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Divide and conquer? Betting on the October 19th by-elections – politicalbetting.com

SystemSystem Posts: 12,114
edited October 2023 in General
imageDivide and conquer? Betting on the October 19th by-elections – politicalbetting.com

October 19th sees two by-elections, both in similarly safe Tory seats. The bookies (and presumably punters) rate the Tory chances as fairly different in the two seats. I’m not sure that’s right.

Read the full story here

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Comments

  • GIN1138GIN1138 Posts: 22,120
    edited October 2023
    I think Labour will take both seats.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,114
    2nd (like the Tories at best)
  • GIN1138GIN1138 Posts: 22,120
    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 23,302
    The moronic non-decision for the two opposition parties to fail to do a deal in mid-Beds will mean both Labour and the Liberals will lose and a deeply unpopular Tory party will sneak through the middle. Hubris.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,114

    The moronic non-decision for the two opposition parties to fail to do a deal in mid-Beds will mean both Labour and the Liberals will lose and a deeply unpopular Tory party will sneak through the middle. Hubris.

    How is it hubris? As a party they should aim to win seats, not just unseat another parties MP at any cost. Make your case as to why your party deserves the vote.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 41,903
    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    Economically 74, politically 97,
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail
  • GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    FWIW, I think Labour are heading for a modest overall majority, similar to what they would have got in 1997 if John Smith had still been their leader.
  • bigglesbiggles Posts: 5,843
    I’ll say it again, only those who don’t know the seat think the LibDems can “legitimately challenge” in Mid Beds. At best they are a spoiler vote that will keep the Tories in.
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    FPT
    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .

    Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.

    There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .

    Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .



    But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised

    I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
    Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
    Absolutely. No good outcomes

    If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?

    I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line

    As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong

    The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
    With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.

    So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.

    Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
    That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.

    Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
    "war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
    The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".

    They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
    Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.

    If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
    How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
    They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
    Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.

    I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
    There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.

    But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
    It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.

    It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
    You seem pretty conflicted about it all.

    Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.

    I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
    This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
    Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
    See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,676
    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    We probably need a forum of PB members to define the rules of engagement for Israel in their war.
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    "Clearly they cannot do that" - I mean, clearly they shouldn't do that, but it has been what successive Israeli governments have effectively been building towards. I think if the order was given, the Israeli army would do it. The question is would anyone in the international community stop them?
  • bigglesbiggles Posts: 5,843
    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    Picking up on posts by you and others in the previous thread, any answer that creates long term peace is clearly going to have to involve trousers full of cash making the average Palestinian wealthy and disinterested in conflict. Literally “give them $1m dollars and some land in Egypt” type money.

    One real issue is that Israel already offered them the best two state deal they were ever going to get, and the settling since then now makes even that deal impossible. So those of us who grew up hoping for a two state solution now have to accept that possibility has gone. In it’s absence the answer has to be obscene amounts of cash.
  • Mid Beds: Labour to win, LD second. 2k majority
    Tamworth: Labour to win. 8k majority

    Lying Tories are done.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    "The Israeli Ambassador in Washington: The number of Israeli deaths may be much more than 800"

    https://x.com/WarMonitors/status/1711385433341370483?s=20

    Is this even possible? Are they still literally finding bodies?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    biggles said:

    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    Picking up on posts by you and others in the previous thread, any answer that creates long term peace is clearly going to have to involve trousers full of cash making the average Palestinian wealthy and disinterested in conflict. Literally “give them $1m dollars and some land in Egypt” type money.

    One real issue is that Israel already offered them the best two state deal they were ever going to get, and the settling since then now makes even that deal impossible. So those of us who grew up hoping for a two state solution now have to accept that possibility has gone. In it’s absence the answer has to be obscene amounts of cash.
    Yep
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,139
    biggles said:

    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    Picking up on posts by you and others in the previous thread, any answer that creates long term peace is clearly going to have to involve trousers full of cash making the average Palestinian wealthy and disinterested in conflict. Literally “give them $1m dollars and some land in Egypt” type money.

    One real issue is that Israel already offered them the best two state deal they were ever going to get, and the settling since then now makes even that deal impossible. So those of us who grew up hoping for a two state solution now have to accept that possibility has gone. In it’s absence the answer has to be obscene amounts of cash.
    As bin Laden showed on 9/11, having insane amounts of cash does not stop evil shitheads being evil shitheads. They just become evil shitheads with insane amounts of cash.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,676
    edited October 2023
    148grss said:

    FPT

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .

    Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.

    There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .

    Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .



    But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised

    I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
    Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
    Absolutely. No good outcomes

    If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?

    I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line

    As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong

    The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
    With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.

    So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.

    Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
    That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.

    Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
    "war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
    The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".

    They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
    Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.

    If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
    How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
    They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
    Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.

    I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
    There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.

    But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
    It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.

    It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
    You seem pretty conflicted about it all.

    Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.

    I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
    This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
    Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
    See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
    And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.

    This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.

    In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.

    We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,216
    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    For now, Israel has international support for whatever it chooses as its next step.
    I have considerable sympathy with that.
    But that doesn't include full scale genocide.

    I have no more idea than you how this ends - but it's noteworthy that the two sides still appear to be talking, even if via proxies.
    (Guardian) Qatar’s foreign ministry confirmed to Reuters that it is involved in mediation talks with Hamas and Israel, including over a possible prisoner swap.

    “We are in constant contact with all sides at the moment. Our priorities are to end the bloodshed, release the prisoners and make sure the conflict is contained with no regional spillover,” foreign ministry spokesperson Majed Al-Ansari told Reuters...


    Note also that much of their senior leadership don't live in Gaza. Future 'Munich' style responses are also possible.

  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,216
    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    We probably need a forum of PB members to define the rules of engagement for Israel in their war.
    With you putting the case for unrestricted warfare ?
  • bigglesbiggles Posts: 5,843
    edited October 2023

    biggles said:

    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    Picking up on posts by you and others in the previous thread, any answer that creates long term peace is clearly going to have to involve trousers full of cash making the average Palestinian wealthy and disinterested in conflict. Literally “give them $1m dollars and some land in Egypt” type money.

    One real issue is that Israel already offered them the best two state deal they were ever going to get, and the settling since then now makes even that deal impossible. So those of us who grew up hoping for a two state solution now have to accept that possibility has gone. In it’s absence the answer has to be obscene amounts of cash.
    As bin Laden showed on 9/11, having insane amounts of cash does not stop evil shitheads being evil shitheads. They just become evil shitheads with insane amounts of cash.
    It doesn’t stop people like him, but it buys off the foot soldiers. Violence (at scale) is usually caused by young men with no jobs, no sense of self respect, and no sex.

