Comments by "Michael RCH" (@michaelrch) on "Channel 4 News" channel.

  1. IDS has gone from saying he'd never back the withdrawal agreement to backing it to now saying that the U.K. should vote it through then not honour it. What a shyster. His kind are why the U.K. is increasingly loathed abroad. Same for JRM. First he says he can't back the withdrawal agreement then he says he will so long as the DUP backs it, then he will if the DUP abstain, now he has just abandoned them and us voting for it anyway. Shyster, charlatan, arrogant fraud. The Brexiteers are full of lies, deceit, arrogance and bullshit. The idea that they are in this for the good of normal working people is a sick joke.
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  2. Better still, tax the oil and gas companies that are making record profits from these record high gas prices. There costs haven't changed a bit. They are sitting back and profiteering while everyone suffers. The head of BP actually called the company "a cash machine". And this is also the industry that is driving us headlong into a climate catastrophe.
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  3. You want a failed state on your doorstep?
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  4.  @BOUNCYwow  The private sector that created this problem and covered it up with massive misinformation campaigns for decades? That private sector? And yes, climate change is already an emergency. I don't know if you have been paying attention but half of Australia was on fire last year. There was a record number of hurricanes that caused a record amount of damage last year. The last 5 years are the hottest 5 years in recorded history. And our carbon emissions have to fall by 15% every year from here if we want a better than 50% odds of avoiding catastrophic warming of 2C. Your complacency only demonstrates your ignorance I'm afraid.
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  5. There a big difference between now and the 70s. In the 70s, workers had power and strong unions. Inequality was much lower then. Now, after 40 years of neoliberalism, unionisation is much lower, workers have much less power vs bosses and inequality is much higher. This is like the 1930s, not the 1970s. Which btw is why fascism is such a threat now.
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  6.  just ask  No, I didn't say that and I don't think or act that way. I have given up plenty so far. Let's see if you have. I gave up eating all animal products because they emit far larger amounts of CO2 and cause far more environmental destruction than plant-based foods. My family stopped flying in 2016 because it is terrible for emissions. We sold our second car and our last car was an EV. We try to buy everything we need second hand and have otherwise cut down on our consumption to just things we need. I only mention this, not because I think it makes me look good - the fact that I eat a plant-based diet probably makes you think even less of me (though you might consider why that is) - but to make a point that I am more than willing to follow through with my own behaviour. But I also know that my personal impact is tiny and the way that our economy works is, for a large part, not driven by personal choices, especially for people with limited means. It is driven by what industrial corporations offer at the lowest prices. And that is not something that consumers control. It is what the structure of our markets controls, and those markets are created and regulated by governments. So until governments take firm action to make the clean, sustainable choices the most attractive and the cheapest, then the dysfunctional market, in combination with profit-seeking corporations, will ensure that we fail to address this crisis, and we all lose, starting with the poorest and ending up with us. Which by the way, has been happening under our noses for the last 10-20 years.
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  7.  @oldineamiller9007  You're making yourself sound like a fool now. If you cannot show peer reviewed published science to back your position then you have nothing. Go back to your safe space on WUWT.
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  8. Corbyn therapist It's basically impossible to go bankrupt by investing in infrastructure and education. They generate economic activity and tax revenue.
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  9. 💯 spot on mate. Trouble is people just don't realise how destructive the animal ag industry is. They don't know that the feed for their beef, chicken and pork is coming from fields that used to be Amazon rainforest a couple of years ago, or that the science is now unequivocal that the only route to a sustainable food system means dramatically reducing meat intake. FWIW the EAT Lancet study showed that the maximum sustainable amount of annual meat intake is 16Kg per year. In the U.K. the average intake in 2017 was 82Kg! We really need to make routine consumption of meat a thing of the past. Our descendants will struggle to eat at all if we don't.
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  10. It is just evolution in action. This happens to all bacteria and viruses, at different rates depending on the genes in the germ. Flu evolves every year, which is why we have new vaccines every year. And when viruses are living in millions of people, they have a lot of opportunities to evolve a beneficial mutation - beneficial to the them, not us of course.
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  11. suroj What a short/selective memory you have. Here are a selection of quotes from Brexiteers prior to the referendum that show that they promised an extremely comprehensive deal including Farage in favour of the Norway model which includes free movement! "There will be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside" David Davis 10 October 2016 "The day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want" Michael Gove 9 April 2016 "Getting out of the EU can be quick and easy – the UK holds most of the cards" John Redwood July 17 2016 "The free trade agreement that we will have to do with the European Union should be one of the easiest in human history" Liam Fox 20 July 2017 "Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market" Daniel Hannan MEP "Only a madman would actually leave the Market" Owen Paterson MP, Vote Leave backer "Wouldn't it be terrible if we were really like Norway and Switzerland? Really? They're rich. They're happy. They're self-governing" Nigel Farage, Ukip leader "The Norwegian option, the EEA option, I think that it might be initally attractive for some business people" Matthew Elliot, Vote Leave chief executive "Increasingly, the Norway option looks the best for the UK" Arron Banks, Leave.EU founder
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  12.  @artuselias  that's a sign of a failed voting system. In a working system, people know that every vote counts the same.
