Right, Anfield, and after tonight Jürgen Klopp will only have three more Premier League matches left at Anfield and I am nowhere close to being ready for this.
Right, Anfield, and after tonight Jürgen Klopp will only have three more Premier League matches left at Anfield and I am nowhere close to being ready for this.
Gordon Brown made a speech when he introduced the 2010 Labour manifesto.
Everything he said came to pass.
Whatever you think about him, we'd have been better in every conceivable way had he remained in charge.
The Gordon Brown that unleashed the forces of hell on his own Chancellor for speaking the truth?
The Gordon Brown who hired people who smeared a grieving David Cameron?
That Gordon Brown?
Giant of a man though. Think everyone agrees on that.
Nope.
Although perhaps I am being harsh about the man who abolished boom & bust and saved the world.
Your man David gave us Brexit.
The will of the people, Brexit could have been easily avoided if your boys Brown and Blair had actually given us a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty as they promised.
David could have avoided Brexit altogether if he had any balls.
Of course, the greatest PM is Tony Blair. I do wish he would come back.
Yet you get outraged by the deaths in Gaza yet defend the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
The war the Tories supported?
Supported on a lie.
I suggest you read the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities ... were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
Of course, the greatest PM is Tony Blair. I do wish he would come back.
Yet you get outraged by the deaths in Gaza yet defend the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
The war the Tories supported?
Supported on a lie.
I suggest you read the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities ... were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
Of course, the greatest PM is Tony Blair. I do wish he would come back.
Yet you get outraged by the deaths in Gaza yet defend the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
The war the Tories supported?
Supported on a lie.
I suggest you read the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities ... were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
Of course, the greatest PM is Tony Blair. I do wish he would come back.
Yet you get outraged by the deaths in Gaza yet defend the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
The war the Tories supported?
Supported on a lie.
I suggest you read the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities ... were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
Of course, the greatest PM is Tony Blair. I do wish he would come back.
Yet you get outraged by the deaths in Gaza yet defend the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
The war the Tories supported?
Supported on a lie.
I suggest you read the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities ... were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
Of course, the greatest PM is Tony Blair. I do wish he would come back.
Yet you get outraged by the deaths in Gaza yet defend the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
The war the Tories supported?
Supported on a lie.
I suggest you read the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities ... were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
Of course, the greatest PM is Tony Blair. I do wish he would come back.
Yet you get outraged by the deaths in Gaza yet defend the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
To be fair - and to be clear I was very much opposed to the Iraq war at the time and subsequently - the British involvement was quite marginal in both its genesis and execution. It was Bush's folly, that Blair foolishly involved us in.
Of course, the greatest PM is Tony Blair. I do wish he would come back.
Yet you get outraged by the deaths in Gaza yet defend the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
The war the Tories supported?
Supported on a lie.
I suggest you read the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities ... were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
Of course, the greatest PM is Tony Blair. I do wish he would come back.
Yet you get outraged by the deaths in Gaza yet defend the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
The war the Tories supported?
Supported on a lie.
I suggest you read the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities ... were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
Of course, the greatest PM is Tony Blair. I do wish he would come back.
Yet you get outraged by the deaths in Gaza yet defend the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
The war the Tories supported?
Supported on a lie.
I suggest you read the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities ... were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
Of course, the greatest PM is Tony Blair. I do wish he would come back.
Yet you get outraged by the deaths in Gaza yet defend the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
The war the Tories supported?
Supported on a lie.
I suggest you read the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities ... were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
Of course, the greatest PM is Tony Blair. I do wish he would come back.
Yet you get outraged by the deaths in Gaza yet defend the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
The war the Tories supported?
Supported on a lie.
I suggest you read the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities ... were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
Right, Anfield, and after tonight Jürgen Klopp will only have three more Premier League matches left at Anfield and I am nowhere close to being ready for this.
Of course, the greatest PM is Tony Blair. I do wish he would come back.
Yet you get outraged by the deaths in Gaza yet defend the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
The war the Tories supported?
Supported on a lie.
I suggest you read the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities ... were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
Of course, the greatest PM is Tony Blair. I do wish he would come back.
Yet you get outraged by the deaths in Gaza yet defend the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
The war the Tories supported?
Supported on a lie.
I suggest you read the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities ... were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
'The government said: “The charge is designed to recover the costs of operating our world-class border facilities where essential biosecurity checks will protect our food supply, farmers and environment against costly disease outbreaks entering the UK through the short straits."'
Oh yes? Controls that haven't been implemented for years and won't be completed for a year.
Of course, the greatest PM is Tony Blair. I do wish he would come back.
Yet you get outraged by the deaths in Gaza yet defend the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
The war the Tories supported?
Supported on a lie.
I suggest you read the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities ... were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
If must means accepting Barty's half a million dead, then no, we can't.
This is a statement taken out of context. On my original post I caveated that by questioning Bart's collateral value to achieve his aim. I was specific in that I last night asked Bart for numbers. He declined and simply retorted with "whatever it takes".
Here's the context.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4736911/#Comment_4736911 BartholomewRoberts Mexicanpete said: » show previous quotes 1. Bollocks it is! 2. At what cost in lives, give me a number (whatever it takes isn't a number). 3. I said pushing bastards out of windows and the like. Have you never seen Munich? 4. 1. Yes it is. 2. Whatever it takes. The death toll of the Iraq War was over a quarter of a million, and this is an order of magnitude more justified than that war, so lets say double that half a million? If that's what it takes? 3. Real life isn't a James Bond movie. Pushing a few people out of windows won't end Hamas.
Thank you. I had lost interest after "whatever it takes" and ignored the value figure and gone to bed.
Half a million is good to know. So we are at circa 10% down so far.
Life must be cheap on Merseyside.
Top marks for reading to the end.
"Official" death toll (possibly exaggerated) is around 32,000, and of that, between a quarter and a half (depending on whether you believe Israel or Hamas - and potentially the difference is who counts as a terrorist and who doesn't) are Hamas members.
Presumably the half million was meant as civilians, and Hamas members do not count towards it.
So no, we are nowhere near "10% down so far" - more like 4%. And IDF operational efficiency is getting better as the war goes on - for example, there were no civilian deaths recorded during the recent Shifa hospital operation. And all the heavy bombing has been done for a while - you'll notice the death toll has remained fairly static for some time. There is no way the death toll ends up anywhere near half a million.
Considering the level of destruction of buildings and of social and health infrastructure that 32 000 deaths is likely to be a significant underestimate.
Considering the identity of the people providing the number, it's likely to be a significant overestimate. And again, you need to deduct the terrorists, since Hamas is including them in the total.
The only thing I know for certain about the actual number of civilians dead, is you have no clue.
As someone else has already posted, Hamas’ best recruiting sergeant ATM is Netanyahu!
Yes and all very predictable, and the reason for the Hamas attack in the first place.
Israel of course had (and has) the right to defend itself when attacked. But that is different to it being wise or sensible to have acted as they have done. Just because you have a right to do something doesn't make it right to enforce it.
The more interesting question is what would have been wise and sensible? Hamas' clear strategy was to put Israel in Zugzwang such that it only had some pretty terrible options. Either a war Hamas would try and ensure cost as many Palestinian lives as to break any international support or accept a terror state on your border with the express intent of wiping you out, with increasingly sophisticated military capabilities funded by another state that believes the same thing.
We know what's happening is horrific. But the deeper question is what different paths there are, and what trade-offs a) one can accept yourself and b) Israelis could or should accept.
I think it's unhelpful to paint this in such stark either/or terms. Israel could be occupying Gaza militarily, while being more helpful on aid and less indiscriminate in blowing stuff up. Israel could (and should) stop trying to annex the West Bank bit by bit. Israel could kick politicians who favour ethnic cleansing of Gaza out of government. It's perfectly possible for Israel to respond strongly to Hamas without behaving as they are now.
Much of this is true in terms of behaviour - particularly the West Bank and Ben Gvir. But it doesn't change the crude logic of the war - nor would it save vast numbers of lives.
Which is why it's not just the foul Israeli right that support the war but the general population who also want Netanyahu and his cronies (and will kick them out when get a vote) out for mismanaging things in the first place and continuing to.
If you replaced Netanyahu with Yair Lapid tomorrow there would not be an immediate ceasefire. Meanwhile, the West Bank will take *a long* time to sort out. Vital, but not part of the immediate Hamas-inspired crisis.
And it is important to put it in such stark terms because that is how the Israelis view it. As existential. Certainly after 7 October, they taken Hamas' rhetoric about wiping out Jews from the Middle East and that they'd do 7 October again and again quite literally and with justification. And for that matter Iran's and its intention to keep arming them.
Therefore *any* serious effort at peace that goes beyond grandstanding and Western politicians being able to feel good needs to take that into account and offer alternative options to Israel continuing until it has destroyed Hamas, and Hamas trying to ensure as many Palestinians as possible die before they are destroyed.
So you're saying that the Israel/Palestine situation will be difficult to sort out? I think we knew that.
Israeli politics has shifted rightwards over the years, to a more pro-settler, pro-annexation, anti-2 state solution position. There's no reason why it can't shift back over coming years... but, sure, it will take years. Getting rid of (and preferably locking up) Bibi will help!
Western grandstanding is largely pointless, but diplomatic pressure from the West, specifically the US, does matter.
It does. But it would be far more effective if it actually tried to understand Israel's position and trying to give it options from there instead of lectures coming from the safety of several thousand miles away.
Many Israelis believe - with some justification given the noises that come out of Tehran and their proxies these days and the US's dysfunction - that the conflict is existential for them. Faced with a choice between being a pariah among countries who they suspect would rather they didn't exist anyway and being slowly wiped out, would say is no choice at all.
That if Hamas is allowed to remain intact after 7 October and rearm, while Iran can also keep arming Hezbollah in the north, it's a matter of time until an even bloodier day and then another, and another.
So therefore, those who want the killing to stop ASAP need to focus as much on giving other options than those perceived choices instead of saying things that make them feel morally superior but may well have the opposite effect to that intended.
And yes, Israeli politics has shifted right - I wonder why - as people have given up on the peace process, and a global left that has shifted towards outright anti-Zionism.
Gordon Brown made a speech when he introduced the 2010 Labour manifesto.
Everything he said came to pass.
Whatever you think about him, we'd have been better in every conceivable way had he remained in charge.
The Gordon Brown that unleashed the forces of hell on his own Chancellor for speaking the truth?
The Gordon Brown who hired people who smeared a grieving David Cameron?
That Gordon Brown?
Giant of a man though. Think everyone agrees on that.
Not me.
He is a large part for why I voted Conservative in 2010. He was a very poor PM, and only marginally better as Chancellor.
Good grief, look what you did! Your part in ushering in 14 years of stagnation, misrule and incompetence.
To be fair, it wasn't entirely my fault. A few others did too!
I supported the Coalition right through to the 2015 GE. The Tories only lost the plot after they no longer had the Lib Dems bringing sanity to the table. Vince Cable being the only really poor LD frontbencher.
There was brief discussion on PB recently re: I.T. Trebitsch Lincoln MP.
Given his virtually-universal bad press, perhaps worth noting he received the following endorsements of his (early) 1906 candidacy:
"[I wish you] success in the fine fight you are making for Free Trade, Land Reform, and Popular Government." - Winston S. Churchill
source "The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln" by Bernard Wasserstein (1988)
"Dear Mr. Lincoln, You have my heartiest good wishes in your contest at Darlington. A win at Darlington would be a great victory for Free Trade and Liberalism, and I feel confident that the vigour with which you have conducted your campaign and the excellence of our cause will combine to defeat the forces of re-action and Protectionism. Yours sincerely, D. Lloyd George"
source "Revelations of an International Spy" by I.T.T. Lincoln (1916)
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
If must means accepting Barty's half a million dead, then no, we can't.
This is a statement taken out of context. On my original post I caveated that by questioning Bart's collateral value to achieve his aim. I was specific in that I last night asked Bart for numbers. He declined and simply retorted with "whatever it takes".
Here's the context.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4736911/#Comment_4736911 BartholomewRoberts Mexicanpete said: » show previous quotes 1. Bollocks it is! 2. At what cost in lives, give me a number (whatever it takes isn't a number). 3. I said pushing bastards out of windows and the like. Have you never seen Munich? 4. 1. Yes it is. 2. Whatever it takes. The death toll of the Iraq War was over a quarter of a million, and this is an order of magnitude more justified than that war, so lets say double that half a million? If that's what it takes? 3. Real life isn't a James Bond movie. Pushing a few people out of windows won't end Hamas.
Thank you. I had lost interest after "whatever it takes" and ignored the value figure and gone to bed.
Half a million is good to know. So we are at circa 10% down so far.
Life must be cheap on Merseyside.
Top marks for reading to the end.
"Official" death toll (possibly exaggerated) is around 32,000, and of that, between a quarter and a half (depending on whether you believe Israel or Hamas - and potentially the difference is who counts as a terrorist and who doesn't) are Hamas members.
Presumably the half million was meant as civilians, and Hamas members do not count towards it.
So no, we are nowhere near "10% down so far" - more like 4%. And IDF operational efficiency is getting better as the war goes on - for example, there were no civilian deaths recorded during the recent Shifa hospital operation. And all the heavy bombing has been done for a while - you'll notice the death toll has remained fairly static for some time. There is no way the death toll ends up anywhere near half a million.
