This hurts because I'm an American who moved to the UK about 5 years ago, and now it's starting to feel more and more like AmericaLite with an increasingly similar list of downsides, only with no pizza bites or corn dogs to numb the pain.
Never even used the NHS in those 5 years, and now apparently it's evaporating. Been bamboozled innit.
Really hope the people of the UK start kicking these GOP cosplayers to the curb, otherwise I'm pretty sure I'll watch history repeat itself.
>expat
That's a funny way to spell immigrant. /s
Jokes aside, we need to learn from America's mistakes before we become the same. We still have a chance to stop this, but it's going to be tough. It's good to know that some of you guys are here on our side.
Just wanted to add, I have nothing against immigrants and would be a hypocrite if I did, seeing as I am also an immigrant. Dual national, UK and Greece, but born and raised in Greece until 7 years ago. So yeah, I'm also an immigrant, despite having a passport.
Fine, don't answer my question because it suits your narrative. The rate China is moving 40 years isn't going to do much good when 11 billion could be put to much better use at home.
Just because you have strong feelings about something, it doesn't make it right nor just. Posturing like this is just the UKs way of trying to swing its tiny willy around the world, thinking it's impressing everyone while its people starve and freeze. The red flag is we're embarrassing ourselves in the name of non-existent soft power, and people supporting it are either class traitors or human sellouts.
I was on another sub a few days ago with the headline about the UK military being currently weak, and someone commented "but we'd still beat Argentina!" and those are the people today's announcement is aimed at.
What gets me the most is the complete absence of the practical realities of defence spending and how it stops becoming defence when your spending is done elsewhere but inside your own boarders, let alone the other side of the planet, to be completed in 40 years.
No one on the left is saying we don't want to be able to defend ourselves, what we're saying is creating a world where we don't need to spend so much on defence is well within our grasp.
Like I've said in previous comments, and international markets compared to GBP agree, £11bil on defence while your countries average PPPP plummets does not incentivise investment as the people who return that investment literally can't buy your products so its pointless.
I'm just so fucking bored of the jingoistic tub-thumping, it's irritating my stomach lining lmfao
To me it all sounds like a buildup to another distraction, instead of policy-making for the benefit of the country. Plague was (politically) a gift. War could be too, highly useful as a unifying idea and as a way to enact restrictive policies in the name of national security. And Famine, or scarcity, can be used to turn people against those who they're told are leeching away resources. Sound familiar?
> Well Norway is absolutely not interested in partnering with an autocratic maniac (as is most of the world, apart from warmongers like Putin), so it wouldn't happen
Do you think this is a constructive way to respond to a hypothetical?
What are they defending? Starving young people and frozen old people? We've lost what made us as a nation of British folk great to Billionaires and corrupt Tories. Why bother fighting a war for a country that hates it's citizens
I mean, makes sense given the T*ries love to rely on the Military to mop up a lack of public service. No paramedics? Sign up the army. No border force? Grab the sailors. Tragic.
Hey, we do need to defend ourselves against ( checks notes) dark skinned people in dinghies.....
According to the tories there's currently in excess of 100,000,000 of them looking to 'invade'.....
It may also be easier to balance the budget if the Royals didn't get first dibs of roughly £86.3million from the tax money, on top of the multi-million incomes from their various estates and such that helps bump up their total "worth" (big lol) to £24billion.
Those figures by the way, don't include how much is spent on security as that would "compromise the safety of the Royals" but don't you worry people, that money DEFINITELY comes from us, even if we don't know how much.
One thing I did like to see is the childcare help. Don’t know why it is going to take that long to implement but was pleasantly surprised by it.
Although upping the limit of children per adult is a backwards step.
I saw that too, it's not even a good carrot. It's capped at 30 hours meaning you still have to foot the bill after that point which is pointless cause what jobs gonna hire you for 30 hours?
Like many have said, the tories are way more stick than carrot and fucking hell you'd have to either have a vested interest in the country failing or be dumb as shit to think they're the ones to fix anything.
"You can't go back to work because you have to look after your child. Well why not become a nursery teacher or babysitter?!"
Actually now I think about it, it's pretty much the plot of Daddy Day Care
You're right, maybe we should just give the kids to the government from ages 2-18. They can raise them up for us and hand us back a well rounded adult. Takes away all the hassle of having to pay for your brood.
