With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
What happens when the higher body decides to ban abortion in the U.K.?
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Nah. I think the new top team- Sunak, Dowden, Cameron, Cleverley - will be pretty united and will happily face down the mutineers. There will be a battle after the election and I rather suspect Cleverley is being lined up by the party establishment with Badenoch as as the approved alternative. Braverman, or whoever the rightwing factionalists line up, will likely get squeezed out.
Braverman has rotten ratings with the public - she's no Boris - a paper tiger.
Braverman represents the heart and soul of the modern Conservative Party.
Shameful and all the Tories on here doubt we're a racist country!
How do you think the French would poll on the issue?
They would NEVER vote Le Pen and even countries who have considered it have never suggested the asylum seeker never having the chance to enter their country.
Suella knows her market
Latest 2027 French presidential first round poll from IFOP
Firstly I'm not even sure Le Pen is to the right of the Tory Party. Certainly not to the right of Braverman. Secondly in every election other than the 30% the rest choose even the most diverse bedfellows to make sure she loses
The letter is so deranged I think it's probably neutral at worst for Sunak. The petulant childishness of it does rather justify him sacking her. Hard to imagine Cameron writing a letter like that.
It’s brutal. It’s also much better written than the Jenkyns letter (not hard)
And where is this petulant childishness? Its lucid, firm, bracing - and it drills right into Sunak’s perceived flaws: mainly weakness
It will damage him
Lets look at the letter again: 1. Details firm promises made on policy detail, anchored back to their manifesto 2. Notes that Sunak is unelected by anyone and was actively rejected by the party 3. Refers to repeated letters sent to try and drive engagement and action to deliver said policy details - I assume she has copies as she will need to show them 4. Describes how he is either shit at politics or a liar - or both 5. Sets out her preferred nuclear option which he has ignored
Brutal, savage, designed to fire up the right of the party against him. Got to hand it to her, its brilliant. What does he do? The right won't let him brush it aside and move on. And unless he can show she is lying about her specific points he will have to deflect and evade. And that won't work either.
Yes, it’s an excellent letter in terms of its purpose. Those who deny this or can’t see it are just projecting their dislike of her on to it
It’s going to shake the Tory party. It’s one of the most cleverly lacerating attacks I’ve seen WITHIN a governing party. She knows what she’s doing
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Nah. I think the new top team- Sunak, Dowden, Cameron, Cleverley - will be pretty united and will happily face down the mutineers. There will be a battle after the election and I rather suspect Cleverley is being lined up by the party establishment with Badenoch as as the approved alternative. Braverman, or whoever the rightwing factionalists line up, will likely get squeezed out.
Braverman has rotten ratings with the public - she's no Boris - a paper tiger.
Braverman represents the heart and soul of the modern Conservative Party.
The letter is so deranged I think it's probably neutral at worst for Sunak. The petulant childishness of it does rather justify him sacking her. Hard to imagine Cameron writing a letter like that.
It’s brutal. It’s also much better written than the Jenkyns letter (not hard)
And where is this petulant childishness? Its lucid, firm, bracing - and it drills right into Sunak’s perceived flaws: mainly weakness
It will damage him
Lets look at the letter again: 1. Details firm promises made on policy detail, anchored back to their manifesto 2. Notes that Sunak is unelected by anyone and was actively rejected by the party 3. Refers to repeated letters sent to try and drive engagement and action to deliver said policy details - I assume she has copies as she will need to show them 4. Describes how he is either shit at politics or a liar - or both 5. Sets out her preferred nuclear option which he has ignored
Brutal, savage, designed to fire up the right of the party against him. Got to hand it to her, its brilliant. What does he do? The right won't let him brush it aside and move on. And unless he can show she is lying about her specific points he will have to deflect and evade. And that won't work either.
Yes, it’s an excellent letter in terms of its purpose. Those who deny this or can’t see it are just projecting their dislike of her on to it
It’s going to shake the Tory party. It’s one of the most cleverly lacerating attacks I’ve seen WITHIN a governing party. She knows what she’s doing
The problem is that she wrote it, and she wrote it now. She has no credibility. She screwed up and got herself sacked.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Nah. I think the new top team- Sunak, Dowden, Cameron, Cleverley - will be pretty united and will happily face down the mutineers. There will be a battle after the election and I rather suspect Cleverley is being lined up by the party establishment with Badenoch as as the approved alternative. Braverman, or whoever the rightwing factionalists line up, will likely get squeezed out.
Braverman has rotten ratings with the public - she's no Boris - a paper tiger.
Braverman represents the heart and soul of the modern Conservative Party.
Shameful and all the Tories on here doubt we're a racist country!
How do you think the French would poll on the issue?
They would NEVER vote Le Pen and even countries who have considered it have never suggested the asylum seeker never having the chance to enter their country.
Suella knows her market
Latest 2027 French presidential first round poll from IFOP
Firstly I'm not even sure Le Pen is to the right of the Tory Party. Certainly not to the right of Braverman. Secondly in every election other than the 30% the rest choose even the most diverse bedfellows to make sure she loses
I didn't expect my prediction that you would compare Le Pen favourably to Braverman to come true quite so quickly.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
You seem to be making an unstated assumption that the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism.
What if the decline of one majority were instead replaced by another that wanted to establish a different kind of state?
I'm not assuming the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism. It might be, it might not be.
I am a democrat. If the population changes and people want a "different kind of state", then they should get a different kind of state. Isn't that how democracy works?
Of course, it's not always quite that simple. If a majority wants to kill everyone called "William", then, no, that should be stopped! There is a (difficult) balance between basic human rights and democracy. A majority in Israel, by some polling, want Jews to have more rights than non-Jews, and I think that would be a mistake. If the situation changed and some future majority wanted to have more rights than Jews, that would also be wrong.
Democracy is about more than voting, it requires respect for minorities.
The idea that Jews* can only be safe from genocide in their own ethnostate is absurd. Certainly there is anti-semitism in many or even all countries, but that doesn't mean genocide. There is no risk of the Shoah being repeated anywhere in Europe.
*or Sikhs, Kurds, Rohingya, Yazedi, Afrikaaners, etc etc.
Lots of confidence on this point from people with little to no stake in the outcome.
Always worth remembering that it was viewed as unthinkable that a civilized country like Germany would do anything like that in the 1930s. Also that it doesn't need to happen in exactly the same way as last time (or the time before that, or the time before that...) in order to justify a mass flight of Jews towards Israel.
That is a fair comment. So, what's the solution? A majority Jewish Israel may protect the Jews, but how do we protect the Yazidis, the Romany, the Rohingya, the Sahrawis etc. Working towards an international, rules-based order that protects minority rights seems like a good thing to do... yes, no?
And how do you balance this idea of a majority Jewish Israel as a protector with what the future people of Israel want to do? Do you oppress non-Jews in Israel to ensure Jews are not oppressed outside Israel?
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Nah. I think the new top team- Sunak, Dowden, Cameron, Cleverley - will be pretty united and will happily face down the mutineers. There will be a battle after the election and I rather suspect Cleverley is being lined up by the party establishment with Badenoch as as the approved alternative. Braverman, or whoever the rightwing factionalists line up, will likely get squeezed out.
Braverman has rotten ratings with the public - she's no Boris - a paper tiger.
Braverman represents the heart and soul of the modern Conservative Party.
No 10 doesn't deny any of Braverman's explosive 'secret pact' claims, but spox says: “The PM believes in actions not words. He is proud that this government has brought forward the toughest legislation to tackle illegal migration this country has seen and has subsequently reduced the number of boat crossings by a third this year. And whatever the outcome of the Supreme Court tomorrow, he will continue that work. The PM thanks the former home secretary for her service."
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Nah. I think the new top team- Sunak, Dowden, Cameron, Cleverley - will be pretty united and will happily face down the mutineers. There will be a battle after the election and I rather suspect Cleverley is being lined up by the party establishment with Badenoch as as the approved alternative. Braverman, or whoever the rightwing factionalists line up, will likely get squeezed out.
Braverman has rotten ratings with the public - she's no Boris - a paper tiger.
You might be right on Braverman. I’m not a fan of hers - but this letter shows she’s smart and eloquent enough to really fuck with Sunak
So she may not become PM but she can advance her cause against the left
It’s another sign of Sunak’s mistake unravelling within 24 hours of him committing jt. As some of us predicted
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Nah. I think the new top team- Sunak, Dowden, Cameron, Cleverley - will be pretty united and will happily face down the mutineers. There will be a battle after the election and I rather suspect Cleverley is being lined up by the party establishment with Badenoch as as the approved alternative. Braverman, or whoever the rightwing factionalists line up, will likely get squeezed out.
Braverman has rotten ratings with the public - she's no Boris - a paper tiger.
Braverman represents the heart and soul of the modern Conservative Party.
Nonsense. (Sorry)
The members beg to differ
Well we'll see.
We already saw it when they elected Johnson and Truss. She is not representative of the 1922, Tory grandees or Conservatives up to about 2016. Just the majority of members and a bunch of folk ranting on Con Home.
No 10 doesn't deny any of Braverman's explosive 'secret pact' claims, but spox says: “The PM believes in actions not words. He is proud that this government has brought forward the toughest legislation to tackle illegal migration this country has seen and has subsequently reduced the number of boat crossings by a third this year. And whatever the outcome of the Supreme Court tomorrow, he will continue that work. The PM thanks the former home secretary for her service."
The letter is so deranged I think it's probably neutral at worst for Sunak. The petulant childishness of it does rather justify him sacking her. Hard to imagine Cameron writing a letter like that.
It’s brutal. It’s also much better written than the Jenkyns letter (not hard)
And where is this petulant childishness? Its lucid, firm, bracing - and it drills right into Sunak’s perceived flaws: mainly weakness
It will damage him
The petulant childishness is in the very existence of the letter when yesterday there had seemed to be an agreement no letters would be exchanged, its length (this is not a letter, it's a newspaper column on headed notepaper), and the uncouth degree of self-praise particularly on page 1, in particular "it is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest". It's an airing of dirty laundry in a way that broaches no subtlety. Certainly not in the style of Howe's resignation speech, Or Robin Cook's.