Considering the level of destruction of buildings and of social and health infrastructure that 32 000 deaths is likely to be a significant underestimate.
Considering the identity of the people providing the number, it's likely to be a significant overestimate. And again, you need to deduct the terrorists, since Hamas is including them in the total.
The only thing I know for certain about the actual number of civilians dead, is you have no clue.
As someone else has already posted, Hamas’ best recruiting sergeant ATM is Netanyahu!
Yes and all very predictable, and the reason for the Hamas attack in the first place.
Israel of course had (and has) the right to defend itself when attacked. But that is different to it being wise or sensible to have acted as they have done. Just because you have a right to do something doesn't make it right to enforce it.
The more interesting question is what would have been wise and sensible? Hamas' clear strategy was to put Israel in Zugzwang such that it only had some pretty terrible options. Either a war Hamas would try and ensure cost as many Palestinian lives as to break any international support or accept a terror state on your border with the express intent of wiping you out, with increasingly sophisticated military capabilities funded by another state that believes the same thing.
We know what's happening is horrific. But the deeper question is what different paths there are, and what trade-offs a) one can accept yourself and b) Israelis could or should accept.
I think it's unhelpful to paint this in such stark either/or terms. Israel could be occupying Gaza militarily, while being more helpful on aid and less indiscriminate in blowing stuff up. Israel could (and should) stop trying to annex the West Bank bit by bit. Israel could kick politicians who favour ethnic cleansing of Gaza out of government. It's perfectly possible for Israel to respond strongly to Hamas without behaving as they are now.
Much of this is true in terms of behaviour - particularly the West Bank and Ben Gvir. But it doesn't change the crude logic of the war - nor would it save vast numbers of lives.
Which is why it's not just the foul Israeli right that support the war but the general population who also want Netanyahu and his cronies (and will kick them out when get a vote) out for mismanaging things in the first place and continuing to.
If you replaced Netanyahu with Yair Lapid tomorrow there would not be an immediate ceasefire. Meanwhile, the West Bank will take *a long* time to sort out. Vital, but not part of the immediate Hamas-inspired crisis.
And it is important to put it in such stark terms because that is how the Israelis view it. As existential. Certainly after 7 October, they taken Hamas' rhetoric about wiping out Jews from the Middle East and that they'd do 7 October again and again quite literally and with justification. And for that matter Iran's and its intention to keep arming them.
Therefore *any* serious effort at peace that goes beyond grandstanding and Western politicians being able to feel good needs to take that into account and offer alternative options to Israel continuing until it has destroyed Hamas, and Hamas trying to ensure as many Palestinians as possible die before they are destroyed.
So you're saying that the Israel/Palestine situation will be difficult to sort out? I think we knew that.
Israeli politics has shifted rightwards over the years, to a more pro-settler, pro-annexation, anti-2 state solution position. There's no reason why it can't shift back over coming years... but, sure, it will take years. Getting rid of (and preferably locking up) Bibi will help!
Western grandstanding is largely pointless, but diplomatic pressure from the West, specifically the US, does matter.
It does. But it would be far more effective if it actually tried to understand Israel's position and trying to give it options from there instead of lectures coming from the safety of several thousand miles away.
Many Israelis believe - with some justification given the noises that come out of Tehran and their proxies these days and the US's dysfunction - that the conflict is existential for them. Faced with a choice between being a pariah among countries who they suspect would rather they didn't exist anyway and being slowly wiped out, would say is no choice at all.
That if Hamas is allowed to remain intact after 7 October and rearm, while Iran can also keep arming Hezbollah in the north, it's a matter of time until an even bloodier day and then another, and another.
So therefore, those who want the killing to stop ASAP need to focus as much on giving other options than those perceived choices instead of saying things that make them feel morally superior but may well have the opposite effect to that intended.
And yes, Israeli politics has shifted right - I wonder why - as people have given up on the peace process, and a global left that has shifted towards outright anti-Zionism.
Netanyahu has been a cancer on Israel . His policies have provoked more trouble and then he pretends he’s the only one that can protect the public .
I'm going to be as tedious and dull as ever and say I don't have very strong views about any politician. How you perceive them now is distorted by hindsight and the nuances of what they had to do when they were in office and the zeitgeist in which they operated.
David Cameron, for example, was desperate to get the Conservatives back into office and realised the only way to do it was to make his brand of one nation conservatism acceptable to the post-Blair centrist landscape. The economic crisis forced him into an economic path which I suspect he didn't want to follow (I think he wanted to maintain spending while gently cutting taxes).
He then misread the 2015 election which I suspect he never thought he would win with a majority but conversely thought had been won by his personal charisma which would carry them through any referendum on EU membership. He also misread the EU who weren't interested in having different membership rules for one state.
He then realised he couldn't force a divided Conservative Party to support him and also must have known Corbyn wouldn't be any help and having emasculated Clegg and the LDs to win his majority he had created a trap of his own making into which he fell and once the referendum was lost, so was he.
A man who started with sound intentions but who allowed politics to subvert those intentions and in the end the contradictions he created destroyed him.
Gordon Brown made a speech when he introduced the 2010 Labour manifesto.
Everything he said came to pass.
Whatever you think about him, we'd have been better in every conceivable way had he remained in charge.
The Gordon Brown that unleashed the forces of hell on his own Chancellor for speaking the truth?
The Gordon Brown who hired people who smeared a grieving David Cameron?
That Gordon Brown?
Giant of a man though. Think everyone agrees on that.
Not me.
He is a large part for why I voted Conservative in 2010. He was a very poor PM, and only marginally better as Chancellor.
Good grief, look what you did! Your part in ushering in 14 years of stagnation, misrule and incompetence.
To be fair, it wasn't entirely my fault. A few others did too!
I supported the Coalition right through to the 2015 GE. The Tories only lost the plot after they no longer had the Lib Dems bringing sanity to the table. Vince Cable being the only really poor LD frontbencher.
That LibDem "sanity" included the insanity of refusing any discussion on an EU referendum. That allowed Farage to fill the vacuum and ultimately delivered Brexit. You must be so proud of that.
Gordon Brown made a speech when he introduced the 2010 Labour manifesto.
Everything he said came to pass.
Whatever you think about him, we'd have been better in every conceivable way had he remained in charge.
The Gordon Brown that unleashed the forces of hell on his own Chancellor for speaking the truth?
The Gordon Brown who hired people who smeared a grieving David Cameron?
That Gordon Brown?
Giant of a man though. Think everyone agrees on that.
Not me.
He is a large part for why I voted Conservative in 2010. He was a very poor PM, and only marginally better as Chancellor.
Good grief, look what you did! Your part in ushering in 14 years of stagnation, misrule and incompetence.
To be fair, it wasn't entirely my fault. A few others did too!
I supported the Coalition right through to the 2015 GE. The Tories only lost the plot after they no longer had the Lib Dems bringing sanity to the table. Vince Cable being the only really poor LD frontbencher.
That LibDem "sanity" included the insanity of refusing any discussion on an EU referendum. That allowed Farage to fill the vacuum and ultimately delivered Brexit. You must be so proud of that.
Yes and the LDs were destroyed by the Conservatives and UKIP in 2015 and the Conservatives will be destroyed by Labour, the LDs and Reform later this year so what goes around comes around....
Gordon Brown made a speech when he introduced the 2010 Labour manifesto.
Everything he said came to pass.
Whatever you think about him, we'd have been better in every conceivable way had he remained in charge.
The Gordon Brown that unleashed the forces of hell on his own Chancellor for speaking the truth?
The Gordon Brown who hired people who smeared a grieving David Cameron?
That Gordon Brown?
Giant of a man though. Think everyone agrees on that.
Not me.
He is a large part for why I voted Conservative in 2010. He was a very poor PM, and only marginally better as Chancellor.
Good grief, look what you did! Your part in ushering in 14 years of stagnation, misrule and incompetence.
To be fair, it wasn't entirely my fault. A few others did too!
I supported the Coalition right through to the 2015 GE. The Tories only lost the plot after they no longer had the Lib Dems bringing sanity to the table. Vince Cable being the only really poor LD frontbencher.
That LibDem "sanity" included the insanity of refusing any discussion on an EU referendum. That allowed Farage to fill the vacuum and ultimately delivered Brexit. You must be so proud of that.
The clever strategy from the PM would have been to hold the referendum at a time and in a way that it could have been won, solidifying our membership for the foreseeable. Cameron thought he was doing so but did precisely the opposite, with his renegotiation followed by a campaign which he tried to lead personally. He should have looked back at how Wilson did it.
Gordon Brown made a speech when he introduced the 2010 Labour manifesto.
Everything he said came to pass.
Whatever you think about him, we'd have been better in every conceivable way had he remained in charge.
The Gordon Brown that unleashed the forces of hell on his own Chancellor for speaking the truth?
The Gordon Brown who hired people who smeared a grieving David Cameron?
That Gordon Brown?
Giant of a man though. Think everyone agrees on that.
Not me.
He is a large part for why I voted Conservative in 2010. He was a very poor PM, and only marginally better as Chancellor.
Good grief, look what you did! Your part in ushering in 14 years of stagnation, misrule and incompetence.
To be fair, it wasn't entirely my fault. A few others did too!
I supported the Coalition right through to the 2015 GE. The Tories only lost the plot after they no longer had the Lib Dems bringing sanity to the table. Vince Cable being the only really poor LD frontbencher.
That LibDem "sanity" included the insanity of refusing any discussion on an EU referendum. That allowed Farage to fill the vacuum and ultimately delivered Brexit. You must be so proud of that.
I wonder what the LibDems could have secured with the political capital they wasted on a referendum on changing the voting system which was doomed to fail?
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
If must means accepting Barty's half a million dead, then no, we can't.
This is a statement taken out of context. On my original post I caveated that by questioning Bart's collateral value to achieve his aim. I was specific in that I last night asked Bart for numbers. He declined and simply retorted with "whatever it takes".
Here's the context.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4736911/#Comment_4736911 BartholomewRoberts Mexicanpete said: » show previous quotes 1. Bollocks it is! 2. At what cost in lives, give me a number (whatever it takes isn't a number). 3. I said pushing bastards out of windows and the like. Have you never seen Munich? 4. 1. Yes it is. 2. Whatever it takes. The death toll of the Iraq War was over a quarter of a million, and this is an order of magnitude more justified than that war, so lets say double that half a million? If that's what it takes? 3. Real life isn't a James Bond movie. Pushing a few people out of windows won't end Hamas.
Thank you. I had lost interest after "whatever it takes" and ignored the value figure and gone to bed.
Half a million is good to know. So we are at circa 10% down so far.
Life must be cheap on Merseyside.
Top marks for reading to the end.
"Official" death toll (possibly exaggerated) is around 32,000, and of that, between a quarter and a half (depending on whether you believe Israel or Hamas - and potentially the difference is who counts as a terrorist and who doesn't) are Hamas members.
Presumably the half million was meant as civilians, and Hamas members do not count towards it.
So no, we are nowhere near "10% down so far" - more like 4%. And IDF operational efficiency is getting better as the war goes on - for example, there were no civilian deaths recorded during the recent Shifa hospital operation. And all the heavy bombing has been done for a while - you'll notice the death toll has remained fairly static for some time. There is no way the death toll ends up anywhere near half a million.
Considering the level of destruction of buildings and of social and health infrastructure that 32 000 deaths is likely to be a significant underestimate.
Considering the identity of the people providing the number, it's likely to be a significant overestimate. And again, you need to deduct the terrorists, since Hamas is including them in the total.
The only thing I know for certain about the actual number of civilians dead, is you have no clue.
As someone else has already posted, Hamas’ best recruiting sergeant ATM is Netanyahu!
Yes and all very predictable, and the reason for the Hamas attack in the first place.
Israel of course had (and has) the right to defend itself when attacked. But that is different to it being wise or sensible to have acted as they have done. Just because you have a right to do something doesn't make it right to enforce it.
The more interesting question is what would have been wise and sensible? Hamas' clear strategy was to put Israel in Zugzwang such that it only had some pretty terrible options. Either a war Hamas would try and ensure cost as many Palestinian lives as to break any international support or accept a terror state on your border with the express intent of wiping you out, with increasingly sophisticated military capabilities funded by another state that believes the same thing.
We know what's happening is horrific. But the deeper question is what different paths there are, and what trade-offs a) one can accept yourself and b) Israelis could or should accept.
I think it's unhelpful to paint this in such stark either/or terms. Israel could be occupying Gaza militarily, while being more helpful on aid and less indiscriminate in blowing stuff up. Israel could (and should) stop trying to annex the West Bank bit by bit. Israel could kick politicians who favour ethnic cleansing of Gaza out of government. It's perfectly possible for Israel to respond strongly to Hamas without behaving as they are now.
Much of this is true in terms of behaviour - particularly the West Bank and Ben Gvir. But it doesn't change the crude logic of the war - nor would it save vast numbers of lives.
Which is why it's not just the foul Israeli right that support the war but the general population who also want Netanyahu and his cronies (and will kick them out when get a vote) out for mismanaging things in the first place and continuing to.
