someone sent me this a couple of years ago. Obviously they weren't British and I'm not sure if they were serious but it's worth a ponder. Is this how the world sees us?
I just cant comprehend how people can sit behind a prime minister that lied to shut down parliament. HOW can anyone, with a shred of integrity or decency, possibly back him.
After what Boris said today... about murdered MP Cox and his crazy violent speech. Add that to how bigoted the Tories are. If you vote for them you at the very least are saying the **** they are saying is ok and you need to hang your head in shame.
I have voted Labour for over fifty years, a couple of times tempted to vote tactically but when I got to the ballot box couldn't quite bring myself to do it....this time my sitting MP is Geoffrey Cox (or Cox-Hucker as I prefer to call him) he runs Rees-Mogg a very close second in the most detestable human competition. So much so that I am resolved I can actually vote LIb Dem next time and hopefully get rid of the odious bully.
Just to correct myself - well that didn't last long. He's been f**king awful ever since I last looked. Back to the arrogance and blind stupidity.
Who are today´s Tories? Almost unrecognisable very previous incarnations. As Anna Soubry has said, she is an out and out Tory yet has said that what has happened is that the Parliamentary party has ceased to be one. Ken Clarke has said much the same. As detestable as they were under Thatcher and Major, they were still Conservative. Under Cameron, May and now Johnson they have move away from Conservatism to what is now neo-right or populism and are similar in ethos to the AfD. If an election were to happen in the near future, I suspect the UK AfD party would get a working majority. What Labour, Lib Dems, SNP, the true Conservative and PC need to do is form an alliance or a "party of national unity" to take on the AfD UK party, agree on a set of principles that are in the national interest rather than those that appeal to their core voters, win a majority, implement many reforms regarding health, education, transport, energy, and policing, have a progressive foreign policy that does not kow-tow to the present White House incumbent, implement PR so that we are never faced with a one dimensional Government that rules only in the interests of its backers. During this time it is to be hoped the True Consersvatism will return, that the likes of Mogg, Redwood, Patel, Braverman are never seen again and it reflects the values and policies of a modern, centre-right party as exemplified by the Christian Democrats of Germany.
Nature will find a balance. Though there may be no place for us in the future of life on earth, harmony will eventually be restored.
I have said time and again, the Earth will be fine. But does nobody have young kids or grandchildren they think enough of to change the living habits for? This isn't going to fix itself. I don't have kids, mainly because I decided long ago that I couldn't trust us not to screw up the Earth. But that doesn't mean people just give up.
The transcript covering Trump's phone call to the Ukraine President has been released. And though some people believe it might have been redacted to remove some very incriminating passages, there is enough there for the man to go straight to jail, not to pass GO or collect $247.23 [£200]. Here's much of the relevant passages that remain: https://apps.npr.org/documents/document.html?id=6429015-Trump-Ukraine-Transcript
After being asked by a colleague and friend of Jo Cox to tone down his aggressive rhetoric and using terms such as 'surrender bill' and 'capitulation act' and the aggressive tarring of No Deal opponents, Boris Johnson said... "The best way to honour the memory of Jo Cox and indeed the best way to bring this country together would be, I think, to get Brexit done." What a deplorable man he is.
I genuinely don't think the world sees us that way. Most people see us as either tedious yobs, tedious tea drinkers or tediously stuttering romantics. The image of Britain as a monster is too one dimensional and part of the revisionist trend in history at the moment. You cannot judge the past on the values of today. It is right to look back and disavow, but wrong to simply reject the past. Imperialism was not a British invention - and was desired by pretty much every nation on Earth. The modern desire for peace, and to respect your neighbours is not something we see particularly at any other point in time. Every European nation had empires - and they all did things we now see as monstrous. They just weren't as good at it as we were. I have been to museums on Aboriginal history in Australia, and seen the monstrous things Brits have done. However, go around the world and look into what the French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, etc. did. If that image is the right one for us to wear, then all Europeans need to wear it. Look at what the Romans did, the Ottomans, the *****ls, the Japanese, the Aztecs. Look everywhere! Tl;dr it is fashionable to bash the British Empire. However, if you want to find things in the past to get offended by, you will have enough to fill ten Twitters ten times over.
The thing is we were no worse than any other of the big European colonisers. So for England, you might as well lump in France, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal and so on. You know its bad though when even South Africans think they have the moral high ground over you. The very reason the Boers started rebelling against the British government, was because the British outlawed slavery down there (a good thing, right?). Now I'm not defending the Empire. Our behaviour in India and Ireland in was shameful. But, as far as the last 100 years are concerned, the Americans are much, much worse.
I have much the same thoughts with regards to working class people who continue to vote for the Tory party. Don’t they think about what their grandchildren will have to put up with based on what is happening now? I think too many read the wrong newspaper and don’t get to see what is really going on.
This is from Jonathan Lis, of the pro-EU thinktank British Influence. He speaks for many of us: "I don’t think any of us who witnessed what happened in the House of Commons today, whether in person or on TV, will ever forget it. I think the genuine, inhuman, toxic horror of it will remain etched in my mind for the rest of my life. This sounds shrill or hysterical. It is not. Something died tonight that will never come back. Something of our decency, our love, our care for one another, not as political opponents but as human beings, trying to do what’s best for the people we care about. This transcends Brexit. I don’t care if you voted leave or remain. It even, in fact, transcends prorogation. This was a festival of gleeful cruelty orchestrated by a political leader so removed from humanity that he was prepared to barrack and assail the friends of a murdered MP. Make no mistake. We’ve witnessed the first steps of a very deliberate revolution. This is the end of civility. End of playing by the rules. End of giving a **** about anyone or anything beyond the nationalist prize you think will unlock the glory you couldn’t begin to deserve. This is Trump’s Britain in ways we can only begin to compute. Language has no more limits. People have no more value. The aggressive, heartless contempt starts here and people have every right to be scared. These moments are as dangerous as any we’ve found in the last 80 years. We expect it from Johnson. The total unadulterated sociopathic malice was ‘priced in’ by his Tory enablers who denied what was in front of them and looked the other way. It’s the rest of the Tories who shame and devastate us. They saw, they listened, and finally they applauded. If you value democracy, if you value civility, if you value basic ****ing decency to your fellow human beings, now is the time to fight for it. We will get over prorogation. We will, somehow, get over Brexit. But unless we fight hard, fight now, we may not get over this." Jonathan Lis
I mean, our history books show us to be a bit of a monster too. Colonisation isn't exactly seen as a good word in the UK. Even when we were decolonising we've caused a lot of issues. A million people died after we separated India a Pakistan. And the issues in Israel speak for themselves for the border we drew there. Even in modern history it's hard to see us as the good guys when looking at how we affect outside countries. Our interventions in the Middle east haven't exactly had a positive effect. And we are even now willing to hurt the whole of Europe for the sake of nationalism and making sure immigrants stay on the war zones we created. Even in our best moments like WW2 we exploited lots of colonials to fight for us in a war that had little to do with many of them. Can certainly understand ethnic Serbs being unhappy with us after nato bombing Belgrade. I have a couple of Serbian friends who were kids through that.
