inspectorst

I'm so supportive of this. Lime bikes are an absolute menace.

Round my neighborhood, I constantly find them just lying on the floor blocking the whole pavement. Especially at this time of year, I find them literally every time I walk to the shops and back, every time I go for a run, every time I walk to the Tube station, etc. I regularly find myself picking them and moving them off the pavement because we have lots of families with push chairs in the area, my elderly neighbour uses a mobility scooter, etc.

It really pisses me off that the people using these bikes are so selfish. The designated parking pay solution seems like a fair compromise to support use of these bikes but only when used in a responsible way - you just don't see this problem with the Santander bikes.

That is obviously untrue. I'm a second-gen immigrant and hard-Remain/Rejoin, Schengen-supporting-as-an-eventual-bridge-to-global-free-movement, neoliberal shill, who disagrees hugely with Labour's cautious official stance on immigration (although I doubt it's what Starmer and his senior team - Remain-voting, 2nd referendum supporters to a person - actually believe).

Even I can see that Starmer is a million times better than Farage - the guy who campaigned for a freeze on all non-NHS immigration, a ban on immigrants bringing their partners and children to the UK, supported the Rwanda scheme, and more generally has made a whole career out of demonising immigrants and refugees.

Imagine being so far off to the left than you can no longer tell the difference between Keir Starmer and Nigel fucking Farage 😂

You can't just say 'austerity' every time a Chancellor decides not to spend even more money...

Government spending in the UK today accounts for 45% of GDP. The state that the Tories have bequeathed to Labour represents a significantly larger share of the UK economy than it did at any point in Gordon Brown's decade as Chancellor. The state today is bigger than it was when the Atlee government left office. In fact the only post-WW2 years in which the state has been bigger than in the Sunak years were very briefly for a couple of years in the mid-1970s and then in 2009-11. The only people in this country for whom a state of today's size is normal relative to most of their life experiences are toddlers who were born in the Johnson/Truss/Sunak era.

By all means argue for a more massive state if you like. But we're not living in austere times.

The 1906-22 Liberal-led governments gave the UK progressive taxation, unemployment benefits, the state pension, the first tax-funded healthcare, the end of the primacy of the House of Lords. This was one of the most transformational progressive governments in our country's history and this is partly why they were winning by-elections in working-class seats right up to the start of the First World War.

I think you're overestimating the existence of underlying 'political' causes of the rise of Labour and underestimating the pure 'electoral' factors around the Asquith/Lloyd George split.

Good. It's bonkers we were handing out non-means-tested fuel benefits to pensioners living in million pound homes, while young people and families in genuine need were struggling.

Pure Tory pork-barrel politics to bribe the one generation that most reliably voted for them. Now let's get rid of the pension triple lock next please.

Parliament could reduce annual illegal immigration to zero with a one-line piece of legislation: 'All immigration is legalised'...

I'm not suggesting we quite go that far. But any attempt to address the problem of illegal immigration needs to start off with a recognition of how 14 years of Tory home secretaries and 13 years of authoritarian New Labour home secretaries before home (the choice of home secretaries were always the worst thing about the Blair and Brown governments) have conspired to ramp up the barriers and hurdles to a regular hardworking immigrant - someone who wants to work and pay taxes and obey the law - actually being able to legally enter the UK and work.

It depends which way the Tories go. If a) the Tories elect another extremist and if b) the Tory-Reform split nonetheless persists into a second election, FPTP makes all sorts of crazy outcomes possible.

This is essentially what happened in the 1920s that allowed Labour to displant the Liberals in the first place over the course of two elections. Looking from the position of the 1906 Liberal landslide or even coming out of the First World War when the Liberals were still the largest party, the idea of Labour replacing them as a major party would have seemed fanciful. But the Asquith/Lloyd George split led to two Liberal Parties standing against each other in the 1918 and 1922 general elections, and by the time the Liberals reunited in 1923 the damage was done - Labour had snuck through in Liberal seats to become the 2nd party and, given how relentlessly majoritarian our system is, the reunited Liberal Party was unable to reassert themselves.

What a pathetic frog-faced snowflake.

Democracy isn't about rules, it's about culture.

America is an example of what happens when you rely on the former not the latter. They have all sorts of rules against misconduct in office, and these rules are routinely abused by the far right to try to shut down their opponents - such as the Republican attempt to impeach Biden with no evidence as revenge for Trump's legitimate impeachment, or attempts to impeach the Democrat Attorney General in Georgia for investigating Trump's attempt to fix the election there, or the expelling of black lawmakers in Tennessee for protesting in support of gun law reform. Meanwhile Trump himself - a twice impeached, convicted criminal - is currently narrowly leading in the polls for their November presidential election...

You're under the impression that the rules you're advocating will just get used against the bad guys. But what will happen in reality is that the very well-funded bad guys will hire some very expensive lawyers who will use these laws to harass the good guys and tie them up in spurious investigations and court cases.

In a democracy, the ultimate punishment for an ill-intentioned politician - liars, cheats, rulebreakers - should come at the ballot box. In a democracy, the political culture makes it the job of the voters to doll out the punishment on election day. The more you take that responsibility away from voters by investing it in rules and regulations, the more you risk diluting voters' sense that this is their job, and the more ill-intents you'll find getting elected (a la Trump). Sometimes that's a risk worth taking, when we're talking about corruption or national security breaches - things where the damage a bad actor can do may so dwarf the voters' capacity to punish them. But I think voters are pretty capable of spotting a political liar and punishing them at the ballot box.

What's astonishing here is that Priti Patel is only about the third or fourth most lunatic extremist of the current set of candidates...

Interesting. I do think The West Wing has encouraged that among American liberals, although I don't think it originated it.

For 6 out of Bill Clinton's 8 years as President, the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives. And for the entire 12 years of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, the Democrats controlled the House. The notion that politicians need to work across party boundaries to pass legislation used to be normal in America.

The West Wing's issue is that it prominently espoused this view just as things were changing and giving way to the modern American political culture of division and extreme partisanship on the right - and you obviously can't cooperate with extremists who see any form of cooperation as a betrayal.