To be fed up of comparisons with 1930s Germany in U.K. politics?

[jessica29054]

Surely a better and far less potentially offensive comparison is the 1980s?

Labour in disarray, therefore weak opposition, and a female PM of course.

Comparisons with the rise of the extreme far right in Germany have little place. The BNP are the equivalent to Hitler and his party and thankfully have little mainstream support.

Anyone who genuinely believes that the army abuse is simply the invention of 'left wing lawyers'

Who has said it is?

The gvt are stopping bogus claims not genuine ones

'it's time employers were made to employ local people'

So you want foreigners to be made to be discriminated against but you don't understand the similarity with the 30s...

Re: France, yes it's xenophobic, they'd definitely recognise what you say about Muslims being the main threat & about the vital importance of giving jobs to 'locals' first.

Some very sweeping generalisations about Ireland there, we're apparently a priest-ridden theocratic racist backwater and also a tolerant paradise welcoming to disaffected British people!

I'm not trying to shut down debate. But this thread absolutely had nothing to do with Muslim people or religion, and BillSykes made it about that

I didn't say anything about Muslims in general I made a point about Islamists. And it was directly related to this thread and the suggestion that we are some sort of dangerous proto-fascist society.

We're not, and when you compare our society to those which exist today which most closely resemble them it makes it completely clear just how laughable it is to say we're anywhere near that.

We live in a democracy under regulated justice system which aims to be fair. We have laws on British (rather than European) statute which ensure equality and prevent hate speech and discrimination. We have freedom of conscience and religion. We have legislation in place which is intended to provide as much equality as possible regardless of race, sex, disability, sexual orientation or religion. In fact if any political constraints are placed on anybody in our society it is the far right because there are specific laws aimed at preventing them peddling hate.

Compare that to Pakistan where discrimination against Ahamddiyah Muslims is enshrined in the constitution and they are actively discriminated against by the state including being denied passports and basic civil rights. Countries where it's not even safe to travel as a Jew of which there are many. Places like Indonesia where the state actively discriminates against Christians and churches are routinely burned down with impunity and the authorities turn a blind eye. Places like Saudi Arabia with no democracy, appalling treatment of women and brutal suppression of dissent including the death sentence for apostasy. Multiple countries where homosexuality is punishable by death or widely discriminated against. Ditto women, people of other religions etc, etc.

If you think the UK is even vaguely close to these sorts of nightmarish scenarios you are absolutely deluded. We're not even moving towards it. The idea that we're turning into the sort of society where mosques or synagogues could be burnt down without penalty or we would introduce laws singling people out because of their religion is ridiculous. We're actually moving more in the other direction - burning down a mosque or synagogue is actually a crime of an elevated level because it's a hate crime. We're passing laws which protect individual religious freedoms and groups rather than oppressing them.

Really there's just absolutely no comparison between the two.

Who has said it is?

Theresa May

"we will never again in any future conflict let those activist left-wing human rights lawyers harangue and harass the bravest of the brave the men and women of our armed forces"

The day after she announced a plan to opt out of human rights to protect UK troops from being sued.

From where im sitting I honestly believe the biggest threat to this country in the medium to long term is the sheer lunacy of the hard left.

Remember Hitlers political party was the Socialist Workers party.

gloria As others and myself has said. I believe that this us to do with the bogus claims that have had thereceived aid now stopped etc not genuine war crimes.

Truth is no one knows until actual policy is debated rather than a headline.

^^ this and let's not forget that the people in the largest nation on earth have no human rights or free speech.

if the UK were to turn a blind eye to abuse that our soldiers (and a very small minority) may carry out we would soon loose respect in the world

our military and security services are highly respected and no government will risk losing that and will want to keep those high standards

well apart from Corbyn but as he will thankfully never be leading the government that isn't really an issue

So, BillSykes, how do you account for the post-Brexit rise in hate crime, then?

Fawful the surplus of foreign born workers who are willing and able to work for far less wages than would be paid to a British citizen by law has started a race to the bottom in a way that's set back workers rights decades.

i am guessing you have a nice public sector job and don't understand the first thing about it.

That's why people like you were amazed and bewildered when swathes of working class voters voted for Brexit. Oh yes of viurze they are just stupid and racist of course.

Shins a country that controls women's fundamental rights to control their bodies in law isn't exactly a beacon of tolerance and justice is it?

You may remember a very famous thread on here by an Irish pregnant poster who was forced to keep her baby despite its inability to survive once born. She was absolutkry devestated and denied an abortion.

As for racism I imagine that's on a par with the rest of the world. We all have them.

Fortnum I think people walked into fascism because they preferred it to communism, didn't they?
(Re: China, as an aside, now they are mostly undercutting British workers if we want to look at who is undercutting who, aren't they, but we don't want to think about that because its too plain that we benefit from that in our standards of living...)

joffrey

Yes any crime is vile and crimes committed against another because of race, religion, sexual orientation or gender are vile.

However the reason you know there was a spike in such crimes is that they are recorded, investigated and the perpetrators put through an independent judicial system and punished or acquitted.

