(1) It's English, the language very occasionally spoken on the Internet.
Rate = x per y, where y is likely a time unit.
e.g. miles per hour e.g. kilometres per second e.g. dumb assertions made by/. poster per day
High rate = high x per y.
(2) Sufficiently high acceleration in an urban area will certainly attract a fine for your local equivalent of dangerous driving. It may even be in violation of a city noise ordinance.
You're correct, off is not off for many 'phones. Taking your battery is out is sufficient. Which I often do, because it's a 2 second operation as I don't have an iPhone.
Yeah, as here, and same for newer rolling stock. Although it does take away some of the sense of freedom when I'm using public transport, such CCTV is the least intrusive record vs centrally linked cameras or tagging. I can just about cope with a grainy image, no more than someone sitting next to me on the bus would see, difficult to process, perhaps seen weeks later or never.
I often move around on foot or by public transport; I'm often either not carrying a 'phone or have it switched off; I frequently don't carry ID; I pay in cash, where necessary. In short, I'm like the average human in Britain 30 years ago. One of the reasons I do this - on top of all the obvious arguments about good health, good tree-hugging, the ability to concentrate when I'm not always interruptible, etc. - is that I love knowing that I'm untrackable. What I'm doing on such a day won't be written down and used against me, or as a training exercise for some more oppressive system. Nothing can see me which I cannot also see. We are even.
(To preempt "CCTV": yes, there's a lot of it in cities and large towns. Most of it is privately owned. We may be the most populated country in Europe, but most of the United Kingdom is still empty space with the occasional interspersed village.)
...thus giving a convenient database of computer availability and movement.
The good news for those concerned about privacy is that it appears for now Canonical is just interested in tracking the users of OEM installations -- those PCs that ship with Ubuntu by default such as from ZaReason, System76, and Dell.
I'm sorry, what? Why is this good news? This sentence makes as much sense as, "The good news for those interested in peaceful action is that the sniper is only interested in targetting the Dutch."
For those not wanting to participate in this anonymous data gathering process, they could always sudo apt-get remove canonical-census.
The N in NHS stands for "National" I.e. available to the entire nation
Which it hasn't been since resources were allocated by Trusts using an internal market competing for public and private services rather than Nationally. I'm assuming you've neither used nor worked in the NHS, because the resources available to patients depend very much on where in the country you live. This has to do with how much money is allocated to your local Trust, and how this Trust has decided to allocate funds and purchase services.
(You could argue that Scotland, England and Northern Ireland have in various ways had different resource allocation for longer periods. But "National" has been in a sense which recognises these as different countries.)
Your argument is "The Tories are privatising management in the NHS". My question to that is "O.K, if they are, why do you feel this is a bad thing?". Which you've failed to answer.
Let's see what you actually said:
I note with interest that throughout this entire discussion you've yet to explain precisely why this is a bad thing?
The thread of conversation had nothing to do with whether privatisation is a good idea, but you nevertheless felt the need to "note with interest" that what you wanted discussed isn't being discussed. Do you also note with interest that throughout this conversation I've never stated that I'm not a terrorist and a paedophile? And even after I've raised that question, I haven't denied being either a terrorist or a paedophile. Jesus, maybe I'm both!
There are likely to be at least 10,000 arguments going on across the Internet right now in which people are discussing the virtues of private vs public healthcare. If you want that debate, you're welcome to join any one of them.
However, it seems you could read that page, and still have not a single useable clue.
I have no idea why people say maths is a strong point of Wikipedia. There is no topic whatever on which I have received enlightenment by reading of a Wikipedia page. Indeed, even when it's a result I just want to look for, I can be sure that Wikipedia's going to go off on some tangent about a minor topic some guy's just learnt about in class and felt the need to mention, while the description of the result itself misses out some fundamental assumptions or uses ambiguous language. And, when I'm confronted with a surprisingly succinct paragraph or two, I usually find it's a rewording almost sentence by sentence of another reference. I've got a lot more out of the far more terse but precise Weisstein's Mathworld.
From reading pages (including discussion) where I already understand the topic, it's clear to me that some people sorta understand what's going on and a few have knowledge which far exceeds mine. But it's impossible for a community of 100 contributing primates, maybe a dozen of them sufficiently knowledgeable and two of them also good educators, to produce a well-written summary of any topic. Trying to end up with an article at the readability level of a centrally edited reference with limited, expert authors is engaging in a war of attrition.
Today I'm at the point where, if anyone shows the slightest hint of using information from Wikipedia, I'll immediately send them away and ask them to come back with another reference as basis. While people are beyond the point of actually citing Wikipedia, the problem still exists of people using its convoluted half-truths as a basis for serious discussion.
I'm sort of amused that FuckingNickName apparently honestly believes that British Leyland (for example) was a great example of British heavy engineering [...] BL workers spent their entire fucking lives on strike.
