General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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I hate Trump too, but starting a trade war with the US would be incredibly stupid. All it would do is guarantee a severe recession and rampant poverty.
I'd much rather the PM swallow their pride and do what's best for the country than call Trump a cunt and look based on twitter for a couple of days before completely thrashing our economy.
This is the realpolitik. Sometimes you have to play nice with awful people.
I hate Trump too, but starting a trade war with the US would be incredibly stupid. All it would do is guarantee a severe recession and rampant poverty.
Thats why you should vanquish neoliberal school of chicago thought form your ruling class. A trade war with the us would destroy the london financial clique, redistribute the wealth away from London, allow the government to mass-nationalize the remaining useful industries for way cheaper and institute a nation-wide job program.
If you step into the battle ring hoisted with a white flag already, you will never win any fight.
You are discounting the taco factor. Everyone knows taco.
That's fair but no one outside of the country will respect you for appeasing him though.
The UK is not exactly in an economically strong position so rolling over and revealing their belly is probably the best approach strategically for them but it certainly looks bad to the EU, Canada and other powers throughout the world.
I kind of agree. He's a shit PM, but he has been handed a shit sandwich to contend with and is (somewhat admirably) rolling with a lot of punches.
I just wish he wasnt such a corporate lapdog in his dayjob
Based. These reactionaries are no different from the anti-immigration crowd
Appeasing Trump isn't the thing you should be worried about. If you think he's the Hitler of this history, you're vastly misremembering what kind of a person Hitler was.
Vladimir Putin is the source of all of it. He's the one who put Trump into power, now twice. He's the one who's creating all the trouble in Europe and USA. He removed UK from EU. He started a major land war in Europe and is alone playing with the idea of extending the war. I wouldn't be surprised if he instigated the Gaza War. He's the one you must not appease.
Trump is just his toy. We should be manipulating Trump, against his master.
This is a childish fantasy. Putin is not the wicked witch which magically conjured up, all the issues inherent to the western imperialist capitalist system into being.
This is an interesting take, and one I hadn't thought of before. We should definitely keep punching up, and maybe start punching out, too.
I'm so fucking sick of global leaders sucking up to Trump.
He's a mask-off fascist and authoritarian.
And so are all of our capitalist-sponsored leaders.
Starmer is such a cunt. Betraying freedom of expression and protest as we speak, an ancient english freedom enjoyed when the mainland did not.
He is conservative, they purged any real reformers out of the party, mainly by conflating israel criticism with antisemitism as they controlled the party enforcement mechanism.
He is betraying the uk, and also making it inevitable the far right gets in to try and fix elections.
The moment I knew I couldn't trust him was when he not only abstained from the vote on the CHIS bill, but instructed the whole party to do so.
For someone who used to be a barrister and head of the Crown Prosecution Service to not vote against a bill that allows undercover police to kill and torture people shows me exactly where his priorities lie.
Did the UK ever have freedom of expression? I think it was just a societal custom. The BBC has always been censored, speaking out against the King was treason, etc.
I think the tories granted kier these powers also.
Wtf are you talking about?
Do we have a law guaranteeing it like the USA's first amendment?
Yeah, that law "guarantees" shit, apparently.
Yes, article 10 of the ECHR guarentees freedom of expression.
Yeah I mean the 17th century when France and the rest of the continent was heavily censored books were printed freely in the UK and people had a lot of rights to criticize whatever they wanted to a degree. England had always had a higher degree of freedom in many respects.
Wasn't it an imprisonable offence for anyone to voice favourable opinions about the French Revolution or be in possession of republican literature at the end of the 19th Century in UK?
Sure it might have been technically, they were not on the ball at all though, in reality you can do what you wanted and you would be very very unlucky if you got caught by one of the few authorities.
Generally speaking though they had a lot more freedom for a lot longer than anyone else on the continent, that is especially true during the years that the philosophes battled the religion and won. Voltaire and the like.
I'm not so sure. It was a pretty reactionary period in Britain with harsh laws that prevented assemblies of more than 50 people, anti-union activities and a serious curtailment of freedoms that were put into law (The Treasonable Practices Act (1795), The Combinations Acts (1795-1800) and the suspension of Habeas Corpus (1798-1801). Anyone considered radical was rounded up and threatened - sometimes physically. Even poor old William Blake was arrested.
Betraying what now? Freedom of speech in the UK, where you can be arrested for calling someone a muppet? Bravo
Meekly accepting your right to protest to be taken away by cynical politicians pretending to be left or right is certainly not the answer. Nor is meekly accepting the government locking down the internet creating a masturbator base and otherwise connecting every person and their likeness to their IP address and every single thing they do in a database that lower level government, politician, and hackers and foreign intelligence agencies and other organized groups can access.
