• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

UK - Election 2015

The Telegraph, the paper that just keeps giving.

Where should you flee in the event of a Labour-SNP pact?

Some highlights:

Nicola Sturgeon has said the SNP will back Labour’s plans to reintroduce the 50p tax rate, and with Alex Salmond in charge of the budget, anarchy could ensue.

Former England footballer Sol Campbell dismissed the [mansion] tax as “the grim reaper” of business entrepreneurs or “anyone that has done well”, adding that it would trigger "uproar" in the country.
 
malicus said:
The Telegraph, the paper that just keeps giving.

Where should you flee in the event of a Labour-SNP pact?

Some highlights:

Nicola Sturgeon has said the SNP will back Labour’s plans to reintroduce the 50p tax rate, and with Alex Salmond in charge of the budget, anarchy could ensue.

Former England footballer Sol Campbell dismissed the [mansion] tax as “the grim reaper” of business entrepreneurs or “anyone that has done well”, adding that it would trigger "uproar" in the country.
Click to expand...

Regarding the Telegraph article:

Katie Hopkins once declared that she would leave the UK if Ed Miliband was to become Prime Minister.
Click to expand...

That alone should secure a few votes for Labour although in the past, celebrities have been remiss on following through on their promises.

It's interesting that people are being advised to, in the main, "flee" to Europe. That route wouldn't be open if the Conservatives have their way, get in, have the referendum and the UK decides to leave the EU.

Even more interesting if you're worried about immigration, you should add to the worldwide problem and emigrate to Australia, if you can get in:boggled:.
 
It was interesting to look through the International Express (weekly version of the Daily for us expats - I only care about the crosswords!) with its election material; the UKIP coverage is hardly new but it was a little surprising to see an article about how Ed Miliband's policies are (literally?) communist.
 
Ed Miliband is taking the position that a significant part of the blame for the EU/Libyan immigration crisis lies with David Cameron. I think that this is a cheap shot and that it's political points scoring at its worst. Libya is a mess but I don't think a Labour government would have done any better or worse.
 
The Don said:
Ed Miliband is taking the position that a significant part of the blame for the EU/Libyan immigration crisis lies with David Cameron. I think that this is a cheap shot and that it's political points scoring at its worst. Libya is a mess but I don't think a Labour government would have done any better or worse.
Click to expand...

Did labour oppose the bombing?
 
a plague on both their houses for this one. Miliband is only bringing up Libya because of the med tragedy, and it isn't as if Labour have been raising the issue before now and didn't oppose the govt on it previously afaik

If I'm a revolutionary in Libya, whatever help I get I'm grateful for, I'm not going to be blaming some country a great distance away for giving me some help but not enough. But that's a pretty simplistic start of a much more complex foreign aid debate....

The Conservatives or perhaps the conservative media is twisting what he actually said (has he said it yet or was it just in the pre-release of the speech text?) in the worst possible way and acting incredibly outraged by the strawman.

He basically said the situation in Libya after the revolution is bad partly because the govt didn't do more to help/plan for the postwar Libya, media at least is reporting it as 'David Cameron partly to blame for the deaths in the Med'). It is actually pretty cynical/clever manipulation by Labour by using the timing of the tragedy to raise the general issue and get the accusation raised without actually making it explicitly themselves.

What they should do is just politely point out the cynicism of Milibot's attack and move on.

I don't like the Conservatives on an ideological level, but David Cameron actually seems like a reasonable human being compared to Miliband, I might be wrong but my gut feel is he's just fame and power hungry and panders massively, whereas Cameron actually feels like he's his own man, and not a terrible one at that. And I struggle to forgive Labour for their past recent performance in govt

Boris Johnson, on the other hand, scares me a great deal. I'm just worried we get people falling for Miliband, 5 years of him leading a left-wing coalition that may or may not make things worse but for damn sure will be obstructed at every turn by the right just like in the US now, and then Bojo the Clown walks in (and I emigrate)
 
Last edited:
The Don said:
Ed Miliband is taking the position that a significant part of the blame for the EU/Libyan immigration crisis lies with David Cameron. I think that this is a cheap shot and that it's political points scoring at its worst. Libya is a mess but I don't think a Labour government would have done any better or worse.
Click to expand...

Considering how Labour gave the UK Iraq (almost a mirror of the Tory Poll Tax crippling them for 20 years) and still hasn't come to terms with that, it will bite Milliband in the ass.
 
DreadNiK said:
a plague on both their houses for this one. Miliband is only bringing up Libya because of the med tragedy, and it isn't as if Labour have been raising the issue before now and didn't oppose the govt on it previously afaik

If I'm a revolutionary in Libya, whatever help I get I'm grateful for, I'm not going to be blaming some country a great distance away for giving me some help but not enough. But that's a pretty simplistic start of a much more complex foreign aid debate....

The Conservatives or perhaps the conservative media is twisting what he actually said (has he said it yet or was it just in the pre-release of the speech text?) in the worst possible way and acting incredibly outraged by the strawman.

He basically said the situation in Libya after the revolution is bad partly because the govt didn't do more to help/plan for the postwar Libya, media at least is reporting it as 'David Cameron partly to blame for the deaths in the Med'). It is actually pretty cynical/clever manipulation by Labour by using the timing of the tragedy to raise the general issue and get the accusation raised without actually making it explicitly themselves.

