Westminstenders: The wheels on bus start to fall off, start to fall off…

[RedToothBrush]

The wheels on bus start to fall off, start to fall off…

Since Article 50 has been triggered – 8 days ago:

1. A week after a terror attack in London, the government threatened to stop co-operation over security issues with the EU. This was quickly retracted as ‘not being a threat’. Except it was.

2. The ‘Great’ Repeal Act White Paper was published. Its vague, lacks detail, does not have a draft bill and there is no plan for a public consultation over it. It proposes sweeping powers for the government without parliamentary scrutiny using Henry VIII powers.

3. HMRC have said the new computer system planned for launch in 2019, won’t be able to cope with the additional work which leaving the Customs Union would produce. It would be five times the work load which sounds like a lot more red tape.

4. Spain have said they would not oppose an Independent Scotland being in the EU.

5. May’s article 50 letter did not mention Gibraltar and after the publication of the EU draft document on how the Brexit process would be handled, this looks like a massive error and oversight. One of the clauses was that any future arrangements with regard to Gibraltar had to be settled with Spain bi-laterally rather than by the EU and the UK’s agreement with the EU would not apply to Gibraltar, unless Spain agreed. This has been taken as an affront to Gibraltar’s sovereignty, although the document says nothing about sovereignty. Michael Howard, however, decided this was sufficient grounds to threaten our ally Spain with war.

May has not condemned his comments, and laughed it off. Though she was happy to get worked up about the word ‘Easter’ a couple of days later.

Of course, this situation was entirely predictable and was predicted yet this situation seems to have taken the government by surprise. Our reaction, in the context of everything else, has made the UK look like a basket case.

6. The government’s plan to run talks on the UK’s settlement on leaving the EU in parallel with talks on the UK’s future relationship with the EU has been rejected by the EU. Instead we must do things in stages, with advancement to the next stage only possible after completing the last: Stage 1 – Exit, Stage 2 – Preliminary agreement on future relation, Stage 3 – Exit/Transition Deal, Stage 4 – As third country status enter a new deal.

The effect of this also means that deals we currently have with counties like South Korea through the EU need to be revisited. There is no guarantee these countries will want to continue trading with us on the same terms, if they do not want to.

7. The EU has set out its own red lines. Our deal 'must encompass safeguards against...fiscal, social & environmental dumping'. Our transition deal must not last longer than three years and individual sectors, like banking, should not get special treatment.

Donald Tusk has said we don’t need a punishment deal as we are doing a good job of shooting ourselves in the foot, whilst Guy Verhofstadt said Brexit is Brexit is a 'catfight in Conservative party that got out of hand” and hoped future generations would reverse it.

8. May has admitted that we might well have no deal in place by the time we leave the EU. Until now we have been told we would have a deal in two years. She has also admitted an extension of free movement of people beyond Brexit.

9. The Brexit Select Committee published their report which warned about the dangers of exit without any deal, as well as talking about problems relating to the ‘Great’ Repeal Act, Gibraltar and NI. This is sensible and you’d think uncontroversial, but the Brexiteers threw the toys out of their pram saying it was too pessimistic. The government’s job is, of course, to plan for problems no matter how unlikely – such as disasters – and to hope that never happens. It seems that these Brexiteers don’t want to act responsibility or do their job.

10. Questions at the WTO have been asked about how Brexit will affect them. Interest in the subject came initially from Indonesia about Tariff Rate Quotas, but other parties who were watching closely were Argentina, China, Russia and the United States.

11. Phillip Hammond has openly said that there are a number of Tory MPs who want us to not make any agreement with the EU and to crash out in a chaotic exit.

12. Polling has suggested that people want Brexit to be quick and cheap. Not only that, but the word ‘Brexit’ has started to poll badly. Instead the Brexit department are advising officials to use the phrase “new partnership with Europe”. Lynton Crosby, the mastermind behind 2015’s Conservative victory has also warned that the Tories would probably lose 30 seats they gained from the LDs at an early election.

Of course, even a 2020 election might prove challenging with a transition deal still likely to be unresolved as Brexit drags on. Government strategy is, apparently, to hope that Remainer's anger will have dissolved by 2020.

Eight days in, and the Brexit Bus looks like it strayed into 1980's Toxeth and got torched, its wheels nicked, and graffitied with obscenities over its £350million pledge.

What bluepeppers said. Who gets to define the 'terrorist'?
But no one gets to define our response, yet.

BluePeppersAndBroccoli

Westminster attack is still referred as a terrorist act. We know it wasn't. It was the act of a loner that clearly had major MH issues. So terrible yes. But not a terrorist attack as we think about it (ISIS)

I don't want to rehash this whole argument, but the fact that he was a loner with mental health issues in no way invalidates categorizing it as a terrorist attack. He didn't run over some people in his home town of Brimingham, but instead he drove down to the political heart of the UK, on the anniversary of the Brussels attacks, and used a mass casualty method that IS advocates for lone wolf attackers in the West. By any common sense standard, that's a terror attack. But of course some rarefied thinkers will disagree.

My views on combatting terrorism are that we must always remain within the laws of war - which are not the same as ordinary civil law

So no torture - so not like Trump wants
No chemical weapons - not like Assad or Putin.
No abuse of civilians

Internment isn't actually illegal in war, but the IRA Troubles showed it is a massive recruitment agent.
The overwhleming majority of Uk Muslims oppose terroris,. Let's keep them on aide

I see this war being fought in terms of sanctions and on the internet, rathr than by bombs and missiles
We had several friends who bombed Germany, one who took part in the firebombing of Dresden and was haunted by guilt (I told him not to be)
I'm not soft - those tactics were effective for that sort of war.
They won't work in this war.

Exactly blue
Let's not forget how many people will still label Thomas Mair a sad loner with MH problems but not a terrorist despite him killing for a political purpose.
Fwiw I think it's possible to be both a terrorist and have MH issues. Actually I think it's quite a largely crossed over vein diagram.

keep them on side < slaps ipad again >

BCF, Im not being a smart arse here, but where are these? Ive never seen one, but then Ive never gone looking. Do they get dumped in a particular forum?

There were some long-running ones in the In the News forum IIRC. Nothing to stop you making a thread; other people get to decide whether to engage in the discussion or not.

Hashi

Let's not forget how many people will still label Thomas Mair a sad loner with MH problems but not a terrorist despite him killing for a political purpose.

Anyone who denies that Mair was a terrorist is a moron - the facts of his target and his opinions / associations make it obvious. I wish there weren't so much special pleading in other cases.

confort a terrorist attacked mean something that has been planned ahead. It also assumes that the person is part of a group.

As far as we know this guy never had any contact with ISIs or any other terrorist group. He didn't spend days planning his attack, do some research in the internet etc.. we can't even be sure that when he came to London this was his plan. He might well have just flipped at some point in the day when he was suppose to do something else in the capital.
Like people with MH do.
Not like what terrorists do.

I personally prefer to listen to the Police who doesn't think it was a terrorist attack.
It was an awful event. It costed a lot of lives and yes it was at Westminster. Oh and he was Muslim.
This doesn't make him a terrorist.

I wish there weren't so much special pleading in other cases.
The only special pleading I see refers to white brits. I've never seen anyone defend a terrorist of any other race or even non Christian religion/no religion.
But I see a lot of people tarnishing all people who share attributes with them, which is as unfair as blaming all white brits for Jo Cox's death.

I don't think the terrorism/ not terrorism distinction is very helpful tbh, when talking about lone wolf type attacks. Indiscriminate violence creates terror whether it has a political motive or not. (I'm sure the people caught up in yesterday's school shooting in California were pretty fucking terrified). And it can be very difficult to draw the line between "disturbed individual" and "terrorism" in an age when terrorists no longer operate in groups.

This is true for both Islamic and white christian terrorism of course. Less publicity probably would help reduce lone wolf attacks; the increase in vehicular terrorism is a case in point. Whether this justifies gagging the press is a matter of debate; I would simply observe that most terrorist attacks get surprisingly little press. How many of us had head about the Palm Sunday bombings until I posted on here? I knew nothing about them until I googled, yet the death toll was 10 times that in the Westminster or Stockholm attacks.

Well organised "classical" terrorist groups with a fixed structure, like the IRA or ETA, have a few psychos - anyone remember the interview where an IRA member said he would "drown his baby in her mother's blood" if it helped drive Brits out of NI ?
However, they are overwhelmingly sane, just ruthless.

The "loose franchise" terrorist groups like ISIS and white supremacist groups often never even meet their terrorists who attack the West
It is mostly recruitment & training via internet - which is what we could disrupt - and those with MH and LDs are particularly vulnerable.

We should also stop those terrorists who do travel to trouble spots for training and to fight - again restricting some freedoms.

misti I saw a very small item about it on the news. I saw a lot more last night about the attack on BVB team bus yesterday.
Ironically given the discussion now I noted a lot of 'no one has said yet whether this is a terrorist act' though they believe it to have been preplanned on the team bus. Terrorism was being linked there almost instantly too before information on suspects were given out.
Maybe labelling everything as terrorism may make terrorism less attractive. It's a hope right?

I think that labelling everything as terrorism is playing in the hands of said terrorist that wants us to be scared of them and to think they are everywhere.
I'm not sure that actually doing the job for them is very wise.

