Just out of a gig in Glasgow this evening...these posters were everywhere.... Needless to say, the minutes silence was impecably honoured....very eerie to be in a venue full of people and for it to be so silent
Politics is a nasty business in my opinion. We all have our reasons for voting, usually or in my case it comes down to personal circumstances. I've always been Labour and even more so when I watch the news whom are so Tory bias it's embarrassing. That said it's each to their own. I suppose if I was minted I may vote conservative but the chances of that are slim
I'm going to offer some support for Stroller here (sorry, Col). I was at Winchester railway station at 5:20AM yesterday morning to be confronted by two Polly Soffissers resplendent in their black paramilitary uniforms, baseball caps and each carrying a semi-automatic of some description. Not what you'd expect at a time like that in rural Hampshire. Anyway, got chatting to them, as you do. Turns out they'd been there all night and were about to knock off. As far as they were aware there were no plans for a day shift to take over, but they'd been informed they were to resume that evening. Given the modus operandi of your typical Islamic suicide bomber, isn't it a requirement that you have a crowd within which to stand and detonate yourself? If I've got this right, and leaving aside the prospect that someone could plant a device overnight, wouldn't it be more helpful to see Polly during the daylight hours? The two officers agreed with me, but were only following orders. Of course, I pointed out, there's an election on. "You got it!" replied Polly.
May had a go at corbyn for his response to the terror attacks - saying our foreign policy of intervention is to blame to some extent. The hatred many people of all political hues hold for Blair is because of our involvement in the Iraq war. It's not a Tory/labour issue per se. I don't know think she should try and make political currency here, because she's playing on people's Fears rather than showing unity. Project Fear mk 3 is already falling on its arse, why ramp it up on such an emotive issue?
But haven't you heard? Apparently she's strong but stable. Unless the electorate don't like any particular bit of what she utters. At which point the strong but stable policy or manifesto commitment is promptly ditched. Then the mantra becomes 'flexible', 'open-minded' and listening. Has anybody else in the Conservatives actually made any policy statements or are we voting for a cult of "Mayism" with a pack of male cheerleaders aka nodding dogs? If she does fail to get the landslide she craves for, she will be history without even becoming a footnote. TBF though there aren't that many Labour politicians who ever open their mouths, Diane Abbott being notable in that regard. But then we know why that is. Even the most cretinous of our voters knows a fellow cretin when they hear one.
A bit of a lefty read from The Guardian, but some very valid points... The Libya fallout shows how Theresa May has failed on terror As home secretary she didn’t see the threat from anti-Gaddafi rebels. And as prime minister, from police cuts to article 50, she’s still making the wrong calls Salman Abedi was British by birth, Libyan by background, a radical Islamist by identity, loyal to a “caliphate” based in Raqqa, Syria. These facts should be the starting point of our response to the atrocity he perpetrated: the threat is global, yet our state is national, and our communities local. Our state and our communities were not strong enough to stop him. The time to discuss why is not after the election, but now. The “blowback theory”, which blames Islamist terrorism directly on western expeditionary warfare, is both facile and irrelevant in this case. By bombing Libya we did not enrage or radicalise young Muslims such as Abedi: we simply gave them space to operate in. And then, whatever the intelligence services were doing, the politicians took their eye off the ball. David Cameron was right to take military action to stop Gaddafi massacring his own people during the Libyan uprising of 2011: the action was sanctioned by the UN, proportionate, had no chance of escalating into an occupation. And Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy had a stabilisation plan. The problem is they had no plan for what to do if their plan went wrong. Nor, it appears, did Cameron’s ministers concern themselves about how a failed state in Libya might affect the growth of global jihadism, and the domestic terror threat in the UK. In January 2016, in evidence to the foreign affairs committee, Liam Fox, defence secretary in 2011, was asked if the government had made an assessment of the threat of Islamic extremism among anti-Gaddafi rebels. Fox replied: “I do not recall reading anything of that nature. That is not to say it would not have been done, but I don’t recall reading such material … I do not recall reading any reports that set out the background of any Islamist activity to specific rebel groups.” It is an astonishing failure. Because, as the committee report makes clear, from February 2011 Islamist rebels detached themselves from the main rebel militia, refused to take orders from it and killed its main commander. By October, the situation was out of control. Theresa May, as home secretary, sat through 55 national security council