babypolis posted:

how popular is corbyn relative to other politicians? like is a +0 favorable considered good?

Peel posted:

it's extremely coincidental that corbyn and labour's fortunes reversed the moment the tories released a 'kill all olds' manifesto

Significant Ant posted:

lmao May is more unpopular than

babypolis posted:

how popular is corbyn relative to other politicians? like is a +0 favorable considered good?

Jose posted:

shes broken

https://twitter.com/SamCoatesTimes/...r%3D483%23pti32

mrbradlymrmartin posted:

considering that everybody important on the island including his own party has been making GBS threads on him publicly for fukken decades breakin even is a o k

hes more hillary than bernie in that regard -- hes got decades of media hatin on him

Baron Corbyn posted:

decades? Corbyn was an unknown backbencher until two years ago. Diane Abbott and to a lesser extent John McDonnell were much more well known as the faces of the socialist left. Abbott has received and continues to receive far more abuse.

Terror Sweat posted:

https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/874671254250409985


huh, so all that stuff about bringing out the youth vote was a bunch of bull?

Fallen Hamprince posted:

Peel posted:

trump

mrbradlymrmartin posted:

yeah it dont seem like there was anything like the same level as hillary hate but he seemed to be the butt of quite a few jokes for longer than that, at least lookin at all the quotes in the papers and poo poo

then again yall got crazy papers maybe its just f a k e n e w s

Peel posted:

trump remained unpopular and in fact less popular than hillary all the way to beating her

MikeCrotch posted:

Fake News never managed to take off in the UK like it did in the US because our tabloids are crazy enough already

Gum posted:

That's a pretty big jump from previous elections

Gum posted:

With Hillary getting far more votes

got any sevens posted:

not the EC votes, which matter

Peel posted:

it's extremely coincidental that corbyn and labour's fortunes reversed the moment the plp mostly shut up and the press were legally forbidden from lying about them

KomradeX posted:

So Sinn Fein I guess meet with May today to tell her that they're in violation of the Good Friday Agreement and to demand an increase in funding and a referendum on union with Ireland. How likely is May to gently caress this up and poo poo gets bad over there again?

Gum posted:

The voice of nationalism said that if this goes through GFA is dead. It's going to be up to the people of NI how they choose to interpret this

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

bring on NIrexit

SKULL.GIF posted:

https://twitter.com/alanferrier/status/873826735300763648

KomradeX posted:

So Sinn Fein I guess meet with May today to tell her that they're in violation of the Good Friday Agreement and to demand an increase in funding and a referendum on union with Ireland. How likely is May to gently caress this up and poo poo gets bad over there again?

Mister Adequate posted:

Alright lads and lasses, seeing as there's a lot of questions about Are Wee Country given the DUP issue, I'm going to put together a small effortpost that can hopefully clear some things up. Bear in mind that I've not actually lived in the province for some time now, and though it's an area of interest, it's not an area I could be called a specialist. You can probably assume that anyone correcting me is more accurate than I am. Also, full disclosure, family of mine was killed in the Shankill Road Bombing of 1993, and I in principle support unification, so various biases may show. Anyway, caveats out of the way, here goes:

What is Northern Ireland?

Northern Ireland occupies six of the thirty two historical counties of Ireland in the north-east of the island, and is one of the four constituent countries that make up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the other three being England, Wales, and Scotland). Whilst England has massive power due to population and hosting the actual UK Parliament, and Wales and Scotland have varying levels of devolved powers, Northern Ireland is a special case due to the legacy of the Troubles. NI is also sometimes called Ulster (Which isn't accurate to the historical Ulster and upsets some Nats as a result), or affectionately, Norn Iron, because that's how us eejits pronounce it. Norn Iron has basically no political connotations and is a pretty good informal term as a result.

What were The Troubles?

Most people will be aware that the Troubles were a period of enormous civil discord and conflict, primarily taking place in NI, lasting from the '60s to the late '90s. More specifically, it was a conflict between the 'Unionists' (So named due to their desire to remain in the United Kingdom) and the 'Nationalists' (Who support a united Ireland), with the Unionists getting under-the-table backing from UK state actors and the Nats having mostly to scrounge up support wherever they could, including weapons stolen from the Norwegian Army, AKs donated by Gaddafi, and various things bought in the US and smuggled over.

Anyway, the reasons for the conflict are vast and complicated, but at the simplest level, England embarked on an imperial project in Ireland that lasted almost a millennium, starting with the Norman invasion in the twelfth century. Over the long centuries the north of Ireland proved to be the most intractable to these foreign invaders, and as a result a huge number of settlers (mainly from Scotland) were brought into the region. So anyway Ireland wins independence, after literal centuries of revolts and rebellions, in the early years of the 20th century, but the settlements in the North had been effective enough to create a new identity of Ulster-Scots, and these people were fiercely loyal to the English throne. End result, Northern Ireland stays with the UK while the rest of Ireland goes their own way.

