British Politics Thread

Unless the Human Rights Act is unfair, I don't think it's a winning speech.

And, of course, he keeps lying about the NHS.

It's how David Cameron said it, not what he said exactly.

Ah, yes, that accent and tone of his...

edited 1st Oct '14 6:43:10 AM by Quag15

Scottish armed police to "only be deployed to firearms incidents or where there is a threat to life".

Banksy original destroyed for being "racist".

edited 1st Oct '14 9:43:19 AM by Bisected8

Good news about the armed police. Police Scotland remains a terrible idea though.

Man, I don't really see how Clegg can survive the last election. He's heavily alienated a ton of voters as Deputy Prime Minister.

And yet, I can't really see Miliband pulling through, even if Labour takes seats from the Liberal Democrats. Miliband reminds me of Mitt Romney - a rich boy who's very awkward around people who aren't also rich.

I was under the impression that Mitt Romney was a fair bit more conservative than "Red Ed"....

Well, kinda. Romney is only as conservative as he wants to be. He's basically a Blue Dog (meaning moderate conservative) Democrat at heart.

What sorta policies does Miliband have to his credit?

edited 1st Oct '14 10:35:58 AM by SarenArterius

As left as you can get away with in modern politics in the UK if you want a majority.

And I don't think Ed is awkward around people who aren't rich, he's awkward around people who aren't political geeks. Cameron is much more isolated from normal people than Miliband is, but he's also much more used to human interaction outside of a quasi-academic setting.

There's such a thing as far-left in this day and age? (Remembers I'm American )

David Cameron's TV Trope page lists him as a Blue Blood, so I can see why he'd be more isolated. I've read his George Osborne economic policies are utter shit, so I normally would say he's done for the election.

And then I look at Labour, and I gotta say, I'm not impressed. I hated Tony Blair, but at least New Labour seemed, well, competent and cohesive.

Blair lacked many thing but he was a very charismatic leader.

As one of my tutor's put it, you can watch recording of Blair and know that what he's saying a lie, but you still want to believe him, even though you know that he's lying.

I want to believe that Blair believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and that he really was trying to be a humanitarian/moral crusader. Then again, given that everybody in the Bush administration flat-out lied, I doubt Blair didn't know either, but... well, yeah. He does have that charisma to him.

I see Blair as a tragic figure. Everything seemed fine until Iraq (and Gaddafi, in retrospect).

So I just saw the BBC recording on Cameron's tex cut proposals.

On the one hand, his debating was very personal and (for lack of a better world - I don't buy any of this) "convincing". Especially compared to what little I saw of Milliband's skills.

On the other hand, the BBC flat out said "we don't know where the money for these tax cuts will come from".

Also, some talk about negotiating less immigration with the EU. Wonder how that will happen.

I want to make a bold prediction here: I bet you that next week, the Liberal Democrats will double down on their European Gambit.

We've had a very anti-Euro conference from UKIP-lite. We've had backbench MPs *cough* John Redwood *cough* actually threaten business leaders if they choose to enter the EU referendum debate on the side of Europe. Labour sure as hell are not going to stick their necks out on Europe.

The Liberal Democrats have nothing to lose, are already the pro Euro party. If they had any sense, they should try to recruit business leaders and start the pro EU debate now. If they can do that, and stay above the mud slinging that is taking place between Labour, Conservatives and UKIP then they might be able to provide a unique pitch.

If nothing else, it would look really good on Nick Clegg's CV as he applies for a job in Brussels once Sheffield Hallam are done with him.

Meanwhile, out on the lunatic fringe...

BBC: Nick Griffin expelled by BNP

Ex-Tory donor Arron Banks gives £1m to UKIP

Scotland would apparently be exempt from Westminster scrapping the Human Rights Act.

Very interesting indeed if that does turn out to be the case. Still makes Scottish people who vote Tory anyway very close to morally bankrupt in my view, but still, at least we wouldn't all be affected. The reason, apparently, is that it's enshrined in the Scotland Act and the SNP have no intention whatsoever of repealling it.

Wait, Cameron is trying to scrap the Human Rights Act? Something Tony Blair himself couldn't do?

The Human Rights Act was bought in under Blair...

To be precise, we were already signed up to the 1953 European Convention on Human Rights under the Council of Europe. What Blair's Human Rights Act changed was letting us prosecute our own cases relevant to the Convention without having to run them through the ECHR in Strasbourg. Taken at face value, the Conservatives' proposal would actually give us less control over our own laws, except that, obviously, it would only be the first step before the far more serious move of pulling us out of the 1953 Convention, basically removing ourselves from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (which the Convention was Europe's legal codification of). Of course, that's incredibly fucked up and a PR nightmare, so the Tories are trying to sell this as rescuing us from a recent violation of our sovereignty by those slimeballs in Labour rather than looking at the laws put into place to avoid the horrors of World War II being repeated and going 'yeah, we don't need those any more'.

edited 1st Oct '14 5:40:22 PM by Iaculus

The ECHR is somewhat more stringent than the UDHR, actually. Protocol 13 is an obvious example.

edited 2nd Oct '14 4:31:30 AM by Achaemenid

I think the assumption here seems to be that the Human rights act and being a signatory of the ECHR is somehow essential to us having human rights. I am sure this plays well to Europhile propagandism but probably does not play to well to a good section of the British people who, I imagine, are all for human rights but simply do not share the ECHR's opinion of what they constitute. Others are probably simply ideologically opposed to the very idea an international body should be essentially able to override the sovereign will of a nation, where that will conflicts with treaty obligations signed up to in what is essentially another era.

