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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Deputy Labour leader Tom Watson feels the heat after publicly

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  • TGOHFTGOHF Posts: 21,633

    TGOHF said:

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite greatly outspending their opponents and having much of the establishment, both domestic and foreign on their side. Indeed, had Remain explained our degree of entanglement with the EU they might well have gone down to a greater defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    Like Goodwin you make the mistake of clinging to the 2016 referendum as being the defining fact of British politics but the reasons why Leave won are almost entirely irrelevant to what is happening in 2018. You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    If only you can explain to the little people in simple sentences where they went wrong by voting Brexit you will win next time..

    You need to look beyond Trump, xenophobic lies and Russian bots as to why the country voted leave. Otherwise you will have "#FBPE" on your grave.
    "and after having had the chance to assess our true options will rightly conclude that there is no alternative to closer integration".
    Good luck with that. The cure to a poisoning is a massive overdose of the same poison ?

  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 35,765

    Sean_F said:

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite greatly outspending their opponents and having much of the establishment, both domestic and foreign on their side. Indeed, had Remain explained our degree of entanglement with the EU they might well have gone down to a greater defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    Like Goodwin you make the mistake of clinging to the 2016 referendum as being the defining fact of British politics but the reasons why Leave won are almost entirely irrelevant to what is happening in 2018. You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    Leave won because most voters don't like the EU, in summary.
    Let's have a referendum on whether people like Westminster, shall we?
    For most of us, Westminster is the devil you know.
  • CD13CD13 Posts: 6,349
    Mr Glenn,

    We have plenty of our own moronic politicians. We don't need to play extra to be ruled by European ones.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,789
    TGOHF said:

    TGOHF said:

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite greatly outspending their opponents and having much of the establishment, both domestic and foreign on their side. Indeed, had Remain explained our degree of entanglement with the EU they might well have gone down to a greater defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    Like Goodwin you make the mistake of clinging to the 2016 referendum as being the defining fact of British politics but the reasons why Leave won are almost entirely irrelevant to what is happening in 2018. You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    If only you can explain to the little people in simple sentences where they went wrong by voting Brexit you will win next time..

    You need to look beyond Trump, xenophobic lies and Russian bots as to why the country voted leave. Otherwise you will have "#FBPE" on your grave.
    "and after having had the chance to assess our true options will rightly conclude that there is no alternative to closer integration".
    Good luck with that. The cure to a poisoning is a massive overdose of the same poison ?
    The poison was the practice of opt-outs and demanding special status. It hit the wall in 2016 and won't be coming back.
  • Can anyone tell me what ‘a supposed anti-semitism problem’ is? I thought Labour had a problem, They have had expulsions, disciplineries, investigations, changes in policy to address the issue - if its only a ‘supposed anti-semitism problem’ then they have done a great deal to address something that doesn’t exist.

    This is what is so funny - the "supporters" of Corbyn continue to defend a "There. Is. No. Antisemitism." Peter Willsman line even after Jeremy himself sends all members a video message saying there is an anti-semitism problem. The rationale being that poor Jeremy has been forced into saying this by the evil Blairite plot.

    On the biggest Labour Facebook group this morning. A smear against Tom Watson claiming that donations made to him by a prominent Jew are part of the 'Israeli global interference in other countries' - they just don't know when to stop such is their hatred for Israel.

    The current Israeli government is abhorrent, but they don't really care about Netanyahu or any small issue like that - their issue is that there is an Israeli PM not what the current incumbent does. When I point out that Labour policy IS support of the state of Israel via our two state solution policy, all I get is abuse for some reason...

    Well said.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 35,765

    TGOHF said:

    TGOHF said:

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite greatly outspending their opponents and having much of the establishment, both domestic and foreign on their side. Indeed, had Remain explained our degree of entanglement with the EU they might well have gone down to a greater defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    Like Goodwin you make the mistake of clinging to the 2016 referendum as being the defining fact of British politics but the reasons why Leave won are almost entirely irrelevant to what is happening in 2018. You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    If only you can explain to the little people in simple sentences where they went wrong by voting Brexit you will win next time..

    You need to look beyond Trump, xenophobic lies and Russian bots as to why the country voted leave. Otherwise you will have "#FBPE" on your grave.
    "and after having had the chance to assess our true options will rightly conclude that there is no alternative to closer integration".
    Good luck with that. The cure to a poisoning is a massive overdose of the same poison ?
    The poison was the practice of opt-outs and demanding special status. It hit the wall in 2016 and won't be coming back.
    The poison was joining in the first place.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,758
    DavidL said:

    In other news Stokes is apparently in the dock, the jury are being empanelled and none of them admit to being big England cricket fans: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/live-england-cricketer-ben-stokes-1865220

    Looks like its running today.

    I find it interesting if, as reported, he and the others have been charged with affray, and not with grievous bodily harm. A fractured eye socket sounded quite serious to me.

    It also means of course the prosecution will have to prove that their behaviour frightened a member of the public.
  • TGOHFTGOHF Posts: 21,633

    TGOHF said:

    TGOHF said:

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite greatly outspending their opponents and having much of the establishment, both domestic and foreign on their side. Indeed, had Remain explained our degree of entanglement with the EU they might well have gone down to a greater defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    Like Goodwin you make the mistake of clinging to the 2016 referendum as being the defining fact of British politics but the reasons why Leave won are almost entirely irrelevant to what is happening in 2018. You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    If only you can explain to the little people in simple sentences where they went wrong by voting Brexit you will win next time..

    You need to look beyond Trump, xenophobic lies and Russian bots as to why the country voted leave. Otherwise you will have "#FBPE" on your grave.
    "and after having had the chance to assess our true options will rightly conclude that there is no alternative to closer integration".
    Good luck with that. The cure to a poisoning is a massive overdose of the same poison ?
    The poison was the practice of opt-outs and demanding special status. It hit the wall in 2016 and won't be coming back.
    Opting out of promised Uk referenda on previous treaties - whilst the Dutch, Irish etc got their say was the poison.

  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,789
    Sean_F said:

    TGOHF said:

    TGOHF said:

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite greatly outspending their opponents and having much of the establishment, both domestic and foreign on their side. Indeed, had Remain explained our degree of entanglement with the EU they might well have gone down to a greater defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    Like Goodwin you make the mistake of clinging to the 2016 referendum as being the defining fact of British politics but the reasons why Leave won are almost entirely irrelevant to what is happening in 2018. You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    If only you can explain to the little people in simple sentences where they went wrong by voting Brexit you will win next time..

    You need to look beyond Trump, xenophobic lies and Russian bots as to why the country voted leave. Otherwise you will have "#FBPE" on your grave.
    "and after having had the chance to assess our true options will rightly conclude that there is no alternative to closer integration".
    Good luck with that. The cure to a poisoning is a massive overdose of the same poison ?
    The poison was the practice of opt-outs and demanding special status. It hit the wall in 2016 and won't be coming back.
    The poison was joining in the first place.
    European integration is a geopolitical fact that we cannot simply ignore or stand aloof from. We're just relearning what Geoffrey Howe called "the lessons of isolation" from the time after the EEC was formed until the time we joined.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 35,765

    Sean_F said:

    TGOHF said:

    TGOHF said:

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    ....
    ...
    If only you can explain to the little people in simple sentences where they went wrong by voting Brexit you will win next time..

    You need to look beyond Trump, xenophobic lies and Russian bots as to why the country voted leave. Otherwise you will have "#FBPE" on your grave.
    "and after having had the chance to assess our true options will rightly conclude that there is no alternative to closer integration".
    Good luck with that. The cure to a poisoning is a massive overdose of the same poison ?
    The poison was the practice of opt-outs and demanding special status. It hit the wall in 2016 and won't be coming back.
    The poison was joining in the first place.
    European integration is a geopolitical fact that we cannot simply ignore or stand aloof from. We're just relearning what Geoffrey Howe called "the lessons of isolation" from the time after the EEC was formed until the time we joined.
    That is a partisan opinion, not a fact.

    It is no more of a fact than the inevitable triumph of Marxism/Leninism or the conversion of the world to Mormonism.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,789
    TGOHF said:

    The poison was the practice of opt-outs and demanding special status. It hit the wall in 2016 and won't be coming back.

    Opting out of promised Uk referenda on previous treaties - whilst the Dutch, Irish etc got their say was the poison.
    You have a point there. If Major had held a referendum on Maastricht, without the Euro opt-out, he'd probably have won. It would have forced John Smith to campaign for Yes, and with Thatcher as the de facto figurehead of the No campaign it would have prevented her political ghost from haunting the Tory party.
  • Sean_F said:

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite greatly outspending their opponents and having much of the establishment, both domestic and foreign on their side. Indeed, had Remain explained our degree of entanglement with the EU they might well have gone down to a greater defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    Like Goodwin you make the mistake of clinging to the 2016 referendum as being the defining fact of British politics but the reasons why Leave won are almost entirely irrelevant to what is happening in 2018. You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    Leave won because most voters don't like the EU, in summary.
    Let's have a referendum on whether people like Westminster, shall we?
    Hazarding a wild guess, far more UK people voted at the Westminster election in 2017 than the Strasbourg election of 2014?
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,789
    Sean_F said:

    Sean_F said:

    TGOHF said:

    TGOHF said:

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    ....
    ...
    If only you can explain to the little people in simple sentences where they went wrong by voting Brexit you will win next time..

    You need to look beyond Trump, xenophobic lies and Russian bots as to why the country voted leave. Otherwise you will have "#FBPE" on your grave.
    "and after having had the chance to assess our true options will rightly conclude that there is no alternative to closer integration".
    Good luck with that. The cure to a poisoning is a massive overdose of the same poison ?
    The poison was the practice of opt-outs and demanding special status. It hit the wall in 2016 and won't be coming back.
    The poison was joining in the first place.
    European integration is a geopolitical fact that we cannot simply ignore or stand aloof from. We're just relearning what Geoffrey Howe called "the lessons of isolation" from the time after the EEC was formed until the time we joined.
    That is a partisan opinion, not a fact.

    It is no more of a fact than the inevitable triumph of Marxism/Leninism or the conversion of the world to Mormonism.
    I think it's a qualitatively different opinion. I'm not forecasting the triumph of a belief system but just observing that integration is a reality, and it cannot be reversed except by means which people will not tolerate. The failure of Brexit is proof of it.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,772
    ydoethur said:

    DavidL said:

    In other news Stokes is apparently in the dock, the jury are being empanelled and none of them admit to being big England cricket fans: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/live-england-cricketer-ben-stokes-1865220

    Looks like its running today.

