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

[Seat68]

2 hours ago, LondonLax said:

The mid 20th century was not some sort of golden age where everyone was rich. 

These days 20 somethings spend a weekend getting drunk in a foreign country with matching t-shirts, filming it all on HD cameras that fit in their pockets. 

Their fathers were working 6 days a week doing menial repetitive labour on a production line. He was eating boring food where a roast chicken on Sunday was considered a luxury treat. No takeaways, morning coffees or European food/wines. The wife had it even worse and was typically confined to child rearing and kitchen duties 7 days a week. The lack of washing machine, dishwasher, disposal nappies, microwave etc saw to that.

A TV cost thousands and not every family could afford one, a holiday abroad was unthinkable. 

It’s very very easy to lose perspective. 

You mean grandfather's surely. 

[snowychap]

 

[peterms]

13 hours ago, markavfc40 said:

Imagine working for this prick.

 

 

[snowychap]

[HanoiVillan]

11 hours ago, LondonLax said:

These days 20 somethings spend a weekend getting drunk in a foreign country with matching t-shirts, filming it all on HD cameras that fit in their pockets. 

I wonder what percentage of '20 somethings' actually have weekends on the piss overseas with any regularity. I bet it's a lot lower than you're thinking. 

[bickster]

Brecon and Radnor signage count. So on the way back from Bristol yesterday I drove through B&R from Crickhowell up through Builth and through to Llangurig. I tried to count the number of different sites displaying election signage on the route. One point for each individual site regardless of the number of signs. This extremely unscientific count produced the following result:

Tory 17

LibDem: 16

NF Corporation Ltd: 3

Labour 1

It was noticeable that more had appeared since Thursday. 

I may have missed some. The Labour site definitely wasn’t there on Thursday and at least one NFc had appeared, plus a huge LibDem one and definitely more Tory ones

Means bugger all but I thought I'd share. 

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

9 minutes ago, bickster said:

Crickhowell up through Builth and through to Llangurig.

Place names or back and bowel diseases ?  

[peterms]

22 hours ago, blandy said:

 

 

[blandy]

JRM there acting out a real life tribute to the fantastic work of Talking Heads. I wonder if the tories aren’t taking their songs a little too literally.  Burning Down the House, Slippery People, Swamp, Life During Wartime and so on. None of it makes any actual sense.

 

[LakotaDakota]

2 hours ago, peterms said:

 

strange how that immediately made me think of liverpudlian boxer David Price

[Xela]

[bickster]

On 27/07/2019 at 09:41, chrisp65 said:

The fact he thinks imperial is a better system than metric.

Much like Boris' clown act, it's an affectation, he doesn't really believe this crap, it's all an act.

Boris' pretend pigeon French act is just that, my daughter was watching him a while back doing it and said if his French was as bumbling as he pretends, he wouldn't have understood the rather nuanced thing that was said to him and certainly wouldn't have even been able to respond in the manner he supposedly attempted. She said he understood perfectly what was said to him and so much so, he gave the response in a less than perfect way throwing in lots in ums and ers and deliberately mispronouncing words slightly but, it was the correct way to respond and only someone with near perfect French would have been able to do it. He spent a good number of his childhood years in school in Belgium, he's pretty fluent

And (no comma) it's exactly the same with Lord Snooty, it's all an act, he really doesn't care. He's more interested in earning vast amounts of money from his funds than any real desire to see a return to Imperial measurements, unless it's to maintain his ludicrously superior air. 

 

[HanoiVillan]

18 minutes ago, bickster said:

Much like Boris' clown act, it's an affectation, he doesn't really believe this crap, it's all an act.

Lots of what he does is affectation, but he hasn't spent a decade in Parliament because he got lost and wandered in one day. He really believes the things he says he believes. 

[bickster]

3 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

He really believes the things he says he believes

You can't be serious, he's almost as contradictory as Trump. His only rationale at any one time is, how does it play for me? what are the metrics?

Does he make buses? does he shite, Does he hate Ice Pillows in Kippers? (Ukippers!) does he shite. He couldn't even make up his mind if he was leave or remain until the last minute, he even wrote two articles. Boris is all Boris believes in, the rest is just a means to an end.

[blandy]

On 26/07/2019 at 22:14, peterms said:

What we should be asking is why 50 years ago the average household had an average standard of living with one wage earner, and now, despite greater wealth, massive technical advances, and a proliferation of cheap labour-saving devices in the home, the average household needs two wage earners to hold that position relative to society as a whole.

Why exactly is that, when all the advances we have made should have meant less hours expended?

I don't think that's the question at all. I don't even think it's a very good question, as written, though I think I understand the intent.

"50 years ago the average household had an average standard of living" - well, yes. They would though, being, y'know "average".

"with one wage earner" - Women staying at home, doing the housework, making the dinner. I'm not sure that the change whereby women now largely want to work and do work is a bad thing. Quite the opposite. The relevance of that part of the question doesn't really help what I perceive to be the underlying intent of the question.

"massive technical advances, and a proliferation of cheap labour-saving devices in the home" - Dishwashers, washing machines, Tumble dryers, HD TV, Internets, Smart phones, Bread-makers and all the other gadgets. They all cost money and most of them are thought of as "essential" these days, for most people. Add in car ownership, foreign holidays, most people now doing further education (Uni) and there's a cost to all this "stuff", all this consumerism. Most people don't want to lose those freedoms or possibilities.

