I love the way the English parliament harps about being spied upon when it is a leading member of the Five Eyes espionage pact. Pot Kettle Black.

@RedSaint83

2 ай бұрын

Not to mention Britain has the second most CCTV in all of Europe, only surpassed by Germany.

@lubnachitalwalla

2 ай бұрын

I you ttivst t

Something about the idea of "The boomers are upset they didn't get early retirement", really makes my millennial-liberal-lefty heart turn black and want to scream obscenities into the ether, as much as Coco's rational explanation makes sense.

Sorry, if you don’t vote (inc. spoiling your ballot, that’s always a perfectly valid option) you don’t get to complain.

@EdwardLindon

2 ай бұрын

Yes, you do. What a perfectly silly notion.

If you ever want to feel *more* furious about Cameron's appointment as Foreign Secretary, read Rory Stewart's memoir. His every interaction with Cameron with regards to foreign policy is deeply frustrating.

I have gone from the Labour Party to the Green Party. 🎉

I disagree strongly with the guest. American here, granted, but not voting is not a legitimate response to being disillusioned with a party or even politics as a whole. It is an incontrovertible proposition that someone on the left not voting is good for the parties on the right, and dislike of the parties on the left is not an excuse to help the parties on the right.

@kittybluett8887

2 ай бұрын

Absolutely agree

@Arian-vf6jo

2 ай бұрын

Although I have been brought up to believe that it is important to always vote. This time around, I, too , am leaning towards not voting for similar reasons.

@duckweedy

2 ай бұрын

@@Arian-vf6jo It is hard as we have no left wing parties . Just variations of same economic policy which is killing people. At least Scotland and Wales have more to choose from.

@silverXnoise

2 ай бұрын

@@duckweedyAmerica isn’t much different. Bernie Sanders is only slightly left of Barack Obama, who spent much of his eight years in office successfully breaking every available record for killing Muslims via nightmare drones and deporting undocumented immigrants. Ronald Reagan would be considered a moderate centrist by contemporary standards. Nixon would be a blue-dog Democrat. It’s always just new flavors of the same dominant capital class rule. Trump is an aberration, possibly a useful idiot. But to the extent his malignant nacho cheese style of populism has distorted our society, it’s the same tissue-thin upper crust who walked into, and then away from, each of those broken social conventions holding every advantage. When COVID19 was still eating ~40,000 of us every day, the investment banks and private equity firms were making a figurative, darkly ironic killing. I forgot what my point was. Eat the rich. 🍷👑🍴

@KapnScumdreg

2 ай бұрын

​The greens are standing in lots of places and are clearly anti austerity, so are local independents on progressive platforms (often having been kicked out or barred from standing by an authoritarian labour leadership) in some places. The only people ignored more than blindly loyal voters are people who don't vote at all. ​@@duckweedy

So glad you guys have picked up on the Alan Titchmarch story too! I’ve been giggling about it for days

Awesome!

Did you hear about that American who's changed his name to "Literally anyone else" & is trying to get on presidential ballot :)

Really enjoy the show

That "American" accent is kinda our version of RP or BBC Pronunciation. It's sort of an accent defined by a lack of accent: It's a sort of "default" accent professionals are taught to speak in because a lot of regional accents have one negative stereotype or another attached to them. It's sometimes called "Midwestern" but the Midwest has plenty of quirky unique accents as well (see: Fargo.)

@EdwardLindon

2 ай бұрын

Interesting info, thanks. But RP is far from neutral. It is (or rather was - true RP is basically extinct) the hegemonic centre of our dialects, a tool of repression and social immobility.

@Eviltwin531

2 ай бұрын

@@EdwardLindon I think that might be a better description of what I was getting at referring to a "Midwestern" accent than I was saying.

Of all the stupid ideas that went into that Tory attack ad on Sadiq Khan... the one I can't fathom is why they asked an American to narrate it?

Ibiza old town is lovely, playa den bossa has clubs but not many poms (I’m a Pom 🙁) and I quite nice….

So..... I can but you can't. 😳🤔😂

George is the voice of the masses who feel totally fucked over by both parties, since Neoliberal concept under Thatcher. As this political idea has progressed through time, driven by media, it has become more & more right wing & less & less serving of the public. Personality I think Guy had the right idea some 419 years ago. Great show again guys.

