I wouldn't place any weight in polling from Russia...I have been watching these vox pop videos, where they are asking lots of questions about Ukraine, Zelensky, Putin etc of Russians. It is really interesting what they don't say or the around about ways many are signal displeasure while not saying so or even saying they are happy with things...
The really big giveaway for me was the rally in the football stadium. Many of the people attending (if you believe the media) were cajoled into being there or offered a day off work. Why would you need to do that if the country was right behind you?
Latest RofIreland poll from @REDCResearch for the @businessposthq - Sinn Fein still way ahead: Sinn Féin 33 Fine Gael 19 (-1 in four weeks) Fianna Fáil 16 (-1) Green Party 5 Social Democrats 5 (+1) Labour 5 (+1) PBP-Solidarity 3 Aontú 2 Independents 11 (Poll: March 18-23)
Sinn Fein now extremely consistent at 33% in the RoI polls now and this should easily get them 60+ seats in 2025.
Fine Gael also now dropping below 20% for the first time since 2005.
Better poll for the smaller parties than the Behaviour and attitudes poll due to a possibly different methodology.
The most interesting thing is the relative resilience of the Irish Greens despite the collapse of FF and FG. I don't know how this plays out seatswise though in the greater Dublin area.
A Sinn Fein government chills my blood but it looks like it could well happen.
Goodness knows why. It seems to be an Irish version of Corbynism except it's got even more traction.
Ireland seems to have shifted very heavily left for some reason. Overall, the left wing vote is 51% in that poll, to 37% for the right.
I don't think it's that surprising TBH - there has been a consistent opening for the centre left in Ireland for a while but the Irish Labour Party has always gone into coalition with FG and got destroyed up to now. The opposition had to go somewhere and SF is effectively a bog standard centre left party now in RoI at least and is merely just being somewhat populist in opposition with FF and FG not delivering for younger voters.
I think the next election will be different as FF at least will not be able to completely rule out cooperation with Sinn Fein.
I don't see why anyone is surprised Ireland is amoral enough to elect a Sinn Fein government. This is the country that shelters under others' defence umbrella, leeches off others' tax base, let women die from lack of abortion access and were neutral against the Nazis.
Spain was neutral against the Nazis (volunteer "Blue Division" notwithstanding) Portugal was neutral against the Nazis Switzerland was neutral against the Nazis Sweden was neutral against the Nazis
Point of order: is it possible to be neutral against something?
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
I had a cousin there. A regular officer with the Australian forces, who had been decorated fighting the Japanese in 1945.He came back a changed man, and quit the Army.
What got to him were the indiscriminate killings of Vietnamese civilians by the Americans. The Australians did long slow jungle patrols to collect intelligence. The Americans just called in artillery and airstrikes on the flimsiest grounds. He saw far too many war crimes to continue the fight.
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
Those who think WFH is the future and nothing wrong with it should challenge themselves to thinking of the 10 best moments in their career and I bet none of them featured being sat at home tapping at a laptop or meeting somebody virtually in a Teams meeting
Working from home exclusively is not good, but I think the benefits of the changes in the last two years outweigh the downsides.
The worse moments of my working life have happened in the office. Having physical distance from colleagues means takes the edge off the bad times.
It does depend a lot on the combination of individual tempraments and types of work. Some people have keenly missed the ability to press the flesh with colleagues on an hourly basis, and some jobs depend on it. Others, a lot less.
However, the bottom line is the bottom line. Employers won't pay for office space if they no longer have to, employees can save a lot of money and time by not commuting and Britain will function better if the good jobs don't require people to live within daily commuting distance of London. Widespread WFH in well-paid jobs has massive potential to level places up.
There's a lot we still have to work out as a society about this new world. How do we build teams, who gets the savings, how do we ensure people have access to decent workspaces in or near their homes? How do we help those struggling extroverts? Hybird working in 2022 won't look like Covid enforced WFH, and it will look different (and better) again in 2027. But if it fails to happen, it's because of a shocking failure of collective imagination.
(And as a counterexample to "the best moments happen collectively"... the best moment of my time as a proper scientist was solving an obscure puzzle in a very minor bit of physics. Nobody else had done it, largely because hardly anyone else had cared. But my tiny, pure, Eureka moment. In the middle of a park, actually. I accept that I'm strange, but it can happen like that.)
Mind me asking what physics puzzle you solved? I'm prepared for the risk of the answer to be deeply technical.
A pleasure!
X-ray diffraction; you shine X-rays at things, you get a spotty pattern which is related to the atomic arrangement of the thing. It's what Crick and Watson used to work out the structure of DNA.
There was this mineral I was studying, where the diffraction pattern had some out-of-pattern spots, which went blurry and got weaker when you heated the mineral up. There had been a number of attempts to explain these (I wasn't quite the only one who had cared about it), but they didn't quite explain everything convincingly.
My Eureka was to guess that a different process was involved- roughly that the X-rays were making the structure shake, and that's what we were seeing. That can happen with other diffraction experiments, but X-rays don't normally do it well.
And it worked. It meant calling in a few favours to get it checked out, but it all fell into place really prettily. More importantly (becuase it isn't really at all important), I had the thrill of knowing "I'm the only person who has ever worked this out, ever". I imagine authors feel the same when their story falls into place.
I get the same kick when I succeed in novel syntheses, making chemical compounds that have never existed in the universe before (as far as we know). Even better if they turn out to kill cancer cells.
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
That's enough about the Viet Cong side of things, how was it for the Americans?
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
I had a cousin there. A regular officer with the Australian forces, who had been decorated fighting the Japanese in 1945.He came back a changed man, and quit the Army.
What got to him were the indiscriminate killings of Vietnamese civilians by the Americans. The Australians did long slow jungle patrols to collect intelligence. The Americans just called in artillery and airstrikes on the flimsiest grounds. He saw far too many war crimes to continue the fight.
The Americans did some appalling shit in indochina. Agent Orange. My god
Those who think WFH is the future and nothing wrong with it should challenge themselves to thinking of the 10 best moments in their career and I bet none of them featured being sat at home tapping at a laptop or meeting somebody virtually in a Teams meeting
Working from home exclusively is not good, but I think the benefits of the changes in the last two years outweigh the downsides.
The worse moments of my working life have happened in the office. Having physical distance from colleagues means takes the edge off the bad times.
It does depend a lot on the combination of individual tempraments and types of work. Some people have keenly missed the ability to press the flesh with colleagues on an hourly basis, and some jobs depend on it. Others, a lot less.
However, the bottom line is the bottom line. Employers won't pay for office space if they no longer have to, employees can save a lot of money and time by not commuting and Britain will function better if the good jobs don't require people to live within daily commuting distance of London. Widespread WFH in well-paid jobs has massive potential to level places up.
There's a lot we still have to work out as a society about this new world. How do we build teams, who gets the savings, how do we ensure people have access to decent workspaces in or near their homes? How do we help those struggling extroverts? Hybird working in 2022 won't look like Covid enforced WFH, and it will look different (and better) again in 2027. But if it fails to happen, it's because of a shocking failure of collective imagination.
(And as a counterexample to "the best moments happen collectively"... the best moment of my time as a proper scientist was solving an obscure puzzle in a very minor bit of physics. Nobody else had done it, largely because hardly anyone else had cared. But my tiny, pure, Eureka moment. In the middle of a park, actually. I accept that I'm strange, but it can happen like that.)
Mind me asking what physics puzzle you solved? I'm prepared for the risk of the answer to be deeply technical.
A pleasure!
X-ray diffraction; you shine X-rays at things, you get a spotty pattern which is related to the atomic arrangement of the thing. It's what Crick and Watson used to work out the structure of DNA.
There was this mineral I was studying, where the diffraction pattern had some out-of-pattern spots, which went blurry and got weaker when you heated the mineral up. There had been a number of attempts to explain these (I wasn't quite the only one who had cared about it), but they didn't quite explain everything convincingly.
My Eureka was to guess that a different process was involved- roughly that the X-rays were making the structure shake, and that's what we were seeing. That can happen with other diffraction experiments, but X-rays don't normally do it well.
And it worked. It meant calling in a few favours to get it checked out, but it all fell into place really prettily. More importantly (becuase it isn't really at all important), I had the thrill of knowing "I'm the only person who has ever worked this out, ever". I imagine authors feel the same when their story falls into place.
Bragg diffraction ... Was there some sort of resonance with the frequency?
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
I had a cousin there. A regular officer with the Australian forces, who had been decorated fighting the Japanese in 1945.He came back a changed man, and quit the Army.
What got to him were the indiscriminate killings of Vietnamese civilians by the Americans. The Australians did long slow jungle patrols to collect intelligence. The Americans just called in artillery and airstrikes on the flimsiest grounds. He saw far too many war crimes to continue the fight.
The Americans did some appalling shit in indochina. Agent Orange. My god
Yes, some years later my cousin developed a painful peripheral neuropathy, thought to be caused by defoliants used.
Latest RofIreland poll from @REDCResearch for the @businessposthq - Sinn Fein still way ahead: Sinn Féin 33 Fine Gael 19 (-1 in four weeks) Fianna Fáil 16 (-1) Green Party 5 Social Democrats 5 (+1) Labour 5 (+1) PBP-Solidarity 3 Aontú 2 Independents 11 (Poll: March 18-23)
Sinn Fein now extremely consistent at 33% in the RoI polls now and this should easily get them 60+ seats in 2025.
Fine Gael also now dropping below 20% for the first time since 2005.
Better poll for the smaller parties than the Behaviour and attitudes poll due to a possibly different methodology.
The most interesting thing is the relative resilience of the Irish Greens despite the collapse of FF and FG. I don't know how this plays out seatswise though in the greater Dublin area.
A Sinn Fein government chills my blood but it looks like it could well happen.
Goodness knows why. It seems to be an Irish version of Corbynism except it's got even more traction.
Ireland seems to have shifted very heavily left for some reason. Overall, the left wing vote is 51% in that poll, to 37% for the right.
I don't think it's that surprising TBH - there has been a consistent opening for the centre left in Ireland for a while but the Irish Labour Party has always gone into coalition with FG and got destroyed up to now. The opposition had to go somewhere and SF is effectively a bog standard centre left party now in RoI at least and is merely just being somewhat populist in opposition with FF and FG not delivering for younger voters.
I think the next election will be different as FF at least will not be able to completely rule out cooperation with Sinn Fein.
I don't see why anyone is surprised Ireland is amoral enough to elect a Sinn Fein government. This is the country that shelters under others' defence umbrella, leeches off others' tax base, let women die from lack of abortion access and were neutral against the Nazis.
Spain was neutral against the Nazis (volunteer "Blue Division" notwithstanding) Portugal was neutral against the Nazis Switzerland was neutral against the Nazis Sweden was neutral against the Nazis
And from a selfish perspective, I’m glad there is a neutral non-NATO country on our doorstep in the event of a Nuclear war.
The best way to avoid being killed if the mushrooms start sprouting is to get away. No amount of duck and cover or lead-lined bomb shelters is a patch on safe passage to a non-target country.
So long as the winds are westerly at the time.
Surely given Ireland's aggressive criticism of Putin's invasion he knows he could nuke Dublin without response as it has no nukes and is not in NATO if we get to WW3.
We on the other hand are at least in NATO and he knows if he nukes London we would in turn nuke Moscow.
If we are destroyed New Zealand or South Africa might be a safe haven, I doubt Ireland would
Even if the Russians didn't nuke the ROI you'd be exposed to deadly amounts of radiation within days. It's simply too close to the UK mainland. In reality though we know that Soviet nuclear doctrine in the event of a first or second strike was to hit any western aligned nation regardless of their status. Indeed it was US doctrine to nuke China in the event of a nuclear war with Russia. Personally I wouldn't bet on the Russians having changed their doctrine.
I read a memoire by someone who was an officer in WW11, I can't recall the book - I think it is well known. In it he describes an incident in France where after heavy fighting he is with a trusted NCO who has been through a lot of action and they come across a Frenchman robbing the corpses of British soldiers. The NCO empties his gun into the robber. I asked myself in all honesty what I would have done as the officer in those circumstances and the answer is nothing.
I think murder is worse than robbing corpses. i personally strive to do neither.
That isn't a comment on the moral dilemma of the officer.
Ideally he should have arrested the the murderer, if circumstances allowed it to be done relatively safely. There's no moral dilemma at all, only a practical one.