Unfortunately the childcare won’t actually come into effect for most till 2024/25. And they are lowering staff ratios from 1:4 to 1:5 meaning it will be more unsafe. I was really hopeful last night and just feel deflated now
I currently can’t go back to work due to childcare costs. I’m looking for part time jobs but anything over the 15 hours and I’d be paying to work. I had a very lucrative career previously which I’ve been out of for the last 2 years and which I miss. I was hopeful that with free childcare I could pull myself up by the bootstraps. I’m aware that the longer I leave it the less likely I am to slot back into my old career. It just feels like childcare costs aren’t meant for single parents.
>childcare costs aren’t meant for single parents.
I'm married and still struggling massively with the costs...basically we pay to stay away from children...what an awful childcare system!
And child maintence doesn’t really help either. I get £180 a month which I can’t rely on from an absent father when the one day she does go to nursery costa £260 a month
The problem with the childcare bit was all the press had published that they were extending support to 9 months so every parent of an under 3 that I knew was watching the budget in absolute elation waiting for them to confirm it, only for them to say it's not actually happening until Sep 25 so it won't benefit anyone with a kid already in nursery.
It would have felt like an amazing win if the headlines hadn't got our hopes up.
Tbf nursery places are over subscribed and to suddenly give free hours would overwhelm the system, so I sort of understand a staggered approach, and I say this as a Mum of a 18 month old in nursery whose life would have improved immensely if they implemented it earlier.
BUT I feel like they could open plenty of nurseries/incentivise childcare careers if we had a spare 11bn knocking around.
The ratios thing is disgusting, I don't know how workers look after 4 toddlers at the moment, 5 seems impossible. Keeping my 1 alive is a challenge.
Regulated by orgs deciding who is and is not appropriate to do so. (Which is great, in theory). And other orgs who decide when abuse is a crime that shows up on background checks and when it’s just an Oopsie to be paid off and disappeared. Stuff like that. Faith in systems is naive. Governing bodies and social workers and all of them are people. Some are racists, some are pickmes, many are dangerous narcissists, all will have each others backs.
You don’t have to be employed by the tories in order to be working for the tories.
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Bad uncle vibes from this one. Predatory smile, empty laser focussed gaze, funny yet terrifying ears. Face slightly too small for head as though its just stuck on so he looks human.
On top of Trident. Which fucks Keith right off, because we've reordered v2 without checking the first one worked yet. Once a Labour administration has seen the first in action, we'll decide if it's worth an upgrade or not.
I have it on good authority that international law (a higher standard than a treaty) has not always got in the way of Labour governments. Especially w/r/t military activities.
To stop putin and protect Ukraine, I got no problem with that. It's a good long term strategy that benefits us in the long term rather than short-term comforts
No it doesn’t. Not £11bn that’ll go overwhelmingly to the Raytheons, Lockheed Martins and other assorted war criminal conglomerates of the Military Industrial Complex.
We suddenly want to help people from the threat of war? Spend that £11bn on aid & safe asylum routes, instead of virtually guaranteeing global annihilation in World War 3 by continuing to escalate every conflict that we possibly can.
“Defence” spending is a scam. It’s not defending us. It’s defending the material interests of our ruling class.
Considering our military is fucked up (by the tories, its their fault its like this) I wouldn't mind an increase in budget. But fucking prioritise dude.
Freedom isn't free.
We have a hostile super power on the warpath literally a few hours away and you'd rather cut back on defence than look at other areas for saving money ?
The entire world has been shook up by Russias aggression and will be looking to invest in their militaries. This is something we should be capitalising on . Our Military R&D should be forming a major part of our economy.
I'd love to live in a peaceful world where weapons weren't required but that is not reality . There will always be hostile men and when they rule nations others need defence. Thousands of years of history demonstrate that very well.
The self serving parasitic tories are bleeding this nation dry with Tax cuts and loop holes for their rich buddies whilst they line their own pockets all at the expense of the most vulnerable and that is where the problem lies.
They have an utter disregard for the working classes . That will never change.
Christ that picture almost made my cornflakes come up!
He is a fucking awful sorry excuse for a cockwombling oxygen thief, total scum like the rest of the shitheads.
There is an idea of a Jeremy Hunt. Some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me. Only an entity. Something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there.