It's a sort of right-wing mirror image of a James O'Brien rant.
I agree it is much better written than Andrea Jenkyns' drunken effort.
I also accept I'm probably not the target audience. But will this really ingratiate her to the Tory right?
I used Ito be firmly convinced FPTP was the best system. I have now completely changed my mind. Not a common thing on PB!
Those in favour of electoral reform have convinced me. We need it. Both Labour and the Tories contain factions and philosophies which are utterly incompatible
We need four five or six parties and PR of some sort. Britain has been badly governed for two decades and we need to address this, and this would be a beginning
Shameful and all the Tories on here doubt we're a racist country!
How do you think the French would poll on the issue?
They would NEVER vote Le Pen and even countries who have considered it have never suggested the asylum seeker never having the chance to enter their country.
Suella knows her market
Latest 2027 French presidential first round poll from IFOP
Firstly I'm not even sure Le Pen is to the right of the Tory Party. Certainly not to the right of Braverman. Secondly in every election other than the 30% the rest choose even the most diverse bedfellows to make sure she loses
A poll in April had Le Pen beating Macron 55% to 45% in another runoff, even some Melenchon voters joined Les Republicains and Zemmour voters to vote for her in that second round poll
I used Ito be firmly convinced FPTP was the best system. I have now completely changed my mind. Not a common thing on PB!
Those in favour of electoral reform have convinced me. We need it. Both Labour and the Tories contain factions and philosophies which are utterly incompatible
We need four five or six parties and PR of some sort. Britain has been badly governed for two decades and we need to address this, and this would be a beginning
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
You seem to be making an unstated assumption that the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism.
What if the decline of one majority were instead replaced by another that wanted to establish a different kind of state?
I'm not assuming the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism. It might be, it might not be.
I am a democrat. If the population changes and people want a "different kind of state", then they should get a different kind of state. Isn't that how democracy works?
Of course, it's not always quite that simple. If a majority wants to kill everyone called "William", then, no, that should be stopped! There is a (difficult) balance between basic human rights and democracy. A majority in Israel, by some polling, want Jews to have more rights than non-Jews, and I think that would be a mistake. If the situation changed and some future majority wanted to have more rights than Jews, that would also be wrong.
Democracy is about more than voting, it requires respect for minorities.
The idea that Jews* can only be safe from genocide in their own ethnostate is absurd. Certainly there is anti-semitism in many or even all countries, but that doesn't mean genocide. There is no risk of the Shoah being repeated anywhere in Europe.
*or Sikhs, Kurds, Rohingya, Yazedi, Afrikaaners, etc etc.
Lots of confidence on this point from people with little to no stake in the outcome.
Always worth remembering that it was viewed as unthinkable that a civilized country like Germany would do anything like that in the 1930s. Also that it doesn't need to happen in exactly the same way as last time (or the time before that, or the time before that...) in order to justify a mass flight of Jews towards Israel.
That is a fair comment. So, what's the solution? A majority Jewish Israel may protect the Jews, but how do we protect the Yazidis, the Romany, the Rohingya, the Sahrawis etc. Working towards an international, rules-based order that protects minority rights seems like a good thing to do... yes, no?
And how do you balance this idea of a majority Jewish Israel as a protector with what the future people of Israel want to do? Do you oppress non-Jews in Israel to ensure Jews are not oppressed outside Israel?
Is clustering Jews in a small country surrounded by unfriendly countries really the 'ideal' way of protecting them as a whole?
I'd think that having communities distributed within all the wealthy democratic nations would be the most effective.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
What, pray, is a ‘fine kumbaya platitude’?
Homo sapiens can be a very nasty, aggressive species when faced with something it doesn’t like. Ask Homo neanderthalis.
TBF, we don't actually know what finished off the Neanderthals.
They weren't entirely finished off - we're in part them.
It's a bit of a stretch, but it has been noted that there is more Neanderthal DNA out there today than at any point in history, simply because of growth in the size of human population, and the fact most of us have a very small percentage of Neanderthal DNA.
I'm certainly no expert, but I thought it had been established that some big chunk of our DNA is probably from the Neanderthals. Some certainly is anyway.
It's about 1-4% on average in non-African people, so not a big chunk, a small amount (which is still an amazing and interesting discovery).
lol
You called me a racist for saying there are discernible and scientifically important genetic differences between Africans and others; you claimed they absolutely do not exist. I gave you this Neanderthal data as an example. Then you went all quiet. Now suddenly it’s an amazing and interesting discovery. Pffff
Yet the evidence of Neanderthal genetic inheritance was on open display here on PB all along….
I used Ito be firmly convinced FPTP was the best system. I have now completely changed my mind. Not a common thing on PB!
Those in favour of electoral reform have convinced me. We need it. Both Labour and the Tories contain factions and philosophies which are utterly incompatible
We need four five or six parties and PR of some sort. Britain has been badly governed for two decades and we need to address this, and this would be a beginning
Great idea if you are content to see HMG being run subject to the whims of the Faragists, Corbynistas, Nationalists, or whoever else ends up holding the balance. The idea that it will be the mushy central calling the shots hasn't worked out too well in Israel.
The letter is so deranged I think it's probably neutral at worst for Sunak. The petulant childishness of it does rather justify him sacking her. Hard to imagine Cameron writing a letter like that.
It’s brutal. It’s also much better written than the Jenkyns letter (not hard)
And where is this petulant childishness? Its lucid, firm, bracing - and it drills right into Sunak’s perceived flaws: mainly weakness
It will damage him
The petulant childishness is in the very existence of the letter when yesterday there had seemed to be an agreement no letters would be exchanged, its length (this is not a letter, it's a newspaper column on headed notepaper), and the uncouth degree of self-praise particularly on page 1, in particular "it is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest". It's an airing of dirty laundry in a way that broaches no subtlety. Certainly not in the style of Howe's resignation speech, Or Robin Cook's.
It's a sort of right-wing mirror image of a James O'Brien rant.
I agree it is much better written than Andrea Jenkyns' drunken effort.
I also accept I'm probably not the target audience. But will this really ingratiate her to the Tory right?
The main purpose of the letter is to fuck over Sunak and damage the people around him. If she achieves this she will become a minor heroine of the Tory right, yes - there is real anger about all this
They are doomed to hideous infighting. You should be enjoying it! Braverman is putting on a cracking show
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
More Kurds live in Turkey than in Iraq and Syria put together. Indeed, the number of Kurds in Iran is greater than or about the same size as the Iraqi and Syrian populations put together, so the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria don't provide the Kurdish people with a solution to their desires for nationhood (and the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria are currently at loggerheads!). While I am sympathetic to Kurdish desire for a nation, I don't think we can rip open the Turkish and Iranian borders without democratic consent.
It's not easy to tell, but I think Christians became the majority in what we call Israel/Palestine today, at least in the Byzantine period. Later, Muslims became a majority. Both of those processes were largely due to conversion. Obviously Jews were very much a minority in recent history until Zionist immigration changed the situation.
I accept that one can and should be sceptical about kumbaya platitudes. Israel is under attack right now: people are dying. Fortunately, Israel isn't under any threat of losing. Ultimately, we want to get to a place where no-one is losing.
And more Jews live outside Israel than in Israel but Israel remains their ultimate homeland of safety as Kurdistan is for Kurds.
The only way Jews can ensure they can never be defeated and eliminated from the planet, as the Nazis wanted and some Jihadi militants now want is to maintain Israel for evermore as a Jewish majority nation and their ultimate place of sanctuary
That is, pretty much definitionally, what Zionism believes, yes. I don't believe that. I think we can strive for a world where minorities can never be eliminated from the planet because of a collective belief in minority rights.
There are many peoples of the world who face oppression and who don't have their own majority nation state. (Some, like the Romany (who the Nazis also wanted to eliminate), have no ambitions for such. Other, like many Kurds or some Sikhs, do.) I don't believe creating majority nation states for the Kurds, Romany, Sikhs, Yazidis, Ossetians, Basques, etc. etc. etc. is necessary or feasible. We have to come up with a better solution to protect people than creating majority nation states.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
The Romanies just move from place to place their entire lives, is the main reason they have no settled state. The Kurds as much as the Jews want their own state (as do many Basques etc).
If Israel ceases to be a majority Jewish state that is it for Jews, if another holocaust is pursued against Jews they will again have no safe majority nation of their own to flee to. It is completely different for Christians in the UK as if the now minority Christian population here is persecuted their are multiple other Christain majority nations in the Americas, southern Europe, Ireland, Poland, southern Africa, the Philippines etc they could flee to.
Jews have no such option if persecuted in their nation of residence, their is no other majority Jewish nation on earth but Israel. Hence they will preserve Israel at all costs, including restricting immigration only to ethnic Jews etc (the birthrate of Orthodox Jews in Israel is high enough for that to be unlikely to be an issue though)
I think that's an entirely wrong description of Romany culture or Romany attitudes to nationhood!
Whether Jews worldwide will "preserve Israel at all costs" is debatable. No group is homogeneous and talking about all Jews as if they are of a single mind is ridiculous. The attitudes of orthodox Ashkenazi Jews in Israel versus liberal Jews in Tel Aviv versus liberal Jews in much of the US versus those in New York's orthodox Jewish communities are wildly different. (For example, many orthodox Jews in New York are strongly opposed to Zionism on religious grounds.)
However, I was asking more about what you think is the right approach. You've mentioned ethnicity-based immigration policies (although not whether you think they are right). What do you think is acceptable to keep Israel a majority Jewish nation? Would you ban conversion to Christianity? Would you have different rules for Jewish and non-Jewish Israeli citizens? I don't see how one can have a liberal democracy and a guarantee of Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation. I don't think any nation should be defined as eternally of one religion.
No it isn't, Romanies live in caravans for a reason, they are a permanently roaming people not a static people.
