The Newer Forest.

Always makes me laugh that the ‘New’ Forest is getting on for a thousand years old.

Yes, everyone here trembles under my tyrannical rule. I try not to let it go to my head.

Gosh, how strange. I expected him to say, ‘He’s a total cunt and I’m only pretending to like him because it’s part of my job’.

Destroying healthcare by… increasing funding for the NHS and for social care, ending strikes by negotiating with the unions, and hitting their initial appointment targets years early?

Me. But I should add that a system of wages and salaries is not slavery, and that part of the reason I know this is that actual slaves really, really want instead to be paid a wage or a salary.

By far the most coherent response, thank you. I still think the contexts are sufficiently different that I find it odd that anyone would feel the need to paint his face on a wall thousands of miles away.

I think you probably understand why it’s ridiculous when right wingers say that socialised healthcare = Stalinism, and so on an identical basis you should see it’s ridiculous to describe the people of the UK as oppressed slaves.

Touché.

Ironically, your statement lacks nuance.

Is this one of those things where they’re using technical legal language or is it an actual walking back of Lammy’s comments?

EDIT: I mean like if this was a domestic criminal case in progress, they’d always say ‘the suspect’ in an official statement, even if it was overwhelmingly clear that ‘the suspect’ was the perpetrator. Is something similar happening here?

The first reply to my comment literally asks:

Genuine question, what good things?

There is quite a range of options between continuing as you say we are and shooting people in the street. Again, enacting arbitrary violence against perceived enemies is literally what Trump is doing. This is not the path to take. Like all people calling for this kind of violence, you are assuming it won’t be inflicted on you or anyone you like, but that is not what history suggests will happen.

Incidentally, another way the UK is not like the US is that carbon emissions are falling in the UK.

Okay, this isn’t a court and it’s absolutely fine for people in casual conversation to say he did something when there’s strong evidence that he did.

Strictly speaking if he yelled ‘I did it and I’d do it again’ at the cameras on his way into court, he’d still be ‘innocent till proven guilty’ but no one would insist that actually meant he ‘hadn’t done it’. EDIT: Actually, strictly speaking, he’d still be ‘innocent’ under a strict definition after pleading guilty but before the jury pronounced him so.

In any case, as to our wider discussion, you’d then be disagreeing with many of the people here and arguing that people painted his face on a wall because he didn’t do anything.

Fictional characters and real people are not actually the same kind of thing, and how people read them are not equivalent.

‘Cancelled the Rwanda scheme?’

‘Cancelled the Rwanda–? Oh, shut up!’

Brian Thompson was not a billionaire. As for the ‘unaccountable’ class our side of the pond, just yesterday a prominent political megadonor and former hedge fund manager was banned from working in financial services, so neither side of your analogy stands up to very much scrutiny.

EDIT: I mean, guys, you could try the path of ‘You can’t trust the systems any more! The only choice is to ignore the law and inflict arbitrary punishments on people we dislike!’ but it is not one that leads to leftist utopia.

Honestly, aside from what Mangione did and whether it can be justified, I just think this shows how America-brained so much of the UK is. The guy lives and committed his crime on the other side of the ocean in a context which does not exist in this country. I would personally prefer for him not to be executed but I don’t understand what anyone’s thinking when they use him as an icon over here.

Equally, we shouldn’t label certain patterns of thinking as ‘disordered’ when they’re actually just different. We certainly shouldn’t medicate differences away. Over diagnosing is (almost by definition) not a good thing and we should take seriously the possibility that it’s happening with some disorders. This in no way precludes supporting those who do have disorders.

This is, in fact, baseless. There are experts in, e.g., ADHD, who thinks it’s over diagnosed, so the base assumption here is: he’s referring to those experts.

Given the real questions about over-diagnosis, your assumption, ‘I bet in this interview I didn’t listen to he was referring to a report I haven’t read’ is, indeed, baseless.

I can’t see them introducing anything that would count as a wealth tax.

Especially because the modest tax rises in the last budget were greeted by universal screeching noises (and… don’t seem to have really paid off).

I agree with the general sentiment you’re all expressing, that Labour should bit the bullet and raise taxes. But the problem is, in doing that we actually are asking them to break a promise they made to the electorate.