Oh really? Please, share some names, then.
There’s no one without baggage, either real or created by the media.
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True, I was making the usual English response of thinking of NI as part of Ireland. Still though, if there’s trouble in NI, some of it will spill over into the Republic.
Also, the EU has to take an interest, because it’s one of the parties of the Good Friday agreement and can’t allow it to be broken, quite apart form the obvious moral arguments.
I’d refer to it less as ‘meddling in UK sovereignty’ and more as ‘trying to preserve a status quo that has worked out better than anyone dared hope’.
(PS, TIL that until the 1998 GF agreement, the UK still technically claimed sovereignty of ‘Southern Ireland’. FFS)
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If de Pfeffel loses his precious Brexit and destroys the Tories in the process, the past three years might have been worth it.
I’d also love to see Bercow apply to Brussels for the extension. He’s one of the few prominent names in Parliament who’s acquitted himself with honour during this whole mess.
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Not a game I really want to play; practically anyone other than Corbyn at this point. Let’s say anyone who hasn’t defended Chris Williamson. But if you really need names, OK: Sadiq Khan. Owen Smith. Hilary Benn. Just let’s not go the bad-faith-argument route of making the discussion about any of them, thank you very much.
Everyone has some baggage, but it takes a special kind of someone to split the party so badly that after years of Cameron and May’s ineptitude the party is further from a majority than it was when JC took office. The latest Ipsos poll has only 73% of Labour members preferring Corbyn to Johnson as PM. Think about that one. How genuinely polarizing do you have to be to generate those numbers?
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Part of the reason its such a sticking point is that violence will not be limited to NI. Cause it was never limited to NI. For one thing the focus of activity was the border itself, which meant regular attacks on Irish Military, and even UN, personnel and facilities. And while attacks deep in The Republic weren’t exactly common they did happen, as did a lot of IRA activity. There were a lot of thefts/raids (including some rather famous art thefts), drug and gun running. And where straight up attacks happened they were usually Northern IRA groups attacking Irish government or military facilities. Though IIRC there were some terror bombings in Dublin (also by the IRA). And that kinda never stopped, every few years some IRA knobs or associates are caught with a haul of guns or drugs in Ireland, or get picked trying to rob a bank or something. (Good News! that sort of activity has apparently been ramping up since the referendum!)
So re-ignition of violence specifically means that violence spilling into an EU member state. Because the multiparty diplomatic agreement on how to prevent that has been violated by one of its parties. Just as Brexit means the diplomatic apparatus for dealing with that, which runs through the EU, has been removed without a replacement. And there is a long line to negotiate a replacement.
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Given other developments, I’m not sure that this matters, but
Where did you get that from?
The German alt right would love to see the UK prosper after Brexit. Alternatively they would like to see both going down. Both paths would lead to an increased chance of Germany “breaking free from the EU”, as they’d see it. Only the wildest one imagine that Britain would prosper and the EU would crash, though.
It’s among moderate conservative, centrist and left where you’d find people actually hoping in a severe crash for the UK, out of frustration with EU hostile politics by the UK, which have been seen as a fifth column of the US by some. Most may expect it, though, but don’t really wish it, like parents watching their adult kids playing with fire despite being told of the danger.
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Well said sir.
Since 1979 the pendulum has swung to the right and never been corrected. It has swung too far. The people hurt now.
Corbyn’s policies are the best available to try and course correct.
Corbyn is also frequently heard saying a line we should all hear more from politicians : “Well, that’s not my policy, but it is our policy”.
What he’s referring to here is local based politics. Local Labour associations debate and vote for what they think should be policy. Conferences then vote that up to the party level. Just as representative politics should be. Most folks only take part on election day, which is a great shame really. For 40 years local politics have been eroded (in parallel to the diminishing unions) and politics has become like watching tribal football games instead.
We have lived with right wing free market ideology for too long. Back to mixed market economics please, that way the government and democracy itself can curtail corporate free market excesses. No other methods are available to us.
We’ve sold all our national industries that are run only for profit. People who aren’t from the UK are always surprised how much we’ve sold compared to, say, the USA. We;ve hollowed out great swathes of the UK in terms of good available careers. McJobs for you and your grandchildren! Our government only finds war easy to achieve. Everything else involves begging corporations or billionaires. For shame. The government must control the large building blocks in society (water, power, telco, steel etc) or we have the ground sold from underneath our feet. That’s not socialism, it’s just common sense. The USA hasn’t sold all it’s public stakes in all these areas. The UK did. It’s now badly broken.
Vote Corbyn. He’s been on the right side of history again and again.
I’m no cultist. He could be more charismatic, but that isn’t everything. Policies are. Always.
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We’ve always been at war with Eastasia exiting the EU
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Eh?
1. —(1) It is hereby recognized and declared that the part of Ireland heretofore known as Eire ceased, as from the eighteenth day of April, nineteen hundred and forty-nine, to be part of His Majesty’s dominions.
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Also by the UVF.