A warm Sunday afternoon is a good time to go out into the fields and tell the peasants to build a strawman, I guess.
(1) The Leyland Motor Corp and BMH had, among other brands: Jaguar, Rover, Triumph, Austin, MG, Morris, Daimler.
(2) The private predecessor BL Motor Corporation had only existed for about 7 years prior, being a combination of the successful Leyland and the not-so-healthy BMH. During the early '70s, it was driven toward bankruptcy by the oil crisis and industrial action.
(3) So, the part-nationalised British Leyland had only existed since 1975 as a rescue attempt. I've stated this right here.
Nevertheless, while they "spent their entire fucking lives on strike" in the latter half of the decade, they managed to remain the largest car manufacturer in the country, releasing from the evil socialist Rover SD1 through the petty capitalist TR7 to the aristocratic Jag XJS, also having the time on the picket lines to build about 40,000 trucks a year. And the proletarian Austin Metro of 1980 was built out of placards and left-wing slogans.
So, yes, BL had an absolutely excellent heritage of "British heavy engineering", a rocky period as a private company during the early '70s, and was put back on track in the latter half of the decade (unlike - to bring up the other example I gave - British Airways, which was returned to profitability by the Tory government again while nationalised).
You should also note with reading comprehension skills that this hasn't been a discussion on whether privatised healthcare is a good idea, but on whether the Tories are privatising and/or dismantling the NHS.
You're doing a classical politician, "Why aren't you talking about what I want to talk about?" Did you threaten to overrule him, AC?
That was all over 20 years ago. The incessant Thatcher obsession by the left is hilarious.
Given that Thatcher and New Labour overtly announced themselves to be Thatcherite, Major wasn't that different from Thatcher and the current government have been in power for only a few months, we have effectively had Thatcherism since 1979. Asking why people discussing British politics are "obsessed" with discussing Thatcher is like asking why people discussing Soviet politics are "obsessed" with discussing Lenin.
I'm also at a loss to understand why detractors of Thatcher are considered "left wing". She was not in favour of small government. She was not in favour of social freedoms. Unless the US neo-con religious right of corporate welfare is your model of the ideal right winger, Thatcher was not "right wing".
Seriously, if it was cost effective to do heavy industry in the UK it would have been re-established by now.
Except that a discussion about Thatcher in the early '80s asks whether it's cost-effective to have heavy industry in the UK in the early '80s. You may prefer to re-ask the question of 2010, but it's irrelevant.
Moreover, we have a very small but highly efficient manufacturing base in this country, and while "heavy industry" isn't our strong point any more, there are developed countries which demonstrate that traditional manufacturing output in a developed nation does not need to be as small as it is in the UK: Japan, Germany, the US.
While Major disagreed with Thatcher's assertion that the UK essentially didn't need manufacturing in its economy, Brown's obsession with banking drove up the value of the pound, making exports difficult. Successive governments have never given a chance to manufacturing, and building the plants necessary for heavy industry takes longer than setting up an office with a few desks and Chinese PCs for our "service" economy.
I think you're a troll as you're giving trite one line responses to everything I say, but on the off-chance that you're actually interested in learning about your history...;-).
BT is still crap but at least it's self-supporting and we now have competition.
What do you mean by BT being self-supporting? It uses subsidies to deliver services to non-profitable areas, and Ofcom is essentially its bedfellow. And there's no reason why a state service can't have competition.
British Airways went from making a loss at the taxpayer's expense to being one of the world's most profitable airlines.
British Airways was running inefficiently and with many loss-making routes, but was downsized to make it profitable for 4 years before it was privatised. While other airlines were struggling, the British Tory government did a fine job of creating a modern nationalised enterprise... then floated it with the strength to compete against private airlines.
Leyland was party nationalised in 1975 to save it from bankruptcy, holding 40% of the British car market - the culling process begun under Labour was substituted with a far more brutal closing down, chopping up and selling off process under the Tories, so I'm not sure how it would otherwise have fared. The Tories weren't so patient with caretaking dodgy manufacturers as they seem to be with bankers.
As for blaming the Tories for the war in Vietnam, definitely la la land.
Reading comprehension's getting the better of you;-). Try interpreting the sentence again in context.
You might want to ask your seniors which government, which ideology and which policies created the Trusts you rightly criticise. Or read this.
Yes, they've got worse under Labour (just as they got worse during the years of Conservative rule), primarily because the Trust system was designed precisely in the knowledge that all such bureaucracies become top-heavy power-struggles.
It was designed to pave the way for stage two of privatisation: where management is taken out of State control and where services are purchased directly from the private sector.
It's my fault for not specifying what figures I was considering, I guess. You can blame me for using the term "manufacturing output".
