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This is a short list of issues many people are dealing with right now: - affording heating - affording food - affording their mortgage - being kicked out of

• trackflak 3y ago
  It seems like the government playbook reads as follows: - Make the practicalities of everyday life extremely miserable - Make the population worn down and apathetic because things are so bad, a better life unattainable for all but a few - Then, no one will notice while we pass bills that heavily restrict your liberty and vastly entrench our power - Profit It's a sinister genius, and smacks of contempt for the governed.
  • gnfargbl 3y ago
    Who is the evil bond villain behind this dastardly plan, exactly? The UK government has made the practicalities of everyday life extremely miserable through a combination of (a) ham-fisted political decisions (Brexit referendum held for party-political reasons, followed by the multi-decade car crash that is still ongoing); plus (b) plain and simple not giving a single shit about the majority of the population, because it isn't in the personal interests of most of the current set of ruling MPs to give said shit. There's no overarching devious plan to enslave us all, here. It's just classic honest-to-goodness incompetence and disinterest.
    • xeonmc 3y ago
      So what you’re saying is, they’re just incompetent rather than malicious?
      • dagw 3y ago
        How anybody can look at the past few years of the Tories and go "there is a group of people clearly capable of planing and executing a genius level long term strategy with finesse and subterfuge", is beyond me.
        • smolder 3y ago
          Feigning incompetence is classic passive aggression and always has plausible deniability.
        • blakblakarak 3y ago
          …because the Tories are the ones being manipulated. A PM earns less than 200k£, a Minister even less and an MP even less - they’re incredibly cheap to ‘buy’.
          • mavhc 3y ago
            We should pay them 10x more
            • polygamous_bat 3y ago
              ... because a billionaire will look at the £2M price tag for the British PM and throw up their hands and say "shucks"? As long as extreme wealth inequality exists, politicians will keep being bought and sold by the minority for their own interest at the expense of the majority.
      • sanitycheck 3y ago
        It's definitely both. Not that our other options at the moment are a significant improvement.
        • t43562 3y ago
          We have to excercise our choice whether or not we are delighted about the other options. We cannot let any party get too entrenched or feel too safe.
    • clnq 3y ago
      I’m sure there are some devious plans taking advantage of the circumstances created.
    • varispeed 3y ago
      You forgot about widening of the wealth gap and massive wealth transfer in the last couple of years. That's not incompetence. The rich are in charge.
    • samtho 3y ago
      > There's no overarching devious plan to enslave us all, here. It's just classic honest-to-goodness incompetence and disinterest. At least the overarching-plan theory has a boogie man to attack. This is preferable to the alternative of nobody being directly at the helm and all these transgressions are done for a purely political game of chess that awards the person responsible with marginally more power than they had prior. Honestly, that reality terrifies me more than some secretive cabal.
      • loup-vaillant 3y ago
        > At least the overarching-plan theory has a boogie man to attack. Oh but there is such an overarching plan: some people have power, and they want to keep it. It’s not even a secret, see how increasingly plutocratic governance is becoming across the whole West. Problem is, the known methods to thwart that plan (that is, taking power from those who currently have it), tend to be unpredictable and deadly.
      • jdietrich 3y ago
        The reality in the UK is worse than your proposed alternative - the government are simply too incompetent to effectively govern. The contents of the government's playbook is completely irrelevant, because they can't reliably deliver on anything. There's a kind of bleak slapstick humour to their sheer ineptitude.