Of course secular left liberals like aren't that bothered about Israel, you didn't have half your family wiped out in the Holocaust after all. We have learnt our lesson after all, won't happen again will it, why do Jews need a homeland of their own?
Yes there may be differences on social issues between liberal and Orthodox Jews, as there are in the political parties they vote for in Israel but on preservation of Israel they are as one. It must be preserved as the Jewish homeland no matter what the cost.
Hence Israel will eternally be for them a place of majority Jewish ethnicity, including controlling immigration if needed to ensure that
Most Romany do not live in caravans. Most live statically. Most Romany are in eastern Europe, of course, so ignore your stereotypes of Romany culture in the UK.
I am concerned about Israel. You don't know my life, my family, my friends. My grandfather was killed by a Nazi bomb, while my grandmother's family were hosting German Jewish refugees. Of course, it was the Conservative government in the 1930s who made it harder for those refugees to come to the UK.
You underestimate the differences in views of Israel among Jewish people. Go read about Neturei Karta in Stamford Hill who are strongly opposed to the existence of the state of Israel.
More generally, you are repeating yourself and not answering my questions. If you don't want to, fine, but it's a bit pointless us just going around in circles. I don't want to stop Israel being a majority, Jewish nation. (I think Bibi should be in jail, but broadly what Israel does should be up to Israelis, not me, or you.) I don't think it is democratic to deny the possibility that such a change might happen in the future. I think we should move away from a 19th-centure view of nation states built on a single ethnos, but I understand and acknowledge the desire of many ethnic groups for a nation state of their own.
90% of British Jews support the existence of Israel as a Jewish majority state and 59% identify as Zionists
A very interesting country Argentina. Buenos Aires is a terrific city. People dancing the tango on every street corner and in the parks. It reminded me of Madrid on a grander scale. A lot of Germans there. I never thought it appropriate to ask how this German colony had originated! I shot a Repsol commercial there.
When were you there? I traveled widely in Argentina in 2019. Buenos Aires is a faded dump - you can still see the glimpses of its once-gilded architecture - the Barcelona of South America etc - but now it is overwhelmed by poverty and new migrants, outside some rare lush suburbs
In places it is seriously dangerous
Paradoxically, everywhere else I went in Argentina seemed pleasant to properly pleasant. In much of the country the climate is kind. Malbec wine flows like water. There are spectacular landscapes. Yes they are quite poor but not obviously poorer than their neighbours - and not obviously poorer than, say, Sicilians - where I have just been
It has such great potential, too. Don’t write it off
A hundred years back didn’t it have a GDP/standard of living comparable with much of Europe?
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
What happens when the higher body decides to ban abortion in the U.K.?
Higher != Better
A victory for ending the murder of unborn children?
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Difficulty is that, under FPTP, to split is to lose.
But making promises that his audience wants to hear, irrespective of his intention/ability to keep them?
Maybe Rishi is just Boris with better trouser control
Starmer's got a fairly open goal this PMQs. Trouble is that means the pressure will be on.
Suella's letter helps because I think there's thinner gruel available on Cameron - more of a slow burner, let the newspapers reopen Greensill Capital rather than Labour forcing the point. On Cameron I think Starmer's best bet is probably to make the point that Sunak didn't think anyone within the current parliamentary party was good enough. But I think he'll use all his questions on Braverman.
Sunak's responses are already clear: he'll talk about "actions not words" as his spokesperson did this afternoon. Starmer's comeback will presumably involve a list of Tory failures on "actions" across various policy areas. and so on.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Difficulty is that, under FPTP, to split is to lose.
But making promises that his audience wants to hear, irrespective of his intention/ability to keep them?
Maybe Rishi is just Boris with better trouser control
Rishi isn’t remotely as good as Boris. Like it or not Boris had the charisma. He won the blue wall, he won the Brexit referendum, he won the mayoralty twice
Sunak hasn’t actually won anything and he will leave politics having lost his one and only election
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
More Kurds live in Turkey than in Iraq and Syria put together. Indeed, the number of Kurds in Iran is greater than or about the same size as the Iraqi and Syrian populations put together, so the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria don't provide the Kurdish people with a solution to their desires for nationhood (and the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria are currently at loggerheads!). While I am sympathetic to Kurdish desire for a nation, I don't think we can rip open the Turkish and Iranian borders without democratic consent.
It's not easy to tell, but I think Christians became the majority in what we call Israel/Palestine today, at least in the Byzantine period. Later, Muslims became a majority. Both of those processes were largely due to conversion. Obviously Jews were very much a minority in recent history until Zionist immigration changed the situation.
I accept that one can and should be sceptical about kumbaya platitudes. Israel is under attack right now: people are dying. Fortunately, Israel isn't under any threat of losing. Ultimately, we want to get to a place where no-one is losing.
And more Jews live outside Israel than in Israel but Israel remains their ultimate homeland of safety as Kurdistan is for Kurds.
The only way Jews can ensure they can never be defeated and eliminated from the planet, as the Nazis wanted and some Jihadi militants now want is to maintain Israel for evermore as a Jewish majority nation and their ultimate place of sanctuary
That is, pretty much definitionally, what Zionism believes, yes. I don't believe that. I think we can strive for a world where minorities can never be eliminated from the planet because of a collective belief in minority rights.
There are many peoples of the world who face oppression and who don't have their own majority nation state. (Some, like the Romany (who the Nazis also wanted to eliminate), have no ambitions for such. Other, like many Kurds or some Sikhs, do.) I don't believe creating majority nation states for the Kurds, Romany, Sikhs, Yazidis, Ossetians, Basques, etc. etc. etc. is necessary or feasible. We have to come up with a better solution to protect people than creating majority nation states.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
The Romanies just move from place to place their entire lives, is the main reason they have no settled state. The Kurds as much as the Jews want their own state (as do many Basques etc).
If Israel ceases to be a majority Jewish state that is it for Jews, if another holocaust is pursued against Jews they will again have no safe majority nation of their own to flee to. It is completely different for Christians in the UK as if the now minority Christian population here is persecuted their are multiple other Christain majority nations in the Americas, southern Europe, Ireland, Poland, southern Africa, the Philippines etc they could flee to.
Jews have no such option if persecuted in their nation of residence, their is no other majority Jewish nation on earth but Israel. Hence they will preserve Israel at all costs, including restricting immigration only to ethnic Jews etc (the birthrate of Orthodox Jews in Israel is high enough for that to be unlikely to be an issue though)
I think that's an entirely wrong description of Romany culture or Romany attitudes to nationhood!
Whether Jews worldwide will "preserve Israel at all costs" is debatable. No group is homogeneous and talking about all Jews as if they are of a single mind is ridiculous. The attitudes of orthodox Ashkenazi Jews in Israel versus liberal Jews in Tel Aviv versus liberal Jews in much of the US versus those in New York's orthodox Jewish communities are wildly different. (For example, many orthodox Jews in New York are strongly opposed to Zionism on religious grounds.)
However, I was asking more about what you think is the right approach. You've mentioned ethnicity-based immigration policies (although not whether you think they are right). What do you think is acceptable to keep Israel a majority Jewish nation? Would you ban conversion to Christianity? Would you have different rules for Jewish and non-Jewish Israeli citizens? I don't see how one can have a liberal democracy and a guarantee of Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation. I don't think any nation should be defined as eternally of one religion.
No it isn't, Romanies live in caravans for a reason, they are a permanently roaming people not a static people.
Of course secular left liberals like aren't that bothered about Israel, you didn't have half your family wiped out in the Holocaust after all. We have learnt our lesson after all, won't happen again will it, why do Jews need a homeland of their own?
Yes there may be differences on social issues between liberal and Orthodox Jews, as there are in the political parties they vote for in Israel but on preservation of Israel they are as one. It must be preserved as the Jewish homeland no matter what the cost.
Hence Israel will eternally be for them a place of majority Jewish ethnicity, including controlling immigration if needed to ensure that
Most Romany do not live in caravans. Most live statically. Most Romany are in eastern Europe, of course, so ignore your stereotypes of Romany culture in the UK.
I am concerned about Israel. You don't know my life, my family, my friends. My grandfather was killed by a Nazi bomb, while my grandmother's family were hosting German Jewish refugees. Of course, it was the Conservative government in the 1930s who made it harder for those refugees to come to the UK.
You underestimate the differences in views of Israel among Jewish people. Go read about Neturei Karta in Stamford Hill who are strongly opposed to the existence of the state of Israel.
More generally, you are repeating yourself and not answering my questions. If you don't want to, fine, but it's a bit pointless us just going around in circles. I don't want to stop Israel being a majority, Jewish nation. (I think Bibi should be in jail, but broadly what Israel does should be up to Israelis, not me, or you.) I don't think it is democratic to deny the possibility that such a change might happen in the future. I think we should move away from a 19th-centure view of nation states built on a single ethnos, but I understand and acknowledge the desire of many ethnic groups for a nation state of their own.
90% of British Jews support the existence of Israel as a Jewish majority state and 59% identify as Zionists
Thank you for admitting that when you said that Jewish people, "on preservation of Israel they are as one", you spoke in error. People here often say you are unwilling to admit to your errors, but here you graciously have.
The idea that PR is the solution to the post social media polarisation of politics is an interesting one.
By forcing the compromises into the public eye, rather than the back room, it might highlight that progress is dependent on people finding a way to work together and that private rancor is a dead end.
Either that or PR will let a minority view into power, and it might never let go.
Interesting times.
Personally I would try to solve the problem at source. The internet is obviously broken.
The letter is so deranged I think it's probably neutral at worst for Sunak. The petulant childishness of it does rather justify him sacking her. Hard to imagine Cameron writing a letter like that.
It’s brutal. It’s also much better written than the Jenkyns letter (not hard)
And where is this petulant childishness? Its lucid, firm, bracing - and it drills right into Sunak’s perceived flaws: mainly weakness
It will damage him
The petulant childishness is in the very existence of the letter when yesterday there had seemed to be an agreement no letters would be exchanged, its length (this is not a letter, it's a newspaper column on headed notepaper), and the uncouth degree of self-praise particularly on page 1, in particular "it is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest". It's an airing of dirty laundry in a way that broaches no subtlety. Certainly not in the style of Howe's resignation speech, Or Robin Cook's.
