UK General Election 2019

[Greyblades]

Its a wierd statement to use as an example of antisemitism, any value judgement in it requires the reader to agree to bad connotations in the term "chase money" as opposed to positive ones, something the capitalist minded would take issue with.

[Furunculus]

LIES!

https://twitter.com/BeccyRyan/status...32664144601090

SO MANY LIES!!!

which is my gently made point about getting all worked up over politicians presenting their package in the most appealing light possible.

[Furunculus]

Its a wierd statement to use as an example of antisemitism, any value judgement in it requires the reader to agree to bad connotations in the term "chase money" as opposed to positive ones, something the capitalist minded would take issue with.

indeed, and somewhat hides the fact that sustained and ubiquitous anti-semitism over centuries has rather excluded jews from trades and guilds, leaving independent finance as a useful avenue of advancement beyond serf-like working of land.

[rory_20_uk]

I've seen this sort of poll before, and whilst this does indicate a certain level of racism there are acould of things to note:

1. 26% of Labour voters declined to answer.

2. 28% of Conservative voters declined to answer

3. 20% of Lib-Dems declined to answer.

4. Given the above there's a significant margin of error to the Con and Lab views, and this is probably confounded by the fact that Labour voters may feel group pressure to answer a certain way more so than Conservatives - especially when they know their party is getting hammered over the issue.

5. Whilst the averacious Jew is a nasty trope it's significantly less dangerous than the Rothschild Conspiracy, which is the more common form of Left-Wing antisemitism.

This isn't racism. Jews are not a race they are a religion - a matrilineal one which means in about 100 years the ethnicity of a Jew can change completely. Corbyn appears to be anti-Zionist since he is pro-Hamas who are also mainly ethnic Semites. Is criticising any facet of Israel somehow not allowed now? What about if the UK government had tackled the IRA the way Israel tackled uprisings? We blockade Ireland on the air, land and sea, we sent in tanks and troops and kill anything that looks like a threat and so on and so on. No, in fact the UK is still lambasted more for the acts they did which is nonsensical.

Viewing Jews as wanting to accrue money isn't always negative. Sikhs also as a cohort do so and like displaying wealth. Hell, I also like accruing money and am more focused than my siblings. I haven't had a day off work in over 4 years (I'm self employed). We are different, not right / wrong.

On the council tax, Labour's new manifesto proposes a second homes tax as "an annual levy on second homes that are used as holiday homes equivalent to 200% of
the current council tax bill for the property[...]" Elsewhere, I've found older reports that Labour was considering the replacement of council tax with property tax. Existing British property taxes include Blair's stamp duty on purchases of land and property, capital gains tax on sales thereof, income tax on income from property, inheritance tax (on global assets!), and annual tax on enveloped dwellings, which I don't understand well enough to summarize (it may have something to do with those rich foreigners). So a straight property tax on the value of land and property seems to be unknown in Britain, which is interesting.

But in the manifesto there's nothing about property tax, and the only other reference to council taxes is "giving councils new powers to tax
properties empty for over a year," which may or may not be related to the aforementioned second homes tax.
("The council tax database indicates that as of October 2018 there are 251,654 properties classed as ‘second homes’ for council tax purposes in England[...]")

I don't know, then, what the current Labour stance on the council tax is, or why they haven't committed to increasing bands. I doubt it has to do with a perception of electoral suicide in light of, you know, the entire rest of the manifesto.

Part of the purpose of nationalization (which is never named as such in the manifesto) is part and parcel with the overall program of decentralization. I guess that means local councils exercising much more decision-making over new and old infrastructure in their jurisdiction.

Increasing council tax on holiday homes is a good start... Note it is not second homes required for work, since that might affect MPs!
Gordon Brown always preferred stealth taxes that would bite in the future to visible ones in the present. And rather like how treating alcohol and tobacco in the same way as all other drugs and rating them according to their danger just isn't going to happen due to the past, the UK really has a fetish with homes and owning them and even somewhat redistributive taxes on homes is suicide - not to mention the much more extreme tax on land utility (the basic difference being the former is a tax on what is there now, and the latter is a tax on the potential of the land - so it helps optimise land usage at the expense of sentiment).

I think Labour realises that people are happy to advocate for "rich bastards" to loose their companies and for the State to grab companies but when it is something literally closer to home like the value of their house then the loss of money is much more real.

Nationalisation often leads to centralisation, not localisation. After all, before the railways were nationalised they were integrated companies and run in geographic areas which made sense - compared to the current split of the trains, the lines and the stations which makes no sense. Surely if decentralisation was the purpose, letting local government have control of different taxes would be the way to go rather than central government annexing companies.

