Comments by "Cinderball" (@cinderball1135) on "Will the government take back control?" video.

  1. [Mild rant!] I'm afraid I find it difficult to take people seriously when they dismiss Labour's defeat as being solely because they were "too left wing". It's grossly simplistic, and it glosses over the purpose of having multiple parties in the election. Why bother having two different parties at all, if both of them are vaguely centrist / right wing, and both broadly echo each other's policy positions? And what's this about Boris Johnson's government somehow being "moderate"? It's not. The only way you can present Johnson as a moderate is by ignoring 90% of what he says and does, and cherrypicking the bits you want to hear. The reality is that breaking off our ties with the EU without a deal is an incredibly extreme position, and one that even Nigel Flipping Farage wouldn't dare stand on, during the 2016 referendum campaign! I think right-wingers like him only make sense, if your memory and understanding of politics doesn't stretch back to the days before 2016. People like me who studied politics before Brexit was a glimmer in the mingy milkman's eye, will recognise a No-Deal scenario as a sudden and extreme divergence away from a course that we plotted nearly 50 years ago. There is nothing moderate about that. And that's before we mention the fact that for no readily apparent reason, the Conservatives have decided to go after child refugees' rights and protections. Like I say, no readily apparent reason - it's not as though they promised to do this in their manifesto, and literally nobody asked them to do this. They just seem to have plucked this idea out of thin air, and included it in their white paper, without the remotest consideration for the harm it might do. This is not what a Moderate would do. But hey, I suppose the purpose of panels like this is to get us discussing politics and engaging with other people's points of view, so mission accomplished. It's just a shame that people like Ollie are now considered part of the mainstream, instead of the right-wing kooks they really are.
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  2.  @MarshallLore  "Labour openly hate Britain" is not a fact - it's quite an extreme opinion that you'd only pick up from overdosing on far-right comment sections and tabloid media. Oh, and last I checked, China's Communist Party is Communist in name only. Their country is actually more of a mixture between kleptocracy and robber baron capitalism. I'm not surprised that Britain's lefties seem far-out compared to a country where the laws are so lax that copyright infringement is a major industry.
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  3. @wolf pup I don't think you read the substance of what I wrote then. I didn't dismiss Ollie as a right-wing kook because he said Labour has a lot of changes to make. I specifically called out the part where he accused Labour of being too left-wing - which is a familiar and overused talking point, which has almost risen to the point of being received wisdom - even though it's got very little relation to the truth. My entire point is that it wasn't just the deluge of policies that did it for Labour this time. It was also Corbyn being unpopular - AND their wishy-washy position on Brexit - AND their reluctance to tackle the Conservatives head-on in debates. It wasn't just one thing that went wrong. Ollie, however, decided to just hand-wave it as Labour being "too left wing" - and I find that to be reductive and patronising. That was my point.
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  4.  @danwiddon3854  I just want to put it down for the record that I'm not a fan of having just two major parties - I'd much prefer a more open system with multiple parties, like that of Germany. But under FPTP, a two-party system is the best we can hope for, and if the two parties are not going to adopt contrasting positions, then we haven't even got that.
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  5.  @MarshallLore  Merely venerating Mao does not make the CCP a left-wing party. I'm far more interested by a party's policies than its history - otherwise we might be deceived into thinking that the modern day Republican party is still a bastion of American liberalism. Whatever clothes it chooses to wear, China's government is actually more aggressively capitalist even than the Thatcherites of this country.
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