British Politics
Been on holiday for a few weeks, surprised to find no general discussion of British politics so though I'd kick one off.
Tory leadership contest is quickly turning into farce. Trump has backed Boris, which should be reason enough for anyone with half a brain to exclude him.
Of the other candidates Rory Stewart looks the best of the outsiders. Surprised to see Cleverly and Javid not further up the betting, but not sure the Tory membership are ready for a brown PM.
https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/bri...
Regarding the LD leadership contest, Jo Swinson is miles ahead of any other candidate (and indeed any of the Tory lot). Should be a shoe in.
Finally, it's Groundhog Day in Labour - the more serious the anti-Semitism claims get, the more Corbyn's cronies write their own obituary by blaming it on outlandish conspiracy theories - this week, it's apparently the Jewish Embassy's fault...
No real surprise that when you reach the dregs of a political party you find this sort of behaviour:
Thankfully the 17 year old boy who went on a stabbing rampage in a kid's dance class in Merseyside, killing two kids, was born in Cardiff according to the police and isn't, as twitter has been putting about, an asylum seeker or other immigrant.
Child of immigrants from Rwanda, of all places, apparently. He is considerably younger than the Hungerford killer and much younger than the Dunblane and Cumbria killers, too young to have experienced their persistent failures, disappointments and frustrations in life. The family seems respectable and we have absolutely no idea what it's about, though the police have ruled out terrorism, which I suppose means that the murderer's phone or computer does not reveal that kind of interest. If he is mad, as seems likely, they don't appear to know yet why he is mad in that particularly horrible way.
It's not being covered up, they just don't know what it is, because it is probably -- and pretty obviously -- mad.
But most of the radicalization leading to violence in your nation takes place inside your nation, often by people born in it; and most sane people dont count that as a win.
The reason the police are saying it's not terror-related is that, having looked at the murderer's devices, they've no evidence of radicalisation. And your pet nation Israel, with its somewhat fanatical security regime (which failed abysmally on Oct 7), suffers incomparably more terrorism than the UK does.
EDL scum assumed Islam was involved so decided to riot around a Southport mosque.
uggh ****ing racists
The reason the police are saying it's not terror-related is that, having looked at the murderer's devices, they've no evidence of radicalisation.
They made this statement within a couple of hours though. I'm not sure how quickly these investigations move, but I would be surprised if they checked all his devices before making this statement.
It's more likely that any attacks are assumed not to be terror related, unless the individual has previous. Innocent until proven guilty seems entirely fair. If they police has said it was terror related, it would have been thousands, not hundreds, rioting considering circumstances.
However, when extreme Islamists are concerned, hacking people to death and blowing kids up is par for the course, so terrorism is not an unreasonable hypothesis.
Logic failure.
If A then B does not imply if B then A
Thank goodness for good people.
But never the rose without the prick
A former counter-terrorism police chief has accused Nigel Farage of helping incite violence that broke out in Southport after the killing of three children in a knife attack this week.
Farage drew criticism from across the political spectrum for remarks he made in a video on Tuesday in which he questioned “whether the truth is being withheld from us” after the attack on Monday.
Neil Basu – a former senior Scotland Yard officer who was in charge of counter-terrorism from 2018 to 2021 – said there were “real world consequences” when public figures failed to “keep their mouth shut”.
“Nigel Farage is giving the EDL [English Defence League] succour, undermining the police, creating conspiracy theories, and giving a false basis for the attacks on the police,” he said, referring to the far-right, Islamophobic group whose supporters are believed to have been involved in the rioting in Southport.
“Has Nigel Farage condemned the violence? Has he condemned the EDL? Fomenting discord in society is what these people seem to exist for,” Basu added.
Farage said that it was “quite legitimate to ask questions”.
Others who criticised the Reform UK leader on Wednesday included the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, who said Farage had “a level of responsibility … and it’s not to stoke up what conspiracy theories or what you think might have happened”.
“There’s a responsibility to say the police are doing a difficult job, local authorities, all of the services that are on the ground,” she said in an interview on LBC.
“We have a responsibility to hold the community together and say let’s get the facts, and then let’s look at what the actual solutions are and what we can do about the horrific situation that we find ourselves in, not to stir up these fake news online.”
Farage was also described on Wednesday as “nothing better than a Tommy Robinson in a suit” by Brendan Cox, the campaigner and husband of the murdered Labour MP, Jo Cox. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, founded the EDL in 2009.