Proportion of the workforce in manufacturing went down very significantly under Thatcher (and thanks to Thatcher); proportion of GDP from manufacturing went down under Thatcher (although this trend began before Thatcher); proportion of GDP from manufacturing general consumer goods has gone down. Today proportion of GDP and people employed in manufacturing is in the low teens, with a significant proportion from pharma, aerospace and other high-techs.
IOW, today's "manufacturing" is not the manufacturing of the '70s. Today's is a small proportion of the workforce designing and building specific often high value items in an efficient manner.
While efficiency increases are always necessary, and we paid the price for turning up our noses at Japan's continuous improvement approach, they did not have to be at the expense of range of consumer and heavy manufacturing, nor did they require the privatisation of manufacturing.
I like your use of the denigrative phrase "with no due respect, you're an idiot" - can't you keep this discussion civil, or do you have to lower the debate and descend to the typical political retorts?
The debate's been fairly sane and rational in here - if you'll look through the thread, you'll hopefully see that I've attempted to fill my arguments with facts and vague reason. But then you had to throw out the, "Cameron's baby died, can't you see that means he feels for us!!!" emotive nonsense, which makes you either a bad orator failing to influence his audience or an idiot (or a troll, but I repeat myself). If I were giving you a typical political retort I might say you're foolhardy or appear emotionally involved, or anything to sidestep the straight language which conveys that you're an idiot.
His "sob story" (charming)
The child's life may have been a tragedy. Charming is the way the uses his dead child to tug on the heartstrings of the voter.
is important as it explains why he places a large importance on the NHS.
Which is why we're currently in phase two of privatisation: privatising management.
Unlike most political leaders he's seen the very best and (likely) the very worst of the NHS throughout his frequent trips to the hospitals.
Has he? Did you follow him around? I've had family members who have had more involvement with the NHS as workers and as patients than he has, and each of them have different stories to tell. Some of them have had experience of how "important" people are treated, although none informed me that they treated Cameron. None of them will have seen the "best" and the "very worst". None of them have asserted that their experience somehow makes them uniquely qualified to make the NHS brilliant. Indeed, a personal experience with something may give you technical insight but it won't necessarily give you the ideology to want to make it better, nor the capability.
Give the man a break. You obviously want to think that the Tories are going to break up the NHS as it fits your agenda.
The Tories did begin the breakup of the NHS (see the N?) in the early '90s with Trusts. The planned privatisation of management is a continuation of the breakup. My agenda here is limited to reporting of what's actually happening.
Trident is expensive, but it's arguably necessary for the long-term defence of our shores - it will last longer than our current financial crisis.
Social services are unarguably necessary for the long-term survival of vulnerable people - evolution's inability to create 100% perfect humans will last longer than our current financial crisis. Didn't see that being ringfenced, though.
Oh look! more money going to Afghanistan. Yeah, even with Trident we're just sitting ducks if we withdraw.
thanks largely to the excessive spending of the Labour Party and also by the financial crisis caused by the bankers.
The Tories and LDs were so quick to spend all of 2000-2008 pointing out what was going on, rather than being comprised of people standing to make a killing on the right investments at the time, eh?
It's not a crisis so much as a predictable cycle in which smart guys make money in a way which happens to put you in debt. I've known a few people in investment banking who had profited handsomely, and while I hate what they've done, I know they're the usual result of being that dangerous combination of clever and human. Now it's time for the government to clear up the problem so we can rinse and repeat in another 20-30 years.
It's also nothing to do with Labour per se. The whole West, like so many women in a cramped ideological apartment, enjoys the cycle simultaneously.
That £30 million figure is a value created by the left-wing press and personally by the by.
If you want to talk about publicly documented wealth rather than figures from, say, the notoriously left-wing Sunday Times, how about considering Sheffield and Astor family assets on the wife's side? We're at least a factor of five out now.
Of course many would prefer proportional representation to AV. But AV is a good compromise. It cuts out tactical voting
Erm, no. Even assuming that people have an interest in ranking alternatives and regard a second choice as a choice at all - perhaps acceptable when you're talking about a close-knit system of high familiarities like MP leadership elections, but not for general elections - all it means is that tactics have to be more complex.
Consider the following outcome (and please correct me if I'm misunderstanding!):
49% vote 1st choice: A, 2nd choice: 20% B, 20% C, 9% D 48% vote 1st choice: B, 2nd choice: A 2% vote 1st choice: C, 2nd choice: B 1% vote 1st choice: D, 2nd choice: B
So party A has the most first choice votes, and party A has the most second choice votes. But party B gets in. Instead of making 49% of people completely happy and 48% slightly happy, you're making 48% completely happy and 33% slightly happy. Why are you giving the final say to the second choice of those who have voted for the least popular candidates?
And would be a drain on government resources had it not been ditched in the 80s? Hmmm...
Wonder less, study more.