@Notalloldpeople

2 ай бұрын

The politically ephemeral grifter definitely doesn’t speak for me.

If people who didn't vote counted, they would win in a landslide every time If your response to both major parties being shit is to stay home then they have no reason to change If they thought that half the country might actually bother to vote for someone else, they'd have to respond to that

East coast of Ibiza is fabulous

Teh waspi thing - *I* knew this was happening, I was just a kid when the tories changed the retirement age and I noticed* and I remember when the coalition changed it because I was incensed - if they were going to change the rules mid way through for people now, then they are going to go it again to the rest of us. So I feel for the Waspis, but a: it wasn't kept secret at all, and b: its just another in a long line of reasons why I couldn't believe people were voting tory again, or kept voting that way through the 20-ttens. There has to come a point where I can blame my fellow citizens for the way they vote, surely? My whole life people have been voting to actively make things obviously worse, then acting shocked when things get worse, I'm really sick of it. New Labour, climate change, xenophobia, brexit, PCCs, big society, the list just goes on and never stops. STOP VOTING FOR THE STATUS QUO FFS *rather precociously for a 13 year old I was outraged that we were doing 'equal rights' by making it worse for everyone not better and was equally annoyed when the car insurance industry was compelled to stop using facts to recognise women were lower risk and as a result put women's premiums up rather than bringing men down. Bah.

You had me at " Titchmarsh has a raging bonner "

Throwing your vote away because you’re too enlighten to engage in an imperfect system is a garbage take. Thought we left that Russell Brand/ 2010 way thinking in the past after it gave us an insurgent bnp/Brexit/trump

It's a shame that women who thought they'd have a pension at 60 now have to wait until they're 65 like the men always did, but how is that pension "inequality"? It should be WASPE.

@joepiekl

2 ай бұрын

I think the argument is that (certainly back in those days) women would have had less of a chance to build up their own pension because of the inequality throughout their career, so the idea of letting them retire earlier is kind of a way of redressing the balance. I don't know about you, but I know plenty of men (my dad and uncles as just three examples) who spent their life doing a fairly normal manufacturing job and still managed to save enough in the pension to retire a few years early. I don't know any women of a similar age who managed to do the same.

@Sophiex2024

2 ай бұрын

I mean there's two issues here, one has already been pointed out that the start of these womens careers were substantially different to those of their male counterparts, it's hard to equalise something that started unequally. But primarily the issue WASPI women are protesting is the bad communication of what was going on i.e. it was not clear the changes in pension age were retroactive, they were given hardly any notice of having to work for longer, they therefore had huge setbacks in financial planning. They've never been against the actual equalisation of mens and womens retirement age (albeit I think most of us agree they should both be lower), they want compensation for the atrocious way it was handled.

That is standard midwestern accent

The ridiculous anti-Kahn attack ad seemed like a pretty bog-standard attack ad to me, but I live in America. It was honestly a little tame by comparison. The ads here are unbelievably unsubtle, featuring sinister background music over black and white photos of someone looking angry with a dire-sounding voiceover lying about them _(and invariably calling them "too extreme for..." whatever they're running to represent)._ All that is usually followed by a sunny picture of the candidate who's produced the ad, usually with his or her family, in their front yard or kitchen smiling like idiots. Our narrators are also Americans, though I don't understand why yours are. Just lying about crime and using misleading video with awkward phrasing like "decriminalize illegal drugs" _(it's very hard to decriminalize _*_legal_*_ drugs)_ seems like a pretty bland ad, to be honest.

@Eviltwin531

2 ай бұрын

That's what I thought, it seemed so "American Attack Ad" to me as to be almost unremarkable. That and so much of the questionable word choice (like the "going underground" and "ULEZ enforcers" bits Nish points out) makes it read so much like an American group doing an attack ad without considering British cultural differences. I hate to turn into the "pushy American" who makes everything about US politics, but we do have political interest groups who specifically try to export their particular brand of right-wing ideology abroad... mostly in the Global South, but not totally unheard of in Europe... and it made me wonder if that might have been from one of them.

@Sophiex2024

2 ай бұрын

I'd imagine that's exactly why they went for an American accent - this kind of video is not at all the done thing in Britain, but a lot of us will have seen American ones so the accent was probably intended to make it sound more normal. Didn't really work though it's just been generally understood as batshit crazy.

i appreciate George's take on voting. Futile doesn't begin to explain it.