fahrenheit451:368

There comes a time in the affairs of nations when the past ought to be put behind them.History was ever thus;if it were otherwise then we in the UK  would be stranded in a perpetual imbroglio of recurring grievances and hatreds.

Which of course certain areas such as the Balkans or the Middle east are and are not likely to emerge from them merely by the counting of years and decades as they pass. Were we something like them,then the offspring of the Roundheads and Royalists would still be embroiled in antipathies and conflicts related to their original struggles in the 1640s, which they are not.

72 hours ago,on Saturday 8 November,Ireland held its General Election and things will never be the same again. Sinn Fein irrevocably emerged as a major player in Dublin politics,one that will have important and lasting consequences for the future structure and coherence of the United Kingdom itself.

The UK having gone through its own recent GE2019 in December still under the antiquated,shambolic FPTP system where a single party can emerge with an overall parliamentary majority of 80 seats having garnered around 30% of the votes cast contrasts unfavourably with Ireland's multi-member constituencies with proportional representation /preference voting that seems entirely ,rationally superior and reflective of and responsive to actual political preferences of the electorate.

The Brexit -powered revolution has a long way to go yet,but its initial dynamic cannot now be countermanded.In its wake as an ineluctable outcome,the UK's over-centralised government and administrative apparatus shall change and evolve.

More or less in some cogent and popularly acceptable fashion if we are fortunate.

Then again,given the UK's chequered history on such matters,perhaps not.

In these historically significant periods of imminent transition,giving the go-ahead to vainglorious, metropolitan elitist,crony-corporate capitalist white elephant projects aka HS2 is not what London ought to be concentrating on or doing.

Then again would it be London if it didn't?

fahrenheit451:259

The Republic of Ireland recently conducted a plebiscite on the question of whether or not the legislature ought to repeal the amendment to the Constitution that gives protection to the life of the unborn. This is disingenuously called by its detractors  the anti-abortion amendment.
64% of the registered Irish Electorate turned out to vote on May 25. 66% of whom voted to repeal the 8th Amendment.

So on the empirical basis of significantly less than half of the 3 million plus electorate voting for repeal,the supporters of " Together4Yes " and corporate MSM everywhere declared a " landslide victory " for the proponents of unrestricted,state-approved extermination of the pre-birth humans.

The British Prime Minister,referred to in one news report as , " a practising christian " (seriously!) immediately congratulated those who'd campaigned for the Repeal of the 8th.Amendment. She was followed in short order by an unruly stampede of PC metropolitan-based virtue-signalling well wishers.Hardly any time had passed when all the major and minor UK parties called,in one way or another,officially or otherwise in the media for Northern Ireland to amend its laws on abortion to bring it in line with that foreign country on its southern border.

As an inveterate campaigner for the protection of the inalienable rights of pre-birth humans, I found that Peter Hitchen's views and assessment of the issue,from the Mail on Sunday of 3 June sum up incisively all that I want to say.

03 June 2018 1:58 AM

" This is pretty much the end of Christian Europe. The old Commandment 'Thou Shalt Do No Murder' has been repealed, by the Irish vote to legalise abortion on demand.

There has always been some leeway about killing – mainly self-defence and Just War. But the great religion that formed European civilisation was always against the destruction of innocent life.

What follows isn't an argument about whether or even when abortion is right or wrong. I'll leave that to you. It is about what abortion is, and how the law works.

Oddly enough, when Britain relaxed its abortion laws 50 years ago, the issue wasn't as clear-cut as it was for Ireland last month. In the 1960s, we knew far less about unborn babies than we do now. There were no ultrasound scans.

The miracles of medicine which nowadays frequently save tiny premature babies were unknown.

It was much easier for supporters of abortion to believe that unborn babies weren't really human – a belief they spread by their use of the chilly Latin word 'foetus'. They don't use Latin to describe anything else in their lives, so why do they use it in this case?

It was also possible to claim, as the legalisers did, that making abortion easier wouldn't turn it into a form of contraception.

Back in the 1960s, they argued it was all about a small number of desperate women forced against their will to have babies through no real choice of their own.