    I find it interesting if, as reported, he and the others have been charged with affray, and not with grievous bodily harm. A fractured eye socket sounded quite serious to me.

    It also means of course the prosecution will have to prove that their behaviour frightened a member of the public.
    Perhaps they could start with the man with the fractured eye socket. From the video he (understandably) looked pretty frightened to me. Ben Stokes can hit a 6 over 90m and can bowl just shy of 90mph. He is an extremely fit and strong professional sportsman at the peak of his powers. A normal member of the public would have absolutely no chance against him. As the video seems to show.
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,933
    F1: according to BBC Gossip, Sainz is on McLaren's radar.

    Which does raise a few questions. But also suggests they think he probably isn't going to Red Bull.
  • ydoethur said:

    Mr. Doethur, https://twitter.com/MykeCole/status/1026118763689795584

    Hannibal was a master of preparation and foresight. He never would've made the blunders May has committed.

    Or, for that matter, made such a failure of his campaign as Cameron did. With all against him, Hannibal went toe-to-toe with the known world's mightiest power for over a decade. With almost all for him, Cameron contrived to lose a referendum he himself had called.

    Now I come to think of it, both were caught out by moves they themselves made. A far cry from Flaminius and Lake Trasimene.

    Cannae have a moment to grab some popcorn before Mr Eagles responds?
    "He tusks me. He tusks me, and I shall have him!"
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,042
    It's just one long popcorn fest in Labour these days:

    https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1026422583112212481
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,758
    edited August 2018
    DavidL said:

    ydoethur said:

    DavidL said:

    In other news Stokes is apparently in the dock, the jury are being empanelled and none of them admit to being big England cricket fans: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/live-england-cricketer-ben-stokes-1865220

    Looks like its running today.

    I find it interesting if, as reported, he and the others have been charged with affray, and not with grievous bodily harm. A fractured eye socket sounded quite serious to me.

    It also means of course the prosecution will have to prove that their behaviour frightened a member of the public.
    Perhaps they could start with the man with the fractured eye socket. From the video he (understandably) looked pretty frightened to me. Ben Stokes can hit a 6 over 90m and can bowl just shy of 90mph. He is an extremely fit and strong professional sportsman at the peak of his powers. A normal member of the public would have absolutely no chance against him. As the video seems to show.
    Hasn't he also been charged though? Doesn't that make him not a member of the public for the purposes of this indictment?

    Edit - those are the reasons I was a bit surprised he wasn't charged with assault and GBH, which on the facts as represented (which I appreciate may be incomplete) struck me as slam dunk.
  • Ishmael_ZIshmael_Z Posts: 8,981
    DavidL said:

    ydoethur said:

    DavidL said:

    In other news Stokes is apparently in the dock, the jury are being empanelled and none of them admit to being big England cricket fans: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/live-england-cricketer-ben-stokes-1865220

    Looks like its running today.

    I find it interesting if, as reported, he and the others have been charged with affray, and not with grievous bodily harm. A fractured eye socket sounded quite serious to me.

    It also means of course the prosecution will have to prove that their behaviour frightened a member of the public.
    Perhaps they could start with the man with the fractured eye socket. From the video he (understandably) looked pretty frightened to me. Ben Stokes can hit a 6 over 90m and can bowl just shy of 90mph. He is an extremely fit and strong professional sportsman at the peak of his powers. A normal member of the public would have absolutely no chance against him. As the video seems to show.
    Thank goodness they revoked that pesky sub judice rule.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,772
    ydoethur said:

    DavidL said:

    ydoethur said:

    DavidL said:

    In other news Stokes is apparently in the dock, the jury are being empanelled and none of them admit to being big England cricket fans: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/live-england-cricketer-ben-stokes-1865220

    Looks like its running today.

    I find it interesting if, as reported, he and the others have been charged with affray, and not with grievous bodily harm. A fractured eye socket sounded quite serious to me.

    It also means of course the prosecution will have to prove that their behaviour frightened a member of the public.
    Perhaps they could start with the man with the fractured eye socket. From the video he (understandably) looked pretty frightened to me. Ben Stokes can hit a 6 over 90m and can bowl just shy of 90mph. He is an extremely fit and strong professional sportsman at the peak of his powers. A normal member of the public would have absolutely no chance against him. As the video seems to show.
    Hasn't he also been charged though? Doesn't that make him not a member of the public for the purposes of this indictment?
    Not sure. The 3 charged are Stokes, Ryan Hale (Alex's brother) and Ryan Alsam Ali. Not sure who he is.
  • Ishmael_ZIshmael_Z Posts: 8,981
    The is labour reallly antiSemitic debate has the same status as the did 6 million really die debate? Technically it's a legitimate question, technically anyone with some prima facie evidence has the right to be heard, but the correct response to both questions is identical: You c__t.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,758
    DavidL said:

    ydoethur said:

    DavidL said:

    ydoethur said:

    DavidL said:

    In other news Stokes is apparently in the dock, the jury are being empanelled and none of them admit to being big England cricket fans: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/live-england-cricketer-ben-stokes-1865220

    Looks like its running today.

    I find it interesting if, as reported, he and the others have been charged with affray, and not with grievous bodily harm. A fractured eye socket sounded quite serious to me.

    It also means of course the prosecution will have to prove that their behaviour frightened a member of the public.
    Perhaps they could start with the man with the fractured eye socket. From the video he (understandably) looked pretty frightened to me. Ben Stokes can hit a 6 over 90m and can bowl just shy of 90mph. He is an extremely fit and strong professional sportsman at the peak of his powers. A normal member of the public would have absolutely no chance against him. As the video seems to show.
    Hasn't he also been charged though? Doesn't that make him not a member of the public for the purposes of this indictment?
    Not sure. The 3 charged are Stokes, Ryan Hale (Alex's brother) and Ryan Alsam Ali. Not sure who he is.
    Looks as though he was the one with the fractured socket, although he isn't named and I could be wrong.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,019
    rcs1000 said:

    I voted remain on the assumption that the dire financial warnings were accurate. The more sophisticated lie from the remain side was in the assumptions made to come to a dire conclusion.

    You still hear some of the nonsense - I had a conversation with someone recently with a remainer who thought that if we had no deal then there would be no trade at all with the EU! They looked at me incredulously when I pointed out WTO rules meant we could carry on trading, and we did this with a lot of the rest of the world. I’m pretty sure they didn’t believe me because it didn’t fit in with their own narrative.

    The issue is that the biggest problems with "No Deal" are rather technical and obscure. The EU's rules prevent withholding taxes on payments between subsidiaries and parents where both entities are in the EU. If we leave without a deal, then we have 27 sets of negotiations with individual countries to persuade them to pass legislation categorising us as Not Belize. Doable? Of course. A complete pain the the arse for the next 24 months? Yes.

    Or the fact that the EU has nine agreements covering standards equivalence, dispute resolution and other matters with the US. Do these get us tariff free access to the US? No. Will they be replaced if we leave without a deal? Undoubtedly. Will it be on 1 April 2019? Errrr, probably not.

    That’s why the Government is running stories about running out of food and stockpiling instead. People understand it.

    They wouldn’t understand the more technical issues, that wouldn’t reasonate at all but might cause a big problem for Exchequer.
  • Three more months of sunshine and then what - the Sun goes out? Quite a scoop he's got there....
    Although it's a little too hot for comfort, I think we'd ought to enjoy or put up with the hot weather while it lasts. Exactly six months ago, it wasn't exactly warm!
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842

    Three more months of sunshine and then what - the Sun goes out? Quite a scoop he's got there....
    Although it's a little too hot for comfort, I think we'd ought to enjoy or put up with the hot weather while it lasts. Exactly six months ago, it wasn't exactly warm!
    Don't blame it on sunshine
    Don't blame it on Corbyn
    Blame it on Brexit ^_~
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,758
    @DavidL - also, are you sure Ryan HALE is Alex HALES' brother? The names are similar but hardly identical.
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,933
    Dr. Prasannan, I remember walking in a -12C blizzard.

    I prefer that to irksome heat during the day and struggling to sleep at night due to the warmth.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,958
    TGOHF said:

    Ishmael_Z said:

    DavidL said:

    In other news Stokes is apparently in the dock, the jury are being empanelled and none of them admit to being big England cricket fans: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/live-england-cricketer-ben-stokes-1865220

    Looks like its running today.

    The first rule of being a big England cricket fan on the Stokes jury is...
    Looks like the prosecution have won the toss and will bat first.

    We can only hope for a collapse....
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,772
    ydoethur said:

    @DavidL - also, are you sure Ryan HALE is Alex HALES' brother? The names are similar but hardly identical.

    Maybe not. I read that and Alex Hales is certainly down as a witness but it may be coincidence.
  • It's just one long popcorn fest in Labour these days:

    https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1026422583112212481

    This is exactly what I keep pointing to. There. Is. No. Antisemitism. Obviously...
  • It's just one long popcorn fest in Labour these days:

    https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1026422583112212481

    I'm sick and tired of popcorn!
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,758
    Ishmael_Z said:

    The is labour reallly antiSemitic debate has the same status as the did 6 million really die debate? Technically it's a legitimate question, technically anyone with some prima facie evidence has the right to be heard, but the correct response to both questions is identical: You c__t.

    The precise numbers are of course a legitimate question and much explored in scholarly debate given the incomplete nature of the records and the destruction of so much of the physical evidence. The 6 million figure is the one the Nazis themselves (to be exact, Eichmann) gave and is therefore generally considered the ceiling. Most research puts the numbers slightly lower, at around 5.1-5.5 million.

    (I fully appreciate that's not what you meant!)

    Yad Vashem has a brief intro to this on its FAQ site:

    https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/faqs.html
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,958

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite greatly outspending their opponents and having much of the establishment, both domestic and foreign on their side. Indeed, had Remain explained our degree of entanglement with the EU they might well have gone down to a greater defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    Like Goodwin you make the mistake of clinging to the 2016 referendum as being the defining fact of British politics but the reasons why Leave won are almost entirely irrelevant to what is happening in 2018. You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    A general election in which 86.6% of the votes were cast for parties committed to implementing Brexit, exiting the CU and the SM.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 39,748
    edited August 2018
    Camfandom is born (albeit a wee bit late).

    https://twitter.com/jimwaterson/status/1026423822789083139
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,789

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite greatly outspending their opponents and having much of the establishment, both domestic and foreign on their side. Indeed, had Remain explained our degree of entanglement with the EU they might well have gone down to a greater defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    Like Goodwin you make the mistake of clinging to the 2016 referendum as being the defining fact of British politics but the reasons why Leave won are almost entirely irrelevant to what is happening in 2018. You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    A general election in which 86.6% of the votes were cast for parties committed to implementing Brexit, exiting the CU and the SM.
    Yes, Remain's bezzy mate Corbyn has left the road clear for Brexit to drive itself into a dead end.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,772
    DavidL said:

    ydoethur said:

    @DavidL - also, are you sure Ryan HALE is Alex HALES' brother? The names are similar but hardly identical.