There was a rapid spread online of misinformation after the attack, with inflammatory far-right narratives rife on the comment threads under posts by Farage and another Reform MP, Rupert Lowe, on their official Facebook pages.
Under posts by Farage and Lowe, who echoed Farage by saying there was “more to this than we’re being told”, comments ranged from predictions of a coming race war, sharing of misinformation, antisemitic tropes and claims of a cover-up.
“This is clearly not a case of accidental mischaracterisation. This is Reform and Farage in particular actively spreading disinformation and actively using insinuation to incite anxiety, concern and inflame emotions,” Cox said.
Farage was described as “utterly shameful” by the Tory peer Lord Barwell, the former MP who served as Theresa May’s Downing Street chief of staff.
He said: “He is an MP. If he has questions, he could have asked them in the House of Commons yesterday – but he wasn’t there. Instead he prefers to encourage those spreading misinformation on here [social media]. Utterly shameful.”
Farage had posted a video on X on Tuesday in which he said he had “one or two questions” as he speculated about whether the stabbing suspect was being monitored by security services.
“I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us. I don’t know the answer to that, but I think it is a fair and legitimate question,” he said.
Farage maintained his position in an interview with the PA news agency, insisting he had “merely expressed a sense of sadness and concern that is being felt by absolutely everybody I know – ‘what the hell is going on?’”
He added: “I think it’s perfectly reasonable to ask what is happening to law and order in our country.
“And who are the perpetrators? Why? Very legitimate questions I was asking, and to conflate that with EDL or anybody else, frankly, it’s desperate stuff.”
The violence against police during the rioting prompted Rayner to raise the prospect of banning more far-right groups.
“We have laws and we have proscribed groups and we do look at that and it is reviewed regularly. So I’m sure that that will be something that the home secretary will be looking at as part of the normal course of what we do and the intelligence that we have,” she told LBC.
The home secretary’s office declined to comment. Two far-right groups have been banned in the last eight years. National Action, a racist neo-Nazi group, was proscribed in 2016, followed by the Sonnenkrieg Division (SKD), a white supremacist group, in 2020.
However, when extreme Islamists are concerned, hacking people to death and blowing kids up is par for the course, so terrorism is not an unreasonable hypothesis.
Detectives are still interviewing the suspect after an extension granted by the magistrates, and local anti-terrorist police are assisting. The story might change, but if they say it doesn't appear to be terror-related they will have a reason (suspect unknown to the Security Service, no known terrorist contacts on suspect's devices, no personal history suggesting terrorist links). Only 2% of the Rwandan population are Muslim and Muslims are kind of required to take Muslim names, so the police would have an idea quite early as to whether the detained suspect was a Muslim or not.
What's 'unreasonable' is an out-of-town EDL flash-mob of gullible, angry, probably racist middle-aged men, apparently having nothing better to do with their lives, which is a bit sad, turning up and recreationally rioting because of some false claim they saw on Twitter, which possibly originated from Putin's bot-farm in Petersburg. As for Farage slyly giving them the nod and then going, 'Who, me? I was Just Asking Questions!', that may be reasonable from his somewhat sinister tactical point of view, but it's just stirring.
Police have arrested more than a dozen of the tattooed shaven-headed mob of 'a few hundred' who've been chucking flares at the gates of Downing Street.
He accessed indecent images of children as young as seven on WhatsApp between December 2020 and August 2021, which police said were sent to him by a convicted paedophile.
blimey
Detectives are still interviewing the suspect after an extension granted by the magistrates, and local anti-terrorist police are assisting.
The suspect is either a madman or terrorist - either way, the police should have a good idea which and he fact that anti-terrorism police are assisting means they, and therefore we, have not discounted that hypothesis, which was my original point.
What's 'unreasonable' is an out-of-town EDL flash-mob of gullible, angry, probably racist middle-aged men, apparently having nothing better to do with their lives, which is a bit sad, turning up and recreationally rioting because of some false claim they saw on Twitter, which possibly originated from Putin's bot-farm in Petersburg. As for Farage slyly giving them the nod and then going, 'Who, me? I was Just Asking Questions!', that may be reasonable from his somewhat sinister tactical point of v
You won't get any pushback about any of this from me.
National Front are back
These aren't "protests" a framed by the BBC et al - these are direct racist attacks on minorities.
