Qassändra

It's finding that the vast majority of white people have unconscious prejudices against those of other races, regardless of whether or not they'd consider themselves racist - that isn't a stereotype, that's hard evidence which comes out whenever these things are tested. It's not that hard to understand. It helps us to solve the problem by establishing the starting point that all of us are prone to making judgements and decisions on a racist basis without realising it. Once we have that starting point, we can make a concerted effort to check ourselves - am I really making this judgement or decision entirely for this reason? Without that starting point, plenty of people will carry on discriminating without even pausing. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who is being discriminated against by someone who doesn't even know that they're doing it - are you telling me you don't see how it's of any use to at least get them to the starting point of being aware they might be doing it? These aren't just pie in the sky theories - they're solid evidence that is borne out in the discrimination that reveals itself on a systematic level when you look at the statistics. It's why "blind" recruitment policies always find a stark difference when employers look at CVs without knowing the race and name of the applicant. None of those people will have consciously thought "I'm not hiring that person because they're black" - they'll have found justifications for doing so that they wouldn't have made for an equivalent white person. We know these kinds of things happen because of the countless studies that show they don't when the exact same CVs are submitted as if they were for someone white!

I mean, if your explanation for why Africa and South America are so starkly worse off isn't down to empire (and if it is, why is "all white people's existence in the nations that benefited from that" controversial?), then your explanation can only really be race-based*. Which, uh, might possibly affirm Munroe's point a bit. (unless of course there are other entirely coincidental factors you want to suggest that mysteriously apply near-universally across those continents along race lines, in which case i'm ALL EARS)

The answer is closer to #1 but not quite. Funding was the main issue, hence why university was reserved for the intellectual elite. The reason student numbers exploded was because the introduction of tuition fees meant universities could take on far more students - which was the intention, given the skills a university education sets you up with are essential for so many jobs in the modern economy. Tuition fees often get decried (and I think it's fair to say they're far too high now - certainly much higher than ever intended at the outset) but without them there's no way so many would have been able to go to university in the last 20 years - the government would never have provided the funding. It'd be silly to pretend every single person who went to university should have gone, but I'm firmly of the view that the vast majority of UK graduates in the last 20 years either are better off for having gone to uni.

Are you really going to attempt to argue that Africa was enriched by the slave trade in the way America and Europe were? And racism goes beyond just the slave trade. There were another good 150 years of empire after Britain stopped trading in slaves. It's not 'un-PC', it's just a grating tic of his.

And even if you interpret the statement as "all white people are racist", that isn't a remotely controversial concept for psychologists. There's legions of evidence through implicit association test studies that almost all white people have at least unconscious biases against black people (or those of other minorities) - regardless of whether they'd consider themselves racist or not. Nobody likes to consider themselves racist, so unconscious bias means we latch onto other reasons why we discriminate against somebody of another colour, but the reasons will often be things that we happily allow to go by if someone of our own race had them (to take the most famous example, how often people will leap to justify cases where black people are killed while being arrested by the police that will typically go along the lines of "well they did something wrong so they deserved it" when they wouldn't ever dream of arguing it was okay for a white person to be killed without trial for carrying drugs). Just because it's an unconscious bias that we all have doesn't mean we can't do anything about it. What it means is that we have to make a conscious effort to be guided by our better angels and self-examine whether our judgements on somebody may be influenced by their skin colour and whether we might not give someone of our own race doing the same the benefit of the doubt.

Do you really think the advantages of empire were entirely individual and only went to families? We live in an exceptionally wealthy country which built much of that wealth on the exploited riches of the world's biggest empire. There's a reason the British working class are broadly better off than, say, the Austrian working class. British Petroleum, Barclays, HSBC, pretty much the entirety of the North West, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Bristol - all companies, cities, regions built off the fortunes of the resources we exploited by invading and occupying Commonwealth nations. That in turn generated other economic activity. Once we disestablished that empire our cities and towns had the economic base from that wealth to manage the transition and produce the country we see today. Do you really think you're the first person to ask these questions? Don't you have even the slightest bit of intellectual curiosity to think past the first argument that comes into your head?

and i see absolutely nothing has changed in my time away

Good GRIEF how on earth did Flashlight qualify?! (sorry i'm aware i'm partially culpable for outcomes like this)

No it doesn't? The promise to abolish tuition fees was a big driver, along with Jeremy Corbyn's candidacy in itself. Do you really think an interpretation of a single NME interview had that much cultural penetration that all the young voters a. agreed with it and b. *that* was the reason that they all turned out? Because that's infinitely more presumptuous. Yes. I've been fairly consistent these last few years on calling out people who overegg poll movements that are within the margin of error. That belief never DID take hold though, regardless of what the Tories said. It's pretty blatant from the polling that it was a small minority that took it that way - about 57-17.

I'm not really sure what use there'll be in 2022 (or whenever the next election is) in litigating whether or not something was an election promise in a general election five years before that Labour didn't win, not least as Labour will almost certainly have a specific policy on it by then.

This is fun!

It was never policy and it's exceptionally clear from the interview itself he wasn't making a cast-iron promise to wipe out student debt, but that Labour would look into doing *something* to ameliorate the debt for students that had paid 9k fees. Taking "I will deal with it" after that bolded part as a cast-iron pledge to eradicate all student debt...is reaching, to put it mildly.

Which was never a policy and was never taken as one by the vast majority of people who voted for Labour on that basis, as polling has found. A 6 point fall in *net* approval is within the margin of error, so while Labour haven't really been making the news over the summer I'm not inclined to think it's statistically significant.

Yes, we will have this freedom. However, which bloc is currently by far the biggest trade partner we have, which we're about to enter pretty dire trading conditions with, just so we can have the power to make these trade agreements with other countries? (Also good luck setting up a trade agreement with the likes of Turkey or India that doesn't involve relaxing visa restrictions for them. Which would definitely go down well with everyone who voted to leave the EU because of freedom of movement.)

You could make the exact same argument for voting in one constituency out of the UK's 650 - the European Parliament is balanced into left wing and right wing blocs that we have just as much influence on shifting the power of balance between as anyone else. It's not the European Parliament's fault we never paid serious attention to what European parliamentary elections were for.

Making a brief cameo to say that it is more important than LIFE ITSELF THAT THIS BECOMES A HIT

Nobody earning less than 80k would've seen a tax rise under Corbyn's manifesto.

I say your run's probably about to come to an end.

45-32 is my rapidly fading final prediction, and I can't bear to predict the seat totals.

Because you're the kind of person who posts the first half of that post when someone mentions a black person got into the best university in the country. Bigots tend to victim blame rape victims.

I'd take this seriously as a line if I didn't think you were the kind of person who'd say it's only 'common sense' that women shouldn't get drunk and wear short skirts.

The YouGov projection thing is based on a new technique they're using which is based on a lot of demographic analytics work and is different to the standard internet polls they do (which as it goes aren't self-selecting panels but *do* run the risk of having more politically interested people than normal - that was one of the biggest issues in 2015, and this projection technique is one way they're trying to get around it). The polling industry as a whole thinks what YouGov is doing is really interesting but it's the first time something of this kind has been attempted, so it's subject to potentially huge error. Once refined, it's likely to be the future of polling.

There's a reason polling is adjusted. Talking about unadjusted polling is like eating flour and insisting it's cake.

Currency rates aren't a tariff war.

35% in one poll is not 35%. We're going to be lucky to get over 27% after the next two weeks.