Should the UK remain a member of the EU

[M_B]

Thats certainly what they want you to think.

[Dr Nowt]

3 minutes ago, M_B said:

Thats certainly what they want you to think.

This, with fucking bells on.

 

[Barrington Womble]

14 minutes ago, magicrat said:

There is a massive risk Johnson will find a wheeze to swerve the Benn act after compressing the timetable and avoid the courts taking action before we crash out .

Surely if honest Johnson really wants a deal and only wants the threat of no deal to get the best possible deal from Brussels, well he only needs to give the impression of he's willing to use his wheeze and won't care about the Benn act, because he'll just get us a deal. Right? 

[magicrat]

Just now, Barry Wom said:

Surely if honest Johnson really wants a deal and only wants the threat of no deal to get the best possible deal from Brussels, well he only needs to give the impression of he's willing to use his wheeze and won't care about the Benn act, because he'll just get us a deal. Right? 

More likely he has zero intention of getting deal and blaming Parliament for tying his hands. 

[Barrington Womble]

2 minutes ago, magicrat said:

More likely he has zero intention of getting deal and blaming Parliament for tying his hands. 

Of course. That nasty democracy getting in the way of real honest conservative democracy. 

[Bjornebye]

10 minutes ago, magicrat said:

More likely he has zero intention of getting deal and blaming Parliament for tying his hands. 

Yep. If he leaves with no deal and it all goes to shit... it will all be Labour and the Lefts fault. 

[Dr Nowt]

Week in Review: 'Both sides' niceties neutralise anti-abuse campaign 

 

'Both sides'. It's one of the most pernicious phrases in modern politics. It sounds so reasonable. But what it does is not reasonable. It aims to prevent the allocation of blame and the diagnosis of problems.

 

Since Boris Johnson waded into the Commons on Wednesday and promoted a nightmare agenda of division and hatred, we've heard a lot about 'both sides'.

"There are members on both sides of the House and both sides of the Brexit argument who have been personally threatened and whose families have been threatened," Speaker John Bercow said during the debate. That's been eagerly taken up. Every time a Brexiter touches on this subject, they never fail to point out that 'both sides' are responsible for abuse. There are "serious threats" of violence against both sides, Dominic Cummings, the mastermind behind Johnson's bullying strategy, insisted yesterday,

The problem with 'both sides ' is not that it is completely false. There is some truth to it. Jacob Rees-Mogg has had his private home targeted by activists, for instance. Brexiter MPs are sometimes shouted at when they walk from parliament to College Green to do TV interviews.

Admittedly, it is occasionally flagrantly nonsensical. On Newsnight on Wednesday night, Tory MP Bernard Jenkins tried to compare the death threats MPs receive to the strain Boris Johnson is under. Brexit campaigner Isabel Oakshott asked why it was OK to be outraged by abuse but still call Johnson a "liar" or a "racist".

This is how it always goes with the subject of abuse. For a few fleeting moments you feel a sense of hope, like the spotlight being shone on it might actually lead to change. But then things start to dribble away.

It begins with the comments about 'both sides', then it moves on to straight-up whataboutery. And before you know it, the whole thing has been neutralised. Nothing can be changed, because everyone is culpable. It becomes a failure of the human condition rather than a kind of political behaviour footed in specific circumstances and the actions of individuals.

The whataboutery is not worth considering. It is OK to call people racist when they make racist comments and liars when they lie. That is a critical description, not abuse. Only a fool would conflate them.

The 'both sides' argument is stronger. It has a kind of colouring-in quality. It takes lots of different comments in different contexts and makes them appear the same.

But they are not the same. They are distinct. And it is by spotting what makes them distinct that you might possibly come to a way of minimising them.

Remainers are responsible for some abuse, there's no doubt about it. It's much parroted but true that they can instinctively think of all Leavers as racists. And the frustration over watching intellectual arguments about trade or security be ignored means they very often treat all Leavers as stupid. Sometimes the online Remain movement targets Brexit supporters with the grim dehumanising tactic of pile-ons. It's grim and it shouldn't happen.

Labour have a significant problems with abuse too. Its online presence is a nest of angry entitled horrors, full of people who see any deviation from the true path as heresy.

The powerful moral argument of the left, particularly since the 2008 crash, has created a kind of justificatory instinct for abuse. Have people died as a result of austerity? Yes. Was it necessary? No. These facts activate a sense of moral fury. And they allow some parts of the Labour movement to treat any opponent as a kind of murderous, cold-hearted monster.