Just as under the relevant national law, anyone who knew where Anne Frank was, 1942-44, was under a duty to report the fact to the authorities.
There's no moral dilemma at all, only a practical one.
Uh, no. I'm not saying murder is wrong because it's illegal, I'm saying it's just wrong. I didn't think that was controversial.
Well, it rather boringly, is. Assassinating Hitler would have been murder, at any time and in any country. You got a problem with it?
No, I don't. But I have a sounds basis for thinking so. you operate within the law when the law is available as a practical remedy. When it comes to a genocidal maniac who is the head of a legion fascist fuckheads, then murder is the only practical response. The only other realistic alternative is letting him live, and that's worse.
Contrast that with someone robbing corpses. A nasty business, very unpleasant. But is the world a better place for appointing yourself Judge Judy and executioner, and upon witnessing it dispensing the ultimate punishment? I think no, the world is better served not killing people for such actions. If your only choice is between a corpse robber going free or me becoming a murderer, I choose the corpse robber's freedom. I would kill, but it would need to be for something MUCH worse than seeing some stealing from a dead guy.
The shooting of the looter can't be justified but if I'm honest I think the officer was correct to turn a blind eye. Somebody under the strain of battle who'd seen comrades killed reacted instantly in fury at the desecration of the dead. To be legalistic would not have been just and also would hit morale and remove an effective soldier in the middle of battle. Based on honest military memoirs and a realistic view of the circumstances of battle which thankfully I have never had to experience I assume that small scale "war crimes" are perpetrated by all sides in all conflicts. The ones to be pursued have are those with sufficient scale or pre-meditation or cruelty. Of course the comforting official fiction must be maintained that any infringement would be actionable.
Those who think WFH is the future and nothing wrong with it should challenge themselves to thinking of the 10 best moments in their career and I bet none of them featured being sat at home tapping at a laptop or meeting somebody virtually in a Teams meeting
Working from home exclusively is not good, but I think the benefits of the changes in the last two years outweigh the downsides.
The worse moments of my working life have happened in the office. Having physical distance from colleagues means takes the edge off the bad times.
It does depend a lot on the combination of individual tempraments and types of work. Some people have keenly missed the ability to press the flesh with colleagues on an hourly basis, and some jobs depend on it. Others, a lot less.
However, the bottom line is the bottom line. Employers won't pay for office space if they no longer have to, employees can save a lot of money and time by not commuting and Britain will function better if the good jobs don't require people to live within daily commuting distance of London. Widespread WFH in well-paid jobs has massive potential to level places up.
There's a lot we still have to work out as a society about this new world. How do we build teams, who gets the savings, how do we ensure people have access to decent workspaces in or near their homes? How do we help those struggling extroverts? Hybird working in 2022 won't look like Covid enforced WFH, and it will look different (and better) again in 2027. But if it fails to happen, it's because of a shocking failure of collective imagination.
(And as a counterexample to "the best moments happen collectively"... the best moment of my time as a proper scientist was solving an obscure puzzle in a very minor bit of physics. Nobody else had done it, largely because hardly anyone else had cared. But my tiny, pure, Eureka moment. In the middle of a park, actually. I accept that I'm strange, but it can happen like that.)
Mind me asking what physics puzzle you solved? I'm prepared for the risk of the answer to be deeply technical.
A pleasure!
X-ray diffraction; you shine X-rays at things, you get a spotty pattern which is related to the atomic arrangement of the thing. It's what Crick and Watson used to work out the structure of DNA.
There was this mineral I was studying, where the diffraction pattern had some out-of-pattern spots, which went blurry and got weaker when you heated the mineral up. There had been a number of attempts to explain these (I wasn't quite the only one who had cared about it), but they didn't quite explain everything convincingly.
My Eureka was to guess that a different process was involved- roughly that the X-rays were making the structure shake, and that's what we were seeing. That can happen with other diffraction experiments, but X-rays don't normally do it well.
And it worked. It meant calling in a few favours to get it checked out, but it all fell into place really prettily. More importantly (becuase it isn't really at all important), I had the thrill of knowing "I'm the only person who has ever worked this out, ever". I imagine authors feel the same when their story falls into place.
Bragg diffraction ... Was there some sort of resonance with the frequency?
Pretty much. It happens all the time in neutron diffraction, but you don't normally see it as an X-ray effect. The mineral just turned out to be mega-sensitive and mega-floppy.
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
You're about to do the Rutger Hauer "I've seen things" speech, aren't you?
Brigadier Tony Wilson (handily deceased) getting it in the neck.
I have to say I have learnt a lot that I wasn't aware of, in particular how detached the SAS were. They seem to have invited themselves to the war. As you say Tony Wilson seems to have been hopeless and responsible for the deaths at Bluff Cove. His whole involvement seems pointless.
Also interesting (for @hyufd) how close the aircraft carriers were close to having to leave for logistics reasons.
Interesting too how crucial Pinochet's Chile was in providing satellite and radar of Argentine air movements.
Violence is more likely if Boris does not trigger Art 16 now.
Most Unionists of course oppose the NIP
So the logic is that Unionists already pissed off by lack of Article 16 will be even aggravated by the increase in support for Sinn Féin. So better trigger A16 to hopefully reduce the chances of them being violent?
The EU were warned if they focused solely on avoiding a hard border in Ireland to avoid a return to violence by the IRA they risked a return to violence by loyalist paramilitaries like the UVF if they insisted on demanding a border in the Irish Sea for a UK and EU trade deal rather than finding a technical solution as the UK government wanted.
The EU and Dublin ploughed on regardless and the UVF bomb threat last week is the result.
There is of course NO increase in support for SF, latest Stormont poll has SF on 23%, down on the 27% they got in 2017
Before @HYFUD gets jumped on for his comment, he has a point. The talks around the risks to the Good Friday agreement on the border talks all came from one direction ie the worry that the IRA would start off again. Very few mentioned the opposite side of the coin ie what would the Unionists do. You might find one or two articles on it but the vast majority of opinion - mainly pushed by people who didn’t want Brexit - was the risk of what the Republicans would do.
Which is true, but that is why it was so damn stupid of Johnson to plonk the border in the Irish Sea as the EU wanted rather than keep the whole UK in the single market until a solution was found.
Which would likely have seen the Brexit Party get 15 to 20% of the vote in 2019, no Brexit still and no Tory majority.
What Boris proposed instead was a technical solution
What Johnson proposed was giving in to all the EU's demands and hoping something would turn up later.
It hasn't, and that's now a problem without an obvious solution.
Which is why the EU's idea was such a stupid idea, and Johnson was stupider still to accept it.
The solution is likely either a technical solution following Boris triggering Article 16 or closer alignment to the SM and CU under a PM Starmer.
I've exported and imported. I'm guessing you haven't. How would this technical solution work? I don't mean the details just the basics.
The basic principle is trusted trader.
Someone who is approved to ship goods into NI from the UK without checks
Products have a sticker on them “not for resale in RoI”
Spot checks exist to ensure compliance
You accept that there may be a small percentage of smuggling and use intelligence led policing to try and catch it
I think Sefcovic was proposing something similar end of last year following discussions with NI business the EU were happy to enter into but UKG wasn't. The proposals seem to have got lost in the Article 16 rhetoric. There may also have been issues around mainland alignment with EU food standards for minimal checks. Also the UK wasn't happy with EUCJ oversight over the NIP.
The proposals can presumably be dusted off should a more constructive environment be established.
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
I had a cousin there. A regular officer with the Australian forces, who had been decorated fighting the Japanese in 1945.He came back a changed man, and quit the Army.
What got to him were the indiscriminate killings of Vietnamese civilians by the Americans. The Australians did long slow jungle patrols to collect intelligence. The Americans just called in artillery and airstrikes on the flimsiest grounds. He saw far too many war crimes to continue the fight.
The Americans did some appalling shit in indochina. Agent Orange. My god
Yes, some years later my cousin developed a painful peripheral neuropathy, thought to be caused by defoliants used.
I’ve toured Laos and Cambodia a lot. Laos in particular suffered from horrific American bombing, including Agent Orange
Even today kids die picking up US UXB, and the dysgenic tragedy of Agent Orange spills down the decades.
America’s greatest crime, I think. Worse than Iraq. Laos wasn’t even a hostile state
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
Violence is more likely if Boris does not trigger Art 16 now.
Most Unionists of course oppose the NIP
So the logic is that Unionists already pissed off by lack of Article 16 will be even aggravated by the increase in support for Sinn Féin. So better trigger A16 to hopefully reduce the chances of them being violent?
The EU were warned if they focused solely on avoiding a hard border in Ireland to avoid a return to violence by the IRA they risked a return to violence by loyalist paramilitaries like the UVF if they insisted on demanding a border in the Irish Sea for a UK and EU trade deal rather than finding a technical solution as the UK government wanted.
The EU and Dublin ploughed on regardless and the UVF bomb threat last week is the result.
There is of course NO increase in support for SF, latest Stormont poll has SF on 23%, down on the 27% they got in 2017
Before @HYFUD gets jumped on for his comment, he has a point. The talks around the risks to the Good Friday agreement on the border talks all came from one direction ie the worry that the IRA would start off again. Very few mentioned the opposite side of the coin ie what would the Unionists do. You might find one or two articles on it but the vast majority of opinion - mainly pushed by people who didn’t want Brexit - was the risk of what the Republicans would do.
Which is true, but that is why it was so damn stupid of Johnson to plonk the border in the Irish Sea as the EU wanted rather than keep the whole UK in the single market until a solution was found.
Which would likely have seen the Brexit Party get 15 to 20% of the vote in 2019, no Brexit still and no Tory majority.
What Boris proposed instead was a technical solution
What Johnson proposed was giving in to all the EU's demands and hoping something would turn up later.
It hasn't, and that's now a problem without an obvious solution.
Which is why the EU's idea was such a stupid idea, and Johnson was stupider still to accept it.
The solution is likely either a technical solution following Boris triggering Article 16 or closer alignment to the SM and CU under a PM Starmer.
I've exported and imported. I'm guessing you haven't. How would this technical solution work? I don't mean the details just the basics.
The basic principle is trusted trader.
Someone who is approved to ship goods into NI from the UK without checks
Products have a sticker on them “not for resale in RoI”
Spot checks exist to ensure compliance
You accept that there may be a small percentage of smuggling and use intelligence led policing to try and catch it
You obviously don't export/import either. So what about the vast majority who won't have that status and won't go into special warehouses. What about temporary exports eg demo stuff, Grand Prix stuff and such like, touring bands. I did lots of that. Had to go thru customs everytime.
If there was a technical solution they would have done it. They haven't, anywhere.
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
Sunak is a malign influence at the heart of government. He's actively blocking it from doing anything useful or necessary, in favour of messing around with the tax code so that he can claim to be cutting taxes while massively increasing them.
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
I read a memoire by someone who was an officer in WW11, I can't recall the book - I think it is well known. In it he describes an incident in France where after heavy fighting he is with a trusted NCO who has been through a lot of action and they come across a Frenchman robbing the corpses of British soldiers. The NCO empties his gun into the robber. I asked myself in all honesty what I would have done as the officer in those circumstances and the answer is nothing.
I think murder is worse than robbing corpses. i personally strive to do neither.
That isn't a comment on the moral dilemma of the officer.
Ideally he should have arrested the the murderer, if circumstances allowed it to be done relatively safely. There's no moral dilemma at all, only a practical one.
Just as under the relevant national law, anyone who knew where Anne Frank was, 1942-44, was under a duty to report the fact to the authorities.
There's no moral dilemma at all, only a practical one.
Uh, no. I'm not saying murder is wrong because it's illegal, I'm saying it's just wrong. I didn't think that was controversial.
Well, it rather boringly, is. Assassinating Hitler would have been murder, at any time and in any country. You got a problem with it?
No, I don't. But I have a sounds basis for thinking so. you operate within the law when the law is available as a practical remedy. When it comes to a genocidal maniac who is the head of a legion fascist fuckheads, then murder is the only practical response. The only other realistic alternative is letting him live, and that's worse.
Contrast that with someone robbing corpses. A nasty business, very unpleasant. But is the world a better place for appointing yourself Judge Judy and executioner, and upon witnessing it dispensing the ultimate punishment? I think no, the world is better served not killing people for such actions. If your only choice is between a corpse robber going free or me becoming a murderer, I choose the corpse robber's freedom. I would kill, but it would need to be for something MUCH worse than seeing some stealing from a dead guy.
