Megxit and the rise of woke royalism

It does not match the reality of those on the same side as the censors, new moralists and social climbers.
Try challenging the orthodoxies handed down from on high instead of scraping and grovelling, ya wee nyaff.

If the Saudis were to do as you say, the shortfall would be made up by The USA, Russia, Canada and Venezuela. Sanctions would be shifted to the countries who continued to buy cheap Saudi oil.
In short, the trade war would intensify with China as the target. Its public spending is already a runaway, and would be forced even higher. 42%of all Chinese growth in the last 10yrs is made up of Government spending. 10yrs ago that spending was 20% of GDP. It is now 35%. Debt, both public and private, has exploded. A lot of Chinese could see their savings wiped out. Trump will shed no tears over all of that.

Absolutely, spot on.

If you think people will react positively to any attempt to “replace” Iran’s leadership you are sorely mistaken.

And I don’t just mean people in Iran.

Trump’s strategy seems simple enough; cut the head off the chicken and let it run around aimlessly for a few seconds before it drops dead. As far as the ‘values’ of a lunatic regime are concerned, they’ve just shot down an airliner stuffed full of their own people. This was no accident, the air to surface missile crew use sophisticated radar and identification software nowadays. They may try to tell you otherwise, but it seems obvious to me that you can’t mistake an airliner for an American fighter. Unless, of course, you are claiming that a foreign fighter had landed at Tehran airplane for refueling before continuing on its journey! The fact that they tried to cover it up by bulldozing the site immediately afterward shows how clumsy they are at diplomacy and handling crisis. It’s like catching kids shortly after they’ve been caught doing something naughty. Therefore, there is no way you can trust them to keep their end of any deal you want to make with them. Trump is right in essence; enough of the continual appeasement. I wouldn’t trust this lot with a bow and arrow let alone a nuclear weapon.
We heard this all before about the warmonger Trump shortly after the start of his Presidency. Remember the Korea crisis? The looney left media were intent on telling us then that we were all heading for WW3! That was an accurate prediction, wasn’t it? This continual finger wagging is getting very tedious now.
Finally, with regards the principle of ‘civilized war’, a batshit crazy oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one, you cannot deal with an implacable enemy in a half hearted way. That strategy went rather well for the Americans in Vietnam, didn’t it?

@In Negative

Interesting comment, but I think you are missing out that essentially the US and Iran are at war, it is unannounced and unacknowledged officially but their actions indicate they are at war.
There were significant events which led up to the killing of Soleimani; the tit for tat taking of oil tankers in July of last year, Iran arresting and probably executing a number of it’s own citizens with links to the US for ‘ spying ‘, the killing of an American civilian + injury of US troops in the rocket attack in Iraq (probably by Hezbollah) soon after, followed by the US bombing sites linked to Hezbollah in retaliation, and ultimately the attack on the US embassy in Baghdad days before the drone attack on Soleimani.

War is going on but everyone including the US and Iran prefer to pretend it is’nt, lying constantly and with no compunction.

@Michael
This is entirely different to what was going on with rocket man. When you murder the dignitary of a sovereign nation with diplomatic privileges whilst on state business you flout an international rule-base on which every country on earth’s moral authority and meaning rests. You destroy the system by which the world consents to operate and conduct its conflicts.

You bring up the passenger shoot down. By what moral standard do you now object to that? Commercial airliners are fair game in uncivilised war. Why pretend otherwise? Trump has already reset the rules. It doesn’t matter what Iran do now, Trump has already destroyed any moral principle.

@Claire
If there is a war, it’s a low-level war. By killing Soleimani Trump has made a bet. He’s made a bet that by doing something irrational and outside the world order that it might bring Iran more into line. In humiliating the country on the world stage, he has said: “What you going to do about that then? You can’t predict what I’ll do next if you do anything about that.” This unpredictability may or may not force Iran to behave in ways that the US want them to. It may also lead us into a full blown war in the middle-east, and as we know from history, there is absolutely no knowing where that will go.

WWI started with the assassination of someone no one had ever heard of. The way the world is right now and the way the middle-east is right now, I reckon we may well be on the threshold of another world war. I would argue that WWI and WWII were necessitated by rapid changes in technology that the old world order was struggling to incorporate. With all the old systems crumbling around us now under the weight of digital technologies, I’d suggest we were in a very similarly unstable place. A globally destructive war might be just the thing we are looking for in order to rebuild our societies more appropriately to changed circumstances.