If you replaced Netanyahu with Yair Lapid tomorrow there would not be an immediate ceasefire. Meanwhile, the West Bank will take *a long* time to sort out. Vital, but not part of the immediate Hamas-inspired crisis.
And it is important to put it in such stark terms because that is how the Israelis view it. As existential. Certainly after 7 October, they taken Hamas' rhetoric about wiping out Jews from the Middle East and that they'd do 7 October again and again quite literally and with justification. And for that matter Iran's and its intention to keep arming them.
Therefore *any* serious effort at peace that goes beyond grandstanding and Western politicians being able to feel good needs to take that into account and offer alternative options to Israel continuing until it has destroyed Hamas, and Hamas trying to ensure as many Palestinians as possible die before they are destroyed.
So you're saying that the Israel/Palestine situation will be difficult to sort out? I think we knew that.
Israeli politics has shifted rightwards over the years, to a more pro-settler, pro-annexation, anti-2 state solution position. There's no reason why it can't shift back over coming years... but, sure, it will take years. Getting rid of (and preferably locking up) Bibi will help!
Western grandstanding is largely pointless, but diplomatic pressure from the West, specifically the US, does matter.
It does. But it would be far more effective if it actually tried to understand Israel's position and trying to give it options from there instead of lectures coming from the safety of several thousand miles away.
Many Israelis believe - with some justification given the noises that come out of Tehran and their proxies these days and the US's dysfunction - that the conflict is existential for them. Faced with a choice between being a pariah among countries who they suspect would rather they didn't exist anyway and being slowly wiped out, would say is no choice at all.
That if Hamas is allowed to remain intact after 7 October and rearm, while Iran can also keep arming Hezbollah in the north, it's a matter of time until an even bloodier day and then another, and another.
So therefore, those who want the killing to stop ASAP need to focus as much on giving other options than those perceived choices instead of saying things that make them feel morally superior but may well have the opposite effect to that intended.
And yes, Israeli politics has shifted right - I wonder why - as people have given up on the peace process, and a global left that has shifted towards outright anti-Zionism.
Netanyahu has been a cancer on Israel . His policies have provoked more trouble and then he pretends he’s the only one that can protect the public .
Yup. As Anshel Pfeffer wrote, he has perhaps been the country's worst Prime Minister - one who may have put it at existential risk.
But he doesn't come from nowhere. Without a second intifada, Hamas' election in Gaza, and so on, the central argument of his later career - that Israel will never be left in peace so it's pointless and dangerous make concessions rather than create "facts on the ground" and contain those who are dangerous - is a dead duck.
Gordon Brown made a speech when he introduced the 2010 Labour manifesto.
Everything he said came to pass.
Whatever you think about him, we'd have been better in every conceivable way had he remained in charge.
The Gordon Brown that unleashed the forces of hell on his own Chancellor for speaking the truth?
The Gordon Brown who hired people who smeared a grieving David Cameron?
That Gordon Brown?
Giant of a man though. Think everyone agrees on that.
Not me.
He is a large part for why I voted Conservative in 2010. He was a very poor PM, and only marginally better as Chancellor.
Good grief, look what you did! Your part in ushering in 14 years of stagnation, misrule and incompetence.
To be fair, it wasn't entirely my fault. A few others did too!
I supported the Coalition right through to the 2015 GE. The Tories only lost the plot after they no longer had the Lib Dems bringing sanity to the table. Vince Cable being the only really poor LD frontbencher.
That LibDem "sanity" included the insanity of refusing any discussion on an EU referendum. That allowed Farage to fill the vacuum and ultimately delivered Brexit. You must be so proud of that.
The clever strategy from the PM would have been to hold the referendum at a time and in a way that it could have been won, solidifying our membership for the foreseeable. Cameron thought he was doing so but did precisely the opposite, with his renegotiation followed by a campaign which he tried to lead personally. He should have looked back at how Wilson did it.
Cameron was full of hubris after the Scottish referendum . The campaign became a media obsession with Bozo v Cameron and the idiot also decided to hold it during Euro 2016 .
Michael Gove has admitted that he showed “moral cowardice” by failing to be upfront with David Cameron about his plans to play a leading role in the Brexit referendum campaign.
In an interview for his Political Currency podcast George Osborne, the former chancellor, said Gove had told Cameron in the Downing Street plan that he would “not play a prominent role in the campaign”. “Did you deceive David?” Osborne asked. “He certainly felt betrayed.”
Gove, who is now the levelling up secretary, said that while he did not believe he had deceived Cameron he ended up “going further than you’d imagine or anticipated at the beginning of the campaign”, adding: “I didn’t want to take part in the debates, the TV shows that I ultimately took part in or play a prominent role.”
However, he said that during the campaign he was urged by Dominic Cummings, who oversaw the Vote Leave campaign, and others to take a more prominent role with the argument: “If you don’t do this, they’ll have Farage on.” He said he was told that he would let people down if he failed to do so. “I didn’t believe I deceived, but as I mentioned, I do think that I could have been clearer earlier.
“And I think that was an example of on the one hand, cowardice on my part, moral cowardice … on the other hand, a recognition that perhaps there’s this feeling in politics, perhaps something will turn up, perhaps this moment won’t come when we have to make that decision,” he said. “But I think David entirely fairly, should have expected me to have been more upfront earlier.”
Gordon Brown made a speech when he introduced the 2010 Labour manifesto.
Everything he said came to pass.
Whatever you think about him, we'd have been better in every conceivable way had he remained in charge.
The Gordon Brown that unleashed the forces of hell on his own Chancellor for speaking the truth?
The Gordon Brown who hired people who smeared a grieving David Cameron?
That Gordon Brown?
Giant of a man though. Think everyone agrees on that.
Not me.
He is a large part for why I voted Conservative in 2010. He was a very poor PM, and only marginally better as Chancellor.
Good grief, look what you did! Your part in ushering in 14 years of stagnation, misrule and incompetence.
To be fair, it wasn't entirely my fault. A few others did too!
I supported the Coalition right through to the 2015 GE. The Tories only lost the plot after they no longer had the Lib Dems bringing sanity to the table. Vince Cable being the only really poor LD frontbencher.
That LibDem "sanity" included the insanity of refusing any discussion on an EU referendum. That allowed Farage to fill the vacuum and ultimately delivered Brexit. You must be so proud of that.
I wonder what the LibDems could have secured with the political capital they wasted on a referendum on changing the voting system which was doomed to fail?
Multimember STV for local elections would undoubtedly be a good thing for council governance. It's a shame they didn't go down that route.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
If must means accepting Barty's half a million dead, then no, we can't.
This is a statement taken out of context. On my original post I caveated that by questioning Bart's collateral value to achieve his aim. I was specific in that I last night asked Bart for numbers. He declined and simply retorted with "whatever it takes".
Here's the context.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4736911/#Comment_4736911 BartholomewRoberts Mexicanpete said: » show previous quotes 1. Bollocks it is! 2. At what cost in lives, give me a number (whatever it takes isn't a number). 3. I said pushing bastards out of windows and the like. Have you never seen Munich? 4. 1. Yes it is. 2. Whatever it takes. The death toll of the Iraq War was over a quarter of a million, and this is an order of magnitude more justified than that war, so lets say double that half a million? If that's what it takes? 3. Real life isn't a James Bond movie. Pushing a few people out of windows won't end Hamas.
Thank you. I had lost interest after "whatever it takes" and ignored the value figure and gone to bed.
Half a million is good to know. So we are at circa 10% down so far.
Life must be cheap on Merseyside.
Top marks for reading to the end.
"Official" death toll (possibly exaggerated) is around 32,000, and of that, between a quarter and a half (depending on whether you believe Israel or Hamas - and potentially the difference is who counts as a terrorist and who doesn't) are Hamas members.
Presumably the half million was meant as civilians, and Hamas members do not count towards it.
So no, we are nowhere near "10% down so far" - more like 4%. And IDF operational efficiency is getting better as the war goes on - for example, there were no civilian deaths recorded during the recent Shifa hospital operation. And all the heavy bombing has been done for a while - you'll notice the death toll has remained fairly static for some time. There is no way the death toll ends up anywhere near half a million.
Considering the level of destruction of buildings and of social and health infrastructure that 32 000 deaths is likely to be a significant underestimate.
Considering the identity of the people providing the number, it's likely to be a significant overestimate. And again, you need to deduct the terrorists, since Hamas is including them in the total.
The only thing I know for certain about the actual number of civilians dead, is you have no clue.
As someone else has already posted, Hamas’ best recruiting sergeant ATM is Netanyahu!
Yes and all very predictable, and the reason for the Hamas attack in the first place.
Israel of course had (and has) the right to defend itself when attacked. But that is different to it being wise or sensible to have acted as they have done. Just because you have a right to do something doesn't make it right to enforce it.
The more interesting question is what would have been wise and sensible? Hamas' clear strategy was to put Israel in Zugzwang such that it only had some pretty terrible options. Either a war Hamas would try and ensure cost as many Palestinian lives as to break any international support or accept a terror state on your border with the express intent of wiping you out, with increasingly sophisticated military capabilities funded by another state that believes the same thing.
We know what's happening is horrific. But the deeper question is what different paths there are, and what trade-offs a) one can accept yourself and b) Israelis could or should accept.
I think it's unhelpful to paint this in such stark either/or terms. Israel could be occupying Gaza militarily, while being more helpful on aid and less indiscriminate in blowing stuff up. Israel could (and should) stop trying to annex the West Bank bit by bit. Israel could kick politicians who favour ethnic cleansing of Gaza out of government. It's perfectly possible for Israel to respond strongly to Hamas without behaving as they are now.
Much of this is true in terms of behaviour - particularly the West Bank and Ben Gvir. But it doesn't change the crude logic of the war - nor would it save vast numbers of lives.
Which is why it's not just the foul Israeli right that support the war but the general population who also want Netanyahu and his cronies (and will kick them out when get a vote) out for mismanaging things in the first place and continuing to.
If you replaced Netanyahu with Yair Lapid tomorrow there would not be an immediate ceasefire. Meanwhile, the West Bank will take *a long* time to sort out. Vital, but not part of the immediate Hamas-inspired crisis.
And it is important to put it in such stark terms because that is how the Israelis view it. As existential. Certainly after 7 October, they taken Hamas' rhetoric about wiping out Jews from the Middle East and that they'd do 7 October again and again quite literally and with justification. And for that matter Iran's and its intention to keep arming them.
Therefore *any* serious effort at peace that goes beyond grandstanding and Western politicians being able to feel good needs to take that into account and offer alternative options to Israel continuing until it has destroyed Hamas, and Hamas trying to ensure as many Palestinians as possible die before they are destroyed.
So you're saying that the Israel/Palestine situation will be difficult to sort out? I think we knew that.
Israeli politics has shifted rightwards over the years, to a more pro-settler, pro-annexation, anti-2 state solution position. There's no reason why it can't shift back over coming years... but, sure, it will take years. Getting rid of (and preferably locking up) Bibi will help!
Western grandstanding is largely pointless, but diplomatic pressure from the West, specifically the US, does matter.
It does. But it would be far more effective if it actually tried to understand Israel's position and trying to give it options from there instead of lectures coming from the safety of several thousand miles away.
Many Israelis believe - with some justification given the noises that come out of Tehran and their proxies these days and the US's dysfunction - that the conflict is existential for them. Faced with a choice between being a pariah among countries who they suspect would rather they didn't exist anyway and being slowly wiped out, would say is no choice at all.
That if Hamas is allowed to remain intact after 7 October and rearm, while Iran can also keep arming Hezbollah in the north, it's a matter of time until an even bloodier day and then another, and another.
So therefore, those who want the killing to stop ASAP need to focus as much on giving other options than those perceived choices instead of saying things that make them feel morally superior but may well have the opposite effect to that intended.
And yes, Israeli politics has shifted right - I wonder why - as people have given up on the peace process, and a global left that has shifted towards outright anti-Zionism.
Netanyahu has been a cancer on Israel . His policies have provoked more trouble and then he pretends he’s the only one that can protect the public .
Yup. As Anshel Pfeffer wrote, he has perhaps been the country's worst Prime Minister - one who may have put it at existential risk.
But he doesn't come from nowhere. Without a second intifada, Hamas' election in Gaza, and so on, the central argument of his later career - that Israel will never be left in peace so it's pointless and dangerous make concessions rather than create "facts on the ground" and contain those who are dangerous - is a dead duck.
Of course things don’t exist in a vacuum . There’s plenty of blame to go around .
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
If must means accepting Barty's half a million dead, then no, we can't.
This is a statement taken out of context. On my original post I caveated that by questioning Bart's collateral value to achieve his aim. I was specific in that I last night asked Bart for numbers. He declined and simply retorted with "whatever it takes".
Here's the context.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4736911/#Comment_4736911 BartholomewRoberts Mexicanpete said: » show previous quotes 1. Bollocks it is! 2. At what cost in lives, give me a number (whatever it takes isn't a number). 3. I said pushing bastards out of windows and the like. Have you never seen Munich? 4. 1. Yes it is. 2. Whatever it takes. The death toll of the Iraq War was over a quarter of a million, and this is an order of magnitude more justified than that war, so lets say double that half a million? If that's what it takes? 3. Real life isn't a James Bond movie. Pushing a few people out of windows won't end Hamas.