Can Western countries afford a manufacturing base? Yes. The US still has the highest manufacturing output of any nation, including China. 40% of Germany's workforce was involved in manufacturing at reunification.
Did all European countries go on a mass privatisation drive in the '80s? No. Much of Western Europe socialist in favour of preserving nationalised industry and services.
Thatcher broke UK manufacturing. She starved nationalised industry while breaking the unions, blamed on-going failure on government ownership, then privatised the now non-competitive remains. Possible alternatives included: implement a modernisation programme (in the sense of technological modernisation, not in the Tory modernisation=privatisation sense); immediately sell off at reasonable market value.
No-one really wants AV, it won't pass, and, "we already asked the public about voting reform but they didn't want it".
Like the US, we are now ideologically a one Party state. It's enough to make me want Soviet democracy. The guaranteed job, housing, and higher education for the willing are icing on the cake.
And so began a very successful 30 year crusade of beating freedom into the world, leading the Conservative flame of privatisation across Western Europe through tolerant Yugoslavia, striking tolerance and free market capitalism into the drunk^Wshining Western democracy that is Yeltsin^WPutin's Empire^WPresidency, celebrating the glorious OrangeBlue Revolution, then sneaking its way into the Muslim heart of secular Iraq and the incorruptible government of united Afghanistan.
And we did so well that we still have money to spare.
Umm... the UK is no longer IN Iraq - what would the demands be?
Well, let's look through the coalition document to see what the main plans relating to war are:
We will take forward our shared resolve to safeguard the UK’s national security and support our Armed Forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Notice the lack of, "We consider that the war in Iraq was wrong and we will implement policies to stop us going into another such war"? Notice the very opposite of, "Afghanistan is another Iraq and we need to withdraw"?
There is no acknowledgement whatever that Iraq was, to the pre-government LDs, one of the most odious aspects of the Labour government. There is no indication that the (lack of) policy and law which allowed Iraq to happen needs fixing. Government doesn't fight wars, but it does send troops to war, so one of the LD's primary responsibilities would be to stop that sort of thing from happening again.
Prior to the Trust nonsense we had central government organisation of the NHS. Doctors and senior nurses had significant control of hospitals from the PoV of day to day operations, but they did not manage provision of NHS services or their financing.
Then we had an internal healthcare market (lol), giving the level of artificial bureaucracy that is NHS Trusts. This was the first wave of privatisation.
The second wave involves not going back to the pre-Trust NHS, but privatising management. Instead of taking control of central administrative aspects, or creating an internal market, you're firing management entirely (who will initially be inefficiently hired back on higher wage).
In summary, you're saying to doctors, "Fuck it, we wash our hands of NHS control. Here's some money, you pay people to manage and select services."
Cameron's passionate for the NHS, he experienced its services routinely with his late son - I personally believe him.
Then, with no due respect, you're an idiot. Some sob story involving his dead son tells you absolutely nothing. Ohtahara syndrome almost certainly means a pathetic (in the classical sense) life and early death, and neither the NHS nor the best private hospital in the world has the resources to change that.
But, while a multi-billion pound Trident programme goes ahead, the social services which those without a £30 million fortune require are already being cut back. Those involved in caring in my family are already feeling the effect as local authorities see budget reductions.
While we're here, why not believe Obama is going to build a fair USA because he's dark-skinned and he somehow "feels for" the black underclass?
Once again, you're remembering history with the level of technical detail printed on iPod packaging. Manufacturing in the late '70s was suffering the after-effects of the oil crisis and consequent inflation. British Steel, which breaking even through the decade up to 1974, was hit by the miners' strikes and began a programme of investment in consolidation. After 50 years without a strike, the miners had the audacity to ask for more than the 7.9% offered on £25/week (national average pay was around £34/week in 1970).
So, you're trying to reduce costs to battle spiralling inflation, at the same time telling people that you can't pay them more while the value of the money in their pocket is going down. Just how would the private sector tackle this better? It could require people to accept a less than living wage, but then the government would take up the slack anyway in giving out benefits. If you want to point the finger at whoever started this, blame the US for its Middle East policy then OPEC for taking advantage.
British heavy industry today, OTOH... well, pretty much doesn't exist.
And British energy? Yeah, the ones not bought out by foreign private suppliers have been bought out by foreign state-owned suppliers.
Where does that leave BT? As a monopolistic, customer-abusive, regulation-flouting, technologically backward puppetmaster for Ofcom.
Slashdot Mirror
This short post couldn't be more wrong.
(1) It's English, the language very occasionally spoken on the Internet.
Rate = x per y, where y is likely a time unit.
e.g. miles per hour /. poster per day
e.g. kilometres per second
e.g. dumb assertions made by
High rate = high x per y.