Yeah, thought as much. It was a vague vague hope

I don't know blue, maybe Hashi has a point. Dortmund attack has had relatively restrained coverage. People have short attention spans, and there is no shortage of stuff going on for people to tweet about. Stockholm quickly got shoved down the trending list by United Airlines for eg.

BluePeppersAndBroccoli

As far as we know this guy never had any contact with ISIs or any other terrorist group. He didn't spend days planning his attack, do some research in the internet etc.. we can't even be sure that when he came to London this was his plan. He might well have just flipped at some point in the day when he was suppose to do something else in the capital.
Like people with MH do.
Not like what terrorists do.

I think Misti and BigChoc have just answered the point about planning. There's also a very obvious pattern of mass casualty IS attacks involving vehicles in just the last couple of years: Nice, Berlin, Stockholm, as well as others outside Europe.

Hashi

The latest report does in fact make it look like the T-word:

www.theguardian.com/football/2017/apr/12/borussia-dortmund-blasts-police-investigate-islamist-link-to-attack

BluePeppersAndBroccoli

I think that labelling everything as terrorism is playing in the hands of said terrorist that wants us to be scared of them and to think they are everywhere.
I'm not sure that actually doing the job for them is very wise.

And denying the reality when they are in fact in many places? How does that help us? The most common refrain on this board is that Leavers are incapable of dealing with awkward realities and prefer to ignore them - if that's true, then surely the same applies to this topic just as much.

Thanks Misti. I thought Id seen it all on here, till BCF mentioned that, thats all there was to it so,thanks for replying. Still quite shocked that sort of thing was allowable. I assume theyre dead as a dodo now, and dont need my 'guidance'

Off again.

My point was the link prior to any official making a statement to its effect or not. Whether it may or may not be is here or there when discussing whether media outlets should be reporting on it. It's doing, as blue says, their job for them.

I think that labelling everything as terrorism is playing in the hands of said terrorist that wants us to be scared of them and to think they are everywhere.
Or?

The suffragettes have been called terrorists.

Terrorism is in the perceiver's response, that's why it's called 'terror'. One can choose one's responses.

If a hundred years ago people were told they would be using metal travel engines which would kill and maim 182 000 British people in 2016 alone, would they have been terrified?

Shouldn't we be now? Let alone the planet destruction and oil fight we're in the middle of again.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08j9z4x
Great programme on the invention of Diesel.

What would any of us be arguing about if this hadn't been invented?
Peanut oil is mentioned.

I have been very concerned about the way the press report suicide attempts linked to terrorism (e.g. The Westminster attacker). Following clusters of suicides, especially amongst young people, the press generally follow a set of guidelines when reporting suicides in an attempt to minimise publicity and in particular avoid glamourising it. E.g.
www.samaritans.org/media-centre/media-guidelines-reporting-suicide

How often do you think they follow these guidelines when reporting suicides linked to terrorism? Pretty much never imo. Instead they obsess over and inadvertently glamourise the event. We know that this can lead to copycat behaviour. I'm therefore with Big Choc on the minimising coverage side of the fence.

Definitions of terrorism are even more pertinent in US , where most mass killings (not usually described as terrorist attacks) are carried out by white (nominally) Christian males, with easy access to guns.

www.dailykos.com/story/2016/6/20/1540741/-Van-Jones-Should-we-now

Bolshybookworm

I have been very concerned about the way the press report suicide attempts linked to terrorism (e.g. The Westminster attacker).

Now I've heard everything - terrorist mass murder classed as a suicide attempt. If suicide was his primary goal, he could have jumped off that bridge instead of killing the people on it, don't you think? And isn't there obviously a different standard of public interest in a case in which members of the public are killed than in the case of a solitary suicide, who harms only themselves?

They tend to be known as suicide attacks

We should accept when a crime is a terrorist act, which it can be even if the perpetrator is a lone wolf with MH issues, whether of the fascist right or the Islamofascist ISIS.

However, equally, don't be cowed by the terrorists into e.g. avoiding London, or flying on holiday (except to destinations where the FO advise against)
ntbo, ISIS terrorists aim to terrorise the West - because they are ridiculously puny as a military threat.

The way to tackle them in the UK is to keep calm, carry on as normal and support the security services - who rely heavily on intelligence supplied by the Muslim community.

So after terrorist attacks, it's counterproductive to emote against Muslims as a group - which ISIS would love you to do.
Just condemn the murderous losers who actually commit terrorist acts, but don't waste too much time on them. They aren't worth it.

As an aside, I never name the terrorist who murdered Jo Cox, because he is not important. She was.
She should be remembered and he should live out his life in prison, in the obscurity he deserves.
I never bothered to learn the names of IRA terrorists either. Why should I.

But what of the gun crimes we have had in this country - the Hungerford and Dunblane massacres? They weren't as far as I am aware, described as terrorism, but as people who had flipped, and then after going on their killing spree, went and killed themselves.