    Maybe not. I read that and Alex Hales is certainly down as a witness but it may be coincidence.
    It would appear that he isn't. According to the Prosecution opening statement these are the 2 men Stokes allegedly hit.

    Prosecutor Mr Corsellis said : “Mr Stokes lost his control and started to attack with revenge, retaliation or punishment in mind. He knocked Mr Hale unconscious and then - after enough time to pause for thought - did the same to Mr Ali. Mr Ali received significant injuries including a fractured left eye socket and required hospital treatment.”
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,958

    This. Any criticism at all is PROOF of a PLOT to have another COUP. By BLAIRITES.

    The Labour Party must rid itself of this despicable behaviour that causes so much offence. No, not anti-Semitism. Anti-Corbynism.
    They are half right.

    Antisemitism is evil. Antisemitism is also being used to attack Labour and Corbyn. That's what political opponents do.
    Opponents like John McDonnell. Owen Jones. Billy Bragg. Tom Watson...

    The problem that Kali Ma worshippers have is that their "any criticism is the start of another Blairite coup" narrative looks increasingly hysterical as non-Blairites point to the thing they don't want discussing.

    I think that Jame O'Brien had it right in his analysis. Corbyn's team insist we can't accept the IHRA definition of anti-semitism because under it Corbyn is an anti-semite. Hence the desperate desire to insist that "criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-semitic" in the IHRA code actually means "we won't be able to criticise Israel".

    Corbyn and the other Israel haters think Israel is a racist endeavour. That it should not exist and should have not been created. Denial of self-determination uniquely to Jews is blatant anti-semitism. Hence the desperate desire for a definition that doesn't include this.
    That comment would be spot on regardless. That it is made by a Labour activist imbues it with even more insight and importance.

    I feel really sorry for you. Democracy demands we have a viable alternative Government able to take over. Ordinarliy, May would be thirty points back for her woeful handling of Brexit. Remainers and Brexiteers are all equally happy to condemn her - and yet, she is still kept in office by the shower of shit that is the current Labour offering.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    edited August 2018

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite greatly outspending their opponents and having much of the establishment, both domestic and foreign on their side. Indeed, had Remain explained our degree of entanglement with the EU they might well have gone down to a greater defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    Like Goodwin you make the mistake of clinging to the 2016 referendum as being the defining fact of British politics but the reasons why Leave won are almost entirely irrelevant to what is happening in 2018. You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    A general election in which 86.6% of the votes were cast for parties committed to implementing Brexit, exiting the CU and the SM.
    Yes, Remain's bezzy mate Corbyn has left the road clear for Brexit to drive itself into a dead end.
    Corbyn is actually the roadblock guaranteeing Brexit.

    As long as he leads Labour whether the Tories or Corbyn Labour win the next general election there will be no ' People's Vote' second referendum nor will we even stay in the single market.

    If Umunna was Labour leader that may be a different matter with a Labour leader more hostile to Brexit
  • grabcocquegrabcocque Posts: 4,234
    edited August 2018
    ydoethur said:


    The precise numbers are of course a legitimate question and much explored in scholarly debate given the incomplete nature of the records and the destruction of so much of the physical evidence. The 6 million figure is the one the Nazis themselves (to be exact, Eichmann) gave and is therefore generally considered the ceiling. Most research puts the numbers slightly lower, at around 5.1-5.5 million.

    (I fully appreciate that's not what you meant!)

    Yad Vashem has a brief intro to this on its FAQ site:

    https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/faqs.html

    A fascinating and truly shocking number I've seen was estimates for the number of excess deaths caused by the first and second world wars.

    18 million deaths in World War one
    80 million deaths in World War two

    Add into that

    25 million killed by the Holodomor and Great Terror in the Soviet Union
    45 million died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China

    The 20th Century was ridiculous.
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,074
    edited August 2018
    https://unherd.com/2018/08/left-deceiving-antisemitism/?utm_source=UnHerd+Today&utm_campaign=4d16bda8ed-May1_Subject-Test_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_79fd0df946-4d16bda8ed-34706857

    Well worth reading. Says what some on here have pointed out.

    “Antisemitism can come from anywhere – with a rider that the place it may be most likely to come from at times is from among those who think that they are immune to it. From people who think that is the thing that they will not be. That that is a thing they could never be. Because they are the good guys. They are the decent ones. They are the ‘anti-fascists’, so how could they possibly be fascists?

    ...... antisemitism can creep up on the ‘virtuous’ and the un-virtuous alike. And that the man who considers himself virtuous is the more likely vessel through which this most foul virus might pass in this age.”
  • AndyJSAndyJS Posts: 29,395
    edited August 2018

    ydoethur said:


    The precise numbers are of course a legitimate question and much explored in scholarly debate given the incomplete nature of the records and the destruction of so much of the physical evidence. The 6 million figure is the one the Nazis themselves (to be exact, Eichmann) gave and is therefore generally considered the ceiling. Most research puts the numbers slightly lower, at around 5.1-5.5 million.

    (I fully appreciate that's not what you meant!)

    Yad Vashem has a brief intro to this on its FAQ site:

    https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/faqs.html

    A fascinating and truly shocking number I've seen was estimates for the number of excess deaths caused by the first and second world wars.

    18 million deaths in World War one
    80 million deaths in World War two

    Add into that

    25 million killed by the Holomodor and Great Terror in the Soviet Union
    45 million died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China

    The 20th Century was ridiculous.
    It was probably still the safest and least violent century that humanity has experienced so far when you look at the wider picture. In 1900 life expectancy was about 45 in the richest countries. In 2000 it was nearly 80. No other century experienced such an improvement, and probably never will, since humans almost certainly won't be living to an average age of 125 by the year 2100.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709

    Sean_F said:

    TGOHF said:

    TGOHF said:

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    Like Goodwin you make the mistake of clinging to the 2016 referendum as being the defining fact of British politics but the reasons why Leave won are almost entirely irrelevant to what is happening in 2018. You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    If only you can explain to the little people in simple sentences where they went wrong by voting Brexit you will win next time..

    You need to look beyond Trump, xenophobic lies and Russian bots as to why the country voted leave. Otherwise you will have "#FBPE" on your grave.
    "and after having had the chance to assess our true options will rightly conclude that there is no alternative to closer integration".
    Good luck with that. The cure to a poisoning is a massive overdose of the same poison ?
    The poison was the practice of opt-outs and demanding special status. It hit the wall in 2016 and won't be coming back.
    The poison was joining in the first place.
    European integration is a geopolitical fact that we cannot simply ignore or stand aloof from. We're just relearning what Geoffrey Howe called "the lessons of isolation" from the time after the EEC was formed until the time we joined.
    Our place was always in EFTA with Scandinavia and Switzerland not the EEC, the EU or the Eurozone and that is likely where we will eventually return to
  • It's just one long popcorn fest in Labour these days:

    https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1026422583112212481

    This one looks like it could be a corker.. McManus has taken down the post and apologised for it, but has left up his screenshot of Watson's Zionist donations. He obviously feels this still needs pointing out and isn't at all antisemitic
  • justin124justin124 Posts: 11,527

    Can anyone tell me what ‘a supposed anti-semitism problem’ is? I thought Labour had a problem, They have had expulsions, disciplineries, investigations, changes in policy to address the issue - if its only a ‘supposed anti-semitism problem’ then they have done a great deal to address something that doesn’t exist.

    This is what is so funny - the "supporters" of Corbyn continue to defend a "There. Is. No. Antisemitism." Peter Willsman line even after Jeremy himself sends all members a video message saying there is an anti-semitism problem. The rationale being that poor Jeremy has been forced into saying this by the evil Blairite plot.

    On the biggest Labour Facebook group this morning. A smear against Tom Watson claiming that donations made to him by a prominent Jew are part of the 'Israeli global interference in other countries' - they just don't know when to stop such is their hatred for Israel.

    The current Israeli government is abhorrent, but they don't really care about Netanyahu or any small issue like that - their issue is that there is an Israeli PM not what the current incumbent does. When I point out that Labour policy IS support of the state of Israel via our two state solution policy, all I get is abuse for some reason...

    Well said.
    I have no time at all for Antisemitism but do seriously doubt that we would be experiencing the current internal Labour party turmoil were Israel still in the hands of BenGurion , Golda Meier, Simon Perez or Yitzak Rabin.
  • grabcocquegrabcocque Posts: 4,234
    HYUFD said:


    Our place was always in EFTA with Scandinavia and Switzerland not the EEC, the EU or the Eurozone and that is likely where we will eventually return to

    I remember some more sensible Tories talking about a two-speed Europe in the early nineties.

    When the Tory party was tearing itself to shreds over Maastricht, it could and should have been working with the other EFTA countries to advance a constructive alternative vision.

    The failure of the UK's politicians to have the courage and vision needed to offer a viable alternative to Eurofederalism for those countries outside the core group is to our eternal shame, and we're reaping the rewards of that failure now.
  • Ishmael_ZIshmael_Z Posts: 8,981
    justin124 said:

    Can anyone tell me what ‘a supposed anti-semitism problem’ is? I thought Labour had a problem, They have had expulsions, disciplineries, investigations, changes in policy to address the issue - if its only a ‘supposed anti-semitism problem’ then they have done a great deal to address something that doesn’t exist.

    This is what is so funny - the "supporters" of Corbyn continue to defend a "There. Is. No. Antisemitism." Peter Willsman line even after Jeremy himself sends all members a video message saying there is an anti-semitism problem. The rationale being that poor Jeremy has been forced into saying this by the evil Blairite plot.

    On the biggest Labour Facebook group this morning. A smear against Tom Watson claiming that donations made to him by a prominent Jew are part of the 'Israeli global interference in other countries' - they just don't know when to stop such is their hatred for Israel.

    The current Israeli government is abhorrent, but they don't really care about Netanyahu or any small issue like that - their issue is that there is an Israeli PM not what the current incumbent does. When I point out that Labour policy IS support of the state of Israel via our two state solution policy, all I get is abuse for some reason...

