The now-enacted will of (some of) the people

[sharkyvilla]

3 minutes ago, ml1dch said:

Assuming you mean from a remain perspective, it depends on what your priority is.

If it is to try and "beat" NF and his cronies to the largest number of MEPs - Labour, or possibly Lib Dem depending on how next week looks in the polling.

If it is to get the Remain vote share as high as possible, whoever best fits your politics of the Lib Dems, CUKTIG, Green or one of the Nationalists.

If it's to get the highest possible number of MEPs from Remainy parties, Lib Dem or Nationalist.

If you mean who to vote for from a leave perspective, Tory or don't bother voting if you are happy with how things are going. Farage Party if you're not happy with how things are going and want to shout incoherently at clouds about the injustice of it all.

Judging from the polling figures, beating the Brexit party in terms of seats looks unlikely.  Ideally in the long term I'd like us to remain in a reformed EU but I don't think this election will have any bearing on that.  I'd like to give my vote to try and convince the government to bring about a new referendum but again I'm not sure this will have any impact.  If anything I can see the headline figure of Farage getting the most votes strengthening Maybot's resolve to push Brexit through at any cost, even if actually there is a remain majority.  That's how daft the whole thing is.

[Xann]

 

 

 

[meregreen]

EU elections are PR . All votes will have relevance.

[ml1dch]

1 minute ago, sharkyvilla said:

Judging from the polling figures, beating the Brexit party in terms of seats looks unlikely.  Ideally in the long term I'd like us to remain in a reformed EU but I don't think this election will have any bearing on that.  I'd like to give my vote to try and convince the government to bring about a new referendum but again I'm not sure this will have any impact

I'd suggest Lib Dem then. The referendum that you want is pretty unlikely, but is more or less impossible without full (and enthusiastic) Labour support. 

The only way that happens if they realise they can't take Remain votes for granted and they see their vote share dropping off the Remain end rather than the Leave end. 

Coming third in these elections behind the Lib Dems is unlikely to make that happen, but it's a useful step in the right direction.

[Chindie]

30 minutes ago, sharkyvilla said:

Judging from the polling figures, beating the Brexit party in terms of seats looks unlikely.  Ideally in the long term I'd like us to remain in a reformed EU but I don't think this election will have any bearing on that.  I'd like to give my vote to try and convince the government to bring about a new referendum but again I'm not sure this will have any impact.  If anything I can see the headline figure of Farage getting the most votes strengthening Maybot's resolve to push Brexit through at any cost, even if actually there is a remain majority.  That's how daft the whole thing is.

The result is inevitably going to be framed in different ways. The demon pug's fascist dream party will get a bunch of votes (almost certainly around the same levels UKIP used to get) and they'll frame it as a demand for a no deal brexit. In all likelihood the other votes against that particular brand of Brexit will outweigh it and that'll be framed as a majority being against a no deal brexit, and a significant chunk of that will be against Brexit of any colour.

Ultimately all you can do is vote for the party that sends the message you want to send. If you want a second referendum/to Remain, then you need to give Labour a kicking to try to force a rethink on their ambiguity, which probably means voting Lib Dem if you're in England. But then you need to weigh up whether you care about giving the Lib Dems an olive branch after their time in coalition. A minor consideration is also that the Lib Dems, I believe, would sit in a European level party grouping that would be unlikely to change much, but of course that doesn't really matter if we leave.

[Xann]

Merthyr - Remember and park the bus near the building so it looks crowded.

[Davkaus]

30 minutes ago, meregreen said:

EU elections are PR . All votes will have relevance.

I think some people would only vote if everyone's vote is ignored except for their own  

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, sharkyvilla said:

Judging from the polling figures, beating the Brexit party in terms of seats looks unlikely.  Ideally in the long term I'd like us to remain in a reformed EU but I don't think this election will have any bearing on that.  I'd like to give my vote to try and convince the government to bring about a new referendum but again I'm not sure this will have any impact.  If anything I can see the headline figure of Farage getting the most votes strengthening Maybot's resolve to push Brexit through at any cost, even if actually there is a remain majority.  That's how daft the whole thing is.

As I've said before, there are two ideas in this sentence and one is true, and the other isn't. This election will have no bearing at all over whether the UK remains in the EU beyond the end of October. However, the elections absolutely do have a very large bearing over the future political direction of the EU, since the largest trans-national grouping in the Parliament choose the President of the Commission. 

[chrisp65]

37 minutes ago, Xann said:

Merthyr - Remember and park the bus near the building so it looks crowded.

According to their twitter feed it was a sell out event, which I suppose in some ways, was true.

But hey, it got Nigel on the local news bulletins. Funnily enough, a few days earlier, there was an independence march in Cardiff that attracted a couple of thousand (still not a big number, but treble what NF managed). But that didn't get anything like the same coverage on the local news. They'd had the mis fortune to time their rally the same day someone had bought a loaf of bread made entirely of crusts. So the headline that day, was always going to be about bread.

Incidentally, that Brexit rally was held at Trago Mills, Merthyr. The guy that owns that thinks welsh culture and the welsh language are 'just clutter'. So he's a racist **** pig too.

I find it fascinating that so many people around the whole brexit thing do have racist or xenophobic ideas. They might pretend they haven't, they might know to keep quiet in decent society. But NF having a rally at a venue owned by a guy with less than enlightened views. The people there, predominantly against immigration, against 'others' of any description.

This whole thing has really exposed a nasty underbelly. Every granny that hates muslims, every middle aged moron that hates gays, every thicko that likes fighting. They've all got a banner to gather around that is not specifically about any of that. 