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Well, that’s why I shouldn’t trust wikipedia.
Although it does show a good example of how if Brits were taught at least a tiny amount of the history of our closest neighbour, maybe we’d not have fucked things up quite as badly?
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Nononononono. Firstly to @phuzz the British backstop is a solution. It doesn’t need one as it is solely there to solve a problem (temporarily) giving the UK sufficient time to implement a permanent solution. As it happens the UK has done no actual real work in the last three years on such a solution and who is to say that they will in the next three or any other time limit the Tories would like to artificially impose.
NI does not need to join Ireland to make a new state. They can have a special economic zone status within the UK (like all the Asian economies the Tories dream about making the UK into have their special economic zones) which would mean sea border controls on imports. Frankly if the DUP weren’t deranged ultras they would bite your hand off to get a deal like that which would make coin for NI like you wouldn’t believe. But the DUP (prorogueing parliaments since Jan 2017 you amateur Tories!) doesn’t really care so much about growing the NI economy or a sustainable future for NI so much as it wants to get handouts from England which it gets to disburse at its pleasure, to its clients. That’s the loyalist way. It’s similar to the Tory way in that democracy is reasonable so long as it delivers power to those in power already, to the right kind of people. The difference is that for loyalists it’s more explicitly ethnonationalist rather than class based.
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It matters, but the decision will be appealed. Meanwhile, credible lawsuits are being prepared in England and Wales.
Since that article was written 3 years ago Corbyn has strived hard to grow into that ‘worst leader ever’ sobriquet. And you might have wanted to add a disclaimer that that this op-ed was written by a friend and former employee of Corbyn’s.
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Absolutely. As a kid growing up in England. all I was told was that most Northern Irish people wanted to stay in the UK but the IRA were determined to force it to leave through violence. I can still remember the visceral shock I felt when I learned about the Divis Tower shooting, where the police (not even the army, but the police) turned a machine-gun on a residential apartment block, killing a nine-year-old boy.
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Yeah, the press have made him out to be as feckless as possible. Whether he’s a good or bad leader, I’d love to find out, post Brexit. He cannot be worse than the gigantic harm Tories are inflicting on us and the economy.
I’m not a journalist in any way at all, so no disclaimers will be forthcoming most likely (sad to say), I’ll never remember. You’re correct it’s a little out of date, but all things have paused since Brexit vote in 2016 imho & he’s been around for a loooong time too, so it still boils down to whether you think the information is bad or not.
But if you’re after more recent info by third parties because you don’t like the source (fair enough):
Here’s a page that shows his history up to 2018 ish :
https://www.publicwhip.org.uk/mp.php?id=uk.org.publicwhip/member/40733
Here’s a page edited last on the 12th August 2019 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Jeremy_Corbyn
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I’ve noticed a certain type of German nationalist/ultra-nationalist – the Identitarian kind – who’s fine with the EU as long as Germany is its most powerful member state (which it currently is). Looked at one way, it’s a revival of the pre-war conservative pan-European (and inherently white supremacist) vision of a European economic union proposed by Bethmann-Hollweg and Kaiser Wilhelm.
This is a serious (and, for fearmongering non-German “Eurosceptics”, deliberate) misunderstanding of the post-war EU project, of course, but that’s nationalists and nativists for you. The way the ones I’m talking about seem to see things is that wise Germany will lead the lesser nation-states of the union in keeping Europe prosperous, safe from both the U.S. and Russia, and – most importantly for them – white.
For this Identitarian type of German nationalist, the idea that a member state would forego the wise and benevolent guidance of Germany and weaken the union it leads is a grave insult, and therefore said member state (and, implied, its citizens) should suffer accordingly. It looks like they get around the little problem that other fascists and Identitarians are behind Brexit by pretending that the referendum decision to Leave was made by 100% of the citizens of the UK, rendering it more a narrative about national identity and rivalry.
As you note, not all parts of (and, I’d agree not the majority of) the German nationalist movement see it this way, but that contingent does seem to exist as part of its panoply of hatemongering and national/ethnic/racial superiority.
There’s some small amount of “that would teach them” mentality in those areas along the political spectrum in Europe if the UK were stupid enough to crash out, especially on the left (within the UK itself, Corbyn sees this as a “the worse the better” scenario which will result in everyone coming around to his vision of a go-it-alone socialist Britain).
For the most part, however, they’d all prefer that the “if” never comes to pass and that the UK remains and are willing to give the Remainers the time they need to put this to a second referendum and then put this whole mess behind them.
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In fairness they didn’t renege on it, May gave parliament three attempts to vote it in, not her fault they didn’t. Many MPs have since said they regretted not voting for it, but many others wouldn’t have negotiated that agreement in the first place if they were the ones doing the negotiating.
The brexiteers could have had their brexit if they really wanted it, they just didn’t like the form it was taking, which is fair enough but it makes their howls of anger at people ‘not respecting the referendum’ massively hypocritical, as May’s deal would have respected the referendum result.
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