    Mega cash fixes all those things.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,676
    Nigelb said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    We probably need a forum of PB members to define the rules of engagement for Israel in their war.
    With you putting the case for unrestricted warfare ?
    I think you'll find that the PB commentators on this war, and the one in Ukraine, don't need my help.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,676
    biggles said:

    biggles said:

    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    Picking up on posts by you and others in the previous thread, any answer that creates long term peace is clearly going to have to involve trousers full of cash making the average Palestinian wealthy and disinterested in conflict. Literally “give them $1m dollars and some land in Egypt” type money.

    One real issue is that Israel already offered them the best two state deal they were ever going to get, and the settling since then now makes even that deal impossible. So those of us who grew up hoping for a two state solution now have to accept that possibility has gone. In it’s absence the answer has to be obscene amounts of cash.
    As bin Laden showed on 9/11, having insane amounts of cash does not stop evil shitheads being evil shitheads. They just become evil shitheads with insane amounts of cash.
    It doesn’t stop people like him, but it buys off the foot soldiers. Violence (at scale) is usually caused by young men with no jobs, no sense of self respect, and no sex.

    Mega cash fixes all those things.
    Is that why Hartlepool is preparing to launch a ground offensive against Middlesbrough?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    If you think the fellow travellers in the UK are bad.....


    “And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters” [crowd cheers and whoops]

    Speeches held at the ‘All Out For Palestine’ protest outside the Israeli Consulate in New York"

    https://x.com/BGOnTheScene/status/1711145162657673347?s=20
  • 148grss said:

    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    "Clearly they cannot do that" - I mean, clearly they shouldn't do that, but it has been what successive Israeli governments have effectively been building towards. I think if the order was given, the Israeli army would do it. The question is would anyone in the international community stop them?
    That is just ridiculous, the Israelis have been building to nothing like that whatsoever.

    There may be collateral damage when there is fighting, as there is anywhere, but the Israelis unlike the Russians or Chinese are not going for war crimes and mass casualties.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,139
    biggles said:

    biggles said:

    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    Picking up on posts by you and others in the previous thread, any answer that creates long term peace is clearly going to have to involve trousers full of cash making the average Palestinian wealthy and disinterested in conflict. Literally “give them $1m dollars and some land in Egypt” type money.

    One real issue is that Israel already offered them the best two state deal they were ever going to get, and the settling since then now makes even that deal impossible. So those of us who grew up hoping for a two state solution now have to accept that possibility has gone. In it’s absence the answer has to be obscene amounts of cash.
    As bin Laden showed on 9/11, having insane amounts of cash does not stop evil shitheads being evil shitheads. They just become evil shitheads with insane amounts of cash.
    It doesn’t stop people like him, but it buys off the foot soldiers. Violence (at scale) is usually caused by young men with no jobs, no sense of self respect, and no sex.

    Mega cash fixes all those things.
    How were the attackers who took the planes on 9/11 bought off? There will always be such young men who are looking for evil shitheads to give them direction.
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    TOPPING said:

    148grss said:

    FPT

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .

    Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.

    There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .

    Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .



    But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised

    I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
    Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
    Absolutely. No good outcomes

    If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?

    I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line

    As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong

    The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
    With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.

    So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.

    Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
    That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.

    Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
    "war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
    The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".

    They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
    Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.

    If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
    How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
    They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
    Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.

    I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
    There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.

    But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
    It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.

    It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
    You seem pretty conflicted about it all.

    Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.

    I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
    This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
    Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
    See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
    And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.

    This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.

    In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.

    We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
    But Palestinian people could use that exact argument about the attack made by Hamas over the weekend - in your world view why shouldn't Hamas be able to look at the crimes committed by the state of Israel and say "we do not care about the distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Israeli and the Israeli's who, in their hundreds of thousands, march through our business districts and destroy our businesses or steal our houses or destroy our olive trees or kill our children"?

    Your logic is the logic of the Montagues and Capulets, and the Prince of Cats himself - "peace; I hate the word".
  • Leon said:

    If you think the fellow travellers in the UK are bad.....


    “And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters” [crowd cheers and whoops]

    Speeches held at the ‘All Out For Palestine’ protest outside the Israeli Consulate in New York"

    https://x.com/BGOnTheScene/status/1711145162657673347?s=20

    Presumably that name came from a Cricket fan then?
  • bigglesbiggles Posts: 5,843
    edited October 2023
    TOPPING said:

    biggles said:

    biggles said:

    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    Picking up on posts by you and others in the previous thread, any answer that creates long term peace is clearly going to have to involve trousers full of cash making the average Palestinian wealthy and disinterested in conflict. Literally “give them $1m dollars and some land in Egypt” type money.

    One real issue is that Israel already offered them the best two state deal they were ever going to get, and the settling since then now makes even that deal impossible. So those of us who grew up hoping for a two state solution now have to accept that possibility has gone. In it’s absence the answer has to be obscene amounts of cash.
    As bin Laden showed on 9/11, having insane amounts of cash does not stop evil shitheads being evil shitheads. They just become evil shitheads with insane amounts of cash.
    It doesn’t stop people like him, but it buys off the foot soldiers. Violence (at scale) is usually caused by young men with no jobs, no sense of self respect, and no sex.

    Mega cash fixes all those things.
    Is that why Hartlepool is preparing to launch a ground offensive against Middlesbrough?
    Not for the most part, because we institutionally make sure they have cash…. Part of why we have a benefits system is so folk who otherwise might get violent drink themselves into a stupor, or have silly fights outside Wetherspoons, instead. We don’t actually bother to do anything constructive to get them back into the workforce because we can’t be bothered.
  • AlanbrookeAlanbrooke Posts: 25,302
    edited October 2023
    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 59,872
    Gaza will be Battle of Algiers, I think.
  • GhedebravGhedebrav Posts: 3,860
    On topic, Tamworth to Labour, Mid Beds to Cons (albeit v tight).
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,216
    biggles said:

    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    Picking up on posts by you and others in the previous thread, any answer that creates long term peace is clearly going to have to involve trousers full of cash making the average Palestinian wealthy and disinterested in conflict. Literally “give them $1m dollars and some land in Egypt” type money.

    One real issue is that Israel already offered them the best two state deal they were ever going to get, and the settling since then now makes even that deal impossible. So those of us who grew up hoping for a two state solution now have to accept that possibility has gone. In it’s absence the answer has to be obscene amounts of cash.
    Autonomy, and the prospect of economic development, while they would require wads of cash, are likely rather more important than the cash itself.

    And there isn't enough money from amy source to give a couple of million people £1m - setting aside the fact that any country, Egypt included, is going to require a great deal of (costly) persuasion to contemplate the idea.