    Well said.
    I have no time at all for Antisemitism but do seriously doubt that we would be experiencing the current internal Labour party turmoil were Israel still in the hands of BenGurion , Golda Meier, Simon Perez or Yitzak Rabin.
    "[B]ut" of the year. Well done.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,575
    AndyJS said:

    ydoethur said:


    The precise numbers are of course a legitimate question and much explored in scholarly debate given the incomplete nature of the records and the destruction of so much of the physical evidence. The 6 million figure is the one the Nazis themselves (to be exact, Eichmann) gave and is therefore generally considered the ceiling. Most research puts the numbers slightly lower, at around 5.1-5.5 million.

    (I fully appreciate that's not what you meant!)

    Yad Vashem has a brief intro to this on its FAQ site:

    https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/faqs.html

    A fascinating and truly shocking number I've seen was estimates for the number of excess deaths caused by the first and second world wars.

    18 million deaths in World War one
    80 million deaths in World War two

    Add into that

    25 million killed by the Holomodor and Great Terror in the Soviet Union
    45 million died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China

    The 20th Century was ridiculous.
    It was probably still the safest and least violent century that humanity has experienced so far when you look at the wider picture. In 1900 life expectancy was about 45 in the richest countries. In 2000 it was nearly 80. No other century experienced such an improvement, and probably never will, since humans almost certainly won't be living to an average age of 125 by the year 2100.
    And it might conceivably get a great deal worse...
    https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/earths-scorching-hot-history/566762/
  • SlackbladderSlackbladder Posts: 9,704
    Here's the thing. If you define Zionism as 'the right of the Jewish population to have a homeland'. They by anti-zionist, you want Isreal to not exist as a state.

    Given that it does exist, and it has a population of about 9m people. What do anti-zionist's want done about it? Unless you mean it needs to be forcably destroyed?
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,758
    AndyJS said:

    ydoethur said:


    The precise numbers are of course a legitimate question and much explored in scholarly debate given the incomplete nature of the records and the destruction of so much of the physical evidence. The 6 million figure is the one the Nazis themselves (to be exact, Eichmann) gave and is therefore generally considered the ceiling. Most research puts the numbers slightly lower, at around 5.1-5.5 million.

    (I fully appreciate that's not what you meant!)

    Yad Vashem has a brief intro to this on its FAQ site:

    https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/faqs.html

    A fascinating and truly shocking number I've seen was estimates for the number of excess deaths caused by the first and second world wars.

    18 million deaths in World War one
    80 million deaths in World War two

    Add into that

    25 million killed by the Holomodor and Great Terror in the Soviet Union
    45 million died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China

    The 20th Century was ridiculous.
    It was probably still the safest and least violent century that humanity has experienced so far.
    There I have to disagree. The twentieth century probably saw more war, death and destruction than in previous centuries simply because the availability of new technology and the spread of geopolitics made it unfortunately easy to kill very large numbers of people over very wide areas in short spaces of time.

    So for example, if we look at Europe previous war catastrophes would include the Thirty Years' War. Eight million dead in three decades, but almost all in the Holy Roman Empire. Or on Asia, the Taiping rebellion. Maybe 20 million killed in 15 years, but again in one small area of China.

    It is of course worth remembering the population was much larger in the twentieth century so in relative terms the losses may have been less severe. But the scale of war and killing in the twentieth century, and the inventive nastiness of a lot of it, was something new and disturbing.
  • grabcocquegrabcocque Posts: 4,234
    edited August 2018
    AndyJS said:


    It was probably still the safest and least violent century that humanity has experienced so far when you look at the wider picture. In 1900 life expectancy was about 45 in the richest countries. In 2000 it was nearly 80. No other century experienced such an improvement, and probably never will, since humans almost certainly won't be living to an average age of 125 by the year 2100.


    Interesting counterfactual, of course. Would the massive advances in social policy and medicine that led to this huge jump in life expectancy have happened without the enormous upheavals and trauma of the 20th century?

    It's hard to say for certain but my guess is no.

    The only time when serious social change happens is after a great national trauma.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,042

    It's just one long popcorn fest in Labour these days:

    https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1026422583112212481

    This one looks like it could be a corker.. McManus has taken down the post and apologised for it, but has left up his screenshot of Watson's Zionist donations. He obviously feels this still needs pointing out and isn't at all antisemitic
    I can't get my head around these people. They are utterly obsessed.
  • logical_songlogical_song Posts: 9,669

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite greatly outspending their opponents and having much of the establishment, both domestic and foreign on their side. Indeed, had Remain explained our degree of entanglement with the EU they might well have gone down to a greater defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    Like Goodwin you make the mistake of clinging to the 2016 referendum as being the defining fact of British politics but the reasons why Leave won are almost entirely irrelevant to what is happening in 2018. You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    A general election in which 86.6% of the votes were cast for parties committed to implementing Brexit, exiting the CU and the SM.
    ... and where the Tories were asking for their Brexit hand to be strengthened and ended up losing seats and their majority.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,042

    Here's the thing. If you define Zionism as 'the right of the Jewish population to have a homeland'. They by anti-zionist, you want Isreal to not exist as a state.

    Given that it does exist, and it has a population of about 9m people. What do anti-zionist's want done about it? Unless you mean it needs to be forcably destroyed?

    iirc Corbyn accepts Israel can exist, but back to 1947 boundaries (although there was some debate i think about exactly what he meant).
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,789

    HYUFD said:


    Our place was always in EFTA with Scandinavia and Switzerland not the EEC, the EU or the Eurozone and that is likely where we will eventually return to

    I remember some more sensible Tories talking about a two-speed Europe in the early nineties.

    When the Tory party was tearing itself to shreds over Maastricht, it could and should have been working with the other EFTA countries to advance a constructive alternative vision.

    The failure of the UK's politicians to have the courage and vision needed to offer a viable alternative to Eurofederalism for those countries outside the core group is to our eternal shame, and we're reaping the rewards of that failure now.
    No-one can articulate what that vision is because it doesn't exist. Any attempt to define an associate status or basic layer of participation in the European system from first principles always comes back to the four freedoms, which doesn't satisfy many of the people who think it's necessary.
  • geoffwgeoffw Posts: 8,092

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite greatly outspending their opponents and having much of the establishment, both domestic and foreign on their side. Indeed, had Remain explained our degree of entanglement with the EU they might well have gone down to a greater defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    Excellent explanatory article by Goodwin who was on R4 Today this morning with Gina Miller commenting and agreeing largely with him except on another brexit vote which he thinks would erode trust in the political system.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 35,765
    AndyJS said:

    ydoethur said:


    The precise numbers are of course a legitimate question and much explored in scholarly debate given the incomplete nature of the records and the destruction of so much of the physical evidence. The 6 million figure is the one the Nazis themselves (to be exact, Eichmann) gave and is therefore generally considered the ceiling. Most research puts the numbers slightly lower, at around 5.1-5.5 million.

    (I fully appreciate that's not what you meant!)

    Yad Vashem has a brief intro to this on its FAQ site:

    https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/faqs.html

    A fascinating and truly shocking number I've seen was estimates for the number of excess deaths caused by the first and second world wars.

    18 million deaths in World War one
    80 million deaths in World War two

    Add into that

    25 million killed by the Holomodor and Great Terror in the Soviet Union
    45 million died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China

    The 20th Century was ridiculous.
    It was probably still the safest and least violent century that humanity has experienced so far when you look at the wider picture. In 1900 life expectancy was about 45 in the richest countries. In 2000 it was nearly 80. No other century experienced such an improvement, and probably never will, since humans almost certainly won't be living to an average age of 125 by the year 2100.
    I think there were probably few worse places to be in than Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1950. Northern China between 1215 and 1230 perhaps?
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,074

    ydoethur said:


    The precise numbers are of course a legitimate question and much explored in scholarly debate given the incomplete nature of the records and the destruction of so much of the physical evidence. The 6 million figure is the one the Nazis themselves (to be exact, Eichmann) gave and is therefore generally considered the ceiling. Most research puts the numbers slightly lower, at around 5.1-5.5 million.

    (I fully appreciate that's not what you meant!)

    Yad Vashem has a brief intro to this on its FAQ site:

    https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/faqs.html

    A fascinating and truly shocking number I've seen was estimates for the number of excess deaths caused by the first and second world wars.

    18 million deaths in World War one
    80 million deaths in World War two

    Add into that

    25 million killed by the Holodomor and Great Terror in the Soviet Union
    45 million died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China

    The 20th Century was ridiculous.
    I have just finished reading Anne Applebaum’s book on the Ukrainian famine - Red Famine. Utterly chilling: both in the deliberate evil that was inflicted on the Ukrainian people and in the way that the truth was denied for decades and decades. How anyone could think that Marxism has anything remotely good about it in the face of evil such as this or the Gulags or the famines inflicted by Mao or the mass murders of Pol Pot beats me.

    And yet the Leader of the Opposition and Shadow Chancellor are perfectly content to speak in front of banners with the faces of these murderers, to call themselves Marxists (McDonnell) and to praise Mao for reducing poverty (Corbyn in a recent interview with Andrew Marr).
  • TGOHFTGOHF Posts: 21,633
    I see Boris has upset the snowflakes again - oh dear.

  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 35,765

    AndyJS said:


    It was probably still the safest and least violent century that humanity has experienced so far when you look at the wider picture. In 1900 life expectancy was about 45 in the richest countries. In 2000 it was nearly 80. No other century experienced such an improvement, and probably never will, since humans almost certainly won't be living to an average age of 125 by the year 2100.


    Interesting counterfactual, of course. Would the massive advances in social policy and medicine that led to this huge jump in life expectancy have happened without the enormous upheavals and trauma of the 20th century?

    It's hard to say for certain but my guess is no.

    The only time when serious social change happens is after a great national trauma.
    Although war is destructive, it often leads to huge medical and technological advances.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,758
    Cyclefree said:

    ydoethur said:


    The precise numbers are of course a legitimate question and much explored in scholarly debate given the incomplete nature of the records and the destruction of so much of the physical evidence. The 6 million figure is the one the Nazis themselves (to be exact, Eichmann) gave and is therefore generally considered the ceiling. Most research puts the numbers slightly lower, at around 5.1-5.5 million.

    (I fully appreciate that's not what you meant!)

    Yad Vashem has a brief intro to this on its FAQ site:

    https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/faqs.html

    A fascinating and truly shocking number I've seen was estimates for the number of excess deaths caused by the first and second world wars.

    18 million deaths in World War one
    80 million deaths in World War two

    Add into that

    25 million killed by the Holodomor and Great Terror in the Soviet Union
    45 million died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China

    The 20th Century was ridiculous.
    I have just finished reading Anne Applebaum’s book on the Ukrainian famine - Red Famine. Utterly chilling: both in the deliberate evil that was inflicted on the Ukrainian people and in the way that the truth was denied for decades and decades. How anyone could think that Marxism has anything remotely good about it in the face of evil such as this or the Gulags or the famines inflicted by Mao or the mass murders of Pol Pot beats me.