It's a sort of right-wing mirror image of a James O'Brien rant.
I agree it is much better written than Andrea Jenkyns' drunken effort.
I also accept I'm probably not the target audience. But will this really ingratiate her to the Tory right?
The main purpose of the letter is to fuck over Sunak and damage the people around him. If she achieves this she will become a minor heroine of the Tory right, yes - there is real anger about all this
They are doomed to hideous infighting. You should be enjoying it! Braverman is putting on a cracking show
I am quite enjoying it. I just can't quite rid myself of the deep seated terror that Cameron, the smiling assassin of the Lib Dems, is going to do them over again like he did in 2015.
My other fear is that if Braverman becomes a talisman of the right then her very clearly expressed position - that Britain should quit the ECHR - will shift the internal Tory Overton window and become full on orthodoxy, just waiting for the next conservative government to arrive and put it into action.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
More Kurds live in Turkey than in Iraq and Syria put together. Indeed, the number of Kurds in Iran is greater than or about the same size as the Iraqi and Syrian populations put together, so the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria don't provide the Kurdish people with a solution to their desires for nationhood (and the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria are currently at loggerheads!). While I am sympathetic to Kurdish desire for a nation, I don't think we can rip open the Turkish and Iranian borders without democratic consent.
It's not easy to tell, but I think Christians became the majority in what we call Israel/Palestine today, at least in the Byzantine period. Later, Muslims became a majority. Both of those processes were largely due to conversion. Obviously Jews were very much a minority in recent history until Zionist immigration changed the situation.
I accept that one can and should be sceptical about kumbaya platitudes. Israel is under attack right now: people are dying. Fortunately, Israel isn't under any threat of losing. Ultimately, we want to get to a place where no-one is losing.
And more Jews live outside Israel than in Israel but Israel remains their ultimate homeland of safety as Kurdistan is for Kurds.
The only way Jews can ensure they can never be defeated and eliminated from the planet, as the Nazis wanted and some Jihadi militants now want is to maintain Israel for evermore as a Jewish majority nation and their ultimate place of sanctuary
That is, pretty much definitionally, what Zionism believes, yes. I don't believe that. I think we can strive for a world where minorities can never be eliminated from the planet because of a collective belief in minority rights.
There are many peoples of the world who face oppression and who don't have their own majority nation state. (Some, like the Romany (who the Nazis also wanted to eliminate), have no ambitions for such. Other, like many Kurds or some Sikhs, do.) I don't believe creating majority nation states for the Kurds, Romany, Sikhs, Yazidis, Ossetians, Basques, etc. etc. etc. is necessary or feasible. We have to come up with a better solution to protect people than creating majority nation states.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
The Romanies just move from place to place their entire lives, is the main reason they have no settled state. The Kurds as much as the Jews want their own state (as do many Basques etc).
If Israel ceases to be a majority Jewish state that is it for Jews, if another holocaust is pursued against Jews they will again have no safe majority nation of their own to flee to. It is completely different for Christians in the UK as if the now minority Christian population here is persecuted their are multiple other Christain majority nations in the Americas, southern Europe, Ireland, Poland, southern Africa, the Philippines etc they could flee to.
Jews have no such option if persecuted in their nation of residence, their is no other majority Jewish nation on earth but Israel. Hence they will preserve Israel at all costs, including restricting immigration only to ethnic Jews etc (the birthrate of Orthodox Jews in Israel is high enough for that to be unlikely to be an issue though)
I think that's an entirely wrong description of Romany culture or Romany attitudes to nationhood!
Whether Jews worldwide will "preserve Israel at all costs" is debatable. No group is homogeneous and talking about all Jews as if they are of a single mind is ridiculous. The attitudes of orthodox Ashkenazi Jews in Israel versus liberal Jews in Tel Aviv versus liberal Jews in much of the US versus those in New York's orthodox Jewish communities are wildly different. (For example, many orthodox Jews in New York are strongly opposed to Zionism on religious grounds.)
However, I was asking more about what you think is the right approach. You've mentioned ethnicity-based immigration policies (although not whether you think they are right). What do you think is acceptable to keep Israel a majority Jewish nation? Would you ban conversion to Christianity? Would you have different rules for Jewish and non-Jewish Israeli citizens? I don't see how one can have a liberal democracy and a guarantee of Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation. I don't think any nation should be defined as eternally of one religion.
No it isn't, Romanies live in caravans for a reason, they are a permanently roaming people not a static people.
Of course secular left liberals like aren't that bothered about Israel, you didn't have half your family wiped out in the Holocaust after all. We have learnt our lesson after all, won't happen again will it, why do Jews need a homeland of their own?
Yes there may be differences on social issues between liberal and Orthodox Jews, as there are in the political parties they vote for in Israel but on preservation of Israel they are as one. It must be preserved as the Jewish homeland no matter what the cost.
Hence Israel will eternally be for them a place of majority Jewish ethnicity, including controlling immigration if needed to ensure that
Most Romany do not live in caravans. Most live statically. Most Romany are in eastern Europe, of course, so ignore your stereotypes of Romany culture in the UK.
I am concerned about Israel. You don't know my life, my family, my friends. My grandfather was killed by a Nazi bomb, while my grandmother's family were hosting German Jewish refugees. Of course, it was the Conservative government in the 1930s who made it harder for those refugees to come to the UK.
You underestimate the differences in views of Israel among Jewish people. Go read about Neturei Karta in Stamford Hill who are strongly opposed to the existence of the state of Israel.
More generally, you are repeating yourself and not answering my questions. If you don't want to, fine, but it's a bit pointless us just going around in circles. I don't want to stop Israel being a majority, Jewish nation. (I think Bibi should be in jail, but broadly what Israel does should be up to Israelis, not me, or you.) I don't think it is democratic to deny the possibility that such a change might happen in the future. I think we should move away from a 19th-centure view of nation states built on a single ethnos, but I understand and acknowledge the desire of many ethnic groups for a nation state of their own.
90% of British Jews support the existence of Israel as a Jewish majority state and 59% identify as Zionists
Thank you for admitting that when you said that Jewish people, "on preservation of Israel they are as one", you spoke in error. People here often say you are unwilling to admit to your errors, but here you graciously have.
As you well know 90%+ in support of something is as close to unanimity as you will ever get in an opinion poll
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Do you think so? I don’t think it makes any sort of argument. Her problem is that she was happy to go along with it all until she was sacked. She is saying “I didn’t have a proper job but I was ok with it because I was getting paid”. Makes her look a fool to me, at least.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Difficulty is that, under FPTP, to split is to lose.
But making promises that his audience wants to hear, irrespective of his intention/ability to keep them?
Maybe Rishi is just Boris with better trouser control
If we had PR Rishi and Cameron would be in different parties to Boris, Rees Mogg and Braverman (and Farage would probably be in the latter party too) and Blair and Starmer would be in a different party to Corbyn and McDonnell.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Do you think so? I don’t think it makes any sort of argument. Her problem is that she was happy to go along with it all until she was sacked. She is saying “I didn’t have a proper job but I was ok with it because I was getting paid”. Makes her look a fool to me, at least.
What does that make the man who appointed her look like? Or rather re-appointed her just after she'd been sacked.
A very interesting country Argentina. Buenos Aires is a terrific city. People dancing the tango on every street corner and in the parks. It reminded me of Madrid on a grander scale. A lot of Germans there. I never thought it appropriate to ask how this German colony had originated! I shot a Repsol commercial there.
When were you there? I traveled widely in Argentina in 2019. Buenos Aires is a faded dump - you can still see the glimpses of its once-gilded architecture - the Barcelona of South America etc - but now it is overwhelmed by poverty and new migrants, outside some rare lush suburbs
In places it is seriously dangerous
Paradoxically, everywhere else I went in Argentina seemed pleasant to properly pleasant. In much of the country the climate is kind. Malbec wine flows like water. There are spectacular landscapes. Yes they are quite poor but not obviously poorer than their neighbours - and not obviously poorer than, say, Sicilians - where I have just been
It has such great potential, too. Don’t write it off
2005. It wasn't great everywhere but it was very elegant in parts and I liked the super wide streets. I would say a cross between Madrid and Miami with a flavour of South America
The letter is so deranged I think it's probably neutral at worst for Sunak. The petulant childishness of it does rather justify him sacking her. Hard to imagine Cameron writing a letter like that.
It’s brutal. It’s also much better written than the Jenkyns letter (not hard)
And where is this petulant childishness? Its lucid, firm, bracing - and it drills right into Sunak’s perceived flaws: mainly weakness
It will damage him
The petulant childishness is in the very existence of the letter when yesterday there had seemed to be an agreement no letters would be exchanged, its length (this is not a letter, it's a newspaper column on headed notepaper), and the uncouth degree of self-praise particularly on page 1, in particular "it is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest". It's an airing of dirty laundry in a way that broaches no subtlety. Certainly not in the style of Howe's resignation speech, Or Robin Cook's.
It's a sort of right-wing mirror image of a James O'Brien rant.
I agree it is much better written than Andrea Jenkyns' drunken effort.
I also accept I'm probably not the target audience. But will this really ingratiate her to the Tory right?
The main purpose of the letter is to fuck over Sunak and damage the people around him. If she achieves this she will become a minor heroine of the Tory right, yes - there is real anger about all this
They are doomed to hideous infighting. You should be enjoying it! Braverman is putting on a cracking show
I am quite enjoying it. I just can't quite rid myself of the deep seated terror that Cameron, the smiling assassin of the Lib Dems, is going to do them over again like he did in 2015.
My other fear is that if Braverman becomes a talisman of the right then her very clearly expressed position - that Britain should quit the ECHR - will shift the internal Tory Overton window and become full on orthodoxy, just waiting for the next conservative government to arrive and put it into action.
Except there is zero chance a right wing Tory party would get into power....