(2) Sufficiently high acceleration in an urban area will certainly attract a fine for your local equivalent of dangerous driving. It may even be in violation of a city noise ordinance.
Oh, to casually toss Picard onto my desk...
You're correct, off is not off for many 'phones. Taking your battery is out is sufficient. Which I often do, because it's a 2 second operation as I don't have an iPhone.
Yeah, as here, and same for newer rolling stock. Although it does take away some of the sense of freedom when I'm using public transport, such CCTV is the least intrusive record vs centrally linked cameras or tagging. I can just about cope with a grainy image, no more than someone sitting next to me on the bus would see, difficult to process, perhaps seen weeks later or never.
I often move around on foot or by public transport; I'm often either not carrying a 'phone or have it switched off; I frequently don't carry ID; I pay in cash, where necessary. In short, I'm like the average human in Britain 30 years ago. One of the reasons I do this - on top of all the obvious arguments about good health, good tree-hugging, the ability to concentrate when I'm not always interruptible, etc. - is that I love knowing that I'm untrackable. What I'm doing on such a day won't be written down and used against me, or as a training exercise for some more oppressive system. Nothing can see me which I cannot also see. We are even.
(To preempt "CCTV": yes, there's a lot of it in cities and large towns. Most of it is privately owned. We may be the most populated country in Europe, but most of the United Kingdom is still empty space with the occasional interspersed village.)
...thus giving a convenient database of computer availability and movement.
The good news for those concerned about privacy is that it appears for now Canonical is just interested in tracking the users of OEM installations -- those PCs that ship with Ubuntu by default such as from ZaReason, System76, and Dell.
I'm sorry, what? Why is this good news? This sentence makes as much sense as, "The good news for those interested in peaceful action is that the sniper is only interested in targetting the Dutch."
For those not wanting to participate in this anonymous data gathering process, they could always sudo apt-get remove canonical-census.
Yeah, you can always opt-out of spam too.
The N in NHS stands for "National" I.e. available to the entire nation
Which it hasn't been since resources were allocated by Trusts using an internal market competing for public and private services rather than Nationally. I'm assuming you've neither used nor worked in the NHS, because the resources available to patients depend very much on where in the country you live. This has to do with how much money is allocated to your local Trust, and how this Trust has decided to allocate funds and purchase services.
(You could argue that Scotland, England and Northern Ireland have in various ways had different resource allocation for longer periods. But "National" has been in a sense which recognises these as different countries.)
Your argument is "The Tories are privatising management in the NHS". My question to that is "O.K, if they are, why do you feel this is a bad thing?". Which you've failed to answer.
Let's see what you actually said:
I note with interest that throughout this entire discussion you've yet to explain precisely why this is a bad thing?
The thread of conversation had nothing to do with whether privatisation is a good idea, but you nevertheless felt the need to "note with interest" that what you wanted discussed isn't being discussed. Do you also note with interest that throughout this conversation I've never stated that I'm not a terrorist and a paedophile? And even after I've raised that question, I haven't denied being either a terrorist or a paedophile. Jesus, maybe I'm both!
There are likely to be at least 10,000 arguments going on across the Internet right now in which people are discussing the virtues of private vs public healthcare. If you want that debate, you're welcome to join any one of them.
However, it seems you could read that page, and still have not a single useable clue.
I have no idea why people say maths is a strong point of Wikipedia. There is no topic whatever on which I have received enlightenment by reading of a Wikipedia page. Indeed, even when it's a result I just want to look for, I can be sure that Wikipedia's going to go off on some tangent about a minor topic some guy's just learnt about in class and felt the need to mention, while the description of the result itself misses out some fundamental assumptions or uses ambiguous language. And, when I'm confronted with a surprisingly succinct paragraph or two, I usually find it's a rewording almost sentence by sentence of another reference. I've got a lot more out of the far more terse but precise Weisstein's Mathworld.
From reading pages (including discussion) where I already understand the topic, it's clear to me that some people sorta understand what's going on and a few have knowledge which far exceeds mine. But it's impossible for a community of 100 contributing primates, maybe a dozen of them sufficiently knowledgeable and two of them also good educators, to produce a well-written summary of any topic. Trying to end up with an article at the readability level of a centrally edited reference with limited, expert authors is engaging in a war of attrition.
Today I'm at the point where, if anyone shows the slightest hint of using information from Wikipedia, I'll immediately send them away and ask them to come back with another reference as basis. While people are beyond the point of actually citing Wikipedia, the problem still exists of people using its convoluted half-truths as a basis for serious discussion.
I'm sort of amused that FuckingNickName apparently honestly believes that British Leyland (for example) was a great example of British heavy engineering [...] BL workers spent their entire fucking lives on strike.
A warm Sunday afternoon is a good time to go out into the fields and tell the peasants to build a strawman, I guess.