    And yet the Leader of the Opposition and Shadow Chancellor are perfectly content to speak in front of banners with the faces of these murderers, to call themselves Marxists (McDonnell) and to praise Mao for reducing poverty (Corbyn in a recent interview with Andrew Marr).
    I would have said personally that Mao considerably increased poverty. He even took away kitchen utensils in order to fulfil his vanity project of increased steel production. He left vast swathes of China more or less destitute through his bungled agricultural reforms and failed economic plans, not to mention the vast destruction unleashed during the Cultural Revolution. It wasn't until Deng came along with his reforms in both the 1960s and 1980s that that was reversed.

    How does Corbyn justify saying the opposite?
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,074
    Sean_F said:

    AndyJS said:

    ydoethur said:


    The precise numbers are of course a legitimate question and much explored in scholarly debate given the incomplete nature of the records and the destruction of so much of the physical evidence. The 6 million figure is the one the Nazis themselves (to be exact, Eichmann) gave and is therefore generally considered the ceiling. Most research puts the numbers slightly lower, at around 5.1-5.5 million.

    (I fully appreciate that's not what you meant!)

    Yad Vashem has a brief intro to this on its FAQ site:

    https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/faqs.html

    A fascinating and truly shocking number I've seen was estimates for the number of excess deaths caused by the first and second world wars.

    18 million deaths in World War one
    80 million deaths in World War two

    Add into that

    25 million killed by the Holomodor and Great Terror in the Soviet Union
    45 million died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China

    The 20th Century was ridiculous.
    It was probably still the safest and least violent century that humanity has experienced so far when you look at the wider picture. In 1900 life expectancy was about 45 in the richest countries. In 2000 it was nearly 80. No other century experienced such an improvement, and probably never will, since humans almost certainly won't be living to an average age of 125 by the year 2100.
    I think there were probably few worse places to be in than Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1950. Northern China between 1215 and 1230 perhaps?
    Read Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder on what it meant to be living in Eastern Europe at any point from 1920 onwards.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 59,540

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite greatly outspending their opponents and having much of the establishment, both domestic and foreign on their side. Indeed, had Remain explained our degree of entanglement with the EU they might well have gone down to a greater defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    At which 82.7% of the electorate voted for parties which advocated implementing the result of the referendum.

    Which appears to have escaped your notice.

    Goodwin's entire point (if you read it) is that the 2016 referendum was not the cause of Brexit - but a long chain of events stretching back decades. Its Remainers who regard the 2016 vote as all defining - hence their tireless attempts to overturn it or run it again, in the forlorn hope of getting a different outcome.......the result was a symptom, not the cause.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,042
    ydoethur said:

    Cyclefree said:

    ydoethur said:


    The precise numbers are of course a legitimate question and much explored in scholarly debate given the incomplete nature of the records and the destruction of so much of the physical evidence. The 6 million figure is the one the Nazis themselves (to be exact, Eichmann) gave and is therefore generally considered the ceiling. Most research puts the numbers slightly lower, at around 5.1-5.5 million.

    (I fully appreciate that's not what you meant!)

    Yad Vashem has a brief intro to this on its FAQ site:

    https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/faqs.html

    A fascinating and truly shocking number I've seen was estimates for the number of excess deaths caused by the first and second world wars.

    18 million deaths in World War one
    80 million deaths in World War two

    Add into that

    25 million killed by the Holodomor and Great Terror in the Soviet Union
    45 million died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China

    The 20th Century was ridiculous.
    I have just finished reading Anne Applebaum’s book on the Ukrainian famine - Red Famine. Utterly chilling: both in the deliberate evil that was inflicted on the Ukrainian people and in the way that the truth was denied for decades and decades. How anyone could think that Marxism has anything remotely good about it in the face of evil such as this or the Gulags or the famines inflicted by Mao or the mass murders of Pol Pot beats me.

    And yet the Leader of the Opposition and Shadow Chancellor are perfectly content to speak in front of banners with the faces of these murderers, to call themselves Marxists (McDonnell) and to praise Mao for reducing poverty (Corbyn in a recent interview with Andrew Marr).
    I would have said personally that Mao considerably increased poverty. He even took away kitchen utensils in order to fulfil his vanity project of increased steel production. He left vast swathes of China more or less destitute through his bungled agricultural reforms and failed economic plans, not to mention the vast destruction unleashed during the Cultural Revolution. It wasn't until Deng came along with his reforms in both the 1960s and 1980s that that was reversed.

    How does Corbyn justify saying the opposite?
    The millions who died of starvation were no longer in the poverty stats?
  • Sunil_PrasannanSunil_Prasannan Posts: 48,921
    edited August 2018
    TGOHF said:

    Ishmael_Z said:

    DavidL said:

    In other news Stokes is apparently in the dock, the jury are being empanelled and none of them admit to being big England cricket fans: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/live-england-cricketer-ben-stokes-1865220

    Looks like its running today.

    The first rule of being a big England cricket fan on the Stokes jury is...
    Looks like the prosecution have won the toss and will bat first.

    Come on, India!

    EDIT: (oops the match ended days ago!)
  • grabcocquegrabcocque Posts: 4,234
    Sean_F said:


    Although war is destructive, it often leads to huge medical and technological advances.

    As a nerd of a certain age, I'm inclined to view everything in terms of early 90s scifi.

    Babylon 5 fans know that human history definitely leans more towards Shadow than Vorlon.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709

    HYUFD said:


    Our place was always in EFTA with Scandinavia and Switzerland not the EEC, the EU or the Eurozone and that is likely where we will eventually return to

    I remember some more sensible Tories talking about a two-speed Europe in the early nineties.

    When the Tory party was tearing itself to shreds over Maastricht, it could and should have been working with the other EFTA countries to advance a constructive alternative vision.

    The failure of the UK's politicians to have the courage and vision needed to offer a viable alternative to Eurofederalism for those countries outside the core group is to our eternal shame, and we're reaping the rewards of that failure now.
    No-one can articulate what that vision is because it doesn't exist. Any attempt to define an associate status or basic layer of participation in the European system from first principles always comes back to the four freedoms, which doesn't satisfy many of the people who think it's necessary.
    That was largely the fault of Blair in failing to follow most EEA nations in imposing transition controls on free movement from the new accession countries in 2004. After a few years of reducing immigration post Brexit that will be resolved
  • geoffwgeoffw Posts: 8,092
    Goodwin: 'The total lack of serious reflection was brought home to me when David Cameron, who had resigned only hours after the vote, reappeared six months later to share his conclusion: Brexit reflected “a movement of unhappiness.” How strange, I thought, because most of the Brexiteers I knew were bloody delighted.'
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 35,765
    Cyclefree said:

    Sean_F said:

    AndyJS said:

    ydoethur said:


    The precise numbers are of course a legitimate question and much explored in scholarly debate given the incomplete nature of the records and the destruction of so much of the physical evidence. The 6 million figure is the one the Nazis themselves (to be exact, Eichmann) gave and is therefore generally considered the ceiling. Most research puts the numbers slightly lower, at around 5.1-5.5 million.

    (I fully appreciate that's not what you meant!)

    Yad Vashem has a brief intro to this on its FAQ site:

    https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/faqs.html

    A fascinating and truly shocking number I've seen was estimates for the number of excess deaths caused by the first and second world wars.

    18 million deaths in World War one
    80 million deaths in World War two

    Add into that

    25 million killed by the Holomodor and Great Terror in the Soviet Union
    45 million died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China

    The 20th Century was ridiculous.
    It was probably still the safest and least violent century that humanity has experienced so far when you look at the wider picture. In 1900 life expectancy was about 45 in the richest countries. In 2000 it was nearly 80. No other century experienced such an improvement, and probably never will, since humans almost certainly won't be living to an average age of 125 by the year 2100.
    I think there were probably few worse places to be in than Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1950. Northern China between 1215 and 1230 perhaps?
    Read Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder on what it meant to be living in Eastern Europe at any point from 1920 onwards.
    Yes, I should have said 1920 to 1950 (and even in WWI, the fighting in the East was appallingly brutal - if not as bad as WWII).
  • edmundintokyoedmundintokyo Posts: 17,136

    Here's the thing. If you define Zionism as 'the right of the Jewish population to have a homeland'. They by anti-zionist, you want Isreal to not exist as a state.

    Given that it does exist, and it has a population of about 9m people. What do anti-zionist's want done about it? Unless you mean it needs to be forcably destroyed?

    I'd like them to give all the people who live in the territory they control the right to vote. I'd also like people there to vote against having an explicitly religious state, which is a terrible idea no matter what the religion. Either of these things would mean an end to "a homeland for the Jewish population", as opposed to a country that Jewish people live in, which there are plenty of other examples of.

    In the short term they're not going to do this, and I don't support making them do it by force; It's quite normal to think another country should do something and not support making them do it by force. I never supported invading apartheid South Africa, but I did support South Africa ending apartheid.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    edited August 2018

    HYUFD said:


    Our place was always in EFTA with Scandinavia and Switzerland not the EEC, the EU or the Eurozone and that is likely where we will eventually return to

    I remember some more sensible Tories talking about a two-speed Europe in the early nineties.

    When the Tory party was tearing itself to shreds over Maastricht, it could and should have been working with the other EFTA countries to advance a constructive alternative vision.

    The failure of the UK's politicians to have the courage and vision needed to offer a viable alternative to Eurofederalism for those countries outside the core group is to our eternal shame, and we're reaping the rewards of that failure now.
    Lord Owen has an excellent article on how we could stay in the EEA but in the EFTA rather than EU pillar

    http://www.lorddavidowen.co.uk/the-chequers-option-is-holed-below-the-waterline-there-is-a-third-way-to-avoid-the-uk-being-boxed-in-between-a-bad-deal-and-no-deal/
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 35,765
    ydoethur said:

    Cyclefree said:

    ydoethur said:


    The precise numbers are of course a legitimate question and much explored in scholarly debate given the incomplete nature of the records and the destruction of so much of the physical evidence. The 6 million figure is the one the Nazis themselves (to be exact, Eichmann) gave and is therefore generally considered the ceiling. Most research puts the numbers slightly lower, at around 5.1-5.5 million.

    (I fully appreciate that's not what you meant!)

    Yad Vashem has a brief intro to this on its FAQ site:

    https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/faqs.html

    A fascinating and truly shocking number I've seen was estimates for the number of excess deaths caused by the first and second world wars.

