General Election - June 8th

He needs to receive professional stress counselling and support, why would talking to the Prime Minister / Queen / Elvis Presley help him?

I think you are now being deliberately obtuse. Many of the residents have justified claims of being ignored by Local and National Government. Theresa May is still on operation damaged limitations or operation self-preservation.

Even Portillo says she was "hiding her humanity". She has just run a campaign in which she has been accused of hiding from the public. Less than a week after winning the election, she is faced with a tragic incident and decided not to face the public. As you indicated, there is hostility there. The residents are looking for answers, they want their voices to be heard. Someone skipped an opportunity to listen.

I think we may perhaps agree on something - the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire is overwhelming but we may observe that this disaster is going to acquire a political dimension.

The disaster has taken a political tone early on, maybe because people still remember how long justice took for the victims of Hillsborough. I think the residents are, rightly, distrusting of the Government (whether red or blue). At such times, it would comfort the residents to think that their pleas are being heard at the very top.

I think what Andrew is referring to is the political jostling and virtue signalling by certain of the political class and their ardent activists. There were accusations that Theresa May's visit yesterday was "devoid of humanity" because she didn't meet and speak with any of the survivors but confined herself to meeting the emergency services. What was not mentioned by the virtue signallers, however, was that Jeremy Corbyn's visit was equally low key and only a few hand-picked survivors (Labour activists?) were wheeled into the presence. And his call for properties in the borough to be seized willy-nilly and handed-over to those now homeless would be illegal and was totally unnecessary as recently-vacated student accommodation has already been made available by the management companies. The borough, of course, has the legal responsibility of rehousing its tenants.

During the election campaign, Corbyn made much political capital out of May's proposal to seek derogation or exit from the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights. He claimed "The Tories want to repeal the Human Rights Act and some want to leave the European Convention on Human Rights".

Article 1 of the First Protocol of the Human Rights Act enshrines the protection of property, a right that would be breached by the requisitioning of other people’s properties: "The protection of property gives every person the right to peaceful enjoyment of their possessions. This imposes an obligation on the State: not to interfere with peaceful enjoyment of property; deprive a person of their possessions; or, subject a person's possessions to control".

Her Majesty has had more practice at this sort of thing than Mrs May has had.

I have always liked understatement

https://www.thecanary.co/2017/06/15...ound-boris-johnson-grenfell-tower-fire-video/

By the time you lot have finished discussing the "Political dimensions" of this tragic event,this thread would be approximately 400 pages long.
I wonder how much you could have resolved between you by then?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...-exteriors?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Pages_Manager

Your contributions may even see us get to 500 pages. BTW, the tragic events not withstanding, the things being discussed here are also being discussed in mainstream media.

Nothing gets resolved on forums, in pubs, in rallies. Shall we just stop debating and discussing? There's a pattern emerging here where you try to stifle opinions that sit uncomfortably with you. Are you a snowflake?

Day out in London

http://www.unitetheunion.org/campaigning/events/tories-out-national-demonstration/

Yeah,I know.. Ha ha!
How do you square that with me "stifling" opinion BTW??

Hell no...As you were..

Labour caused the crisis
[Main article]
The full "blame Labour" narrative goes something like this:

"The Labour party caused the economic crisis and the budget deficit by recklessly overspending, therefore the only solution is to cut, cut, cut."

This narrative is one of the most endlessly repeated Tory fallacies. It doesn't matter how many times people point out the elemental flaws in the theory that "Labour caused the crisis", the Tories will keep repeating it because they believe the majority of British people are simple minded reactionaries that can be fooled by such a transparently inaccurate narrative. Here are just a few of the gaping flaws in this oft repeated central Tory narrative:

1. The actual origin of the crisis: The credit crisis actually emanated from the United States. It was caused by huge levels of financial sector corruption and wanton recklessness, specifically in the Securitisation Food Chain. Once the banks realised that the majority of financial sector institutions were as corruption riddled and recklessly over-leveraged as they themselves were, they stopped lending to each other, causing the credit crisis. To deny the fact that the crisis actually originated in the US Securitisation Food Chain is to deny reality.

http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/tory-all-narrativeno-substance.html

It was all explained to me in the clearest terms when I was about 3 years old ,after I received my first money savings box.
It came in the shape of a pig and it was made of China.
Mind you...That was only lesson number 1.
Looking back..My up bringing and the educational and moral values that I received at home have served me well in life.... Very well in fact..
I gave my kids a similar up bringing and thus far am very proud of the fruits of my labour!
My family were strictly Labour voters back in those days and typically working class people .
Perhaps my family could have been accused back then of having a future view, way above societies expectations at that time for social labour voting plebs like us, now that I think about it.
It could have very easily have been so different ..
The consequences of that do not bare thinking about for me..Personally..