(1) The Leyland Motor Corp and BMH had, among other brands: Jaguar, Rover, Triumph, Austin, MG, Morris, Daimler.
(2) The private predecessor BL Motor Corporation had only existed for about 7 years prior, being a combination of the successful Leyland and the not-so-healthy BMH. During the early '70s, it was driven toward bankruptcy by the oil crisis and industrial action.
(3) So, the part-nationalised British Leyland had only existed since 1975 as a rescue attempt. I've stated this right here.
Nevertheless, while they "spent their entire fucking lives on strike" in the latter half of the decade, they managed to remain the largest car manufacturer in the country, releasing from the evil socialist Rover SD1 through the petty capitalist TR7 to the aristocratic Jag XJS, also having the time on the picket lines to build about 40,000 trucks a year. And the proletarian Austin Metro of 1980 was built out of placards and left-wing slogans.
So, yes, BL had an absolutely excellent heritage of "British heavy engineering", a rocky period as a private company during the early '70s, and was put back on track in the latter half of the decade (unlike - to bring up the other example I gave - British Airways, which was returned to profitability by the Tory government again while nationalised).
You should also note with reading comprehension skills that this hasn't been a discussion on whether privatised healthcare is a good idea, but on whether the Tories are privatising and/or dismantling the N HS.
You're doing a classical politician, "Why aren't you talking about what I want to talk about?" Did you threaten to overrule him, AC?
That was all over 20 years ago. The incessant Thatcher obsession by the left is hilarious.
Given that Thatcher and New Labour overtly announced themselves to be Thatcherite, Major wasn't that different from Thatcher and the current government have been in power for only a few months, we have effectively had Thatcherism since 1979. Asking why people discussing British politics are "obsessed" with discussing Thatcher is like asking why people discussing Soviet politics are "obsessed" with discussing Lenin.
I'm also at a loss to understand why detractors of Thatcher are considered "left wing". She was not in favour of small government. She was not in favour of social freedoms. Unless the US neo-con religious right of corporate welfare is your model of the ideal right winger, Thatcher was not "right wing".
Seriously, if it was cost effective to do heavy industry in the UK it would have been re-established by now.
Except that a discussion about Thatcher in the early '80s asks whether it's cost-effective to have heavy industry in the UK in the early '80s. You may prefer to re-ask the question of 2010, but it's irrelevant.
Moreover, we have a very small but highly efficient manufacturing base in this country, and while "heavy industry" isn't our strong point any more, there are developed countries which demonstrate that traditional manufacturing output in a developed nation does not need to be as small as it is in the UK: Japan, Germany, the US.
While Major disagreed with Thatcher's assertion that the UK essentially didn't need manufacturing in its economy, Brown's obsession with banking drove up the value of the pound, making exports difficult. Successive governments have never given a chance to manufacturing, and building the plants necessary for heavy industry takes longer than setting up an office with a few desks and Chinese PCs for our "service" economy.
I think you're a troll as you're giving trite one line responses to everything I say, but on the off-chance that you're actually interested in learning about your history... ;-).
This is just how people felt talking to New Labour politicians in 1997.
BT is still crap but at least it's self-supporting and we now have competition.
What do you mean by BT being self-supporting? It uses subsidies to deliver services to non-profitable areas, and Ofcom is essentially its bedfellow. And there's no reason why a state service can't have competition.
British Airways went from making a loss at the taxpayer's expense to being one of the world's most profitable airlines.
British Airways was running inefficiently and with many loss-making routes, but was downsized to make it profitable for 4 years before it was privatised. While other airlines were struggling, the British Tory government did a fine job of creating a modern nationalised enterprise... then floated it with the strength to compete against private airlines.
Leyland was party nationalised in 1975 to save it from bankruptcy, holding 40% of the British car market - the culling process begun under Labour was substituted with a far more brutal closing down, chopping up and selling off process under the Tories, so I'm not sure how it would otherwise have fared. The Tories weren't so patient with caretaking dodgy manufacturers as they seem to be with bankers.
As for blaming the Tories for the war in Vietnam, definitely la la land.
Reading comprehension's getting the better of you ;-). Try interpreting the sentence again in context.
You might want to ask your seniors which government, which ideology and which policies created the Trusts you rightly criticise. Or read this.
Yes, they've got worse under Labour (just as they got worse during the years of Conservative rule), primarily because the Trust system was designed precisely in the knowledge that all such bureaucracies become top-heavy power-struggles.
It was designed to pave the way for stage two of privatisation: where management is taken out of State control and where services are purchased directly from the private sector.
It's my fault for not specifying what figures I was considering, I guess. You can blame me for using the term "manufacturing output".