[Montmorency]

What are the p values for the survey?

It's just a single survey, so it wouldn't contain any significance tests, right? But if you want a quick and dirty z-score between Conservatives and Labour over "Total yes" on that question, I got 8.8 for a p-value of < .00001.

But the best you can say absent those values is that conservative voters are somewhat more (not most) likely to agree with statements that are considered anti-Semitic.

I would be even more conservative and say it can only distinguish the selected groups on this one question, not overall likelihood to agree with anti-Semitic attitudes. The included total results from the previous such survey at least indicate stability in attitudes in the overall population (between samples). With more such questions on anti-Semitic attitudes it might become tempting to extrapolate. Here are the other questions in the survey and the party crosstabs:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

"Having a connection to Israel makes Jewish people less loyal to Britain than other British
people"."

	Con	Lab	LibDem
Total Yes	16	9	8
Total No	58	66	70

"Jewish people consider themselves to be better than other British people".

	Con	Lab	LibDem
Total Yes	14	11	8
Total No	58	64	66

"Compared to other groups, Jewish people have too much power in the media".

	Con	Lab	LibDem
Total Yes	15	11	11
Total No	54	56	63

"Jewish people talk about the Holocaust just to further their political agenda".

	Con	Lab	LibDem
Total Yes	13	8	7
Total No	69	74	76

"Jewish people can be trusted just as much as other British people in business"

	Con	Lab	LibDem
Total Yes	77	75	79
Total No	8	8	9

"I am just as open to having Jewish friends as I am to having friends from other sections of British society"

	Con	Lab	LibDem
Total Yes	91	92	93
Total No	4	2	0

The differences between Conservative and Labour (or LibDem) respondents on these questions is visibly much smaller. From this one survey you probably can't tell a great deal about the crosstab of three parties (Labour, Cons, LibDem) on anti-Semitic attitudes, or what it all means put together. The safest hypothesis is that there isn't a great deal of distinction between average partisans when it comes to anti-Semitism. Which is what I reported in my post above. !!!!!! (That means hearken.)

You might like to look at the study I linked in the post above, which is more substantial and rigorous in doing this sort of thing. I have described some of the results.

Its a wierd statement to use as an example of antisemitism, any value judgement in it requires the reader to agree to bad connotations in the term "chase money" as opposed to positive ones, something the capitalist minded would take issue with.

You are noticing that racial tropes are not rational. But this one is much older than capitalism.

LIES!

https://twitter.com/BeccyRyan/status...32664144601090

SO MANY LIES!!!

which is my gently made point about getting all worked up over politicians presenting their package in the most appealing light possible.

I have two questions about Neil's scenario (outside sources are solicited):

What is the basis of the calculation, and what is the prevalence of such financial arrangements that would be meaningfully affected by tax reform? I assume his scenario depends on elimination of the marriage allowance and taxing dividends as ordinary income. On dividends, "Labour will tax capital gains at the same level as income tax and abolish the lower income tax rate for dividend income." I note that currently most pensions and annuities are not taxed at all in the UK, and Corbyn does not intend to change that AFAIK, so if I have it right £2000 in dividends taxed as ordinary income would in fact incur zero liability because £2000 total taxable income would fall within the personal allowance (equivalent to the US standard deduction). I don't see then where Neil's figure of £400 tax liability could come from. There is a potential £250 loss from the elimination of the marriage allowance, not a new tax but a closing of a preference, but here we return to the second question of how many people affected, and for those what account for positive offset by new credits, allowances, and other increases in the manifesto.

Would definitely like to see the numbers, but I suspect Neil was trying to catch Corbyn with a real edge case. That would be fair enough if Corbyn has claimed for sure no one below a certain income threshold could possibly incur increased tax liability - but has he? For example, in Andrew Yang's Universal Income proposal, as it is currently structured a very small proportion of people currently living in poverty (correspondingly, an income under £14000 today is pretty well poverty) would see a decrease in their net incomes. This can hardly be called fatal, and to my knowledge Yang has never pretended that there is a direct monetary net benefit to exactly every citizen below a certain income.

This isn't racism. Jews are not a race they are a religion

Jews are functionally like a race.

pro-Hamas who are also mainly ethnic Semites.

It has long been accepted that "Semite" is synecdoche for Jew. It was a term that gained currency with respect to Germany's ethnic problems in the 19th century, and let me tell ya, there weren't many Arabs or Ugarites in 19th-century Germany.

