brexit negging when yr mandate is is trash: or further chronicles of a garbage-fire

aye but my problem is it really only targets the poorest drinker. most working class folk are going to get steaming in the pub and in the process blowing relatively large amounts of money. or they're drinking at home having some smirnoff or 8 cans of stella. their consumption won't be affected. the people who will be affect will be the ones buying a bottle of whiskey that costs a tenner. or a bottle of 7% cider that costs 2 quid.

it just seems to me like another exercise in judging and impoverishing people who are already at the bottom of the heap. Will it educate and encourage the heavy drinkers whose tipple of choice isn't a fundamentally financial decision? I doubt it, but I don't doubt this will end up hitting poor people and putting more money in the hands of organized criminals.

sorry for just repeating what Jim said :) - on my phone

obviously I take it personally because a) yes, I drink too much and b) I veer in and out of the "people whose booze decisions are financially influenced" so I mayn't be the most neutral observer but still

tbf the bathtub gin tastes fine after a wrap of M-cat.

last time I had m-cat it fucked my sinuses for a week. which probably helps the moonshine go down tbf

yep to both those comments. the moralising inherent by making unaffordable that which is not debarred those with more money is bad.

also bad - i think - is the utilitarian argument around “cost to the NHS” etc. implicit in that is the same argument “if they could afford to pay for it it wd be ok” and there’s a parallel utilitarian evaluation of people as cost units.

god yeah, first the smokers, then the boozers; doughnut fans should be worried.

This has more than a whiff of John Knox about it.

Booze should have protected status ffs! It was the only the other day I was reading about a 7000 year collection of clay wine bottles found at a site.

*7000 years old*

That's older than Christianity times 3, you fucks!

we have it in scotland already and i'm against it for the same reasons as the rest of you. on the other hand if you could get a drinkable bottle of wine here for £2 like you can in french and spanish supermarkets i'd be dead by now.

I wouldn't be dead at French pricing by now, just killing myself slowly with better fucking wine.

I'm more of a pub drinker but i'd probably drink and cook with wine more often if it was sane priced

rarely see campaigners on Breakfast Time saying "we could reduce drink problems by trying to make this country a bit less shitty tho"

oh no, wait. we don't have it yet and that's what this is about. we had it a few years back for a while before it got challenged. fwiw, i think this will be quite a big vote loser for the snp, so i think nicola's "delight" at this verdict may be short lived.

More seats for the Tories then.

btw, did you know those v cheap and strong ciders are made from onions?

gotta get some vit C down your neck!

this is tomorrow's big housing announcement fwiw: £60bn of housing association debt to be taken back off government balance sheet (as it was pre 2015)https://t.co/5vQMyEbJn2 via @FT

— Jim Pickard (@PickardJE) November 15, 2017

wow, fucking cup of bathtub gruel runneth over!

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/tory-austerity-deaths-study-report-people-die-social-care-government-policy-a8057306.html

"It is now very clear that austerity does not promote growth or reduce deficits - it is bad economics, but good class politics," he said. "This study shows it is also a public health disaster. It is not an exaggeration to call it economic murder.”

btw, did you know those v cheap and strong ciders are made from onions?

wait waht

fuck that bmj open paper is horrifying

The paper identified that mortality rates in the UK had declined steadily from 2001 to 2010, but this reversed sharply with the death rate growing again after austerity came in.

From this reversal the authors identified that 45,368 extra deaths occurred between 2010 and 2014, than would have been expected, although it stops short of calling them "avoidable".

Based on those trends it predicted the next five years - from 2015 to 2020 - would account for 152,141 deaths - 100 a day - findings which one of the authors likened to “economic murder”.

Yep, that is an academic paper, not shouty lefties using terms like "class politics" and "economic murder".

gosh i bet the media will be all over this clear evidence of mass murder

Yes, those people who booed Aditya Chakrabortty on Question Time last week will be feeling very foolish when they read this story.

well there's no call for rudeness to MPs, it's only politics after all

just 100 people a day being fed into the woodchipper nbd

country’s full anyway iirc, just making some space

pretty sure all of the people who died were a net drain on Our Economy so y

Made the mistake of reading the comments on the independent article, warning others not to do the same.