Thank you. I had lost interest after "whatever it takes" and ignored the value figure and gone to bed.
Half a million is good to know. So we are at circa 10% down so far.
Life must be cheap on Merseyside.
Top marks for reading to the end.
"Official" death toll (possibly exaggerated) is around 32,000, and of that, between a quarter and a half (depending on whether you believe Israel or Hamas - and potentially the difference is who counts as a terrorist and who doesn't) are Hamas members.
Presumably the half million was meant as civilians, and Hamas members do not count towards it.
So no, we are nowhere near "10% down so far" - more like 4%. And IDF operational efficiency is getting better as the war goes on - for example, there were no civilian deaths recorded during the recent Shifa hospital operation. And all the heavy bombing has been done for a while - you'll notice the death toll has remained fairly static for some time. There is no way the death toll ends up anywhere near half a million.
Considering the level of destruction of buildings and of social and health infrastructure that 32 000 deaths is likely to be a significant underestimate.
Considering the identity of the people providing the number, it's likely to be a significant overestimate. And again, you need to deduct the terrorists, since Hamas is including them in the total.
The only thing I know for certain about the actual number of civilians dead, is you have no clue.
As someone else has already posted, Hamas’ best recruiting sergeant ATM is Netanyahu!
Yes and all very predictable, and the reason for the Hamas attack in the first place.
Israel of course had (and has) the right to defend itself when attacked. But that is different to it being wise or sensible to have acted as they have done. Just because you have a right to do something doesn't make it right to enforce it.
The more interesting question is what would have been wise and sensible? Hamas' clear strategy was to put Israel in Zugzwang such that it only had some pretty terrible options. Either a war Hamas would try and ensure cost as many Palestinian lives as to break any international support or accept a terror state on your border with the express intent of wiping you out, with increasingly sophisticated military capabilities funded by another state that believes the same thing.
We know what's happening is horrific. But the deeper question is what different paths there are, and what trade-offs a) one can accept yourself and b) Israelis could or should accept.
I think it's unhelpful to paint this in such stark either/or terms. Israel could be occupying Gaza militarily, while being more helpful on aid and less indiscriminate in blowing stuff up. Israel could (and should) stop trying to annex the West Bank bit by bit. Israel could kick politicians who favour ethnic cleansing of Gaza out of government. It's perfectly possible for Israel to respond strongly to Hamas without behaving as they are now.
Much of this is true in terms of behaviour - particularly the West Bank and Ben Gvir. But it doesn't change the crude logic of the war - nor would it save vast numbers of lives.
Which is why it's not just the foul Israeli right that support the war but the general population who also want Netanyahu and his cronies (and will kick them out when get a vote) out for mismanaging things in the first place and continuing to.
If you replaced Netanyahu with Yair Lapid tomorrow there would not be an immediate ceasefire. Meanwhile, the West Bank will take *a long* time to sort out. Vital, but not part of the immediate Hamas-inspired crisis.
And it is important to put it in such stark terms because that is how the Israelis view it. As existential. Certainly after 7 October, they taken Hamas' rhetoric about wiping out Jews from the Middle East and that they'd do 7 October again and again quite literally and with justification. And for that matter Iran's and its intention to keep arming them.
Therefore *any* serious effort at peace that goes beyond grandstanding and Western politicians being able to feel good needs to take that into account and offer alternative options to Israel continuing until it has destroyed Hamas, and Hamas trying to ensure as many Palestinians as possible die before they are destroyed.
So you're saying that the Israel/Palestine situation will be difficult to sort out? I think we knew that.
Israeli politics has shifted rightwards over the years, to a more pro-settler, pro-annexation, anti-2 state solution position. There's no reason why it can't shift back over coming years... but, sure, it will take years. Getting rid of (and preferably locking up) Bibi will help!
Western grandstanding is largely pointless, but diplomatic pressure from the West, specifically the US, does matter.
I think the demographics of Israel point to an ever more radical position. Haredi have big families (hence why Liberal Israelis resent them being exempt from military service). Similarly the schools are controlled by the orthodox, so the children of secular Israelis get indoctrinated from a young age. This article from the New Yorker gives a picture of what is going on.
So we have a self-radicalising state, and every sign of that accelerating. While secular liberal Israel still exists, it is being phased out. Its a mirror image of the self radicalisation of the Palestinians and other neighbours. The secular, nationalist PLO supplanted by Hamas for example.
It doesn't bode well for future peace from either side.
There has never been peace in the middle east, there never will be peace in the middle east. Doesn't matter what the us, uk, eu or even pendle council say or do....its not happening so just leave them to it
Michael Gove has admitted that he showed “moral cowardice” by failing to be upfront with David Cameron about his plans to play a leading role in the Brexit referendum campaign.
In an interview for his Political Currency podcast George Osborne, the former chancellor, said Gove had told Cameron in the Downing Street plan that he would “not play a prominent role in the campaign”. “Did you deceive David?” Osborne asked. “He certainly felt betrayed.”
Gove, who is now the levelling up secretary, said that while he did not believe he had deceived Cameron he ended up “going further than you’d imagine or anticipated at the beginning of the campaign”, adding: “I didn’t want to take part in the debates, the TV shows that I ultimately took part in or play a prominent role.”
However, he said that during the campaign he was urged by Dominic Cummings, who oversaw the Vote Leave campaign, and others to take a more prominent role with the argument: “If you don’t do this, they’ll have Farage on.” He said he was told that he would let people down if he failed to do so. “I didn’t believe I deceived, but as I mentioned, I do think that I could have been clearer earlier.
“And I think that was an example of on the one hand, cowardice on my part, moral cowardice … on the other hand, a recognition that perhaps there’s this feeling in politics, perhaps something will turn up, perhaps this moment won’t come when we have to make that decision,” he said. “But I think David entirely fairly, should have expected me to have been more upfront earlier.”
Someone has started realising what the first line in their obituary is going to be.
He does seem to be the first leading Brexiteer to admit that the Brexit referendum was a mistake.
There is a lot to be said for this but how do you address an issue like Scottish Independence?? Is he really saying that a majority government in Holyrood had the right to take Scotland out of the Union when the majority had rejected such a policy? Surely not.
What I would agree is that referendums should be extremely rare beasts but I think there isn't a politician alive who hasn't realised this (except possibly the Taoisigh of Ireland who has since paid the price).
On topic - a lot of social media is an echo-chamber. People minded to vote Labour are mainly going to pro-Labour or perceived neutral sources. Places like Twitter are about point-scoring over the 'enemy' rather than winning them over.
However, the Cons will spend big money on advertising online and will use sophisticated (and very expensive) targeting. But to what end? Positive ads cannot work because the Cons have nothing to sell in terms of a record or a vision. So they have to be negative against Starmer and Lab. Which might work but they have been doing it for at least two years. Even when it sticks people still prefer the alternative to Mr Sunak and his ramshackle bunch. Worse, those folk who do like Mr Sunak know that he would be gone after a couple of bad polls. Then who? Suella, Badenoch, Shapps or maybe Truss redux.
The public have seen this farce for the last four years and precious few are yelling 'encore!'
Gordon Brown made a speech when he introduced the 2010 Labour manifesto.
Everything he said came to pass.
Whatever you think about him, we'd have been better in every conceivable way had he remained in charge.
The Gordon Brown that unleashed the forces of hell on his own Chancellor for speaking the truth?
The Gordon Brown who hired people who smeared a grieving David Cameron?
That Gordon Brown?
Giant of a man though. Think everyone agrees on that.
Not me.
He is a large part for why I voted Conservative in 2010. He was a very poor PM, and only marginally better as Chancellor.
He was, but so have all five of his successors been. The gruesome twosome should have taken Britain into the eurozone one spring and then held an EU membership referendum two summers later. "Do you want to go back to the days of bureaux d'échange?" Win the referendum and then join Schengen.
Mind you, they did handle the handover from one PM to the next in an expert fashion, with that line about the Granita.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
If must means accepting Barty's half a million dead, then no, we can't.
This is a statement taken out of context. On my original post I caveated that by questioning Bart's collateral value to achieve his aim. I was specific in that I last night asked Bart for numbers. He declined and simply retorted with "whatever it takes".
Here's the context.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4736911/#Comment_4736911 BartholomewRoberts Mexicanpete said: » show previous quotes 1. Bollocks it is! 2. At what cost in lives, give me a number (whatever it takes isn't a number). 3. I said pushing bastards out of windows and the like. Have you never seen Munich? 4. 1. Yes it is. 2. Whatever it takes. The death toll of the Iraq War was over a quarter of a million, and this is an order of magnitude more justified than that war, so lets say double that half a million? If that's what it takes? 3. Real life isn't a James Bond movie. Pushing a few people out of windows won't end Hamas.
Thank you. I had lost interest after "whatever it takes" and ignored the value figure and gone to bed.
Half a million is good to know. So we are at circa 10% down so far.
Life must be cheap on Merseyside.
Top marks for reading to the end.
"Official" death toll (possibly exaggerated) is around 32,000, and of that, between a quarter and a half (depending on whether you believe Israel or Hamas - and potentially the difference is who counts as a terrorist and who doesn't) are Hamas members.
Presumably the half million was meant as civilians, and Hamas members do not count towards it.
So no, we are nowhere near "10% down so far" - more like 4%. And IDF operational efficiency is getting better as the war goes on - for example, there were no civilian deaths recorded during the recent Shifa hospital operation. And all the heavy bombing has been done for a while - you'll notice the death toll has remained fairly static for some time. There is no way the death toll ends up anywhere near half a million.
Considering the level of destruction of buildings and of social and health infrastructure that 32 000 deaths is likely to be a significant underestimate.
Considering the identity of the people providing the number, it's likely to be a significant overestimate. And again, you need to deduct the terrorists, since Hamas is including them in the total.
The only thing I know for certain about the actual number of civilians dead, is you have no clue.
As someone else has already posted, Hamas’ best recruiting sergeant ATM is Netanyahu!
Yes and all very predictable, and the reason for the Hamas attack in the first place.
Israel of course had (and has) the right to defend itself when attacked. But that is different to it being wise or sensible to have acted as they have done. Just because you have a right to do something doesn't make it right to enforce it.
The more interesting question is what would have been wise and sensible? Hamas' clear strategy was to put Israel in Zugzwang such that it only had some pretty terrible options. Either a war Hamas would try and ensure cost as many Palestinian lives as to break any international support or accept a terror state on your border with the express intent of wiping you out, with increasingly sophisticated military capabilities funded by another state that believes the same thing.
We know what's happening is horrific. But the deeper question is what different paths there are, and what trade-offs a) one can accept yourself and b) Israelis could or should accept.
I think it's unhelpful to paint this in such stark either/or terms. Israel could be occupying Gaza militarily, while being more helpful on aid and less indiscriminate in blowing stuff up. Israel could (and should) stop trying to annex the West Bank bit by bit. Israel could kick politicians who favour ethnic cleansing of Gaza out of government. It's perfectly possible for Israel to respond strongly to Hamas without behaving as they are now.
Much of this is true in terms of behaviour - particularly the West Bank and Ben Gvir. But it doesn't change the crude logic of the war - nor would it save vast numbers of lives.
Which is why it's not just the foul Israeli right that support the war but the general population who also want Netanyahu and his cronies (and will kick them out when get a vote) out for mismanaging things in the first place and continuing to.
If you replaced Netanyahu with Yair Lapid tomorrow there would not be an immediate ceasefire. Meanwhile, the West Bank will take *a long* time to sort out. Vital, but not part of the immediate Hamas-inspired crisis.
And it is important to put it in such stark terms because that is how the Israelis view it. As existential. Certainly after 7 October, they taken Hamas' rhetoric about wiping out Jews from the Middle East and that they'd do 7 October again and again quite literally and with justification. And for that matter Iran's and its intention to keep arming them.
Therefore *any* serious effort at peace that goes beyond grandstanding and Western politicians being able to feel good needs to take that into account and offer alternative options to Israel continuing until it has destroyed Hamas, and Hamas trying to ensure as many Palestinians as possible die before they are destroyed.
So you're saying that the Israel/Palestine situation will be difficult to sort out? I think we knew that.
Israeli politics has shifted rightwards over the years, to a more pro-settler, pro-annexation, anti-2 state solution position. There's no reason why it can't shift back over coming years... but, sure, it will take years. Getting rid of (and preferably locking up) Bibi will help!
Western grandstanding is largely pointless, but diplomatic pressure from the West, specifically the US, does matter.
I think the demographics of Israel point to an ever more radical position. Haredi have big families (hence why Liberal Israelis resent them being exempt from military service). Similarly the schools are controlled by the orthodox, so the children of secular Israelis get indoctrinated from a young age. This article from the New Yorker gives a picture of what is going on.
So we have a self-radicalising state, and every sign of that accelerating. While secular liberal Israel still exists, it is being phased out. Its a mirror image of the self radicalisation of the Palestinians and other neighbours. The secular, nationalist PLO supplanted by Hamas for example.
It doesn't bode well for future peace from either side.
There has never been peace in the middle east, there never will be peace in the middle east. Doesn't matter what the us, uk, eu or even pendle council say or do....its not happening so just leave them to it
Never say never. After all, anyone looking at Europe in 1945 would have struggled to see a peaceful future, as opposed to an alternation of outright war and growling.