Viewing Jews as wanting to accrue money isn't always negative. Sikhs also as a cohort do so and like displaying wealth. Hell, I also like accruing money and am more focused than my siblings. I haven't had a day off work in over 4 years (I'm self employed). We are different, not right / wrong.

I find it hard to believe that anyone in this thread could be having a hard time understanding what is meant by the stereotype of Jews and money. Greedy, usurious, swindling kikes? Ever read Merchant of Venice? Come on now.

Nationalisation often leads to centralisation, not localisation. After all, before the railways were nationalised they were integrated companies and run in geographic areas which made sense - compared to the current split of the trains, the lines and the stations which makes no sense. Surely if decentralisation was the purpose, letting local government have control of different taxes would be the way to go rather than central government annexing companies.

I won't to spend too much time looking into this right now - maybe @Idaho knows more - but here's McDonnell on nationalization: https://truthout.org/articles/democr...-21st-century/

Crucially though, for McDonnell, the task is bigger than just creating a few more worker cooperatives; the project for Labour in the 21st century is to articulate “how we can change our economy to suit our society, rather than changing society to suit our economy … We need to go much further than simply offering a defence of what we already have.” And such a vision should not just fall back on old models of centralized, technocratic state ownership, with all their well-documented flaws:

Nor can we simply demand top-down nationalisation as a panacea. The old, Morrisonian model of nationalisation centralised too much power in a few hands in Whitehall. It had much in common with the new model of multinational corporations, in which power is centralised in a few hands in Silicon Valley, or the City of London. It won’t work in a world in which technological change is providing opportunities to decentralise power.

Riffing off the above, it's as good a time as any to remind the reader that the private firm is indeed administered like a Communist dictatorship.

You may recall the thread where I described Monty's presentation of the history of racism in the US Army Air Force as "banal". What you might call "lazy" racism is everywhere, what Corbyn peddles is something rather more than that. It's not just the sideways look, the muttered word, it's not even the spitting and the crossing the street.

No, it's the racism of old men in back rooms talking about how to "solve" the "problem", how to "free" themselves from the pernicious "influence".

This guy thinks the murderous, all-encompassing apartheid of the white majority in mid-century America was "banal" and "lazy," but Corbyn pronouncing a name exactly how I would expect a British person to pronounce it is genocidal intent.

*spits*
*spits again*

Last night when interviewed by Andrew Neil Corbyn had visible difficulty condemning the Rothschild conspiracy as antisemitic. I find that significant given that he wrote a forward to Imperialism: A Study where he described the book as "controversial at the time" but also "basically right".

Do you believe writing a forward to a collection of Voltaire's works would make one an anti-Semite? Should we throw out the corpus of Gottlieb Frege, David Hume? Or should we contextualize it? Even a glance reveals that the book is not about Zionist conspiracies at all, but is a classic work of political science. In fact it contains more material on the inferiority of Africans and Asians, which you don't see fit to mention for some reason.

What gives away the game, PVC, is that instead of choosing to develop potentially-persuasive examples you breathlessly emphasize trivialities as compromising while turning to dismiss egregious real-world harms. How can this be interpreted as anything other than pretext?

That book blames World War I on the Rothschilds and other Jewish bankers - it asserts that they engineered the war so as to profit from the sale of armaments etc.

The book was published well before the Great War, and is about imperialism, capitalism, and mercantilism. You're not doing anything to restore confidence in your integrity here.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

This guy thinks the murderous, all-encompassing apartheid of the white majority in mid-century America was "banal" and "lazy," but Corbyn pronouncing a name exactly how I would expect a British person to pronounce it is genocidal intent.

*spits*
*spits again*

Sorry, no.

Ep-steen, also, Ross-child or perhaps Roth's-child. Anglicisation is the name of the game here, as it has been from the 19th Century onwards. To the extent that I hadn't even linked the name Epstein to Jewishness or Yiddish before Corbyn miss-pronounced it.

In any case, I didn't say it was "genocidal intent", I said it was a form of "othering" which recalls the Blood Libel. I'll thank you not to put words in my mouth.

Do you believe writing a forward to a collection of Voltaire's works would make one an anti-Semite? Should we throw out the corpus of Gottlieb Frege, David Hume? Or should we contextualize it? Even a glance reveals that the book is not about Zionist conspiracies at all, but is a classic work of political science. In fact it contains more material on the inferiority of Africans and Asians, which you don't see fit to mention for some reason.

We are not discussing Hobson's status as a generally terrible human being, which he was, we are discussing Corbyn's support for his work and the link to the Rothschild Conspiracy..