This is splendidly splenetic. However, it raises the question of why Ms Braverman did not resign. How many broken promises and breaches of confidence would it have taken before she did so? Because it is clear that her limit had not been reached when she was dismissed.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Difficulty is that, under FPTP, to split is to lose.
But making promises that his audience wants to hear, irrespective of his intention/ability to keep them?
Maybe Rishi is just Boris with better trouser control
Rishi isn’t remotely as good as Boris. Like it or not Boris had the charisma. He won the blue wall, he won the Brexit referendum, he won the mayoralty twice
A strategy based on telling everyone what they want to hear, whether it is true or not, will only get you so far, and eventually and inevitably he ran out of road. After which he was, and is, a busted flush.
Shameful and all the Tories on here doubt we're a racist country!
How do you think the French would poll on the issue?
They would NEVER vote Le Pen and even countries who have considered it have never suggested the asylum seeker never having the chance to enter their country.
Suella knows her market
Latest 2027 French presidential first round poll from IFOP
Firstly I'm not even sure Le Pen is to the right of the Tory Party. Certainly not to the right of Braverman. Secondly in every election other than the 30% the rest choose even the most diverse bedfellows to make sure she loses
You don’t think the head of the sodding national front is to the right of the Tories? A woman who wants a referendum on the death penalty, net migration of 10k, and no immediate right to French citizenship for children of naturalised Frenchmen?
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
More Kurds live in Turkey than in Iraq and Syria put together. Indeed, the number of Kurds in Iran is greater than or about the same size as the Iraqi and Syrian populations put together, so the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria don't provide the Kurdish people with a solution to their desires for nationhood (and the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria are currently at loggerheads!). While I am sympathetic to Kurdish desire for a nation, I don't think we can rip open the Turkish and Iranian borders without democratic consent.
It's not easy to tell, but I think Christians became the majority in what we call Israel/Palestine today, at least in the Byzantine period. Later, Muslims became a majority. Both of those processes were largely due to conversion. Obviously Jews were very much a minority in recent history until Zionist immigration changed the situation.
I accept that one can and should be sceptical about kumbaya platitudes. Israel is under attack right now: people are dying. Fortunately, Israel isn't under any threat of losing. Ultimately, we want to get to a place where no-one is losing.
And more Jews live outside Israel than in Israel but Israel remains their ultimate homeland of safety as Kurdistan is for Kurds.
The only way Jews can ensure they can never be defeated and eliminated from the planet, as the Nazis wanted and some Jihadi militants now want is to maintain Israel for evermore as a Jewish majority nation and their ultimate place of sanctuary
That is, pretty much definitionally, what Zionism believes, yes. I don't believe that. I think we can strive for a world where minorities can never be eliminated from the planet because of a collective belief in minority rights.
There are many peoples of the world who face oppression and who don't have their own majority nation state. (Some, like the Romany (who the Nazis also wanted to eliminate), have no ambitions for such. Other, like many Kurds or some Sikhs, do.) I don't believe creating majority nation states for the Kurds, Romany, Sikhs, Yazidis, Ossetians, Basques, etc. etc. etc. is necessary or feasible. We have to come up with a better solution to protect people than creating majority nation states.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
The Romanies just move from place to place their entire lives, is the main reason they have no settled state. The Kurds as much as the Jews want their own state (as do many Basques etc).
If Israel ceases to be a majority Jewish state that is it for Jews, if another holocaust is pursued against Jews they will again have no safe majority nation of their own to flee to. It is completely different for Christians in the UK as if the now minority Christian population here is persecuted their are multiple other Christain majority nations in the Americas, southern Europe, Ireland, Poland, southern Africa, the Philippines etc they could flee to.
Jews have no such option if persecuted in their nation of residence, their is no other majority Jewish nation on earth but Israel. Hence they will preserve Israel at all costs, including restricting immigration only to ethnic Jews etc (the birthrate of Orthodox Jews in Israel is high enough for that to be unlikely to be an issue though)
I think that's an entirely wrong description of Romany culture or Romany attitudes to nationhood!
Whether Jews worldwide will "preserve Israel at all costs" is debatable. No group is homogeneous and talking about all Jews as if they are of a single mind is ridiculous. The attitudes of orthodox Ashkenazi Jews in Israel versus liberal Jews in Tel Aviv versus liberal Jews in much of the US versus those in New York's orthodox Jewish communities are wildly different. (For example, many orthodox Jews in New York are strongly opposed to Zionism on religious grounds.)
However, I was asking more about what you think is the right approach. You've mentioned ethnicity-based immigration policies (although not whether you think they are right). What do you think is acceptable to keep Israel a majority Jewish nation? Would you ban conversion to Christianity? Would you have different rules for Jewish and non-Jewish Israeli citizens? I don't see how one can have a liberal democracy and a guarantee of Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation. I don't think any nation should be defined as eternally of one religion.
No it isn't, Romanies live in caravans for a reason, they are a permanently roaming people not a static people.
Of course secular left liberals like aren't that bothered about Israel, you didn't have half your family wiped out in the Holocaust after all. We have learnt our lesson after all, won't happen again will it, why do Jews need a homeland of their own?
Yes there may be differences on social issues between liberal and Orthodox Jews, as there are in the political parties they vote for in Israel but on preservation of Israel they are as one. It must be preserved as the Jewish homeland no matter what the cost.
Hence Israel will eternally be for them a place of majority Jewish ethnicity, including controlling immigration if needed to ensure that
Most Romany do not live in caravans. Most live statically. Most Romany are in eastern Europe, of course, so ignore your stereotypes of Romany culture in the UK.
I am concerned about Israel. You don't know my life, my family, my friends. My grandfather was killed by a Nazi bomb, while my grandmother's family were hosting German Jewish refugees. Of course, it was the Conservative government in the 1930s who made it harder for those refugees to come to the UK.
You underestimate the differences in views of Israel among Jewish people. Go read about Neturei Karta in Stamford Hill who are strongly opposed to the existence of the state of Israel.
More generally, you are repeating yourself and not answering my questions. If you don't want to, fine, but it's a bit pointless us just going around in circles. I don't want to stop Israel being a majority, Jewish nation. (I think Bibi should be in jail, but broadly what Israel does should be up to Israelis, not me, or you.) I don't think it is democratic to deny the possibility that such a change might happen in the future. I think we should move away from a 19th-centure view of nation states built on a single ethnos, but I understand and acknowledge the desire of many ethnic groups for a nation state of their own.
90% of British Jews support the existence of Israel as a Jewish majority state and 59% identify as Zionists
Thank you for admitting that when you said that Jewish people, "on preservation of Israel they are as one", you spoke in error. People here often say you are unwilling to admit to your errors, but here you graciously have.
As you well know 90%+ in support of something is as close to unanimity as you will ever get in an opinion poll
I think the attitude that a group who represent 10% of something don't matter isn't healthy.
The letter is so deranged I think it's probably neutral at worst for Sunak. The petulant childishness of it does rather justify him sacking her. Hard to imagine Cameron writing a letter like that.
It’s brutal. It’s also much better written than the Jenkyns letter (not hard)
And where is this petulant childishness? Its lucid, firm, bracing - and it drills right into Sunak’s perceived flaws: mainly weakness
It will damage him
The petulant childishness is in the very existence of the letter when yesterday there had seemed to be an agreement no letters would be exchanged, its length (this is not a letter, it's a newspaper column on headed notepaper), and the uncouth degree of self-praise particularly on page 1, in particular "it is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest". It's an airing of dirty laundry in a way that broaches no subtlety. Certainly not in the style of Howe's resignation speech, Or Robin Cook's.
It's a sort of right-wing mirror image of a James O'Brien rant.
I agree it is much better written than Andrea Jenkyns' drunken effort.
I also accept I'm probably not the target audience. But will this really ingratiate her to the Tory right?
The main purpose of the letter is to fuck over Sunak and damage the people around him. If she achieves this she will become a minor heroine of the Tory right, yes - there is real anger about all this
They are doomed to hideous infighting. You should be enjoying it! Braverman is putting on a cracking show
I am quite enjoying it. I just can't quite rid myself of the deep seated terror that Cameron, the smiling assassin of the Lib Dems, is going to do them over again like he did in 2015.
Cammo was forced into that by his party, against his own preference. Had he adopted a more far-sighted coalition-friendly electoral strategy, both his own career and the prospects for our country might have turned out significantly better than what we’ve witnessed this last eight years.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Difficulty is that, under FPTP, to split is to lose.
But making promises that his audience wants to hear, irrespective of his intention/ability to keep them?
Maybe Rishi is just Boris with better trouser control
Rishi isn’t remotely as good as Boris. Like it or not Boris had the charisma. He won the blue wall, he won the Brexit referendum, he won the mayoralty twice
A strategy based on telling everyone what they want to hear, whether it is true or not, will only get you so far, and eventually and inevitably he ran out of road. After which he was, and is, a busted flush.
Sunak may randomly stumble on the sensible square. Losing the fog of the Parliamentary odd people on the right is helpful. (Lord knows what they, the odd, think they're doing)
- the team is ALWAYS bigger than the individual - it's always important to go with dignity, even if you don't think it's your fault
A bit late for that. I would imagine that she considers herself loyal to the true conservative team and it is dignified to challenge a usurper PM.
Yes I think that’s right. And she has a point. Sunak is unelected and has no mandate - his only mandate is from the winning manifesto of 2019
She’s arguing that the manifesto is bigger than him
As I said yesterday all Sunak has done is bring forward the Tory civil war so it now happens before the election, in public, and meanwhile his asinine promotion of Cameron is likewise unraveling - and will only get worse as people scrutinise his finances as he squats, unelected, in the Lords
Sunak made a howling error - despite all the praise he got oh here
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Have suddenly realised I am burning the candle at both ends and in the middle. Big client asked about Christmas working. Realised I've had one day off since summer holiday in July. And I worked part of that whilst in Spain.
So have scrapped a planned team planning session on Friday and am not working. As I am so frazzed that whatever I output would have been bollocks anyway.
