the_bloke

Interesting that people keep mentioning the word 'democracy' yet both PR and FPTP meet the dictionary definition of the word. Something is either democratic, or it isn't. Imagine voting in an election in September, and the previous government stays in power until all the back room agreements and hand shaking are complete.. say by Christmas? Maybe by Christmas? If you don't feel FPTP is democratic, how do you feel about voting out a Government only for it to remain in power until some arbitrary point in the future? Isn't the record something like a year and a half in Belgium? https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-coalition-formal-talks-likely-spd-fdp-greens/ Going back on topic: `'We are committed to a referendum on the voting system for the House of Commons. An independent commission on voting systems will be appointed early to recommend a proportional alternative to the first-past-the-post system.' - Labour 1997 Manifesto Then after they actually won: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/may/24/uk.election200111 - `Blair accused of breaking promise on voting reform`

Why were you inviting the contrast of UK vs. German government performance and success in post #1793 if you can't attribute the supposed success of Germany to PR then? Was it just for yet another dig at the UK?

My money is on it being a Meth lab tbh.

Yes, I am. If you want to compare Germany and the UK, please enlighten us as to the amazing things PR has brought to Germany that FPTP wouldn't have done? I can't see any, but then I'm not a Europhile and don't know the system in and out. It didn't stop recessions. It didn't stop involvement in Afghanistan. It didn't stop militants committing murder with lorries. It doesn't stop policy u-turns, as evidenced by the flip flopping over ending nuclear power. It didn't stop tension over immigration. It didn't stop them bailing out the banks. It doesn't actually mean that the parties work better with each other either.

You've avoided the point; if a party says one thing in the manifesto then can't deliver it or can only deliver a sub set of it due to various levels of compromise, then people aren't getting what they voted for are they. If people feel strongly about that, they can make sure to vote for someone else in the next election and remove the party that promised one thing and delivered another from power - unless it's PR, where the same parties are always involved in the decisions for decades. PR is basically governing by committee. The safest options will always be taken due to the compromises and deal making that has to be done. IMO if this country had PR since 1945 none of the large scale political decisions and social and economic changes would ever have happened.

If you want to know how smoothly PR works, pay attention to the current condition of German government. Three weeks after the election and still no government has been formed. Lots of back room deals going on, and the result will likely be a three way coalition of parties that will struggle to push any policy through from their manifesto without compromise. It's democracy yes, but in a way that no one gets what they voted for.

I suspect the comment is about the high level management and directorship of the BBC, not the on air talent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Board 22 people on the board and executive committee 1 who is a Baroness 1 who has a Baron as a parent 1 who has a Labour life peer as a parent 1 ex Conservative MP 1 ex comms director of the Conservatives 4 ex Cambridge 2 ex Oxford Numerous CBEs Mostly private school educated

Remember though, that was 'New Labour'. You know, the one that won elections and put their policies into practice, but for some reason the current Labour party wants to distance itself from. Maybe something to do with illegal wars and NHS privatisation. The current Labour party thinks it has more in common with pre 1997 Labour, the one that hasn't won a General Election since 1974, which is plainly a fantastic model to replicate.

As someone who grew up about as south as you can get before getting wet, if you ate a hot meal at noon or the evening then it was dinner. If you had cold food like sandwiches at noon, then it was lunch, if you had it in the evening then it was tea. Coming up north and seeing people having a 'Sunday Lunch' of a roast dinner was just silly. What do people put in their lunch boxes? Chicken mash and gravy? No.

It is if you consider the idea that certain moderators just employed knee jerk reactions to reports because the report was from their friend that they shared the same political viewpoint as. My gut feel says that nearly all the heavy handed moderation was from one or two mods and was probably based on the reports of one or two posters. I wonder how many tickets went along the lines of '<insert moderator name> please shut down this thread as it's turning into an argument' after the person raising the ticket caused the argument in the first place..

The idea the forum has bias is a mixture of: a) There are more active posters with one political ideology on the forum than there are others, so you see more X-leaning posts b) The previous moderation team worked to the forum rules and then applied their own set of rules depending upon the moderator, the poster raising the complaint and the poster being complained about I was once told that I couldn't link to an external site which exposed the names and addresses of the general public even if it was official and in the public domain - the external site was the Sheffield Council building planning application site, which by design has the names of the people putting forward their planning applications and the names of those supporting or arguing against an application. That's the level of moderation and poor understanding of how the Internet works that the forum used to suffer from, and lead me to believe that the previous moderation team didn't really grasp what was going on and would happily just do what posters they liked told them to do.