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  13. The Earth will go on. But without stable climate and a food supply, we won't. And the collapse will be unimaginably horrible.
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  14.  @cinderball1135  No he doesn't at all. He is behind Johnson in most metrics including the most important one, approval.
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  15. It seems like every time the government sees an environmental crisis it thinks, "what can we do to make this worse?"
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  16. This guy is 1000% right. As soon as you realise that we don't have any kind of metaphysical free will (which I think is a hangover of religious moral systems), then our criminal justice system makes no sense at all. People will behave as their genetics and past experiences determine. Stopping crime should start with avoiding the conditions and incentives that drive people to crime.
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  17. No, it's a very wealthy nation. But no one can protect their country against climate chaos. It is far more powerful than we are.
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  18. At 35 billion km across, this monster is 4 times the diameter Neptune's orbit 😳
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  19.  @franceleeparis37  Child poverty has ballooned under the Tories. Food bank usage has gone from nothing to feeding more people than MacDonalds. Universal credit was cut last year and it will fall by 5% in real terms this year.
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  20. The hasbara bots are hard at work in the comments I see...
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  21. Suie D Well I'm afraid that Trump is the primary representative of the US on the world stage. His humiliation humiliated the USA as a whole. They elected him after all.
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  22. It's their property. They are worried about losing money.
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  23.  @lnteIIigence  It's not inevitable. It's the predictable result of pumping billions of tonnes of pollution into the atmosphere every year. We have the option to stop doing that. The world has never seen climate change like this - not in the geological record. Let me put this in perspective for you. 252 million years ago, when the early dinosaurs were just developing, there was an event which released huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. The temperature rose 16C - mainly due to volcanic eruptions and the underground burning of coal. 94% of species were wiped out. Here is the salient fact. We are currently putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere 10 times faster than during that event. We have put ourselves on this track. Our pollution and destruction of the natural world is literally causing a mass extinction event. It's not a coincidence that we are here. We live in a late stage capitalist society that has devised the means of its own destruction. This is the result.
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  24. And that is also dying thanks to heating and acidification of the oceans.
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  25. Slaine Saxon I might lose my job if there is no deal. Not so great for me and my kids.
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  26. #DontPayUK ✊
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  27.  @paulwei6596  it's called framing. The discussion is immediately framed in the context of a hostile China potentially going to war with the US. Never mind the fact that it's the US that has its warships off the coast of China, that it's the US that is sending senior legislators to Taiwan when it knows how inflammatory that it, when it's the US that is constantly talking about the military threat of China to the world even though the US has 800 overseas bases, spends 8x what China spends on defence and has been at war overseas for all but 20 years of its history...
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  28.  @JB27888  People on low incomes pay almost no tax as it is. Talk of tax cuts is to attract the upper middle class and property owners. This has been Tory orthodoxy forever. The economic issues for low paid workers are low wages and in-work benefits. 40% of people on universal credit are working full time. So when the Tories cut UC £1000 a year, nearly half the people that hit were working. And these people are disproportionately in the communities that the government has been promising to level up. As for people in benefits, they are seeing a real terms 8% cut in their already tiny incomes. The best thing for those on low wages and who aren't working would be mich higher minimum wages a much more redistributive state - ie higher taxes on the rich and business and better and expanded public services to reduce the cost of living.
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  29.  @ilsesprecher7221  We have engineered the climate by filling it with greenhouse gases. HAARP and the sun are irrelevant. In fact solar activity has been going down while the planet has been warming over the last 40 years.
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  30. Well, on the flip side, if their vehicle is a hazard to life (locally and at a planetary scale), maybe other people have a right to self defence.
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  31.  @tombartram7384  the UN convention on refugees provides the right for refugees to apply for refuge in any country they choose for the obvious reason that if they couldn't then the only countries taking refugees would be those bordering conflict zones. You obviously don't want Britain to take any people seeking refuge. Even though it's a system that Churchill helped setup after WW2 to avoid another holocaust. Just say so.
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  32. We don't just depend on the oxygen from the Amazon. We depend on its capacity to absorb CO2. This is why animal agriculture is so destructive. It requires ever more land, meaning catastrophic deforestation and habitat destruction. There is no bigger cause of deforestation than farming animals.
