this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
144 points (98.6% liked)

UK Politics

3098 readers
88 users here now

General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Noit@lemm.ee 41 points 6 months ago (2 children)

This is death spiral shit. I probably look on national service more favourably than the average person and I know you cannot just throw it out as a desperate Hail Mary without building a huge amount of consensus.

[–] Bernie_Sandals@lemmy.world 21 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

I'm an American who doesn't follow UK politics too much, but this feels like political suicide type stuff. Am I right in thinking that?

Like he was already polling bad, how the fuck is "You see that war to the east young people? Isn't that scary? Anyway, you gotta serve now" supposed to gain him literally any support?

I feel like even the stereotypical old conservative would be hesitant about possibly voting to send their grandchildren to war.

[–] Skua@kbin.social 16 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

They know the young won't vote for them anyway, so they're hoping this will do something to stem the tide with the rest of the population who would not have to do the service

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 10 points 6 months ago (2 children)

What kind of older person thinks "Hell yeah! I want to send my kids off to war!"?

[–] 0000011110110111i@lemm.ee 9 points 6 months ago

People who know that their own actual kids won’t be sent. Just the poor kids whilst their own kids get bone spurs.

[–] BenGFHC@kbin.social 5 points 6 months ago

People who's kids have grown up but are too poor to be able to have kids of their own?

[–] Bernie_Sandals@lemmy.world 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

So they've decided to possibly sacrifice the young in the name of getting the middle and older aged peoples votes? And the only other policy proposal I've heard from him is flying people to Rwanda to "fix" immigration?

Jesus Christ your politics suck. Hopefully, yall vote them out and fix things a bit.

[–] Skua@kbin.social 1 points 6 months ago

It's honestly got a lot in common with your politics, in many ways. Our Labour party isn't looking likely to do much good, but holy shit it would be nice to at least making everything worse in the sleaziest way possible all of the time. I personally put a lot of the blame on FPTP voting, although that is clearly not an instant fix in itself; the Dutch are doing a fine job of demonstrating that

[–] ChuckEffingNorris@lemmy.ml 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's worse than that, they have an existential crisis due to older voters not wanting them. For decades as people got older they started getting more conservative (small c) in their views. This has stopped happening on a scale that it once did.

Their voters are literally dying and not being replaced. It's mainly because people around the world have not been able to generate wealth and assets to the extent that generations before them have.

Good fucking riddance to them all.

[–] Skua@kbin.social 1 points 6 months ago

Good fucking riddance to them all.

I couldn't agree more

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 6 points 6 months ago

The point here is that the British conservatives are on the death row and they know it. They just try to break as many things they can get their hand on to a) make it more painful for the next government to fix it and b) squeeze as much value out of it for their cronies. That is British politics in a nutshell.

[–] PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 8 points 6 months ago

If you made it a volunteer with benefits program that tries to offer skills based placement you could literally call it free job experience and a shitton of college grads would be thanking you for doing it, the problem is the command with nothing to gain and the implied threat of what you'll lose behind it being mandatory.