"all the advances we have made should have meant less hours expended?" - That was once the sort of marketing promise, the Tomorrow's World line about us all working less and having more leisure time and living on cheese and Onion nutri-pills dispensed by robots or whatever. And it's not turned out like that at all for most people, though there's a bit of a "FIRE" thing going - Financially Independent, Retire Early - for those that actually want to and can devote themselves to that ideal.

People work more for 3 reasons - to consume more, or because they have to (or a bit of both), or because (especially for women) it brings an independence that was largely missing 50 years ago. The "average" household now might be single, might be retired, might be house sharing, might be renting rather than owning - the average doesn't really exist as a 2 adults 2 kids, stay at home Mum like it did 50 years ago. The world has changed. Why is complex. But in terms of injustice, or things aren't what we hoped for - some ways worse, some ways better - the areas that are worse are in inequality, not for the average person, but for those who are unfortunate enough to find themselves in the bottom part of the income scale. Stuff like gig-economy contracts, super high house prices in some (most) areas. Most people, the "average", do all right now, and they did alright in 1969. They have more "stuff" now, are healthier, live longer, travel more, do less dangerous jobs, have more equality and tolerance if they're not white, or straight or male etc. though Muslims and Jewish people get a hard time from some quarters.

The big problem issues [outside whatever happens with the Brexit clusterpork] are environmental destruction, climate change, house prices, transport congestion, exploitation via gig economy jobs and the need for so many people to have to use food banks, or sleep rough, aren't they? Most of that can be put down to "austerity" and lax regulation, plus globalisation and big business dodging national regulation via complex location arrangements, plus political corruption.

[HanoiVillan]

57 minutes ago, bickster said:

You can't be serious, he's almost as contradictory as Trump. His only rationale at any one time is, how does it play for me? what are the metrics?

Does he make buses? does he shite, Does he hate Ice Pillows in Kippers? (Ukippers!) does he shite. He couldn't even make up his mind if he was leave or remain until the last minute, he even wrote two articles. Boris is all Boris believes in, the rest is just a means to an end.

I was referring to Rees-Mogg. 

[HanoiVillan]

48 minutes ago, blandy said:

"with one wage earner" - Women staying at home, doing the housework, making the dinner. I'm not sure that the change whereby women now largely want to work and do work is a bad thing. Quite the opposite. The relevance of that part of the question doesn't really help what I perceive to be the underlying intent of the question.

The question is more complex than images of Don Draper chaining his wife to the Aga. It's important to remember that most people have jobs, rather than careers, and that child-rearing can be rewarding as well. It also doesn't only have to be done by women. 

Elizabeth Warren's book 'The Two-Income Trap' is a useful reference here. It's a little old, and obviously is written for an American context, but much of that context is echoed in the UK. Her main points were, as glossed by Matthew Yglesias:

'The “two-income trap,” as described by Warren, really consists of three partially separate phenomena that have arisen as families have come to rely on two working adults to make ends meet:

• The addition of a second earner means, in practice, a big increase in household fixed expenses for things like child care and commuting.
• Much of the money that American second earners bring in has been gobbled up, in practice, by zero-sum competition for educational opportunities expressed as either skyrocketed prices for houses in good school districts or escalating tuition at public universities.
• Last, while the addition of the second earner has not brought in much gain, it has created an increase in downside risk by eliminating an implicit insurance policy that families used to rely on.

[. . .]

The main financial savings vehicle for the American middle class was the owner-occupied home in the good school district. But the only way to tap that asset is to sell it and move someplace less desirable, disrupting children’s lives and risking a tumble out of the middle class.

Consequently, families in practice try to deal with financial hardship by availing themselves of the wide range of consumer credit opportunities made available by the ongoing deregulation of the financial industry. This combination of brittle household finances, stagnant discretionary incomes, and wide availability of poorly understood debt products fundamentally explains the runup in bankruptcies.'

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/two-income-trap-elizabeth-warren-book

If people have an interesting and rewarding career, of course it is good if they are able to pursue it. But there is no point in pretending that there aren't a large number of people, especially people with children, who wish that they didn't have to go to work at Superdrug's checkout counter or whatever and could look after their family instead. The point is that the *necessity* for two incomes in a family has not provided much in the way of 'freedom' at all; instead it has provided a lack of spare capacity. 

59 minutes ago, blandy said:

The "average" household now might be single, might be retired, might be house sharing, might be renting rather than owning - the average doesn't really exist as a 2 adults 2 kids, stay at home Mum like it did 50 years ago.

You're right that many more people are house sharing or renting now than were doing so 50 years ago, but that simply means that the 'average' household has a much more precarious financial situation with (much) less in the way of assets. 

[bickster]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

I was referring to Rees-Mogg. 

In that case, I apologise for the tone of my comment, however JRM is a charlatan too, he doesn’t believe half that crap, it’s an act

[snowychap]

 

And further to that thread:

 

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, bickster said:

In that case, I apologise for the tone of my comment, however JRM is a charlatan too, he doesn’t believe half that crap, it’s an act

No apology needed 

However, I don't agree with your assessment, and assuming that your political opponents aren't sincere in the beliefs they hold seems like a recipe for underestimating them.