    18 million deaths in World War one
    80 million deaths in World War two

    Add into that

    25 million killed by the Holodomor and Great Terror in the Soviet Union
    45 million died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China

    The 20th Century was ridiculous.
    I have just finished reading Anne Applebaum’s book on the Ukrainian famine - Red Famine. Utterly chilling: both in the deliberate evil that was inflicted on the Ukrainian people and in the way that the truth was denied for decades and decades. How anyone could think that Marxism has anything remotely good about it in the face of evil such as this or the Gulags or the famines inflicted by Mao or the mass murders of Pol Pot beats me.

    And yet the Leader of the Opposition and Shadow Chancellor are perfectly content to speak in front of banners with the faces of these murderers, to call themselves Marxists (McDonnell) and to praise Mao for reducing poverty (Corbyn in a recent interview with Andrew Marr).
    I would have said personally that Mao considerably increased poverty. He even took away kitchen utensils in order to fulfil his vanity project of increased steel production. He left vast swathes of China more or less destitute through his bungled agricultural reforms and failed economic plans, not to mention the vast destruction unleashed during the Cultural Revolution. It wasn't until Deng came along with his reforms in both the 1960s and 1980s that that was reversed.

    How does Corbyn justify saying the opposite?
    Deng was sure that China was poorer in 1976 than in 1949. The rural Soviet Union was probably poorer in 1950 than in 1915.

    The only thing that Communists did effectively was war.
  • Sean_F said:

    AndyJS said:

    ydoethur said:


    The precise numbers are of course a legitimate question and much explored in scholarly debate given the incomplete nature of the records and the destruction of so much of the physical evidence. The 6 million figure is the one the Nazis themselves (to be exact, Eichmann) gave and is therefore generally considered the ceiling. Most research puts the numbers slightly lower, at around 5.1-5.5 million.

    (I fully appreciate that's not what you meant!)

    Yad Vashem has a brief intro to this on its FAQ site:

    https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/faqs.html

    A fascinating and truly shocking number I've seen was estimates for the number of excess deaths caused by the first and second world wars.

    18 million deaths in World War one
    80 million deaths in World War two

    Add into that

    25 million killed by the Holomodor and Great Terror in the Soviet Union
    45 million died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China

    The 20th Century was ridiculous.
    It was probably still the safest and least violent century that humanity has experienced so far when you look at the wider picture. In 1900 life expectancy was about 45 in the richest countries. In 2000 it was nearly 80. No other century experienced such an improvement, and probably never will, since humans almost certainly won't be living to an average age of 125 by the year 2100.
    I think there were probably few worse places to be in than Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1950. Northern China between 1215 and 1230 perhaps?
    Latin America during the 16th century?
  • StereotomyStereotomy Posts: 4,092

    If you define Zionism as 'the right of the Jewish population to have a homeland'. They by anti-zionist, you want Isreal to not exist as a state.

    The second sentence very clearly doesn't follow from the first.
  • grabcocquegrabcocque Posts: 4,234
    edited August 2018


    Goodwin's entire point (if you read it) is that the 2016 referendum was not the cause of Brexit - but a long chain of events stretching back decades. Its Remainers who regard the 2016 vote as all defining - hence their tireless attempts to overturn it or run it again, in the forlorn hope of getting a different outcome.......the result was a symptom, not the cause.

    It's a record that gets shockingly little rotation. But polls have consistently shown a majority of UK adults in favour of either a reduction in the EU's competencies or outright departure since the early 90s.

    This is not some recent spasm of stupidity fed by Boris's idiotic bus-borne lies, but a deep-rooted but lowkey euroscepticism that took hold in the early 90s and never went away.

    Failure of pro-EU governments, especially Blair's and Cameron's, to engage honestly with that is another contributing factor to the mess we're in now.

    It feels weird to say this, but HYUFD has a point. The UK was never going to be a willing participant in a federal EU, and a federal EU has always been the end goal.

    If British politicians had been honest, we should have realised a long time ago that our place was in some sort of EEA or Swiss bilateral arrangement and worked towards that.

    I wish Eurofederalism well. I just don't think the UK will ever be part of it. So we need to find our place and make our peace with that. And we should have done it in the 90s.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,789

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite greatly outspending their opponents and having much of the establishment, both domestic and foreign on their side. Indeed, had Remain explained our degree of entanglement with the EU they might well have gone down to a greater defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    At which 82.7% of the electorate voted for parties which advocated implementing the result of the referendum.

    Which appears to have escaped your notice.

    Goodwin's entire point (if you read it) is that the 2016 referendum was not the cause of Brexit - but a long chain of events stretching back decades. Its Remainers who regard the 2016 vote as all defining - hence their tireless attempts to overturn it or run it again, in the forlorn hope of getting a different outcome.......the result was a symptom, not the cause.
    2016 was a unique event that allowed the question of EU membership to become a proxy for all those issues you mention. That will never happen again because we can now see that those issues are not defined by our participation in the EU or otherwise.

    Goodwin's article is totally incoherent in many ways, but the section on English national identity is particularly special. He points out that people who regard themselves as English, not British were more likely to support Brexit, and in the next paragraph says that the British are suspicious of identities that claim to supersede the nation.
  • Here's the thing. If you define Zionism as 'the right of the Jewish population to have a homeland'. They by anti-zionist, you want Isreal to not exist as a state.

    Given that it does exist, and it has a population of about 9m people. What do anti-zionist's want done about it? Unless you mean it needs to be forcably destroyed?

    Ahmadinejad wanted it "erased from the pages of history". But of course his words were also translated as "wiped from the map".
  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,232
    TGOHF said:

    I see Boris has upset the snowflakes again - oh dear.

    We all guessed Boris would go down this path, but the timing's a bit too obvious, coming as it does only days after the Yaxley-Lennon saga. Boris just sounds desperate to be noticed.
  • It's just one long popcorn fest in Labour these days:

    https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1026422583112212481

    This one looks like it could be a corker.. McManus has taken down the post and apologised for it, but has left up his screenshot of Watson's Zionist donations. He obviously feels this still needs pointing out and isn't at all antisemitic
    I can't get my head around these people. They are utterly obsessed.
    McManus suspended already. Looks like Jez really means it!
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,074

    Here's the thing. If you define Zionism as 'the right of the Jewish population to have a homeland'. They by anti-zionist, you want Isreal to not exist as a state.

    Given that it does exist, and it has a population of about 9m people. What do anti-zionist's want done about it? Unless you mean it needs to be forcably destroyed?

    What I don’t understand is this: if the existence of a state for the Jewish people is, ipso facto, racist then surely this applies to any other state which is for a particular people, a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people, for instance. Either both of them are racist endeavours or neither of them are.

    Denying the right to a homeland only to Jews - which seems to be the view of some of the Corbynistas - seems to me to be a very clear example of racism in action.

  • geoffwgeoffw Posts: 8,092
    Goodwin: 'Britain’s National Centre for Social Research recently pointed out that levels of British support for leaving the EU or radically reducing the EU’s power “have been consistently above 50 percent for a little over 20 years.” '
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,789


    Goodwin's entire point (if you read it) is that the 2016 referendum was not the cause of Brexit - but a long chain of events stretching back decades. Its Remainers who regard the 2016 vote as all defining - hence their tireless attempts to overturn it or run it again, in the forlorn hope of getting a different outcome.......the result was a symptom, not the cause.

    It's a record that gets shockingly little rotation. But polls have consistently shown a majority of UK adults in favour of either a reduction in the EU's competencies or outright departure since the early 90s.

    This is not some recent spasm of stupidity fed by Boris's idiotic bus-borne lies, but a deep-rooted but lowkey euroscepticism that took hold in the early 90s and never went away.

    Failure of pro-EU governments, especially Blair's and Cameron's, to engage honestly with that is another contributing factor to the mess we're in now.

    It feels weird to say this, but HYUFD has a point. The UK was never going to be a willing participant in a federal EU, and a federal EU has always been the end goal.

    If British politicians had been honest, we should have realised a long time ago that our place was in some sort of EEA or Swiss bilateral arrangement and worked towards that.
    The UK would never be a willing participant in an EEA or Swiss bilateral arrangement because we don't like being told what to do and would viscerally resent the concept of being politically outranked by France and Germany.
  • grabcocquegrabcocque Posts: 4,234


    Goodwin's entire point (if you read it) is that the 2016 referendum was not the cause of Brexit - but a long chain of events stretching back decades. Its Remainers who regard the 2016 vote as all defining - hence their tireless attempts to overturn it or run it again, in the forlorn hope of getting a different outcome.......the result was a symptom, not the cause.

    It's a record that gets shockingly little rotation. But polls have consistently shown a majority of UK adults in favour of either a reduction in the EU's competencies or outright departure since the early 90s.

    This is not some recent spasm of stupidity fed by Boris's idiotic bus-borne lies, but a deep-rooted but lowkey euroscepticism that took hold in the early 90s and never went away.

    Failure of pro-EU governments, especially Blair's and Cameron's, to engage honestly with that is another contributing factor to the mess we're in now.

    It feels weird to say this, but HYUFD has a point. The UK was never going to be a willing participant in a federal EU, and a federal EU has always been the end goal.

    If British politicians had been honest, we should have realised a long time ago that our place was in some sort of EEA or Swiss bilateral arrangement and worked towards that.
    The UK would never be a willing participant in an EEA or Swiss bilateral arrangement because we don't like being told what to do and would viscerally resent the concept of being politically outranked by France and Germany.
    I think the point stands though. If we'd had more vision and were less taken by eternal infighting and delusion, we could have been at the forefront of EFTA, and worked with the periphery to shape it according to our vision.

    As it stands now, we're only likely to get an off-the-shelf Norway+CU deal, and we'll have to just lump it.
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,074
    ydoethur said:

    Cyclefree said:

    ydoethur said:


    The precise numbers are of course a legitimate question and much explored in scholarly debate given the incomplete nature of the records and the destruction of so much of the physical evidence. The 6 million figure is the one the Nazis themselves (to be exact, Eichmann) gave and is therefore generally considered the ceiling. Most research puts the numbers slightly lower, at around 5.1-5.5 million.

    (I fully appreciate that's not what you meant!)

    Yad Vashem has a brief intro to this on its FAQ site:

    https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/faqs.html

    A fascinating and truly shocking number I've seen was estimates for the number of excess deaths caused by the first and second world wars.