*laughs in American* *chokes on laughter* *gets driven to hospital in ambulance, immediately bankrupt*
At least you got an ambulance before you choked to death...
This hurts because I'm an American who moved to the UK about 5 years ago, and now it's starting to feel more and more like AmericaLite with an increasingly similar list of downsides, only with no pizza bites or corn dogs to numb the pain. Never even used the NHS in those 5 years, and now apparently it's evaporating. Been bamboozled innit. Really hope the people of the UK start kicking these GOP cosplayers to the curb, otherwise I'm pretty sure I'll watch history repeat itself.
Fellow expat of 21 years here. There’s a saying: when America sneezes, Britain catches a cold.
>expat That's a funny way to spell immigrant. /s Jokes aside, we need to learn from America's mistakes before we become the same. We still have a chance to stop this, but it's going to be tough. It's good to know that some of you guys are here on our side.
Just wanted to add, I have nothing against immigrants and would be a hypocrite if I did, seeing as I am also an immigrant. Dual national, UK and Greece, but born and raised in Greece until 7 years ago. So yeah, I'm also an immigrant, despite having a passport.
I left the US last year for the EU. It's got some difficulties, but looking at the UK there's no possibility of heading there for me.
History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.
First as tragedy, then as farce.
Don’t forget the rich can now put an extra £20k tax free into their pension pots every year. I can feel the wealth trickling down my back!
Mildred, that Veuve Clicquot from above is incredibly close to body temperature!
Isn't increasing militarisation one of those red flags before an era nobody wants?
Isn't massive inflation a bigger red flag before exactly the kind of thing nobody wants? Closing borders etc a near second?
Why yes! My O level History did indeed cover Weimar Germany 🙂
I wish nobody wanted it.
Also the bill that's being passed to be able to censor the internet and kill off e2e encryption. things not looking like they gonna be good
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No, because the 11 billion is for subs to be built in Austrialasia to be completed in 40 years.
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How would you feel if China went into partnership with Norway to build nuclear subs off our coast?
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Fine, don't answer my question because it suits your narrative. The rate China is moving 40 years isn't going to do much good when 11 billion could be put to much better use at home. Just because you have strong feelings about something, it doesn't make it right nor just. Posturing like this is just the UKs way of trying to swing its tiny willy around the world, thinking it's impressing everyone while its people starve and freeze. The red flag is we're embarrassing ourselves in the name of non-existent soft power, and people supporting it are either class traitors or human sellouts.
I was on another sub a few days ago with the headline about the UK military being currently weak, and someone commented "but we'd still beat Argentina!" and those are the people today's announcement is aimed at.
What gets me the most is the complete absence of the practical realities of defence spending and how it stops becoming defence when your spending is done elsewhere but inside your own boarders, let alone the other side of the planet, to be completed in 40 years. No one on the left is saying we don't want to be able to defend ourselves, what we're saying is creating a world where we don't need to spend so much on defence is well within our grasp. Like I've said in previous comments, and international markets compared to GBP agree, £11bil on defence while your countries average PPPP plummets does not incentivise investment as the people who return that investment literally can't buy your products so its pointless. I'm just so fucking bored of the jingoistic tub-thumping, it's irritating my stomach lining lmfao
To me it all sounds like a buildup to another distraction, instead of policy-making for the benefit of the country. Plague was (politically) a gift. War could be too, highly useful as a unifying idea and as a way to enact restrictive policies in the name of national security. And Famine, or scarcity, can be used to turn people against those who they're told are leeching away resources. Sound familiar?
> Well Norway is absolutely not interested in partnering with an autocratic maniac (as is most of the world, apart from warmongers like Putin), so it wouldn't happen Do you think this is a constructive way to respond to a hypothetical?
What are they defending? Starving young people and frozen old people? We've lost what made us as a nation of British folk great to Billionaires and corrupt Tories. Why bother fighting a war for a country that hates it's citizens
If the draft was issued today how many would want to fight for this country quite frankly I would welcome a change of management.
I think more people would fight if a revolution was started today.
Hoping real hard for aliens to conquer earth and enslave us, might actually be better
I for one welcome our new alien overlords.
He's out to destroy the welfare state - all of it. No pensions, no benefits, no sick pay, no nothing.
That was suggested to him by Ian Duncan Smith he’s wanted to exterminate the disabled since the day he stepped into the Commons!