Or possibly, they all really have looked at the democratic deficit in EU systems and want to begin a process of grass roots democratisation of our liberal economic power house.

Bloody clever man that NF.

 

[VILLAMARV]

On 16/05/2019 at 10:50, NurembergVillan said:

 

I got through the first line of Audio and had to bite.

"Towns like Merthyr have recieved millions of pounds in regeneration money, this whole town centre was funded with EU grants....."

I haven't heard the rest yet. I assume Farage is about to say something silly.

Just for context for everyone out there though. On my most recent visits to Merthyr the most noticeable thing was not that the shops were closing down at a rapid rate like here in Cardiff, but that the charity shops were closing down in Merthyr. The "shops" are long gone. Unless you count the poundland/bookies/greggs/phoneshop combo I suppose. Personally I don't see much merit in it. At the same time as "regenerating" the town centre all the consumers are in Morrisons or over the out of town shopping warehouses on the A470. The Cwm Taf health board just got put in "targeted intervention" after a damning enquiry. A few years ago it was true to say Merthyr's youngsters were statistically more likely to go to prison than anywhere else in England and Wales

Quote

Paul Marshallsea, project co-ordinator at Dowlais Engine House in Merthyr Tydfil, was speaking after revelations that 16 and 17-year-olds in the town were more likely to be locked up than anywhere else in England and Wales. Mr Marshallsea said he was not surprised Youth Justice Board (YJB) figures showed one in every 130 16 and 17-year-olds in Merthyr was jailed in 2009-10. In comparison, in Pembrokeshire, which had the lowest rate, one in 6,000 teens was given a custodial sentence.

https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/local-news/youth-crime-merthyr-blamed-deprivation-2694304

Quote

There has been a surge in violent crime in the past four years in Merthyr Tydfil, data reveals. Analysis has found a 166% increase in violent crime since January 2013. During this time, South Wales Police dealt with over 30,000 crimes and offences in Merthyr Tydfil – around half of the borough’s population.

https://joeldayblog.wordpress.com/2017/12/15/violent-crime-is-increasing-in-merthyr-tydfil/

Now maybe they are just all jealous of the £100,000 lamppost that Newbridge got instead of them but in phrasing the question along the lines of "all the money we get" the interviewer is repeating lazy tropes a la Farage I'm afraid. And it really winds me up.

People in Merthyr are shat on. While the public are encouraged to confine their thoughts to repeating things heard on the news and bickering about how much money to throw at a problem or indeed where it come from I can't help but feel the point is lost that places like Merthyr are not anomalies plucked from the ether. They are the direct result of our actions as a society. And every day of complicity or tacet approval of this situation is as bad as the next imho.

Farage isn't going to help Merthyr is he? But then if we are honest neither have the Tory, Coalition or Labour governments throughout my entire life. Nor will they in the future.

I would expect this community and others like it to vote angrily until someone actually gives a shit about them. Just like last time.

Anyway rant over carry on.

[VILLAMARV]

*sigh* at the rest of that interview.

3 years we've been at this and the conversation hasn't moved along one bit.

[VILLAMARV]

2 hours ago, Xann said:

Merthyr - Remember and park the bus near the building so it looks crowded.

Same on the other side though to be fair. For the walk through Merthyr town centre remember to stay in close up so we dont see the empty shops on the other side of the street while banging on about regeneration.

(I'm guessing all the homeless people sleeping rough in the streets down by the bus station were already moved on....)

[bickster]

Trago Mills a supermarket in the midst of the Swansea Road estate, an estate that was notorious as far back as the '70s and has only got worse. Merthyr is a shithole, Swansea Rd is it's ringpiece the morning after a double helping of Vindaloo, at least the Gurnos only went to the fish bar for tea

Merthyr, the place that first elected Kier Hardy as an MP is steeped in Labour tradition but in recent years appears to be abandoning the Labour Party, you'd have been laughed at a few years ago for even suggesting that

Yet despite all that Farage manages to get next to no-one to attend his mini Nuremberg Rally 

[Seat68]

Merthyr, you get **** all money but a fair percentage of that **** all is from EU coffers. NF would like that for his pension please. 

[bickster]

 

[HanoiVillan]

4 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

As I've said before, there are two ideas in this sentence and one is true, and the other isn't. This election will have no bearing at all over whether the UK remains in the EU beyond the end of October. However, the elections absolutely do have a very large bearing over the future political direction of the EU, since the largest trans-national grouping in the Parliament choose the President of the Commission. 

Further to this; a debate was held between the candidates of the 6 main trans-national groupings for the role of President this week:

I appreciate that most people are unlikely to watch it, or care, or base their vote on it, but frankly it's at least as sensible as many other methods of deciding who to vote for, and at least has the virtue of taking the idea of 'European democracy' at face value. 

[Seat68]

Man who named his vanity project The Brexit Party says they aren't just about Brexit. 

Edited May 18, 2019 by Seat68

[ml1dch]

3 minutes ago, Seat68 said:

Man who named his vanity project The Brexit Party says they aren't just about Brexit. 

To be fair, he didn't name it or found it.

It was formed by Catherine Blaiklock, before she was forced out for being too racist for her racist party for racists.

Farage then took over.

[sharkyvilla]

8 minutes ago, Seat68 said:

Man who named his vanity project The Brexit Party says they aren't just about Brexit. 

But then you challenge him on non-Brexit things he does this

 

Edited May 18, 2019 by sharkyvilla

[bickster]

He apparently called a female member of staff on the show the C word on leaving the studio