Politika u UK

[Dr Arslanagić]

Na pravim izborima ce vecina UKIP glasaca zapusiti nos i glasati za torijevce.

[Dr Arslanagić]

btw, do jaja mi je ovo zgražavanje nad UKIP-om, oni samo govore ono što intimno misli 75% torijevaca, 50% laburista i 25% libdemovaca.

[pacey defender]

bilo ovo?

 

[Budja]

UKIP, koliko shvatam sada izdaleka, ne profilise se samo kao anti-EU paritja, anti-imigracija, vec i anti-establishment partija.

Otuda i izolacionizam u spoljnoj politici i disonantan stav oko Ukrajine.

A posto su LibDems zavrsili karijeru, zeleni se nisu probili, levica podeljena (Galovej, Loach, dve razlicite partije) protestne glasace mogu da pokupe.

[Filipenko]

jobs.JPG

 

Mo' immigrants' jobs.

[Zaz_pi]

Tacerizam ili norvezinizam, privatizacija nacionalnih resursa ili ne:

 

 

Dude, where’s my North Sea oil money?

 

For a few years, the UK enjoyed a once-in-a-lifetime windfall – only, unlike the Norwegians, we’ve got almost nothing to show for it

Last Wednesday, every single Norwegian became a millionaire – without having to lift a lillefinger. They owe the windfall to their coastline, and a huge dollop of good sense. Since 1990, Norway has been squirreling away its cash from North Sea oil and gas into a rainy-day fund. It’s now big enough to see Noah through all 40 of those drizzly days and nights. Last week, the balance hit a million krone for everyone in Norway. Norwegians can’t take a hammer to the piggy bank, amassed strictly to provide for future generations. And converted into pounds, the 5.11 trillion krone becomes a mere £100,000 for every man, woman and child. Still, the oljefondet (the government pension fund of Norway) owns over 1% of the world’s stocks, a big chunk of Regent Street and some of the most prime property in Paris: a pretty decent whipround for just five million people.

Wish it could have been you with a hundred-grand bonus? Here’s the really nauseating part: it should have been. Britain had its share of North Sea oil, described by one PM as “God’s gift” to the economy. We pumped hundreds of billions out of the water off the coast of Scotland. Only unlike the Norwegians, we’ve got almost nothing to show for it. Our oil cash was magicked into tax cuts for the well-off, then micturated against the walls of a thousand pricey car dealerships and estate agents.

All this was kick-started by Margaret Thatcher, the woman who David Cameron claims saved the country. The party she led still touts itself as the bunch you can trust with the nation’s money. But that isn’t the evidence from the North Sea. That debacle shows the Conservatives as being as profligate as sailors on shore leave.

Britain got nothing from the North Sea until the mid-70s – then the pounds started gushing. At their mid-80s peak, oil and gas revenues were worth more than 3% of national income. According to the chief economist at PricewaterhouseCoopers, John Hawksworth, had all this money been set aside and invested in ultra-safe assets it would have been worth £450bn by 2008. He admits that is a very conservative estimate: Sukhdev Johal, professor of accounting at Queen Mary University of London, thinks the total might well have been £850bn by now. That doesn’t take you up to Norwegian levels of prosperity – they’ve more oil and far fewer people to divvy it up among – but it’s still around £13,000 for everyone in Britain.

Hawksworth titled his 2008 paper on the subject: “Dude, where’s my oil money?” We don’t have any new hospitals or roads to show for it: public sector net investment plunged from 2.5% of GDP at the start of the Thatcher era to just 0.4% of GDP by 2000. It is sometimes said that the money was ploughed into benefits for the miners and all the other workers Thatcherism chucked on the scrapheap, but that’s not what the figures show. Public sector current spending hovered around 40% of GDP from Thatcher through to the start of the banking crisis.

So where did our billions go? Hawksworth writes: “The logical answer is that the oil money enabled non-oil taxes to be kept lower.” In other words: tax cuts. When the North Sea was providing maximum income, Thatcher’s chancellor, Nigel Lawson slashed income and other direct taxes, especially for the rich. The top rate of tax came down from 60p in the pound to just 40p by 1988. He also reduced the basic rate of income tax; but the poor wouldn’t have seen much of those pounds in their pockets, as, thanks to the Tories, they were paying more VAT.