    18 million deaths in World War one
    80 million deaths in World War two

    Add into that

    25 million killed by the Holodomor and Great Terror in the Soviet Union
    45 million died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China

    The 20th Century was ridiculous.
    I have just finished reading Anne Applebaum’s book on the Ukrainian famine - Red Famine. Utterly chilling: both in the deliberate evil that was inflicted on the Ukrainian people and in the way that the truth was denied for decades and decades. How anyone could think that Marxism has anything remotely good about it in the face of evil such as this or the Gulags or the famines inflicted by Mao or the mass murders of Pol Pot beats me.

    And yet the Leader of the Opposition and Shadow Chancellor are perfectly content to speak in front of banners with the faces of these murderers, to call themselves Marxists (McDonnell) and to praise Mao for reducing poverty (Corbyn in a recent interview with Andrew Marr).
    I would have said personally that Mao considerably increased poverty. He even took away kitchen utensils in order to fulfil his vanity project of increased steel production. He left vast swathes of China more or less destitute through his bungled agricultural reforms and failed economic plans, not to mention the vast destruction unleashed during the Cultural Revolution. It wasn't until Deng came along with his reforms in both the 1960s and 1980s that that was reversed.

    How does Corbyn justify saying the opposite?
    He didn’t justify it because Marr was too feeble an interviewer to ask him that simple question. Corbyn just said it and smirked as if he had made some very good point. For someone who claims to be interested in these matters, he is remarkably ignorant about them.

    I will see if I can dig out a film of the interview.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 59,540

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    That will never happen again
    Ever wondered why Blair and Clegg resiled from promises to hold a referendum on EU membership?

    Could it be they realised there was a strong chance they'd get an answer they didn't like?

    the referendum marked the first occasion in Britain’s history when the culturally liberal middle-class, which orbits London and the university towns, had lost. Until this point, the advocates of double liberalism—a globalized economy accompanied by a highly liberal immigration policy—had gotten all they had wanted. Business got a continuing influx of mass cheap labour that fed a consumption-driven growth model that not only removed incentives for investing in training but exacerbated divides between the high and low-skilled. The liberal middle-class got economic benefits alongside Polish cleaners and membership of the dominant value set but became increasingly detached from the ‘left behind.’ Even though political scientists had torn apart the ‘protest thesis’ two decades earlier, showing how people who rebel against the liberal consensus also hold clear and consistent preferences, to many of the winners who now suddenly felt like losers the idea that this was just an irrational backlash seemed like the easiest and most comforting explanation.

    https://quillette.com/2018/08/03/britains-populist-revolt/
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,789
    edited August 2018


    Goodwin's entire point (if you read it) is that the 2016 referendum was not the cause of Brexit - but a long chain of events stretching back decades. Its Remainers who regard the 2016 vote as all defining - hence their tireless attempts to overturn it or run it again, in the forlorn hope of getting a different outcome.......the result was a symptom, not the cause.

    It's a record that gets shockingly little rotation. But polls have consistently shown a majority of UK adults in favour of either a reduction in the EU's competencies or outright departure since the early 90s.

    This is not some recent spasm of stupidity fed by Boris's idiotic bus-borne lies, but a deep-rooted but lowkey euroscepticism that took hold in the early 90s and never went away.

    Failure of pro-EU governments, especially Blair's and Cameron's, to engage honestly with that is another contributing factor to the mess we're in now.

    It feels weird to say this, but HYUFD has a point. The UK was never going to be a willing participant in a federal EU, and a federal EU has always been the end goal.

    If British politicians had been honest, we should have realised a long time ago that our place was in some sort of EEA or Swiss bilateral arrangement and worked towards that.
    The UK would never be a willing participant in an EEA or Swiss bilateral arrangement because we don't like being told what to do and would viscerally resent the concept of being politically outranked by France and Germany.
    I think the point stands though. If we'd had more vision and were less taken by eternal infighting and delusion, we could have been at the forefront of EFTA, and worked with the periphery to shape it according to our vision.

    As it stands now, we're only likely to get an off-the-shelf Norway+CU deal, and we'll have to just lump it.
    I think this misdiagnoses the genesis of the Euroscepticsm of the early 90s. It began with the events surrounding the downfall of Thatcher and metastasised from there.

    It was never in the national interest to pursue the kind of relationship you describe, and even attempting to define it would have proven as confounding as trying to define a "have your cake and eat it" Brexit.
  • edmundintokyoedmundintokyo Posts: 17,136
    Cyclefree said:

    Here's the thing. If you define Zionism as 'the right of the Jewish population to have a homeland'. They by anti-zionist, you want Isreal to not exist as a state.

    Given that it does exist, and it has a population of about 9m people. What do anti-zionist's want done about it? Unless you mean it needs to be forcably destroyed?

    What I don’t understand is this: if the existence of a state for the Jewish people is, ipso facto, racist then surely this applies to any other state which is for a particular people, a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people, for instance. Either both of them are racist endeavours or neither of them are.

    Denying the right to a homeland only to Jews - which seems to be the view of some of the Corbynistas - seems to me to be a very clear example of racism in action.

    Not a Corbynista, but I don't think Palestinian is a race. A state for black people, or a state for white people, or a state for Arab people, sounds like it might well be a racist project, and if it started enshrining differential treatment for that race in law - for example, by privileging people of that race in immigration decisions - then it would definitely be racist.

    You'd be right if you're saying that countries are often racist, and I'd say the Corbynistas' particular interest in Israel is, varying from person to person, a combination of
    1) Holding democracies to higher standards
    2) Siding with the underdog against America and/or former colonial powers
    3) Anti-Semitism
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,789

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    That will never happen again
    Ever wondered why Blair and Clegg resiled from promises to hold a referendum on EU membership?

    Could it be they realised there was a strong chance they'd get an answer they didn't like?

    the referendum marked the first occasion in Britain’s history when the culturally liberal middle-class, which orbits London and the university towns, had lost. Until this point, the advocates of double liberalism—a globalized economy accompanied by a highly liberal immigration policy—had gotten all they had wanted. Business got a continuing influx of mass cheap labour that fed a consumption-driven growth model that not only removed incentives for investing in training but exacerbated divides between the high and low-skilled. The liberal middle-class got economic benefits alongside Polish cleaners and membership of the dominant value set but became increasingly detached from the ‘left behind.’ Even though political scientists had torn apart the ‘protest thesis’ two decades earlier, showing how people who rebel against the liberal consensus also hold clear and consistent preferences, to many of the winners who now suddenly felt like losers the idea that this was just an irrational backlash seemed like the easiest and most comforting explanation.

    https://quillette.com/2018/08/03/britains-populist-revolt/
    This is utter nonsense. Goodwin is wet behind the ears and seems to think the world began in 1997.

    In any case Blair never promised a referendum on EU membership, and I don't think Clegg did other than in a dodgy Lib Dem leaflet. I'm not here to defend either of them.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,575
    ydoethur said:

    Cyclefree said:

    ydoethur said:


    The precise numbers are of course a legitimate question and much explored in scholarly debate given the incomplete nature of the records and the destruction of so much of the physical evidence. The 6 million figure is the one the Nazis themselves (to be exact, Eichmann) gave and is therefore generally considered the ceiling. Most research puts the numbers slightly lower, at around 5.1-5.5 million.

    (I fully appreciate that's not what you meant!)

    Yad Vashem has a brief intro to this on its FAQ site:

    https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/faqs.html

    A fascinating and truly shocking number I've seen was estimates for the number of excess deaths caused by the first and second world wars.

    18 million deaths in World War one
    80 million deaths in World War two

    Add into that

    25 million killed by the Holodomor and Great Terror in the Soviet Union
    45 million died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China

    The 20th Century was ridiculous.
    I have just finished reading Anne Applebaum’s book on the Ukrainian famine - Red Famine. Utterly chilling: both in the deliberate evil that was inflicted on the Ukrainian people and in the way that the truth was denied for decades and decades. How anyone could think that Marxism has anything remotely good about it in the face of evil such as this or the Gulags or the famines inflicted by Mao or the mass murders of Pol Pot beats me.

    And yet the Leader of the Opposition and Shadow Chancellor are perfectly content to speak in front of banners with the faces of these murderers, to call themselves Marxists (McDonnell) and to praise Mao for reducing poverty (Corbyn in a recent interview with Andrew Marr).
    I would have said personally that Mao considerably increased poverty. He even took away kitchen utensils in order to fulfil his vanity project of increased steel production. He left vast swathes of China more or less destitute through his bungled agricultural reforms and failed economic plans, not to mention the vast destruction unleashed during the Cultural Revolution. It wasn't until Deng came along with his reforms in both the 1960s and 1980s that that was reversed.

    How does Corbyn justify saying the opposite?
    There is, of course, no justification for Corbyn challenging your historical judgement, Mr. ydoethur.
  • TGOHFTGOHF Posts: 21,633

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    That will never happen again
    Ever wondered why Blair and Clegg resiled from promises to hold a referendum on EU membership?

    Could it be they realised there was a strong chance they'd get an answer they didn't like?

    the referendum marked the first occasion in Britain’s history when the culturally liberal middle-class, which orbits London and the university towns, had lost. Until this point, the advocates of double liberalism—a globalized economy accompanied by a highly liberal immigration policy—had gotten all they had wanted. Business got a continuing influx of mass cheap labour that fed a consumption-driven growth model that not only removed incentives for investing in training but exacerbated divides between the high and low-skilled. The liberal middle-class got economic benefits alongside Polish cleaners and membership of the dominant value set but became increasingly detached from the ‘left behind.’ Even though political scientists had torn apart the ‘protest thesis’ two decades earlier, showing how people who rebel against the liberal consensus also hold clear and consistent preferences, to many of the winners who now suddenly felt like losers the idea that this was just an irrational backlash seemed like the easiest and most comforting explanation.

    https://quillette.com/2018/08/03/britains-populist-revolt/
    This is utter nonsense. Goodwin is wet behind the ears and seems to think the world began in 1997.

    It's those silly little people who don't know anything again....
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,019
    Sean_F said:

    ydoethur said:

    Cyclefree said:

    ydoethur said:


    The precise numbers are of course a legitimate question and much explored in scholarly debate given the incomplete nature of the records and the destruction of so much of the physical evidence. The 6 million figure is the one the Nazis themselves (to be exact, Eichmann) gave and is therefore generally considered the ceiling. Most research puts the numbers slightly lower, at around 5.1-5.5 million.

    (I fully appreciate that's not what you meant!)

    Yad Vashem has a brief intro to this on its FAQ site:

    https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/faqs.html

    A fascinating and truly shocking number I've seen was estimates for the number of excess deaths caused by the first and second world wars.