The shooting of the looter can't be justified but if I'm honest I think the officer was correct to turn a blind eye. Somebody under the strain of battle who'd seen comrades killed reacted instantly in fury at the desecration of the dead. To be legalistic would not have been just and also would hit morale and remove an effective soldier in the middle of battle. Based on honest military memoirs and a realistic view of the circumstances of battle which thankfully I have never had to experience I assume that small scale "war crimes" are perpetrated by all sides in all conflicts. The ones to be pursued have are those with sufficient scale or pre-meditation or cruelty. Of course the comforting official fiction must be maintained that any infringement would be actionable.
That’s an excellent summary, and properly judicious
It’s a war, bad shit happens - up to and including ‘murder’ - but sometimes you have to be pragmatic and look away
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
I had a cousin there. A regular officer with the Australian forces, who had been decorated fighting the Japanese in 1945.He came back a changed man, and quit the Army.
What got to him were the indiscriminate killings of Vietnamese civilians by the Americans. The Australians did long slow jungle patrols to collect intelligence. The Americans just called in artillery and airstrikes on the flimsiest grounds. He saw far too many war crimes to continue the fight.
The Americans did some appalling shit in indochina. Agent Orange. My god
Yes, some years later my cousin developed a painful peripheral neuropathy, thought to be caused by defoliants used.
I’ve toured Laos and Cambodia a lot. Laos in particular suffered from horrific American bombing, including Agent Orange
Even today kids die picking up US UXB, and the dysgenic tragedy of Agent Orange spills down the decades.
America’s greatest crime, I think. Worse than Iraq. Laos wasn’t even a hostile state
Surely almost a century of slavery and then another one of lynching and the Klan outranks that.
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
Having six identities helps with that, mind.
You don’t know the half of it
Twelve
hate to be That Guy, but in that case he's spot on the half of it
Brigadier Tony Wilson (handily deceased) getting it in the neck.
I have to say I have learnt a lot that I wasn't aware of, in particular how detached the SAS were. They seem to have invited themselves to the war. As you say Tony Wilson seems to have been hopeless and responsible for the deaths at Bluff Cove. His whole involvement seems pointless.
Also interesting (for @hyufd) how close the aircraft carriers were close to having to leave for logistics reasons.
Interesting too how crucial Pinochet's Chile was in providing satellite and radar of Argentine air movements.
Thatcher never forgot Pinochet's contribution to our victory when Straw tried to get him prosecuted
Yes. I was aware of that but a good reminder. Not mentioned was the SAS, I believe if memory serves me, also attempted to launch a raid on the feared Super Etendards from Chile.
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
Having six identities helps with that, mind.
You don’t know the half of it
Twelve
hate to be That Guy, but in that case he's spot on the half of it
Sunak is a malign influence at the heart of government. He's actively blocking it from doing anything useful or necessary, in favour of messing around with the tax code so that he can claim to be cutting taxes while massively increasing them.
Agree, but there’s actually a phalanx of fellow travellers: Raab, Truss and Kwarteng to be specific.
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
I had a cousin there. A regular officer with the Australian forces, who had been decorated fighting the Japanese in 1945.He came back a changed man, and quit the Army.
What got to him were the indiscriminate killings of Vietnamese civilians by the Americans. The Australians did long slow jungle patrols to collect intelligence. The Americans just called in artillery and airstrikes on the flimsiest grounds. He saw far too many war crimes to continue the fight.
The Americans did some appalling shit in indochina. Agent Orange. My god
Yes, some years later my cousin developed a painful peripheral neuropathy, thought to be caused by defoliants used.
I’ve toured Laos and Cambodia a lot. Laos in particular suffered from horrific American bombing, including Agent Orange
Even today kids die picking up US UXB, and the dysgenic tragedy of Agent Orange spills down the decades.
America’s greatest crime, I think. Worse than Iraq. Laos wasn’t even a hostile state
Surely almost a century of slavery and then another one of lynching and the Klan outranks that.
Fair point. The two are so different as to be incomparable anyway, but I should have said ‘most criminal foreign endeavor’, or something like that.
Even worse, they lost the damn war, and to top it all off, by the end the US elite like Rob Macnamara realized it was a war that never needed to be fought anyway. The Vietnamese hate the Chinese, and aren’t much keener on Russians. It was a war of independence and America should have showered Vietnam with kindness not chemical weapons.
As Macnamara said ‘we could have won it by giving them all fridges’
Violence is more likely if Boris does not trigger Art 16 now.
Most Unionists of course oppose the NIP
So the logic is that Unionists already pissed off by lack of Article 16 will be even aggravated by the increase in support for Sinn Féin. So better trigger A16 to hopefully reduce the chances of them being violent?
The EU were warned if they focused solely on avoiding a hard border in Ireland to avoid a return to violence by the IRA they risked a return to violence by loyalist paramilitaries like the UVF if they insisted on demanding a border in the Irish Sea for a UK and EU trade deal rather than finding a technical solution as the UK government wanted.
The EU and Dublin ploughed on regardless and the UVF bomb threat last week is the result.
There is of course NO increase in support for SF, latest Stormont poll has SF on 23%, down on the 27% they got in 2017
Before @HYFUD gets jumped on for his comment, he has a point. The talks around the risks to the Good Friday agreement on the border talks all came from one direction ie the worry that the IRA would start off again. Very few mentioned the opposite side of the coin ie what would the Unionists do. You might find one or two articles on it but the vast majority of opinion - mainly pushed by people who didn’t want Brexit - was the risk of what the Republicans would do.
Which is true, but that is why it was so damn stupid of Johnson to plonk the border in the Irish Sea as the EU wanted rather than keep the whole UK in the single market until a solution was found.
Which would likely have seen the Brexit Party get 15 to 20% of the vote in 2019, no Brexit still and no Tory majority.
What Boris proposed instead was a technical solution
What Johnson proposed was giving in to all the EU's demands and hoping something would turn up later.
It hasn't, and that's now a problem without an obvious solution.
Which is why the EU's idea was such a stupid idea, and Johnson was stupider still to accept it.
The solution is likely either a technical solution following Boris triggering Article 16 or closer alignment to the SM and CU under a PM Starmer.
I've exported and imported. I'm guessing you haven't. How would this technical solution work? I don't mean the details just the basics.
The basic principle is trusted trader.
Someone who is approved to ship goods into NI from the UK without checks
Products have a sticker on them “not for resale in RoI”
Spot checks exist to ensure compliance
You accept that there may be a small percentage of smuggling and use intelligence led policing to try and catch it
I think Sefcovic was proposing something similar end of last year following discussions with NI business the EU were happy to enter into but UKG wasn't. The proposals seem to have got lost in the Article 16 rhetoric. There may also have been issues around mainland alignment with EU food standards for minimal checks. Also the UK wasn't happy with EUCJ oversight over the NIP.
The proposals can presumably be dusted off should a more constructive environment be established.
IIRC that was the spin, but the detail of Sefcovic’s proposal was a lot less sensible
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
Violence is more likely if Boris does not trigger Art 16 now.
Most Unionists of course oppose the NIP
So the logic is that Unionists already pissed off by lack of Article 16 will be even aggravated by the increase in support for Sinn Féin. So better trigger A16 to hopefully reduce the chances of them being violent?
The EU were warned if they focused solely on avoiding a hard border in Ireland to avoid a return to violence by the IRA they risked a return to violence by loyalist paramilitaries like the UVF if they insisted on demanding a border in the Irish Sea for a UK and EU trade deal rather than finding a technical solution as the UK government wanted.
The EU and Dublin ploughed on regardless and the UVF bomb threat last week is the result.
There is of course NO increase in support for SF, latest Stormont poll has SF on 23%, down on the 27% they got in 2017
Before @HYFUD gets jumped on for his comment, he has a point. The talks around the risks to the Good Friday agreement on the border talks all came from one direction ie the worry that the IRA would start off again. Very few mentioned the opposite side of the coin ie what would the Unionists do. You might find one or two articles on it but the vast majority of opinion - mainly pushed by people who didn’t want Brexit - was the risk of what the Republicans would do.
Which is true, but that is why it was so damn stupid of Johnson to plonk the border in the Irish Sea as the EU wanted rather than keep the whole UK in the single market until a solution was found.
Which would likely have seen the Brexit Party get 15 to 20% of the vote in 2019, no Brexit still and no Tory majority.
What Boris proposed instead was a technical solution
What Johnson proposed was giving in to all the EU's demands and hoping something would turn up later.
It hasn't, and that's now a problem without an obvious solution.
Which is why the EU's idea was such a stupid idea, and Johnson was stupider still to accept it.
The solution is likely either a technical solution following Boris triggering Article 16 or closer alignment to the SM and CU under a PM Starmer.
I've exported and imported. I'm guessing you haven't. How would this technical solution work? I don't mean the details just the basics.
The basic principle is trusted trader.
Someone who is approved to ship goods into NI from the UK without checks
Products have a sticker on them “not for resale in RoI”
Spot checks exist to ensure compliance
You accept that there may be a small percentage of smuggling and use intelligence led policing to try and catch it
You obviously don't export/import either. So what about the vast majority who won't have that status and won't go into special warehouses. What about temporary exports eg demo stuff, Grand Prix stuff and such like, touring bands. I did lots of that. Had to go thru customs everytime.
If there was a technical solution they would have done it. They haven't, anywhere.
Most of my business is export, albeit invisibles not trade.
But you asked for the basics not the details… the trusted trader scheme captured 95% of volume relatively easily
I read a memoire by someone who was an officer in WW11, I can't recall the book - I think it is well known. In it he describes an incident in France where after heavy fighting he is with a trusted NCO who has been through a lot of action and they come across a Frenchman robbing the corpses of British soldiers. The NCO empties his gun into the robber. I asked myself in all honesty what I would have done as the officer in those circumstances and the answer is nothing.
I think murder is worse than robbing corpses. i personally strive to do neither.
That isn't a comment on the moral dilemma of the officer.
Ideally he should have arrested the the murderer, if circumstances allowed it to be done relatively safely. There's no moral dilemma at all, only a practical one.
Just as under the relevant national law, anyone who knew where Anne Frank was, 1942-44, was under a duty to report the fact to the authorities.
There's no moral dilemma at all, only a practical one.
Uh, no. I'm not saying murder is wrong because it's illegal, I'm saying it's just wrong. I didn't think that was controversial.
Well, it rather boringly, is. Assassinating Hitler would have been murder, at any time and in any country. You got a problem with it?
No, I don't. But I have a sounds basis for thinking so. you operate within the law when the law is available as a practical remedy. When it comes to a genocidal maniac who is the head of a legion fascist fuckheads, then murder is the only practical response. The only other realistic alternative is letting him live, and that's worse.
Contrast that with someone robbing corpses. A nasty business, very unpleasant. But is the world a better place for appointing yourself Judge Judy and executioner, and upon witnessing it dispensing the ultimate punishment? I think no, the world is better served not killing people for such actions. If your only choice is between a corpse robber going free or me becoming a murderer, I choose the corpse robber's freedom. I would kill, but it would need to be for something MUCH worse than seeing some stealing from a dead guy.
The shooting of the looter can't be justified but if I'm honest I think the officer was correct to turn a blind eye. Somebody under the strain of battle who'd seen comrades killed reacted instantly in fury at the desecration of the dead. To be legalistic would not have been just and also would hit morale and remove an effective soldier in the middle of battle. Based on honest military memoirs and a realistic view of the circumstances of battle which thankfully I have never had to experience I assume that small scale "war crimes" are perpetrated by all sides in all conflicts. The ones to be pursued have are those with sufficient scale or pre-meditation or cruelty. Of course the comforting official fiction must be maintained that any infringement would be actionable.
That’s an excellent summary, and properly judicious
It’s a war, bad shit happens - up to and including ‘murder’ - but sometimes you have to be pragmatic and look away
Nope £5.4 m awarded to Chesterfield Canal group awarded as part of Staveley Town deal on Friday just gone.
My own football club have had almost £1m of levelling up money in 3 separate tranches for Community sporting developments in Staveley (@staveleymwfc)
New Staveley railway station coming by 2024. Boris is shovelling cash our way. What has Labour ever done to address inequality between London and its own heartlands?
I read a memoire by someone who was an officer in WW11, I can't recall the book - I think it is well known. In it he describes an incident in France where after heavy fighting he is with a trusted NCO who has been through a lot of action and they come across a Frenchman robbing the corpses of British soldiers. The NCO empties his gun into the robber. I asked myself in all honesty what I would have done as the officer in those circumstances and the answer is nothing.