Proportion of the workforce in manufacturing went down very significantly under Thatcher (and thanks to Thatcher); proportion of GDP from manufacturing went down under Thatcher (although this trend began before Thatcher); proportion of GDP from manufacturing general consumer goods has gone down. Today proportion of GDP and people employed in manufacturing is in the low teens, with a significant proportion from pharma, aerospace and other high-techs.
IOW, today's "manufacturing" is not the manufacturing of the '70s. Today's is a small proportion of the workforce designing and building specific often high value items in an efficient manner.
While efficiency increases are always necessary, and we paid the price for turning up our noses at Japan's continuous improvement approach, they did not have to be at the expense of range of consumer and heavy manufacturing, nor did they require the privatisation of manufacturing.
I like your use of the denigrative phrase "with no due respect, you're an idiot" - can't you keep this discussion civil, or do you have to lower the debate and descend to the typical political retorts?
The debate's been fairly sane and rational in here - if you'll look through the thread, you'll hopefully see that I've attempted to fill my arguments with facts and vague reason. But then you had to throw out the, "Cameron's baby died, can't you see that means he feels for us!!!" emotive nonsense, which makes you either a bad orator failing to influence his audience or an idiot (or a troll, but I repeat myself). If I were giving you a typical political retort I might say you're foolhardy or appear emotionally involved, or anything to sidestep the straight language which conveys that you're an idiot.
His "sob story" (charming)
The child's life may have been a tragedy. Charming is the way the uses his dead child to tug on the heartstrings of the voter.
is important as it explains why he places a large importance on the NHS.
Which is why we're currently in phase two of privatisation: privatising management.
Unlike most political leaders he's seen the very best and (likely) the very worst of the NHS throughout his frequent trips to the hospitals.
Has he? Did you follow him around? I've had family members who have had more involvement with the NHS as workers and as patients than he has, and each of them have different stories to tell. Some of them have had experience of how "important" people are treated, although none informed me that they treated Cameron. None of them will have seen the "best" and the "very worst". None of them have asserted that their experience somehow makes them uniquely qualified to make the NHS brilliant. Indeed, a personal experience with something may give you technical insight but it won't necessarily give you the ideology to want to make it better, nor the capability.
Give the man a break. You obviously want to think that the Tories are going to break up the NHS as it fits your agenda.
The Tories did begin the breakup of the NHS (see the N?) in the early '90s with Trusts. The planned privatisation of management is a continuation of the breakup. My agenda here is limited to reporting of what's actually happening.
Trident is expensive, but it's arguably necessary for the long-term defence of our shores - it will last longer than our current financial crisis.
Social services are unarguably necessary for the long-term survival of vulnerable people - evolution's inability to create 100% perfect humans will last longer than our current financial crisis. Didn't see that being ringfenced, though.
Oh look! more money going to Afghanistan. Yeah, even with Trident we're just sitting ducks if we withdraw.
thanks largely to the excessive spending of the Labour Party and also by the financial crisis caused by the bankers.
The Tories and LDs were so quick to spend all of 2000-2008 pointing out what was going on, rather than being comprised of people standing to make a killing on the right investments at the time, eh?
It's not a crisis so much as a predictable cycle in which smart guys make money in a way which happens to put you in debt. I've known a few people in investment banking who had profited handsomely, and while I hate what they've done, I know they're the usual result of being that dangerous combination of clever and human. Now it's time for the government to clear up the problem so we can rinse and repeat in another 20-30 years.
It's also nothing to do with Labour per se. The whole West, like so many women in a cramped ideological apartment, enjoys the cycle simultaneously.
That £30 million figure is a value created by the left-wing press and personally by the by.
If you want to talk about publicly documented wealth rather than figures from, say, the notoriously left-wing Sunday Times, how about considering Sheffield and Astor family assets on the wife's side? We're at least a factor of five out now.
Of course many would prefer proportional representation to AV. But AV is a good compromise. It cuts out tactical voting
Erm, no. Even assuming that people have an interest in ranking alternatives and regard a second choice as a choice at all - perhaps acceptable when you're talking about a close-knit system of high familiarities like MP leadership elections, but not for general elections - all it means is that tactics have to be more complex.
Consider the following outcome (and please correct me if I'm misunderstanding!):
49% vote 1st choice: A, 2nd choice: 20% B, 20% C, 9% D
48% vote 1st choice: B, 2nd choice: A
2% vote 1st choice: C, 2nd choice: B
1% vote 1st choice: D, 2nd choice: B
So party A has the most first choice votes, and party A has the most second choice votes. But party B gets in. Instead of making 49% of people completely happy and 48% slightly happy, you're making 48% completely happy and 33% slightly happy. Why are you giving the final say to the second choice of those who have voted for the least popular candidates?
And would be a drain on government resources had it not been ditched in the 80s? Hmmm...
Wonder less, study more.
Can Western countries afford a manufacturing base? Yes. The US still has the highest manufacturing output of any nation, including China. 40% of Germany's workforce was involved in manufacturing at reunification.