Tory Shadow cabinet member seems to disagree
Progressive leftists love to wax poetically about revolution of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie. Well, there it is. Those are the proletariats you guys are so abstractly in love with, protesting the neoliberal system.
What is going on in the streets of England is the people rising up against Western liberalism that you love to **** on so much, while having zero understanding of what the alternative looks like.
Enjoy the fruits of your labor completely undermining the liberal world order.
No you fascist apologist, these are self-avowed racists attacking ethnic minorities.
But in many places in the EU housing isn't the problem it is in the UK. In italy in particular outside few cities it's really cheap (or was until very recently). We literally give houses for 1 euro in many places (if you pay for the renovations).
You are projecting a british problem that doesn't exist in many areas of the EU upon EU politics
Yes I think he is.
He doesn't want to talk about racism and xenophobia, which are the drivers behind the swell in the far right's popularity - that much is obvious. Even people here, like Elrazor, have talked about how women's rights have taken away some of his assumed privileges and how immigration has given UK women a much wider and more attractive pool of men to choose from.
Here's some more projection
Priced out of housing, many younger disillusioned voters embrace populism
The scarcity of affordable homes to buy or rent has raised enthusiasm for politicians campaigning against immigration — though other causes for the crunch abound.
Protesters march with signs saying "People before property"
Supporters of a rent control initiative march near the Capitol calling for more rent control in Sacramento, California. The scarcity of affordable housing has triggered protests across Europe and the United States. | Rich Pedroncelli/AP
By Jamie Dettmer, Adam Cancryn, Eva Hartog and Nick Taylor-Vaisey
From California to Krakow, young voters who are losing faith in democracy have been spurred in part by a surprising cause: high rents and rising property prices.
The scarcity of affordable housing has triggered protests across European cities, from London to Lisbon, and on both coasts of the United States, where home prices have surged 54 percent since 2019. In California recently, hundreds of people, mostly renters, marched on the state capitol to decry the scarcity of reasonably priced rentals. In San Francisco, which has been so slow to approve new housing that a state law is forcing it to bypass some city regulations, the issue has fueled a rancorous debate in this year’s mayor’s race.
And across North America and Europe, the shortage is pushing voters, particularly younger ones, toward populist leaders who promise to address the problem by targeting an issue already key to their platforms — though not necessarily the main one driving the problem — increased immigration.
“If you can’t afford a place to live, you want to point fingers at someone, and incumbent politicians make an easy target — as do migrants,” Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance’s Michael Shank told POLITICO. “It’s a simple rhetorical flourish, but one that’s politically powerful and palatable to a public that’s understandably upset that they can’t find an affordable home.”
The link between housing and populism arises in large part because of the angst that can grow among those priced out of the market, research from David Adler and Ben Ansell suggests. While “some homeowners have gained massively” from rising house prices, they write, “housing market dynamics have created a map of winners and losers.”
Millennials and Gen Z are largely among the losers.
And for many of them, some centrist politicians worry the housing crunch is not only helping to nourish the rise of populism but also risks tarnishing the very idea of democracy. “If people think markets are rigged and a democracy isn’t listening to them, then you get — and this is the worrying thing to me — an increasing number of young people saying, ‘I don’t believe in democracy, I don’t believe in markets,’” Michael Gove, Britain’s housing minister, warned in February.
Indeed, opinion polls over the past few years have been consistently suggesting that millennials and Gen Z are much more disillusioned with democracy than Generation X or baby boomers were at the same life stage.
In some Western countries, the scarcity of affordable housing is fueling anger with high levels of migration. And populist politicians have been quick to capitalize on that, including Donald Trump, who says he wants to “stop the unstainable [sic] invasion of illegal aliens which is driving up housing costs.”
Maybe if more had started projecting decades ago like this idiot did.
Progressive leftists love to wax poetically about revolution of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie. Well, there it is. Those are the proletariats you guys are so abstractly in love with, protesting the neoliberal system.
What is going on in the streets of England is the people rising up against Western liberalism that you love to **** on so much, while having zero understanding of what the alternative looks like.
Enjoy the fruits of your labor completely undermining the liberal world order.
The main protagonists are just outright extremists. The far right that have always existed.
but yes it's our failure that underpins the populism supporting it. Inequality, housing, health, energy etc etc etc. We have failed abysmally and we are still offering nothing.
Tech to identify them, arrest and imprison imo
rubber bullets and tear gas please.