Shameful and all the Tories on here doubt we're a racist country!
How do you think the French would poll on the issue?
They would NEVER vote Le Pen and even countries who have considered it have never suggested the asylum seeker never having the chance to enter their country.
Suella knows her market
Latest 2027 French presidential first round poll from IFOP
Firstly I'm not even sure Le Pen is to the right of the Tory Party. Certainly not to the right of Braverman. Secondly in every election other than the 30% the rest choose even the most diverse bedfellows to make sure she loses
Posts like this make you look even more partisan and stupid than usual.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Difficulty is that, under FPTP, to split is to lose.
But making promises that his audience wants to hear, irrespective of his intention/ability to keep them?
Maybe Rishi is just Boris with better trouser control
Rishi isn’t remotely as good as Boris. Like it or not Boris had the charisma. He won the blue wall, he won the Brexit referendum, he won the mayoralty twice
Sunak hasn’t actually won anything and he will leave politics having lost his one and only election
nolo contendere
I don't like Boris, or his impact on public life. But in his prime, there was a verve to his dishonesty that was hard to hate. A bit like Michael Crick's comment on Jeffrey Archer, "he's very hard to dislike."
(Hence he's not coming back; the balloon has been punctured and can't be mended.)
Yes, Boris was a conman. But at his best, he elevated that to a con artist. Rishi is paint by numbers, and it doesn't work as well.
Whoever had to clear up the mess Bozza and Liz left would be in trouble. But Rishi isn't doing it well.
The letter is so deranged I think it's probably neutral at worst for Sunak. The petulant childishness of it does rather justify him sacking her. Hard to imagine Cameron writing a letter like that.
It’s brutal. It’s also much better written than the Jenkyns letter (not hard)
And where is this petulant childishness? Its lucid, firm, bracing - and it drills right into Sunak’s perceived flaws: mainly weakness
It will damage him
The petulant childishness is in the very existence of the letter when yesterday there had seemed to be an agreement no letters would be exchanged, its length (this is not a letter, it's a newspaper column on headed notepaper), and the uncouth degree of self-praise particularly on page 1, in particular "it is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest". It's an airing of dirty laundry in a way that broaches no subtlety. Certainly not in the style of Howe's resignation speech, Or Robin Cook's.
It's a sort of right-wing mirror image of a James O'Brien rant.
I agree it is much better written than Andrea Jenkyns' drunken effort.
I also accept I'm probably not the target audience. But will this really ingratiate her to the Tory right?
The main purpose of the letter is to fuck over Sunak and damage the people around him. If she achieves this she will become a minor heroine of the Tory right, yes - there is real anger about all this
They are doomed to hideous infighting. You should be enjoying it! Braverman is putting on a cracking show
I am quite enjoying it. I just can't quite rid myself of the deep seated terror that Cameron, the smiling assassin of the Lib Dems, is going to do them over again like he did in 2015.
My other fear is that if Braverman becomes a talisman of the right then her very clearly expressed position - that Britain should quit the ECHR - will shift the internal Tory Overton window and become full on orthodoxy, just waiting for the next conservative government to arrive and put it into action.
Except there is zero chance a right wing Tory party would get into power....
Yes Thatcher and Boris both led the Tories to heavy defeats on rightwing manifestos as we all remember, could never happen
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
Lots of well intentioned nonsense here in your example. Abortion both now and historically is not an uncontested issue with a single obviously correct view - like say the use of bubonic plague in war, or torturing randomly chosen children for public entertainment.
It is therefore and excellent example of something which should be under democratic and accountable control in a democracy, exactly as it is in the UK. The USA was wrong to allow it through the courts, and would be just as wrong to ban it through the courts.
Full disclosure: I follow Bill Clinton on this one (if little else): abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
A tower block in Bristol has been evacuated over safety fears.
"A major incident has been declared in Bristol after "major structural faults" were discovered in a tower block. Surveys showed Barton House in Redfield would not be safe in the event of a fire or explosion."
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Difficulty is that, under FPTP, to split is to lose.
But making promises that his audience wants to hear, irrespective of his intention/ability to keep them?
Maybe Rishi is just Boris with better trouser control
Rishi isn’t remotely as good as Boris. Like it or not Boris had the charisma. He won the blue wall, he won the Brexit referendum, he won the mayoralty twice
Sunak hasn’t actually won anything and he will leave politics having lost his one and only election
Centrists are such bad losers that they’ll never give those who beat them any credit - it was always that the opponent was discredited, or someone told a fib in the campaign, or it was just a way of stopping a worse opponent winning. It seems to be the modern way; you can’t just disagree, the other side’s arguments & achievements have to be invalid, and their character must be despicable. Set against their own pious, worthiness of course
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
It’s also a hostage to fortune as if the Rwanda plan is rejected tomorrow then all the Sunak outriders will be able to just point at her and say she’s clearly incompetent as her big policy was against the law and if she can’t get that right then what’s she for. They can say that she’s screwed up and set back the attempts at a plan to deter immigrants and that her actions are impotent.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Difficulty is that, under FPTP, to split is to lose.
But making promises that his audience wants to hear, irrespective of his intention/ability to keep them?
Maybe Rishi is just Boris with better trouser control
Rishi isn’t remotely as good as Boris. Like it or not Boris had the charisma. He won the blue wall, he won the Brexit referendum, he won the mayoralty twice
A strategy based on telling everyone what they want to hear, whether it is true or not, will only get you so far, and eventually and inevitably he ran out of road. After which he was, and is, a busted flush.
You’ll be surprised to hear I agree. A busted flush. He actually looks like he’s busted, as well - he’s aged a fair bit, the hair is thinning, I don’t detect the old mojo. He’s not coming back
The letter is so deranged I think it's probably neutral at worst for Sunak. The petulant childishness of it does rather justify him sacking her. Hard to imagine Cameron writing a letter like that.
It’s brutal. It’s also much better written than the Jenkyns letter (not hard)
And where is this petulant childishness? Its lucid, firm, bracing - and it drills right into Sunak’s perceived flaws: mainly weakness
It will damage him
The petulant childishness is in the very existence of the letter when yesterday there had seemed to be an agreement no letters would be exchanged, its length (this is not a letter, it's a newspaper column on headed notepaper), and the uncouth degree of self-praise particularly on page 1, in particular "it is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest". It's an airing of dirty laundry in a way that broaches no subtlety. Certainly not in the style of Howe's resignation speech, Or Robin Cook's.
It's a sort of right-wing mirror image of a James O'Brien rant.
I agree it is much better written than Andrea Jenkyns' drunken effort.
I also accept I'm probably not the target audience. But will this really ingratiate her to the Tory right?
The main purpose of the letter is to fuck over Sunak and damage the people around him. If she achieves this she will become a minor heroine of the Tory right, yes - there is real anger about all this
They are doomed to hideous infighting. You should be enjoying it! Braverman is putting on a cracking show
I am quite enjoying it. I just can't quite rid myself of the deep seated terror that Cameron, the smiling assassin of the Lib Dems, is going to do them over again like he did in 2015.
Cammo was forced into that by his party, against his own preference. Had he adopted a more far-sighted coalition-friendly electoral strategy, both his own career and the prospects for our country might have turned out significantly better than what we’ve witnessed this last eight years.
Post 2015 politics makes the Coalition vs Edstone as a golden age of sane politics, as I have often pointed out.
Once the Tories shed the LD leash they went more tonto than a short tempered XL Bully.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
It’s also a hostage to fortune as if the Rwanda plan is rejected tomorrow then all the Sunak outriders will be able to just point at her and say she’s clearly incompetent as her big policy was against the law and if she can’t get that right then what’s she for. They can say that she’s screwed up and set back the attempts at a plan to deter immigrants and that her actions are impotent.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Difficulty is that, under FPTP, to split is to lose.
But making promises that his audience wants to hear, irrespective of his intention/ability to keep them?
Maybe Rishi is just Boris with better trouser control
Rishi isn’t remotely as good as Boris. Like it or not Boris had the charisma. He won the blue wall, he won the Brexit referendum, he won the mayoralty twice
A strategy based on telling everyone what they want to hear, whether it is true or not, will only get you so far, and eventually and inevitably he ran out of road. After which he was, and is, a busted flush.
You’ll be surprised to hear I agree. A busted flush. He actually looks like he’s busted, as well - he’s aged a fair bit, the hair is thinning, I don’t detect the old mojo. He’s not coming back
i thought those qualities got you a cabinet job without the bother of being an MP!
- the team is ALWAYS bigger than the individual - it's always important to go with dignity, even if you don't think it's your fault
A bit late for that. I would imagine that she considers herself loyal to the true conservative team and it is dignified to challenge a usurper PM.
Yes I think that’s right. And she has a point. Sunak is unelected and has no mandate - his only mandate is from the winning manifesto of 2019
She’s arguing that the manifesto is bigger than him
As I said yesterday all Sunak has done is bring forward the Tory civil war so it now happens before the election, in public, and meanwhile his asinine promotion of Cameron is likewise unraveling - and will only get worse as people scrutinise his finances as he squats, unelected, in the Lords
Sunak made a howling error - despite all the praise he got oh here
it all dates back to the fault line created by Brexit. It's incurable
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Difficulty is that, under FPTP, to split is to lose.
But making promises that his audience wants to hear, irrespective of his intention/ability to keep them?
Maybe Rishi is just Boris with better trouser control
Rishi isn’t remotely as good as Boris. Like it or not Boris had the charisma. He won the blue wall, he won the Brexit referendum, he won the mayoralty twice
A strategy based on telling everyone what they want to hear, whether it is true or not, will only get you so far, and eventually and inevitably he ran out of road. After which he was, and is, a busted flush.
You’ll be surprised to hear I agree. A busted flush. He actually looks like he’s busted, as well - he’s aged a fair bit, the hair is thinning, I don’t detect the old mojo. He’s not coming back
There are no second lives in British politics. Not since Harold Wilson anyway, and that wasn't a successful sequel.