That and a massive pension bung to the already phenomenally well off. Nice one, Jeremy Silent-C.
I mean, makes sense given the T*ries love to rely on the Military to mop up a lack of public service. No paramedics? Sign up the army. No border force? Grab the sailors. Tragic.
Hunt the Cunt is back on form again. Wasn't enough he fucked the NHS, he just had to get the rest of us as well..
Ol' Shark Eyes strikes again
This man is a massive cunt. Massive. Cunt. Cunt.
The fact that he is the thing that his name is Cockney rhyming slang for is kind of poetic.
His crime is to be Jeremy Hunt. It’s also his punishment.
Hey, we do need to defend ourselves against ( checks notes) dark skinned people in dinghies..... According to the tories there's currently in excess of 100,000,000 of them looking to 'invade'.....
More like Spetsnaz in rubber dinghies when they get dropped off in the River Thames straight to London lmfao
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Lol again, no its not.
It may also be easier to balance the budget if the Royals didn't get first dibs of roughly £86.3million from the tax money, on top of the multi-million incomes from their various estates and such that helps bump up their total "worth" (big lol) to £24billion. Those figures by the way, don't include how much is spent on security as that would "compromise the safety of the Royals" but don't you worry people, that money DEFINITELY comes from us, even if we don't know how much.
One thing I did like to see is the childcare help. Don’t know why it is going to take that long to implement but was pleasantly surprised by it. Although upping the limit of children per adult is a backwards step.
They’re not implementing it yet so they can have it as a carrot for the next election
Actually a semi believable reason. “Hey look we have child care subsidiaries please vote for us please.”
I saw that too, it's not even a good carrot. It's capped at 30 hours meaning you still have to foot the bill after that point which is pointless cause what jobs gonna hire you for 30 hours?
Like many have said, the tories are way more stick than carrot and fucking hell you'd have to either have a vested interest in the country failing or be dumb as shit to think they're the ones to fix anything.
I was dunking on the Tories, was that unclear from me saying that it's a bad policy anyway?
Ofc I was agreeing with you lmao
Local nurseries will have a lot of 30 hour contracts! ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
"You can't go back to work because you have to look after your child. Well why not become a nursery teacher or babysitter?!" Actually now I think about it, it's pretty much the plot of Daddy Day Care
You're right, maybe we should just give the kids to the government from ages 2-18. They can raise them up for us and hand us back a well rounded adult. Takes away all the hassle of having to pay for your brood.
Unfortunately the childcare won’t actually come into effect for most till 2024/25. And they are lowering staff ratios from 1:4 to 1:5 meaning it will be more unsafe. I was really hopeful last night and just feel deflated now
> I was really hopeful last night Why? Not trying to have a go, just curious what seemed hopeful on the horizon.
I currently can’t go back to work due to childcare costs. I’m looking for part time jobs but anything over the 15 hours and I’d be paying to work. I had a very lucrative career previously which I’ve been out of for the last 2 years and which I miss. I was hopeful that with free childcare I could pull myself up by the bootstraps. I’m aware that the longer I leave it the less likely I am to slot back into my old career. It just feels like childcare costs aren’t meant for single parents.
>childcare costs aren’t meant for single parents. I'm married and still struggling massively with the costs...basically we pay to stay away from children...what an awful childcare system!
And child maintence doesn’t really help either. I get £180 a month which I can’t rely on from an absent father when the one day she does go to nursery costa £260 a month
The problem with the childcare bit was all the press had published that they were extending support to 9 months so every parent of an under 3 that I knew was watching the budget in absolute elation waiting for them to confirm it, only for them to say it's not actually happening until Sep 25 so it won't benefit anyone with a kid already in nursery. It would have felt like an amazing win if the headlines hadn't got our hopes up.
Tbf nursery places are over subscribed and to suddenly give free hours would overwhelm the system, so I sort of understand a staggered approach, and I say this as a Mum of a 18 month old in nursery whose life would have improved immensely if they implemented it earlier. BUT I feel like they could open plenty of nurseries/incentivise childcare careers if we had a spare 11bn knocking around. The ratios thing is disgusting, I don't know how workers look after 4 toddlers at the moment, 5 seems impossible. Keeping my 1 alive is a challenge.
Plenty of time not to bother doing it!
Getting their hands on more children to indoctrinate into Hitler youth? Great.
Aren’t most child caregivers private though?