        • Aromasin 3y ago
          It's because we have a government of aristocratic bimbos who have blundered through life studying a curriculum of ancient classics and pre-1950s history, with a sprinkling of "GDP is king" economics, which at best prepares them on how to accumulate a power base, but provides no practical knowledge on how to use said power effectively in a modern society. Our Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology is a woman called Michelle Donelan. She graduated with a BA in history and politics, and her career outside of being a career politician was in marketing, including a time working on Marie Claire magazine and for World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). How in the world is she qualified for to run the nations tech initiatives? If she was appointed as CEO of a tech company, the stock would sink like a rock over night. Dare I even get started on Michael Gove, who originally wanted the role. Let's compare this to some other comparable countries to the UK: Canada's Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry; François-Philippe Champagne. Ex Vice-President and Senior Counsel of ABB Group, as well as Strategic Development Director, acting General Counsel, and Chief Ethics Officer and Member of the Group Management Committee of Amec Foster Wheeler. Taiwan's Minister of Digital Affairs; Audrey Tang. Tang was a child prodigy, reading works of classical literature before the age of five, advanced mathematics before six, and programming before eight, and she began to learn Perl at age 12. On CPAN, Tang initiated over 100 Perl projects between June 2001 and July 2006, including the popular Perl Archive Toolkit (PAR), a cross-platform packaging and deployment tool for Perl 5. South Korea's Minister of Science and ICT; Lee Jong-ho. Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Seoul National University. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2016 for contributions to development and characterization of bulk multiple-gate field effect transistors. Australian Minister for Industry and Science; Edham Husic. Husic worked as a research officer for the member for Chifley, Roger Price. Husic was first elected as a branch organiser in 1997. In 1998, he was elected as vice-president of the Communications Division of the CEPU. From 1999 to 2003, he worked for Integral Energy as a communications manager. I can do the same peer-to-peer analysis when looking at our agricultural, education, health, and transport secretaries. Our government is criminally incompetent when compared to the majority of other first world countries. It's a fucking embarrassment.
    • ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      > just classic honest-to-goodness incompetence 1. Appoint Evgeny Alexandrovich Lebedev to House of Lords as Lord of Siberia. His dad is a Russian oligarch and owns evening standard. 2. Handing out billions in PPE contracts to Tory donors to companies that were literally registered yesterday. 3. Privatise rail. Allow massive dividends from private rail companies. Spend 3.5 billion bailing out the same rail companies. 4. Allow 80 billion in dividents to be extracted from private water companies. Legalised dumping of raw sewage into rivers by water companies. Infrastructure is not maintained and most of water is lost to leaks. Enter talks about bailout with water companies.
    • mptest 3y ago
      >Who is the evil bond villain behind this dastardly plan, exactly? Idk, maybe start with the 8 people who own more wealth than 3.6 billion people combined? 3 own more wealth than half the US. Probably freaking them?!? I really hope this is rhetorical. >There's no overarching devious plan to enslave us all, here. Of course not... Enslaving us is not the goal, just the best means to infinite wealth/power accumulation. The US is built on free labor, from slaves to the prison labor we use as slaves today. >It's just classic honest-to-goodness incompetence and disinterest. Laughably naive. You're describing the apathetic's contribution, the banality of the evil, not the people who really drive decisions who rely on that apathy.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • totetsu 3y ago
      https://metro.co.uk/2017/10/04/everyone-is-disgusted-by-boris-johnsons-libya-dead-bodies-comment-6975363/ https://metro.co.uk/2017/10/04/everyone-is-disgusted-by-bori... This guy? "Boris Johnson Libya 'dead bodies' comment provokes anger" "There's a group of UK business people, actually, some wonderful guys who want to invest in Sirte on the coast, near where Gaddafi was captured and executed as some of you may have seen." "They have got a brilliant vision to turn Sirte into the next Dubai." "The only thing they have got to do is clear the dead bodies away," he said, before laughing.
    • idontknoworcare 3y ago
      Ask Kanye West
  • ColinHayhurst 3y ago
    All parties have supported and encouraged this bill. There have been a few individuals in each party willing to question it, and improve it, but they have been more or less ignored by all sides.
  • corobo 3y ago
    Honestly I think it's worse than that. Their playbook is just that last one. - Profit Everything else is a mere side effect of that rather than a plan to end up there. And we're worried about AI alignment, lol. Bring on the grey goo.
  • 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
    it's from the friedman/thatcher-esque neoliberal playbook. manufacture a crisis that creates the scenarios which are most pliable for the policies you want to impose. or as chomsky called it "manufacturing consent" UK has had 15 years of getting battered with elite-imposed financial austerity, and the outcome.....brexit. says it all.
  • switch007 3y ago
    Don’t forget destroy education to make people less educated
    • kerrsclyde 3y ago
      The secondary education my children recieved was awful. UK Secondary schools seem more interested in their uniform policy than the quality of learning.
• gambiting 3y ago
  None of these problems are unique to the UK though. Many other EU countries struggle with all of these problems(and more!) and yet manage to preserve the privacy of their citizens regardless. And I'm not saying that someone worrying about affording food and energy bills should prioritize privacy over it, but the way I see it there is apathy on all levels of the society. I have friends who are very firmly in the top 1% of the British society and they also don't care too much about it, it's just yet another thing that they feel doesn't affect them so why worry about it. It's very different feeling to the one you can get in the US or in Germany or Poland, where even people who are theoretically not affected by surveillance laws are upset about them and will be very vocal about them. Like I Said in another comment - on a personal level all I want is my friends, colleagues and family to say "this kind of thing is unacceptable in democratic society and I don't agree with it" instead of "meh I don't care".