    In any event, who is likely to offer such largesse as a reward for terrorism ?

    An economic solution might have been feasible a decade or so back (I think we discussed it here before sometime, in the aftermath of Iraq), but right now ?
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,676
    148grss said:

    TOPPING said:

    148grss said:

    FPT

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .

    Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.

    There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .

    Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .



    But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised

    I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
    Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
    Absolutely. No good outcomes

    If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?

    I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line

    As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong

    The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
    With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.

    So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.

    Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
    That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.

    Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
    "war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
    The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".

    They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
    Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.

    If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
    How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
    They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
    Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.

    I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
    There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.

    But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
    It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.

    It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
    You seem pretty conflicted about it all.

    Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.

    I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
    This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
    Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
    See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
    And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.

    This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.

    In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.

    We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
    But Palestinian people could use that exact argument about the attack made by Hamas over the weekend - in your world view why shouldn't Hamas be able to look at the crimes committed by the state of Israel and say "we do not care about the distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Israeli and the Israeli's who, in their hundreds of thousands, march through our business districts and destroy our businesses or steal our houses or destroy our olive trees or kill our children"?

    Your logic is the logic of the Montagues and Capulets, and the Prince of Cats himself - "peace; I hate the word".
    I am very clear about what arguments the Palestinian people used to justify the attack. They want to terrorise Israel so as to make them leave (the West Bank presumably for starters, and the Middle East as an endgame).

    I perfectly well understand the reasons for their actions. I assume also they will have anticipated potential responses and we shall see which one of them Israel decides upon.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,216
    TOPPING said:

    Nigelb said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    We probably need a forum of PB members to define the rules of engagement for Israel in their war.
    With you putting the case for unrestricted warfare ?
    I think you'll find that the PB commentators on this war, and the one in Ukraine, don't need my help.
    You are a commentator too.
  • bigglesbiggles Posts: 5,843

    biggles said:

    biggles said:

    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    Picking up on posts by you and others in the previous thread, any answer that creates long term peace is clearly going to have to involve trousers full of cash making the average Palestinian wealthy and disinterested in conflict. Literally “give them $1m dollars and some land in Egypt” type money.

    One real issue is that Israel already offered them the best two state deal they were ever going to get, and the settling since then now makes even that deal impossible. So those of us who grew up hoping for a two state solution now have to accept that possibility has gone. In it’s absence the answer has to be obscene amounts of cash.
    As bin Laden showed on 9/11, having insane amounts of cash does not stop evil shitheads being evil shitheads. They just become evil shitheads with insane amounts of cash.
    It doesn’t stop people like him, but it buys off the foot soldiers. Violence (at scale) is usually caused by young men with no jobs, no sense of self respect, and no sex.

    Mega cash fixes all those things.
    How were the attackers who took the planes on 9/11 bought off? There will always be such young men who are looking for evil shitheads to give them direction.
    You’re missing the point. You can’t buy off small numbers of dedicated terrorists, but you can buy off the Arab street.
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155

    148grss said:

    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    "Clearly they cannot do that" - I mean, clearly they shouldn't do that, but it has been what successive Israeli governments have effectively been building towards. I think if the order was given, the Israeli army would do it. The question is would anyone in the international community stop them?
    That is just ridiculous, the Israelis have been building to nothing like that whatsoever.

    There may be collateral damage when there is fighting, as there is anywhere, but the Israelis unlike the Russians or Chinese are not going for war crimes and mass casualties.
    Amnesty International, alongside many other reputable organisations (and disreputable ones, like the UN), would disagree:

    https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/report-israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,068
    Leon said:

    If you think the fellow travellers in the UK are bad.....


    “And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters” [crowd cheers and whoops]

    Speeches held at the ‘All Out For Palestine’ protest outside the Israeli Consulate in New York"

    https://x.com/BGOnTheScene/status/1711145162657673347?s=20

    I briefly had a Labour councillor who turned out to be an admirer of Hitler. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-36009544. She had previously been Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick Students Union. Strange as it may seem, there are people who think they are anti-racist, at the same time that they hate Jews.
  • bigglesbiggles Posts: 5,843
    Nigelb said:

    biggles said:

    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    Picking up on posts by you and others in the previous thread, any answer that creates long term peace is clearly going to have to involve trousers full of cash making the average Palestinian wealthy and disinterested in conflict. Literally “give them $1m dollars and some land in Egypt” type money.

    One real issue is that Israel already offered them the best two state deal they were ever going to get, and the settling since then now makes even that deal impossible. So those of us who grew up hoping for a two state solution now have to accept that possibility has gone. In it’s absence the answer has to be obscene amounts of cash.
    Autonomy, and the prospect of economic development, while they would require wads of cash, are likely rather more important than the cash itself.

    And there isn't enough money from amy source to give a couple of million people £1m - setting aside the fact that any country, Egypt included, is going to require a great deal of (costly) persuasion to contemplate the idea.

    In any event, who is likely to offer such largesse as a reward for terrorism ?

    An economic solution might have been feasible a decade or so back (I think we discussed it here before sometime, in the aftermath of Iraq), but right now ?
    Don’t disagree. I don’t see any workable solution. The two state solution has gone, but there’s no incentive for any Arab country to do anything but back it (at best).

    Basically, I wouldn’t start from here….
  • Sean_F said:

    Leon said:

    If you think the fellow travellers in the UK are bad.....


    “And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters” [crowd cheers and whoops]

    Speeches held at the ‘All Out For Palestine’ protest outside the Israeli Consulate in New York"

    https://x.com/BGOnTheScene/status/1711145162657673347?s=20

    I briefly had a Labour councillor who turned out to be an admirer of Hitler. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-36009544. She had previously been Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick Students Union. Strange as it may seem, there are people who think they are anti-racist, at the same time that they hate Jews.
    Why I am not surprised it was Warwick Students Union...
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    edited October 2023
    Sean_F said:

    Leon said:

    If you think the fellow travellers in the UK are bad.....


    “And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters” [crowd cheers and whoops]

    Speeches held at the ‘All Out For Palestine’ protest outside the Israeli Consulate in New York"

    https://x.com/BGOnTheScene/status/1711145162657673347?s=20

    I briefly had a Labour councillor who turned out to be an admirer of Hitler. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-36009544. She had previously been Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick Students Union. Strange as it may seem, there are people who think they are anti-racist, at the same time that they hate Jews.
    A friend of mine has recently bought a small house in Provence. He is getting to know his French neighbours, including a sweet older lady; she told him of the best places to find truffles, in the nearby woods. Then she told him he was very lucky to have such information, and she laughingly added


    "We have a saying, you can tell the German where to find the Jew, but you never tell him where to find the truffle"

  • GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
  • FairlieredFairliered Posts: 4,860
    I had some sympathy for the Palestinians, but if Maggie Chapman is on their side, all sympathy has evaporated.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Clearly a sub sample, but that SNP number is hilarious, and surely a record?
  • bigglesbiggles Posts: 5,843
    Sean_F said:

    Leon said:

    If you think the fellow travellers in the UK are bad.....