What it does need is the right pair of leaders. Think de Klerk and Mandela, or Trimble and Adams. Might not happen soon, might not happen in our lifetime. But even monolithic cultures aren't totally unchanging.
But both sides desiring peace rather than absolute victory is the only thing that has ever really worked in the long run.
Gordon Brown made a speech when he introduced the 2010 Labour manifesto.
Everything he said came to pass.
Whatever you think about him, we'd have been better in every conceivable way had he remained in charge.
The Gordon Brown that unleashed the forces of hell on his own Chancellor for speaking the truth?
The Gordon Brown who hired people who smeared a grieving David Cameron?
That Gordon Brown?
Giant of a man though. Think everyone agrees on that.
Not me.
He is a large part for why I voted Conservative in 2010. He was a very poor PM, and only marginally better as Chancellor.
Good grief, look what you did! Your part in ushering in 14 years of stagnation, misrule and incompetence.
To be fair, it wasn't entirely my fault. A few others did too!
I supported the Coalition right through to the 2015 GE. The Tories only lost the plot after they no longer had the Lib Dems bringing sanity to the table. Vince Cable being the only really poor LD frontbencher.
I heard Steve Webb on R4 this afternoon whilst driving back from Glasgow. What a loss he was to UK politics. Very clever, polite, clear and sensible, he was outstanding. If Cameron had any sense he would have offered him a peerage and kept him in the government. If the Lib Dems had him as leader instead of....Ed? they would be in a better place.
It did make me nostalgic for the Coalition which, in my view, was the best government of my adult life.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
What about the rest of the armed resistance? Or is it just Hamas that gets your goat?
Reminder: any aim that requires genocide or other crimes against humanity is wrong. Aims do NOT justify means.
The real message of current events is that Zionism was always racist, ethnic-supremacist wank. Even senior retired judges are acknowledging by their actions that Jeremy Corbyn was right.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
You're also not prepared to see 'whatever it takes' done to destroy Hamas - you would not be tolerant for example of Israel bombing civilians in London to polish off a few Hamas operatives, or indeed of bombing your own neighbourhood. Everyone has limits, it's just that yours extend well beyond showing Palestinian civilians a shred of mercy.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
Whatever it takes? Exterminate the civilian population of Gaza? Nuke Doha to take out the leadership?
Hamas is a terrorist group - it cannot and will not be destroyed by conventional military actions like the one the Israelis are currently undertaking.
Michael Gove has admitted that he showed “moral cowardice” by failing to be upfront with David Cameron about his plans to play a leading role in the Brexit referendum campaign.
In an interview for his Political Currency podcast George Osborne, the former chancellor, said Gove had told Cameron in the Downing Street plan that he would “not play a prominent role in the campaign”. “Did you deceive David?” Osborne asked. “He certainly felt betrayed.”
Gove, who is now the levelling up secretary, said that while he did not believe he had deceived Cameron he ended up “going further than you’d imagine or anticipated at the beginning of the campaign”, adding: “I didn’t want to take part in the debates, the TV shows that I ultimately took part in or play a prominent role.”
However, he said that during the campaign he was urged by Dominic Cummings, who oversaw the Vote Leave campaign, and others to take a more prominent role with the argument: “If you don’t do this, they’ll have Farage on.” He said he was told that he would let people down if he failed to do so. “I didn’t believe I deceived, but as I mentioned, I do think that I could have been clearer earlier.
“And I think that was an example of on the one hand, cowardice on my part, moral cowardice … on the other hand, a recognition that perhaps there’s this feeling in politics, perhaps something will turn up, perhaps this moment won’t come when we have to make that decision,” he said. “But I think David entirely fairly, should have expected me to have been more upfront earlier.”
Someone has started realising what the first line in their obituary is going to be.
He does seem to be the first leading Brexiteer to admit that the Brexit referendum was a mistake.
There is a lot to be said for this but how do you address an issue like Scottish Independence?? Is he really saying that a majority government in Holyrood had the right to take Scotland out of the Union when the majority had rejected such a policy? Surely not.
What I would agree is that referendums should be extremely rare beasts but I think there isn't a politician alive who hasn't realised this (except possibly the Taoisigh of Ireland who has since paid the price).
I don't think self determination issues can be sorted without a referendum; but if you think they are always a bad idea, then you have to declare in advance that a Westminster election will decide the matter if the majority of Scottish seats go to nationalist parties or lese apply the same principle to a Holyrood election.
The EU thing was a problem without a solution. We had got ourselves into an EU the form of which in the end meant there was no enthusiastic majority for either IN or OUT.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
If must means accepting Barty's half a million dead, then no, we can't.
This is a statement taken out of context. On my original post I caveated that by questioning Bart's collateral value to achieve his aim. I was specific in that I last night asked Bart for numbers. He declined and simply retorted with "whatever it takes".
Here's the context.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4736911/#Comment_4736911 BartholomewRoberts Mexicanpete said: » show previous quotes 1. Bollocks it is! 2. At what cost in lives, give me a number (whatever it takes isn't a number). 3. I said pushing bastards out of windows and the like. Have you never seen Munich? 4. 1. Yes it is. 2. Whatever it takes. The death toll of the Iraq War was over a quarter of a million, and this is an order of magnitude more justified than that war, so lets say double that half a million? If that's what it takes? 3. Real life isn't a James Bond movie. Pushing a few people out of windows won't end Hamas.
Thank you. I had lost interest after "whatever it takes" and ignored the value figure and gone to bed.
Half a million is good to know. So we are at circa 10% down so far.
Life must be cheap on Merseyside.
Top marks for reading to the end.
"Official" death toll (possibly exaggerated) is around 32,000, and of that, between a quarter and a half (depending on whether you believe Israel or Hamas - and potentially the difference is who counts as a terrorist and who doesn't) are Hamas members.
Presumably the half million was meant as civilians, and Hamas members do not count towards it.
So no, we are nowhere near "10% down so far" - more like 4%. And IDF operational efficiency is getting better as the war goes on - for example, there were no civilian deaths recorded during the recent Shifa hospital operation. And all the heavy bombing has been done for a while - you'll notice the death toll has remained fairly static for some time. There is no way the death toll ends up anywhere near half a million.
Considering the level of destruction of buildings and of social and health infrastructure that 32 000 deaths is likely to be a significant underestimate.
Considering the identity of the people providing the number, it's likely to be a significant overestimate. And again, you need to deduct the terrorists, since Hamas is including them in the total.
The only thing I know for certain about the actual number of civilians dead, is you have no clue.
As someone else has already posted, Hamas’ best recruiting sergeant ATM is Netanyahu!
Yes and all very predictable, and the reason for the Hamas attack in the first place.
Israel of course had (and has) the right to defend itself when attacked. But that is different to it being wise or sensible to have acted as they have done. Just because you have a right to do something doesn't make it right to enforce it.
The more interesting question is what would have been wise and sensible? Hamas' clear strategy was to put Israel in Zugzwang such that it only had some pretty terrible options. Either a war Hamas would try and ensure cost as many Palestinian lives as to break any international support or accept a terror state on your border with the express intent of wiping you out, with increasingly sophisticated military capabilities funded by another state that believes the same thing.
We know what's happening is horrific. But the deeper question is what different paths there are, and what trade-offs a) one can accept yourself and b) Israelis could or should accept.
I think it's unhelpful to paint this in such stark either/or terms. Israel could be occupying Gaza militarily, while being more helpful on aid and less indiscriminate in blowing stuff up. Israel could (and should) stop trying to annex the West Bank bit by bit. Israel could kick politicians who favour ethnic cleansing of Gaza out of government. It's perfectly possible for Israel to respond strongly to Hamas without behaving as they are now.
Much of this is true in terms of behaviour - particularly the West Bank and Ben Gvir. But it doesn't change the crude logic of the war - nor would it save vast numbers of lives.
Which is why it's not just the foul Israeli right that support the war but the general population who also want Netanyahu and his cronies (and will kick them out when get a vote) out for mismanaging things in the first place and continuing to.
If you replaced Netanyahu with Yair Lapid tomorrow there would not be an immediate ceasefire. Meanwhile, the West Bank will take *a long* time to sort out. Vital, but not part of the immediate Hamas-inspired crisis.
And it is important to put it in such stark terms because that is how the Israelis view it. As existential. Certainly after 7 October, they taken Hamas' rhetoric about wiping out Jews from the Middle East and that they'd do 7 October again and again quite literally and with justification. And for that matter Iran's and its intention to keep arming them.
Therefore *any* serious effort at peace that goes beyond grandstanding and Western politicians being able to feel good needs to take that into account and offer alternative options to Israel continuing until it has destroyed Hamas, and Hamas trying to ensure as many Palestinians as possible die before they are destroyed.
So you're saying that the Israel/Palestine situation will be difficult to sort out? I think we knew that.
Israeli politics has shifted rightwards over the years, to a more pro-settler, pro-annexation, anti-2 state solution position. There's no reason why it can't shift back over coming years... but, sure, it will take years. Getting rid of (and preferably locking up) Bibi will help!
Western grandstanding is largely pointless, but diplomatic pressure from the West, specifically the US, does matter.
I think the demographics of Israel point to an ever more radical position. Haredi have big families (hence why Liberal Israelis resent them being exempt from military service). Similarly the schools are controlled by the orthodox, so the children of secular Israelis get indoctrinated from a young age. This article from the New Yorker gives a picture of what is going on.
So we have a self-radicalising state, and every sign of that accelerating. While secular liberal Israel still exists, it is being phased out. Its a mirror image of the self radicalisation of the Palestinians and other neighbours. The secular, nationalist PLO supplanted by Hamas for example.
It doesn't bode well for future peace from either side.
There has never been peace in the middle east, there never will be peace in the middle east. Doesn't matter what the us, uk, eu or even pendle council say or do....its not happening so just leave them to it
Never say never. After all, anyone looking at Europe in 1945 would have struggled to see a peaceful future, as opposed to an alternation of outright war and growling.
What it does need is the right pair of leaders. Think de Klerk and Mandela, or Trimble and Adams. Might not happen soon, might not happen in our lifetime. But even monolithic cultures aren't totally unchanging.
But both sides desiring peace rather than absolute victory is the only thing that has ever really worked in the long run.
No there is a difference, europeans never believed for example that french people shouldn't exist. The israelis believe the palestinians shouldnt and the palestinians believe jews shouldn't. The european wars of the twentieth century were about control mostly not wiping out the enemy
Michael Gove has admitted that he showed “moral cowardice” by failing to be upfront with David Cameron about his plans to play a leading role in the Brexit referendum campaign.
In an interview for his Political Currency podcast George Osborne, the former chancellor, said Gove had told Cameron in the Downing Street plan that he would “not play a prominent role in the campaign”. “Did you deceive David?” Osborne asked. “He certainly felt betrayed.”
Gove, who is now the levelling up secretary, said that while he did not believe he had deceived Cameron he ended up “going further than you’d imagine or anticipated at the beginning of the campaign”, adding: “I didn’t want to take part in the debates, the TV shows that I ultimately took part in or play a prominent role.”
However, he said that during the campaign he was urged by Dominic Cummings, who oversaw the Vote Leave campaign, and others to take a more prominent role with the argument: “If you don’t do this, they’ll have Farage on.” He said he was told that he would let people down if he failed to do so. “I didn’t believe I deceived, but as I mentioned, I do think that I could have been clearer earlier.
“And I think that was an example of on the one hand, cowardice on my part, moral cowardice … on the other hand, a recognition that perhaps there’s this feeling in politics, perhaps something will turn up, perhaps this moment won’t come when we have to make that decision,” he said. “But I think David entirely fairly, should have expected me to have been more upfront earlier.”
Someone has started realising what the first line in their obituary is going to be.
He does seem to be the first leading Brexiteer to admit that the Brexit referendum was a mistake.
There is a lot to be said for this but how do you address an issue like Scottish Independence?? Is he really saying that a majority government in Holyrood had the right to take Scotland out of the Union when the majority had rejected such a policy? Surely not.
What I would agree is that referendums should be extremely rare beasts but I think there isn't a politician alive who hasn't realised this (except possibly the Taoisigh of Ireland who has since paid the price).
I don't think self determination issues can be sorted without a referendum; but if you think they are always a bad idea, then you have to declare in advance that a Westminster election will decide the matter if the majority of Scottish seats go to nationalist parties or lese apply the same principle to a Holyrood election.
The EU thing was a problem without a solution. We had got ourselves into an EU the form of which in the end meant there was no enthusiastic majority for either IN or OUT.
I agree, I have, however, no desire to revisit the rights and wrongs for the nth time.
Gordon Brown made a speech when he introduced the 2010 Labour manifesto.
Everything he said came to pass.
Whatever you think about him, we'd have been better in every conceivable way had he remained in charge.
The Gordon Brown that unleashed the forces of hell on his own Chancellor for speaking the truth?
The Gordon Brown who hired people who smeared a grieving David Cameron?
That Gordon Brown?
Giant of a man though. Think everyone agrees on that.
Not me.
He is a large part for why I voted Conservative in 2010. He was a very poor PM, and only marginally better as Chancellor.
Good grief, look what you did! Your part in ushering in 14 years of stagnation, misrule and incompetence.
To be fair, it wasn't entirely my fault. A few others did too!
