Brexit, for once some facts.

soundwave

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Woosh

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soundwave

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Woosh

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Here it is, bad Orange man is coming for Irish Pharma bonanza, huge part of corp tax take here!
Irish gov is bricking it.. oh Urzula, vere are u now?
"President Trump has announced plans to impose tariffs on imported pharmaceuticals, potentially reaching 250%, specifically targeting products made in countries like Ireland. "
Trump keeps threatening sectors after sectors but I think he'd fold in October. Trump has no right to play with tariffs. It's a reserve right of Congress in the U S constitution. The supreme court will probably confirm this in September.
 

Tony1951

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No, I do belong to this group since I stopped employment on passing 50, which I'd planned ever since 16 years old. That is 17 years short of the current retirement age.

Of course I haven't just sat in a chair ever since, I've occupied myself with my own interests which are not work, but which have incidentally maintained my physical and mental health without need to continue being a wage slave for that purpose.

That is the point I am making, that everyone should have that benefit of human advancement, many years for personal and optional diverse interests.


Instead capitalism has used human advancement to keep us alive and still wage slaves for twice as long, simply to increase the wealth of the small elite.

Harold Wilson as PM had the right idea when he spoke of the advancement with the phrase "white hot heat of technology" and how it could enable an age of leisure. That was the promise and possibility, but which has been perverted into the complete opposite by the right wing elite who hold power.
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It was capitalism which enabled human advancement. Consider how life was for those who lived prior to the advent of capitalism.

Thousands of generations lived as hunter gatherers, wandering the planet, looking for sustenance, mates, and shelter. We were given NOTHING without making the effort to find and use it.

Leisure pursuits and the innate desire to engage in them, emerged not as pointless diversion, but the curiosity which gave people the opportunity to make something useful. DOING was at the core of survival.

No one got to mess around enjoying 'diversions' for forty years.

You speak as if 'capitalism' had somehow subverted some Garden of Eden existence of idyllic leisure.

Not so. You worked until you died right up until very recently - in Britain it was only from 1908 when the government started paying a pension of five shillings a week to those over 70. Even that was means tested, the full five bob (25p) only going to those with an income of less than £21 a year, reducing on a sliding scale above that.

There is no right to idle amusement. We are animals, and like animals, it is up to us to make sure we survive by whatever means we can. The only way what you describe as a right - speaking of the right to a long period of economic inactivity, is by compelling others who do work to fund it, or, by funding it yourself from savings and investment.

The same compulsory expropriation of earned resources underlies all social services spending. It can provide perverse incentives to parasitism and is seen to do so in teh UK right now, where alarming increases in dependency among working age - even very young people are rapidly becoming a serious problem. The rise in applications for disability support from people under thirty in the UK since covid, is not reflected anywhere among our neighbours. This indicates that the problem is one of vice, idleness, and dependency culture.
 
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flecc

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You worked until you died right up until very recently

There is no right to idle amusement. We are animals, and like animals, it is up to us to make sure we survive by whatever means we can.
There is an absolute right to live however I wish that I can provide for on the planet I was born upon, or as you put it, "survive by whatever means we can". And that includes having my share of the advances that humans have made that enable increasing amounts of leisure time.

That gradually increasing leisure time we could have enjoyed for centuries, had not a self appointed privileged elite stolen it for themselves with the sin of selfish capitalism, commencing in this country with the theft of most of our country via the enclosures many centuries ago. That increasing loss of land led to the bulk of the people being cast as inferiors, condemned to work for the privileged in exchange for only the minimum necessary for survival, while the elite enjoyed abundant wealth and leisure.

Of course I've explained all this to you before, but you seem incapable of reading and understanding such simple truths, well illustrated by history.
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flecc

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The same compulsory expropriation of earned resources underlies all social services spending - - - - - The rise in applications for disability support from people under thirty in the UK since covid, is not reflected anywhere among our neighbours. This indicates that the problem is one of vice, idleness, and dependency culture.
No it doesn't. Since what you object to works so well in our Scandinavian neighbours to keep everyone there happy, it indicates that English governance has a very serious problem, the right wing and all those like you who support it.
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Tony1951

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There is an absolute right to live however I wish that I can provide for on the planet I was born upon, or as you put it, "survive by whatever means we can". And that includes having my share of the advances that humans have made that enable increasing amounts of leisure time.