meetings on Libya between March and November 2011. The national security adviser’s “lessons learned” report makes no mention of any Home Office contribution to that body’s decisions, nor any mention of the implications for domestic terror. It is now reported that MI5 was facilitating the travel of non-jihadi British Libyans to fight in Tripoli. The minister responsible for that decision would have been May. Did she ask about the impact of the Libyan fighting on the terror threat here? That would be something the newspapers, if they did their job, would be shouting at her today, instead of hurling insults at Jeremy Corbyn. In July 2011, as the fighting raged, May did warn that al-Qaida was seizing arms in Libya. However, she concluded, because of the Arab spring, “al-Qaida is failing”. Unfortunately it was the Arab spring that failed, and the rise of Islamic State was one of the results. In January this year May pulled the plug on any future strategy of regime change and foreign intervention, implicitly criticising Cameron’s Libya strategy. Speaking in Philadelphia, she decried “the failed policies of the past”. But it is the job of a government to do more than decry things. It has to deal with the mess created. And to do that, it has to ask a question May never bothered with: are cuts to the police and defence budgets sustainable in the context of the increased terror threat? May’s response, to the rooms full of police federation reps who did raise it, year after year, was to reject the premise of the question. Now, with the terror threat at critical, she has had to deploy troops to guard key installations. No matter by how much the budgets of GCHQ and MI5 have been boosted, in an attack such as this – and the threat is ongoing – it is the resilience of police, fire and A&E departments that is tested. The troop deployment is a tacit admission that this resilience is under strain. Reversing police budget cuts now, as Labour has promised, should be mandatory. If anything, the recent spate of attacks – both failed and successful – shows the need for a more strategic rethink. Britain needs the equivalent of the French GIGN, the full-time paramilitary force deployed to deal with the Bataclan attack. Such a force would need a new legal framework and heavy investment in extra resources – not, as now, resources borrowed from frontline police and special forces. Reports suggest the explosives used by Abedi, the bomb design and the networks utilised were those of radicalised north Africans living in European cities. As they constructed their Brexit strategy, senior civil servants briefed journalists that May was prepared to threaten the EU with withdrawal of security and intelligence co-operation. May stupidly included the threat in her article 50 letter, later claiming it was not a threat at all. How hollow and foolish that all sounds now. The Manchester massacre should be a wake-up call. This is a government of amateurs; Fox didn’t bother to ask about the terror implications when we bombed Libya; May lost 19,000 police in the face of reasoned warnings. Unfortunately the enemy we are fighting are professionals. Jeremy Corbyn has, ignored by the commentators, repeatedly used prime minister’s questions to warn about the impact of police cuts on our security. He has – at every point – done what May and Fox did not: asked the right questions. Laugh, if you want, at Diane Abbott’s failure to answer the question: how much would 10,000 extra police cost? But it was the wrong question. With the Isis caliphate about to collapse in Raqqa and Mosul, spreading its survivors into the refugee trails of Europe, I don’t care how much 10,000 new officers cost. The right question is: how soon can they start
Not sure about Pakistan, but this is the situation in our ally and partner, Saudi Arabia: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is an Islamic theocratic monarchy in which Sunni Islam is the official state religion based on firm Sharia law and non-Muslims are not allowed to hold Saudi citizenship.Children born to Muslim fathers are by law deemed Muslim, and conversion from Islam to another religion is considered apostasy and punishable by death. Blasphemy against Sunni Islam is also punishable by death, but the more common penalty is a long prison sentence. There have been no confirmed reports of executions for either apostasy or blasphemy in recent years. A Saudi court sentenced a Palestinian man, Ashraf Fayadh to death for apostasy on November 17, 2015, for alleged blasphemous statements during a discussion group and in a book of his poetry. Religious freedom is virtually non-existent. The Government does not provide legal recognition or protection for freedom of religion, and it is severely restricted in practice. As a matter of policy, the Government guarantees and protects the right to private worship for all, including non-Muslims who gather in homes for religious practice; however, this right is not always respected in practice and is not defined in law. The Saudi Mutaween (Arabic: مطوعين), or Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (i.e., the religious police) enforces the prohibition on the public practice of non-Muslim religions. Sharia applies to all people inside Saudi Arabia, regardless of religion. Jolly good that they aren't executing people at the moment for wanting to leave their religion!