I supported the Coalition right through to the 2015 GE. The Tories only lost the plot after they no longer had the Lib Dems bringing sanity to the table. Vince Cable being the only really poor LD frontbencher.
I heard Steve Webb on R4 this afternoon whilst driving back from Glasgow. What a loss he was to UK politics. Very clever, polite, clear and sensible, he was outstanding. If Cameron had any sense he would have offered him a peerage and kept him in the government. If the Lib Dems had him as leader instead of....Ed? they would be in a better place.
It did make me nostalgic for the Coalition which, in my view, was the best government of my adult life.
The advantages of coalition still aren’t fully appreciated. Majority governments under the British system end up victim to the increasing hubris of the guy (or gal) in charge; having two parties acting as a check on each other didnt half screen out a lot of potential mistakes, much of the avoided disaster only known to those most closely involved. Yes, it’s more difficult to make radical changes when in a coalition (although there are counter-examples, the kensin freedoms being one), but then the apparently ‘radical’ stuff majority governments come up with isn’t always sensible.
Michael Gove has admitted that he showed “moral cowardice” by failing to be upfront with David Cameron about his plans to play a leading role in the Brexit referendum campaign.
In an interview for his Political Currency podcast George Osborne, the former chancellor, said Gove had told Cameron in the Downing Street plan that he would “not play a prominent role in the campaign”. “Did you deceive David?” Osborne asked. “He certainly felt betrayed.”
Gove, who is now the levelling up secretary, said that while he did not believe he had deceived Cameron he ended up “going further than you’d imagine or anticipated at the beginning of the campaign”, adding: “I didn’t want to take part in the debates, the TV shows that I ultimately took part in or play a prominent role.”
However, he said that during the campaign he was urged by Dominic Cummings, who oversaw the Vote Leave campaign, and others to take a more prominent role with the argument: “If you don’t do this, they’ll have Farage on.” He said he was told that he would let people down if he failed to do so. “I didn’t believe I deceived, but as I mentioned, I do think that I could have been clearer earlier.
“And I think that was an example of on the one hand, cowardice on my part, moral cowardice … on the other hand, a recognition that perhaps there’s this feeling in politics, perhaps something will turn up, perhaps this moment won’t come when we have to make that decision,” he said. “But I think David entirely fairly, should have expected me to have been more upfront earlier.”
Someone has started realising what the first line in their obituary is going to be.
He does seem to be the first leading Brexiteer to admit that the Brexit referendum was a mistake.
There is a lot to be said for this but how do you address an issue like Scottish Independence?? Is he really saying that a majority government in Holyrood had the right to take Scotland out of the Union when the majority had rejected such a policy? Surely not.
What I would agree is that referendums should be extremely rare beasts but I think there isn't a politician alive who hasn't realised this (except possibly the Taoisigh of Ireland who has since paid the price).
In Ireland they don't have a choice. If they want to amend the constitution they have to have a referendum. There is another one happening with the European elections this summer on whether Ireland should join the European Patent Court.
As regards something like Scottish Independence I think this is where a second chamber with a different mandate is helpful. But I also think if the voters knew that there wouldn't be a referendum, and a majority of SNP MSPs would be able to withdraw Scotland from the Union, that it would change the dynamics of such elections. And the SNP, or at least sufficient of its MSPs, might decide it was unwise to proceed if they failed to receive 50%+1 of the votes at an election as well as a majority of seats.
I think, for example, that it was better when a government would call a GE for a specific mandate when a reform was blocked, as with the People's Budget. I don't think it would have been good to have a referendum on that instead.
On topic - a lot of social media is an echo-chamber. People minded to vote Labour are mainly going to pro-Labour or perceived neutral sources. Places like Twitter are about point-scoring over the 'enemy' rather than winning them over.
However, the Cons will spend big money on advertising online and will use sophisticated (and very expensive) targeting. But to what end? Positive ads cannot work because the Cons have nothing to sell in terms of a record or a vision. So they have to be negative against Starmer and Lab. Which might work but they have been doing it for at least two years. Even when it sticks people still prefer the alternative to Mr Sunak and his ramshackle bunch. Worse, those folk who do like Mr Sunak know that he would be gone after a couple of bad polls. Then who? Suella, Badenoch, Shapps or maybe Truss redux.
The public have seen this farce for the last four years and precious few are yelling 'encore!'
That's why they should get rid of Sunak and try to get some decent policies out there that they can run on come the election. Saying 'look we've started this and we mean to continue' is a lot more powerful than saying 'we'll do this if we get re-elected, promise'.
Michael Gove has admitted that he showed “moral cowardice” by failing to be upfront with David Cameron about his plans to play a leading role in the Brexit referendum campaign.
In an interview for his Political Currency podcast George Osborne, the former chancellor, said Gove had told Cameron in the Downing Street plan that he would “not play a prominent role in the campaign”. “Did you deceive David?” Osborne asked. “He certainly felt betrayed.”
Gove, who is now the levelling up secretary, said that while he did not believe he had deceived Cameron he ended up “going further than you’d imagine or anticipated at the beginning of the campaign”, adding: “I didn’t want to take part in the debates, the TV shows that I ultimately took part in or play a prominent role.”
However, he said that during the campaign he was urged by Dominic Cummings, who oversaw the Vote Leave campaign, and others to take a more prominent role with the argument: “If you don’t do this, they’ll have Farage on.” He said he was told that he would let people down if he failed to do so. “I didn’t believe I deceived, but as I mentioned, I do think that I could have been clearer earlier.
“And I think that was an example of on the one hand, cowardice on my part, moral cowardice … on the other hand, a recognition that perhaps there’s this feeling in politics, perhaps something will turn up, perhaps this moment won’t come when we have to make that decision,” he said. “But I think David entirely fairly, should have expected me to have been more upfront earlier.”
Someone has started realising what the first line in their obituary is going to be.
He does seem to be the first leading Brexiteer to admit that the Brexit referendum was a mistake.
There is a lot to be said for this but how do you address an issue like Scottish Independence?? Is he really saying that a majority government in Holyrood had the right to take Scotland out of the Union when the majority had rejected such a policy? Surely not.
What I would agree is that referendums should be extremely rare beasts but I think there isn't a politician alive who hasn't realised this (except possibly the Taoisigh of Ireland who has since paid the price).
Depends how you use a referendum. Using them to confirm a decision the public has already unconsciously taken might well have a point. When support for X is at a steady two thirds plus, but it's right to confirm that explicitly.
Where they're a lot more toxic is when they get used to make 50:50 decisions. Both Brexit and Sindy fell into those categories. Yes, each one had a winner, but the results were close enough that the losing side had a case to keep going. I very much doubt that 52:48 the other way would have caused Farage, Cummings or any of the others to fold their tents and walk away.
I think it's conservative to say don't make a change unless the case is overwhelming. Sindy has never reached that, and significant unwinding of Brexit hasn't so far.
Gordon Brown made a speech when he introduced the 2010 Labour manifesto.
Everything he said came to pass.
Whatever you think about him, we'd have been better in every conceivable way had he remained in charge.
The Gordon Brown that unleashed the forces of hell on his own Chancellor for speaking the truth?
The Gordon Brown who hired people who smeared a grieving David Cameron?
That Gordon Brown?
Giant of a man though. Think everyone agrees on that.
Not me.
He is a large part for why I voted Conservative in 2010. He was a very poor PM, and only marginally better as Chancellor.
Good grief, look what you did! Your part in ushering in 14 years of stagnation, misrule and incompetence.
To be fair, it wasn't entirely my fault. A few others did too!
I supported the Coalition right through to the 2015 GE. The Tories only lost the plot after they no longer had the Lib Dems bringing sanity to the table. Vince Cable being the only really poor LD frontbencher.
I heard Steve Webb on R4 this afternoon whilst driving back from Glasgow. What a loss he was to UK politics. Very clever, polite, clear and sensible, he was outstanding. If Cameron had any sense he would have offered him a peerage and kept him in the government. If the Lib Dems had him as leader instead of....Ed? they would be in a better place.
It did make me nostalgic for the Coalition which, in my view, was the best government of my adult life.
The advantages of coalition still aren’t fully appreciated. Majority governments under the British system end up victim to the increasing hubris of the guy (or gal) in charge; having two parties acting as a check on each other didnt half screen out a lot of potential mistakes, much of the avoided disaster only known to those most closely involved. Yes, it’s more difficult to make radical changes when in a coalition (although there are counter-examples, the kensin freedoms being one), but then the apparently ‘radical’ stuff majority governments come up with isn’t always sensible.
I always thought that coalitions were a bad idea but they turned out to have a number of unexpected benefits. Firstly, the Coalition Agreement, which is a remarkable document, gave a much clearer plan for the government for the full term than any manifesto. Secondly, the reluctance to change Ministerial posts made people much more responsible for the decisions that they made. Thirdly, the Quartet of Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Alexander properly tested new ideas from a variety of perspectives which kept government cock ups to an acceptable minimum.
It changed my thinking, I would freely admit and weakened the argument for keeping FPTP.
Claudia Cockerell @claudcockerell Went to (gatecrashed) Nigel Farage's 60th birthday party last night for @Londoners_Diary . His half melted ice sculpture will stay with me for many, many years. A lot happened:
Claudia Cockerell @claudcockerell · 6h Farage teased a 'big announcement' in the coming weeks, but said he didn't want to make it on his birthday: 'Why spoil a lovely booze up?'
I'm going to be as tedious and dull as ever and say I don't have very strong views about any politician. How you perceive them now is distorted by hindsight and the nuances of what they had to do when they were in office and the zeitgeist in which they operated.
David Cameron, for example, was desperate to get the Conservatives back into office and realised the only way to do it was to make his brand of one nation conservatism acceptable to the post-Blair centrist landscape. The economic crisis forced him into an economic path which I suspect he didn't want to follow (I think he wanted to maintain spending while gently cutting taxes).
He then misread the 2015 election which I suspect he never thought he would win with a majority but conversely thought had been won by his personal charisma which would carry them through any referendum on EU membership. He also misread the EU who weren't interested in having different membership rules for one state.
He then realised he couldn't force a divided Conservative Party to support him and also must have known Corbyn wouldn't be any help and having emasculated Clegg and the LDs to win his majority he had created a trap of his own making into which he fell and once the referendum was lost, so was he.
A man who started with sound intentions but who allowed politics to subvert those intentions and in the end the contradictions he created destroyed him.
The thing with the 2016 referendum is that he never imagined he would lose it. The timing was predicated on the basis of getting it out of the way quickly, so that there would still be time for Cameron to do "other things" after settling the issue of the EU, before handing over the leadership before the next GE.
If he had imagined that he might lose then he would have taken longer over the renegotiation, been more awkward with the EU in order to get more of what he wanted, and then would have had a better hand to play in the referendum.
I think the common thread, with the AV referendum, with Clinton losing to Trump in 2016, and a number of other things, is a lack of imagination in appreciating why reasonable people might disagree with you, and a general tendency to underestimate uncertainty and natural variation.
Self checkouts are an interesting business question. Customers are divided but more dislike them than like them; staff hate them - more because they don't work very smoothly and staff get the grief from customers than because the machines put them out of a job; they cost more than manned tills when maintenance and increased theft are factored in.
So why, given they are net negatives for customers, staff and the business itself, do businesses persevere with self checkouts? It seems to be a version of "one final push". Businesses believe a technical solution will be found to make the self checkout system work better.
I used to hate them and would approach them full of negativity. They seemed to sense this and react badly since I would never get through the procedure, even with a small shop, without at least one thing, and often several, going wrong. My nuts wouldn't scan, it wouldn't recognise a meal deal, no red pepper on the look-up, my bag in the wrong place, carrots not properly on the scales etc etc. I'd end up almost weeping with frustration.
But then I changed my mental attitude. I started walking up there with a smile and with confidence. "Hello, clever machine, you're going to zip this straight through, aren't you?" This was now the vibe. Along with that I dropped my tentative way of presenting things to it and instead acted firmly and decisively.
It worked. They changed their ways and started co-operating with me. I really like them now and have become almost insouciant when using them.
Of course, the greatest PM is Tony Blair. I do wish he would come back.
Yet you get outraged by the deaths in Gaza yet defend the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
The war the Tories supported?
Supported on a lie.
I suggest you read the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities ... were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
I'm going to be as tedious and dull as ever and say I don't have very strong views about any politician. How you perceive them now is distorted by hindsight and the nuances of what they had to do when they were in office and the zeitgeist in which they operated.
David Cameron, for example, was desperate to get the Conservatives back into office and realised the only way to do it was to make his brand of one nation conservatism acceptable to the post-Blair centrist landscape. The economic crisis forced him into an economic path which I suspect he didn't want to follow (I think he wanted to maintain spending while gently cutting taxes).
He then misread the 2015 election which I suspect he never thought he would win with a majority but conversely thought had been won by his personal charisma which would carry them through any referendum on EU membership. He also misread the EU who weren't interested in having different membership rules for one state.
He then realised he couldn't force a divided Conservative Party to support him and also must have known Corbyn wouldn't be any help and having emasculated Clegg and the LDs to win his majority he had created a trap of his own making into which he fell and once the referendum was lost, so was he.
A man who started with sound intentions but who allowed politics to subvert those intentions and in the end the contradictions he created destroyed him.