That gradually increasing leisure time we could have enjoyed for centuries, had not a self appointed privileged elite stolen it for themselves with the sin of selfish capitalism, commencing in this country with the theft of most of our country via the enclosures many centuries ago. That increasing loss of land led to the bulk of the people being cast as inferiors, condemned to work for the privileged in exchange for only the minimum necessary for survival, while the elite enjoyed abundant wealth and leisure.

Of course I've explained all this to you before, but you seem incapable of reading and understanding such simple truths, well illustrated by history.
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You think subsistence farming - ie farming a tiny plot on the common land is a route to abundant wealth and leisure???? Really????

flecc said:
And that includes having my share of the advances that humans have made that enable increasing amounts of leisure time.
How do you work out that you have an innate right to benefit from other people's discoveries and inventions, that you had no hand in inventing or developing, except through paying for the goods and services they represent?
 
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Tony1951

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And -

Marxist and neo-Marxist historians argue that rich landowners used their control of state processes to appropriate public land for their private benefit. This created a landless working class that provided the labour required in the new industries developing in the north of England. For example: "In agriculture the years between 1760 and 1820 are the years of wholesale enclosure in which, in village after village, common rights are lost".[10] "Enclosure (when all the sophistications are allowed for) was a plain enough case of class robbery".[11] Anthropologist Jason Hickel notes that this process of enclosure led to myriad peasant revolts, among them Kett's Rebellion and the Midland Revolt, which culminated in violent repression and executions.[12]

Other scholars[13] argue that the better-off members of the European peasantry encouraged and participated actively in enclosure, seeking to end the perpetual poverty of subsistence farming. "We should be careful not to ascribe to [enclosure] developments that were the consequence of a much broader and more complex process of historical change."[14] "[T]he impact of eighteenth and nineteenth century enclosure has been grossly exaggerated...."[15]



That puts you in the Marxist or Neo-Marxist camp.
 

Tony1951

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No it doesn't. Since what you object to works so well in our Scandinavian neighbours to keep everyone there happy, it indicates that English governance has a very serious problem, the right wing and all those like you who support it.
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Norway is now vastly wealthy from its oil bonanza and small population and the fact that its politicians wisely invested the proceeds in a national wealth fund. Unlike the Saudis, the money was not squirrelled into the coffers of a head chopping elite.

Sweden and social cohesion and contentment - not so much. Stupid, left wing ideology like yours resulted in the acceptance of large numbers of incompatible Middle Easterners unprepared to join the previously happy, cooperative people and have created massive problems. Last year there were six times the number of murders in Sweden as in the rest of Scandinavia combined.




We see something of the same on a small scale where whole high streets in towns are blighted by gangster run shops selling counterfeit tobacco and vapes and illegal goods. Vast amounts now of organised crime, trafficking of women and what the police call OCGs ( organised crime groups) are run by foreign origin gangs and Albanians in particular. Then we have the massive pile of filth hidden under the carpet for the last forty years - the hideous child grooming gangs. Only the wilfully blind don't see what is happening.

And by the way - I spent a lot of my life, probably the first forty years of my adulthood as a Labour voter and certainly centre left - if not more left than that. I am now centre right because of changes I have witnessed, because I see the solution in that direction.

Of course Marxists always scream,'EXTREME RIGHT', at anyone who points out the reality of what has happened to our cities and the impact that it has on the people who live in them, so you and your friend from Edinburgh will no doubt be screaming soon that I am a fascist. Neither of you seem capable of understanding what fascism is and was, and of drawing a distinction between fascism and the democratic right.

Attempt to campaign for the legal democratic abolition of the ECHR and you are suddenly a Nazi - but only in the minds of lazy minded fools - so who cares?
 
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flecc

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Oct 25, 2006
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That puts you in the Marxist or Neo-Marxist camp.
AKA socialism's fair sharing, NOT as the far right try to say, communism.

So, I'm happy with that.

I give you Europe introducing the widespread 35 hour week, but the UK government rejecting it in favour of a 48 hour week here, end result markedly LOWER productivity.