    “And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters” [crowd cheers and whoops]

    Speeches held at the ‘All Out For Palestine’ protest outside the Israeli Consulate in New York"

    https://x.com/BGOnTheScene/status/1711145162657673347?s=20

    I briefly had a Labour councillor who turned out to be an admirer of Hitler. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-36009544. She had previously been Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick Students Union. Strange as it may seem, there are people who think they are anti-racist, at the same time that they hate Jews.
    “The greatest man in history”? Blimey. Eva Braun would demur from that.
  • AlanbrookeAlanbrooke Posts: 25,302

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Cameron didnt have enough active support to make people vote for him. I find Starmer the same.
  • bigglesbiggles Posts: 5,843

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Cameron didnt have enough active support to make people vote for him. I find Starmer the same.
    Completely agree. We’ve all forgotten how much Brown clawed back vs. Cameron in the polls. That’s why I don’t write off Labour falling short.

    I await Lord Osborne in the Lord Mandelson role for the analogy to be complete.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,006
    Ghedebrav said:

    On topic, Tamworth to Labour, Mid Beds to Cons (albeit v tight).

    Both will be very close. It could be the other way round just as easily.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,676
    Sean_F said:

    Leon said:

    If you think the fellow travellers in the UK are bad.....


    “And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters” [crowd cheers and whoops]

    Speeches held at the ‘All Out For Palestine’ protest outside the Israeli Consulate in New York"

    https://x.com/BGOnTheScene/status/1711145162657673347?s=20

    I briefly had a Labour councillor who turned out to be an admirer of Hitler. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-36009544. She had previously been Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick Students Union. Strange as it may seem, there are people who think they are anti-racist, at the same time that they hate Jews.
    Not strange at all. People think they are punching up when they hate Jews because the Jews control the world.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 23,302

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    @Mexicanpete please explain
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,216

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Cameron didnt have enough active support to make people vote for him. I find Starmer the same.
    There was a residual amount of sympathy for Labour, I think, back then.
    I'm not sure that is the case for the current incarnation of the Conservatives.

    Also, the LibDems had a much higher base from 2005.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 23,302
    Leon said:

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Clearly a sub sample, but that SNP number is hilarious, and surely a record?
    How is it a subsample? It's a GB-wide poll.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 23,302
    Andy_JS said:

    Ghedebrav said:

    On topic, Tamworth to Labour, Mid Beds to Cons (albeit v tight).

    Both will be very close. It could be the other way round just as easily.
    Lab and the Libs will only have themselves to blame if neither takes Mid Beds. A deal should have been done.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,006
    Leon said:

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Clearly a sub sample, but that SNP number is hilarious, and surely a record?
    It isn't a sub-sample. But how it would relate to a Scottish share for the SNP is difficult to say.
  • AlanbrookeAlanbrooke Posts: 25,302
    Nigelb said:

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Cameron didnt have enough active support to make people vote for him. I find Starmer the same.
    There was a residual amount of sympathy for Labour, I think, back then.
    I'm not sure that is the case for the current incarnation of the Conservatives.

    Also, the LibDems had a much higher base from 2005.
    In 2010 I voted against Brown not for Cameron. Sunak is just sort of there and doesnt inspire a counter vote.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,068
    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    Leon said:

    If you think the fellow travellers in the UK are bad.....


    “And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters” [crowd cheers and whoops]

    Speeches held at the ‘All Out For Palestine’ protest outside the Israeli Consulate in New York"

    https://x.com/BGOnTheScene/status/1711145162657673347?s=20

    I briefly had a Labour councillor who turned out to be an admirer of Hitler. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-36009544. She had previously been Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick Students Union. Strange as it may seem, there are people who think they are anti-racist, at the same time that they hate Jews.
    A friend of mine has recently bought a small house in Provence. He is getting to know his French neighbours, including a sweet older lady; she told him of the best places to find truffles, in the nearby woods. Then she told him he was very lucky to have such information, and she laughingly added


    "We have a saying, you can tell the German where to find the Jew, but you never tell him where to find the truffle"

    A friend of mine married a Polish woman whose friends back home will, after a few drinks, say things like "We hated the Germans, but at least they got rid of the Jews." One old guy even described it as "pest control."
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 41,903
    TOPPING said:

    148grss said:

    FPT

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .

    Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.

    There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .

    Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .



    But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised

    I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
    Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
    Absolutely. No good outcomes

    If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?

    I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line

    As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong

    The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
    With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.

    So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.

    Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
    That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.

    Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
    "war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
    The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".

    They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
    Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.

    If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
    How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
    They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
    Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.

    I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
    There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.

    But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
    It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.

    It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
    You seem pretty conflicted about it all.

    Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.

    I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
    This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
    Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
    See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
    And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.

    This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.

    In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.

    We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
    You're an odd fruit sometimes.

    On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.

    Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 13,677
    biggles said:

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Cameron didnt have enough active support to make people vote for him. I find Starmer the same.
    Completely agree. We’ve all forgotten how much Brown clawed back vs. Cameron in the polls. That’s why I don’t write off Labour falling short.

    I await Lord Osborne in the Lord Mandelson role for the analogy to be complete.
    Cummings will be The Prince That Was Promised.
  • GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    Really? Every election is different, of course, but there are at least a couple of key differences that are immediately obvious.

    One is that Labour have enjoyed a substantial and sustained polling lead as they did in 1997 - polling was less intensive in the early 1970s and varied quite a bit, but in general Labour had a slim lead in the months leading up to the campaign and the Tories led most polls in the campaign.

    Another is that the Tories had been in for a long period by 1997, whereas Heath had been in for less than four years.

    I agree the economic backdrop is more 1974 than 1997, but polls and sentiment about the incumbent party do matter quite a lot.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,676
    edited October 2023
    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    148grss said:

    FPT

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .

    Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.

    There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .

    Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .



    But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised

    I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
    Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
    Absolutely. No good outcomes

    If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?

    I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line

    As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong

    The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
    With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.

    So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.

    Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
    That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.

    Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
    "war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
    The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".

    They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
    Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.

    If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
    How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
    They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
    Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.

    I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
    There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.

    But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
    It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.

    It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
    You seem pretty conflicted about it all.

    Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.

    I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
    This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
    Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
    See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
    And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.

    This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.

