Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

In Syria, Britain is making the same mistakes all over again

A Conservative MP explains why he cannot back a plan to fight Islamic State which does nothing about the toxic politics which feed it



By Adam Holloway MP

9:51PM GMT 01 Dec 2015


Since 1984, when I was an 18-year-old spending part of my gap year with the Afghan resistance to the Russians, I have seen wars in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. And throughout those years, as a schoolboy, a soldier, an ITN reporter and a Parliamentarian, I have learned the blindingly obvious: the problems of these countries only get fixed when you fix the broken politics.

And yet for the last 15 years I have watched British governments join or create international "coalitions" that have used military force without understanding what drives each conflict on the ground. This ignorance has had disastrous consequences for tens of millions of people in the Middle East and North Africa.


So last week, on the plane back from a visit to Iraq and Turkey, I knew that in the imminent "bomb Syria" debate I would have stand up and say that I simply do not know enough about the big plan to fix the broken politics. That after the last “bomb Syria” vote in 2013 (Assad that time), I do not have confidence that there is any such plan at all.


Indeed, some of the people pressing for bombing now are putting it about that, had we bombed the Assad regime two years ago, Syria would not have descended into the chaos we see today... How are they getting on in Libya?



More common sense here:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/12028072/In-Syria-Britain-is-about-to-make-the-same-mistakes-all-over-again.html

It is all pretty academic as Cameron will get good majority. Plenty of Lab rebels plus the Libs and the DUP. Unlikely to be more than 10 Conservative rebels.

Have you or your family and or friends got any shares in the arms industry by any chance?

Hilary Benn standing at the despatch box with Corbyn sitting next to him as he is talking in support of the government. Corbyn looking glum. Benn looking like a possible new leader of Labour.

Corbyn looking like yesterday's news.

Have you or your family and or friends got any shares in the arms industry by any chance?

Benn is making a much better speech that Corbyn did by a long way.

Have you or your family and or friends got any shares in the arms industry by any chance?

Benn's speech was cheered and clapped by both sides of the house. The Foreign Secretary praised the speech and said it would go down as one of the great speeches in Parliament.

I don't own arms shares unfortunately, but I wish I did. Arms manufacture is a perfectly respectable business. Where would we be without arms to defend ourselves? If it hadn't been for Churchill, prior to WWII, realising the rise of Nazism and scaling up arms production we might have lost the war.

And what about your family and friends?

No idea. I don't discuss their shareholdings. If you have a pension that you or your employer contribute to, then you can bet that it is invested partly in arms companies. The same applies if you have unit trusts, assurance policies or insurance policies of any kind including car and household. All of them invest in the stock market including arms companies. You support arms companies in many ways that you may not be aware of.

It looks like 67 Labour MPs voted for the government.

No idea. You don't discuss their shareholdings? oh really.

The rest is irrelevant to me.

Why would I discuss anyone's shareholdings? It is all a bit unimportant.

Well if you don't know that..

By Dan Hodges11:01PM GMT 02 Dec 2015
They had said they needed two days of debate. War. Peace. To bomb Isil. Not to bomb Isil. The issues were too complex. The stakes too high. The arguments too nuanced.
They were wrong. It boiled down to one speech and one moment. Parliamentary history distilled in a way few of us have seen in our lifetime.
Hilary Benn’s speech. It is about to become the House of Commons “where were you when Kennedy was shot” moment. Where were you sitting. Who were you with. What were you thinking.
"Hilary Benn did not just captivate the House, he inverted the House"
Our parliamentarians get a bad press. Some of it is deserved. Some of it isn’t. But when the moment comes – and the great issues of state come – they invariably rise to the occasion.
Tonight they did not. David Cameron, hamstrung by his ill-advised comment (one he privately deeply regrets) that members of the opposition were “terrorist sympathisers” never got into his stride. Jeremy Corbyn easily got into his, and delivered one of the worst speeches by a senior party leader the Commons has ever seen.
For a while it looked like Britain’s servicemen and women would be sent to war with partisan point scoring ringing in their ears. And then the shadow foreign secretary rose to deliver his wind-up speech.

Two years ago Hilary Benn was instrumental in convincing Ed Miliband to oppose action against Assad. Tonight he articulately, and passionately and elegantly re-crafted his ploughshares into a swords.
The diplomatic case. The military case. The strategic case. Calmly and forensically he made the argument the Prime Minister could not make and the Leader of the Opposition could not destroy.
“We now have a clear and unambiguous UN resolution. The UN is asking us to do something. it is asking us to do something now, to act in Syria and Iraq. It was a Labour government that helped to found the UN at the end of the Second World War. We wanted the nations of the world working together to deal with threats to international peace and security. Daesh is unquestionably that.”
It was a truly incredible moment. He did not just captivate the House, he inverted the House. Hilary Benn did not look like the Shadow Foreign Secretary. He did not look like the leader of the opposition. He looked like the prime minister. And by extension, his party, which for the past few days has appeared broken and beaten, looked like the government.


Most amazing of all was the effect on the real Leader of the Opposition. Though we may as well now refer to him as the former leader of the opposition. Jeremy Corbyn started by looking agitated. Then he appeared uncomfortable. Then he began to shrink. It was like watching the witch from the Wizard of Oz who has just had a bucket of water thrown over her. All the talk of his “mandate”. All the talk of his legions of new activists. They were destroyed in an instant. Crushed by Hilary Benn and 100 years of the Labour party’s accumulated moral authority.
“As a party we have always been defined by our internationalism,” he said. “We believe we have a responsibility one to another. We never have and we never should walk by on the other side of the road. And we are here faced by fascists. Not just their calculating brutality but their belief that they are superior to every single one of us in this Chamber tonight and all of the people that we represent. They hold us in contempt. They hold our values in contempt, they hold our belief in tolerance and decency in contempt, they hold our democracy – the rules by which we will make our decision tonight – in contempt. And what we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated. And it is why as we have heard tonight socialists and trade unionists and others joined the international brigade in the 1930s to fight against Franco. It’s why this entire House stood up against Hitler and Mussolini. It is why our party has always stood up against the denial of human rights and for justice. And my view is that we must now confront this evil. It is now time for us to do our bit in Syria and that is why I ask my colleagues to vote for this motion tonight.”


It was an incredible moment. As Hilary Benn sat down the House rose as one. Every side broke into prolonged and sustained applause. Benn’s colleagues reached across to embrace him. Angela Eagle physically pushed Jeremy Corbyn back into his seat and reached out to her colleague.
Hilary Benn had successfully made the case for war. He had also made the case for the Labour Party.

Love the riding the bomb loop.

'Dr Strangelove or how I stopped worrying and came to love the bomb'.