Britain - The Official Thread

  • Thread starter Ross
  • 12,481 comments
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How will you vote in the 2019 UK General Election?

  • The Brexit Party

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Change UK/The Independent Group

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Conservative Party

    Votes: 3 7.5%

  • Green Party

    Votes: 2 5.0%

  • Labour Party

    Votes: 11 27.5%

  • Liberal Democrats

    Votes: 8 20.0%

  • Other (Wales/Scotland/Northern Ireland)

    Votes: 3 7.5%

  • Other Independents

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Other Parties

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Spoiled Ballot

    Votes: 2 5.0%

  • Will Not/Cannot Vote

    Votes: 11 27.5%
  • Total voters
    40
  • Poll closed .
If Piers Morgan is one of the better anchors in America, I dread to think what the others are like.
 
If Piers Morgan and James 'fat, unfunny, fat' Corden fell down a well, and were lost forever, the world would be a better place.
 
dhandes
If Piers Morgan and James 'fat, unfunny, fat' Corden fell down a well, and were lost forever, the world would be a better place.
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Perhaps Piers could fall in first then fatty Corden who could get stuck half way down and sob himself to death whilst peeing himself...

...not that I would wish any harm on anyone

...apart from them

...and Katie Price

...and that fat guy from the Go Compare ads.
 
Rant on...

So the regular army is getting cut by 20,000. I support this.

It's become clear that foreign intervention with soldiers from distant cultures isn't welcome in much of the world. Conflicts, crisis and atrocities must become issues of regional stability and not global involvement. The days of Western troops being used in large numbers are nearly gone.

What is ahead of Britain is a smaller, better trained and better equipped military. I don't see this as a first step in drastic reductions in military spending. We will have an aircraft carrier, I even believe we'll have two. We will have the F-35 and we will have a highly trained, well equipped and highly responsive air force.

The army will benefit in it's smaller numbers because it will no longer be such a daunting task to replace and upgrade such vast numbers of weaponry and equipment. Fewer resources will be wasted on the main battle tank because it's going the way of the battleship. No matter how big you make it, it'll still only take one aircraft and one well placed munition to destroy it.

My main worry is that we are catapulting a vast number of skilled and semi-skilled workers into a jobs market that just isn't ready for them. It's well documented that armed forces personnel don't have a great track record of adapting to civvy street and I fear this isn't improving at a quick enough pace to assist the latest batch.

My other concern is that these cuts have been handled so poorly that we've lost some of most experienced, battle hardened and well respected officers that we've seen for a generation. The very people that we need to get through this period of change.

Rant over.
 
20,000 more unemployed to add to the count, and 20,000 highly skilled individuals with a great CV to take what jobs there are. Yes, fantastic move. Meh, numbers are numbers. Some of these cuts just seem like they are made for the sound of the numbers rather than real saving on money.
Probably wouldn't need to make those cuts anyway if we didn't keep screwing around deciding what kind of aircraft carriers we want.
 
Ardius
20,000 more unemployed to add to the count, and 20,000 highly skilled individuals with a great CV to take what jobs there are. Yes, fantastic move. Meh, numbers are numbers. Some of these cuts just seem like they are made for the sound of the numbers rather than real saving on money.
Probably wouldn't need to make those cuts anyway if we didn't keep screwing around deciding what kind of aircraft carriers we want.
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Or paying way over the odds for aicraft that we can't afford in the first place.

When you can't afford to give your paratroopers parachute training, you know there must be something very, very wrong!
 
Ardius
20,000 more unemployed to add to the count, and 20,000 highly skilled individuals with a great CV to take what jobs there are.
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I wouldn't use the term "highly skilled" to refer to many military personnel. Many are simply soldiers, some are run-of-the-mill mechanics, some handy on a construction site and some have moderate medical training. In areas that they are highly skilled it's unlikely they'll find clear links to civvy jobs.

Yes, fantastic move. Meh, numbers are numbers. Some of these cuts just seem like they are made for the sound of the numbers rather than real saving on money.
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There probably won't be any saving, simply better control of spending. Equipment, service benefits (housing and medical costs) and pensions will be easier to balance.

Probably wouldn't need to make those cuts anyway if we didn't keep screwing around deciding what kind of aircraft carriers we want.
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The carriers are simply the icing on the cake.

The whole MoD purchasing system is terrible. Costs on nearly every project in decades have spiralled out of control. Not just because of poor control of contracts but also because politicians have been allowed to meddle in far too many decisions that they know too little about. While I understand that politicians represent us, an MP standing up and trying to proclaim him/herself an expert on the F35 variants is a complete joke.

MD
Or paying way over the odds for aicraft that we can't afford in the first place.

When you can't afford to give your paratroopers parachute training, you know there must be something very, very wrong!
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I don't see paratroopers being used on a large scale ever again. At best they should be called pathfinders.
 
