Getting people to vote against themselves (Politics)

[Mick Harper]

A shame. I thought he showed some promise. Is a completre lack of a sense of humour a giveaway though? Perhaps others might judge whether I was unduly harsh. I really thought I was kidgloving him (as one always should with newbies) but I find myself increasingly making errors of judgement about people lately.

[Chad]

[Mick Harper]

You're a case in point, you bastard.

[Ishmael]

[Ishmael]

[Ishmael]

[Ishmael]

[Ishmael]

Speaking of getting people to vote against themselves, apparently, successive British governments have been doing a bang-up job of it!

Why Britain is poorer than any US state, other than Mississippi.

You take the US figures for GDP per state (here), divide it by population (here) to come up with a GDP per capita figure. Then get the equivalent figure for Britain: I used the latest Treasury figures (here) which also chime with the OECD's (here). A version of this has been done on Wikipedia, but with one flaw: when comparing the wealth of nations, you need to look at how far money goes. This means using a measure called Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). When this is done, the league table looks like the below. I've put some other countries in for comparison.

....Even lower-income Americans, those at the bottom 20 per cent, are better-off than their British counterparts. The only group actually worse-off are the bottom 5 per cent.

....In America, poverty is more obvious due to White Flight -- a phenomenon we just didn't have....Britain has no space for white flight, we're forced to live closer together. And we fool ourselves into thinking that proximity has brought cohesion. In fact, we have developed a new kind of segregation: keeping the poor cooped up in council estates, a stone's throw from the posh parts -- yet creating a very high welfare barrier which stops them properly breaking out. Brits may be appalled at America's gap in black-white life expectancy. But our Liverpool-SW1 life expectancy gap is just as big; we just don't get upset about it. When you walk south over Westminster Bridge from the House of Commons, life expectancy drops five years.

[Boreades]

But first you have to get people to vote.

In the UK general election of May 2015, all the pollsters were (in)famously way out in their predictions, and have been rehearsing their excuses ever since.

The best one so far might be this from ComRes. It seems like it was the poor Labour voters that did it. Or didn't do it. Or couldn't be bothered, which might suggest a socio-economic chicken-and-egg situation.

http://www.comres.co.uk/statement-comres-voter-turnout-model/

For those not familiar with UK socio-economic classification, we don't talk about "upper, middle and lower class" anymore. It's socio-economic groups A to E.

M'Lady Boreades and I are downsizing to group E as rapidly as possible, to drop below the radar of people who think we should be bothered.



FFS, how do I set the width of an image here?

[Mick Harper]

The selfishness of the British electorate knows no bounds. I went to bed on Thursday night living in one of the most exclusive areas in Europe and woke up on Saturday afternoon to discover I live in the Socialist Republic of Kensington. All right, yes, I can move, and certainly shall, but who am I going to sell my house to? Whom am I going to sell my house to, I suppose I shall have to get used to saying. Why can't these wretched lefty intellectuals stay in Hampstead where they belong.

[Boreades]

[Mick Harper]

[Wile E. Coyote]

At the end of the old era, the first thing that needs to happen is the destruction of the old icons....It was always such. Unfortunately when a zealous 65 year old Croat sought to shove over a statue, it toppled onto him, breaking his leg.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/08/croatian-man-breaks-leg-vandalising-anti-fascist-monument

[Wile E. Coyote]

Oh well, Wiley will get his vote, for the next European elections in May.

Cannot remember for the life of me, the name of the bugger, or party, who won last time. In fact, I can't remember even what he or she actually does, that is if anything at all.

Still, duty bound, don't you know. After all the suffragettes tied themselves to racehorses, so I could vote for Sir Pinky Fullerton-Smyth, Wayne Clapp or Nasseema Templeton Singh, to do their bit for Blighty in Brussels.

[Mick Harper]

It was amazing to watch four hundred odd MP's voting against their own interest (mostly) and (presumably) the national interest by rejecting the only offer on the table. This seems to be because, unusually, two different paradigm errors have collided:

1. Being trapped forever in the backstop. This is a weird way of describing international treaties. We entered the permanent backstop i.e. open borders with the Republic, quite voluntarily, and without any Parliamentary opposition, when we signed the Belfast Agreement. Despite all the contortions the EU have made to help us out of our fix, it'll still be there whatever we do. The ERG, for instance, never say how 'crashing out' alters our obligations. Perhaps Mr Rees-Mogg is a fan of international anarchy and will advocate unilateral abrogation.

2. Single markets, customs unions et al. The Leaving Agreement has nothing to say on these matters. It gives us two years to sort out these sorts of things. Why we don't just leave in an orderly fashion on March 29th and then get down to discussing amongst ourselves, and then with the EU, is something you will have to take up with the Labour Party, the other parties, the ERG and the various rag tags now emerging from all sides.

I am close to hoping that the EU tells us to fuck off on March 29th, they've just about had enough of us. It won't do them much harm. Like I keep saying, we're just not that important. That's the real paradigm error.