Who believes that now, when Britain has 180,000 abortions a year, many of them involving women who have undergone the procedure more than once before?

There was also a claim that there were many thousands of dangerous back-street abortions. But seek facts on this, and you will run into trouble.

At the time, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (in the British Medical Journal of April 2, 1966) said of such claims: 'These are without any secure factual foundation of which we are aware.'

They said there were, on average, 50 fatal abortion attempts each year in England and Wales. This was undoubtedly tragic and gruesome, but did it really justify legalising abortion on demand?

Most people don't realise that before 1967 many legal abortions were already taking place in Britain (about 3,000 a year in NHS hospitals, probably many more in private clinics), just much more tightly regulated.

In short, Ireland has no real excuse for rushing to copy this country, which had taken its decision on the basis of several false assumptions, and in some ignorance of the facts about the unborn.

We went too far and still can't work out what to do about it. And Ireland had plenty of reasons to pause, or be a good deal more cautious.

But this was just as much about the overthrow of Ireland's Christian past as it was about abortion.

For good reasons and bad, much of Ireland has turned its back on its own faith. And, like the rest of Europe, it has embraced the new religion of Selfism, whose chief commandment is 'Nobody has any right to tell me what to do with my own body'.

You can see why people might want to punish the Roman Catholic Church, which has certainly allowed and hidden sexual abuse and brutality.

But these things are not unknown in secular liberal organisations, from children's homes and old people's care homes to the BBC and the police.

Abortion has become a rallying point for the Selfist faith, a test of the new post-Christian version of virtue. How else can we explain the mad calls (many of them from 'Conservative' politicians in this country) to force Northern Ireland to follow suit?

These demands make no sense at all. The whole point of Ireland is that it is separate from the UK.

The whole point of devolved government in Stormont is that Northern Ireland makes its own rules on such things.

If Northern Ireland decides to relax its abortion laws, then the fact that Ireland has done so has no bearing on the matter at all.

The truth is that modern abortion campaigners are fervent dogmatists who impose their new ideology everywhere, on any excuse. They know the truth about it. But they don't mind. They want a very different world from the one we grew up in, and now they are going to get it.

And once one vulnerable, voiceless minority has been classified as less than human, who will be next? "

Here I Stand,I can do no other..

fahrenheit451:255

The Anglophobic,or should we say anti-British sentiment that has suffused Irish political and cultural discourse since time immemorial has attained its zenith.
The Fenian Kneecappers and Bombers and their misbegotten offspring have ascended their very own allegorical Calvary and are awaiting their own imminent resurrection as foretold in the annals of terrorism and bloodshed.
That quintessentially obtuse and arcane shibboleth known as  " The Irish Border Question " has been parlayed into the defining problematic on which the UK's brexit from the EU is now ordained to founder catastrophically.

The Irish Times reported on November 21,2017 :-

After a heated Bundestag debate, Germany voted yesterday to back Ireland’s request to restructure crisis-era loans and save the exchequer an estimated €150 million.

The request from Dublin turned into a proxy battle between Germany’s two leading parties, which are locked in a growing coalition battle.

Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) backed Ireland’s request, along with the Greens and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), calling Ireland a model crisis country.

Amazingly shortly thereafter, the EU's puppet regime in Dublin commenced to orchestrate with commendable alacrity its very own Greek Chorus on the UK's admittedly,feeble,procrastinating attempt at negotiating what is termed Brexit from the EU.
Labour, ( metropolitan elitist,Blairite and Corbynite alike ) and its supine Trades Union running dogs and all the collected detritus of anti-British Irish politics lined up squarely behind The Kneecappers & Bombers aka Sinn Fein and their demented but only marginally less odious political cousins in the republic.
The allure of donning the mantle of messiah -manque has proven too much.for the intellectual leprechauns of irish tribal politics. And Juncker,Tusk and Barnier have played an absolute blinder against ,again admittedly, an all too obviously vertebrae-deficient UK government.

And so Brexit and all the promises made that the Referendum result would be implemented,blah.blah are about to be taken out and executed at dawn.