I think the issue with Cameron was that it was mostly surface and he was too cowardly or imperceptive to follow through the logic of his early modernisation pitch.
As an example he clearly early on called UKIP a bunch of fruitcakes and racists and said he wanted his party to stop banging on about Europe. But never took on his party to explain why that was such a bad thing.
Or on immigration. The pledge to cut it to the "tens of thousands" was farcical from the start given it was not in his gift. But he kept it anyway rather than make the argument that levels of immigration are generally to do with structural issues with the economy rather than governments "letting everyone in".
He said he'd initially match Labour's spending plans but then decided it was to his advantage to impose bigger than strictly needed cuts outside health for which we are now paying the price in the hope it would leave room to cut taxes.
Made great virtue of his green credentials but then started saying he wanted to "cut the green crap" - despite energy transition perhaps being the few parts of his legacy he can be a bit proud of.
The result was that his party inevitably reverted to type and its baser instincts the moment it felt electorally secure. It's like if Blair and Brown had instead of governing as New Labour had started saying, well that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, they may look like a pair of idiots but they kind of have a point.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
Whatever it takes? Exterminate the civilian population of Gaza? Nuke Doha to take out the leadership?
Hamas is a terrorist group - it cannot and will not be destroyed by conventional military actions like the one the Israelis are currently undertaking.
Why not?
Countless terrorist groups have been destroyed by conventional military actions down the years.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
Lives are cheaper than talk in Bartworld.
Exterminating half a million people to get rid of 30,000 Hamas operatives is a moral outrage. Remove the 30,000 by as clinical a means as is practicable with as little collateral as possible is fine.
Gordon Brown made a speech when he introduced the 2010 Labour manifesto.
Everything he said came to pass.
Whatever you think about him, we'd have been better in every conceivable way had he remained in charge.
The Gordon Brown that unleashed the forces of hell on his own Chancellor for speaking the truth?
The Gordon Brown who hired people who smeared a grieving David Cameron?
That Gordon Brown?
Giant of a man though. Think everyone agrees on that.
Not me.
He is a large part for why I voted Conservative in 2010. He was a very poor PM, and only marginally better as Chancellor.
Good grief, look what you did! Your part in ushering in 14 years of stagnation, misrule and incompetence.
To be fair, it wasn't entirely my fault. A few others did too!
I supported the Coalition right through to the 2015 GE. The Tories only lost the plot after they no longer had the Lib Dems bringing sanity to the table. Vince Cable being the only really poor LD frontbencher.
I heard Steve Webb on R4 this afternoon whilst driving back from Glasgow. What a loss he was to UK politics. Very clever, polite, clear and sensible, he was outstanding. If Cameron had any sense he would have offered him a peerage and kept him in the government. If the Lib Dems had him as leader instead of....Ed? they would be in a better place.
It did make me nostalgic for the Coalition which, in my view, was the best government of my adult life.
The advantages of coalition still aren’t fully appreciated. Majority governments under the British system end up victim to the increasing hubris of the guy (or gal) in charge; having two parties acting as a check on each other didnt half screen out a lot of potential mistakes, much of the avoided disaster only known to those most closely involved. Yes, it’s more difficult to make radical changes when in a coalition (although there are counter-examples, the kensin freedoms being one), but then the apparently ‘radical’ stuff majority governments come up with isn’t always sensible.
I always thought that coalitions were a bad idea but they turned out to have a number of unexpected benefits. Firstly, the Coalition Agreement, which is a remarkable document, gave a much clearer plan for the government for the full term than any manifesto. Secondly, the reluctance to change Ministerial posts made people much more responsible for the decisions that they made. Thirdly, the Quartet of Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Alexander properly tested new ideas from a variety of perspectives which kept government cock ups to an acceptable minimum.
It changed my thinking, I would freely admit and weakened the argument for keeping FPTP.
The other side of the story being that the 'majority' governments that followed have all, in their different ways, illustrated the downsides of the majoritarian system, including demonstrating many of the weaknesses often blamed on coalitions, such as being held to ransom my a minority of members. Because, of course, all the Tory governments are effectively internal coalitions between people with widely varying views.
At least we never got the chaos under that Miliband.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
Whatever it takes? Exterminate the civilian population of Gaza? Nuke Doha to take out the leadership?
Hamas is a terrorist group - it cannot and will not be destroyed by conventional military actions like the one the Israelis are currently undertaking.
Why not?
Countless terrorist groups have been destroyed by conventional military actions down the years.
Easy for you to say from the safety of your carer's basement.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
Lives are cheaper than talk in Bartworld.
Exterminating half a million people to get rid of 30,000 Hamas operatives is a moral outrage. Remove the 30,000 by as clinical a means as is practicable with as little collateral as possible is fine.
You are a moral vacuum.
I must have missed the death toll passing half a million then. How many of the dead so far were Hamas?
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
Lives are cheaper than talk in Bartworld.
Exterminating half a million people to get rid of 30,000 Hamas operatives is a moral outrage. Remove the 30,000 by as clinical a means as is practicable with as little collateral as possible is fine.
You are a moral vacuum.
I must have missed the death toll passing half a million then. How many of the dead so far were Hamas?
Bart confirmed that was HIS acceptable total last night
I could be one Hamas operative, it could be 500,000. The term used by Bart was "whatever it takes". He also calculated his half a million by extrapolating the 250,000 dead in the second Gulf War and multiplying according to the severity of the foe.
Claudia Cockerell @claudcockerell Went to (gatecrashed) Nigel Farage's 60th birthday party last night for @Londoners_Diary . His half melted ice sculpture will stay with me for many, many years. A lot happened:
Claudia Cockerell @claudcockerell · 6h Farage teased a 'big announcement' in the coming weeks, but said he didn't want to make it on his birthday: 'Why spoil a lovely booze up?'
Lady Whiteadder: Then can you explain what he meant by "great booze-up"?
Blackadder: [very long pause] Yes, I can. My friend is a missionary and on his last visit abroad brought back with him the chief of a famous tribe. His name is Great Boo. He's been suffering from sleeping sickness and he's obviously just woken because as you've heard, Great Boo's up.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
Lives are cheaper than talk in Bartworld.
Exterminating half a million people to get rid of 30,000 Hamas operatives is a moral outrage. Remove the 30,000 by as clinical a means as is practicable with as little collateral as possible is fine.
You are a moral vacuum.
I must have missed the death toll passing half a million then. How many of the dead so far were Hamas?
Bart confirmed that was HIS acceptable total last night
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
Lives are cheaper than talk in Bartworld.
Exterminating half a million people to get rid of 30,000 Hamas operatives is a moral outrage. Remove the 30,000 by as clinical a means as is practicable with as little collateral as possible is fine.
You are a moral vacuum.
I must have missed the death toll passing half a million then. How many of the dead so far were Hamas?
Bart confirmed that was HIS acceptable total last night
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
Lives are cheaper than talk in Bartworld.
Exterminating half a million people to get rid of 30,000 Hamas operatives is a moral outrage. Remove the 30,000 by as clinical a means as is practicable with as little collateral as possible is fine.
You are a moral vacuum.
I must have missed the death toll passing half a million then. How many of the dead so far were Hamas?
Bart confirmed that was HIS acceptable total last night
Self checkouts are an interesting business question. Customers are divided but more dislike them than like them; staff hate them - more because they don't work very smoothly and staff get the grief from customers than because the machines put them out of a job; they cost more than manned tills when maintenance and increased theft are factored in.
So why, given they are net negatives for customers, staff and the business itself, do businesses persevere with self checkouts? It seems to be a version of "one final push". Businesses believe a technical solution will be found to make the self checkout system work better.
I used to hate them and would approach them full of negativity. They seemed to sense this and react badly since I would never get through the procedure, even with a small shop, without at least one thing, and often several, going wrong. My nuts wouldn't scan, it wouldn't recognise a meal deal, no red pepper on the look-up, my bag in the wrong place, carrots not properly on the scales etc etc. I'd end up almost weeping with frustration.
But then I changed my mental attitude. I started walking up there with a smile and with confidence. "Hello, clever machine, you're going to zip this straight through, aren't you?" This was now the vibe. Along with that I dropped my tentative way of presenting things to it and instead acted firmly and decisively.
It worked. They changed their ways and started co-operating with me. I really like them now and have become almost insouciant when using them.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
Whatever it takes? Exterminate the civilian population of Gaza? Nuke Doha to take out the leadership?
Hamas is a terrorist group - it cannot and will not be destroyed by conventional military actions like the one the Israelis are currently undertaking.
Why not?
Countless terrorist groups have been destroyed by conventional military actions down the years.
I think Israel will be well aware they can't bomb fanatical Islamism out of existence. What they can do is destroy the group that threatens them's institutional capabilities to act on its ideology.
A Hamas that is no longer running Gaza as its own corrupt fiefdom, has lost its most able leadership, and the infrastructure it uses to arm and protect itself is far less dangerous than it was. There should be intense focus on how we get there with the minimum of bloodshed rather than so much impotent handwringing.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
Lives are cheaper than talk in Bartworld.
Exterminating half a million people to get rid of 30,000 Hamas operatives is a moral outrage. Remove the 30,000 by as clinical a means as is practicable with as little collateral as possible is fine.
You are a moral vacuum.
I must have missed the death toll passing half a million then. How many of the dead so far were Hamas?
Bart confirmed that was HIS acceptable total last night
I could be one Hamas operative, it could be 500,000. The term used by Bart was "whatever it takes". He also calculated his half a million by extrapolating the 250,000 dead in the second Gulf War and multiplying according to the severity of the foe.
I didn't say that's what I wanted to happen, I just drew a comparison between the quarter of a million dead that we were responsible for and said that this was a far more existential conflict.
Unless Tony Blair gets held to account for war crimes, I fail to see why what Israel did which is less damaging than what we did is a crime, but what we did is not.
Michael Gove has admitted that he showed “moral cowardice” by failing to be upfront with David Cameron about his plans to play a leading role in the Brexit referendum campaign.
In an interview for his Political Currency podcast George Osborne, the former chancellor, said Gove had told Cameron in the Downing Street plan that he would “not play a prominent role in the campaign”. “Did you deceive David?” Osborne asked. “He certainly felt betrayed.”
Gove, who is now the levelling up secretary, said that while he did not believe he had deceived Cameron he ended up “going further than you’d imagine or anticipated at the beginning of the campaign”, adding: “I didn’t want to take part in the debates, the TV shows that I ultimately took part in or play a prominent role.”
However, he said that during the campaign he was urged by Dominic Cummings, who oversaw the Vote Leave campaign, and others to take a more prominent role with the argument: “If you don’t do this, they’ll have Farage on.” He said he was told that he would let people down if he failed to do so. “I didn’t believe I deceived, but as I mentioned, I do think that I could have been clearer earlier.
“And I think that was an example of on the one hand, cowardice on my part, moral cowardice … on the other hand, a recognition that perhaps there’s this feeling in politics, perhaps something will turn up, perhaps this moment won’t come when we have to make that decision,” he said. “But I think David entirely fairly, should have expected me to have been more upfront earlier.”
Someone has started realising what the first line in their obituary is going to be.
He does seem to be the first leading Brexiteer to admit that the Brexit referendum was a mistake.
There is a lot to be said for this but how do you address an issue like Scottish Independence?? Is he really saying that a majority government in Holyrood had the right to take Scotland out of the Union when the majority had rejected such a policy? Surely not.
What I would agree is that referendums should be extremely rare beasts but I think there isn't a politician alive who hasn't realised this (except possibly the Taoisigh of Ireland who has since paid the price).
Well, Irish independence happened without a referendum.
I would suggest that major Constitutional change should require a Supermajority, and to have been in the parties manifesto. I would suggest a 2/3 majority.
Not only would this mean that there was a decisive majority in favour of the change, but also would mean that the Parliament would be committed to implementing it.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
Whatever it takes? Exterminate the civilian population of Gaza? Nuke Doha to take out the leadership?
Hamas is a terrorist group - it cannot and will not be destroyed by conventional military actions like the one the Israelis are currently undertaking.
Why not?
Countless terrorist groups have been destroyed by conventional military actions down the years.
I think Israel will be well aware they can't bomb fanatical Islamism out of existence. What they can do is destroy the group that threatens them's institutional capabilities to act on its ideology.
A Hamas that is no longer running Gaza as its own corrupt fiefdom, has lost its most able leadership, and the infrastructure it uses to arm and protect itself is far less dangerous than it was. There should be intense focus on how we get there with the minimum of bloodshed rather than so much impotent handwringing.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
Whatever it takes? Exterminate the civilian population of Gaza? Nuke Doha to take out the leadership?
Hamas is a terrorist group - it cannot and will not be destroyed by conventional military actions like the one the Israelis are currently undertaking.
Why not?
Countless terrorist groups have been destroyed by conventional military actions down the years.
Well lets see, the IRA? Islamic state? Hezbollah? Abu Sayyaf? Or to go a bit further back, Eoka? The FLN? Mau mau? The OAS? None of these were defeated by a conventional military campaign.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
Lives are cheaper than talk in Bartworld.
Exterminating half a million people to get rid of 30,000 Hamas operatives is a moral outrage. Remove the 30,000 by as clinical a means as is practicable with as little collateral as possible is fine.
