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notaspy posted:The letter was meant to be seem impartial, that the business world is saying that the Tories are best for country. That these are all Tory supporters supporting the Tories make it a farce. Both the gong-winners and the Tory donors are minorities of the full 103 signatories. Two-thirds of them are not Tory donors, and four-fifths did not receive honours from the present government, so saying that they're all Tory confederates is just false. kapparomeo fucked around with this message at 12:36 on Apr 2, 2015 |
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Apr 2, 2015 12:26
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Pistol_Pete posted:In their latest issue, Private Eye are reporting that the Telegraph group have specifically assured the Conservatives that they'll do whatever it takes to help them win the election. Pffffft, pull the other one, it's got bells on. Next you'll be spinning us a fairy story that the Morning Star is a leftie paper.
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Apr 4, 2015 09:38
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Oberleutnant posted:Mail front page is great today, it has everything - Stugeon is apparently being called "Queen of Scotland" (traitor/usurpation/disrespect to the queen) and apparently claims "We'll call the shots now" (generally not knowing her place/being an uppity scot). Not an uppity Scot, an uppity separatist. Although nationalists frequently assume they are the One True Scotland, they're not one and the same thing.
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Apr 4, 2015 12:22
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keep punching joe posted:An immigrant feeling comfortable and integrated into society enough to regard it as their primary nationality is a bad thing? Why shouldn't Coohoolin consider himself Scottish, why shouldn't any immigrant? Coohoolin isn't an immigrant. He was born in England. He grew up in Oxford. He could legitimately adopt a British identity, but seeing how he so graciously condescends to consider himself in the same category of people who've struggled across continents holding on to trains and crammed in stinking leaking boats to make a new life here is outright insulting. kapparomeo fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 17:36
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JFairfax posted:You're a Lord for the rest of your life right? diseases or not It seemed to pass completely under the radar and barely got a mention in the press, but last year there was a new House of Lords Reform Act. You have the title itself for life, but peers now can voluntarily resign from the House of Lords (the pollster Lord Ashcroft did this recently), and they are also excluded if they are imprisoned for more than one year or fail to attend an entire session of parliament. Personally, I'm not too comfortable with the Act. I can understand the criminal exclusion but the other two are harder to justify. Leaving aside ideological objections to the Lords and just looking at the functionality and internal logic of the system as it stands here and now today, part of the point of the Lords is that they are more independent because they can't lose their position if they defy the whips, and that's because of their life terms. Provisions for reservation and exclusion give the whips more leverage over disobedient Lords. If you're going to be away from the Lords for work, like Lord Ashcroft you could have just requested a leave of absence. Lords aren't paid salaries or pensions so there's no wasted cost for sessions they don't attend. From June there's also another House of Lords (Expulsion & Suspension) Act that comes into force which enables the Lords to vote on permanently dismissing members. kapparomeo fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Apr 17, 2015 |
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Apr 17, 2015 15:09
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Lord of the Llamas posted:Is a session a year or the five year term? A session is one year, between State Openings of Parliament.
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Apr 17, 2015 15:20
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Private Speech posted:Anyway about the election, how much of a gerrymandering advantage does labour really have? I remember someone saying that the tories need 2-3% more vote to get a seat advantage over labour, but that surely can't be right? More than that, even. Our current FPTP system is biased very heavily in favour in Labour, due to the concentration of its voter base in urban areas. For example, in 1983, even despite writing the longest suicide note in history and only polling less than 28% of the votes Labour still got 209 seats - in 1997, the year of Labour's great landslide triumph, Conservatives nonetheless polled over 30% of the votes and yet only ended up with 165 seats. In 2010, Labour polled just 29% of the vote, almost as bad as their 1983 performance, and yet that still gave them 258 seats - in 2005 and 2001 the Tories again polled 32% and 31% of the vote and yet they ended up with less than 200 seats each time. kapparomeo fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Apr 23, 2015 |
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Apr 23, 2015 03:50
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Whitefish posted:Reforming assured shorthold tenancies would be a good thing right? Here's an old post by LemonDrizzle on the topic of the negative impact of rent controls, one of the articles he cites is pasted below. ================================================== JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Volume 29, Number 2, pages 207–220. To briefly outline why rent controls are bad, consider the sort of situation that causes people to be priced out of homes - broadly speaking, one where demand for housing in an area exceeds the supply. Suppose we have three homes available for rent and five people (A, B, C, D, and E) who want to rent them. A is willing and able to pay £500 per month in rent, B £400, C £300, D £200, and E £100. In an unregulated market, the outcome is pretty simple: A has his pick of the homes because he can pay the most, then B picks from the remaining two, and C takes the last one for somewhere between £200 and £300. D and E are priced out, and will have to look for alternative accommodation some place else. Sucks to be them, but since there are only three homes available and five people who want them, two are going to have to lose out however you do things. OK, now let's say we decide that pricing people out is bad and we're going to institute a rent control so that everyone can afford to live in our little area. No home may be rented for more than £100 per month, so they'll be allocated some other way - by lottery, first come first served, whatever. The first thing to notice here is that our fundamental problem remains: we have fewer homes than people who want them. That alone ought to make you question the usefulness of rent control because it means that no matter what, some people are going to be excluded from the area - maybe by something other than price, but excluded nevertheless. This may by coincidence produce the same outcome as the unregulated market (A, B, and C housed, D and E left to suck it), but it may not. What happens if A is one of the losers here? The first thing he'll do is quietly knock on the winners' doors and offer to sublet a place from them. Since he's willing to pay £500 and the winner only has to pay the controlled rent of £100, A can essentially offer the winning tenant £400/month to accept the inconvenience of living elsewhere. That's going to be a very attractive offer to D or E, so they'll probably take him up on it. Congratulations, your rent control scheme has just created a completely unregulated black market! This isn't a theoretical concern - it's happening right now in Sweden. Second, rent control reduces the quality and supply of housing. In the first scenario, the landlords receive upwards of £600/month in rent and thus have a relatively large surplus with which to maintain the properties together with a strong incentive to build more. In the rent controlled scenario, they only receive £300 and have no incentive to upgrade or maintain their properties, much less to build more. Rent control (i) completely fails to solve your actual problem, (ii) creates a bunch of new problems in the form of black markets, and (iii) over time makes your actual problem worse by reducing the incentive to address the supply shortage or adequately maintain existing stock.
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Apr 26, 2015 00:42
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Zephro posted:Technically nothing if he loses his seat, there's no law saying a party leader has to be a sitting MP. For instance: Nigel Farage, Natalie Bennett, Nicola Sturgeon (sort of). It's different in the Lib Dems' case though, their "Federal Constitution" says that the party leader specifically must be a Commons MP. In addition to Article 10 quoted by Prince John above it's also governed by Article 9: "The Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons shall consist of all Members of that House in receipt of the Party’s whip. Its Leader shall be the Leader of the Party elected as provided in Article 10." kapparomeo fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 17:01
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I only got in late so I missed Sturgeon's Q&A session - did anyone try to question her on actual policy or was it just the referendum over and over again?
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Apr 30, 2015 22:19
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