The Corbynites' emphasis on media control and 'dark money' - both arguments have a strain of truth in them, but are massively overstated - means they treat opponents not as people who think differently but as agents of a hostile political camp operating under a cloak of deception: liars with bad motives.

Brexit abuse comes from a completely different place. It was there right from the beginning. The public were split into two groups: the people and the elite. Neither of these categories exist in real life. You might as well call them goodies and baddies. They were then set to war with one another. Cummings was the chief orchestrator of this in the campaign and he is the chief orchestrator of it now.

It didn't need to be this way. Brexit could have been discussed, and even implemented, as a fundamentally logistical exercise. But once that happened, the case grew weak. So instead it was turned into culture war. It was about out-of-touch metropolitan elites and the left-behind real people, even though most of its advocates were wealthy and made these comments from London. Those who opposed it were treated as traitors. Immigrants were treated as a threat. The core functions of a liberal society, including the judiciary and parliament, were treated as sabotage agents.

Almost as soon as it came into existence, it showed how dangerous it was. Jo Cox was stabbed to death during the campaign by a man chanting "Britain first". Yesterday, a man tried to break into the constituency office of the Labour MP Jo Phillips. Jolyon Maughn, who helped bring the case against the government's suspension of parliament, confirmed he now has extra security around his home and was advised to wear a stab vest.

No.10 threatens it for the future. Yesterday, an unnamed source - presumably Cummings - revelled in the fact a second referendum would be "one massive campaign of total abuse".

The links are clear and uncontroversial. As Phillips said, the abuse often uses the exact same language the prime minister uses: Surrender, betrayal, and the rest of his nakedly cynical lexicon. As Lib Dem MP Luciana Berger pointed out, Johnson's comments in parliament are often clipped and then put online on far-right Brexiter networks.

The Brexiter abuse is not just different by quality. It is different by severity. It rides roughshod over everything. No matter what you might think of Corbynism, it is not trying to attack the institution of parliament.

The Brexit movement daily attacks parliament with the illogical and degenerate slur that it is somehow against the people who elected it. It attacks the judiciary for ruling that parliament must be protected, with Brexit commentators in politics and the media demanding to know the voting record of judges, branding it a "coup" or threatening to publish the addresses of those involved in the case.

'Both sides' are not doing this. Could we really credibly claim that, if the result had gone the other way, Remainers would have spent this week attacking the independence of the judiciary? It's absurd. We need to be honest about what different groups are doing if we want to address what is happening.

The Brexiter abuse is also different by status. It comes from the very top, from the highest position in the land. Vote Leave unleashed the most poisonous rhetoric seen in British politics in our lifetime. And now it has been installed at the heart of government, with all the validation and respectability that affords.

The 'both sides' talk is not reasonable. The reasonable thing is to stop abuse before it turns into violence. That's what reasonable looks like: identifying the potential for trouble and acting to prevent it. By reverting to this 'both sides' argument, we are preventing targeted action against abuse and therefore making it more likely that violence will follow.

It is the Brexit movement which is challenging the fundamental underpinnings of liberal democracy. It is the prime minister who is actively whipping up hatred because he thinks it might win him an election. He is doing that. He is responsible

[Brownie]

2 hours ago, Barry Wom said:

But isn't the point that this trick effectively puts this law on hold while you do something wrong and thus stops it being a criminal act. Then once you've completed your dead, the act is re-enabled and makes it law again. 

Lawyers have said today that isn’t possible. And anyway, I don’t think the people who responded to the poll would have even considered it.

[Barrington Womble]

5 minutes ago, Brownie said:

Lawyers have said today that isn’t possible. And anyway, I don’t think the people who responded to the poll would have even considered it.

Just because some lawyers think it's not possible doesn't mean Cox won't give his marvelous view on it to allow the government to give it a whirl and kill a bit more time before 31st. The aim here is not to be right, it's to kill time to allow us to drop out by default. If they can keep kicking the can to let the clock tick down, they will. It's exactly why the opposition parties wouldn't let the cunt have his election. He couldn't be trusted to do this, even though it's clearly law. 