Labor is the enemy.
If starmer kissing hisbarse a littke bit is what it takes to get some kind of support for Ukraine, then in OK woth that.
"I hate indians, they're a beastly people with a beastly religion"
-Winston Churchill
"Madam I may be drunk, but you are ugly, and in the morning I shall be sober."
~ Winston Churchill
Perhaps I should have included a disclaimer, I'm certainly not quoting Churchill because I like him. As your quote demonstrates, he's a fucking racist asshole (among many other flaws) but gifted at the ol' soundbite.
Don't worry about it, I just like pointing it out
My 'favourite' of those kinds of quotes is"I do not admit ... that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place".
Not only is that full-on "racial hierarchy as justification for genocide" but it was in a speech arguing in favor of allowing the creation of the state of Isreal even though those pesky Palestinians were living in the proposed terrority. Thanks for your statesmanship Winny, that worked out great for everyone...
"Sir, if you were my husband I'd poison your tea"
"Madam, if you were my wife I would drink it"
~~-Winston Churchill~~
Well sure. Thats colonization. Which is the basis for the existence of most countries. If you believe the U.S., Canada, Australia (and lots of others) have a right to exist, then you agree with Churchill.
Well, first, I'm not sure that they do have a right to exist, and certainly not without some serious steps in acknowledging the issue and making meaningful reparations.
But more specifically, Churchill is saying that he doesn't even see that a "great wrong has been done" in the first place. Whether the benefits outweigh the harms or whether it's too late to fix historic wrongs are very different debates from "do you think it is wrong to genocide a people to colonise their land?".
And the reason it's important to acknowledge that historic wrongs were wrong, even if you can't do anything to change them, is because you are less likely to argue in favor of repeating the exact wrong again, as Big C is doing in that speech.
Can you articulate what you mean by a state having "a right to exist"?
A moral rational to not be dissolved.
The countries you mentioned were all built on a genocide of their indigenous inhabitants to establish an ethnostate. They each, however, have since at least acknowledged that ethnostates are bad and have structured their charters/constitutions on the principle of strict equality for its citizens.
Israel, on the other hand, is currently in the process of establishing a Jewish ethnostate with an outspoken intention of creating at best an apartheid state, if not a completely ethnically cleansed state.
I see a clear difference in ongoing behaviour, and I don't think the ideas are as conjoined as you present them.
This is a false equivalence.
The land of Neville Chamberlain has now produced a much worse politician, who is not just an appeaser but an actual supporter of modern day Fascists including the XXI century version of the NAZIs: Zionists.
The spirit of Chamberlain is alive and well.
I woke up from a dream about Chamberlain (presumably trigger by this visit) and felt compelled to make a meme about it. Originally I wanted to use a Chamberlain quote, but to be fair to the man, his excuses for appeasement were at least "avoid a world war" and "save countless lives".
Obviously, even those excuses don't stand up when the war had already begun for many people. But sucking up to Trump, condoning the destruction of political freedoms and concentration camp prisons just for a trade deal? Pathetic.
The thing everyone gets wrong about Chamberlain is that appeasement wasn't happening in a vacuum.
First is that thanks to Churchill, the UK never had a roaring 20s. First was the WW1 debt, and then Churchill, who was in charge of monetary policy, implemented a strict gold and silver policy that made trade with any other countries extremely disadvantageous for the UK.
So yeah, the UK started the Great Depression early.
So Chamberlain comes into power with three major issues.
First is a madman in Europe who every knew was going to start another world war.
Second was the fact that the UK didn't have a modern military.
Third was the fact that the UK didn't have an economy that could support modernizing the military.
So yeah, Chamberlain had to "appease" Hitler while he worked on the economy and ordered a massive buildup of short range fighter aircraft.
And that right there is the only reason the UK survived the Battle of Britain.
Then Churchill comes in and starts screaming about appeasement, badmouthing Chamberlain left and right. When Churchill himself made the conditions that lead to appeasement.
But that's how conservatives work. They cause a problem, then blame person who tries to fix it for not being magically able to undo the damage.
That's very interesting. It's not an area of history I've studied much, but even my brief reading this morning came across some pretty reasonable statements from Chamberlain. Basically, "no one had any complaints when I went off to Germany to reach a deal with Herr Hitler. But now with hindsight everyone's blaming me for something we all wanted." and from what your saying, even with hindsight it was the right decision at the time to give Britain time to get on a war footing.
Peace for our time!
Spray tan piece of shit