General British politics discussion thread

I'm not sure if it is based on their charitable status but they are still expected to lose their corporation tax exemption. Only other exemption I am aware of is business rates.

While she will probably be sick that this happened, if the hotel was used for years for such purposes it would not have been a secret for those looking to intimidate, hurt or even kill those inside. Still it should be a warning for MP's that those rioters are looking for a fight and you do not need to add kindling and a spark to their fire.

You do not want to be in a position to always just blame the previous government for the current problems, but when you read stories like this,

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/04/conservatives-left-uk-wide-open-to-far-right-violence-says-former-adviser

'The Conservative government left the UK wide open to the far-right violence erupting across parts of the country by ignoring red flags and stoking fires with a culture war agenda, a senior adviser on extremism to Tory prime ministers has said.

Dame Sara Khan, who was Rishi Sunak’s independent adviser for social cohesion and resilience until May this year and acted as counter-extremism commissioner under Theresa May and Boris Johnson, said the recent administrations had failed the British people.

Repeated and urgent counsel that far-right extremists were exploiting gaps in the law to foment violence on social media had been ignored while top-rank politicians in a series of administrations sought to gain advantage by waging culture wars, Khan said, in a damning intervention.

“The writing was clearly on the wall for some time,” Khan said. “All my reports have shown, in a nutshell that, firstly, these extremist and cohesion threats are worsening; secondly, that our country is woefully unprepared. We’ve got a gap in our legislation which is allowing these extremists to operate with impunity.

“Previous governments have astonishingly failed to address these trends, and they’ve taken instead, in my view, approaches that have actually been counterproductive and actually just defy any logical rationale.

“They scrapped the counter-extremism strategy [in 2021], including all the resources and funding for local areas across the country who are struggling with extremist activity and extremist actors. And the government, at that time, did not replace it with anything. They left local authorities struggling to deal with consistent extremist challenges in their area.

“Political leadership is really important and how our politicians behave is really, really critical, because I’ve seen, and I’m sure other people have seen, politicians who have actually, indirectly or directly undermined social cohesion because they’ve used inflammatory language.”'

I also wonder how much these thugs have been itching for a fight, seeing as they could not go to Germany to battle others at the Euro's and those guys also fight back, and the absence of football means you just have angry people with time on their hands and they are now just looting and causing trouble.

Social media is undoubtedly part of the problem but UK politicians (and not just a small number on the fringes, many high profile MPs) have been stockpiling fuel for this particular problem for years. They should bear a huge amount of responsibility too. The Southport situation is just the spark to this fuel.

That law was never gonna last. I'de say if the new government didn't take it down a court eventually would.

It was only a Tory virtue signal law anyway.