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  33. It was so obvious last year, when Johnson was trying to sell his skinny Brexit deal with the promise of a great trade deal to come, that all the Tories really wanted was a no-deal hard Brexit, just a year later. Now, after 8 months of deadly incompetence over Covid, it comes as not even a vague surprise that they were lying through their teeth about their desire to, and chances of getting a trade deal.
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  34. @mediastudiesnetwork safety from who?
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  35. 💯
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  36. Israel is a terrorist state and while our government supports them, they make us all complicit in their disgusting crimes.
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  37. Remember, if this deal is signed, we have 14 months to negotiate trade deals with the 60+ countries that the EU already has comprehensive deals with, including Japan, Canada, Korea and most of South America. And worldwide, trade deals typically take about 7 YEARS to negotiate... Oh, plus, we have to do a deal with the EU itself during that time - a deal that has to be ratified by every single EU nation, right down to the regional council of Wallonia. "Bonne chance avec ça" as Barnier might say...
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  38. There will be nothing “glorious” about Brexit. There never could have been. It’s utterly ignominious. Britain has never looked so tragic and pathetic. All this drivel 2 years after the referendum and 15 months after Article 50. Brexiteers have no plans and never had any. They never had a way to get out of EU institutions while avoiding a catastrophic no deal. 42% of Leave voters thought that remaining in the Single Market was more important than reducing immigration, along with 94% of remainers - adding up to 66% of voters. Brexiteers are now leading us to no deal which couldn’t be further from what people actually thought they would get. THIS is the betrayal.
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  39. Fallout -Clash of Clans I'm afraid not. The deal was passed into law in January when Johnson had a stonking majority. Isn't it obvious that he just cannot honour a commitment? Kinda reminds me of his many children by many women that he ran away from...
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  40. At least Die Linke have some serious policies.
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  41. You only say that because you have no appreciation of just how seriously we have fucked the planet we live on. Literally every important indicator of the state of our environment is in the red, and we are constantly making it worse, faster and faster.
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  42. TheShepTV I agree it's a clumsy wording but he is not wrong on the point. The relationship of the mainland with Ireland has something that the political class had consistently neglected and often got horribly wrong for centuries. London has consistently not treated NI as a full part of the union. London often has acted as if it wished that Ireland would just either be quiet or go away. This is the sense in which Ireland has "haunted the UK".
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  43. NI is the same as income tax except the rich pay next to nothing over £50k of income. It's the worst possible tax to use to pay for pay for this policy. Because, the Tories. Obviously. 🤮
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  44. I agree with pretty much all your sentiments there. Except one. This IS capitalism. This end state of capitalism is built into the system itself. It concentrates wealth and power inexorably. That process is intrinsic to the system. It systematically exploits works and accrues the value that they create to an ever smaller group of capitalists who gain such market dominance and such dominance of the organs of our democracy that they create their own destruction. They render the working class poorer and poorer until the workers cannot even create the demand to keep the economy going. What we are seeing now is a repeat of the 1920s and 30s but with one awful exception. The destruction is not limited to our society now. It encompasses the whole natural world. The system is now so big that it has expanded beyond the boundaries that our finite planet sets. And all the while money and power continue to accrue to a tiny elite who are oblivious to the planetary catastrophe that is on our path. You are right. This system has had its day. This rotten, unjust and destructive system must end soon, or else everything will.
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  45.  @martingibbons7070  Your wages would be even lower if these unions didn't exist and do what they do to support their members. Dont blame them. They aren't your enemy. The bosses who drive down wages and extract ever bigger profits are. Join a union. Fight for what's rightfully yours.
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  46. Improve your health. Stop cruelty to animals. Save the planet. Switch to a whole food plant based diet. You will never hear this from politicians as they are too scared of the farm lobby but the reality is that you can lose weight and dramatically reduce the risk of conditions like heart disease and diabetes by cutting out animals from you diet. "Both clinical trials and observational research indicate an advantage to adoption of PBDs for preventing overweight and obesity and promoting weight loss. PBDs may also confer higher levels of diet quality than are observed with other therapeutic diet approaches, with similar levels of adherence and acceptability. " https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5466943/ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth
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  47. 6:30 the CST is a charity run by Gerald Ronson - one of the Guiness 4 convicted of fraud, and another multimillionaire businessman Lloyd Dorfman. 🤔 Is it conceivable that their input is not 100% unbiased when it comes to Labour?
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  48. Said no science anywhere.
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  49. Evidently Johnson got a late night call from some food industry lobbyists 🤑
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  50. @JesusisKing indeed. New labour were likes pigs at the trough. And starmer has packed his team with the worst of that crop of shysters.
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