peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
It’s not about drink, it’s about intelligent conversation from people who actually run businesses and understand the way of the world.....
Current Affairs The Conservative Party
- Thread starter Ashtonian
- Start date
- Status
It’s not about drink, it’s about intelligent conversation from people who actually run businesses and understand the way of the world.....
orchard
Player Valuation: £60m
"I am not even going to address the idiocy that the hon. Gentleman has just come up with. He has made a number of allegations, which I suggest he goes and makes elsewhere. I am simply going to say this: the Government have let a contract for which we will pay no money until and unless ferries are running. That is responsible stewardship of public money. On other matters, from the due diligence we have done, there is no reason to believe that anyone involved in this business is not fit to do business with the Government. I say this again: we are not spending money unless these ferries operate."
Which was always gonna happen. As a company you can't magic ferries in a few weeks. It takes planning and investment so for the government to change their mind at the last minute due to their incompetence...
Is your pub in Galt's Gulch Pete?
abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
Ayn Rand's Capitalist Paradise Is Now a Greedy Land-Grabbing Shitstorm
https://gawker.com/ayn-rands-capitalist-paradise-is-now-a-greedy-land-grab-1627574870
Atlas Shrugged readers remember Galt's Gulch as the rural refuge where Ayn Rand's Real Men of Genius spurned American socialism for their own anti-leftist paradise. Some inspired libertarians have set up a real-life Galt's Gulch in Chile. Unregulated capitalism, though, is presenting some problems!
In Rand's weighty tome, America's bravest, wisest industrialists and inventors—the kind of job creators we lowly leeches suck dry of lifeblood—quietly leave an increasingly collectivist and crumbling American society and follow their capitalist working-class hero, John Galt, to form a completely transaction-based community in the Western wilds.
Plenty of Rand-y acolytes have dreamed of fleeing Obama's (and Clinton's and Carter's and Johnson's and Kennedy's) America and entering the warm, dopamine confines of their own Galt's Gulch. Last year, one group appeared to have succeeded with a settlement in Chile—"a fully self-sustaining community" that would enable individualistic immigrants (with sufficient funds) to fully renounce "the oppression of the over-regulated, over-taxed, war-riddled and welfare-riddled society consuming the world." They take Bitcoin and everything.
But all is not so sweet. Wendy McElroy, a "Canadian individualist anarchist" of some note, bought a 1.25-acre plot in Galt's Gulch Chile last year, or so she thought. She wrote a blistering post Monday suggesting that the Real Men of Genius behind the settlement are grifters, or incompetents, or both:
The emailer was apparently an ex-employee who demanded payoffs from Galt's Gulch's two main developers. Which, according to McElroy, he got, after "many unpleasant details," and after GGC did get some land that included water rights. But then, the whole thing deteriorated into a power struggle and lawsuits over "maze-like transfers of cash and authority," and at some point McElroy learned that she didn't actually own her plot, because the development wasn't authorized to sell lots that small:
That silence you hear? That's the sound of Atlas shrugging.
The upshot, McElroy learned, is that Galt's Gulch also "owes hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to hardware stores [and] service providers" in the nearest town, "ordinary Chileans who are acutely harmed by the project's malfeasance."
Even so, GGC developers will still sell you a 1,200-acre "Master Estate" for a mere $500,000. As long as you're also willing to extend GGC developers a $2 million "Founders Club" loan along with that $500,000, which they'll totally pay back, they swear.
In other words, Galt's Gulch Chile sounds exactly like the sort of plan you would expect from a a bunch of fans of a crotchety old millionairess who wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness.
* * *
- "If only there were some sort of....."
- "Government???"
- "No!!!"
- "Regulations?"
- "...well... no...."
orchard
Player Valuation: £60m
"... we will pay no money until and unless ferries are running."
Indeed. I'd be amazed if that was ever true and that any commercial company worth their salt would agree to it.
orchard
Player Valuation: £60m
Well it was started in response to a legitimate question quite arrogantly in the commonz by a serving minister.
Whether a company would agree to such a contract, or what one considers reasonable is irrelevant.
Like I said, I suspect Chris Grayling was talking out of his bunghole. Whether deliberately or not I've no idea. I mean what ferry company is going to have a few spare ferries laying about just waiting to come to our rescue? Seems far more likely that they will have had to buy/rent new ferries at considerable cost, so it seems unlikely given the inherent uncertainty around Brexit that they wouldn't have included clauses in the contract in the event of the government pulling out. This is especially so as they're essentially doing an incompetent government a huge favour and the Tories were so desperate they turned to a company without any ferries at all.
Given that versus the desire for Grayling to present himself as slightly less incompetent than everyone thinks, I would be far more likely to believe he was making it up as he went along.
summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
That's Mervyn King, Baron King of Lothbury, with a 'pension pot' of 10 million pounds.
Thanks Pete. I didn't post it to mean to be insulting or overly dramatic, but there are severe structural difficulties facing the Conservative Party. They have now short, medium and long term difficulties piling up and a headless who is hopeless at both any kind of medium term strategising (and by this I mean often thinking beyond the next week) and a completely uncharismatic way of delivering her message.
That is not to say that a right wing party will not replace them. People are not suddenly going to become massively more left wing (I think the same polarisation that exists currently will continue) though there will certainly be some fragmentation. It;s interesting today, a right winger in the Daily Express stated he now regrets voting against electoral reform in 2012, I do wonder if this will start to get an echo chamber across the right of politics?
You look at what happened in the 90's re Europe to the Conservatives and they were nearly wiped out. You look what happened to the Lib Dems under Clegg during their great betrayal (and I suspect for Conservative voters this will be seen as a greater betrayal than what he did) and you factor in that the level of scrutiny is now far greater than in the 90's and it's hard to see them surviving.
For me they have looked at it all wrong. For a group of people who I have always had a political respect for in their ability to grasp the realities and pragmatism of politics I have to say I am astounded with how it's been handled/managed. The Conservative Party is the most successful party in European politics. It has rarely been a shambles, which makes this current episode all the more confusing.
It was always clear, from the outside that Brexit could never be all they wanted it to be. It couldn't be both Brexit and the Conservatives doing well. In all likelihood it had to be one or the other. They've wanted both and will likely get neither.
Farage grasped this. He quit UKIP shortly after. The party was destroyed really, he chose Brexit. As I've said it astounds me that they didn't recognise the rules of the game.
The issue does become though, given we have children starving, ethically how long can this government keep people living in abject poverty while finding money to cover for it's own incompetency. That is the debate in this instance. As a (fairly substantial I might add) tax payer I am disgusted by this and would like some sort of explanation, though I doubt we will get one. It's this level of arrogance from the Conservatives, in alienating people like myself that will see them out for a substantial amount of time.
They have been unbelievably bad and you would hope they're in the wilderness for a generation. You just wonder who might take their place. Brexit was designed to bury ukip but instead they have found a whole new audience.
Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, has been sacked over the Huawei leak.
www.bbc.co.uk
Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson sacked over Huawei leak
No 10 says Theresa May had "lost confidence in his ability to serve" in his role.
www.bbc.co.uk
- Status