What gives away the game, PVC, is that instead of choosing to develop potentially-persuasive examples you breathlessly emphasize trivialities as compromising while turning to dismiss egregious real-world harms. How can this be interpreted as anything other than pretext?

The Book, the mural, Ken Livingstone, Naz Shah, othering Jews as Zionists with no concept or "English irony" or history, being in need of education, attending a commemoration for those who planned the Munich hostage-taking...

It's not one thing Monty, it's a litany of sins - were it only one, two, even three examples I might be persuaded it was bad judgement but there's always another one.

The book was published well before the Great War, and is about imperialism, capitalism, and mercantilism. You're not doing anything to restore confidence in your integrity here.

My mistake, he's referring to the Boer War. I confused the original work with later commentary. The point that it fed into the intellectual environment that precipitated the Holocaust remains valid. Further, a new edition was printed, with new introduction, in 1938.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

It's just a single survey, so it wouldn't contain any significance tests, right? But if you want a quick and dirty z-score between Conservatives and Labour over "Total yes" on that question, I got 8.8 for a p-value of < .00001.

Prima facia it seems significant (hardly surprising that folks closer to the reactionary end are somewhat more likely to be nativists etc.), but that stuff is really ordinal level data, not even interval Likert-style scaling. I don't think the Z-score really works there, as there really is no "mean" per se. I wish they'd put in 5-point Likert questions, then you could get a better significance approximation using interval level stats.

[rory_20_uk]

Jews are functionally like a race.

It has long been accepted that "Semite" is synecdoche for Jew. It was a term that gained currency with respect to Germany's ethnic problems in the 19th century, and let me tell ya, there weren't many Arabs or Ugarites in 19th-century Germany.

I find it hard to believe that anyone in this thread could be having a hard time understanding what is meant by the stereotype of Jews and money. Greedy, usurious, swindling kikes? Ever read Merchant of Venice? Come on now.
:

I don't think that Jews are functionally like a race. Ethiopian Jews are black for example. To make all Jews the same is again easier to homogenise them and treat a group as all the same.

I know that Semite has become a lazy term for being a Jew. I view it as extremely unhelpful - and assists those who wish to have anything anti-Israel as somehow anti-Jew. I think that the two should be clearly separated. Perhaps in 19th century Germany it make sense, but things have changed.

Wanting to have / accrue money is quite a way from being greedy, usurious swindling kikes. Again, this enables confirmation bias to link questions that could be taken as neutral to be a negative since more is being read into the interpretation.

I personally am anti-Zionist but I've nothing really against Jews or Semites as cohorts.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

I don't think that Jews are functionally like a race. Ethiopian Jews are black for example. To make all Jews the same is again easier to homogenise them and treat a group as all the same.

I know that Semite has become a lazy term for being a Jew. I view it as extremely unhelpful - and assists those who wish to have anything anti-Israel as somehow anti-Jew. I think that the two should be clearly separated. Perhaps in 19th century Germany it make sense, but things have changed.

Wanting to have / accrue money is quite a way from being greedy, usurious swindling kikes. Again, this enables confirmation bias to link questions that could be taken as neutral to be a negative since more is being read into the interpretation.

I personally am anti-Zionist but I've nothing really against Jews or Semites as cohorts.

Jewishness can function as an ethnic or religious identity. In the US it's much more strongly an ethnic identity - something reflected in the portrayal of Jews in American entertainment and also in Bernie Sanders' retort to one interviewer "Are you suggesting I'm white?" In the UK the situation is much more ambiguous because whilst Jews are seen as somewhat distinct (and are still portrayed this way sometimes) it's much more in the way that any other white British group, like Londoners or people from the West Country. Again, referring to political statements consider Ed Milliband's claim that he would be quote "The first Jewish Prime Minister" if he won the election - most people tend not to think of Benjamin Disraeli as Jewish because he was a practising Christian despite his being very openly Jewish, ethnically speaking.

None of which explains why Monty believes British people would pronounces Jewish names as though they were speaking Yiddish - especially given we anglicise everything, just ask my valet.*

*Yes Monty, I realise it was an early importation from French when the t was still sounded but we've deliberately not updated it in 500 years.

[Pannonian]

Johnson appears for as few PMQs as possible, refuses to appear for Commons committee, refuses to be interviewed by Neil after the others have done theirs, refuses to appear for multi-party debate, then the Tories complain that Channel 4 have deprived them of representation after they'd refused to expose Johnson to exposure.

Will PM Johnson be held accountable for anything? Will Tory voters care that the PM does not have to be held accountable?