Posts by lvd 13 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2026
"who do you recommend we vote for?"
It's not up to me to tell anyone how to vote. Read the manifestos, look at each party's track record and decide for yourself if they're trustworthy. Then vote accordingly.
Or just blindly vote for whichever party your preferred daily rag and Twitter bots are shilling for. Which an awful lot of people will do.
"The fact is the whole establishment is rotten. It's not just the political parties."
And this is exactly the problem. Certainly since the seventies at least, we've seen an ever-widening gulf between the politicians and the plebs, with the whole rotten lot of them kowtowing to the wishes of the elite. The post-war consensus helped to paper over some of the cracks, but that's been steadily dismantled by both Labour and the Tories ever since Thatcher was elected. In Scottish Nationalist circles, it's not at all uncommon to hear the two parties described as being two cheeks of the same arse, and there's a lot of truth in that. Same playbook every time - blame the country's woes on militant unions, Europe, immigrants, small boats, Europe, benefit scroungers, immigrants, Europe, bloated nationalised industries, younger generations who haven't got jobs, EUROPE... those have been the main bogeymen that I can recall.
It's all complete deflection, of course, designed to distract from a venal, self-serving and greedy institution that couldn't care less about the electorate. Why would they, when all they have to do is promise the earth in the run-up to polling day and then ignore those promises once the results are in? It will need a party led by a charismatic visionary with the guts to make real changes to change that. I can go back as far as Ted Heath, and the only politicians I can think of who fitted that bill are Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Nicola Sturgeon. The first two developed God disease and Sturgeon's standing down in May.
Whether you loved them or loathed them, you can't deny they all made their mark but the establishment survived. Farage has no chance against that - he's just a gobshite who likes the sound of his own voice. The only thing he might do is provoke an uprising if he takes his fascism too far too quickly.
"Comparing someone to the Nazis is shameful.
You have no actual arguement [sic] so you result in calling people names. How fucking childish can you get"
Normally I would agree, particularly when it's just thrown about as a casual insult.
In this case, it's very different. ICE under Trump is following the Brownshirts' playbook to the letter. Granted, we haven't seen an equivalent of Kristallnacht or the Night of the Long Knives yet, but the intimidation tactics they're employing are straight from 1930s Germany. You can look forward with confidence to gangs of armed ICE thugs hanging round polling places in November and intimidating voters under the excuse of 'stopping the steal' or something.
So yes, calling Trump and his thugs Nazis is spot on.
"In 2023, an NHS England official likened patient data in the FDP to information in an online Microsoft Word document. They told The Register that the cloud operator has access to that document, but the user would not expect Microsoft to look at it."
"Would not expect..." Durr, this is Trump's politburo we're talking about here. If his apparatchiks want the data, they'll get it, no matter how many mealy-mouthed platitudes they lob at the UK government about security and separation and right-shored storage, yada yada.
I just don't get this weapons-grade stupidity. Just how naive are these people?
"USA could nuclearly disarm the UK over (a probably fairly short) time by simply no longer providing support or maintenance for the actual missiles
It would be nice to think that there's a bunch of Defence Science and Technology Laboratory boffins somewhere working quietly on the UK being able to do its own maintenance and store all the missiles over here. Were I the PM, that's the first thing I'd have instigated when the orange oaf was re-elected. Second thing would have been getting the Dreadnought boats altered to be able to carry French missiles as well as Trident and the third would be to talk to the French government about buying some.
But this is a British government we're talking about, so that probably hasn't even crossed Starmer's mind.
Not that I'm a fan of a nuclear Armageddon - I grew up during the Cold War - but the one thing the last few years have shown us is that the lout in the White House and the warmonger in the Kremlin only understand the use of force, or the threat thereof.
"They want their constitutional monarchy and democratic governance back."
They haven't had much of that since 1953. Since then, Iran's been ruled by a secular autocrat - the Shah - and then religious autocrats (the ayatollahs). And if the carnage unleashed by the orange oaf is anything to go by, they might not be too enamoured of US-style democracy either.
Interesting times, unfortunately.