    18 million deaths in World War one
    80 million deaths in World War two

    Add into that

    25 million killed by the Holodomor and Great Terror in the Soviet Union
    45 million died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China

    The 20th Century was ridiculous.
    I have just finished reading Anne Applebaum’s book on the Ukrainian famine - Red Famine. Utterly chilling: both in the deliberate evil that was inflicted on the Ukrainian people and in the way that the truth was denied for decades and decades. How anyone could think that Marxism has anything remotely good about it in the face of evil such as this or the Gulags or the famines inflicted by Mao or the mass murders of Pol Pot beats me.

    And yet the Leader of the Opposition and Shadow Chancellor are perfectly content to speak in front of banners with the faces of these murderers, to call themselves Marxists (McDonnell) and to praise Mao for reducing poverty (Corbyn in a recent interview with Andrew Marr).
    I would have said personally that Mao considerably increased poverty. He even took away kitchen utensils in order to fulfil his vanity project of increased steel production. He left vast swathes of China more or less destitute through his bungled agricultural reforms and failed economic plans, not to mention the vast destruction unleashed during the Cultural Revolution. It wasn't until Deng came along with his reforms in both the 1960s and 1980s that that was reversed.

    How does Corbyn justify saying the opposite?
    Deng was sure that China was poorer in 1976 than in 1949. The rural Soviet Union was probably poorer in 1950 than in 1915.

    The only thing that Communists did effectively was war.
    The State was probably more powerful in both cases, but at a terrible human cost.
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,074

    Here's the thing. If you define Zionism as 'the right of the Jewish population to have a homeland'. They by anti-zionist, you want Isreal to not exist as a state.

    Given that it does exist, and it has a population of about 9m people. What do anti-zionist's want done about it? Unless you mean it needs to be forcably destroyed?

    I'd like them to give all the people who live in the territory they control the right to vote. I'd also like people there to vote against having an explicitly religious state, which is a terrible idea no matter what the religion. Either of these things would mean an end to "a homeland for the Jewish population", as opposed to a country that Jewish people live in, which there are plenty of other examples of.

    In the short term they're not going to do this, and I don't support making them do it by force; It's quite normal to think another country should do something and not support making them do it by force. I never supported invading apartheid South Africa, but I did support South Africa ending apartheid.
    In an ideal world having Jews live in a state which was not explicitly Jewish might work. But that idea is dead in the water and for this reason: Jews have lived as good citizens in lots of states which were not explicitly Jewish, they have contributed, integrated, fought for their country etc, done all the things which good citizens do.

    And still they have been persecuted and cast out. See France and the Dreyfus affair, see Germany and the Holocaust, see how French Jews are being told now not to wear the kippah in public and how they are leaving their homeland, see how British Jews are feeling now, see how even in countries where the Jewish community is tiny, there is still anti-semitism encouraged or facilitated by the authorities (eg Hungary), see how the Argentinians co-operated with the Iranians over the bombing of a synagogue. And so on. Jews feel that they cannot ever be confident that they will be safe in a non-Jewish country. And with their history, who can blame them?
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709


    Goodwin's entire point (if you read it) is that the 2016 referendum was not the cause of Brexit - but a long chain of events stretching back decades. Its Remainers who regard the 2016 vote as all defining - hence their tireless attempts to overturn it or run it again, in the forlorn hope of getting a different outcome.......the result was a symptom, not the cause.

    It's a record that gets shockingly little rotation. But polls have consistently shown a majority of UK adults in favour of either a reduction in the EU's competencies or outright departure since the early 90s.

    This is not some recent spasm of stupidity fed by Boris's idiotic bus-borne lies, but a deep-rooted but lowkey euroscepticism that took hold in the early 90s and never went away.

    Failure of pro-EU governments, especially Blair's and Cameron's, to engage honestly with that is another contributing factor to the mess we're in now.

    It feels weird to say this, but HYUFD has a point. The UK was never going to be a willing participant in a federal EU, and a federal EU has always been the end goal.

    If British politicians had been honest, we should have realised a long time ago that our place was in some sort of EEA or Swiss bilateral arrangement and worked towards that.
    The UK would never be a willing participant in an EEA or Swiss bilateral arrangement because we don't like being told what to do and would viscerally resent the concept of being politically outranked by France and Germany.
    Germany told us what to do in the EU anyway and France vetoed our original application to join the EEC, EFTA is based on trading rather than political and monetary union which is what we thought we were joining the Common Market for
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite greatly outspending their opponents and having much of the establishment, both domestic and foreign on their side. Indeed, had Remain explained our degree of entanglement with the EU they might well have gone down to a greater defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    At which 82.7% of the electorate voted for parties which advocated implementing the result of the referendum.

    Which appears to have escaped your notice.

    Goodwin's entire point (if you read it) is that the 2016 referendum was not the cause of Brexit - but a long chain of events stretching back decades. Its Remainers who regard the 2016 vote as all defining - hence their tireless attempts to overturn it or run it again, in the forlorn hope of getting a different outcome.......the result was a symptom, not the cause.
    2016 was a unique event that allowed the question of EU membership to become a proxy for all those issues you mention. That will never happen again because we can now see that those issues are not defined by our participation in the EU or otherwise.

    Goodwin's article is totally incoherent in many ways, but the section on English national identity is particularly special. He points out that people who regard themselves as English, not British were more likely to support Brexit, and in the next paragraph says that the British are suspicious of identities that claim to supersede the nation.
    Yet those who saw themselves as English AND British were closest to the actual referendum result in the way they voted
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709


    Goodwin's entire point (if you read it) is that the 2016 referendum was not the cause of Brexit - but a long chain of events stretching back decades. Its Remainers who regard the 2016 vote as all defining - hence their tireless attempts to overturn it or run it again, in the forlorn hope of getting a different outcome.......the result was a symptom, not the cause.

    It's a record that gets shockingly little rotation. But polls have consistently shown a majority of UK adults in favour of either a reduction in the EU's competencies or outright departure since the early 90s.

    This is not some recent spasm of stupidity fed by Boris's idiotic bus-borne lies, but a deep-rooted but lowkey euroscepticism that took hold in the early 90s and never went away.

    Failure of pro-EU governments, especially Blair's and Cameron's, to engage honestly with that is another contributing factor to the mess we're in now.

    It feels weird to say this, but HYUFD has a point. The UK was never going to be a willing participant in a federal EU, and a federal EU has always been the end goal.

    If British politicians had been honest, we should have realised a long time ago that our place was in some sort of EEA or Swiss bilateral arrangement and worked towards that.

    I wish Eurofederalism well. I just don't think the UK will ever be part of it. So we need to find our place and make our peace with that. And we should have done it in the 90s.
    Sensible points
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 59,540

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    That will never happen again
    Ever wondered why Blair and Clegg resiled from promises to hold a referendum on EU membership?

    Could it be they realised there was a strong chance they'd get an answer they didn't like?

    the referendum marked the first occasion in Britain’s history when the culturally liberal middle-class, which orbits London and the university towns, had lost. Until this point, the advocates of double liberalism—a globalized economy accompanied by a highly liberal immigration policy—had gotten all they had wanted. Business got a continuing influx of mass cheap labour that fed a consumption-driven growth model that not only removed incentives for investing in training but exacerbated divides between the high and low-skilled. The liberal middle-class got economic benefits alongside Polish cleaners and membership of the dominant value set but became increasingly detached from the ‘left behind.’ Even though political scientists had torn apart the ‘protest thesis’ two decades earlier, showing how people who rebel against the liberal consensus also hold clear and consistent preferences, to many of the winners who now suddenly felt like losers the idea that this was just an irrational backlash seemed like the easiest and most comforting explanation.

    https://quillette.com/2018/08/03/britains-populist-revolt/
    In any case Blair never promised a referendum on EU membership
    Hannan's comments are true. Blair has twice promised a referendum on Europe

    http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/domestic_politics/factcheck+did+blair+promise+euro+referendum/558277.html
  • grabcocquegrabcocque Posts: 4,234
    HYUFD said:


    Germany told us what to do in the EU anyway and France vetoed our original application to join the EEC, EFTA is based on trading rather than political and monetary union which is what we thought we were joining the Common Market for

    Charles de Gaulle never wanted us to join because he thought our political culture wasn't compatible with Eurofederalism and that we'd just end up being trouble.

    CDG was an astute man indeed.
  • brendan16brendan16 Posts: 2,315



    It's those silly little people who don't know anything again....

    Things would be so much easier if we didn't let the plebs have the vote! Brexit and the large vote for Corbyn in 2017 are symptomatic of a wider malaise - a lot of people for different reasons don't think the system is working for them. And if you feel you have nowt to lose what would be your issue with seeing the whole sorry system crash and burn!

    Low wages, job insecurity, low and high level crime with little police action to address it and unaffordable housing to rent or buy amongst other issues.

    A lot of people Voted for change and instead they got Theresa May and Philip Hammond!
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,789
    On the constitution, not on withdrawal.
  • grabcocquegrabcocque Posts: 4,234
    edited August 2018
    Vote for change! Vote conservative!

    That's the problem with Conservatives. No matter how many times you vote for them they never put the clocks back one single second.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,958

    Sean_F said:

    It’s an open question which is greater: the crazed hysteria of the Corbynites or the crazed hysteria of the Leavers.

    Whilst Remainers are models of sober mature reflection......
    Remainers have not so far hopped from hate figure to hate figure or sought to undermine every aspect of the civic infrastructure that they have come into contact with.
    I'm not so sure about that. You should look at the New European, or some of the Remain twitter threads.
    Here’s an example of a Remainer twitter thread that should be read by anyone hoping to understand where we are.

    https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1025645484092870656?s=21
    He misses the entire point of Goodwin's article - Remain lost before the campaign started - despite greatly outspending their opponents and having much of the establishment, both domestic and foreign on their side. Indeed, had Remain explained our degree of entanglement with the EU they might well have gone down to a greater defeat - but funnily enough, they don't get criticised for that.....
    Like Goodwin you make the mistake of clinging to the 2016 referendum as being the defining fact of British politics but the reasons why Leave won are almost entirely irrelevant to what is happening in 2018. You also ignore the fact that we've had a General Election in the meantime...
    A general election in which 86.6% of the votes were cast for parties committed to implementing Brexit, exiting the CU and the SM.
    ... and where the Tories were asking for their Brexit hand to be strengthened and ended up losing seats and their majority.
    Er...because it wasn't ever going to be a "Brexit election" when there wasn't a fag paper between Labour, Conservatives, UKIP and the DUP on implementing Brexit, exiting the CU and the SM.

    How the bright sparks at CCHQ couldn't spot that one coming down the line is beyond me. Actually.....
This discussion has been closed.