Raif Badawi is still in jail awaiting the second tranche of the 600 lashes he was sentenced to for apostasy.
I think the estimated 1,000,000 illegals in this Country has more of a bearing on terrorism then cut-backs by May
Most, if not all, recent terror attacks here have been committed by people legally here and usually born here unless I'm mistaken (which I probably am, happy to be corrected).
Back to the usual back biting and u turning at the centre of the Tory Party. The policies that they are standing on have been fashioned by May and her unelected and pathetically inexperienced 'advisors' (who have careers in 'advising' and nothing else) Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy (look them up and see if you think this charming pair should be de facto running the country which is what they do) and now these two have fallen out, and Lyndon Crosby, an Aussie who can't vote in this election, is having to 'relaunch' the campaign, which has clearly been a disaster for them. Back to May v Corbyn as the choice for President of the UK, avoid any policy discussion. Tory MPs saying a majority of anything less than 80 will be a failure. Of course the truly horrible Seamus Milne has the same role for Corbyn, and doubtless some happy crappy new style C of E vicar does it for Timmy. Whoever you vote for you will get people you haven't voted for in the most literal sense. Apparently we are to see more of Boris Johnson and David Davies this week, and nothing from Hammond. Top hole, what!
Here's a question. Who is Theresa May's director of press/communications, her version of Alastair Campbell or Bernard Ingham? Who is her top spin doctor? She has rented Crosby for the campaign, but that's temporary and he doesn't actually engage with the media. As these are civil service posts (although obviously political appointments) we probably wouldn't be hearing from them during an election campaign, but go on, who does she have doing this job? We used to hear from Ingham and Campbell on a daily basis, whatever you thought of them they were big characters, the sort that only leaders with genuine self confidence have around them. You wouldn't need to Google it to find out their names. Still thinking? She doesn't have one. Both her Press Secretary and Director of Communications resigned the week that the election was called, because they weren't included in any meetings on anything, and couldn't work with Fiona Hill, described by Tory insiders as 'totally unpredictable'. Fiona, clearly a talented individual, is now doubling up as communications lead as well as dreaming up all the Tory policies and advising Theresa on what to wear. Still thinking? Come on this was a big news story. OK then, the press secretary was Lizzie Loudon and communications director Kate Perrior. Nah, me neither. Probably because they had absolutely no influence. Lots of negative comment from within the Tory party about the style of May's leadership and management.
Sadly, this is what you get when a Prime Minister with a working majority calls a totally unnecessary election based on a perceived certain win due to the unelectability of the main opposition. The fact it took her own party by surprise and they had no credible manifesto other than some moronic chant of 'strong and stable' has backfired horrendously and, fair play to Labour, they have run rings round her despite their manifesto being seriously suspect on cost grounds. The worst nightmare of all won't be a Labour win but a Labour coalition with the Scots, Welsh and Greens. The Lib Dems have already ruled themselves out of that although if they have a chance of squeezing another referendum out of it they may enjoy playing the 'kingmaker'. In all, deeply depressing...
Good analysis from my son, who will be voting for the first time and has declared for Corbyn. On hearing Diane Abbott on the radio - 'why do they let her speak?'
She has to speak because if Corbyn wins, she will be our Home Secretary. God help us... Why? She's muddle-headed, can't deal with figures and has no talent, so I think it must be because she and Jeremy were once bed buddies
Abbott is useless but May's grasp of figures isn't great either. All those years promising to get net immigration below 100k.