    In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.

    We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
    You're an odd fruit sometimes.

    On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.

    Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
    You aren't paying attention.

    https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4564114#Comment_4564114

    Edit: and I noted your first comment of the day on the whole thing was to point out that Israel had better not misbehave.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,216

    Nigelb said:

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Cameron didnt have enough active support to make people vote for him. I find Starmer the same.
    There was a residual amount of sympathy for Labour, I think, back then.
    I'm not sure that is the case for the current incarnation of the Conservatives.

    Also, the LibDems had a much higher base from 2005.
    In 2010 I voted against Brown not for Cameron. Sunak is just sort of there and doesnt inspire a counter vote.
    In 2010I voted against Brown; this time I will vote against Sunak - especially after last week.
  • AlanbrookeAlanbrooke Posts: 25,302

    Sinn Fein do a 180 degree turn, clearly dont want to upset the yanks

    https://www.irishtimes.com/world/middle-east/2023/10/09/sinn-fein-leader-mary-lou-mcdonald-condemns-hamas-attack-on-israel-as-truly-horrific/

    Expect Stars of David at he next Celtic match.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557

    Leon said:

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Clearly a sub sample, but that SNP number is hilarious, and surely a record?
    How is it a subsample? It's a GB-wide poll.
    Sorry, my bad

    I mean: you can't extrapolate from such a tiny sample of Scottish voters within the wider poll, it will be horribly inaccurate

    But it is funny
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,666
    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    Leon said:

    If you think the fellow travellers in the UK are bad.....


    “And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters” [crowd cheers and whoops]

    Speeches held at the ‘All Out For Palestine’ protest outside the Israeli Consulate in New York"

    https://x.com/BGOnTheScene/status/1711145162657673347?s=20

    I briefly had a Labour councillor who turned out to be an admirer of Hitler. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-36009544. She had previously been Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick Students Union. Strange as it may seem, there are people who think they are anti-racist, at the same time that they hate Jews.
    A friend of mine has recently bought a small house in Provence. He is getting to know his French neighbours, including a sweet older lady; she told him of the best places to find truffles, in the nearby woods. Then she told him he was very lucky to have such information, and she laughingly added


    "We have a saying, you can tell the German where to find the Jew, but you never tell him where to find the truffle"

    Anti semitism remains an acceptable discrimination in many places. I had a tiler in last week from Romania. Didn’t have many conversations with him but out of nowhere he told me of a Jewish customer he had and him and the boys asking the guy repeatedly if he could smell gas as a joke. It was weird and jarring and I thought at first I must be misunderstanding.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    edited October 2023
    Horrific vids now coming out of Gaza. Dead babies, the works

    Expect the narrative to shift again, especially as this is just the begining, and it will only get worse when the ground invasion begins

    BLEAK
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 23,302
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Clearly a sub sample, but that SNP number is hilarious, and surely a record?
    How is it a subsample? It's a GB-wide poll.
    Sorry, my bad

    I mean: you can't extrapolate from such a tiny sample of Scottish voters within the wider poll, it will be horribly inaccurate

    But it is funny
    Yes, that's fair.
  • SirNorfolkPassmoreSirNorfolkPassmore Posts: 7,120
    edited October 2023

    Leon said:

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Clearly a sub sample, but that SNP number is hilarious, and surely a record?
    How is it a subsample? It's a GB-wide poll.
    You can click the links through to the data tables and it shows SNP level with the Lib Dems on 16% in Scotland, behind the Tories on 17% and Labour on 43%.

    Pretty meaningless, of course - the numbers are trivial (about one person per percentage point in Scotland) and there's no attempt to balance for demographics within each region. I mean, it hasn't been a good few days for the SNP, but they won't realistically be fighting the Lib Dems for 3rd/4th place at the General Election in Scotland.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 41,903
    TOPPING said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    148grss said:

    FPT

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .

    Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.

    There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .

    Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .



    But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised

    I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
    Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
    Absolutely. No good outcomes

    If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?

    I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line

    As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong

    The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
    With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.

    So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.

    Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
    That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.

    Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
    "war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
    The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".

    They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
    Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.

    If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
    How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
    They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
    Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.

    I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
    There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.

    But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
    It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.

    It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
    You seem pretty conflicted about it all.

    Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.

    I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
    This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
    Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
    See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
    And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.

    This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.

    In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.

    We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
    You're an odd fruit sometimes.

    On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.

    Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
    You aren't paying attention.

    https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4564114#Comment_4564114.
    I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
  • bigglesbiggles Posts: 5,843


    Sinn Fein do a 180 degree turn, clearly dont want to upset the yanks

    https://www.irishtimes.com/world/middle-east/2023/10/09/sinn-fein-leader-mary-lou-mcdonald-condemns-hamas-attack-on-israel-as-truly-horrific/

    Expect Stars of David at he next Celtic match.

    FFS:

    “Looking at scenes where a lot of young people were out, enjoying themselves and, to me it was such a violent and traumatic death, it is just truly horrific, and I understand perfectly the sense of trauma that’s been expressed”.

    This obviously doesn’t apply in Brum.
  • AlanbrookeAlanbrooke Posts: 25,302
    Nigelb said:

    Nigelb said:

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Cameron didnt have enough active support to make people vote for him. I find Starmer the same.
    There was a residual amount of sympathy for Labour, I think, back then.
    I'm not sure that is the case for the current incarnation of the Conservatives.

    Also, the LibDems had a much higher base from 2005.
    In 2010 I voted against Brown not for Cameron. Sunak is just sort of there and doesnt inspire a counter vote.
    In 2010I voted against Brown; this time I will vote against Sunak - especially after last week.
    well good luck I havent decided who to vote for or indeed if Ill bother. The BoJo election was the first one I couldnt even be arsed to vote.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,006
    Leon said:

    Horrific vids now coming out of Gaza. Dead babies, the works

    Expect the narrative to shift again, especially as this is just the begining, and it will only get worse when the ground invasion begins

    BLEAK

    I'm trying to avoid these videos by just listening to the news on the radio.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,676
    So people will hit the polling booths and think either:

    a) thank god my chance to get rid of the Tories they have truly fucked the country and Lab is the party to save us; or
    b) where is the vision of a Lab govt and why will they be different from what I have today? I prefer nursey and the Cons flavour of boring technocrat if I am going to have a boring technocrat.

    Neither do I buy the voxpops from eg WatO from Lab activists saying that previous Cons voters won't vote rather than vote for today's Cons. I think they may well vote Cons again.

    Take me (go on, take me). As a previous Cons voter I can't see myself voting Lab, because I don't want to vote for a party that actively dislikes me, so might well end up voting Cons, especially as the Brexit nutjobs are largely gone.