  • lynx23 3y ago
    > Many other EU countries The UK is not a EU country. Just to remind those which think they can be in and out at the same time.
    • tmjwid 3y ago
      Maybe not, but lets not split hairs here. The op was discussing comparing nations and used a blanket "EU" moniker to denote this. You know, our next door neighbours of similar economic size...
      • lynx23 3y ago
        I guess I will loose this on the ground of not being a native speaker. But to me, the little word "other" makes a difference. At least if I translate to my native language, the phrase "andere EU-Staaten" clearly implies that UK is also a EU country. Removing "andere" fixes the sentence to actually tell the truth. And yes, this distinction is important. The british people have democratically decided to leave the EU.
        • 3y ago
• belorn 3y ago
  In order to address those political people would need to go and demonstrate and become political active in order to bring in tax reforms, banking reforms, economic reforms, social welfare reforms, government administrative reforms, school reforms, healthcare reforms, police reforms, and possible more in order to take money from other sectors to pay for it. The purpose of anti-privacy laws is to make sure that such activity is fully monitored and dealt with in proper manner before they can become a problem. The rise of new political parties is in particular important to keep in check, and that is impossible if people have private communication and unchecked travel. This why and how privacy rank above those issues. Naturally most people are not political active, and most who are do not threaten to partake or create competing political movements.
  • barrysteve 3y ago
    Yes, because we know in the '40s, that political groups built on disaffected men and brotherly evilness, threatened to take away the wealth and power we intend for our Sons to inherit. Nobody is going to SAY this basic truth and give disaffected men a chance to make a moral decision, instead we are going to enslave the entire planet, to ensure security and freedom for Anakin's new Empire (lol).
• graemep 3y ago
  Because privacy is part of the same underlying issue: the centralisation of power, in both governments and big businesses.
• DrBazza 3y ago
  Most of those are Government funded, and Government caused. Want a NHS dentist? Ok, the Government finds another way to tax you to fund that. Now the Government taxes landlords on their rental income. Landlords exist the market en-masse. Rents go up, availability goes down. Want somewhere to rent? Oh dear, the Government just taxed those "greedy" landlords out of the market. Want "better" public transport? Let's introduce a top 50% rate on the most "mobile" and tax paying part of the electorate to fund that as well. Then they leave the UK or offshore their accounts etc., just like in the 70s. Maybe Australia will reintroduce the 10 Pound Poms again. Want shorter NHS waiting times? Let's bring in more doctors and nurses, which of course is more of a cost to the NHS. So the NHS needs even more funding, which comes from... more tax. Of course fewer people would reduce NHS waiting times, but apparently we're not allowed to say that. I honestly don't see taxation in the UK coming down for a generation at this rate. This country currently has an addiction to wanting the Government to pay for everything, whilst blaming it for everything, because it is involved in everything. Maybe Thatcher was right about the State being small.
  • gambiting 3y ago
    I think it's because a lot of British people still live the dream of being a major superpower with strong and robust economy. In reality UK has decimated its manufacturing economy and relies almost entirely on being a service economy, skewed almost entirely towards London and other areas of the UK have been left to languish. People visiting places like Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, Bristol and so on wonder how the hell is it possible that you're visiting what is ostensibly the 5th biggest economy in the world yet the infrastructure of nearly everything is crumbling, councils can't even afford to clean the streets, social programs are being shut left and right, police won't come unless there's an actual murder and so on and so on. My point is - a lot of people would say "but Germany can have a working public transport and functional police force and not tax its citizens to death". Like...yes, they can, but they have a functional economy which can support most of the country not just Berlin. If UK had a working local economy then councils would get funding from local businesses operating where they are - but right now most of the industry is gone or barely functional.
    • 3y ago
• appleaday1 3y ago
  divide and conquer, dealing with this problem in Canada Redditosphere atm, so much astroturfing going around. We need some next gen AutoMod improvements to deal with this bs.
• pcrh 3y ago
  There's nothing wrong with that list. On the other hand, when it comes to legislation, MPs and committees consider only the legislation under question. Nothing on that list suggests that privacy should be deprecated.