I think murder is worse than robbing corpses. i personally strive to do neither.
That isn't a comment on the moral dilemma of the officer.
Ideally he should have arrested the the murderer, if circumstances allowed it to be done relatively safely. There's no moral dilemma at all, only a practical one.
Just as under the relevant national law, anyone who knew where Anne Frank was, 1942-44, was under a duty to report the fact to the authorities.
There's no moral dilemma at all, only a practical one.
Uh, no. I'm not saying murder is wrong because it's illegal, I'm saying it's just wrong. I didn't think that was controversial.
Well, it rather boringly, is. Assassinating Hitler would have been murder, at any time and in any country. You got a problem with it?
No, I don't. But I have a sounds basis for thinking so. you operate within the law when the law is available as a practical remedy. When it comes to a genocidal maniac who is the head of a legion fascist fuckheads, then murder is the only practical response. The only other realistic alternative is letting him live, and that's worse.
Contrast that with someone robbing corpses. A nasty business, very unpleasant. But is the world a better place for appointing yourself Judge Judy and executioner, and upon witnessing it dispensing the ultimate punishment? I think no, the world is better served not killing people for such actions. If your only choice is between a corpse robber going free or me becoming a murderer, I choose the corpse robber's freedom. I would kill, but it would need to be for something MUCH worse than seeing some stealing from a dead guy.
The shooting of the looter can't be justified but if I'm honest I think the officer was correct to turn a blind eye. Somebody under the strain of battle who'd seen comrades killed reacted instantly in fury at the desecration of the dead. To be legalistic would not have been just and also would hit morale and remove an effective soldier in the middle of battle. Based on honest military memoirs and a realistic view of the circumstances of battle which thankfully I have never had to experience I assume that small scale "war crimes" are perpetrated by all sides in all conflicts. The ones to be pursued have are those with sufficient scale or pre-meditation or cruelty. Of course the comforting official fiction must be maintained that any infringement would be actionable.
I'm not so sure that the shooting cannot be justified.
You don't want non-combatants wandering around on a battlefield, both for their own safety and the safety of your own troops (are they non-combatants or enemy soldiers). Obviously some get caught up in the fighting anyway, but if they know that the penalty for looting is to get shot then that reduces the number that might be out and about, thus reducing the risks to them from the normal dangers of a battle.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with my own argument, particularly on a modern battlefield, but in WWII? I think it's reasonable.
Mask anecdata: In my Seattle suburb (Kirkland) mask wearing indoors was close to universal two or three weeks ago, and a significant minority were wearing them outdoors. Today is a lovely day with hazy sun, and I didn't see anyone wearing them inside or outside, even at a big gathering at a Lake Washington park for -- I think -- a Nowruz celebration.
Mask wearing regulations changed, and most people were only too happy to stop wearing them.
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
Having six identities helps with that, mind.
You don’t know the half of it
Twelve
hate to be That Guy, but in that case he's spot on the half of it
Mask anecdata: In my Seattle suburb (Kirkland) mask wearing indoors was close to universal two or three weeks ago, and a significant minority were wearing them outdoors. Today is a lovely day with hazy sun, and I didn't see anyone wearing them inside or outside, even at a big gathering at a Lake Washington park for -- I think -- a Nowruz celebration.
Mask wearing regulations changed, and most people were only too happy to stop wearing them.
Sunak is a malign influence at the heart of government. He's actively blocking it from doing anything useful or necessary, in favour of messing around with the tax code so that he can claim to be cutting taxes while massively increasing them.
He has been totally captured by Treasury orthodoxy. Which shows how inexperienced he was when he suddenly became CoE at such a young age and with sod all experience as an MP or minister.
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
Sunak is a malign influence at the heart of government. He's actively blocking it from doing anything useful or necessary, in favour of messing around with the tax code so that he can claim to be cutting taxes while massively increasing them.
He has been totally captured by Treasury orthodoxy. Which shows how inexperienced he was when he suddenly became CoE at such a young age and with sod all experience as an MP or minister.
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
One day I am going to discover that everyone on PB, apart from me including me, is @Leon.
It'll be a denouement like the end of the third Matrix film.
There was only one Matrix film: everybody knows that.
Reloaded is great - I've never understood why people don't like it. But I can understand pretending Revolutions doesn't exist.
Not seen Resurrections, though I suspect it would only disappoint me if I did.
I saw the first one about 3 times in the cinema, and haven't seen any of the others because I don't want to be disappointed. It would be difficult for any of them to be better than the original.
Theresa May’s solution for the Irish border was for the UK to stay in the customs union until a technical solution could be found.
That was destroyed, essentially by the Brexit hard gang, egged on by then king over the water, Boris Johnson.
Boris and the ERGers own the Irish problem, just as they do the decline of UK export performance.
(All of this was predicted by Remainers).
Of course if PM Starmer wins the next general election he will likely just reheat May's Deal, to go full back into the EEA plus free movement risks him losing the redwall and he obviously thinks Boris' deal is too hard Brexit.
So May might have the last laugh yet
No. Dynamic alignment to the SM, particularly on food and agriculture gets rid of most of the hassle on the Irish Sea border and for that matter the Dover one. Not even 10% of Leavers would be bothered by that. Not least because EU regulations are by and large very good.
So would equivalence.
The EU should indeed offer equivalence on food and ag.
Although it’s not a full excuse, it’s possible they have been put off by noises within the Tory party for a reduction in food standards to better attract a US trade deal.
They may at some point have thought they could bounce us into some form of dynamic alignment via the protocol (for NI or the whole UK). Equivalence would give the EU power, of course, since they could always withdraw it. I would have thought they would want that power.
Violence is more likely if Boris does not trigger Art 16 now.
Most Unionists of course oppose the NIP
So the logic is that Unionists already pissed off by lack of Article 16 will be even aggravated by the increase in support for Sinn Féin. So better trigger A16 to hopefully reduce the chances of them being violent?
The EU were warned if they focused solely on avoiding a hard border in Ireland to avoid a return to violence by the IRA they risked a return to violence by loyalist paramilitaries like the UVF if they insisted on demanding a border in the Irish Sea for a UK and EU trade deal rather than finding a technical solution as the UK government wanted.
The EU and Dublin ploughed on regardless and the UVF bomb threat last week is the result.
There is of course NO increase in support for SF, latest Stormont poll has SF on 23%, down on the 27% they got in 2017
Before @HYFUD gets jumped on for his comment, he has a point. The talks around the risks to the Good Friday agreement on the border talks all came from one direction ie the worry that the IRA would start off again. Very few mentioned the opposite side of the coin ie what would the Unionists do. You might find one or two articles on it but the vast majority of opinion - mainly pushed by people who didn’t want Brexit - was the risk of what the Republicans would do.
Which is true, but that is why it was so damn stupid of Johnson to plonk the border in the Irish Sea as the EU wanted rather than keep the whole UK in the single market until a solution was found.
Which would likely have seen the Brexit Party get 15 to 20% of the vote in 2019, no Brexit still and no Tory majority.
What Boris proposed instead was a technical solution
What Johnson proposed was giving in to all the EU's demands and hoping something would turn up later.
It hasn't, and that's now a problem without an obvious solution.
Which is why the EU's idea was such a stupid idea, and Johnson was stupider still to accept it.
The solution is likely either a technical solution following Boris triggering Article 16 or closer alignment to the SM and CU under a PM Starmer.
I've exported and imported. I'm guessing you haven't. How would this technical solution work? I don't mean the details just the basics.
The basic principle is trusted trader.
Someone who is approved to ship goods into NI from the UK without checks
Products have a sticker on them “not for resale in RoI”
Spot checks exist to ensure compliance
You accept that there may be a small percentage of smuggling and use intelligence led policing to try and catch it
You obviously don't export/import either. So what about the vast majority who won't have that status and won't go into special warehouses. What about temporary exports eg demo stuff, Grand Prix stuff and such like, touring bands. I did lots of that. Had to go thru customs everytime.
If there was a technical solution they would have done it. They haven't, anywhere.
Most of my business is export, albeit invisibles not trade.
But you asked for the basics not the details… the trusted trader scheme captured 95% of volume relatively easily
But nothing like 95% of exporters/importers. No idea what the figure is but would not be surprised if under 10%. I asked for basic because I knew HYUFD wouldn't have a clue. Just comes up with 'technical solution ' without a clue what that is. Trusted Trader scheme is not a solution. You only have to look at Norway/Sweden where they have very amicable arrangements with a lot of tech and still waits are typically a couple of hours.
NorthofStoke said ". . . I assume that small scale "war crimes" are perpetrated by all sides in all conflicts. "
There are a number of examples supporting your conclusion in Rick Atkinson's "Liberation Trilogy", which tells the story of the American army in WW II, in North Africa and Europe.
Here's one that sticks in my mind. At the end of the war, American soldiers liberated a concentration camp. The SS guards had surrendered. But when the Americans saw the horrible condition of the prisoners, they shot the SS guards anyway. When Eisenhower heard about it, he called for an investigation, but Atkinson doesn't say that actually happened.
(I would modify your statement slightly, adding this qualifier: "in all large conflicts".)
One of the greatest war crimes in World War II was the "Manila massacre", where the Japanese murdered at least 100,000 Filipino civilians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_massacre (As far as I know, they didn't gain any military advantage from the murders.)
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
One day I am going to discover that everyone on PB, apart from me including me, is @Leon.
It'll be a denouement like the end of the third Matrix film.
There was only one Matrix film: everybody knows that.
Reloaded is great - I've never understood why people don't like it. But I can understand pretending Revolutions doesn't exist.
Not seen Resurrections, though I suspect it would only disappoint me if I did.
Resurrections is ok. It gets a bit meta about why it even exists, and the motivations of the villain didn't make a lick of sense, but it was better than I thought it would be nonetheless.
Sunak is a malign influence at the heart of government. He's actively blocking it from doing anything useful or necessary, in favour of messing around with the tax code so that he can claim to be cutting taxes while massively increasing them.
He has been totally captured by Treasury orthodoxy. Which shows how inexperienced he was when he suddenly became CoE at such a young age and with sod all experience as an MP or minister.
Time for Johson to swap him with Javid?
Javid is unlikely to be much different, isn’t he a self-professed Ayn Rand fan?
If we want someone who will challenge Treasury orthodoxy, Gove is about the only person I can think of.
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
One day I am going to discover that everyone on PB, apart from me including me, is @Leon.
It'll be a denouement like the end of the third Matrix film.
There was only one Matrix film: everybody knows that.
Reloaded is great - I've never understood why people don't like it. But I can understand pretending Revolutions doesn't exist.
Not seen Resurrections, though I suspect it would only disappoint me if I did.
I saw the first one about 3 times in the cinema, and haven't seen any of the others because I don't want to be disappointed. It would be difficult for any of them to be better than the original.
When I saw the first film at the cinema all I knew about it was the adverts on the side of London buses: "What is the Matrix". Seeing it for the first time with only that for preconditioning made for an experience that I've never come close to repeating at a cinema again.
It's so hard to see a film without knowing too much about it already these days, and I think the film was much better for it.
Sunak is a malign influence at the heart of government. He's actively blocking it from doing anything useful or necessary, in favour of messing around with the tax code so that he can claim to be cutting taxes while massively increasing them.
He has been totally captured by Treasury orthodoxy. Which shows how inexperienced he was when he suddenly became CoE at such a young age and with sod all experience as an MP or minister.
Time for Johson to swap him with Javid?
Javid is unlikely to be much different, isn’t he a self-professed Ayn Rand fan?
If we want someone who will challenge Treasury orthodoxy, Gove is about the only person I can think of.
DUP fails to narrow gap with SF & MO'N remains on course to be First Minister. TUV support down
🔷SF 26% (+1 from Jan)
🔷DUP 19% (+2)
🔷Alliance 16% (+2)
🔷UUP 13% (-1)
🔷SDLP 11% (-)
🔷TUV 9% (-3)
Better for SF than I expected (loyalist f*ckwittery possibly playing into their hands) and interesting they are doing well at the same time as Alliance increasing and SDLP holding up. Only real movement would appear to be from TUV to DUP.
This poll does not look great for unionism TBH as 40% is pretty much the combined DUP+UUP+TUV floor and the DUP is likely to lose more seats than the UUP and TUV gain, who are both unlikely to gain more than a couple.