    Plus how much of Reform's 8% will (revert) to the Cons in the ballot box. Quite a lot I imagine.
  • Andy_JS said:

    Ghedebrav said:

    On topic, Tamworth to Labour, Mid Beds to Cons (albeit v tight).

    Both will be very close. It could be the other way round just as easily.
    I'm feeling a decent 5k Maj win for Lab in Tamworth, a history there of Lab representation and given the circumstances re: bum Pincher. Mid Beds much trickier, the Cons could just sneak through the middle and hang on, just...
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,179


    Sinn Fein do a 180 degree turn, clearly dont want to upset the yanks

    https://www.irishtimes.com/world/middle-east/2023/10/09/sinn-fein-leader-mary-lou-mcdonald-condemns-hamas-attack-on-israel-as-truly-horrific/

    Expect Stars of David at he next Celtic match.

    Gerry Adams hasn't got the memo:

    https://twitter.com/GerryAdamsSF/status/1711081616133525843
  • 148grss said:

    148grss said:

    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    "Clearly they cannot do that" - I mean, clearly they shouldn't do that, but it has been what successive Israeli governments have effectively been building towards. I think if the order was given, the Israeli army would do it. The question is would anyone in the international community stop them?
    That is just ridiculous, the Israelis have been building to nothing like that whatsoever.

    There may be collateral damage when there is fighting, as there is anywhere, but the Israelis unlike the Russians or Chinese are not going for war crimes and mass casualties.
    Amnesty International, alongside many other reputable organisations (and disreputable ones, like the UN), would disagree:

    https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/report-israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/
    Amnesty aren't an especially reputable organisation (they have an agenda), but even still I can't see anything skimming through their page that remotely matches what you've said.

    Please say where in Amnesty's page rather than your own hallucinations or raging antisemitism that it says that the Israelis are building towards killing everyone.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 27,993

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    @Mexicanpete please explain
    MoE (more or less)

    After Rutherglen I am less confident of a Tory victory. But I remember 1992. Best not to keep one's hopes up.
  • AlanbrookeAlanbrooke Posts: 25,302
    Leon said:

    Horrific vids now coming out of Gaza. Dead babies, the works

    Expect the narrative to shift again, especially as this is just the begining, and it will only get worse when the ground invasion begins

    BLEAK

    The media has been splitting in to camps. Al Jazeera unsurprisingly has been showing misery in Palestine , Sky has been wobbling on the fence and GB News has been pro Israel.
    Listening to the Hamas bloke on WATO he spent most of the interview lying it was like Comical Ali in a grim sense.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 59,872
    Sean_F said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    Leon said:

    If you think the fellow travellers in the UK are bad.....


    “And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters” [crowd cheers and whoops]

    Speeches held at the ‘All Out For Palestine’ protest outside the Israeli Consulate in New York"

    https://x.com/BGOnTheScene/status/1711145162657673347?s=20

    I briefly had a Labour councillor who turned out to be an admirer of Hitler. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-36009544. She had previously been Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick Students Union. Strange as it may seem, there are people who think they are anti-racist, at the same time that they hate Jews.
    A friend of mine has recently bought a small house in Provence. He is getting to know his French neighbours, including a sweet older lady; she told him of the best places to find truffles, in the nearby woods. Then she told him he was very lucky to have such information, and she laughingly added


    "We have a saying, you can tell the German where to find the Jew, but you never tell him where to find the truffle"

    A friend of mine married a Polish woman whose friends back home will, after a few drinks, say things like "We hated the Germans, but at least they got rid of the Jews." One old guy even described it as "pest control."
    Bloody hell.
  • Big_G_NorthWalesBig_G_NorthWales Posts: 62,631
    edited October 2023
    Hamas official live on Sky denies any civilians have been killed

    Why give them airtime
  • Andy_JS said:

    Leon said:

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Clearly a sub sample, but that SNP number is hilarious, and surely a record?
    It isn't a sub-sample. But how it would relate to a Scottish share for the SNP is difficult to say.
    From the detailed table on the R&W website :https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-gb-voting-intention-8-october-2023/ we have the following Scottish Sub-Sample

    C 17
    L 43
    LD 16
    SNP 16
    G 7

    Ha, Ha, Ha....
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 17,972
    Leon said:

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Clearly a sub sample, but that SNP number is hilarious, and surely a record?
    A subsample, so only for fun.
    Lab 43%
    Con 17%
    Lib Dem 16%
    SNP 16%
    It often happens after a by-election that the winning party does well, and the losing party does badly, in subsequent opinion polls. People like to back the winner.
  • theakestheakes Posts: 927
    Biggies: I will say it again the indications on the ground are of the Lib Dem support growing. 3 weeks ago a Labour commissioned poll gave the Lib Dems 22%, read into this what you want. The "yellows" say it is going to be close, a phrase they usually use when they feel they are in the box seat, simply to gel up their membership to campaign. That appears to have been effective as they claim to have had "hundreds through the door this weekend". I am withholding betting on them as I feel they could go out to at least 9-2 at William Hill.
    What we do not know is whether there is going to be another Labour commissioned poll this week "leaked" to the Guardian. My gut feeling is that if there is not then Labour are slipping.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 59,872
    biggles said:

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Cameron didnt have enough active support to make people vote for him. I find Starmer the same.
    Completely agree. We’ve all forgotten how much Brown clawed back vs. Cameron in the polls. That’s why I don’t write off Labour falling short.

    I await Lord Osborne in the Lord Mandelson role for the analogy to be complete.
    Cameron lost it in January by shitting the bed on Lisbon, and then droning on and on about The Big Society.

    Remember that?

    He'd have probably got his majority if he'd stuck to a referendum on Lisbon. He didn't want to, though, nor pander to the sorts of voters who might be interested in that, and so he didn't win.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,676
    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    148grss said:

    FPT

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .

    Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.

    There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .

    Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .



    But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised

    I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
    Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
    Absolutely. No good outcomes

    If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?

    I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line

    As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong

    The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
    With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.

    So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.

    Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
    That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.

    Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
    "war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
    The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".

    They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
    Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.

    If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
    How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
    They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
    Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.

    I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
    There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.

    But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
    It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.

    It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
    You seem pretty conflicted about it all.

    Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.

    I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
    This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
    Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
    See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
    And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.

    This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.

    In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.

    We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
    You're an odd fruit sometimes.

    On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.

    Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
    You aren't paying attention.

    https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4564114#Comment_4564114.
    I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
    I am extremely clear on why Hamas attacked Israel. I am extremely clear on why Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked them in 1948. And in 1967. And 1973. And 2023.

    They attacked them because they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. In each instance they failed and in trying they got themselves into quite a pickle.