Thank God we live in democratic lawful Britain. Don't you agree?

What Fortnum said, with bells on.

The left have done some nifty rebranding of the word Socialist since the 1930s.

Indeed China is undercutting British workers and perhaps if it hadn't been for EU legislation we could have acted decisively to save those British jobs. You can't have it both ways.

I think you would find civil war happening on our streets if the government of the day defied the will of the people who, like it or not,voted to leave.

And you think there won't be civil war if the half of the population and the two countries who voted Remain are ignored?

Westminister is currently on a collision course with NI, and there's a very real possibility that civil war could re-erupt there.

Meanwhile Scotland could lose between 30,000 and 80,000 jobs as a result of Brexit, according to an economic analysis. Holyrood's Europe committee convener Joan McAlpine said the outlook was "grim", and warned there could be a "huge constitutional crisis" if Holyrood was not consulted about the "Great Repeal Bill", which severs ties between the EU and the UK.

The report from the Fraser of Allander Institute examines a series of potential post-Brexit scenarios. These range from an "optimistic" model similar to Norway's relationship with the EU to a "pessimistic" one based on a so-called "hard Brexit" outside the single market, based on World Trade Organisation rules.

The group said the most optimistic outlook would see Scottish GDP drop by 2% within 10 years, causing the loss of 30,000 jobs. The most pessimistic model would see GDP 5% lower within a decade, with 80,000 fewer jobs in the economy.

Prof Graeme Roy, director of the Strathclyde University institute, said the "detailed assessment" had found Brexit was likely to have "a significant negative impact on the Scottish economy".^

Ms McAlpine said the report "paints a grim picture" of the economy a decade on from Brexit.

There has been debate over whether Holyrood will have a say on the legislation that severs the ties between the UK and the EU, via the legislative consent system.

She said: "I would have thought there has to be a legislative consent motion (LCM), because it impacts on so many areas of Scottish law.
"I think there's a huge lack of understanding about the devolution settlement. The Sewell convention means that if there's a bill in the Westminster parliament which impacts on devolved areas, it has to get the consent of the Scottish Parliament.

"Clearly this impacts on devolved areas - and the decision on the LCM as I understand it is made here, by the presiding officer."

Asked what would happen if this was contested by Westminster, Ms McAlpine said: "We would be in unprecedented constitutional territory. It's our decision, our judgement whether it goes to the Scottish parliament and then the Scottish parliament votes on it democratically.

"There would be a huge constitutional crisis."

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-37564729

Shins a country that controls women's fundamental rights to control their bodies in law isn't exactly a beacon of tolerance and justice is it?

I suggest you look closer to home - women in part of the U.K. are similarly denied reproductive rights.

The trouble is with people who support left or right wing extremes they are by nature intolerant, pig headed and incapable of proper debate without resorting to violence in word and deeds.

See momentum and the BNP.

Both cut from the same dirty cloth.

gloria As others and myself has said. I believe that this us to do with the bogus claims that have had thereceived aid now stopped etc not genuine war crimes

You believe wrong then. The proposed plan is to opt out of human rights to protect British troops from being sued full stop.

maud I was talking about Ireland! Where are you talking about?

Wearedoomed, the point is - Brexit created a society where those people now feel justified and validated and like a majority of the population were racist all along and secretly agree with them.

How do you tackle that?

Why are you so sure the police and powers that be have chased this aggressively enough? What makes you believe all victims of such hate crimes would even come forward and report it? Is hate crime OK because someone comes along and resolves it as a crime? Or is it symptomatic of something deeper, that we need to tackle? Also, how naive are we in assuming that 'these people' really get dealt with? Do they? How do you know that?

*The trouble is with people who support left or right wing extremes they are by nature intolerant, pig headed and incapable of proper debate without resorting to violence in word and deeds.

See momentum and the BNP.

Both cut from the same dirty cloth.*

I totally agree

So, BillSykes, how do you account for the post-Brexit rise in hate crime, then?

And what evidence is there that we have even had one?

A lot of stories on this concerned a supposed 57% spike. This was a figure of reported crimes via one source which was an online form. This ignored that the site in question had been much more widely advertised between the compared dates which affected the figures - not Brexit. A lot of this supposed spike was a result of post brexit hysteria and people reporting Nigel Farage speeches or third hand accounts of rumours of attacks on social media. And this was a figure of allegations, not proven incidents.

Of the most high profile crimes the tapas restaurant vandalism turned out to be a burglarly, the Newcastle far right protests had been going on regularly well pre-Brexit and the Polish community centre attack has not been definitively linked and could well have had more to do with bad feeling over a change to a Bring Your Own Booze policy.

I haven't seen any reliable evidence which backs the supposed spike up. Just the one story with the 57% figure which had been widely debunked.

Gloria Scotland voted to stay in the U.K. The referendum was a UK mJority to leave. London voted in but do you think London will kick off and demand indeoendance?

Look no one knows how this will pan out for us as a country but I think it's really important to look ahead, stop the doom mongering and get on with it.

Maud is talking about Northern Ireland.