You are a moral vacuum.
I must have missed the death toll passing half a million then. How many of the dead so far were Hamas?
Bart confirmed that was HIS acceptable total last night
I could be one Hamas operative, it could be 500,000. The term used by Bart was "whatever it takes". He also calculated his half a million by extrapolating the 250,000 dead in the second Gulf War and multiplying according to the severity of the foe.
I didn't say that's what I wanted to happen, I just drew a comparison between the quarter of a million dead that we were responsible for and said that this was a far more existential conflict.
Unless Tony Blair gets held to account for war crimes, I fail to see why what Israel did which is less damaging than what we did is a crime, but what we did is not.
I have no objection to Blair being tried at the Hague. We could do a 2 for 1 deal with Netanyahu.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
Whatever it takes? Exterminate the civilian population of Gaza? Nuke Doha to take out the leadership?
Hamas is a terrorist group - it cannot and will not be destroyed by conventional military actions like the one the Israelis are currently undertaking.
Why not?
Countless terrorist groups have been destroyed by conventional military actions down the years.
I think Israel will be well aware they can't bomb fanatical Islamism out of existence. What they can do is destroy the group that threatens them's institutional capabilities to act on its ideology.
A Hamas that is no longer running Gaza as its own corrupt fiefdom, has lost its most able leadership, and the infrastructure it uses to arm and protect itself is far less dangerous than it was. There should be intense focus on how we get there with the minimum of bloodshed rather than so much impotent handwringing.
And when they've done that they'll have to try not to fund & support the next group.
I was skim reading the...... altercation............ between CorrectHorseBattery and Barty Roberts last night.
I must admit I'm somewhat in CHB's favour here. Israel has gone far to far with its response to 7th October. Their is no justification to destroying aid convoys and killing aid workers. And I don't believe them when they say it was an accident. It wasn't, and they know it.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we will all agree on.
No. We all don't.
OK, a fair point.
I'll reconfirm.
Barty's point is that Hamas must be destroyed, which I think we all ( except @Dura_Ace ) agree on.
Talk is cheap, you say that Hamas must be destroyed but aren't willing to see anything actually done to see it done.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
Whatever it takes? Exterminate the civilian population of Gaza? Nuke Doha to take out the leadership?
Hamas is a terrorist group - it cannot and will not be destroyed by conventional military actions like the one the Israelis are currently undertaking.
Why not?
Countless terrorist groups have been destroyed by conventional military actions down the years.
Well lets see, the IRA? Islamic state? Hezbollah? Abu Sayyaf? Or to go a bit further back, Eoka? The FLN? Mau mau? The OAS? None of these were defeated by a conventional military campaign.
The Tamil Tigers were defeated. Where are Tibet and South Vietnam on the map nowadays? Bangladesh won a war of independence from Pakistan.Things can be settled by military means.
Comments
Without going too far down memory lane we should never have been in the position of impending financial collapse in the first place.
Perhaps if we had kept all our gold it might not have been so bad,
I suggest you read the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities ... were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/iraq-inquiry-key-points-from-the-chilcot-report
Your chaps supported it.
Blair lied like Netanyahu does.
It;'s like Starmer wanting to have us all locked up longer under Covid. Johnson carries the can not Starmer.
They retire?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/04/our-profits-could-disappear-small-uk-businesses-hit-out-at-new-import-fees
'The government said: “The charge is designed to recover the costs of operating our world-class border facilities where essential biosecurity checks will protect our food supply, farmers and environment against costly disease outbreaks entering the UK through the short straits."'
Oh yes? Controls that haven't been implemented for years and won't be completed for a year.
Food security my sharny arse.
Many Israelis believe - with some justification given the noises that come out of Tehran and their proxies these days and the US's dysfunction - that the conflict is existential for them. Faced with a choice between being a pariah among countries who they suspect would rather they didn't exist anyway and being slowly wiped out, would say is no choice at all.
That if Hamas is allowed to remain intact after 7 October and rearm, while Iran can also keep arming Hezbollah in the north, it's a matter of time until an even bloodier day and then another, and another.
So therefore, those who want the killing to stop ASAP need to focus as much on giving other options than those perceived choices instead of saying things that make them feel morally superior but may well have the opposite effect to that intended.
And yes, Israeli politics has shifted right - I wonder why - as people have given up on the peace process, and a global left that has shifted towards outright anti-Zionism.
I supported the Coalition right through to the 2015 GE. The Tories only lost the plot after they no longer had the Lib Dems bringing sanity to the table. Vince Cable being the only really poor LD frontbencher.
Given his virtually-universal bad press, perhaps worth noting he received the following endorsements of his (early) 1906 candidacy:
"[I wish you] success in the fine fight you are making for Free Trade, Land Reform, and Popular Government." - Winston S. Churchill
source "The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln" by Bernard Wasserstein (1988)
"Dear Mr. Lincoln, You have my heartiest good wishes in your contest at Darlington. A win at Darlington would be a great victory for Free Trade and Liberalism, and I feel confident that the vigour with which you have conducted your campaign and the excellence of our cause will combine to defeat the forces of re-action and Protectionism. Yours sincerely, D. Lloyd George"
source "Revelations of an International Spy" by I.T.T. Lincoln (1916)
I'm going to be as tedious and dull as ever and say I don't have very strong views about any politician. How you perceive them now is distorted by hindsight and the nuances of what they had to do when they were in office and the zeitgeist in which they operated.
David Cameron, for example, was desperate to get the Conservatives back into office and realised the only way to do it was to make his brand of one nation conservatism acceptable to the post-Blair centrist landscape. The economic crisis forced him into an economic path which I suspect he didn't want to follow (I think he wanted to maintain spending while gently cutting taxes).
He then misread the 2015 election which I suspect he never thought he would win with a majority but conversely thought had been won by his personal charisma which would carry them through any referendum on EU membership. He also misread the EU who weren't interested in having different membership rules for one state.
He then realised he couldn't force a divided Conservative Party to support him and also must have known Corbyn wouldn't be any help and having emasculated Clegg and the LDs to win his majority he had created a trap of his own making into which he fell and once the referendum was lost, so was he.
A man who started with sound intentions but who allowed politics to subvert those intentions and in the end the contradictions he created destroyed him.
But he doesn't come from nowhere. Without a second intifada, Hamas' election in Gaza, and so on, the central argument of his later career - that Israel will never be left in peace so it's pointless and dangerous make concessions rather than create "facts on the ground" and contain those who are dangerous - is a dead duck.
What I would agree is that referendums should be extremely rare beasts but I think there isn't a politician alive who hasn't realised this (except possibly the Taoisigh of Ireland who has since paid the price).
However, the Cons will spend big money on advertising online and will use sophisticated (and very expensive) targeting. But to what end? Positive ads cannot work because the Cons have nothing to sell in terms of a record or a vision. So they have to be negative against Starmer and Lab. Which might work but they have been doing it for at least two years. Even when it sticks people still prefer the alternative to Mr Sunak and his ramshackle bunch. Worse, those folk who do like Mr Sunak know that he would be gone after a couple of bad polls. Then who? Suella, Badenoch, Shapps or maybe Truss redux.
The public have seen this farce for the last four years and precious few are yelling 'encore!'
Mind you, they did handle the handover from one PM to the next in an expert fashion, with that line about the Granita.
If you believe they must be destroyed, then whatever it takes is appropriate.
If you're not prepared to see whatever it takes done then self-evidently you don't actually believe they must be destroyed.
What it does need is the right pair of leaders. Think de Klerk and Mandela, or Trimble and Adams. Might not happen soon, might not happen in our lifetime. But even monolithic cultures aren't totally unchanging.
But both sides desiring peace rather than absolute victory is the only thing that has ever really worked in the long run.
It did make me nostalgic for the Coalition which, in my view, was the best government of my adult life.
Reminder: any aim that requires genocide or other crimes against humanity is wrong.
Aims do NOT justify means.
The real message of current events is that Zionism was always racist, ethnic-supremacist wank. Even senior retired judges are acknowledging by their actions that Jeremy Corbyn was right.
Hamas is a terrorist group - it cannot and will not be destroyed by conventional military actions like the one the Israelis are currently undertaking.
The EU thing was a problem without a solution. We had got ourselves into an EU the form of which in the end meant there was no enthusiastic majority for either IN or OUT.
As regards something like Scottish Independence I think this is where a second chamber with a different mandate is helpful. But I also think if the voters knew that there wouldn't be a referendum, and a majority of SNP MSPs would be able to withdraw Scotland from the Union, that it would change the dynamics of such elections. And the SNP, or at least sufficient of its MSPs, might decide it was unwise to proceed if they failed to receive 50%+1 of the votes at an election as well as a majority of seats.
I think, for example, that it was better when a government would call a GE for a specific mandate when a reform was blocked, as with the People's Budget. I don't think it would have been good to have a referendum on that instead.
I mean the guy/girl is a unintentional comedy genius.
Where they're a lot more toxic is when they get used to make 50:50 decisions. Both Brexit and Sindy fell into those categories. Yes, each one had a winner, but the results were close enough that the losing side had a case to keep going. I very much doubt that 52:48 the other way would have caused Farage, Cummings or any of the others to fold their tents and walk away.
I think it's conservative to say don't make a change unless the case is overwhelming. Sindy has never reached that, and significant unwinding of Brexit hasn't so far.
Firstly, the Coalition Agreement, which is a remarkable document, gave a much clearer plan for the government for the full term than any manifesto. Secondly, the reluctance to change Ministerial posts made people much more responsible for the decisions that they made. Thirdly, the Quartet of Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Alexander properly tested new ideas from a variety of perspectives which kept government cock ups to an acceptable minimum.
It changed my thinking, I would freely admit and weakened the argument for keeping FPTP.
@claudcockerell
Went to (gatecrashed) Nigel Farage's 60th birthday party last night for
@Londoners_Diary
. His half melted ice sculpture will stay with me for many, many years. A lot happened:
Claudia Cockerell
@claudcockerell
·
6h
Farage teased a 'big announcement' in the coming weeks, but said he didn't want to make it on his birthday: 'Why spoil a lovely booze up?'
https://twitter.com/claudcockerell/status/1775862729732935686
If he had imagined that he might lose then he would have taken longer over the renegotiation, been more awkward with the EU in order to get more of what he wanted, and then would have had a better hand to play in the referendum.
I think the common thread, with the AV referendum, with Clinton losing to Trump in 2016, and a number of other things, is a lack of imagination in appreciating why reasonable people might disagree with you, and a general tendency to underestimate uncertainty and natural variation.
(Start at 3:30)
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/apr/04/rain-rain-go-away-groundstaff-fear-worst-on-eve-of-new-cricket-season
Ashley Giles is now saying that the ground might have to be abandoned, and Worcestershire find a different permanent home.
https://twitter.com/Conservatives/status/1775882749921911191
One imagines Rishi's next royal audience might be frank. Perhaps bordering on direct.
As an example he clearly early on called UKIP a bunch of fruitcakes and racists and said he wanted his party to stop banging on about Europe. But never took on his party to explain why that was such a bad thing.
Or on immigration. The pledge to cut it to the "tens of thousands" was farcical from the start given it was not in his gift. But he kept it anyway rather than make the argument that levels of immigration are generally to do with structural issues with the economy rather than governments "letting everyone in".
He said he'd initially match Labour's spending plans but then decided it was to his advantage to impose bigger than strictly needed cuts outside health for which we are now paying the price in the hope it would leave room to cut taxes.
Made great virtue of his green credentials but then started saying he wanted to "cut the green crap" - despite energy transition perhaps being the few parts of his legacy he can be a bit proud of.
The result was that his party inevitably reverted to type and its baser instincts the moment it felt electorally secure. It's like if Blair and Brown had instead of governing as New Labour had started saying, well that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, they may look like a pair of idiots but they kind of have a point.
Countless terrorist groups have been destroyed by conventional military actions down the years.
Exterminating half a million people to get rid of 30,000 Hamas operatives is a moral outrage. Remove the 30,000 by as clinical a means as is practicable with as little collateral as possible is fine.
You are a moral vacuum.
At least we never got the chaos under that Miliband.
I could be one Hamas operative, it could be 500,000. The term used by Bart was "whatever it takes". He also calculated his half a million by extrapolating the 250,000 dead in the second Gulf War and multiplying according to the severity of the foe.
Blackadder: [very long pause] Yes, I can. My friend is a missionary and on his last visit abroad brought back with him the chief of a famous tribe. His name is Great Boo. He's been suffering from sleeping sickness and he's obviously just woken because as you've heard, Great Boo's up.
I mean EVERYBODY knows that "True" Tories HATE King Charles!
A Hamas that is no longer running Gaza as its own corrupt fiefdom, has lost its most able leadership, and the infrastructure it uses to arm and protect itself is far less dangerous than it was. There should be intense focus on how we get there with the minimum of bloodshed rather than so much impotent handwringing.
Unless Tony Blair gets held to account for war crimes, I fail to see why what Israel did which is less damaging than what we did is a crime, but what we did is not.
It's the Conservative way.
I would suggest that major Constitutional change should require a Supermajority, and to have been in the parties manifesto. I would suggest a 2/3 majority.
Not only would this mean that there was a decisive majority in favour of the change, but also would mean that the Parliament would be committed to implementing it.