Doesn't that clearly indicate that it is the government here
that is the real problem?
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Woosh

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Not so. You worked until you died right up until very recently.
A lot still do. Worked until they dropped.
That is the result of uncontrolled capitalism.
Human progress in living standard has a lot more to do with sciences than capitalism which in the current form has existed since the Dutch empire in the 1500s.
 
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flecc

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Norway is now vastly wealthy from its oil bonanza and small population and the fact that its politicians wisely invested the proceeds in a national wealth fund. Unlike the Saudis, the money was not squirrelled into the coffers of a head chopping elite.

Sweden and social cohesion and contentment - not so much. Stupid, left wing ideology like yours resulted in the acceptance of large numbers of incompatible Middle Easterners unprepared to join the previously happy, cooperative people and have created massive problems. Last year there were six times the number of murders in Sweden as in the rest of Scandinavia combined.




We see something of the same on a small scale where whole high streets in towns are blighted by gangster run shops selling counterfeit tobacco and vapes and illegal goods. Vast amounts now of organised crime, trafficking of women and what the police call OCGs ( organised crime groups) are run by foreign origin gangs and Albanians in particular. Then we have the massive pile of filth hidden under the carpet for the last forty years - the hideous child grooming gangs. Only the wilfully blind don't see what is happening.
Clutching at the same straws again, Scandinavia is far more than just Norway and Sweden. We had the same North Sea benefits but the inept Tories squandered it all.

And despite their temporary crime problem, the Swedes are still far happier with their governance than the Brits are with theirs.

As for our crime problem, that's a British one, nothing to do with Scandinavian socialism so an entirely different subject.
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Tony1951

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Jul 29, 2025
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A lot still do. Worked until they dropped.
That is the result of uncontrolled capitalism.
Human progress in living standard has a lot more to do with sciences than capitalism in the current form existed since the Dutch empire in the 1500s.
We don't have 'uncontrolled capitalism'.

What are you talking about?

Business operates in a straight jacket of regulations of all kinds. I don't object to most of the regulation.

The post above is so full of stupid errors that I scarcely know where to start in straightening you out.

Employment regulations require almost an HR department to keep abreast of them
Environmental regulations must be complied with.
Health and Safety regulations are mandatory on pain of imprisonment.
Minimum wage regulations can not be ignored.
Parental Leave and Maternity Leave are compulsory.
Trading Standards enforcement is obligatory.

What is this 'uncontrolled capitalism', you speak of?????

Then you say that human progress is more to do with science than it is to do with capitalism.

You can not really separate science from capitalism. To do so is ridiculous.

Firstly the vast majority of science funding comes from businesses.

Secondly who drives medical progress? Pharma businesses in the main. Where would we have been in 2020 had we not had big Pharma to develop and bring to scale the production of vaccines?

The whole of that post was complete Marxist madness and completely untrue.
 

Tony1951

Esteemed Pedelecer
Jul 29, 2025
269
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Clutching at the same straws again, Scandinavia is far more than just Norway and Sweden. We had the same North Sea benefits but the inept Tories squandered it all.

And despite their temporary crime problem, the Swedes are still far happier with their governance than the Brits are with theirs.

As for our crime problem, that's a British one, nothing to do with Scandinavian socialism so an entirely different subject.
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Ha ha ha ha - seek help. You are delusional.
 

Tony1951

Esteemed Pedelecer
Jul 29, 2025
269
81
Clutching at the same straws again, Scandinavia is far more than just Norway and Sweden. We had the same North Sea benefits but the inept Tories squandered it all.
AI Overview

64051
The Scandinavian countries, traditionally defined as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, have a combined population of approximately 22 million people. Specifically, Sweden has the largest population within Scandinavia, exceeding 10 million. Denmark and Norway each have populations between 5 and 6 million.

Here's a more detailed breakdown:

  • Sweden: Approximately 10.55 million people.
  • Denmark: Approximately 5.96 million people.
  • Norway: Approximately 5.55 million people.
Sweden has a population almost equal to the rest of Scandinavia in total.

And despite their temporary crime problem, the Swedes are still far happier with their governance than the Brits are with theirs.
Are they? How do you know this?

If it is true, it is probably because the politicians they elect do what the people want, and don't subscribe to the view that the people are in general fools who are to be ignored (which is where and why I came into this conversation).
 

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