What did Thatcher’s grateful children do with their tax cuts? “They used the higher disposable income to bid up house prices,” suggests Hawskworth. For a few years, the UK enjoyed a once-in-a-lifetime windfall; and it was pocketed by the rich. The revolution begun by Thatcher and Reagan is often seen as being about competition and extending markets. But that’s to focus on the process and overlook the motivation or the result. As the historian of neoliberalism Philip Mirowski argues, what the past 30 years have been about is using the powers of the state to divert more resources to the wealthy. You see that with privatisation: the handing over of our assets at knock-down prices to corporations and supposed “investors”, who then skim off the profits. The transformation of the North Sea billions into tax cuts for the wealthy is the same process but at its most squalid.

Compare and contrast with the Norwegian experience. In 1974, Oslo laid down the principle that oil wealth should be used to develop a “qualitatively better society”, defined by historian Helge Ryggvik as “greater equality”. Ten oil commandments were set down to ensure the industry was put under democratic control – which it remains to this day, with the public owning nearly 70% of the oil company and the fields. It’s a glimpse of what Britain could have had, had it been governed by something more imaginative and less rapacious than Thatcherism.

If Scotland had held on to the revenues from North Sea oil, the question today would not be how it would manage solo, but how London would fare without its bankrollers over Hadrian’s Wall. Oljeeventyr is how Norwegians refer to their recent history: the oil fairy tale. It conveys the magic of how in just a few decades, they have been transformed from being the poor Nordic neighbour to being the richest. We have no equivalent term for our North Sea experience, but let me suggest one: a scandal.

[hazard]

Svabo im objasnio

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-eu-27155893

 

 

Is Germany becoming more Eurosceptic?

 

The new AfD is challenging long-established parties in Germany

 

There's no such thing as a Eurosceptic. Not a typical one anyway. That much is already clear in this round of European Parliament campaigning.

 

Euroscepticism takes on many forms. In Germany, it comes in the form of the AfD - the Alternative fuer Deutschland.

 

The party was founded by a group of economists. Joern Kruse - a professor of economics - is one of those founders. He's the leader of the party in Hamburg.

 

"We want to reform the euro. We want to make it workable. At the moment it doesn't work. It creates unemployment and debt crises."

What does reforming the euro mean? "Probably saying goodbye to a number of members like Greece and Portugal."

 

The mainstream parties here aren't too worried about the AfD. Take a listen to what Roland Heintze told me (he's top of the list for MEP candidates for the ruling Christian Democrats in Hamburg).

 

Roland Heintze: "The future of the euro is the main issue for Germans"

 

"Germans are, all in all, still very enthusiastic about the European Union," says one of Hamburg University's political scientists, Kamil Marchinkiewicz.

 

So don't, he cautions, "overestimate the AfD's importance in German politics. It may function as an organisation bringing German Eurosceptics together, but in comparison to UKIP in Britain they are a soft kind of Eurosceptic."

 

Germans, he says, are "sceptical about British Euroscepticism, because they believe Germany is benefiting from the EU and most Germans believe that also Britain is benefiting from the EU."

 

"Germans are more sceptical about the chances of their country outside the EU, even though Germany is the most powerful country in Europe. They somehow probably underestimate their own power and they don't understand why Britain, even though it's a smaller country, probably overestimates its chances (outside the EU) in the globalised world."

[Roger Sanchez]

Uhapsilo Gerryja Adamsa glede usvezi ubojstva Jean McConville.

 

Uručbirano Tapatalkićem s Lumije Jeftinjare

[jms_uk]

Poruke, cela ta Ukip histerija. Videcemo kako ce proci na izborima (pravim, ne ovim za EU parlament) ali nisam siguran da ce im se agresivna kampanja na kraju isplatiti.

 

Ovde ima dobrih sprdnji na UKip plakate https://twitter.com/UkipBillboards

 

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/people-are-wasting-ukips-money-by-sending-bricks-to-their-fr

[teacher]

Samo za rogera i pristaše prodavca magle Salmonda:
 

Alex Salmond defends Vladimir Putin remarks

 

 

Scotland's first minister clarifies views about Russian president given to Alastair Campbell in GQ interview
 
Wednesday 30 April 2014 18.41 BST
 
 
Alex Salmond has resisted calls for an apology after saying Russian president Vladimir Putin's patriotism was "entirely reasonable".
 