Did all European countries go on a mass privatisation drive in the '80s? No. Much of Western Europe socialist in favour of preserving nationalised industry and services.
Thatcher broke UK manufacturing. She starved nationalised industry while breaking the unions, blamed on-going failure on government ownership, then privatised the now non-competitive remains. Possible alternatives included: implement a modernisation programme (in the sense of technological modernisation, not in the Tory modernisation=privatisation sense); immediately sell off at reasonable market value.
No-one really wants AV, it won't pass, and, "we already asked the public about voting reform but they didn't want it".
Like the US, we are now ideologically a one Party state. It's enough to make me want Soviet democracy. The guaranteed job, housing, and higher education for the willing are icing on the cake.
The iron was bought and her name was Thatcher.
And so began a very successful 30 year crusade of beating freedom into the world, leading the Conservative flame of privatisation across Western Europe through tolerant Yugoslavia, striking tolerance and free market capitalism into the drunk^Wshining Western democracy that is Yeltsin^WPutin's Empire^WPresidency, celebrating the glorious OrangeBlue Revolution, then sneaking its way into the Muslim heart of secular Iraq and the incorruptible government of united Afghanistan.
And we did so well that we still have money to spare.
but also that it was Labour supporters making the most noise about it. Which you seem to be proving all on your own...
You're doing it again. Did someone hack into my /. profile and attach a shoop of a Labour Party membership card or something?
Umm ... the UK is no longer IN Iraq - what would the demands be?
Well, let's look through the coalition document to see what the main plans relating to war are:
We will take forward our shared resolve to safeguard the UK’s national security and support our Armed Forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Notice the lack of, "We consider that the war in Iraq was wrong and we will implement policies to stop us going into another such war"? Notice the very opposite of, "Afghanistan is another Iraq and we need to withdraw"?
There is no acknowledgement whatever that Iraq was, to the pre-government LDs, one of the most odious aspects of the Labour government. There is no indication that the (lack of) policy and law which allowed Iraq to happen needs fixing. Government doesn't fight wars, but it does send troops to war, so one of the LD's primary responsibilities would be to stop that sort of thing from happening again.
Prior to the Trust nonsense we had central government organisation of the NHS. Doctors and senior nurses had significant control of hospitals from the PoV of day to day operations, but they did not manage provision of NHS services or their financing.
Then we had an internal healthcare market (lol), giving the level of artificial bureaucracy that is NHS Trusts. This was the first wave of privatisation.
The second wave involves not going back to the pre-Trust NHS, but privatising management. Instead of taking control of central administrative aspects, or creating an internal market, you're firing management entirely (who will initially be inefficiently hired back on higher wage).
In summary, you're saying to doctors, "Fuck it, we wash our hands of NHS control. Here's some money, you pay people to manage and select services."
Cameron's passionate for the NHS, he experienced its services routinely with his late son - I personally believe him.
Then, with no due respect, you're an idiot. Some sob story involving his dead son tells you absolutely nothing. Ohtahara syndrome almost certainly means a pathetic (in the classical sense) life and early death, and neither the NHS nor the best private hospital in the world has the resources to change that.
But, while a multi-billion pound Trident programme goes ahead, the social services which those without a £30 million fortune require are already being cut back. Those involved in caring in my family are already feeling the effect as local authorities see budget reductions.
While we're here, why not believe Obama is going to build a fair USA because he's dark-skinned and he somehow "feels for" the black underclass?
Once again, you're remembering history with the level of technical detail printed on iPod packaging. Manufacturing in the late '70s was suffering the after-effects of the oil crisis and consequent inflation. British Steel, which breaking even through the decade up to 1974, was hit by the miners' strikes and began a programme of investment in consolidation. After 50 years without a strike, the miners had the audacity to ask for more than the 7.9% offered on £25/week (national average pay was around £34/week in 1970).
So, you're trying to reduce costs to battle spiralling inflation, at the same time telling people that you can't pay them more while the value of the money in their pocket is going down. Just how would the private sector tackle this better? It could require people to accept a less than living wage, but then the government would take up the slack anyway in giving out benefits. If you want to point the finger at whoever started this, blame the US for its Middle East policy then OPEC for taking advantage.
British heavy industry today, OTOH... well, pretty much doesn't exist.
And British energy? Yeah, the ones not bought out by foreign private suppliers have been bought out by foreign state-owned suppliers.
Where does that leave BT? As a monopolistic, customer-abusive, regulation-flouting, technologically backward puppetmaster for Ofcom.
Not much has changed since "Yes, Minister" was broadcast, was it? ;-)
Agreed. Same old boys running the show for each other.
(Got a scholarship to a minor Public school and grew to hate the culture of privilege. Some of my old schoolchums are on the path to Sir Humphrey.)