Westministenders: Tell Boris it should be more Stokenders and Copenders

[RedToothBrush]

FINALLY this is the thread of the Copeland and Stoke By-Elections.
In the next few days we will be subjected to a whole pile of analysis from the media most of which will completely miss the point, and will waffle on about Brexit as if it’s the only issue ever and this is what matters to everyone.

Its bollocks.

This is the ‘Westminster Bubble’ that doesn’t report what is on the ground. It includes the media and the politicians who ran into town for the election, never to set foot there ever again. In one case pulling faces at the local children. In another desperately trying to prove how local he is.
Is it any wonder some think that all politicians are all the same?

You can learn far more about what really matters by reading the Stoke Sentinel and The Whitehaven News than reading The Sun or The Mail, those great champions of Leave. (Fancy that local papers being more relevant to a community than a national ones).

The by-election in Stoke has been a particular display of pond life style campaigning. We’ve had Hillsborough, ‘dodgy addresses’, arrest of a candidate, text messages saying you’ll go to hell for voting ‘wrong’, letters that say that MPs voted differently to the way they did, an activist being hunted by the police for trying to enter someone’s house and then pissing on her property, crying candidates, faked photos on twitter, dodgy sexist tweets from candidates dragged up, photographs with known far right activists, egg throwing and vandalism.

The word that keep coming out? Not ‘Brexit’. But ‘Change’.

What have the main parties in either election really added in terms of positive change?

Tomorrow’s weather will not help matters. The chances are that it will keep turnout down, making those postal votes more important. It will drive out the angry to vote whilst the apathetic and hopelessly disillusioned will stay home. The result will not be decided by the 60%+ of the electorate who voted to leave the EU. It will be decided by a fraction of that.

Someone has to lose. There will be political blood shed. Friday will see the political blame and finger pointing I doubt anyone will get it.
The real story is about how few people will vote and how few people think their vote counts for anything.

Immigrants and ‘benefit scroungers’ are not to blame for this. Nor is it even the ‘cultural elite’. Politicians have a duty to the whole country, to do the best for them all. Not to merely do the ‘will of the people’. Popularism does not help people. It merely starts a runaway train of the tyranny of the majority. You don’t give children sweets because they demand them. You educate children, and nurture them. If they are unaware of real issues, you make sure they learn and you explain why you are making unpopular decisions honestly, rather than feeding them a crock of shit. Because that’s your job as a PM, as MP, as a MEP, as an elected mayor, as a county councillor, as a borough councillor, as a parish councillor. To step up.

We need politicians with the back bone to do the right thing for all, rather than just worrying about their electoral strategy and how to con people to vote for you this time. We need politicians to actually take the responsibility of office rather than see it as a career opportunity.

The issues that matter most to people ultimately are not about the EU. They are not about immigration. It’s too easy to blame on immigration rather than tackle the infrastructure problems of the country and admit where you have gone wrong in the past. It’s easier to drive an hysterical fear of terrorism and cultural values being in danger from an enemy far away rather than look at who is really responsible.

If people don’t think that others are unaware of the problem, and don’t care about them and how they are being thrown under the bus, they are wrong. Plenty of people on both sides of the EU referendum debate get it.

Plenty on both sides don’t and are indulging the fantasy land excuses for domestic political failure.

The question is how do you get that message out, in a way that makes a difference and does change things? How do you break the stereotypes of the stupid and the patronising? How do you get people like the Nathan from Stoke to be heard and to believe in politics. Not believe in Brexit. Believe that politics can help them.

I was at an event recently where someone was joking about hating paying tax etc, trying to avoid it as far as possible. And then the same person was decrying the lack of service from the NHS.

Then challenge them on this! I did so the other day with someone who used to go on about Government's taxing and spending. What did they expect them to do? Did they not think they had an obligation to pay tax? It was quite an entertaining discussion.

Remember all those trade experts who warned about how the UK might be able to do a quick deal with the US but had no chance of a good deal, and were dismissed as project fear?

Here's the Telegraph now:

www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/02/26/uk-faces-hard-pounding-us-negotiations-warns-top-trade-expert/

Talking about politics and money is seen as rude in England, works well for those who control them. Peregrina well done for challenging!

So the Daily Heil is banned from Trump briefings, and the Telegraph publishes slightly twitchier pieces on Brexit, interesting Kaija

^The German police are just not having it with racist nonsense today.
Polizei Mannheim, the official Twitter handle of the Mannheim police force in Germany, posted this update about the recent Heidelberg attack...

Brexit Means Brexit @woodside2010
@KareemLailah @PolizeiMannheim is he fuck German. He's a fucking Muslim. Fuck the lot of them out of the West.

@PolizeiMannheim
@woodside2010 @KareemLailah
WTF are you talking about^?

Wish they would do that here.

MPs warn: Hard Brexit could seriously damage NHS

Even if they are excluded from deportation, highly trained medical professionals with good English are very mobile and probably won't beg permission to stay in a UK they feel is unwelcoming.

215,000 EU nationals work in health and social care, with doctors presumably the most difficult to replace - training British replacements for specialists would take several years.