What they should do is just politely point out the cynicism of Milibot's attack and move on.

I don't like the Conservatives on an ideological level, but David Cameron actually seems like a reasonable human being compared to Miliband, I might be wrong but my gut feel is he's just fame and power hungry and panders massively, whereas Cameron actually feels like he's his own man, and not a terrible one at that. And I struggle to forgive Labour for their past recent performance in govt

Boris Johnson, on the other hand, scares me a great deal. I'm just worried we get people falling for Miliband, 5 years of him leading a left-wing coalition that may or may not make things worse but for damn sure will be obstructed at every turn by the right just like in the US now, and then Bojo the Clown walks in (and I emigrate)
Click to expand...

It's fun comparing and contrasting political leaders. They stimulate similar responses in me. But the foibles of a Cameron, a Milliband or even an Obama have very little to do with the way the geopolitical game is played. I would dearly like to know what the idea was behind taking sides in Libya because it certainly had nothing to do with establishing democracy there, even if the resulting destabilisation were a good idea.
 
The Don said:
I suppose this is the official public position with regard to Trident's independence:

The fact that, in theory, the British Prime Minister could give the order to fire Trident missiles without getting prior approval from the White House has allowed the UK to maintain the façade of being a global military power. In practice, though, it is difficult to conceive of any situation in which a Prime Minister would fire Trident without prior US approval
Click to expand...

Source:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmdfence/986/986we13.htm

Of course whether that is true is another matter entirely.
Click to expand...

Except that that's not "the official public position," but rather a annex to Greenpeace's submission to the Select Committe on Defence.
 
ddt said:
I see quite a good parallel there to the Englandspiel. In the latter case, Leo Marks has stated in his memoirs that he raised concerns about the messages from the Dutch agents/radio operators - but none of the official documents, neither Marks' memos nor the answers, have been declassified. In your case, it's also only the public claims from RAF veterans, not the official documents that those bypasses were officially sanctioned.
Click to expand...

Although I was aware of Englandspiel in general, I've not looked into it specifically, but it seems that a number of files have been declassified over the years and are available at teh National Archives. This report from 2004 mentions some, and this is the NA record of one released in 2006. A lot of the SOE personal files are still closed, but many of those of agents who died durign the war have been open for move than ten years, and a cursory check shows that this includes some relating to agents who fell victim to Englandspiel (e.g. Gerrit Dessing, Meindert Koolstra, Jan Hofstede).

Why not? We're talking of a time when the Empire was quickly dissolving, and the British economy wasn't going quite stellar. And this was after the public humiliation of Suez.
Click to expand...
Hang on, if we're talking about Polaris and Trident, then we're talking about British-built submarines carrying American-build missiles with British-built warheads. The only control America could have had over them in an operational situation would be by some prior agreement, of which there is no evidence. That's quite apart from the fact that the UK retained nuclear air-droppable bombs and depth charges until the late 1990.
 
For informed critics and supporters of Trident, the difficulties start here. In 2010, David Cameron cancelled a programme to upgrade the Nimrod surveillance aircraft tasked to look for the Russian subs. The UK’s are now protected only by helicopters and ships.
TLDR version:

Cuts in conventional Anti Submarine capability mean that the UK is less certain that its nuclear deterrent will be safely hidden in case of war.
Click to expand...

Nimrod was useful but wasn't a main plank of Anti Submarine warfare even in the Cold War. Seabed Sonar, Surface ships with AS torpedo, AS missile and Helicopters plus the Hunter/Killer subs (all the non trident ones) are the main AS weapons.
 
Information Analyst said:
It would be better to ask what state the country would be in without the bombing, since that occured some way into an already fairly widescale civil war.
Click to expand...
It's interesting that this bombing took place in 2011, the centenary year of the first use of aircraft in war ... which was in Libya, then the Ottoman province of Tripolitania, during the Italo-Turkish War.
22 October – A military airplane makes an operational flight for the first time when an Italian Army Blériot XI piloted by Captain Carlo Piazza flies from Tripoli to 'Aziziya to carry out reconnaissance of Ottoman Army positions in Libya during the Italo-Turkish War. Later in the day, an Italian Nieuport flown by a Captain Moizo becomes the first airplane to be damaged by enemy forces in combat when it suffers several hits from Turkish ground fire.
Click to expand...
 
Information Analyst said:
It would be better to ask what state the country would be in without the bombing, since that occured some way into an already fairly widescale civil war.
Click to expand...

It would if that was my interest in asking the question (now answered by another poster). Labour supported bombing Libya, the Conservatives supported invading Iraq (true, they can claim to have been misled by Bliar et al and folks can choose to believe that if they wish - I choose not to) and there is hardly a fag paper to separate them from each other.
 
anglolawyer said:
It would if that was my interest in asking the question (now answered by another poster). Labour supported bombing Libya, the Conservatives supported invading Iraq (true, they can claim to have been misled by Bliar et al and folks can choose to believe that if they wish - I choose not to) and there is hardly a fag paper to separate them from each other.
Click to expand...

Milliband is not blaming Cameron for the current situation because of the bombing, but because of the failure to follow it up constructively.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom