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The voters give Starmer a mandate for Palestine – politicalbetting.com
The voters give Starmer a mandate for Palestine – politicalbetting.com
With Keir Starmer announcing that the UK will recognise a Palestinian state unless Israel calls a ceasefire in Gaza, new YouGov data shows Britons support recognition by 45% to 14%yougov.co.uk/internationa…
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(As are Greens the other way.)
Oh, and first?
Johnson's accusation that the CPS allowed a notorious child-abuser to slip through their fingers whilst Keir Starmer was in overall charge of their operations was based on fact. As evidenced by his apology at that time for his organisation's failings.
But the attempt to link Nigel Farage to Savile doesn't event amount to guilt by association. It is nothing less than base, unevidenced slander…
…the name Jimmy Savile is political Kryptonite for Keir Starmer. And the fact it was allowed to leave the lips of one of his own Ministers beggars belief
By reaching for the Savile slur, Starmer has also broken one of the basic rules of attack politics. Which is that, if you want to try and smear an opponent, the smear has to at least have some basic public resonance. It must, in some small way, match existing perceptions of your target.
People have many different perceptions of Nigel Farage and Reform. But the accusation that he and his party are instinctively soft on criminals in general, and paedophiles in particular, lacks even the most minimal credibility.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-14951641/DAN-HODGES-Questions-Keir-Starmer-role-Jimmy-Savile-saga-stretch-credibility.html
Anyway, Hamas don't approve of man dates.
Even the wannabe Nobel Peace Prize winner hasn't the influence to change the facts on the ground. Note where the water for is.
Scotland could hold a second independence referendum if polls show 60 percent of Scots consistently support principle of a fresh vote, Scottish Secretary Alister Jack suggested in an interview with me yesterday.
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2021/08/29/the-uk-government-says-opinion-polls-are-more-important-than-actual-votes/
*makes sure not to hold breath*
Hopefully nobody will suggest that to Donald Trump.
I think “outrage” is over used as a word. But it’s possible to be unhelpful and meaningless.
The land should be given to its rightful owner: the Seleukids.
However, it's meaningless because they won't do so. There are too many internal political and geopolitical calculations at play for the current Israeli government to care overmuch about any world opinion save that of the USA (and possibly to a lesser extent Egypt but they hate Hamas even more than Israel does).
But since when did you believe anything the last Tory government did or said?
Recognition will mean recognising the PLA as the government of all Palestine. Including Gaza.
How long until Fruit & Nut will claim that “Hamas is the legitimate government of Gaza, and must be recognised.”?
Its a slow but inexorable strangulation and encroachment of Area B.
But yes, you are right. For the West Bank to become a viable state +/- Gaza and East Jerusalem the Israeli military and settlers need to go. I can't see that happening.
Oh. I see. Probably a few hours, then.
Nothing else really is of any consequence here.
https://x.com/mosababutoha/status/1950192452221972636?s=43
It’s utterly tedious. Two sides blaming each other. Hamas doing nothing to alleviate its own people’s suffering either but getting a free pass.
A nasty thought - the main reason that Europe has stable borders is mad ethnic cleansing, first one way, then the other, followed by half a century of two nuclear armed super states telling everyone “that’s how it is”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1j5954edlno
Trump: People were taken out of the spa, hired by Epstein… I told him we don’t want you taking our people, whether it’s spa or not spa. He did it again, I said out of here.
Reporter: Was one of the stolen people Virginia Giuffre?
Trump: I think so. He stole her.
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1950256617301430443
I'd be interested in earlier polling on this same question - say going back to 2000 or perhaps even to before the Oslo Accords of 1995.
With Putin (and arguably, Trump) we will be lucky if we can return to that.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1j5954edlno.amp
But the meaning lies in keeping the Labour Party together and Starmer in No 10 and has nothing whatever to do with helping secure peace in that benighted part of the world. Nor has anyone that I can see made a case that it will.
Blair was ultimately brought down by his support for Israel in 2007, not for lying about Iraq or any of his hundreds of other screw-ups.
Starmer may know nothing whatever about economics or diplomacy or many of the other arts of government, but he knows how to play the Labour Party like a fiddle, e.g. when he ran on a Corbynite manifesto for its leadership, then ditched it about two days later. And he clearly hasn't forgotten Blair's fate.
For which Israel received neither thanks nor security.
If the England men’s team win the next World Cup and Nick Robinson says “the men showing women how it’s done” he will be pilloried and cancelled. Why is it that so many people who claim to want equality are the most divisive.
Can she not be poached by 5-live where her entreaties to “let us know what you think” are suited.
But some people of similar doctrinal stripe in eg NI, were quite willing to embrace violence. There was always a desgree of Arminian/Calvinist tension, but they navigated that successively.
Since I said UVF, consider Ian Paisley's Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, which is orthodox Calvinist, and his claims about the "Third Force" in 1981, and his "demonstration to journalists" of 500 of his men waving their firearms licences:
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/07/world/paisley-and-500-protestants-stage-ulster-show-of-force.html
That's one obvious difference with the current USA tradition, whether MAGA or Reformed Evangelicals (Calvinist mainly - equivalent to eg Strict Baptists or Open Brethren here), who often have an unapologetic callousness which is absent from that movement in the UK. Even now, some take a hard line on 'moral' questions, but it has been gradually liberalising for more than half a century.
Politically I think this is one reason why American style Nat Cons, and our self-dubbed "Patriots" on the Right will have quite a job appropriating the "Christian" identity in the UK, as their latest identity-skin to steal.
The main reason that those borders have remained stable until recently is because of the rise of democracy and the EU. With FoM it matters little who controls Alsalce and Lorraine or the Sudetenland.
Borders in Africa and Asia have also remained pretty much unchanged in recent decades too. Not because of ethnic homogenised, but rather because of the recognition that redrawing borders requires either bloody war or interminable discussions, see the recent Thai/Cambodia fighting.
I recently read "The Peacemakers" on the Versailles treaty of 1919. An awful lot of later conflicts were set up by those negotiations, which rarely took into account local populations views.
Polling to start the day and pretty much as you were from More in Common, no fruits on show yet
➡️ REF UK 29% (-)
🌹 LAB 23% (+1)
🌳 CON 20% (-1)
🔶 LIB DEM 13% (-2)
🌍 GREEN 7% (-1)
🟡 SNP 3% (+1)
N = 2,040 | Dates: 26 - 28/7 | Change w 21/7
If Germany and Czechoslovakia/Czechia had remained in low level conflict with several major flare-ups since 1945, and Czechoslovakia/CZ had agreed to return the Sudetenland to Germany in 2005, and ethnically cleanse it of Slavs so it can be a pure German territory, should Germany
a) make nice, be glad, turn it into a successful prosperous area
b) elect Nazis, try to take over the rest of Czechia?
To achieve international recognition and peace with Israel how much of the land within the 1967 borders should the Palestinians give up ?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/kemi-badenoch-geldof-israel-lies-gaza-aid-b2796765.html
Now which side started the current war ? Did Israel attack Gaza or did Gaza attack Israel ?
You would be on more reasonable ground to complain about Israel's behaviour in the West Bank or its treatment of its own Palestinian population than how it acted towards Gaza between 2005 and 2023.
Too soon....
Yes Hamas started the current war. The argument is about the Israelis' conduct in responding to it.
I see f-all moves from Israel towards peace. Neither do I see such moves from Hamas.
Four out of five permanent UN Security Council members would also likely back it as would the UN General Assembly but the US would again likely veto it
"Google failed to warn 10 million of Turkey earthquake severity"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77v2kx304go
(Yes, the system failed in that case. But such systems will save many lives in the future.)
Remember, that until WWII, there were villages of ethnic Germans, speaking a dialect of German scattered between the USSR border and about half way to Moscow*. Just an example.
Europe was a very, very patchwork quilt.
Drawing a border that encompassed all of ethnic group A, without B-Z, was impossible.
Much of the rest of the world was similar.
*Many of whom fought and died for Russia, very loyally, in WWII
Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson
Some of us remember when we didn’t have “communities around the country”.
There were the British people.
Us.
Yes, there were huge class inequalities but there was a priceless feeling of being united.
Things like the Lionesses fleetingly remind us.
The way we were.
https://x.com/AllisonPearson/status/1949902800483471548
Pearson was born in 1960, so would realistically remember things analytically from perhaps 1975. I'm not sure what she even means. "Communities around the country" are the British reality, and have been for a number of centuries - whilst acknowledging that the state has quite the record of oppressing minorities *.
I'm not sure what she is hankering after other than a projected 'memory' of something that never existed, or a world that may have existed in her subcultural bubble. I might suggest it is a stereotype from Terry and June.
I'm interested what triggered her to go down the identity politics and victimhood route - it's very "woke". Most recently it seems to me to be policing standards that have long been applied to other people being applied to Pearson herself.
* As an aside form my other post, quite a number of nonconformist denominations or associations still have memories of suppression by Govt as a significant part of their self-understanding eg under Acts requiring conformity to the Church of England, Folk-memories get institutionalised here for a long time,
Israel has had no further Hamas attacks since October 7th so neither statement really true
There is something real at the back of what she is saying - a changed context between a singular culture and multiple cultures.
I’d say that there has been staggering cultural changes between 1985 and 2025.
Do you see why withdrawing from more of Palestine isn't going to be accepted by the Israelis ?
As to how Israel has responded - blockading food supplies, destruction of urban areas, military occupation, ethnic cleansing - how does that differ to what British strategy was to Germany in the world wars ?
Maybe I'm in a minority of one but I don't join the self-righteous condemnation of Israel for doing what we applaud ourselves for doing a few generations back.
Egypt and related client states ruled Gaza for an extended period of time, with no significant independence movement, terror attacks, or global protests, is my point. Whether they formally legally annexed it is tangential.
Punctuation and spelling are critical.
Somewhere like South Tyrol is happy now, not because of ethnic cleansing, but because Italy and Austria are both democracies, and both in the EU and in Schengen.
Potted history:
Israel's view - they left Gaza completely to see if the Palestinians could live peacefully alongside Israel. At the time there were great investment plans (eg for the port) and billions committed to the regeneration of Gaza. Then, on account of the corruption of the PA, the Palestinians voted in Hamas and the rest is history.
Palestinian view - Israel continues to occupy Palestine which comprises Gaza and the West Bank (and arguably the bit in between) and it is only via armed struggle that Israel agreed to leave Gaza and therefore the struggle continues.
That is yer problem right there.