ExigeEvan
I don't see paratroopers being used on a large scale ever again. At best they should be called pathfinders.
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Very true, it would be almost suicidal on a modern battlefield, but that's the point. Get dropped in, take out important targets, and hold out while doing as much damage as possible for as long as possible. They have a short life expectancy (in conventional warfare) for a reason.

It's a much better idea to keep an elite unit, such as the Paras, fully trained and cut other regular infantry units. Quality over quantity.
 
The point is, 20,000 men is just a number to us, we have no information to judge whether its good or not. The media of course just report it for the shock effect.
For all we know, the 20,000 men could leave us severely under-manned in some areas or it could be scaling down and making things more effecient.

I personally think its unlikely that its to make things more effecient, but I'm just pessimistic with current governments anyway.
 
MarinaDiamandis
Very true, it would be almost suicidal on a modern battlefield, but that's the point. Get dropped in, take out important targets, and hold out while doing as much damage as possible for as long as possible. They have a short life expectancy (in conventional warfare) for a reason.
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Which just isn't acceptable to the modern public, and isn't required in modern combat. 2 Apaches and a chinook with paratroopers can do just as much damage and with a better chance of extraction.

It's a much better idea to keep an elite unit, such as the Paras, fully trained and cut other regular infantry units. Quality over quantity.
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I'm not against the Paras as an elite unit, I'm simply disagreeing with the need to parachute in large numbers.
 
Graffiti artist who worked for Adidas is banned from Olympic Games venues

Most pertinent quote here:

BTP confirmed that four men from Kent, London and Surrey, aged between 18 and 38, had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit criminal damage
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Now, I'm not about to condone graffiti here, though as I said when I posted that link on my facebook page, the most you should ever do when found guilty of graffiti is community service, unless you've been painting with the blood of dead babies.

But "suspicion of conspiracy to commit criminal damage"? So they've not been arrested for graffiti, nor have they even been arrested for thinking of doing graffiti, but they've been arrested for possibly thinking about doing graffiti, because they've done it in the past at some point.

If you don't understand the absurdity of this, then I'll put the same situation into a different scenario:

You've got a speeding ticket through the post. Bugger.

You didn't get caught speeding by a gatso or a radar trap. You didn't even get it for thinking about going a little quicker than normal on your way to work. You actually got sent the ticket because the police thought you might be thinking about speeding, because you'd got caught five years ago by a different radar trap in a different bit of the country.

...and now you see how stupid it is. But wait! There's more!

The arrests come as the Metropolitan police's strategy of halting potential disruptive action in advance of major public events was given high court endorsement. The tactic is a key plank of police* planning to ensure the Games are not disrupted.
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Right. It'd be awful if the games were disrupted by someone scrawling "TWONK" (or similar) on a nearby bridge, but closing off entire lanes of traffic in London, disrupting millions of commuters, so a dozen vehicles a day can pass through is fine.

Or fining shop owners in some god-forsaken bit of Cumbria twenty grand because their flower arrangement looks a bit like Olympic rings if you're missing one eye and you're sitting in a room full of freshly cut onions.

Can I move to America now please? You can't possibly be this stupid over there, can you?

*Highlighted for amusement. You'd have to be a right plank to come up with this stuff.
 
homeforsummer
Graffiti artist who worked for Adidas is banned from Olympic Games venues
*snip*
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I'm sorry but the Police have a duty to prevent crime as well as solve it.

However, the sanctions imposed on the above graffiti artist are hilariously Gestapo; "Any spray paint, marker pens, any grout pen, etching equipment, or unset paint."

And if you want to know the Olympic restrictions on retailers I'll gladly describe them to you at length as I'm in charge of making sure my store is compliant with the hilarious laws.
 
This is one of the many reasons that I plan to leave the country at the earliest convenience.
 
ExigeEvan
I'm sorry but the Police have a duty to prevent crime as well as solve it.
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They do, but that should not include arresting people who may not even have any intention of committing a crime. If they'd found them stocking up on cans of spray paint? Sure, but even then there's no guarantee that they'd be doing so specifically to "disrupt" the Olympics. As you point out yourself, banning people from even buying anything that might remotely be considered artistic is rather draconian.
 
ExigeEvan
And go where?

I'm not saying Britain is perfect, far from it, but where is really better to outweigh the cost/disruption?
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My current plan is to look for orchestra work after my degree. The prospects in that field are much better in somewhere like Germany, for example than they are here.
 
homeforsummer
Excellent piece in The New York Times about how the Olympics are bringing out the best in Brits, i.e. moaning about stuff :lol:
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Hilarious, yeah. That's what I would do - my country bans everything and deploys the military for "security", I moan about it but am too carefree to do anything else, and then I'd laugh at a news article from a different country which is making a joke of how I'm too lazy to do anything more than complain when my government displays its overreaching authority over me and my willingness to submit to that authority because they've rendered me weak and frail, too scared to consider standing up for a cause or taking care of myself for a chance. After that I'd probably watch V for Vendetta, think, "Yeah, that would be crazy," go to bed, and wake up the next morning to do it all over again.
 

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