To my mind the post-war international consensus probably made sense in the immediate post-war era, when the world had just recovered from the horrors of war and of Nazism. But I think to suggest that Britain cannot do without an international body to prevent the rising of fascism (as the left-of-centre seems to hint) somehow fails to take into account the fact that fascism never quite took as much root in this country as it did on the continent, and also the very fact of what we were fighting for in the first place. Certainly from a modern perspective the pre-war world had nowhere near the human rights record the modern world might be said to have, but it was certainly Fair for Its Day compared to Nazism, which probably only arose in response to the constitutional weakness of the Weimar republic and the terrible economic situation Germany was facing following WW 1.

And whatever one may say about UKIP, they are nowhere approaching as bad as the Nazis.

And whatever one may say about UKIP, they are nowhere approaching as bad as the Nazis.

Except for all the ex-BNP members they've got, which one candidate has confirmed to be subject to an informal 'don't ask, don't tell' policy. Plus there's the fact that Farage was co-president of the EU parliament faction Europe of Freedom and Democracy with the Lega Nord's Francesco Speroni for three years after he said that Anders Breivik had been acting in defence of Western civilisation. And the fact that they've had literal blackshirts guarding them during events◊. And how their Small and Medium Businesses spokesman stated his intent to remove all workers' rights in the UK.

And we've been doing fine for sixty years with the Convention in place, as have the rest of the nations who signed it. It was the document that first legally codified human rights in Europe. What's the pressing demand for scrapping it now? It's also worth noting that a country doesn't have to go MAXIMUM NAZI to still be really, really bad. The concentration camps were adapted from British designs first used during the Boer War, which Winston Churchill suggested using to house the mentally-ill during his stint as Home Secretary in 1910-11. America was a segregated nation throughout World War II. South Africa had already refused to sign the UDHR in order to protect its system of apartheid, which continued until 1991. The Convention was not just created in response to the Nazis, but in response to the continuing atrocities beyond the Iron Curtain after the war ended. The Nazis weren't something uniquely monstrous unapproached anywhere else. They were just the worst example of existing cultural trends which the UDHR and the laws based on it sought to address.

edited 2nd Oct '14 5:52:37 AM by Iaculus

UKIP to me seem frankly more Tea Party than fascist by any means- i.e an awkward alliance of right-libertarianism and social conservatism- or at worst the Tories squared.

T Hey might have ex-BNP members in practice, but as my UKIP-member friend is constantly stating they are the only party with any formal policy officially barring them. Frankly the mere fact of having ex-BNP members does not make them equivalent to the BNP: one must wonder why those people left the BNP in the first place, as they may have become disillusioned with it for good reason. As for their partnership in the European parliament... well that says little given the way vastly differing political parties often form uneasy alliances (take the current lot in government: who would have thought, prior to 2010, the Tories and Lib Dems would make such ready bedfellows?) As to the spokesman who is so opposed to what would seem to most important and non-negotiable worker's rights- well, that truly is worrying, though I will have to see what exactly is party policy before making my mind up on that. UKIP seems to pride themselves on having some freedom of views at least on the local level. Note the rationale for it is more the libertarian-eqsue idea that it is makes it difficult to do business if these rights are absolutely enshrined in law (never mind of course that it makes potential employees' lives difficult to live if their employers do nothing towards those ends either) than anything worse.

It is indeed fair to say that many other regimes, and indeed Britain itself are by no means squeaky-clean on the human rights record, historically speaking. But I would like to hope we have learned from our mistakes and moved on at least in part, without needing some international body to do it for us, presenting attendant problems. Fundamentally there is never going to be any true 100% consensus on where fundamental rights begin and end,and there are clear national differences on this. For example, in America many the right to bear arms is enumerated in the Constitution and many believe it to be the one thing that stands between them and potential tyranny- here in the UK, most of us think the prospect too dangerous. Likewise here in Europe he establishment believes that the death penalty is abhorrent- in the States it is an accepted, if highly controversial, means of ultimately dealing with the worst of criminals. Should it be so much different with things like the right of prisoners to vote, or whether those who pose a severe risk to national security should be deported regardless of where they are being deported to? (Perhaps the latter one has some grounds for concern, though!)

edited 2nd Oct '14 7:31:29 AM by TheLyniezian