[Trumo]

Then it's imperative that those fighting against the government, the ERG and other Brexit fuckwits keep pointing out that all the stalling tactics that parliament has been accused of are actually being carried out by the very people making that accusation. Keep saying it was people like Bojo the Clown who voted against an actual Brexit deal (MayBot's deal, as shit as it was, was also about delivering the 'will of the people' and 'honouring the results of the referendum') time and time again, and prevented any sort of progress from being made, and they are fully complicit in the current impasse and mud slinging. Keep pointing out that they are the ones putting fuel on the fire with their war rhetoric about 'surrender' to the EU, claiming that parliament is against the people, slagging off instruments of governance like the Supreme Court that would still be needed whether or not Brexit happens, inciting racial hatred and promoting the divide currently gripping the country.

 

These people are not interested in fairness and balance, so go all out to lay the blame for all the problems at their door. Be persistent about it. Make sure that they have their names all over it. Give them ownership of and responsiblity for it all regardless of how strongly they wanted Brexit. After all, if they hadn't started it, we wouldn't be in this mess.

[Brownie]

45 minutes ago, Barry Wom said:

Just because some lawyers think it's not possible doesn't mean Cox won't give his marvelous view on it to allow the government to give it a whirl and kill a bit more time before 31st. The aim here is not to be right, it's to kill time to allow us to drop out by default. If they can keep kicking the can to let the clock tick down, they will. It's exactly why the opposition parties wouldn't let the cunt have his election. He couldn't be trusted to do this, even though it's clearly law. 

We’ve gone right off on a tangent here mate I was just pointing out how fucking daft the public are to choose an option in the poll which is a law breaking one.

[Barrington Womble]

23 minutes ago, Brownie said:

We’ve gone right off on a tangent here mate I was just pointing out how fucking daft the public are to choose an option in the poll which is a law breaking one.

Fair enough, haha. 

[Tj hooker]

Bloke on LBC just said if we don’t leave the EU he will leave the UK. Eddie Mair asked him where he’ll go? His reply was somewhere in Europe. You really cannot make this shit up.

[Dr Nowt]

Speaking of Eddie Mair, in the run up to this election that time he sliced and diced Johnson on live tv wants to be regularly distributed widely on the interwebs.

 

Couldn’t have painted him any more accurately, or be any more apt given the way this election will be fought.

 

”A nasty piece of work” sums it up.

[Guest Pistonbroke]

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/daniel-goshawk-soldier-brexit-civil-war-mp-angela-rayner-a9123921.html

 

A serving British Army soldier is under investigation after abusing an MP and threatening “civil war” over Brexit.

Daniel Goshawk called Labour’s Angela Rayner a “stupid b****”, adding: “C***s like you will perish when civil war comes and it’s coming. 17.4 million people are gunning for blood if we don’t leave.”

He was replying to a tweet where Ms Rayner criticised the attorney general’s response to a Supreme Court ruling that the prorogation of parliament was unlawful.

 

Mr Goshawk’s Twitter profile, which has since been deleted, described him as a “serving British Army soldier” who lives in Didcot and included a photograph in combat fatigues.

Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, said: “This is an unacceptable tweet from a member of the British Army to Angela Rayner. 

 

“This foul language goes against the values of the armed forces and is now being investigated by the Army and civilian police.”

Lt Gen Ivan Jones, the Commander Field Army, offered a public apology to Ms Rayner and anyone affected by the “appalling tweets”.

“He does not represent the remarkable men and women in British Army who serve this nation,” he added. “Rest assured this is being dealt with.”

 

A 32-year-old man of the same name, and of Vauxhall Barracks in Didcot, was convicted of two counts of assaulting a woman last June.

Daniel Goshawk was sentenced to 100 hours of unpaid work and ordered to pay costs at Banbury Magistrates’ Court in October.

 

A person also using the name Daniel Goshawk posted a comment on a 2015 story on migrants protesting at a Cyprus RAF base that suggested anti-Islam views.

“Religion of peace eh,” it read. “Simple stick them in a plane or boat and send them back, these people don’t want our help or generosity they are here for a nice house and free money and health care, and then try impose their way of life onto us.”

In 2014, a Lance Corporal Daniel Goshawk, then aged 28, was commended for heroic service in Afghanistan.

Army officials would not immediately confirm whether the incidents related to the same man, and whether he had been reprimanded after the assault conviction.
 

Mr Goshawk’s Twitter account had also shared tweets criticising pro-Remain MPs and judges.

Ms Rayner described the message as a “usual vile tweet I get daily”, but it came amid mounting alarm over death threats and abuse suffered by politicians. 