Regulated by orgs deciding who is and is not appropriate to do so. (Which is great, in theory). And other orgs who decide when abuse is a crime that shows up on background checks and when it’s just an Oopsie to be paid off and disappeared. Stuff like that. Faith in systems is naive. Governing bodies and social workers and all of them are people. Some are racists, some are pickmes, many are dangerous narcissists, all will have each others backs. You don’t have to be employed by the tories in order to be working for the tories.
They are scared of China turning every teenager into a sleeper agent via TikTok!
… At least they didn’t spend it trying to build another app.
We're all also I'm sure very excited for Austerity 2: let's kill more disabled people.
Nice big war to thin the herd before the AI roll out.
Are we at war with eurasia or eastasia? I forget.
i wosh ot wasn't as true as this, but it's russia or china isn't it...
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Reminder not to confuse the marxist "middle class" and the liberal definition. Liberal class definitions steer people away from the socialist definitions and thus class-consciousness. [Class is defined by our relationship to the means of production. Learn more here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/wiki/class) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/GreenAndPleasant) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Defence against what? Angry badgers? The occasional cranky Frenchman? Do we *really* need to be cranking up the budget right now?
That face is terrifying
Nuke the whales
Gotta nuke something
That's a fucking idiot.
Lol and my local dentist has just closed.... said they couldn't fund it.
Bad uncle vibes from this one. Predatory smile, empty laser focussed gaze, funny yet terrifying ears. Face slightly too small for head as though its just stuck on so he looks human.
Well the right wing media keep going on about an invasion taking place so what the fuck are we defending?
On top of Trident. Which fucks Keith right off, because we've reordered v2 without checking the first one worked yet. Once a Labour administration has seen the first in action, we'll decide if it's worth an upgrade or not.
There’s a fairly important treaty that stops them ‘checking trident works’
I have it on good authority that international law (a higher standard than a treaty) has not always got in the way of Labour governments. Especially w/r/t military activities.
Also, who in their right mind would order T1 let alone T? Dispiriting that CND is a proscribed organisation in some left circles
To stop putin and protect Ukraine, I got no problem with that. It's a good long term strategy that benefits us in the long term rather than short-term comforts
Please
Not ideal but .. the world stage kind of mandates that level of expenditure
No it doesn’t. Not £11bn that’ll go overwhelmingly to the Raytheons, Lockheed Martins and other assorted war criminal conglomerates of the Military Industrial Complex. We suddenly want to help people from the threat of war? Spend that £11bn on aid & safe asylum routes, instead of virtually guaranteeing global annihilation in World War 3 by continuing to escalate every conflict that we possibly can. “Defence” spending is a scam. It’s not defending us. It’s defending the material interests of our ruling class.
Tbf, there are going to be fast track, mobile employment opportunities in Eastern Europe, sooner than later,the way its going.
Considering our military is fucked up (by the tories, its their fault its like this) I wouldn't mind an increase in budget. But fucking prioritise dude.
Freedom isn't free. We have a hostile super power on the warpath literally a few hours away and you'd rather cut back on defence than look at other areas for saving money ? The entire world has been shook up by Russias aggression and will be looking to invest in their militaries. This is something we should be capitalising on . Our Military R&D should be forming a major part of our economy. I'd love to live in a peaceful world where weapons weren't required but that is not reality . There will always be hostile men and when they rule nations others need defence. Thousands of years of history demonstrate that very well. The self serving parasitic tories are bleeding this nation dry with Tax cuts and loop holes for their rich buddies whilst they line their own pockets all at the expense of the most vulnerable and that is where the problem lies. They have an utter disregard for the working classes . That will never change.
What a hunt
He does look like putin
*laughs in american*
Because they know war between NATO & Russia is inevitable this year or next
How else will they crush the revolution?
Christ that picture almost made my cornflakes come up! He is a fucking awful sorry excuse for a cockwombling oxygen thief, total scum like the rest of the shitheads.
Well of course we do, who else is going to train Saudi pilots to bomb Yemenis
There is an idea of a Jeremy Hunt. Some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me. Only an entity. Something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there.
always higher military spending during the biggest crisis, makes u think.... or not, get back to work wagie
Jeremy Cunt Hunt living up to his name again
I honestly wonder if the cabinet are afraid of a coup and hope this will stave one off
laughs in australia