The letter is so deranged I think it's probably neutral at worst for Sunak. The petulant childishness of it does rather justify him sacking her. Hard to imagine Cameron writing a letter like that.
It’s brutal. It’s also much better written than the Jenkyns letter (not hard)
And where is this petulant childishness? Its lucid, firm, bracing - and it drills right into Sunak’s perceived flaws: mainly weakness
It will damage him
Lets look at the letter again: 1. Details firm promises made on policy detail, anchored back to their manifesto 2. Notes that Sunak is unelected by anyone and was actively rejected by the party 3. Refers to repeated letters sent to try and drive engagement and action to deliver said policy details - I assume she has copies as she will need to show them 4. Describes how he is either shit at politics or a liar - or both 5. Sets out her preferred nuclear option which he has ignored
Brutal, savage, designed to fire up the right of the party against him. Got to hand it to her, its brilliant. What does he do? The right won't let him brush it aside and move on. And unless he can show she is lying about her specific points he will have to deflect and evade. And that won't work either.
“It is generally agreed that…” isn’t savage in the slightest.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
- the team is ALWAYS bigger than the individual - it's always important to go with dignity, even if you don't think it's your fault
A bit late for that. I would imagine that she considers herself loyal to the true conservative team and it is dignified to challenge a usurper PM.
Yes I think that’s right. And she has a point. Sunak is unelected and has no mandate - his only mandate is from the winning manifesto of 2019
She’s arguing that the manifesto is bigger than him
As I said yesterday all Sunak has done is bring forward the Tory civil war so it now happens before the election, in public, and meanwhile his asinine promotion of Cameron is likewise unraveling - and will only get worse as people scrutinise his finances as he squats, unelected, in the Lords
Sunak made a howling error - despite all the praise he got oh here
it all dates back to the fault line created by Brexit. It's incurable
Brexit is not a fault line, its history. Its done, we've moved on.
Even Keir Starmer has moved on, its only diehards like you and Scott that haven't.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Difficulty is that, under FPTP, to split is to lose.
But making promises that his audience wants to hear, irrespective of his intention/ability to keep them?
Maybe Rishi is just Boris with better trouser control
Rishi isn’t remotely as good as Boris. Like it or not Boris had the charisma. He won the blue wall, he won the Brexit referendum, he won the mayoralty twice
A strategy based on telling everyone what they want to hear, whether it is true or not, will only get you so far, and eventually and inevitably he ran out of road. After which he was, and is, a busted flush.
He had strengths in the right moments, but it was his own weaknesses which brought him down after all. He should not have been so vulnerable after having such a big win in 2019, and no amount of blaming internal conspiracies changes that.
With Suella I find it a bit hard to believe most of her goals will have been thwarted intentionally, since Rishi is definitely keen on stopping the boats for example. He's also definitely failed, but it doesn't look like he was walking on eggshells with that policy attempt.
But it hardly matters, despite being a right wing Brexiter he was already seen as a remainer traitor by his fellow right wing Brexiters, and he's never getting them back on board now, or their voters.
The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has arrested seven people following a series of dawn raids in connection with a collapsed law firm.
Axiom Ince is at the centre of a criminal investigation launched by the SFO on Tuesday after £66m of client funds went missing from its accounts.
More than 80 of the SFO’s investigators joined forces with the Metropolitan Police to arrest seven individuals on suspicion of fraud offences across nine locations around Bedfordshire.
It comes after former managing partner of Axiom Ince, Pragnesh Modhwadia, admitted that most of the missing funds had already been spent.
Millions were spent purchasing six properties and redeveloping seven others, he told the High Court in September.
The former Axiom Ince boss reportedly owns a collection of houses, luxury London flats, office blocks and shopping malls, according to documents seen by legal website Roll on Friday.
His portfolio built over nearly two decades reportedly included a £1.6m flat in Chelsea and a £4.6m office block in Edgware.
Mr Modhwadia also used the cash to buy two law firms in pre-pack administration deals.
This included £2.2m for Ince Group, once London’s largest listed law firm, which owed creditors £41m when it collapsed in April.
He was suspended by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in August over suspected dishonesty, alongside two other law firm directors, Shyam Mistry and Idnan Liaqat.
'....As you know, I accepted your offer to serve as home secretary in October 2022 on certain conditions.
Despite you having been rejected by a majority of party members during the summer leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be prime minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key policy priorities...It is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest and thus enabling you to become prime minister.
For a year, as home secretary I have sent numerous letters to you on the key subjects contained in our agreement, made requests to discuss them with you and your team, and put forward proposals on how we might deliver these goals.
I worked up the legal advice, policy detail and action to take on these issues. This was often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest.
You have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these key policies. Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises...These are not just pet interests of mine. They are what we promised the British people in our 2019 manifesto which led to a landslide victory. They are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum.
Our deal was no mere promise over dinner, to be discarded when convenient and denied when challenged...In October of last year you were given an opportunity to lead our country. It is a privilege to serve and one we should not take for granted. Service requires bravery and thinking of the common good.
It is not about occupying the office as an end in itself.
Someone needs to be honest: your plan is not working, we have endured record election defeats, your resets have failed and we are running out of time. You need to change course urgently.
I may not have always found the right words, but I have always striven to give voice to the quiet majority that supported us in 2019. I have endeavoured to be honest and true to the people who put us in these privileged positions.
I will, of course, continue to support the government in pursuit of policies which align with an authentic conservative agenda.'
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
It’s also a hostage to fortune as if the Rwanda plan is rejected tomorrow then all the Sunak outriders will be able to just point at her and say she’s clearly incompetent as her big policy was against the law and if she can’t get that right then what’s she for. They can say that she’s screwed up and set back the attempts at a plan to deter immigrants and that her actions are impotent.
But then that just reflects terribly on Sunak for appointing her and agreeing to her plans
Sunak is fucked. And Braverman has just used her strap-on
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
Well you don't think it's a good letter either - I'm sure.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
It's written with all the brilliance I would expect from a Cambridge educated lawyer.
'....As you know, I accepted your offer to serve as home secretary in October 2022 on certain conditions.
Despite you having been rejected by a majority of party members during the summer leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be prime minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key policy priorities...It is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest and thus enabling you to become prime minister.
For a year, as home secretary I have sent numerous letters to you on the key subjects contained in our agreement, made requests to discuss them with you and your team, and put forward proposals on how we might deliver these goals.
I worked up the legal advice, policy detail and action to take on these issues. This was often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest.
You have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these key policies. Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises...These are not just pet interests of mine. They are what we promised the British people in our 2019 manifesto which led to a landslide victory. They are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum.
Our deal was no mere promise over dinner, to be discarded when convenient and denied when challenged...In October of last year you were given an opportunity to lead our country. It is a privilege to serve and one we should not take for granted. Service requires bravery and thinking of the common good.
It is not about occupying the office as an end in itself.
Someone needs to be honest: your plan is not working, we have endured record election defeats, your resets have failed and we are running out of time. You need to change course urgently.
I may not have always found the right words, but I have always striven to give voice to the quiet majority that supported us in 2019. I have endeavoured to be honest and true to the people who put us in these privileged positions.
I will, of course, continue to support the government in pursuit of policies which align with an authentic conservative agenda.'
Now then young Rev'd HY. Will you be supporting: a) the indignantly righteous Mrs Braverman and her band of right wing culture warriors b) the rejected unelected Prime Minister who I expect will very quickly find his authority and his support sweeping away from him c) Whoever wins, and whats more you have *always* supported whoever wins
I wonder if a Labour rebellion and sackings increases the chance of a Corbyn run in London as a way of giving his mob a national platform? He could win if he stood.
He couldn't, but Susan Hall would win. Still that ticks all Corbyn's boxes.
Corbyn should be setting up his own party for the general election. Mandelson is simply running his "they have nowhere else to go" shtick and telling the Left to suck it up.
Well as someone of a Conservative disposition that would tick all your boxes.
- the team is ALWAYS bigger than the individual - it's always important to go with dignity, even if you don't think it's your fault
A bit late for that. I would imagine that she considers herself loyal to the true conservative team and it is dignified to challenge a usurper PM.
Yes I think that’s right. And she has a point. Sunak is unelected and has no mandate - his only mandate is from the winning manifesto of 2019
She’s arguing that the manifesto is bigger than him
As I said yesterday all Sunak has done is bring forward the Tory civil war so it now happens before the election, in public, and meanwhile his asinine promotion of Cameron is likewise unraveling - and will only get worse as people scrutinise his finances as he squats, unelected, in the Lords
Sunak made a howling error - despite all the praise he got oh here
it all dates back to the fault line created by Brexit. It's incurable
Brexit is not a fault line, its history. Its done, we've moved on.
Even Keir Starmer has moved on, its only diehards like you and Scott that haven't.
The next election will not be decided by Brexit..
Agreed. Everyone sees it for the massive error it was and the trendlines show rejoin consensus starting to emerge with us going back in around 10-15 years roughly. The issue has been decided. We screwed up.
No mucking around with opt-outs this time. Euro, Schengen, the full monty when we're back in our rightful place at the heart of Europe, rather than pissing around with half arsed "trade deals" with south sea islands on the other side of the globe.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
It's written with all the brilliance I would expect from a Cambridge educated lawyer.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
It’s also a hostage to fortune as if the Rwanda plan is rejected tomorrow then all the Sunak outriders will be able to just point at her and say she’s clearly incompetent as her big policy was against the law and if she can’t get that right then what’s she for. They can say that she’s screwed up and set back the attempts at a plan to deter immigrants and that her actions are impotent.
But then that just reflects terribly on Sunak for appointing her and agreeing to her plans
Sunak is fucked. And Braverman has just used her strap-on
You're the expert on sex toys, not me. But it's a curious setup which hurts both the fooker and the fookee.
If you seek to destroy your enemy, first dig two graves and all that.
Wouldn’t it have been better for Braverman to wait till after the SC hearing before having her tirade .
There’s a good chance the government will win the appeal .
Stride was on PM saying he didn’t know, but the government “had every reason to think it would be in their favour”. If DavidL is correct that the government gets briefed of the outcome a day or so in advance, then that’s it.