@Claire
My claim about Trump’s irrationality in killing Soleimani is based on the flouting of all civilised practise where international relations and war are concerned. I agree with you that he was responding to a line of symbolic provocations (as the US see them) and I agree that it makes sense in a tit for tat escalation of hostilities too. My point though is that he blatantly broke with all legal conventions and went way beyond what might be considered standard political practise. It is irrational insofar as it breaks with consensual, rationalised conflict and goes back to a might is right system of self-interest. There has been no formal declaration of war between Iran and America. It was an illegal assassination of a very important figure from a legitimate sovereign country – akin, say, to the North Koreans killing Prince Harry on a diplomatic mission to South Korea. I would expect that to unite the whole UK in disgust and outrage (not to mention the wider “civilised” world) regardless of what they thought about the monarchy.

And this is what Trump achieveed. He used the US occupation of Iraq (another sovereign country) without informing them, to murder a dignitry of a neighbouring state, a dignitry who was also fighting alongside many of them against ISIS. It’s not just Iran that have good reason to feel affronted by this action. The millions on the streets of Iran surely prefigure a far wider grief/outrage right across the middle-east.

I still feel that Trump is looking to clear the way for a negotiation with Iran that he has brokered and approved of. The strategy might even work and if it does, I’ll give him credit. It’s a hell of a gamble though and he’s gambling with way way more than just the Iranians. He’s relying on a lot of unpredictable elements behaving in ways I don’t believe are natural to them. Who knows what kinds of tribal enemy he’s unleashed in that action.

@Claire
It’s also worth balancing the claims of Iranian provocation a little too. This whole situation has come about becuase the US tore up the Iranian nuclear deal, a deal that Iran were comitted to and honouring; the US have also imposed crippling sanctions on Iran which a) increases its domestic instability (one reason for the sanctions) and b) means many of its poorest, sickest and youngest will suffer/die. They are deliberately trying to strangle Iran to death in the hope a more convenient regime will emerge.

Whatever you think of Iran, you can see why it wouldn’t want to just sit back and let itself be strangled to death.

@Claire
I draw an equivalence between Harry and Soleimani not to compare deeds, but only as to compare the way a people are wounded by his death. He is a figure whose killing appears to have humiliated and united the Iranian people en masse. He was emblematic of something more profound within the culture and that culture’s feelings regarding America and the West. He is more than “a bad guy,” as Trump might have it.

As for his being directly responsible for thousands of deaths, I have no idea about this. I hear it a lot, but I’ve not been given any specific example of any particular outrage. It was likely more important to America to kill him for political reasons than to avenge the deaths of US soldiers. He was an important figure in Shiite unification throughout the middle-east – the Saudis didn’t like him; Israel didn’t like him; from a western perspective, he was a destabilising force. I don’t know anything like enough about this to get too deeply involved in it – like everyone else, I’d never heard of this guy before the other day. I’d imagine though that they killed him in order to weaken Iranian power in the region whilst committing a symbolic outrage to show that Trump isn’t playing by the established rules.

Given the West’s clandestine support of groups like ISIS where it suited them (e.g. in Syria and Libya) I’m not convinced the US are too troubled by the deaths of soldiers in and of themselves. Let us not forget that ISIS et al are essentially of a Saudi tradition and are quite useful in destabilising Iran.

How many votes did the “resurgent” SDP achieve in the election.

The SDP was a pretty big pipe dream in the 1980s. Right now? Well, best of luck to anyone backing that horse.

Olivia dear, there’s more to life than filthy lucre…

That was a reply to Mr. Dominic Straiton.

I agree with you Zenobia (!!!)

The Puritans did indeed make an important contribution to the British constitution and culture in all sorts of ways as well as founding America. England’s civil war meant we had a ‘ republic’ which lasted 20 years, and Cromwell gradually took on all the privileges that had previously been held by only monarchs.
I do not think Woke culture is comparable with Puritanism, far from it.

‘repost’ = riposte?

‘repost’ = riposte?

A citizens army executed the king and tried to impose a more democratic political structure in England in 1649 (The Agreement of the People). Thwarted by the military elite of the time. 1945 and a citizens army tried to impose a more democratic political structure in Britain (The Atlee government). Gradually being thwarted by incompetent middle class politicians.