    Has Israel behaved as you or indeed I would have wished them to over the past 70 years? I'm sure not. But it's useful idiots like you who think that if Israel had only been a bit nicer over the period everyone would be holding hands and making daisy chains together.

    You think that I am excusing Israel's behaviour to the Palestinians on the one hand and ignoring the fact that this might be a root cause of this weekend's actions. Just like I seek to understand the reasons for Putin's actions.

    I am here to educate you that for centuries and most recently decades the Arab world (and of course others) has been antipathetic to the Jews and hence this weekend's actions are a symptom of that hatred.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,139
    biggles said:

    biggles said:

    biggles said:

    Leon said:

    What does Israel do if they invade Gaza, and every Gazan rises up and tries to fight them, with rocks and sticks if necessary?

    Kill them all??

    Clearly they cannot do that, so it is possible this “invasion” might fail

    Picking up on posts by you and others in the previous thread, any answer that creates long term peace is clearly going to have to involve trousers full of cash making the average Palestinian wealthy and disinterested in conflict. Literally “give them $1m dollars and some land in Egypt” type money.

    One real issue is that Israel already offered them the best two state deal they were ever going to get, and the settling since then now makes even that deal impossible. So those of us who grew up hoping for a two state solution now have to accept that possibility has gone. In it’s absence the answer has to be obscene amounts of cash.
    As bin Laden showed on 9/11, having insane amounts of cash does not stop evil shitheads being evil shitheads. They just become evil shitheads with insane amounts of cash.
    It doesn’t stop people like him, but it buys off the foot soldiers. Violence (at scale) is usually caused by young men with no jobs, no sense of self respect, and no sex.

    Mega cash fixes all those things.
    How were the attackers who took the planes on 9/11 bought off? There will always be such young men who are looking for evil shitheads to give them direction.
    You’re missing the point. You can’t buy off small numbers of dedicated terrorists, but you can buy off the Arab street.
    What if a number of the people on the Arab street have been so indoctrinated with hate against Jews that they'll become dedicated terrorists, even if they have money?

    How can anyone go out onto the streets to cheer what happened at the weekend? Yet that is what we have seen, even in 'civilised' countries.

    Hate is the problem; it is the hate we need to address. IMO it is extremely naive to think money alone can eradicate hate; the answer is education, education, education ...
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 15,659
    On the basis of no real knowledge but more of a gut feeling about the kind of places Labour will do worse than average I think I agree with this well argued piece. I would think it more likely that Labour gains Mid Beds and loses out in Tamworth than the other way round.
  • AlanbrookeAlanbrooke Posts: 25,302

    Hamas official live on Sky denies any civilians have been killed

    Why give them airtime

    He is a twat.

    He says no civilians dead while at the same time Hamas publish on their website people they have murdered.
  • JohnLilburneJohnLilburne Posts: 6,210
    Andy_JS said:

    Leon said:

    Horrific vids now coming out of Gaza. Dead babies, the works

    Expect the narrative to shift again, especially as this is just the begining, and it will only get worse when the ground invasion begins

    BLEAK

    I'm trying to avoid these videos by just listening to the news on the radio.
    I have had my twitter account suspended which is probably a blessing (a misunderstanding - I questioned what "proportionality" means as it clearly doesn't have the usual meaning of "in proportion with" as no-one would want the Israelis to do to the Palestinians what has been done to them. But someone interpreted it as me wanting the Israelis to do just that. At least, that's what I think has happened as X don't give you any information why you've been suspended)
  • bigglesbiggles Posts: 5,843
    theakes said:

    Biggies: I will say it again the indications on the ground are of the Lib Dem support growing. 3 weeks ago a Labour commissioned poll gave the Lib Dems 22%, read into this what you want. The "yellows" say it is going to be close, a phrase they usually use when they feel they are in the box seat, simply to gel up their membership to campaign. That appears to have been effective as they claim to have had "hundreds through the door this weekend". I am withholding betting on them as I feel they could go out to at least 9-2 at William Hill.
    What we do not know is whether there is going to be another Labour commissioned poll this week "leaked" to the Guardian. My gut feeling is that if there is not then Labour are slipping.

    I think the better the LibDems think they are doing, the better it actually is for the Tories as they take Labour votes. I just don’t see the LibDems going all the way. You also have to allow for the fact they are nowhere on the local council (frankly neither are Labour) so I suspect they have no real idea of the reality on the ground since no one has ever seen canvassing returns not in “donkey in blue rosette” territory.

    That said, it isn’t impossible. They have won in seats where the demographics are all wrong before, and lasted for a year or two.
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,269
    edited October 2023

    I had some sympathy for the Palestinians, but if Maggie Chapman is on their side, all sympathy has evaporated.

    Hard to remember that someone who was once the COO of a rape crisis centre now thinks that one should "understand" the "context" for brutal rapes of young girls. She is the current Deputy Convenor of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee..

    The Scottish Greens have been unhinged for a while. Now we know some of their number are lacking in all moral sense.


    Sinn Fein do a 180 degree turn, clearly dont want to upset the yanks

    https://www.irishtimes.com/world/middle-east/2023/10/09/sinn-fein-leader-mary-lou-mcdonald-condemns-hamas-attack-on-israel-as-truly-horrific/

    Expect Stars of David at he next Celtic match.

    Gerry Adams hasn't got the memo:

    https://twitter.com/GerryAdamsSF/status/1711081616133525843
    Gerry Adams has never had any problem with the murder of young people out enjoying themselves.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 12,325
    TOPPING said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    148grss said:

    FPT

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .

    Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.

    There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .

    Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .



    But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised

    I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
    Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
    Absolutely. No good outcomes

    If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?

    I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line

    As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong

    The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
    With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.

    So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.

    Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
    That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.

    Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
    "war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
    The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".

    They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
    Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.

    If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
    How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
    They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
    Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.

    I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
    There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.

    But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
    It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.

    It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
    You seem pretty conflicted about it all.

    Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.

    I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
    This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
    Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
    See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
    And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.

    This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.

    In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.

    We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
    You're an odd fruit sometimes.

    On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.

    Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
    You aren't paying attention.

    https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4564114#Comment_4564114.
    I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
    I am extremely clear on why Hamas attacked Israel. I am extremely clear on why Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked them in 1948. And in 1967. And 1973. And 2023.

    They attacked them because they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. In each instance they failed and in trying they got themselves into quite a pickle.

    Has Israel behaved as you or indeed I would have wished them to over the past 70 years? I'm sure not. But it's useful idiots like you who think that if Israel had only been a bit nicer over the period everyone would be holding hands and making daisy chains together.