Expressions of Schadenfreude might be appropriate at this juncture,but for what reason, I don't know.

fahrenheit451:217

The lamentable farrago over the UK's impending departure from the EU - aka the brexit negotiations - continues unabated.

The UK domestic Remain campaign/Referendum verdict deniers are currently in the midst of throwing the kitchen sink at Brexit.

Having already deployed the mendacious blackmail demands of the so-called " Divorce settlement " alongside the bogus lamentations and woefully insincere pleading of EU Citizens against the sensitive heartstrings of the May minority regime; the globalist plutocratic denizens of domestic metropolitan elitism and their Controllers in Brussels have now opened up a third front- that of the largely fictitious "problem" surrounding hypothetical difficulties envisaged around the Irish Border post- Brexit.

Why is the failing minority Dublin regime stirring the proverbial merde at this time? The Irish Times lends an insight into the lickspittle grovelling demeanour of the bankrupt,inconsequential grubby little Irish state's pathetic posturing- all as it happens at the behest of their lords and masters - das Deutsche Reich.

German parliament votes to back Irish debt restructuring

Social Democratic Party opposes move which will save exchequer estimated €150m

Tue, Nov 21, 2017, 16:42

Derek Scally in Berlin

cting finance minister Peter Altmaier told the German parliament Ireland had fulfilled all conditions of its EU/IMF programme and was part of a rescue “success story” that included Spain and Portugal.

 

After a heated Bundestag debate, Germany voted yesterday to back Ireland’s request to restructure crisis-era loans and save the exchequer an estimated €150 million.

The request from Dublin turned into a proxy battle between Germany’s two leading parties, which are locked in a growing coalition battle.

Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) backed Ireland’s request, along with the Greens and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), calling Ireland a model crisis country.

But the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) voted against, calling on Dublin to adopt a “fairer tax policy” that prioritised its EU partners over multinationals.

In turn, the SPD’s critical stance saw Bundestag rivals accuse it of “playing politics” over Ireland – and EU rescue policies the party had backed in the past.

Motion

The heated debate ended with disagreement over the show-of-hands vote, prompting a full lobby vote that saw the motion passed by 348 to 283.

Dublin has applied to refinance an IMF loan, as well as two bilateral loans from Denmark and Sweden, using funds borrowed at lower rates from financial markets.

As Ireland has also borrowed €40.2 billion from two EU bailout facilities, all European Union states must agree to waive the right to get early repayment at the same time.

The Bundestag is one of a handful of European parliaments whose permission is required to change Ireland’s crisis-loan terms and allow early repayment. Elsewhere, the decision is made by government.

Acting finance minister Peter Altmaier told the German parliament that Ireland had fulfilled all conditions of its EU/IMF programme and was part of a rescue “success story” that included Spain and Portugal.

Ireland had restructured its banks and welfare system, won back trust of financial markets and was back in growth, he said, proving EU crisis measures had been appropriate.

Poison

Backing Dublin’s request and reducing the Irish debt burden, he said, would increase further market trust in “this small but important country”, and was thus in the interest of Irish and German taxpayers.

“I welcome today that I spoke with the Irish finance minister and he is ready to continue the technical co-operation and oversight with the IMF,” added Mr Altmaier. “This is in the interest of Ireland and will increase credibility in Irish politics.”

SPD parliamentary secretary Carsten Schneider attacked Ireland’s request, given its refusal to collect from Apple €13 billion in tax the European Commission says is outstanding.

“If a liberally minded country relinquishes tax revenues … then, for us in the SPD, our solidarity is at an end,” he said. “Tax dumping cannot be a business model in a social and progressive EU … it is poison for democracy.”

Mr Schneider suggested that Ireland had failed to honour two crisis-era promises to revisit its tax model and had “run the stop sign twice”.

Not everyone in Dr Merkel’s CDU had warm words for Ireland, with MP Hans Michelbach conceding that Ireland was a “tax haven and accessory for tax tricks of transnational concerns”.

“This is not acceptable,” he said. But, turning to Mr Schneider, he added: “You cannot use a mallet against another European country … and mix loan repayments with tax policy.”

 Schadenfreude or what ? the Taigs sold out to the Huns.