale of Britain’s inequality that should be concerning us. It is the methods used to entrench it. We could call it the great inequality con, in which society becomes more divided and unequal, and sections of the media and political class ingrain it with a potent mix of fear, fibs and distraction.

“Inequality is maintained by misleading the public,” wrote the Oxford University professor Danny Dorling in his book Peak Inequality, and it is not hard to see what he means. Take a look at last week’s Mail on Sunday, which produced an eight-page “wealth pullout” explaining “how to protect your cash from Corbyn” if Labour were elected, and telling readers with a straight face that the issue of the day is not rising homelessness but tax relief for families with second homes. Meanwhile, the government has lined up cuts to corporation tax (already one of the lowest rates in the developed world) which will cost the public purse billions more in lost revenue than previously thought – and yet there is still no money to help schools who forced to turn to crowdfunding websites to pay for pencils, glue and textbooks.

This con goes straight to the heart of public spending, and has been peddled with increasing zeal by ministers since the global crash. From George Osborne’s “fiscal rules” to Theresa May’s “no such thing as a magic money tree”, the Conservatives have justified years of vast cuts based on the premise it was necessary to get the deficit down. In fact, new research by the Fabian Society has found nearly half the money clawed back in social security payments has gone on increases in the tax-free personal allowance for higher earners, instead of being used for deficit reduction. It means the government is actually providing more in-work cash support to Britain’s richest households than poor families are receiving. Forget the deficit myth, that’s a dad with Parkinson’s effectively paying the bedroom tax to give a City financier some pocket money.

Grauniad

[snowychap]

Online pornography age checks to be mandatory in UK from 15 July

Quote

The UK’s controversial age verification system for online pornography will become mandatory on 15 July, the government has confirmed.

From that date, commercial providers of online pornography will be required to carry out “robust” age verification checks on users, in order to keep children from accessing adult content.

Websites that refuse to implement the checks face being blocked by UK internet service providers, or having their access to payment services withdrawn.

...

But campaigners have criticised the laws’ potential effectiveness. The government was forced to exempt large social media sites from the ban, over fears that a strict implementation would result in sites including Twitter, Reddit, Imgur and Tumblr being blocked for the adult content.

Additionally, concerns have been raised that the laws could result in the creation of a database of the UK’s porn viewers, which would pose a privacy problem if it were to ever leak.

Unfortunately for the government’s attempts to calm fears on the privacy issue, the news was announced by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport in an email that exposed the contact details of almost 300 recipients. DCMS was also responsible for implementing the new GDPR laws in the UK, which mandate large financial penalties for breaches that expose personal data.

Jim Killock, the executive director of the Open Rights Group, said: “The government needs to compel companies to enforce privacy standards. The idea that they are ‘optional’ is dangerous and irresponsible. Having some age verification that is good and other systems that are bad is unfair and a scammer’s paradise – of the government’s own making.”

“Data leaks could be disastrous,” Killock added, “and they will be the government’s own fault. The government needs to shape up and legislate for privacy before their own policy results in people being outed, careers destroyed or suicides being provoked.”

 

Edited April 17, 2019 by snowychap

[mjmooney]

[bickster]

50 minutes ago, snowychap said:

Unfortunately for the government’s attempts to calm fears on the privacy issue, the news was announced by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport in an email that exposed the contact details of almost 300 recipients. DCMS was also responsible for implementing the new GDPR laws in the UK, which mandate large financial penalties for breaches that expose personal data.

Oh that amuses me greatly given my current employment role 

[Dr_Pangloss]

Enter credit card or passport information to view porn, sites that are crawling with vulnerabilities, what could possibly go wrong? What a disgraceful piece of legislation.

Edited April 18, 2019 by Dr_Pangloss

[HanoiVillan]

Maybe the bill should be considered a helping hand to the VPN industry?

[Davkaus]

10 hours ago, Dr_Pangloss said:

Entire credit card or passport information to view porn, sites that are crawling with vulnerabilities, what could possibly go wrong? What a disgraceful piece of legislation.

There's so, so much wrong with it.

• The unnecessary storage of inherently sensitive information
• Conditioning the population in to unthinkingly providing their identification documents to an industry with no lack of unscrupulous operators. This is an identity theft scandal waiting to happen. 
• It literally doesn't solve the problem of vulnerable youngsters stumbling across pornography. It doesn't apply to sites that host some pornography, only where it's more than a third of pornography. So twitter, reddit, imgur, and other sites like that are completely exempt. Where are unsuspecting vulnerable individuals more likely to stumble across porn? Nobody has ever unintentionally seen porn on Pornhub
• The developer of this solution? The owner of Pornhub, they've given them a huge competitive advantage.

At what point did it become the government's place to be responsible for parenting? ISPs already have opt in (and in some cases, opt out) porn filters, that any parents can enable. Remember when the tories used to shriek about the nanny state?

[Davkaus]

2 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

Maybe the bill should be considered a helping hand to the VPN industry?

It's hard not to suspect that this could be a step towards justifying turning their attention towards VPNs for the benefit of the intelligence services. Think of the children, they're a dangerous tool run by disgusting companies to allow children to access pornography.

[HanoiVillan]

1 minute ago, Davkaus said:

It's hard not to suspect that this could be a step towards justifying turning their attention towards VPNs for the benefit of the intelligence services. Think of the children, they're a dangerous tool run by disgusting companies to allow children to access pornography.

It's almost certain I would say. However, using one will be at least a few more years of relative freedom while they get the necessary procedures and legislation into place, albeit at a cost. 

[Xann]

Quarter of a million attempts to access porn in the Palace of Westminster in a year under Cameron.

Quarter of a million attempts to access Grindr in the Palace of Westminster in a month a couple of years after the above.

In between the the two incidents WiFi was added in the public gallery.

Draw your own conclusions about that second gem. You'd suspect a lot of those attempts would be automated updates to and from Grindr's servers as users entered the vicinity. 

[VILLAMARV]

 

[Seat68]

11 hours ago, VILLAMARV said:

 

Have you seen their demands? They are bonkers.