DUP fails to narrow gap with SF & MO'N remains on course to be First Minister. TUV support down
🔷SF 26% (+1 from Jan)
🔷DUP 19% (+2)
🔷Alliance 16% (+2)
🔷UUP 13% (-1)
🔷SDLP 11% (-)
🔷TUV 9% (-3)
Better for SF than I expected (loyalist f*ckwittery possibly playing into their hands) and interesting they are doing well at the same time as Alliance increasing and SDLP holding up. Only real movement would appear to be from TUV to DUP.
This poll does not look great for unionism TBH as 40% is pretty much the combined DUP+UUP+TUV floor and the DUP is likely to lose more seats than the UUP and TUV gain, who are both unlikely to gain more than a couple.
Surely that is DUP does narrow the gap (slightly)? That is a 0.5% swing from SF to DUP since their last poll.
41% for Unionism is also still more than the 37% for SF and SDLP Nationalism
Violence is more likely if Boris does not trigger Art 16 now.
Most Unionists of course oppose the NIP
So the logic is that Unionists already pissed off by lack of Article 16 will be even aggravated by the increase in support for Sinn Féin. So better trigger A16 to hopefully reduce the chances of them being violent?
The EU were warned if they focused solely on avoiding a hard border in Ireland to avoid a return to violence by the IRA they risked a return to violence by loyalist paramilitaries like the UVF if they insisted on demanding a border in the Irish Sea for a UK and EU trade deal rather than finding a technical solution as the UK government wanted.
The EU and Dublin ploughed on regardless and the UVF bomb threat last week is the result.
There is of course NO increase in support for SF, latest Stormont poll has SF on 23%, down on the 27% they got in 2017
Before @HYFUD gets jumped on for his comment, he has a point. The talks around the risks to the Good Friday agreement on the border talks all came from one direction ie the worry that the IRA would start off again. Very few mentioned the opposite side of the coin ie what would the Unionists do. You might find one or two articles on it but the vast majority of opinion - mainly pushed by people who didn’t want Brexit - was the risk of what the Republicans would do.
Which is true, but that is why it was so damn stupid of Johnson to plonk the border in the Irish Sea as the EU wanted rather than keep the whole UK in the single market until a solution was found.
Which would likely have seen the Brexit Party get 15 to 20% of the vote in 2019, no Brexit still and no Tory majority.
What Boris proposed instead was a technical solution
What Johnson proposed was giving in to all the EU's demands and hoping something would turn up later.
It hasn't, and that's now a problem without an obvious solution.
Which is why the EU's idea was such a stupid idea, and Johnson was stupider still to accept it.
The solution is likely either a technical solution following Boris triggering Article 16 or closer alignment to the SM and CU under a PM Starmer.
I've exported and imported. I'm guessing you haven't. How would this technical solution work? I don't mean the details just the basics.
The basic principle is trusted trader.
Someone who is approved to ship goods into NI from the UK without checks
Products have a sticker on them “not for resale in RoI”
Spot checks exist to ensure compliance
You accept that there may be a small percentage of smuggling and use intelligence led policing to try and catch it
You obviously don't export/import either. So what about the vast majority who won't have that status and won't go into special warehouses. What about temporary exports eg demo stuff, Grand Prix stuff and such like, touring bands. I did lots of that. Had to go thru customs everytime.
If there was a technical solution they would have done it. They haven't, anywhere.
Most of my business is export, albeit invisibles not trade.
But you asked for the basics not the details… the trusted trader scheme captured 95% of volume relatively easily
But nothing like 95% of exporters/importers. No idea what the figure is but would not be surprised if under 10%. I asked for basic because I knew HYUFD wouldn't have a clue. Just comes up with 'technical solution ' without a clue what that is. Trusted Trader scheme is not a solution. You only have to look at Norway/Sweden where they have very amicable arrangements with a lot of tech and still waits are typically a couple of hours.
Sure but from a macro perspective it’s volume that counts. Of course it is nowhere near 95% of import/export firms.
I think it’s a few hundred firms (from memory) - I’d also add eBay/Amazon as processing agents which would also catch a lot of small traders.
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
One day I am going to discover that everyone on PB, apart from me including me, is @Leon.
It'll be a denouement like the end of the third Matrix film.
There was only one Matrix film: everybody knows that.
Reloaded is great - I've never understood why people don't like it. But I can understand pretending Revolutions doesn't exist.
Not seen Resurrections, though I suspect it would only disappoint me if I did.
I saw the first one about 3 times in the cinema, and haven't seen any of the others because I don't want to be disappointed. It would be difficult for any of them to be better than the original.
When I saw the first film at the cinema all I knew about it was the adverts on the side of London buses: "What is the Matrix". Seeing it for the first time with only that for preconditioning made for an experience that I've never come close to repeating at a cinema again.
It's so hard to see a film without knowing too much about it already these days, and I think the film was much better for it.
I completely missed the subtext the first time, like most viewers then, probably.
Nope £5.4 m awarded to Chesterfield Canal group awarded as part of Staveley Town deal on Friday just gone.
My own football club have had almost £1m of levelling up money in 3 separate tranches for Community sporting developments in Staveley (@staveleymwfc)
New Staveley railway station coming by 2024. Boris is shovelling cash our way. What has Labour ever done to address inequality between London and its own heartlands?
DUP fails to narrow gap with SF & MO'N remains on course to be First Minister. TUV support down
🔷SF 26% (+1 from Jan)
🔷DUP 19% (+2)
🔷Alliance 16% (+2)
🔷UUP 13% (-1)
🔷SDLP 11% (-)
🔷TUV 9% (-3)
Better for SF than I expected (loyalist f*ckwittery possibly playing into their hands) and interesting they are doing well at the same time as Alliance increasing and SDLP holding up. Only real movement would appear to be from TUV to DUP.
This poll does not look great for unionism TBH as 40% is pretty much the combined DUP+UUP+TUV floor and the DUP is likely to lose more seats than the UUP and TUV gain, who are both unlikely to gain more than a couple.
The 41% for the three Unionist parties compares to the aggregate 43.6% they received in 2017.
Interesting that the aggregate for SF & SDLP is down by a similar amount (2.8pp).
Latest RofIreland poll from @REDCResearch for the @businessposthq - Sinn Fein still way ahead: Sinn Féin 33 Fine Gael 19 (-1 in four weeks) Fianna Fáil 16 (-1) Green Party 5 Social Democrats 5 (+1) Labour 5 (+1) PBP-Solidarity 3 Aontú 2 Independents 11 (Poll: March 18-23)
Sinn Fein now extremely consistent at 33% in the RoI polls now and this should easily get them 60+ seats in 2025.
Fine Gael also now dropping below 20% for the first time since 2005.
Better poll for the smaller parties than the Behaviour and attitudes poll due to a possibly different methodology.
The most interesting thing is the relative resilience of the Irish Greens despite the collapse of FF and FG. I don't know how this plays out seatswise though in the greater Dublin area.
A Sinn Fein government chills my blood but it looks like it could well happen.
Goodness knows why. It seems to be an Irish version of Corbynism except it's got even more traction.
Ireland seems to have shifted very heavily left for some reason. Overall, the left wing vote is 51% in that poll, to 37% for the right.
I don't think it's that surprising TBH - there has been a consistent opening for the centre left in Ireland for a while but the Irish Labour Party has always gone into coalition with FG and got destroyed up to now. The opposition had to go somewhere and SF is effectively a bog standard centre left party now in RoI at least and is merely just being somewhat populist in opposition with FF and FG not delivering for younger voters.
I think the next election will be different as FF at least will not be able to completely rule out cooperation with Sinn Fein.
I don't see why anyone is surprised Ireland is amoral enough to elect a Sinn Fein government. This is the country that shelters under others' defence umbrella, leeches off others' tax base, let women die from lack of abortion access and were neutral against the Nazis.
Spain was neutral against the Nazis (volunteer "Blue Division" notwithstanding) Portugal was neutral against the Nazis Switzerland was neutral against the Nazis Sweden was neutral against the Nazis
More Frenchmen fought for Axis countries than for the Allies.
Theresa May’s solution for the Irish border was for the UK to stay in the customs union until a technical solution could be found.
That was destroyed, essentially by the Brexit hard gang, egged on by then king over the water, Boris Johnson.
Boris and the ERGers own the Irish problem, just as they do the decline of UK export performance.
(All of this was predicted by Remainers).
Of course if PM Starmer wins the next general election he will likely just reheat May's Deal, to go full back into the EEA plus free movement risks him losing the redwall and he obviously thinks Boris' deal is too hard Brexit.
So May might have the last laugh yet
No. Dynamic alignment to the SM, particularly on food and agriculture gets rid of most of the hassle on the Irish Sea border and for that matter the Dover one. Not even 10% of Leavers would be bothered by that. Not least because EU regulations are by and large very good.
So would equivalence.
The EU should indeed offer equivalence on food and ag.
Although it’s not a full excuse, it’s possible they have been put off by noises within the Tory party for a reduction in food standards to better attract a US trade deal.
They may at some point have thought they could bounce us into some form of dynamic alignment via the protocol (for NI or the whole UK). Equivalence would give the EU power, of course, since they could always withdraw it. I would have thought they would want that power.
I think the proposal was the EU would guarantee equivalence as long as the UK maintained alignment. This includes dynamic alignment. The UK could get off the train at any point, at the risk of losing equivalence.
Frost was very opposed to an approach that went against the spirit of Brexit and preferred to do without equivalence from the get-go.
Violence is more likely if Boris does not trigger Art 16 now.
Most Unionists of course oppose the NIP
So the logic is that Unionists already pissed off by lack of Article 16 will be even aggravated by the increase in support for Sinn Féin. So better trigger A16 to hopefully reduce the chances of them being violent?
The EU were warned if they focused solely on avoiding a hard border in Ireland to avoid a return to violence by the IRA they risked a return to violence by loyalist paramilitaries like the UVF if they insisted on demanding a border in the Irish Sea for a UK and EU trade deal rather than finding a technical solution as the UK government wanted.
The EU and Dublin ploughed on regardless and the UVF bomb threat last week is the result.
There is of course NO increase in support for SF, latest Stormont poll has SF on 23%, down on the 27% they got in 2017
Before @HYFUD gets jumped on for his comment, he has a point. The talks around the risks to the Good Friday agreement on the border talks all came from one direction ie the worry that the IRA would start off again. Very few mentioned the opposite side of the coin ie what would the Unionists do. You might find one or two articles on it but the vast majority of opinion - mainly pushed by people who didn’t want Brexit - was the risk of what the Republicans would do.
Which is true, but that is why it was so damn stupid of Johnson to plonk the border in the Irish Sea as the EU wanted rather than keep the whole UK in the single market until a solution was found.
Which would likely have seen the Brexit Party get 15 to 20% of the vote in 2019, no Brexit still and no Tory majority.
What Boris proposed instead was a technical solution
What Johnson proposed was giving in to all the EU's demands and hoping something would turn up later.
It hasn't, and that's now a problem without an obvious solution.
Which is why the EU's idea was such a stupid idea, and Johnson was stupider still to accept it.
The solution is likely either a technical solution following Boris triggering Article 16 or closer alignment to the SM and CU under a PM Starmer.
I've exported and imported. I'm guessing you haven't. How would this technical solution work? I don't mean the details just the basics.
The basic principle is trusted trader.
Someone who is approved to ship goods into NI from the UK without checks
Products have a sticker on them “not for resale in RoI”
Spot checks exist to ensure compliance
You accept that there may be a small percentage of smuggling and use intelligence led policing to try and catch it
You obviously don't export/import either. So what about the vast majority who won't have that status and won't go into special warehouses. What about temporary exports eg demo stuff, Grand Prix stuff and such like, touring bands. I did lots of that. Had to go thru customs everytime.
If there was a technical solution they would have done it. They haven't, anywhere.
Most of my business is export, albeit invisibles not trade.
But you asked for the basics not the details… the trusted trader scheme captured 95% of volume relatively easily
But nothing like 95% of exporters/importers. No idea what the figure is but would not be surprised if under 10%. I asked for basic because I knew HYUFD wouldn't have a clue. Just comes up with 'technical solution ' without a clue what that is. Trusted Trader scheme is not a solution. You only have to look at Norway/Sweden where they have very amicable arrangements with a lot of tech and still waits are typically a couple of hours.
