What Next From Labour?

Makes me laugh
Students in Hong Kong fighting tooth and nail for what they believe is the personal freedom
They’re getting shot for it
Once arrested they get ten years
Life ruined but they’re still there
Our government just gave it away for 20 pieces of silver
Don’t figure
I don’t condone violence in any form
Once fist raised argument lost
But they understand the value of freedom

 

I don't think everything will be free, who says so? You can duff your caps to the billionaires instead, if you feel obliged. Just get on your bike, Oh! someone's said that already, sorry guv, I forgot my place.

 

We are away on the 12th, so I registered for the postal vote as well.

 

I personally think voting should be compulsory
We all live here and if we all vote
Whichever way
You can see what the whole country is feeling
Ten minutes of your life every three years I can live with
But something needs to change
The way it’s openly anti voter,
I’ll do what I want not what you vote
It’s shocking how they can have a manifesto with it in it
I’m off to live in a cave

 

As a Brummie resident you might reflect on Corbyn’s apparent plan to unveil his manifesto in your fair city on the 45th anniversary of his Republican friends’ atrocity.

 

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”
― Alexander Fraser Tytler

 

No escape mate, if Corbyn gets in you’ll have free Wi-fi

 

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

George Orwell, from his book 1984 written in 1948...but so easily could be Jeremy Corbyn or John MacDonald (perhaps not DIane Abbott, too intelligible for her) in 2019.

 

Funnily enough the authorship of this is disputed and possibly quite modern. However, the QT audience in Bolton last night demonstrated that a mature democracy can smell sh1te!
https://order-order.com/2019/11/22/question-time-audience-versus-labours-manifesto/

 

Bollocks it will be free - I’ll be paying for it...

 

Yes and with Labour state owned telecoms and broadband you would be paying for that, and paying for the inevitable censorship and even more propaganda that would accompany it.

Lets pretend to to give people free stuff, so that we can control them even more.

You might think that current levels of censorship are bad enough with Google, Facebook and Twitter etc only allowing opinions that they deem to be acceptable, just imagine how bad it would get if the state owned the method of content delivery to you...very scary in my opinion.

 

worse, they will leave it for whomever comes after to pay off their debts...again

 

can we imagine the chaos that will ensue if corbots clan nationalise everything in a short space of time, giving jobs to their cronies and allowing the unions back into power, ffs we would all be doomed as nothing will ever work

 

If the magic grandpa wins the same people who payed off the debt of the last labour goverment, the honest hardworking people of this country.

 

The history of Hong Kong is slightly more convoluted than that. We originally had it as a trading post in the 19th century when China didn't value it, on a 100 year agreement which was originally put in place to facilitate the tea trade. We then negotiated a 50 year extension. When that lapsed we were obliged to hand it back; it was never actually ours to keep.
As part of the hand back the citizens there were afforded a certain degree of independence from the communist China, and the recent protests are against the erosion of those rights as the Chinese government is trying to get a closer assimilation and greater control over what has been an independent trading hub since the British governed it.

The author James Clavell wrote a series of historical novels based on the tea (and opium) trade, which although fiction are based on the political structure of the time and pre snowflake-apologist generation; and are very well researched, so they give a good idea of the situation of the time.

A tldr version of how it worked is this: we wanted tea but the Chinese would only accept silver in trade. We needed to get the silver back to buy more tea but the Chinese wouldn't trade it back for anything. So independent traders smuggled opium into China to get the silver back into circulation via the black market. They were paying the Portuguese a small fortune to operate out of the Portuguese colony in Macao as base of operations, until Hong Kong was identified as an ideal deep water harbour and a separate deal was done. Thus Hong Kong. An enterprising officer smuggled tea plants out of China and set up plantations in India, which then broke the stranglehold the Chinese had on the tea market (ever hear if Thomas Lipton?) which had the side effect of killing the opium trade which the government didn't officially support but it was seen as a necessary evil and a blind eye was turned.

 

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Faced with a choice like that, I'd probably go to the pub or stay in bed. Fortunately I've got more of a choice where I live.

 

Where I live we've got Debbie Abrahams as MP for Labour, a steadfast remainer while my area is pro Brexit so I hope she loses her seat. It's a bit unlikely but you never know.