*waves from Australia, where the much mentioned idea of taxing fossil fuel companies keeps getting ignored by the government*
Funny events in anti-woke world
- Thread starter Agema
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The reason Britain pays like the highest price for energy among peers is because of horrible Labour policy. You hate tariffs right? Well Labour self-imposed tariffs on Britain by moving a lot of manufacturing (and jobs) out of Britain to reduce carbon emissions. However, people still want/need these things so now those things are being made in other countries with dirtier energy than Britain so the green Labour policies are causing more carbon to be emitted, not less. And Labour policy made it so stuff made with dirty energy is taxed so it's essentially a self-imposed tariff. This is why people don't like stupid ass left policies, it's because they don't fucking work.
This is a well-worn Conservative attack line.
Basically, if we all remember, there was a massive financial crash and recession in 2007/2008. Do you know what the UK has a particularly large sector in? Oh yeah... finance. So the UK government did what governments would do: it propped up the banks on the one hand, and on the other engaged in stimulus spending to mitigate the recession. (This is the same tactic that GWB / Obama enacted in the USA. It's what the rest of Europe did too: stopped banks collapsing and engaged counter-cyclical spending.)
So when the Tories took over in 2010, they took over a country that had a much higher national debt than a few years previously.
This the Tories claimed was Labour profligacy and waste. Fundamentally, deeply dishonest of course, because they'd have done exactly the same and spent a ton of money propping up the banks and economy if they were in charge. But at face value the debt numbers are what they are, explanations of the real world are hard work, and the British press are heavily right-wing biased, so the Tories got away with it.
The Tories have got it in the neck at least last election, because they were awful. They tried to shrink the economy into growth 2010-2015. If that sounds perverse, it is. Of course it failed: bad growth and no debt reduction. After that they fucked us with Brexit. It's not just the fact that the average Briton is about £2000 a year worse off already because of Brexit, but it's the administrative effort wasted on it that could have been spent fixing shit. All those civil servants, their time, the money, that could have been spent on better energy policy, industrial policy, not letting the water companies pour literal shit into the rivers and onto beaches, etc.
The Tories had 14 goddamn years. Anyone who thinks Labour broke things so badly the Tories couldn't fix it in that time is transparently a Tory stooge or a moron.
A horrible labour policy from over a decade ago with them not having been in power until recently? What exactly where the Tories doing those 10+ years of uninterrupted rule? Why is a giant shift such as leaving the EU so much easier then bringing some factories back?
Besides moving manufacturing abroad were prices are cheaper is a neoliberal thing and where did that ideology come from?
They don't have uninterrupted rule because the civil servants don't have to listen to what the ministers tell them and can do what they want essentially. The Tories haven't been able to reverse shitty Labour policy. Britain has been getting poorer for the last couple decades, that is not a good thing.
Something something deepstate. Something something sir Humphry's ghost. If the civil servants were so dangerous Brexit would not have happened
No it isn't, you clown. Virtually nothing you've said there is true, you are utterly clueless.
Check this graph:
Deindustrialisation in the UK started under Thatcher (Conservative!) in the 1980s, that's the huge decrease that decade. It's a parallel to the offshoring heavily associated with Reagan (not a leftist) in the USA, except that Reagan didn't butcher manufacturing as savagely as Thatcher (Conservative!). UK manufacturing output eventually started growing again and peaked during Labour's administration in the 2000s. Then it falls with the financial crash/recession ~2008, and the Conservatives took over 2010.
Manufacturing jobs did disappear heavily 1980-2010 in the UK. The whole period. This was in part offshoring, and in part automation. The same pattern occurred in the USA. (The biggest collapse in manufacturing jobs - and a massive increase in Chinese imports - was in the 2000s when GWB was in charge... like Reagan, not a leftist.) The same processes occurred in France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Sweden, anywhere else.
If it happens everywhere, it's not the Labour Party. And quite the opposite from being leftists, that's capitalism. Automation can make stuff cheaper and more efficiently, so the capitalists fire the workers and use robots. China can do it even cheaper, so the capitalists move the factory to China.
* * *
Why is British energy expensive? Well, let me explain the economics of energy generation.
Across almost the entire Western world, the model to price electricity is "pay-as-clear". What this means is that all the electricity generating companies sell their energy to the network to meet demand. The network buys energy starting with the cheapest bid, until it hits the point where demand is met, and everyone who supplies gets paid. Here's the key point: all producers are paid the price that the most expensive electricity used. So cheaper-generated electricity makes much more profit. This then encourages efficiency, theoretically.
I stress again, this is not "Labour", so much as it is the standard model for paying for energy across most of the developed world. Not only that, but in the UK, it was the Conservative Party that first installed the "pay-as-clear" model in 1990.
The British pay a lot for energy because it is very heavily reliant on gas for electricity generation. What this means is that the marginal price - the most expensive price that meets demand - is nearly always gas (in fact, ~95% of the time). This means that the cost of electricity in the UK is effectively tied to the price of gas. So when some authoritarian prick (Putin, Trump) starts a war that fucks the global gas supply, bills in the UK go up the wazoo.
Needless to say, almost none of this is Labour's fault. "Because Labour" is certainly no excuse that the Conservatives spent 14 years playing with their dicks rather than sorting out a ton of the country's problems.
Indeed it was. With two jointly-running highly-funded campaigns to leave, and just one to remain. And during that referendum, we were assured by both 'leave' campaigns that we could safely retain such benefits as membership of the customs union and single market access, if we left!
And the conservative governments were not voted on you mean to say?
Brexit was an advisory referendum. Leaving the EU was not set in stone. It would be tone death and perhaps even unethical to ignore the referendum , but officially the Brexit vote bound the government to nothing. Had the civil service been the shadow dictatorship you picture them as they would have killed it.
I've been skipping around that video; when does she talk about environmentally based offshoring?
IndyCar Launches, Deletes Offensive T-Shirt From Its Online Store
IndyCar pulled an officially licensed shirt after fans blasted its offensive, tone-deaf slogan.
sports.yahoo.com
It's worse than that.
That video is about a load of policies that are proposed: have not yet been enacted. Obviously, laws that don't exist or yet to have effects cannot reasonably explain the cost of energy generation and job offshoring now, or historically.
The other problem is that this is a nakedly right-wing ideological clickbait podcast where right-wing interviewers invite right-wing opinion-givers to give right-wing commentary. It's propaganda, not a serious investigation of reality.
And these aren't even subtle problems with that video. They are incredibly obvious problems.
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One person can make a mistake. For this many people to sign off on it, it's deliberate.For a sport that's often about turning left really fast, that's one sharp right.IndyCar Launches, Deletes Offensive T-Shirt From Its Online Store
IndyCar pulled an officially licensed shirt after fans blasted its offensive, tone-deaf slogan.
Yeah, second that. Possibly they did not expect it to blow up quite as big as it did, but people responsible knew it was a thing.
Or, maybe that's why some people advocate for diversity as a strength in an organisation: because if the many people to sign off are very similar, it's not that far from only having one person sign off.
They don't have control of the high level things. It's like saying the state senators in American can control bills in the federal Congress.
46:14ish area (according to the transcript).
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The days of Machiavellian bowler hat wearing Civil Servants as portrayed through Sir Humphrey Appleby, assuming they were as real as sentiment around the character implies, are very much long gone.
now that the goal has been accomplished and Syria is ruled by israel-friendly Islamists, we can start to talk about how an OPCW investigation-- and the media circus produced about that investigation-- was directed to serve political objectives rather than any genuine desire to discover the truth.