Sure but from a macro perspective it’s volume that counts. Of course it is nowhere near 95% of import/export firms.
I think it’s a few hundred firms (from memory) - I’d also add eBay/Amazon as processing agents which would also catch a lot of small traders.
Yes but the point is there is therefore not a technical solution for the vast majority, so for anyone to suggest there is, is nonsense.
In my case I commonly did temporary exports pre the removal of controls. Not once did stuff go straight through. Normally only held up for an hour or so, but it was always very limited stuff, so god knows what a McLaren lorry or a Rolling Stones tour lorry goes through, and once it took 3 weeks for one item.
Latest RofIreland poll from @REDCResearch for the @businessposthq - Sinn Fein still way ahead: Sinn Féin 33 Fine Gael 19 (-1 in four weeks) Fianna Fáil 16 (-1) Green Party 5 Social Democrats 5 (+1) Labour 5 (+1) PBP-Solidarity 3 Aontú 2 Independents 11 (Poll: March 18-23)
Sinn Fein now extremely consistent at 33% in the RoI polls now and this should easily get them 60+ seats in 2025.
Fine Gael also now dropping below 20% for the first time since 2005.
Better poll for the smaller parties than the Behaviour and attitudes poll due to a possibly different methodology.
The most interesting thing is the relative resilience of the Irish Greens despite the collapse of FF and FG. I don't know how this plays out seatswise though in the greater Dublin area.
A Sinn Fein government chills my blood but it looks like it could well happen.
Goodness knows why. It seems to be an Irish version of Corbynism except it's got even more traction.
Ireland seems to have shifted very heavily left for some reason. Overall, the left wing vote is 51% in that poll, to 37% for the right.
I don't think it's that surprising TBH - there has been a consistent opening for the centre left in Ireland for a while but the Irish Labour Party has always gone into coalition with FG and got destroyed up to now. The opposition had to go somewhere and SF is effectively a bog standard centre left party now in RoI at least and is merely just being somewhat populist in opposition with FF and FG not delivering for younger voters.
I think the next election will be different as FF at least will not be able to completely rule out cooperation with Sinn Fein.
I don't see why anyone is surprised Ireland is amoral enough to elect a Sinn Fein government. This is the country that shelters under others' defence umbrella, leeches off others' tax base, let women die from lack of abortion access and were neutral against the Nazis.
Spain was neutral against the Nazis (volunteer "Blue Division" notwithstanding) Portugal was neutral against the Nazis Switzerland was neutral against the Nazis Sweden was neutral against the Nazis
More Frenchmen fought for Axis countries than for the Allies.
DUP fails to narrow gap with SF & MO'N remains on course to be First Minister. TUV support down
🔷SF 26% (+1 from Jan)
🔷DUP 19% (+2)
🔷Alliance 16% (+2)
🔷UUP 13% (-1)
🔷SDLP 11% (-)
🔷TUV 9% (-3)
Better for SF than I expected (loyalist f*ckwittery possibly playing into their hands) and interesting they are doing well at the same time as Alliance increasing and SDLP holding up. Only real movement would appear to be from TUV to DUP.
This poll does not look great for unionism TBH as 40% is pretty much the combined DUP+UUP+TUV floor and the DUP is likely to lose more seats than the UUP and TUV gain, who are both unlikely to gain more than a couple.
The 41% for the three Unionist parties compares to the aggregate 43.6% they received in 2017.
Interesting that the aggregate for SF & SDLP is down by a similar amount (2.8pp).
Yes the combined SF+SDLP vote is also pretty much the same as in the 2019 GE, ditto the alliance vote. I still feel that the Alliance surge will mainly damage the DUP though.
On a bad night for the DUP they could get only one seat in Belfast N for example:
SF 2 (-) DUP 1 (-1) SDLP 1 (-) Alliance 1 (+1)
My eyes are also firmly on Belfast S and Lagan Valley.
DUP fails to narrow gap with SF & MO'N remains on course to be First Minister. TUV support down
🔷SF 26% (+1 from Jan)
🔷DUP 19% (+2)
🔷Alliance 16% (+2)
🔷UUP 13% (-1)
🔷SDLP 11% (-)
🔷TUV 9% (-3)
Better for SF than I expected (loyalist f*ckwittery possibly playing into their hands) and interesting they are doing well at the same time as Alliance increasing and SDLP holding up. Only real movement would appear to be from TUV to DUP.
This poll does not look great for unionism TBH as 40% is pretty much the combined DUP+UUP+TUV floor and the DUP is likely to lose more seats than the UUP and TUV gain, who are both unlikely to gain more than a couple.
The 41% for the three Unionist parties compares to the aggregate 43.6% they received in 2017.
Interesting that the aggregate for SF & SDLP is down by a similar amount (2.8pp).
There is an aggregate move to Alliance, and within Unionism, a move away from the DUP.
Latest RofIreland poll from @REDCResearch for the @businessposthq - Sinn Fein still way ahead: Sinn Féin 33 Fine Gael 19 (-1 in four weeks) Fianna Fáil 16 (-1) Green Party 5 Social Democrats 5 (+1) Labour 5 (+1) PBP-Solidarity 3 Aontú 2 Independents 11 (Poll: March 18-23)
Sinn Fein now extremely consistent at 33% in the RoI polls now and this should easily get them 60+ seats in 2025.
Fine Gael also now dropping below 20% for the first time since 2005.
Better poll for the smaller parties than the Behaviour and attitudes poll due to a possibly different methodology.
The most interesting thing is the relative resilience of the Irish Greens despite the collapse of FF and FG. I don't know how this plays out seatswise though in the greater Dublin area.
A Sinn Fein government chills my blood but it looks like it could well happen.
Goodness knows why. It seems to be an Irish version of Corbynism except it's got even more traction.
Ireland seems to have shifted very heavily left for some reason. Overall, the left wing vote is 51% in that poll, to 37% for the right.
I don't think it's that surprising TBH - there has been a consistent opening for the centre left in Ireland for a while but the Irish Labour Party has always gone into coalition with FG and got destroyed up to now. The opposition had to go somewhere and SF is effectively a bog standard centre left party now in RoI at least and is merely just being somewhat populist in opposition with FF and FG not delivering for younger voters.
I think the next election will be different as FF at least will not be able to completely rule out cooperation with Sinn Fein.
I don't see why anyone is surprised Ireland is amoral enough to elect a Sinn Fein government. This is the country that shelters under others' defence umbrella, leeches off others' tax base, let women die from lack of abortion access and were neutral against the Nazis.
Spain was neutral against the Nazis (volunteer "Blue Division" notwithstanding) Portugal was neutral against the Nazis Switzerland was neutral against the Nazis Sweden was neutral against the Nazis
More Frenchmen fought for Axis countries than for the Allies.
Wasn't there conscription of adult French men?
Several 100 000 French were used as forced labour in Germany with the collaboration of the Vichy government which was a kind of conscription I guess.
Sunak is a malign influence at the heart of government. He's actively blocking it from doing anything useful or necessary, in favour of messing around with the tax code so that he can claim to be cutting taxes while massively increasing them.
He has been totally captured by Treasury orthodoxy. Which shows how inexperienced he was when he suddenly became CoE at such a young age and with sod all experience as an MP or minister.
Time for Johson to swap him with Javid?
Javid is unlikely to be much different, isn’t he a self-professed Ayn Rand fan?
If we want someone who will challenge Treasury orthodoxy, Gove is about the only person I can think of.
I don't think Sunak suffers from an overdose of Treasury orthodoxy. His problem is he lacks common sense. Take his Spring Statement last week. It's clear the UK faces a big squeeze on incomes. Apart from Brexit a lot of this is due to forces beyond the government's control. So he should level with the public:
"Finances are tight. We will protect the vulnerable and ensure the pain is spread equitably for the rest"
I think people would understand that. Instead of which, he does these stunts filling up someone else's car with petrol and tries to cover up the fiscal damage with complicated adjustments to tax and NI. With the result that hundreds of thousands are tipped into poverty (deliberately?) while no-one else knows what's going on.
The headline you *just* linked to says 'estimated'. A mayoral spokesman says that based on third party eyewitness accounts, they estimate that 300 people died. And even his statement was extremely equivocal. In more than 10 days I would expect to hear from family members missing relatives, I would expect (heaven forbid) to see bodies. Instead we've seen the whole thing fall into abeyance.
DUP fails to narrow gap with SF & MO'N remains on course to be First Minister. TUV support down
🔷SF 26% (+1 from Jan)
🔷DUP 19% (+2)
🔷Alliance 16% (+2)
🔷UUP 13% (-1)
🔷SDLP 11% (-)
🔷TUV 9% (-3)
Better for SF than I expected (loyalist f*ckwittery possibly playing into their hands) and interesting they are doing well at the same time as Alliance increasing and SDLP holding up. Only real movement would appear to be from TUV to DUP.
This poll does not look great for unionism TBH as 40% is pretty much the combined DUP+UUP+TUV floor and the DUP is likely to lose more seats than the UUP and TUV gain, who are both unlikely to gain more than a couple.
Doug Beattie seems to have flattered to deceive. From the view outside he seems to occupy the uncomfortable territory of supposedly being a 'progressive' Unionist while possessing many of the characteristics of the dinosaurs.
Sunak is a malign influence at the heart of government. He's actively blocking it from doing anything useful or necessary, in favour of messing around with the tax code so that he can claim to be cutting taxes while massively increasing them.
He has been totally captured by Treasury orthodoxy. Which shows how inexperienced he was when he suddenly became CoE at such a young age and with sod all experience as an MP or minister.
Time for Johson to swap him with Javid?
Javid is unlikely to be much different, isn’t he a self-professed Ayn Rand fan?
If we want someone who will challenge Treasury orthodoxy, Gove is about the only person I can think of.
I don't think Sunak suffers from an overdose of Treasury orthodoxy. His problem is he lacks common sense. Take his Spring Statement last week. It's clear the UK faces a big squeeze on incomes. Apart from Brexit a lot of this is due to forces beyond the government's control. So he should level with the public:
"Finances are tight. We will protect the vulnerable and ensure the pain is spread equitably for the rest"
I think people would understand that. Instead of which, he does these stunts filling up someone else's car with petrol and tries to cover up the fiscal damage with complicated adjustments to tax and NI. With the result that hundreds of thousands are tipped into poverty (deliberately?) while no-one else knows what's going on.
I guess it depends on what you think of Treasury orthodoxy.
Rishi is a very interesting character, but he suffers from several issues.
1. He is fully signed up to drier-than-dry economics (Treasury orthodoxy) in the face of a systemic decline of productivity and slow growth.
2. He is not in the slightest bit interested in the least well off.
3. As a billionaire, he appears to be entirely remote from the everyday concerns of the average British voter.
4. He’s obsessed with building his own personal brand at the expensive of overall cohesive government messaging. This includes the bizarre optics around the penny cut on income tax.
The headline you *just* linked to says 'estimated'. A mayoral spokesman says that based on third party eyewitness accounts, they estimate that 300 people died. And even his statement was extremely equivocal. In more than 10 days I would expect to hear from family members missing relatives, I would expect (heaven forbid) to see bodies. Instead we've seen the whole thing fall into abeyance.
Although I don't know if you know this, but there's a war on.
Sunak is a malign influence at the heart of government. He's actively blocking it from doing anything useful or necessary, in favour of messing around with the tax code so that he can claim to be cutting taxes while massively increasing them.
He has been totally captured by Treasury orthodoxy. Which shows how inexperienced he was when he suddenly became CoE at such a young age and with sod all experience as an MP or minister.
Time for Johson to swap him with Javid?
Javid is unlikely to be much different, isn’t he a self-professed Ayn Rand fan?
If we want someone who will challenge Treasury orthodoxy, Gove is about the only person I can think of.
I don't think Sunak suffers from an overdose of Treasury orthodoxy. His problem is he lacks common sense. Take his Spring Statement last week. It's clear the UK faces a big squeeze on incomes. Apart from Brexit a lot of this is due to forces beyond the government's control. So he should level with the public:
"Finances are tight. We will protect the vulnerable and ensure the pain is spread equitably for the rest"
I think people would understand that. Instead of which, he does these stunts filling up someone else's car with petrol and tries to cover up the fiscal damage with complicated adjustments to tax and NI. With the result that hundreds of thousands are tipped into poverty (deliberately?) while no-one else knows what's going on.