His interview answers, btw, were in the best traditions of Yes Minister mogadon. The perfect response to the Braverman tirade.
If Cruella has 'the deal' in writing, and publishes it, Richi is screwed.
If she doesn't publish it, she is finished.
She doesn’t. Read her letter - she showed him a list of points, which she says he agreed to. That’s it.
Weak tea.
Which is mildly ironic, given our view of Sunak.
She seems to have fallen for the same trick Brown did, not realising that once the other person is in the top job any promises are worthless, and can easily be batted back as being currently impractical due to circumstances.
I used Ito be firmly convinced FPTP was the best system. I have now completely changed my mind. Not a common thing on PB!
Those in favour of electoral reform have convinced me. We need it. Both Labour and the Tories contain factions and philosophies which are utterly incompatible
We need four five or six parties and PR of some sort. Britain has been badly governed for two decades and we need to address this, and this would be a beginning
Great idea if you are content to see HMG being run subject to the whims of the Faragists, Corbynistas, Nationalists, or whoever else ends up holding the balance. The idea that it will be the mushy central calling the shots hasn't worked out too well in Israel.
Comments
Higher != Better
It’s going to shake the Tory party. It’s one of the most cleverly lacerating attacks I’ve seen WITHIN a governing party. She knows what she’s doing
https://x.com/rallen78/status/1724479814713651418?s=61&t=s0ae0IFncdLS1Dc7J0P_TQ
If she doesn't publish it, she is finished.
And how do you balance this idea of a majority Jewish Israel as a protector with what the future people of Israel want to do? Do you oppress non-Jews in Israel to ensure Jews are not oppressed outside Israel?
https://x.com/PippaCrerar/status/1724480860588478791?s=20
So she may not become PM but she can advance her cause against the left
It’s another sign of Sunak’s mistake unravelling within 24 hours of him committing jt. As some of us predicted
I'm told some Labour MPs are going to be sending the Braverman letter to their constituents...
otherwise it's all sound and fury, signifying nothing...
It's a sort of right-wing mirror image of a James O'Brien rant.
I agree it is much better written than Andrea Jenkyns' drunken effort.
I also accept I'm probably not the target audience. But will this really ingratiate her to the Tory right?
Those in favour of electoral reform have convinced me. We need it. Both Labour and the Tories contain factions and philosophies which are utterly incompatible
We need four five or six parties and PR of some sort. Britain has been badly governed for two decades and we need to address this, and this would be a beginning
That's what I was told anyways.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-67401875
Michael Matheson is the Cabinet Secretary for Health so quite a big cheese (insofar as they have any now) in Natland.
Refusing to hand in his ipad to check whether or not fraudulent claims have been made.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230405-le-pen-would-beat-macron-if-french-presidential-vote-repeated-poll
You will soon recant your nonsense on Brexit.
I'd think that having communities distributed within all the wealthy democratic nations would be the most effective.
They are doomed to hideous infighting. You should be enjoying it! Braverman is putting on a cracking show
https://fullfact.org/news/are-majority-british-jews-zionists/
But making promises that his audience wants to hear, irrespective of his intention/ability to keep them?
Maybe Rishi is just Boris with better trouser control
Suella's letter helps because I think there's thinner gruel available on Cameron - more of a slow burner, let the newspapers reopen Greensill Capital rather than Labour forcing the point. On Cameron I think Starmer's best bet is probably to make the point that Sunak didn't think anyone within the current parliamentary party was good enough. But I think he'll use all his questions on Braverman.
Sunak's responses are already clear: he'll talk about "actions not words" as his spokesperson did this afternoon. Starmer's comeback will presumably involve a list of Tory failures on "actions" across various policy areas. and so on.
Sunak hasn’t actually won anything and he will leave politics having lost his one and only election
- the team is ALWAYS bigger than the individual
- it's always important to go with dignity, even if you don't think it's your fault
By forcing the compromises into the public eye, rather than the back room, it might highlight that progress is dependent on people finding a way to work together and that private rancor is a dead end.
Either that or PR will let a minority view into power, and it might never let go.
Interesting times.
Personally I would try to solve the problem at source. The internet is obviously broken.
My other fear is that if Braverman becomes a talisman of the right then her very clearly expressed position - that Britain should quit the ECHR - will shift the internal Tory Overton window and become full on orthodoxy, just waiting for the next conservative government to arrive and put it into action.
Only FPTP keeps them together
How many broken promises and breaches of confidence would it have taken before she did so? Because it is clear that her limit had not been reached when she was dismissed.
https://x.com/SCynic1/status/1724485616518238571?s=20
You are a foolish old man aren’t you?
If no one else claims it it's mine!
She’s arguing that the manifesto is bigger than him
As I said yesterday all Sunak has done is bring forward the Tory civil war so it now happens before the election, in public, and meanwhile his asinine promotion of Cameron is likewise unraveling - and will only get worse as people scrutinise his finances as he squats, unelected, in the Lords
Sunak made a howling error - despite all the praise
he got oh here
So have scrapped a planned team planning session on Friday and am not working. As I am so frazzed that whatever I output would have been bollocks anyway.
I don't like Boris, or his impact on public life. But in his prime, there was a verve to his dishonesty that was hard to hate. A bit like Michael Crick's comment on Jeffrey Archer, "he's very hard to dislike."
(Hence he's not coming back; the balloon has been punctured and can't be mended.)
Yes, Boris was a conman. But at his best, he elevated that to a con artist. Rishi is paint by numbers, and it doesn't work as well.
Whoever had to clear up the mess Bozza and Liz left would be in trouble. But Rishi isn't doing it well.
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
It is therefore and excellent example of something which should be under democratic and accountable control in a democracy, exactly as it is in the UK. The USA was wrong to allow it through the courts, and would be just as wrong to ban it through the courts.
Full disclosure: I follow Bill Clinton on this one (if little else): abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
"A major incident has been declared in Bristol after "major structural faults" were discovered in a tower block.
Surveys showed Barton House in Redfield would not be safe in the event of a fire or explosion."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-england-bristol-67421318
There’s a good chance the government will win the appeal .
Once the Tories shed the LD leash they went more tonto than a short tempered XL Bully.
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
Even Keir Starmer has moved on, its only diehards like you and Scott that haven't.
The next election will not be decided by Brexit..
With Suella I find it a bit hard to believe most of her goals will have been thwarted intentionally, since Rishi is definitely keen on stopping the boats for example. He's also definitely failed, but it doesn't look like he was walking on eggshells with that policy attempt.
But it hardly matters, despite being a right wing Brexiter he was already seen as a remainer traitor by his fellow right wing Brexiters, and he's never getting them back on board now, or their voters.
The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has arrested seven people following a series of dawn raids in connection with a collapsed law firm.
Axiom Ince is at the centre of a criminal investigation launched by the SFO on Tuesday after £66m of client funds went missing from its accounts.
More than 80 of the SFO’s investigators joined forces with the Metropolitan Police to arrest seven individuals on suspicion of fraud offences across nine locations around Bedfordshire.
It comes after former managing partner of Axiom Ince, Pragnesh Modhwadia, admitted that most of the missing funds had already been spent.
Millions were spent purchasing six properties and redeveloping seven others, he told the High Court in September.
The former Axiom Ince boss reportedly owns a collection of houses, luxury London flats, office blocks and shopping malls, according to documents seen by legal website Roll on Friday.
His portfolio built over nearly two decades reportedly included a £1.6m flat in Chelsea and a £4.6m office block in Edgware.
Mr Modhwadia also used the cash to buy two law firms in pre-pack administration deals.
This included £2.2m for Ince Group, once London’s largest listed law firm, which owed creditors £41m when it collapsed in April.
He was suspended by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in August over suspected dishonesty, alongside two other law firm directors, Shyam Mistry and Idnan Liaqat.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/11/14/serious-fraud-office-arrests-seven-axiom-ince-law-firm/
Despite you having been rejected by a majority of party members during the summer leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be prime minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key policy priorities...It is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest and thus enabling you to become prime minister.
For a year, as home secretary I have sent numerous letters to you on the key subjects contained in our agreement, made requests to discuss them with you and your team, and put forward proposals on how we might deliver these goals.
I worked up the legal advice, policy detail and action to take on these issues. This was often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest.
You have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these key policies. Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises...These are not just pet interests of mine. They are what we promised the British people in our 2019 manifesto which led to a landslide victory. They are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum.
Our deal was no mere promise over dinner, to be discarded when convenient and denied when challenged...In October of last year you were given an opportunity to lead our country. It is a privilege to serve and one we should not take for granted. Service requires bravery and thinking of the common good.
It is not about occupying the office as an end in itself.
Someone needs to be honest: your plan is not working, we have endured record election defeats, your resets have failed and we are running out of time. You need to change course urgently.
I may not have always found the right words, but I have always striven to give voice to the quiet majority that supported us in 2019. I have endeavoured to be honest and true to the people who put us in these privileged positions.
I will, of course, continue to support the government in pursuit of policies which align with an authentic conservative agenda.'
An even more brutal resignation statement than Howe's, Lamont's or Robin Cook's
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67416146
Sunak is fucked. And Braverman has just used her strap-on
Read her letter - she showed him a list of points, which she says he agreed to. That’s it.
Weak tea.
Which is mildly ironic, given our view of Sunak.
It is blistering.
a) the indignantly righteous Mrs Braverman and her band of right wing culture warriors
b) the rejected unelected Prime Minister who I expect will very quickly find his authority and his support sweeping away from him
c) Whoever wins, and whats more you have *always* supported whoever wins
https://twitter.com/alantravis40/status/1724491672854106219/photo/1
No mucking around with opt-outs this time. Euro, Schengen, the full monty when we're back in our rightful place at the heart of Europe, rather than pissing around with half arsed "trade deals" with south sea islands on the other side of the globe.
If you seek to destroy your enemy, first dig two graves and all that.
His interview answers, btw, were in the best traditions of Yes Minister mogadon. The perfect response to the Braverman tirade.