Boris Johnson is embroiled in a row with MPs after rebuffing calls to moderate his language around Brexit, while a man has been charged with attacking the office of Jess Phillips MP on Thursday.

Police have named right-wing extremism as the fastest-growing terror threat in Britain, following the thwarting of seven attack plots since March 2017.

 

The armed forces have been increasing efforts to crack down on right-wing extremism following a series of scandals.

A leaflet on “extreme right-wing indicators and warnings” compiled in 2017 urged servicemen and women to report behaviour including “claiming immigration is the root of injustices” and becoming angry at perceived threats to national identity.

 

 

Last year, a British Army soldier was jailed for being a member of banned neo-Nazi group National Action.

Lance Corporal Mikko Vehvilainen had been trying to recruit fellow soldiers for National Action in preparation for a race war to “cleanse our lands”.

Among his targets was Private Mark Barrett, who was acquitted of terror charges but discharged from the Army.

Last month it was revealed that two supporters of the Generation Identity white nationalist group were serving in the Royal Navy, prompting an internal investigation. 

[M_B]

So their latest plan in Operation No Deal is to spur the right wing into rioting or at least the threat of rioting so that they can declare a state of emergency.

 

Expect to see more talk of potential civil disobedience over the next few weeks. I wouldnt be surprised if we actually see some half hearted attempts by the likes of Tommy Robinson's supporters when they get wind of it.

[Guest Pistonbroke]

2 minutes ago, M_B said:

So their latest plan in Operation No Deal is to spur the right wing into rioting or at least the threat of rioting so that they can declare a state of emergency.

 

Expect to see more talk of potential civil disobedience over the next few weeks. I wouldnt be surprised if we actually see some half hearted attempts by the likes of Tommy Robinson's supporters when they get wind of it.

 

I had to laugh at the defence secretary saying 'This foul language goes against the values of the Armed Forces.'

 

Talk about lying through your teeth. 

[lifetime fan]

37 minutes ago, Lizzie Birdsworths Wrinkled Chopper said:

Speaking of Eddie Mair, in the run up to this election that time he sliced and diced Johnson on live tv wants to be regularly distributed widely on the interwebs.

 

Couldn’t have painted him any more accurately, or be any more apt given the way this election will be fought.

 

”A nasty piece of work” sums it up.

 

Be rude not to...

 

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2013/mar/24/boris-johnson-accused-nasty-video

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Boris Johnson can nob off.

 

 

[Anubis]

Looking forward to the 30th October when he summarily dissolves Parliament, assumes dictatorship, and puts the army on the streets. There’s part of me thinks the mad bastards (Cummings included) have probably mulled it over informally while having a drink.

[Dr Nowt]

Speaking of Eddie Mair, in the run up to this election that time he sliced and diced Johnson on live tv wants to be regularly distributed widely on the interwebs.

 

Couldn’t have painted him any more accurately, or be any more apt given the way this election will be fought.

 

”A nasty piece of work” sums it up.

[sir roger]

Very surprised that the story about the soldier tweeting Angela Rayner hasn’t mentioned the military arseholes shooting at Corbyn image. Did we ever hear the resolution of this saga ?

 

More importantly what about the general saying they wouldn’t allow Labour to win under Corbyn , makes you wonder about the ‘values’ of the armed forces.

[Anubis]

3 minutes ago, sir roger said:

Very surprised that the story about the soldier tweeting Angela Rayner hasn’t mentioned the military arseholes shooting at Corbyn image. Did we ever hear the resolution of this saga ? 

 

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-essex-48868071

[sir roger]

Cheers Anubis , looking at the stories attached beneath the main link Colchester barracks seems a nice place to work.

[Guest Pistonbroke]

1 hour ago, sir roger said:

Cheers Anubis , looking at the stories attached beneath the main link Colchester barracks seems a nice place to work.

 

I had the unfortunate pleasure of escorting a few bad boys to the Military prison there back in the 80's, it's a shit hole, as is Colchester. I can only speak for the time I served myself (1981-1990) but the forces was full of racist, homophobic bastards and their behaviour was never frowned upon unless it was aimed at a senior rank you happened to have in your unit. I know they are raising awareness on the LGBT front and even allow them to serve now, but from the small contact I have with serving personell Racism is still a big problem. The powers that be also like certain regiments/corps to be highly strung in case of conflict, using Xenophobia dressed up as Nationalism was one of their main agendas. You get a lot of good and intelligent people in the forces, but they are highly outnumbered by the dregs of society.