I guess it depends on what you think of Treasury orthodoxy.
Rishi is a very interesting character, but he suffers from several issues.
1. He is fully signed up to drier-than-dry economics (Treasury orthodoxy) in the face of a systemic decline of productivity and slow growth.
2. He is not in the slightest bit interested in the least well off.
3. As a billionaire, he appears to be entirely remote from the everyday concerns of the average British voter.
4. He’s obsessed with building his own personal brand at the expensive of overall cohesive government messaging. This includes the bizarre optics around the penny cut on income tax.
Theresa May’s solution for the Irish border was for the UK to stay in the customs union until a technical solution could be found.
That was destroyed, essentially by the Brexit hard gang, egged on by then king over the water, Boris Johnson.
Boris and the ERGers own the Irish problem, just as they do the decline of UK export performance.
(All of this was predicted by Remainers).
Of course if PM Starmer wins the next general election he will likely just reheat May's Deal, to go full back into the EEA plus free movement risks him losing the redwall and he obviously thinks Boris' deal is too hard Brexit.
So May might have the last laugh yet
No. Dynamic alignment to the SM, particularly on food and agriculture gets rid of most of the hassle on the Irish Sea border and for that matter the Dover one. Not even 10% of Leavers would be bothered by that. Not least because EU regulations are by and large very good.
So would equivalence.
The EU should indeed offer equivalence on food and ag.
Although it’s not a full excuse, it’s possible they have been put off by noises within the Tory party for a reduction in food standards to better attract a US trade deal.
That will take some time to unwind - as there is also much amplification of that alleged difference by activists seeking to use it as a lever to claim that changes are the end of world as we know it.
For example, last week there was a series of interviews with farmers about the impact of the New Zealand / Oz trade agreements on Lamb Farming, who are getting on and adapting rather than saying that the apocalypse has arrived.
A couple of months ago there was a similar series of interviews with fishing businesses who are now adapting successfully.
The current complaints are about HOW DARE THEY THINK ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT IN FARMING (when we need to think about threats to food production volumes now that a regional war has suddenly happened).
It reminds me to an extent of the rhetoric run by the General Election campaign by Corbyn's Labour claiming that a US Trade Agreement would mean the NHS would be sold off. Lurid but total BS, as the Treaty said the opposite, and soon regressing to its proper place.
Latest RofIreland poll from @REDCResearch for the @businessposthq - Sinn Fein still way ahead: Sinn Féin 33 Fine Gael 19 (-1 in four weeks) Fianna Fáil 16 (-1) Green Party 5 Social Democrats 5 (+1) Labour 5 (+1) PBP-Solidarity 3 Aontú 2 Independents 11 (Poll: March 18-23)
Sinn Fein now extremely consistent at 33% in the RoI polls now and this should easily get them 60+ seats in 2025.
Fine Gael also now dropping below 20% for the first time since 2005.
Better poll for the smaller parties than the Behaviour and attitudes poll due to a possibly different methodology.
The most interesting thing is the relative resilience of the Irish Greens despite the collapse of FF and FG. I don't know how this plays out seatswise though in the greater Dublin area.
A Sinn Fein government chills my blood but it looks like it could well happen.
Goodness knows why. It seems to be an Irish version of Corbynism except it's got even more traction.
Ireland seems to have shifted very heavily left for some reason. Overall, the left wing vote is 51% in that poll, to 37% for the right.
I don't think it's that surprising TBH - there has been a consistent opening for the centre left in Ireland for a while but the Irish Labour Party has always gone into coalition with FG and got destroyed up to now. The opposition had to go somewhere and SF is effectively a bog standard centre left party now in RoI at least and is merely just being somewhat populist in opposition with FF and FG not delivering for younger voters.
I think the next election will be different as FF at least will not be able to completely rule out cooperation with Sinn Fein.
I don't see why anyone is surprised Ireland is amoral enough to elect a Sinn Fein government. This is the country that shelters under others' defence umbrella, leeches off others' tax base, let women die from lack of abortion access and were neutral against the Nazis.
Spain was neutral against the Nazis (volunteer "Blue Division" notwithstanding) Portugal was neutral against the Nazis Switzerland was neutral against the Nazis Sweden was neutral against the Nazis
More Frenchmen fought for Axis countries than for the Allies.
Wasn't there conscription of adult French men?
Several 100 000 French were used as forced labour in Germany with the collaboration of the Vichy government which was a kind of conscription I guess.
That was while Vichy existed. After it 'fell', and was absorbed into the Reich, then all men below a certain age (50?) were liable for conscription.
Latest RofIreland poll from @REDCResearch for the @businessposthq - Sinn Fein still way ahead: Sinn Féin 33 Fine Gael 19 (-1 in four weeks) Fianna Fáil 16 (-1) Green Party 5 Social Democrats 5 (+1) Labour 5 (+1) PBP-Solidarity 3 Aontú 2 Independents 11 (Poll: March 18-23)
Sinn Fein now extremely consistent at 33% in the RoI polls now and this should easily get them 60+ seats in 2025.
Fine Gael also now dropping below 20% for the first time since 2005.
Better poll for the smaller parties than the Behaviour and attitudes poll due to a possibly different methodology.
The most interesting thing is the relative resilience of the Irish Greens despite the collapse of FF and FG. I don't know how this plays out seatswise though in the greater Dublin area.
A Sinn Fein government chills my blood but it looks like it could well happen.
Goodness knows why. It seems to be an Irish version of Corbynism except it's got even more traction.
Ireland seems to have shifted very heavily left for some reason. Overall, the left wing vote is 51% in that poll, to 37% for the right.
I don't think it's that surprising TBH - there has been a consistent opening for the centre left in Ireland for a while but the Irish Labour Party has always gone into coalition with FG and got destroyed up to now. The opposition had to go somewhere and SF is effectively a bog standard centre left party now in RoI at least and is merely just being somewhat populist in opposition with FF and FG not delivering for younger voters.
I think the next election will be different as FF at least will not be able to completely rule out cooperation with Sinn Fein.
I don't see why anyone is surprised Ireland is amoral enough to elect a Sinn Fein government. This is the country that shelters under others' defence umbrella, leeches off others' tax base, let women die from lack of abortion access and were neutral against the Nazis.
Spain was neutral against the Nazis (volunteer "Blue Division" notwithstanding) Portugal was neutral against the Nazis Switzerland was neutral against the Nazis Sweden was neutral against the Nazis
More Frenchmen fought for Axis countries than for the Allies.
The headline you *just* linked to says 'estimated'. A mayoral spokesman says that based on third party eyewitness accounts, they estimate that 300 people died. And even his statement was extremely equivocal. In more than 10 days I would expect to hear from family members missing relatives, I would expect (heaven forbid) to see bodies. Instead we've seen the whole thing fall into abeyance.
Although I don't know if you know this, but there's a war on.
Sorry.
There's a special military operation on.
Yes, I know there's a war on, one where we're being asked to shoot down Russian planes over Ukraine, and public opinion is being mobilised around such an escalation by the atrocities committed by the Russian side during their invasion. So it's hugely important that the true extent, or otherwise, of these events is known.
NorthofStoke said ". . . I assume that small scale "war crimes" are perpetrated by all sides in all conflicts. "
There are a number of examples supporting your conclusion in Rick Atkinson's "Liberation Trilogy", which tells the story of the American army in WW II, in North Africa and Europe.
Here's one that sticks in my mind. At the end of the war, American soldiers liberated a concentration camp. The SS guards had surrendered. But when the Americans saw the horrible condition of the prisoners, they shot the SS guards anyway. When Eisenhower heard about it, he called for an investigation, but Atkinson doesn't say that actually happened.
(I would modify your statement slightly, adding this qualifier: "in all large conflicts".)
One of the greatest war crimes in World War II was the "Manila massacre", where the Japanese murdered at least 100,000 Filipino civilians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_massacre (As far as I know, they didn't gain any military advantage from the murders.)
You must read the Ian Toll trilogy on the Pacific War - it has a whole chapter on Japanese war crimes towards the end of the conflict. Really awful, scary stuff. The Japanese soldiers knew they were doomed, and so they decided 'fuck it, we'll kill and rape everyone.'
The headline you *just* linked to says 'estimated'. A mayoral spokesman says that based on third party eyewitness accounts, they estimate that 300 people died. And even his statement was extremely equivocal. In more than 10 days I would expect to hear from family members missing relatives, I would expect (heaven forbid) to see bodies. Instead we've seen the whole thing fall into abeyance.
Although I don't know if you know this, but there's a war on.
Sorry.
There's a special military operation on.
Yes, I know there's a war on, one where we're being asked to shoot down Russian planes over Ukraine, and public opinion is being mobilised around such an escalation by the atrocities committed by the Russian side during their invasion. So it's hugely important that the true extent, or otherwise, of these events is known.
You do know that there's not going to be a no-fly zone, right?
Theresa May’s solution for the Irish border was for the UK to stay in the customs union until a technical solution could be found.
That was destroyed, essentially by the Brexit hard gang, egged on by then king over the water, Boris Johnson.
Boris and the ERGers own the Irish problem, just as they do the decline of UK export performance.
(All of this was predicted by Remainers).
Of course if PM Starmer wins the next general election he will likely just reheat May's Deal, to go full back into the EEA plus free movement risks him losing the redwall and he obviously thinks Boris' deal is too hard Brexit.
So May might have the last laugh yet
No. Dynamic alignment to the SM, particularly on food and agriculture gets rid of most of the hassle on the Irish Sea border and for that matter the Dover one. Not even 10% of Leavers would be bothered by that. Not least because EU regulations are by and large very good.
So would equivalence.
The EU should indeed offer equivalence on food and ag.
Although it’s not a full excuse, it’s possible they have been put off by noises within the Tory party for a reduction in food standards to better attract a US trade deal.
That will take some time to unwind - as there is also much amplification of that alleged difference by activists seeking to use it as a lever to claim that changes are the end of world as we know it.
For example, last week there was a series of interviews with farmers about the impact of the New Zealand / Oz trade agreements on Lamb Farming, who are getting on and adapting rather than saying that the apocalypse has arrived.
A couple of months ago there was a similar series of interviews with fishing businesses who are now adapting successfully.
The current complaints are about HOW DARE THEY THINK ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT IN FARMING (when we need to think about threats to food production volumes now that a regional war has suddenly happened).
It reminds me to an extent of the rhetoric run by the General Election campaign by Corbyn's Labour claiming that a US Trade Agreement would mean the NHS would be sold off. Lurid but total BS, as the Treaty said the opposite, and soon regressing to its proper place.
I doubt any apocalypse will happen overnight.
I would encourage any Tory apparatchiks reading to avoid importing US food standards into the UK, though.
The headline you *just* linked to says 'estimated'. A mayoral spokesman says that based on third party eyewitness accounts, they estimate that 300 people died. And even his statement was extremely equivocal. In more than 10 days I would expect to hear from family members missing relatives, I would expect (heaven forbid) to see bodies. Instead we've seen the whole thing fall into abeyance.
Although I don't know if you know this, but there's a war on.
Sorry.
There's a special military operation on.
Yes, I know there's a war on, one where we're being asked to shoot down Russian planes over Ukraine, and public opinion is being mobilised around such an escalation by the atrocities committed by the Russian side during their invasion. So it's hugely important that the true extent, or otherwise, of these events is known.
You do know that there's not going to be a no-fly zone, right?
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
The issue is the betting. @leon shows no interest at all, whereas @MoonRabbit displays a level of knowledge.
Thank you. I thought being called a bot for the first three months was bad enough, now I’m an escaped project seeping out of Leon’s Id his super ego has lost control over.
Thank you very much for that Farooq. You a very wrong again. Just because I don’t appear in the room doesn’t mean I’m not keeping an eye on the nonsense you are up too.
Anyway. What’s your position on the English employing the lock ness monster to suppress the Scott’s?
C4 documentary on the Falklands seems quite decent. Not many words being minced, particularly not by Michael Rose the SAS commander. Inter service contempt alive and well evidently.
A reminder also of what a bloody bleak part of the world it was to fight a war in.
Are there any good parts?
Less shite is an option.
Vietnam was a fun place to have a war. Lots of drugs, good music, nice weather, beaches, beautiful people, booze, mountains. Sexy helicopter rides, excellent food (in the cities)
Probably the “nicest” war, in that respect
You either fight, or you surf.
