Wasn't part of Gibraltars self-determination outlined when 96% of the populace voted to remain in the EU? Mugabe struggles to get those sort of numbers.
Wasn't part of Gibraltars self-determination outlined when 96% of the populace voted to remain in the EU? Mugabe struggles to get those sort of numbers.
They had a sovereignty vote not long ago and the number for staying British was more than 96%. Maybe as high as 99%.
Yes. I mean, it might be stupid but you/they can trade with, or not trade with, whoever they like.Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
Which is fine, but let's not pretend that such views represent government policy.
Well, it's all going great as 'The Chief Minister Of Gibraltar' (first time I knew that existed) has called Donald Tusk, and I am 100% serious, a cuck.
This sort of thing annoys me because it makes me realise that if I had spent my teenage years sucking privilege dick instead of doing drugs and going to raves I could definitely be half way there to running a small to medium sized nation at this point.
A trade deal is either ratified by the European parliament or, if there's a mixed agreement, it's returned to the member states for individual ratification. In the event it's the former, Spain could have its MEPs outvoted and the deal goes ahead. In the latter, it could block it by refusing to ratify the UK-EU deal at a national level (see Wallonia with CETA), but it would scupper the whole deal.
What Spain are doing, however, is wanting to exercise a veto over whether the UK-EU deal also applies to Gibraltar - in effect, suggesting it's a "special case". It would allow them to block a deal only where Gibraltar is concerned, thus assuaging its constitutional obsession without raising any direct political difficulties with the rest of the EU if it tried to block the entire deal.
They're British, they want to be British, they're recognised as British citizens in the EU, and they joined in 1973 with the UK. Pretending that they should have some sort of special status, subject to a Spanish veto, is clearly a direct challenge to their right to self determination.
Spain has a right to boycott trade with Gibraltar, or the UK, if they so wish. They also have the right to block a "mixed agreement" trade deal with the UK and its territories. They have no legitimate claim to veto a deal for Gibraltar alone on the basis of a 300+ year claim of sovereignty.
It's Spain who brought this issue up, and are trying to blackmail the UK in regards to Brexit. A number Spanish politicians have come out with very strong words on the issue. Howard is an idiot, and no longer an MP - he doesn't represent anybody.
If this was any other country other than the UK, you would be shouting from the rooftops that a country shouldn't be blackmailing another country on trade deals so that it could leverage it's position on a piece of land that hasn't voted overwhelmingly in favour of the status-quo.Esteban González Pons, the vice-chair of the European People’s party, told El País newspaper that May’s failure to mention Gibraltar in the letter on Wednesday was “very relevant”, adding that the omission was “because Gibraltar isn’t part of the United Kingdom; it’s a colony like the island of St Helena”.
That said, there are clear lessons to be taken from the Falklands. British policy up to 1982 gave a clear indication to the Argentinians that we weren't really fussed about it. We'd restricted full British citizenship to the Falklanders and withdrawn key military assets from the south Atlantic. We'd even had some preliminary discussions on a lease arrangement to effectively cede control after a period of time (decades). Galtieri thought they could invade, we wouldn't bother to defend it, and it would give him an easy nationalistic drum to beat at home. The Argentinians were effectively beaten from the moment Thatcher sent the task force, because they didn't think they'd actually have to fight.
Not that anybody seriously thinks there would be war (fucking seriously) over Gibraltar, but we do need to be quite clear publicly and privately that its sovereignty is not up for discussion, that we're fully committed to it and, where the question is raised in the abstract, we would be more than prepared to defend it. If we aren't clearly committed, that'll just encourage the Spanish (and the EU, by extension) to continue making it an issue. It needs nipped in the bud quickly, otherwise it's just going to fester.
The whole thing is just more Remainer bed-shitting. As is their OUTRAGE about blue passports. If it doesn't matter what colour the passports are, why are they wasting so much seethe on it?
Because they say they can't find any money to put into the NHS, Schools, Police, Fire Department, Council yada yada yada because AUSTERITY but can find half a billion down the back of the sofa to change the colour of the passport that I will then invariably have to pay a bajillion quid for to recoup the cost. It's just fucking stupid and a pointless waste of time and money yet this is all the papers can point to along with straight bananas (which we barely grow because it's a fucking banana for fucks sake) as signs of our FREEDOM. What's the point?
And if it's only the bloody REMOANERS who care about this, why is it on the front of, the only true patriots paper, The Express?
The 'everything bad and costly about Brexit is 48% of the countrys fault' argument has got incredibly tedious incredibly fast.
Passports are updated every five years to combat fraud. The present contract ends in 2019. It'll need to be updated anyway for new passports issued thereafter, and present passports reflect European citizenship which will need to be amended also. Ergo it's £500m over the course of the next five year contract which is going to be spent anyway, in which providing a blue rather than a burgundy cover literally adds nothing to the cost.
This synthetic outrage, ignorant of fact, is really wasting everybody's time. Who would you care if the new passports were blue instead of burgundy after 2019?
No-one except if we reversed the colours it would outrage: The Express, The Mail, Nigel Farage, Arron Banks etc. etc. etc.
Oh yeah I'd forgotten about this bloke
"A source of humiliation"
Oh yeah and I'll refer back to the YouGov poll about Brexit
52% of Leave voters, no idea why that number seems to ring a bell so much.
Because they can't take it. See also: the responses to literally every President Donald J. Trump tweet.