    You think that I am excusing Israel's behaviour to the Palestinians on the one hand and ignoring the fact that this might be a root cause of this weekend's actions. Just like I seek to understand the reasons for Putin's actions.

    I am here to educate you that for centuries and most recently decades the Arab world (and of course others) has been antipathetic to the Jews and hence this weekend's actions are a symptom of that hatred.
    One tiny question in this massive discussion. Like most people I take for granted that there are faults on all sides, and that, like Israel, the Palestinians of Gaza have a rational case to make about their point of view.

    Listening to Hamas's (who are Gaza's elected representatives) spokesman with Evan Davies on PM just now, it was painful to hear how terribly badly their chap made their case.

    Most of us are middling liberals aware there are several sides to difficult questions. Do they have no-one who can speak to us intelligently about the events of the weekend?
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 10,640
    For decades, UK governments from all 3 parties have had a foreign policy supporting a rules-based international order, and a domestic law forbidding war crimes. Yet multiple people here have, in recent days, advocated that Israel should commit war crimes. (And they're not defending Israel's actions. They're calling for Israel to go further than they currently are.)

    Can I ask these people: why didn't you speak out against the UK's policy in favour of a rules-based International order and against war crimes? If war crimes don't exist or they're fine in some circumstances, shouldn't we have said that decades ago?
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,216
    TOPPING said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    148grss said:

    FPT

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    Leon said:

    nico679 said:

    The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .

    Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.

    There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .

    Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .



    But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised

    I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
    Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
    Absolutely. No good outcomes

    If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?

    I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line

    As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong

    The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
    With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.

    So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.

    Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
    That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.

    Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
    "war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
    The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".

    They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
    Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.

    If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
    How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
    They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
    Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.

    I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
    There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.

    But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
    It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.

    It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
    You seem pretty conflicted about it all.

    Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.

    I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
    This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
    Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
    See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
    And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.

    This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.

    In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.

    We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
    You're an odd fruit sometimes.

    On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.

    Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
    You aren't paying attention.

    https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4564114#Comment_4564114.
    I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
    I am extremely clear on why Hamas attacked Israel. I am extremely clear on why Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked them in 1948. And in 1967. And 1973. And 2023.

    They attacked them because they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. In each instance they failed and in trying they got themselves into quite a pickle.

    Has Israel behaved as you or indeed I would have wished them to over the past 70 years? I'm sure not. But it's useful idiots like you who think that if Israel had only been a bit nicer over the period everyone would be holding hands and making daisy chains together.

    You think that I am excusing Israel's behaviour to the Palestinians on the one hand and ignoring the fact that this might be a root cause of this weekend's actions. Just like I seek to understand the reasons for Putin's actions.

    I am here to educate you that for centuries and most recently decades the Arab world (and of course others) has been antipathetic to the Jews and hence this weekend's actions are a symptom of that hatred.
    How is that so very different from Russia's attitude to Ukraine ?
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,269

    Hamas official live on Sky denies any civilians have been killed

    Why give them airtime

    They probably think that all the people they have killed are not civilians and therefore a legitimate target.

    After all, the head of Hamas has been saying since at least 2019 that every Jew in the world must be killed. These people are utter scum.
  • SirNorfolkPassmoreSirNorfolkPassmore Posts: 7,120
    edited October 2023

    biggles said:

    GIN1138 said:

    FPT

    John Rentoul
    @JohnRentoul
    ·
    11m
    Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free

    The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.

    Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
    Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
    It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
    Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.

    Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,

    Labour 43% (–)
    Conservative 27% (-2)
    Liberal Democrat 13% (+1)
    Reform UK 8% (+1)
    Green 6% (+2)
    Scottish National Party 1% (-2)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 1 October

    https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1711411197898346637
    Cameron didnt have enough active support to make people vote for him. I find Starmer the same.
    Completely agree. We’ve all forgotten how much Brown clawed back vs. Cameron in the polls. That’s why I don’t write off Labour falling short.

    I await Lord Osborne in the Lord Mandelson role for the analogy to be complete.
    Cameron lost it in January by shitting the bed on Lisbon, and then droning on and on about The Big Society.

    Remember that?

    He'd have probably got his majority if he'd stuck to a referendum on Lisbon. He didn't want to, though, nor pander to the sorts of voters who might be interested in that, and so he didn't win.
    In the 2010 election, UKIP plus BNP were only on 5%. Lib Dems ended up on 23% (and were higher at points in the campaign).

    So Cameron could make overtures to the 5% by droning on about the Lisbon Treaty, or make overtures to the 23% by droning on about the Big Society.

    I'm not sure he made the wrong call there.

    Besides, 2010-15 were, with hindsight, his golden era as he had a very decent majority with a broadly like-minded Lib Dem leadership and no need to pander to the hard right. His Premiership survived five years of coalition with great ease... and was over barely a year after he had won his majority.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    Andy_JS said:

    Leon said:

    Horrific vids now coming out of Gaza. Dead babies, the works

    Expect the narrative to shift again, especially as this is just the begining, and it will only get worse when the ground invasion begins

    BLEAK

    I'm trying to avoid these videos by just listening to the news on the radio.
    They need to be seen, just as the vids of the Israelis being slain need to be seen

    You have to go out and seek the balance for yourself

    Weirdly, I think the narrative will be better for Israel once their soldiers go in. Because then it will become soldier v soldier, army v army, and it will feel "fair". The Israelis might even appear heroic

    Right now we are getting the usual appalling scenes of Israeli bombing, and shattered Gaza and shattered Gazan bodies. Ugh
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,068


    Sinn Fein do a 180 degree turn, clearly dont want to upset the yanks

    https://www.irishtimes.com/world/middle-east/2023/10/09/sinn-fein-leader-mary-lou-mcdonald-condemns-hamas-attack-on-israel-as-truly-horrific/

    Expect Stars of David at he next Celtic match.

    Gerry Adams hasn't got the memo:

    https://twitter.com/GerryAdamsSF/status/1711081616133525843
    Professional courtesy from one mass murderer to other mass murderers.
  • AlanbrookeAlanbrooke Posts: 25,302

    For decades, UK governments from all 3 parties have had a foreign policy supporting a rules-based international order, and a domestic law forbidding war crimes. Yet multiple people here have, in recent days, advocated that Israel should commit war crimes. (And they're not defending Israel's actions. They're calling for Israel to go further than they currently are.)

    Can I ask these people: why didn't you speak out against the UK's policy in favour of a rules-based International order and against war crimes? If war crimes don't exist or they're fine in some circumstances, shouldn't we have said that decades ago?

    It was customary for UK govts not to lie to Parliament about going to war.

    Then New Labour gave us Iraq, all HMGs lost their credibility at that point
This discussion has been closed.