Vietnam definitely had the best RnR. If you were lucky you got a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Bangkok or Hongers
At worst, Danang beach, which was quite the party town
You weren’t there, man.
My first trip to Thailand was the mid 80s, and you could still ‘sense’ the war. Especially in the north - Chiangmai. There were bars which still played the cartridges and cassettes of 60s and 70s rock music left by the Americans. Indeed there were still Americans, soldiers and journalists who experienced the war and somehow never went home. Drinking hard liquor in the night market, or in Patpong, endlessly reminiscing
All gone now
Christ, you’re aged.
Indeed, but I have also LIVED. My God, I have lived
The issue is the betting. @leon shows no interest at all, whereas @MoonRabbit displays a level of knowledge.
Thank you. I thought being called a bot for the first three months was bad enough, now I’m an escaped project seeping out of Leon’s Id his super ego has lost control over.
Thank you very much for that Farooq. You a very wrong again. Just because I don’t appear in the room doesn’t mean I’m not keeping an eye on the nonsense you are up too.
Anyway. What’s your position on the English employing the lock ness monster to suppress the Scott’s?
The headline you *just* linked to says 'estimated'. A mayoral spokesman says that based on third party eyewitness accounts, they estimate that 300 people died. And even his statement was extremely equivocal. In more than 10 days I would expect to hear from family members missing relatives, I would expect (heaven forbid) to see bodies. Instead we've seen the whole thing fall into abeyance.
Although I don't know if you know this, but there's a war on.
Sorry.
There's a special military operation on.
Yes, I know there's a war on, one where we're being asked to shoot down Russian planes over Ukraine, and public opinion is being mobilised around such an escalation by the atrocities committed by the Russian side during their invasion. So it's hugely important that the true extent, or otherwise, of these events is known.
You do know that there's not going to be a no-fly zone, right?
The two big problems with no fly zone starts with commanders not wishing to put their people up there on a suicide mission, so it needs relentless attacks on the enemy’s anti aircraft, radar and airfields just to be ready to police the sky.
More likely we are dragged in by Russia proving missiles or drones that struck their military came from non Ukraine areas such as off the coast.
Latest RofIreland poll from @REDCResearch for the @businessposthq - Sinn Fein still way ahead: Sinn Féin 33 Fine Gael 19 (-1 in four weeks) Fianna Fáil 16 (-1) Green Party 5 Social Democrats 5 (+1) Labour 5 (+1) PBP-Solidarity 3 Aontú 2 Independents 11 (Poll: March 18-23)
Sinn Fein now extremely consistent at 33% in the RoI polls now and this should easily get them 60+ seats in 2025.
Fine Gael also now dropping below 20% for the first time since 2005.
Better poll for the smaller parties than the Behaviour and attitudes poll due to a possibly different methodology.
The most interesting thing is the relative resilience of the Irish Greens despite the collapse of FF and FG. I don't know how this plays out seatswise though in the greater Dublin area.
A Sinn Fein government chills my blood but it looks like it could well happen.
Goodness knows why. It seems to be an Irish version of Corbynism except it's got even more traction.
33% for SF is just 1% more than Corbyn Labour got in 2019 and 7% less than Corbyn Labour got here in 2017 for perspective.
Do not forget either the combined score for the FF and FG government is 35% ie 2% more than SF. Ireland is also STV PR not FPTP
I'm not ruling out the possibility of FF+FG scraping a majority and somehow locking SF put of power but they would surely need to at least be at 40% combined to achieve that. SF as largest party is probably inevitable. A combined FF+FG vote of 35% must be a record low?
Slide in the FG vote is interesting as I thought they would be holding up a lot better than FF. Varadakar's appeals to Dublin Metro voters aren't working.
I think a SF-FF majority is possiblyan undervalued prospect TBH and SF will be surpringly centrist if they do get into gvt as they already have the young vote in the bag.
If SF gets more than 35%, they could really take off in seats though as remember FG got 76 seats on 36% in 2011 even accounting for SF being marginally less transfer friendly.
The large number of independent TDs currently being elected makes it difficult to shut SF out. SF only received 24.5% of the vote last time, would have won more TDs if they'd stood more candidates, and FF and FG had to call on the Greens to keep SF out.
If SF really do poll above 30% then it will almost certainly be impossible to keep them out of government.
In many constituencies, independents stand to gain transfers from SF voters at higher rate than almost all other parties. Seeing as how core SFers were (and guessing still are to above-average degree) famously adverse to giving non-SF candidates any preferences.
Comments
Heading for second World Cup And first since 1986. Going to win the Concacaf group seeded seventh.
What got to him were the indiscriminate killings of Vietnamese civilians by the Americans. The Australians did long slow jungle patrols to collect intelligence. The Americans just called in artillery and airstrikes on the flimsiest grounds. He saw far too many war crimes to continue the fight.
Twelve
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/04/margaret-thatcher-pinochet-chile-scotch-malt-whisky
Thatcher never forgot Pinochet's contribution to our victory when Straw tried to get him prosecuted
The proposals can presumably be dusted off should a more constructive environment be established.
Even today kids die picking up US UXB, and the dysgenic tragedy of Agent Orange spills down the decades.
America’s greatest crime, I think. Worse than Iraq. Laos wasn’t even a hostile state
If there was a technical solution they would have done it. They haven't, anywhere.
https://twitter.com/_MJMoody_/status/1507711435723493380?s=20&t=yqfZYPwQ5Iult_UyOSxJPQ
It’s a war, bad shit happens - up to and including ‘murder’ - but sometimes you have to be pragmatic and look away
Even worse, they lost the damn war, and to top it all off, by the end the US elite like Rob Macnamara realized it was a war that never needed to be fought anyway. The Vietnamese hate the Chinese, and aren’t much keener on Russians. It was a war of independence and America should have showered Vietnam with kindness not chemical weapons.
As Macnamara said ‘we could have won it by giving them all fridges’
Not seen Resurrections, though I suspect it would only disappoint me if I did.
But you asked for the basics not the details… the trusted trader scheme captured 95% of volume relatively easily
My own football club have had almost £1m of levelling up money in 3 separate tranches for Community sporting developments in Staveley (@staveleymwfc)
New Staveley railway station coming by 2024. Boris is shovelling cash our way. What has Labour ever done to address inequality between London and its own heartlands?
You don't want non-combatants wandering around on a battlefield, both for their own safety and the safety of your own troops (are they non-combatants or enemy soldiers). Obviously some get caught up in the fighting anyway, but if they know that the penalty for looting is to get shot then that reduces the number that might be out and about, thus reducing the risks to them from the normal dangers of a battle.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with my own argument, particularly on a modern battlefield, but in WWII? I think it's reasonable.
Mask wearing regulations changed, and most people were only too happy to stop wearing them.
Time for Johson to swap him with Javid?
Qatar here we come. Will give England a game. Potentially.
Better than Italy.
https://twitter.com/markjlowe/status/1508152001229733899
Best reason for an abandonment for anything ever.
There are a number of examples supporting your conclusion in Rick Atkinson's "Liberation Trilogy", which tells the story of the American army in WW II, in North Africa and Europe.
Here's one that sticks in my mind. At the end of the war, American soldiers liberated a concentration camp. The SS guards had surrendered. But when the Americans saw the horrible condition of the prisoners, they shot the SS guards anyway. When Eisenhower heard about it, he called for an investigation, but Atkinson doesn't say that actually happened.
(I would modify your statement slightly, adding this qualifier: "in all large conflicts".)
One of the greatest war crimes in World War II was the "Manila massacre", where the Japanese murdered at least 100,000 Filipino civilians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_massacre (As far as I know, they didn't gain any military advantage from the murders.)
Energy, not the tech sector, is still the motor of history
JANAN GANESH"
https://www.ft.com/content/0c76474f-ece6-4395-80b7-18cc5df481e0
I agree on Reloaded.
If we want someone who will challenge Treasury orthodoxy, Gove is about the only person I can think of.
Some more conversation about using frozen Russian reserves for reparations for Ukraine.
This from the Brookings Institution suggests that $350bn is available, and how it could be spent:
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/russia-can-be-made-to-pay-for-ukraine-damage-now/
It's so hard to see a film without knowing too much about it already these days, and I think the film was much better for it.
on course to be First Minister. TUV support down
🔷SF 26% (+1 from Jan)
🔷DUP 19% (+2)
🔷Alliance 16% (+2)
🔷UUP 13% (-1)
🔷SDLP 11% (-)
🔷TUV 9% (-3)
Better for SF than I expected (loyalist f*ckwittery possibly playing into their hands) and interesting they are doing well at the same time as Alliance increasing and SDLP holding up. Only real movement would appear to be from TUV to DUP.
This poll does not look great for unionism TBH as 40% is pretty much the combined DUP+UUP+TUV floor and the DUP is likely to lose more seats than the UUP and TUV gain, who are both unlikely to gain more than a couple.
41% for Unionism is also still more than the 37% for SF and SDLP Nationalism
I think it’s a few hundred firms (from memory) - I’d also add eBay/Amazon as processing agents which would also catch a lot of small traders.
It seems rather different now...
(And yes, there was only one)
Interesting that the aggregate for SF & SDLP is down by a similar amount (2.8pp).
Frost was very opposed to an approach that went against the spirit of Brexit and preferred to do without equivalence from the get-go.
In my case I commonly did temporary exports pre the removal of controls. Not once did stuff go straight through. Normally only held up for an hour or so, but it was always very limited stuff, so god knows what a McLaren lorry or a Rolling Stones tour lorry goes through, and once it took 3 weeks for one item.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_France
On a bad night for the DUP they could get only one seat in Belfast N for example:
SF 2 (-)
DUP 1 (-1)
SDLP 1 (-)
Alliance 1 (+1)
My eyes are also firmly on Belfast S and Lagan Valley.
Exciting! New Tube for the Piccadilly Line
https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/the-ukraine-war-has-put-silicon-valley-in-its-place-20220327-p5a8b4
"Finances are tight. We will protect the vulnerable and ensure the pain is spread equitably for the rest"
I think people would understand that. Instead of which, he does these stunts filling up someone else's car with petrol and tries to cover up the fiscal damage with complicated adjustments to tax and NI. With the result that hundreds of thousands are tipped into poverty (deliberately?) while no-one else knows what's going on.
The headline you *just* linked to says 'estimated'. A mayoral spokesman says that based on third party eyewitness accounts, they estimate that 300 people died. And even his statement was extremely equivocal. In more than 10 days I would expect to hear from family members missing relatives, I would expect (heaven forbid) to see bodies. Instead we've seen the whole thing fall into abeyance.
From the view outside he seems to occupy the uncomfortable territory of supposedly being a 'progressive' Unionist while possessing many of the characteristics of the dinosaurs.
Rishi is a very interesting character, but he suffers from several issues.
1. He is fully signed up to drier-than-dry economics (Treasury orthodoxy) in the face of a systemic decline of productivity and slow growth.
2. He is not in the slightest bit interested in the least well off.
3. As a billionaire, he appears to be entirely remote from the everyday concerns of the average British voter.
4. He’s obsessed with building his own personal brand at the expensive of overall cohesive government messaging. This includes the bizarre optics around the penny cut on income tax.
Get rid.
Sorry.
There's a special military operation on.
For example, last week there was a series of interviews with farmers about the impact of the New Zealand / Oz trade agreements on Lamb Farming, who are getting on and adapting rather than saying that the apocalypse has arrived.
A couple of months ago there was a similar series of interviews with fishing businesses who are now adapting successfully.
The current complaints are about HOW DARE THEY THINK ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT IN FARMING (when we need to think about threats to food production volumes now that a regional war has suddenly happened).
It reminds me to an extent of the rhetoric run by the General Election campaign by Corbyn's Labour claiming that a US Trade Agreement would mean the NHS would be sold off. Lurid but total BS, as the Treaty said the opposite, and soon regressing to its proper place.
Let me find my sources, and get back to you.
I would encourage any Tory apparatchiks reading to avoid importing US food standards into the UK, though.
Thank you very much for that Farooq. You a very wrong again. Just because I don’t appear in the room doesn’t mean I’m not keeping an eye on the nonsense you are up too.
Anyway. What’s your position on the English employing the lock ness monster to suppress the Scott’s?
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/england-uses-loch-ness-monster-26569550
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9scjqFF3do
It took autocorrect 15 minutes to accept Id as a word.
More likely we are dragged in by Russia proving missiles or drones that struck their military came from non Ukraine areas such as off the coast.