Unfortunately the settlement was not palatable to basically anyone, and tensions rose over the years, with Unionists terrified of an impending annexation by the Republic that would leave them all out of work at best, and Nats treated as second-class citizens, repressed by the Unionist-dominated coppers, and so on. In the late 60s this came to a head with the Battle of the Bogside, which was a fuckoff enormous riot in Derry (Or Londonderry if that's what you prefer). The Troubles were on. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) on the Nationalist side, and Ulster Defence Association (UDA), Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and a shitload of other wee groups and splinter factions on the Unionist side.

Basically we all spend the next thirty years bombing and shooting and baseball batting the shite out of each other, and Northern Ireland became a pretty brutal place, where police stations were armored like you'd expect to see in Iraq in 2006, violence was everyday, and Belfast at least had to be physically divided by huge-rear end walls euphemistically called Peace Lines because otherwise we all went into Permanent Riot Mode and it's like 28 Days Later up in.

So what ended this mess?

An extremely long and grueling political process, the Peace Process, whose cornerstone is commonly called the Good Friday Agreement. It is widely acknowledged to be a messy and imperfect situation, but it did well enough to put the worst of The Troubles in the past, and the few remaining diehards on both sides were mostly left out in the cold. In part this was because the peace process involved basically every group of relevance in the matter, which meant sitting down across the table from known terrorist leaders. Concessions of various sorts were made, one of the most contentious of which was prisoner releases of convicted terrorists and so on; not something many bereaved families want to see, but if it stops more families ending up in the same situation, it's something I'm personally able to live with.

As I say though, it was a good enough agreement to end the great majority of serious violence, despite ongoing issues with things like marches and so on. The thing is that one of the core, central, most indispensable parts of the agreement is the dissolution of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which brings us up to the current mess. There are many other ways in which the EU is an important guarantor of peace, but that is by far the main one. Almost everyone ended up in agreement on it, with referendums in both the North and Republic strongly in support of the agreement, and only one major political player opposed - the Democratic Unionist Party.

Wait, what about Sinn Fein? They don't take their seats, but could they, to change the maths?

Okay, Sinn Fein are/were the political wing of Irish Nationalism and were very strongly linked to the IRA, which is one of the main reasons aforesaid compromises were both hard to get and essential. They remain committed to a United Ireland, and they stand for UK General Elections in the North (They're also active in the Republic as a more 'normal' political party but that's not directly germane). They reliably get a handful of seats in Norn Iron, but due to history and objectives, they do not take the seats they win in the British Parliament. To do so would give legitimacy to British rule over Northern Ireland.

The Commons has 650 representatives, meaning on paper a party needs to win 326 seats in order to have a majority, and thereby have an uncomplicated mandate that only has to worry about their own party's MPs. Because SF doesn't take their seats, this number is reduced, usually to 323. This time around SF actually won seven seats, meaning that magic number for this Parliament is 322. As the Tories have 318, they need to find four seats from elsewhere to have the majority needed for getting things done. Everyone else is either too ideologically opposed to the Tories (e.g. the SNP) or has been badly burned by coalitions before (Liberal Democrats), which means the only game in town appears to be the DUP. In this instance, as the DUP have ten seats, a Tory-DUP coalition or alliance or whatever tots up to 328, which is a very narrow majority but enough.

However, there was last night a possible situation where the Tories and DUP would add up to about 323 seats, which would mean, should Sinn Fein actually take their seats, that this coalition would lose its majority. As SF loving detest the Tories with every fibre of their beings it is understandable that people could ask "Hang on... what if...?" but it was never really on the cards. Sinn Fein's party constitution explicitly forbids taking Westminster seats, and our dead, gay forum's general consensus is that whilst there may be some theoretical circumstance where they'd take their seats, we are talking about some kind of insane situation where they are needed in order to stop an existential threat. That all said, being able to kill a Tory-DUP coalition has to be the most tempting look at Westminster Sinn Fein's had in a long long time.

Alright, they're not taking their seats - So what about the DUP?

The Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP, are unique in UK politics in that they are an evangelical force that has considerable power at least in Norn Iron. They're anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage, and have at least some people high in the party who deny climate change and are Young Earth Creationists. They were founded by the inimical Reverend Ian Paisley, who was, uh, firm in his stances on remaining part of the UK among other things. Now, normally this lot aren't doing anything on the UK stage as a whole, being more concerned with vetoing gay marriage or expansion of abortion rights in Norn Iron. Yesterday's election shattered that however; today the DUP are the only thing propping up Theresa May's government, giving them massive influence and power.