The whole 'Labour were 3000 votes from winning in 2017' is based on a load of assumptions that no one knows would have been true or not. The most obvious assumption was that the votes in the marginal seats that people count in this scenario would have been for Labour. https://ukandeu.ac.uk/the-2017-general-election-not-that-close-after-all/ As that article points out, using the same logic as 'Labour only needed 3000 votes to win' you can also say 'Conservatives only needed 50 for a majority'.

Yes, she did. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/nov/05/labour.uk

Absolutely this. I've been saying this for years on SF when people bring up the subject of media bias. People don't buy a newspaper that has viewpoints in it they don't agree with, they buy a newspaper that has a viewpoint that causes them to nod and feel smug about when they read it. The modern day equivalent is Twitter; the reason it's known as an 'echo chamber' is because people only follow and interact with other people and organisations that reinforce their views, not bring them into question.

I can't say I'm an expert on ice cream vans, but some Googling says that the largest manufacturer of ice cream vans in the UK, Whitby Morrison, launched it's electric van last year. So SCC without consultation with the ice cream vendors, has created a requirement that the vendor needs to purchase a brand new van to sell ice cream. I'm sure that's great for the vendor after an awful financial period - I can't see a price list but comments on Facebook suggest this new electric van is upwards of £100k.

The online version of the Guardian is usually the top or second place most visited newspaper website in the UK, swapping places at the top with the Mail. The Sun online is a long way down the list. More people read the Guardian than the Sun.

I like how the council response is 'there are alternatives' then doesn't say what they are.

No idea. Consider this though, this pay rise would reduce the numbers of people who don't pay tax (as they are under the threshold) and get means tested benefits (such as child tax credits) by a huge amount. Hardly anyone would qualify. Labour would at a stroke undo the working-benefits system they introduced back in the early 2000s. In other news, it's being reported that the Bakers Union has disaffiliated itself with the Labour Party because of the infighting over the £15ph minimum pay, as they strongly believe it should be a thing. However, much like Labour themselves, and the 'Sheffield Needs A Pay Rise' protest group, they are unable to actually pay people £15 ph. https://sheffieldtuc.co.uk/job-advertisement-for-union-organiser-for-sheffield-needs-a-pay-rise/ This whole £15 ph demand is bobbins when those demanding it can't pay it to their own staff.

Thatcher.

£15ph at a full time rate of 37.5hrs a week is a salary of £29,250 pa. I'm sure there are a lot of people currently in stressful jobs earning around £30k a year that would take a step backwards and work in a job with zero skills and responsibility for the same money.

I agree, and they shouldn't blame it all on Brexit. However it's clear that this has highlighted huge issues with the haulage industry in the UK, issues which have been coming for at least ten years with the problem of not retaining drivers in the industry. Some of these issues stem from poor conditions and pay in the job, which have been kept artificially low by putting the sticking plaster of foreign labour on the problem. Instead of the incremental market forces of supply and demand forcing employers to make the job better over the last decade (two decades?), cheap drivers from the EU were used instead. Other issues seem to be the traditionally British poor bureaucracy and expense, such as slow and expensive driver training schemes, months to wait for tests at the test centre, the joy of DVLA and so on and generally shoddy resource management across the industry as a whole. That isn't a fault of Brexit, it's a fault of Britain. A consequence of Brexit seems to be the sudden shock that employers can't pay people crap wages to do crap jobs anymore.

I couldn't care less what sort of background a politician comes from. We live in a capitalist society, where people have the right and opportunity to climb up the social and economic ladder; I don't understand the hatred towards people that have been successful, or even the hatred towards those who have descendants of those who were successful. It's a strange world when people vote for politicians who want to make everyone have more chances, more money, more career progression then hate on the politicians who have actually taken those chances, made money and had greater career progression. The politics of envy doesn't work and it's ugly.

I'm seeing the opposite. Now people are returning to the office for only a few days a week, it's cheaper to come into work by car than it was before (parking costs are less) and they want to feel they are getting use out of the car instead of leaving it on the drive all week.

Apparently on LBC this morning the Shadow Home Secretary revealed in a discussion about the minimum wage that he didn't actually know what it was. Something less than £10 was his guess.

You should be able to use the Disk Management utility in Windows to see what partitions are on the physical drive, but if it doesn't recognise the format of the partition then it won't say what the format is. It might also be encrypted to prevent people ripping films from the HD. The first case might be solvable by finding a utility that can identify and read from the drive - none spring to mind however - but the second means the drive is dead in the water as the only device that has the key and could read it was the DVD recorder.