At the launch of Scottish National party's European election campaign, Scotland's first minister said his remarks had been misunderstood and he would not be retracting them. He said: "When people see the comments I made, they will see that they're perfectly reasonable. I said I deprecated Russian actions in Ukraine and also its human rights record. I pointed out that the western press underestimated Putin and that's obviously true."
 
Salmond encountered a storm of protest after stating he admired "certain aspects" of Putin's politics and his restoration "of a substantial part of Russian pride" in an interview conducted on 14 March for the May edition of the men's magazine GQ with Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former spin doctor.
 
Michael Ostapko, the Scottish chairman of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain, said Ukrainians had made "overwhelming comments [of] hurt, disgust, betrayal and astonishment" and called for Salmond to retract his comments. In the Commons, his remarks were described as a "gross error of judgment" by William Hague, the foreign secretary, and as a "dreadful blunder" by Jim Murphy, the shadow international development secretary.
 
The Mail Online website quoted Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov, saying he "agrees with the viewpoint of the Scottish first minister".
 
Salmond said: "When I was talking about the pride issue, it was in the aftermath of the Sochi [winter] Olympics, which was obviously a restoration of Russian pride. Those are reasonably balanced remarks."
 
He would reply to Ostapko in detail, he said, "showing the comments were made specifically on Russia and Ukraine, which were comprehensive and unambiguous".
 
The transcript of the Campbell-Salmond interview released in advance by GQ's publisher Conde Nast shows no mention of Ukraine or the Sochi Olympics, nor does the full text of the interview being published on Thursday.
 
In the days before the interview, pro-Russian paramilitaries seized key Ukrainian buildings in Crimea and work on the Crimean referendum had started. Nato had warned about a serious threat to European stability from Russia's actions.
 
In his GQ interview, Campbell sought to establish Salmond's view of the Russian president by asking: "Putin?." Salmond replied: "Well, I don't approve of a range of Russian actions, but he is more effective than the press he gets and you can see why he carries support in Russia."
 
"Admire him?‚" asked Campbell. Salmond replied: "Certain aspects. There are aspects of Russian constitutionality and the intermesh with business and politics that are obviously difficult to admire. He's restored a substantial part of Russian pride and that must be a good thing. Russians are fantastic people, incidentally; they are lovely people."
 
Asked on Wednesday whether he would give a different answer now, Salmond replied: "If I was asked the same question today, I would go into detail on the annexation of Crimea, but that wasn't possible and indeed, of course, I have done that subsequent to it; it wasn't possible before it happened. My view is that the interview was perfectly balanced and people, when they see it in context, would think that as well."
 
The SNP are leading the European election polls in Scotland with a series of recent surveys suggesting the party could hit their target of matching or beating their highest European election result of 34% in 1989.
 
It remains unclear whether the long-running Scottish independence referendum campaign could improve or dilute the low turnout in previous European elections, which stood at 28.5% in 2009.
 
While some polls suggest the SNP could get closer to 40% on 22 May, SNP strategists are uncertain whether that will translate into the party winning three out of Scotland's six European parliament seats. The SNP holds two seats but could win an extra seat under the complex proportional voting system used for European parliament votes, if the Eurosceptic Ukip vote increases and the Lib Dem vote collapses.

 

 

[MancMellow]

 

[Filipenko]

Bude li sreće, Dejvid Mojes će this time next year biti imigrant.

[MancMellow]

videcemo...

[Prospero]

^^  extra :D

[Roger Sanchez]

 

Welcome to Britain, the new land of impunity

No matter the criticisms made or damage done, fat cats and politicians seem able to cling on. Often their efforts are rewarded

 

There has seldom, in the democratic era, been a better time to thrive by appeasing wealth and power, or to fail by sticking to your principles. Politicians who twist and turn on behalf of business are immune to attack. Those who resist are excoriated.

Here’s where a culture of impossible schemes and feeble accountability leads: to cases like that of Mark Wood, a highly vulnerable man who had his benefits cut after being wrongly assessed by the outsourcing company Atos Healthcare as fit for work, and starved to death – while those who run such companies retire with millions. Impunity for the rich; misery for the poor.

Kakva kronika. :ziga: