Chomper Higgot

During my summer visit to the UK this year I frequently took advantage of a pint at pubs, the weather being fabulous I enjoyed my pints outside (an English summer tradition I hear). I wonder how many people passing thought, look at that welfare scrounger?

I’m not sure you have a grasp of Britain’s history on slavery. Slavery exists in the UK today and now.

Good outcome. He’s done.

Smart move. Trump will almost certainly ignore/deride/contest the subpoena. The message is clear, ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’.

More nonsense. Was that form the Daily Mail, The Express, or The Sun?

I feel your pain Bro, it must have been hard on you.

I think you’ll find most expats take a balanced view, seeing positives and negatives.

A result of the UK’s housing policy, nothing to do with how and why welfare works the way it does.

Nobody is asking you to accept blame. You might though pause to examine how much of the wealth of the UK was created by slavery. You might even spend a moment to think about the slavery that exists now in the UK, and elsewhere.

Let’s examine this a moment. So a couple with good well paying jobs have two children, they are earning good money and don’t need welfare. Then along comes a recession and they both lose their jobs and can’t find work that pays their bills, they take the work they can find, but what shall they do with the children they can no long wet afford? Send them to an orphanage, petition for the reintroduction of workhouses, or simply toss them out on the street? People’s personal situation frequently changes, in the UK’s economy that has over the past 40 years created the precariat, constantly moving in and out of poverty is a certainty of life.

You know an awful lot more about your neighbors than ever did I. Or perhaps not.

Trump was obviously laboring under the misunderstanding that the extreme rightwing Christian ideologues he was being fed to appoint to the USSC were to be put there for his benefit.

I’d be astonished if you’ve ever done any ‘Research’. Reading guff on the internet is not ‘research’ especially when a search algorithm is deciding what you get to see.

I suggest you read some litterateur and perhaps some poetry too.

‘Google is left wing’. My goodness.

Well, the inventors in the western history books are yes. But how much around us in life today was invented before the first history books were written?

Because it’s a reliable source with that offers reporting on a broad spectrum of subjects. That said you’ll not find much discussion of what dress some tv star wore last night, or anything on the lover’s tiff going on between someone who was once in a girl band.

And the papers with the widest readership are?

I didn’t give any Guardian sources, so why your fixation with the Guardian? Privatizing the NHS by stealth: https://www.counterfire.org/articles/opinion/23459-taking-our-health-by-stealth-the-truth-about-nhs-privatisation Right to buy and housing crisis: https://cles.org.uk/blog/to-fix-englands-housing-crisis-scrap-right-to-buy/ Apprenticeships: https://www.academia.edu/7606267/The_decline_of_apprenticeship_training_in_Britain Final salary pensions closing: https://intelligent-partnership.com/hundreds-of-gold-plated-final-salary-pension-schemes-close/ Neoliberalism and corporate power: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1024529420910382 Should be enough reading for you.

And there’s your best response. You haven’t challenged a single thing I said, you just baselessly label it ‘Guardian Rubbish’ and ‘fake events’, despite I and many others remembering these events.

Perhaps you’d like to give examples of which of the events I’ve referred to didn’t happen, or aren’t correct?

I wouldn’t say the UK is ‘Broken’ rather its bent and twisted. In the decades since 1979 (the advent of neoliberalism in the UK) the laws and regulations have been rigged in favour of the wealthy to the detriment of everyone else. The rail system, broken up, stripped of its assets and sold on for the profit of the few. Utility companies got the same treatment, and customers got massively increased bills. The public housing stock sold off and local authorities stripped of government funding so no replacement housing could be built, rigging the housing market in readiness for ‘buy yo let’, AKA placing private landlords in direct competition for ‘low cost housing units’ - jacking up the prices. Public housing policy designed, not to provide housing, but to prop up the price of an already over inflated market. Deregulation of the banking and financial systems, more asset stripping of industry. Lightly regulated Banks and the financial institutions gambling with customer’s money, knowing their gambles were underwritten by ‘too big to fall’ government backing, at cost to tax payers and a decade of ‘austerity’ that decimated public services. The UK’s world class system of Apprenticeships, wiped out, and with it a path to a decent life millions had made use of, denied their children and grandchildren. Workplace benefits stripped back, workplace pensions devalued and removed while state pensions pushed further back from people as they aged. The stealth privatization of the NHS, big announcements of increased funding, with the small print dictating the funds must be used to contract out services private companies. Dentistry practically out of reach for millions unless they can pay to private. GP appointments now a ‘promise to improve’ to a 2 week wait. Zero hour contracts, the gig economy, a precarious uncertainty for millions rather than a contract of employment. Deregulation for businesses while workers unions corralled with ever more laws to stop them representing their members. And then there’s the twist. People barely off the bottom rung, kicking those below them while fawning over those above. People giving up their rights and freedoms in favour of more neoliberalism, more power and wealth to the already wealthy, backing evermore cuts to welfare and of course blaming foreigners. The place is bent and bitterly twisted.

Gross generalizations your thing then.

"I've already said I'm sorry hundreds of times, and I'm done saying I'm sorry," You’re not done yet Jones, hand over $965,000,000.

I’m only surprised he figured out he should get out his camper before setting it aflame.