I'll just leave this here:

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Based on your other posts, I am now moving to Belfast where austerity has finally ended. Up yours England, Scotland and Wales.

Austerity? What austerity is that, then?!? You live in England not Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal or Malta where austerity is very real and imposed by hard-nosed German bankers.

Read this:

That aside, now that Britain’s so-called austerity has become the focus of intense debate, it is important to expose the myth that the nation’s finances have been cut to the bone under the Tories. That suggestion is nonsense — for the simple reason that there has been very little austerity at all.

Last week, Sir Nicholas Macpherson, Permanent Secretary at the Treasury from 2005-2016, wrote an exceptionally important article for the Financial Times. He noted that gross public debt actually rose as a proportion of national income between 2010 and 2016, from 76 per cent to 89 per cent.

As Sir Nicholas wrote: ‘Britain never experienced austerity.’ As someone who ran Britain’s most important financial institution for 11 years, he is in a position to know.

Sir Nicholas also noted that our profligacy distinguished us from other countries such as Ireland, which reduced its indebtedness from 86 per cent to 75 per cent of national income during the same period. (Spain is another telling example of a nation that really did cut its spending.)

This, I believe, is a devastating indictment of George Osborne, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer throughout this period.

In 2010, he took office promising to rein back public spending significantly and improve national finances. Because of the crash, the British people understood the need for financial belt-tightening.

But the truth is Osborne never did actually make the cuts he promised. Under his aegis, national debt nearly doubled to a terrifying £1.7 trillion, and public spending barely fell. It’s easy to forget that spending on the NHS is higher in real terms than it has ever been before. Britain spends (or, many would say, wastes) an astonishing £13 billion a year on overseas aid projects.

Meanwhile, Britain’s debt as a percentage of national income is higher than it has been for more than 50 years. The budget deficit is an eye-watering £50 billion, and that is after seven years of so-called Tory austerity.

Now, with Jeremy Corbyn gaining in confidence every day, we are about to set out on a new splurge — sparked by a panicky response to Labour’s wild promises of huge increases in public spending.

This is monstrously irresponsible. All talk of balancing the books has now been abandoned and I shudder to think what this means for the future of Britain.

The deficit, which has never been tamed, will again rise inexorably. It can’t be long before the national debt surges beyond £2 trillion. This will force up interest rates as the financial markets lose faith in the ability of the British Government to repay what it owes.

In truth, there are only three ways a government can deal with the kind of soaring debt we have now.

One is by reducing the value of the national debt in real terms by unleashing a period of high inflation. This was the solution tried by Sir Edward Heath’s Conservative government in the Seventies, with disastrous consequences for Britain’s credit rating on the international markets.

The second method is by defaulting — when governments fail to pay what they owe. Though this looks more and more like where we could end up, the reality is that the City of London would not permit this to happen.

The third is to pay off the debt. But there is no chance of that.

In the wake of the election, both parties appear to have collectively decided to put off debt repayment into the distant future. I believe this course of action is morally wrong, for it is desperately unfair on future generations.

Successive past British governments, Conservative and Labour, have behaved with reckless financial irresponsibility. It is the younger generation of today who will be forced to deal with that recklessness.

Which makes it all the more mystifying that so many of those youngsters are slavish adherents of Jeremy Corbyn — the man who, in the pursuit of la-la-land economics, promises to spend even more than we already are.
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Source

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True, if you compare austerity in the U.K. with austerity in Greece, then they have it worse. It doesn't invalidate our nurses complaints about pay caps though.

I see the Welsh are now asking for a similar boost to their kitty for health and education. They won't get it, there are only 4 Plaid MPs, if only the Tories won 3 more seats.

He is referring to BJC or were you just confirming the UVF connection ?

Inflation set to peak at 3.4% this year, with nurses wages capped at 1%. Perhaps we should picket the food banks to let the nurses getting food there that they've never had it so good (well, compared to Greece)?

There are, after all, no magic money trees. Unless we need to bribe a party to buy us a strong and stable government.