Stella Creasy will be furious at the hyperbolic language in this paper, as she was with Chakrabortty as soon he mentioned "deaths" on QT.

Creasy's the kind of grassroots working class activist who knows this talk doesn't play well with hard-working families

Any of the PLP who abstained on important welfare reform votes during the ConDem era, and still haven't changed their thinking on austerity - really ought to think about joining another party at this point.

Yes, those people who booed Aditya Chakrabortty on Question Time last week will be feeling very foolish when they read this story.

do you mean Tory councillor, Chris Stevens and his co-workers?

https://twitter.com/christevens

Yes, I think I mentioned at the time that QT audiences now seem to be stuffed with party activists desperate to get their ugly mugs on television.

xxp Creasy is my MP and though no doubt a deplorable leftist-dad slug has also done a lot of work fighting pay day lenders and the gambling "industry" and has recently been very vocally anti-PFI, so I tend to take the good with the bad

She claims she was eye-rolling at members of the audience fwiw (probably not much)

oh and I meant centrist-dad of course!

i remember working with a couple of scots in poland and my god - no one else in a bar would immediately say on having finished a drink “are you getting them in or what” etc.

p amateurish not to have a system with transactional delay time built in imo

What Aditya said was true and he was right to raise it, but he was a little naive in his choice of phrasing. He made it sound like she was basically sending disabled people to the gas chamber and it had the effect of derailing the conversation and making it easy for people to throw their hands up in faux-outrage. Obviously Tory ringers are going to boo whatever but sounding like the typical hectoring leftie tends to have a counterproductive effect on other people, they immediately get defensive *even if what you are saying is true* and even if they would otherwise be predisposed to agree with you.

Having said that the social media reaction was mostly people @ing him with variants of "thank fuck someone finally said that", and for every person that booed in the studio there were probably hundreds nodding along in agreement. The moment it became obvious the austerity consensus was collapsing was the reaction Osbourne's cuts to disability benefit in the 2016 Budget, when they pretty much had to hide him away for weeks.

I didn't think there was anything wrong with Chakrabortty's phrasing tbh. When people are already in broken and weakened conditions, you don't need killing facilities to hasten their demise. If taking away benefits - the very means that give them dignity + some modicum of a "life" has the same effect, then no point soft-soaping it just because wilful ignoramuses are going to jeer.

i don't know if the point is that saying "austerity is killing people" won't change anybody's mind about the situation, but what chance have you got to convince people too fastidious to face the consequences of their political actions anyway?

i remember working with a couple of scots in poland and my god - no one else in a bar would immediately say on having finished a drink “are you getting them in or what” etc.

Holl'! Ah've awready boaght a coupla rounds, ya fuckin' walloper!

Wee Boaby in Bialystok there

chris dillow on the report: http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2017/11/the-politics-of-death.html

He didn't say "austerity is killing people", he said "she is sending disabled people to their deaths", which is true but when you're clunkily shoehorning it into an answer about something else you're not doing yourself any favours. Other people have made similar points on QT and had people applauding and cheering. And I'm saying this as someone who thinks AC is one of the Guardian's better columnists and I generally agree with him on most things.

i don't know if the point is that saying "austerity is killing people" won't change anybody's mind about the situation, but what chance have you got to convince people too fastidious to face the consequences of their political actions anyway?

Some people, like the fucker in the audience, are going to deliberately twist and misread you whatever you say and there's no point in even trying to argue or convert people, and other people are going to immediately cheer, but there's also a big chunk of people in the middle who probably don't even think that much about these issues and these are the people you need to win round. And that doesn't mean ducking or soft-soaping the issue or turning into 2015 Ed Miliband, but finger-jabbing tends to have the opposite of the desired effect.

He's a very good man and an excellent and fearless writer but not a particularly good debater.

Chakrabortty was talking in the heat of live QT, where you don't always get the chance to do a power-point presentation of your arguments, especially if you are criticising current policies. The BBC don't even seem to have acknowledged the report on their news section today. So I didn't find him "finger jabbing" at all, he got it in there, and it highlighted that people are effectively being sent to their deaths. What's the smooth + approved version of this? Fuck it I don't care tbh!