EU doctors tend to be more experienced specialists:
registrars (13 %), staff grades (18 %) and specialty doctors (11 %)

In NHS England, pediatric cardiology, pediatric and perinatal diagnostics, cardio-thoracic surgery and neurosurgery would lose 18-33% of their doctors.

http://www.politico.eu/article/nhs-faces-dearth-of-pediatric-doctors-surgeons-from-hard-brexit/

Graphics show % E27 surgeons by speciality, then all E27 doctors by geographic region:

Where there are drugs, there’s money

"That makes the London-based European Medicines Agency one of the biggest spoils of Brexit.
And nearly every other country in the EU is actively courting the EU’s drug regulator to move to their shores once the U.K. leaves the bloc"

"Lobbying to win the agency is already at the highest diplomatic levels, with heads of governments, health ministers and diplomats in Brussels and in the capitals making their public and private cases."

" Its crucial role in assessing the safety and efficacy of new drugs puts it at the center of the European pharmaceutical market.
In 2016, the agency gave the green light to 81 medicines for treating cancer, cardiovascular diseases and infections, among others.

To do this, the EMA brings 40,000 people each year to its 6-floor, 23,500-square-meter headquarters in London’s Canary Wharf.
It needs 350 hotel rooms per night, five days a week, the agency’s Executive Director Guido Rasi said last year.
The EMA has a budget of €322 million for 2017."

Sounds like a prize the Uk really didn't want to lose

www.politico.eu/article/bidding-war-for-europes-medicines-regulator-kicks-into-high-gear-ema-brexit-drug-regulator-uk-eu/

Remember how May's govt first promised extra money for the NHS after Brexit.
Then told NHS head Stevens
“the NHS could learn from the painful cuts to the home office and ministry of defence budgets that she and Philip Hammond, the chancellor, had overseen when they were in charge of those departments,”

Sir Gerald Kaufman, Labour MP for Manchester Gorton and Father of The House of Commons, has died aged 86

So, another byelection in a Labour/Leave seat.

I just posted on the wheelchair thread about Groundhog Day ...

Hope this is true?

www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/27/germany-rightwing-afd-party-struggles-internal-crisis

Gorton was Leave?

Swedish - Gorton was a strong Remain constituency which now, of course, may bring a whole different set of problems for a Labour candidate.

I had no idea that Gerald Kaufman was still a sitting MP .

The Afd has always had more of a problem than far right parties in other countries, because it has to keep clear blue water between itself and any hint of flirting with Nazis.
So they always have to walk a tightrope.

imo, part of the reason for their drop in popularity is that Martin Schulz (European Parliament president) took over as SPD president from a nonentity.
So, after 10 years of Merkel, suddenly there was a serious alternative for Germans who want change.
Since he has spent so much time in Brussels, he is regarded as untainted by any mistakes made in Berlin and highly experienced at top level politics (Brussels wouldn't be a plus in the Uk !)

Germany now has highly capable leaders for the moderate parties of left and right, so there is no political vaccuum

Note for Corbyn & Labour:
when the main party of the left doesn't look a serious alternative, some of its voters drift to the populist far right.
Nature and voters abhor a vaccum - which is what the UK currently has on the left

Was it? Good if that's true. I'm thinking it's proximity to Hyde/Ashton made it a bit more Leave?

I thought Kaufmann died years ago I've thought that of a few people in other fields

Germany now has highly capable leaders for the moderate parties of left and right, so there is no political vacuum
Time to get passports sorted

62.1% according to wiki. It includes lots of areas - Levenshulme, Whalley Range, Longsight - that, certainly when my friends were studying there, were very studenty areas or had a high proportion of ex-students who had stayed on in the city. That may have helped the Remain vote.

Irene Clennell’s deportation is front page news on the Straits Times.
www.straitstimes.com/singapore/52-year-old-singaporean-deported-despite-decades-long-fight-to-stay-with-british-husband
We must look great to the rest of the world.

www.ibtimes.co.uk/brexit-end-free-movement-new-eu-migrants-uk-when-article-50-triggered-1608683

So it seems we are now getting officially bargaining chips ...

And it also looks like she want to restrict the movement of people NOW
EU citizens will instead be subject to new migration curbs that will be put in place. This could possibly include a new visa scheme and restricted access to benefits, the Telegraph reports.

I have no idea how she is proposing to do that (how on earth will yu be able to tell if someone is living in the uk already or need a visa??) but the move is interesting as it is very clearly setting an agenda regarding the FOM and what she is planning to do re immigration.
Use add the recent story of the woman sent back to Singapore an you get quite a horrible image what of the future holds TBH.

The zeitgeist here is in many ways testimony to the appalling education and culture in England particularly( as you said before Misti). There is a sinister, collusive indifference.

I'm actually relieved read That. I have always been horrified at how English people react to things, their indifference and also the feeling that they just cannot do or change nothing at all. So any attemp to try and stop whatever government decision it is, fracking being a good example, is just derided.

YY about the fact that it is actively discourage to talk about politics as it just creates division. The issue is that because people aren't used to talk about politics, when they do, it always ends up badly because they don't know how to do that iyswim.

Losing the EMA will be a blow - even if we eventually stay in the EU or EEA, once those organisations have gone, they won't want to relocate in a hurry.

Re Irene Clennell - how on earth does Theresa May square that with a 'country open for business'? It must be embarassing to her that it's splashed over the front pages of newspapers. Of course, many countries which were part of the Empire will probably be saying, "so what's new?"

I hope Labour bucks its ideas up in Kaufman's old seat, and realises that if people want UKIP they can now vote Tory, and go back to its roots of supporting working people. Because however often May proclaims that the Tories are the party for all, most people know they are not.

Wonder if Nuttall will stand again? Cue more amusing photoshopping.....