Now, the modern Conservative party has made attempts to be more socially progressive, and indeed they were the party who got gay marriage legislation through the Commons and legalized it in the UK minus Northern Ireland, and they more-or-less consider that stuff to be secondary at best, and a series of lost battles at worst. The DUP probably won't be demanding an abortion ban or anything, but they also can't be counted on to support anything progressive that comes up, because it's going to make Jimmy on the Newtownards Road extremely upset come next election time. Still, these are more-or-less negotiable or avoidable, and you'd be likely able to count on other parties supporting things like that regardless. The real problem is in Brexit.

Wait, Brexit? How does that effect Northern Ireland?

Remember when I said the Good Friday Agreement relied on an open border? Yeah, that's the problem. Regressive as they are in many ways, the DUP are smart enough to know that the border with the Republic is essential. Since the end of the Troubles, NI has seen a lot of new growth and development (place looks nothing like it did when I was wee), and the current economy is hugely reliant on being able to trade over the border with zero paperwork, fees, or anything else. You just hop in your truck in Newry, drive down to Drogheda, and start unloading.

So Brexit is going to put that to bed, because it will create a border between the United Kingdom and the European Union, a land border in the case of the island of Ireland. Absolutely everyone in Norn Iron is bricking it as a result because they know just how catastrophic this will be for the economy, and the DUP wants the softest Brexit they can get as a result. Whatever the border looks like, it needs to be as open to movement and trade as it is today, and every addition to that starts putting people out of work and closing businesses.

Unfortunately for prospects of their coalition, the Tories have taken very much the opposite tack; a Full English Brexit, a Red White and Blue Brexit, a Hard Brexit, "No deal is better than a bad deal", and so on. Characterize it as you please, the end result is the same, the Tories don't give a flying gently caress about NI or the consequences of Brexit, and have traded on promises of sticking it to the EU and being willing to crash out of the negotiations if they can't get the deal they want. Unfortunately, contrary to what they claim, the EU does not need us more than we need them, and given how done Brussels is with our stupid bullshit, they're not going to be very open to us pissing around.

Everything else can be negotiated or just put on the back burner until the next parliament, but because Article 50 has been triggered, and the negotiations are scheduled to start in a mere ten days, Brexit cannot. It is coming down the tracks with absolute inexorability, and no matter what is done, SOMEONE is going to be angry enough to pull their support out of Parliament and scuttle the whole thing. May wasn't actually wrong that going in with like a 50+ seat majority would strengthen her hand, but it was actually about domestic strength more than with the EU negotiators. Now, if she pursues the hard Brexit her party wants, the DUP will tell her to get out tae gently caress. If she pursues one soft enough to satisfy them, her own MPs will tell her to get out tae gently caress. And the thing is that this does not change if she goes. Sometimes you can shore things up with a change of leadership, but whatever poor sod is in charge, with the Commons distributed as it is, faces exactly the same situation and exactly the same problems.

Further Constitutional Complications

In order to secure peace in Norn Iron, the London government had to basically step back from any sort of party political involvement in the Province. The UK at large was supposed to act as a guarantor and mediator, with the authority to bring everyone together and have them sit down and find agreements, but largely staying hands-off otherwise. To explicitly favor one political party or enter into agreement with them is deeply and fundamentally problematic in this regard. This may be why there's no announcement of a formal coalition, to maintain plausible deniability over this matter, but the problem was never going to be in the official name of the thing.

As the North is currently mired in an existing political crisis anyway, with the devolved government in Stormont unable to agree on an Executive and therefore not currently actually sitting, far past the deadline for forming a government, so it's hard to imagine any of this coming at a worse time. That deadline was extended due to the General Election but things are only more complicated right now.

So... Brexit bad?

Brexit bad enough that, if handled badly, we could be in for Troubles 2: Electric Boogaloo, or a NI unification referendum, or God alone knows. I wouldn't expect a marked increase in violence but who can say for sure? And the various groups are much smaller than at their heights, but they're mostly still there, carrying on as criminal gangs more than anything, but no doubt all able to get guns and bombs together for a new campaign if needed.

UrbicaMortis posted:

Well, neither sinn fein or the DUP want a return to the troubles. I mean, they both have power in NI, they don't want people to start trying to blow them up. I'm not an expert in NI stuff though, so I'm quoting a good post from UKMT below:

SKULL.GIF posted:

https://twitter.com/alanferrier/status/873826735300763648

Mainwaring posted:

https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/875347278596366336

Uncle Wemus posted:

When was the american equal coverage rule killed was that during reagan?

Taintrunner posted:

a true corbynite would sieze the yachts of the borgeois and rescue both yah lass and the good dinner egg boy

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

https://twitter.com/camcamina/status/874713648278769664

SKULL.GIF posted:

https://twitter.com/alanferrier/status/873826735300763648