So what if they're annoyed? It's a passport colour. That said, basing a rant on an outright misrepresentation that it's going to see half a billion quid going up in flames to appease small minded nationalism is just as bad.
'Who would care...'
'Shows people who would care is all on GS side'
'They don't count'
They should definitely bring back smoking in pubs.
Saying we should bring it back after we leave isn't saying it's why people voted to leave. If some of the leave crowd want it to be a consequence of the vote (rather than it ever having been a cause / driver of it), who cares? What does it matter to you, personally, if it's blue?
Continuity Remain are making it into an issue because they're still desperate to show that Little England rose up in an anti-everything rebellion against common sense. It's a collective bed shitting unparalleled in modern politics, as others have outlined.
I'm quite intrigued by the idea that 20% of the remain vote want to bring back the death penalty. That sort of chicanery is reserved for the uneducated leave-supporting proletarian masses.
First point - I don't want to pay for a new passport.
Second point - It was literally the front page of the Express yesterday. That's where the reaction is from.
A referendum on the death penalty would be the funniest thing in history.
You'll have to pay for a new passport at some stage because your current British passport says you're a European citizen and you won't be in two years.
You're also making the usual Continuity Remain mistake of taking views from the nutter fringe of the debate (the express barely qualifies as journalism) and deciding it accurately represents the views of everyone on the leave side.
As Ital alluded to, there's a nutter fringe who love this sort of thing. Getting involved in the debate is exactly what they want, and it's drowning the sensible middle ground. The likes of the Lord Blair and the Guardian are just as bad on the other side, but most people just lol at them rather than engaging in morally superior hand wringing.
Fucking imagine the carnage if it went through. The entire staff of the Guardian would end up on hunger strike.
hahahahahahahahaha.
I forgot they wore those wigs.
It's true, because the leave side know that their side won and the holdouts on the other side just look desperate.
I think it was Floyd who said before the vote that the fallout from a leave vote would be incredible, and it has certainly been the case.
You're so crap at this, phonics.
The courts don't represent Continuity Remain, for fuck sake.
So that's not 'morally superior hand wringing'? Did Brexit fall apart due to those judges or did everything continue on as normal?
He addressed that sort of balls in the bits of his post you deleted, Harold.
So everyone who voted Remain is FREAKING OUT and are all blathering idiots outraged by everything (they even seem to have formed a party called Continuity Remain?) but Leave has a wide variety of views, some nutters and some more in the middle. Weird that.
It would lose (it really would this time), but imagine the campaign hand wringing.
Also, both sides are basically doing the same thing on pretty much every issue on this, and behaving in exactly the same ridiculous, petty way. It's just that the Leave win was not expected (thanks Dom), so both have been even more tub-thumping than they would otherwise have been.
The whole point of referring to 'Continuity Remain' is to differentiate the sad acts bealing on Twitter from 'everyone who voted Remain', since most of them have accepted it and moved on with their lives.
Probably quite rightly as it's actually something worth getting upset about, while very little if any of the cry me a river remain stuff is.
Would it lose though? Aren't opinion poll results (rofl) always in favour of it?
They aren't really nowadays. Maybe 15 years ago. It's in decline. The last one I saw the other day was 36% in favour.
Also, I see this £500 million figure for blue passports is in fact just the amount of money it costs to make passports over that period, blue or otherwise, and will be paid anyway (and covered by the passport fee). That must be at least as much of a LIE as anything peddled by the Leave campaign.
I like to think that the pro-life (arf) campaign would manage to balls it right up by refusing to be complacent ('Not this time!') and going overboard.
'Tony Martin's comments have no place in modern Britain.'
The AV referendum was the best one, because it was the moment they realised that their bullshit could be easily defeated by other bullshit, and yet this apparently didn't instil them with any self awareness whatsoever.
That Dan Snow advert was prophetic, what with pub once again triumphing over coffee.
It would depend on the criminal landscape at the time. If there was an Ian Huntley up in court at aroind the same time as the vote then I think enough people would be reactionary enough to swing it.
There's clearly a subset of the population that would like to see a certain class of odious criminal escorted out onto the scaffold and summarily executed within the hour after they've been convicted, but it seems to be an ever diminishing view.
Whatever your view on the morality of it, the practicality of it is such that you really can't have it. You can't exactly do much to fix it if you manage to strap the wrong person into the electric chair.
Even if it got through a referendum, would they actually use it in practice? It would have to be a Breivik type event before everyone was in agreement.
People just think it'd make awesome TV
Everyone used to go and watch it back in the olden days, didn't they. You could have the hangings at Wembley and charge £45 a ticket. Good fundraiser.
I doubt they could ever get away with implementing it, even if it was on the statute book as an option. Assuming you go with lethal injection, being the only supposedly humane way of murdering someone, you'd find obstacles absolutely everywhere. In some of the states, the Americans have had to put a stop to it because nobody will sell them the drugs. No doctors are willing to actually administer the injections either, and the jailers doing it run the risk of being done for inflicting cruel and unusual punishment if they fuck it up - so anybody sensible is going to run a mile before they agree to involve themselves.
Pretty much every other mechanism fails on the basic criteria of not being absolutely dreadful, so there's literally no way of bringing it in without it being a complete disaster.
More importantly, it would see us cede much-welcome moral high ground on the Americans. Nobody wants that, surely.
Nitrogen would be the way. Portillo did a good documentary on it a few years ago-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-nitrogen.html
Hanging is the British way of offing people, so it would have to be that.
Bring back Pierrepoint.
He'd have to be Peterpoint nowadays.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
