The Falklands and Corbyn

[SunnyInHades]

Gibraltar

Gib's a jewel in the crown.

"Gibraltar's economy one of world's fastest growing"
"main drivers of growth are .. online gaming and financial services industries."
"fewer than 200 people are unemployed"

[AtW]

"main drivers of growth are .. online gaming and financial services industries."

I wonder how fast they'd drive away if Osborne enforced UK taxes there?

[seanraaron]

The defence capability is already there to counter anything the Argies are capable of deploying.

The hedges are fully grown now, are they?

[Troll]

Now I won't claim to know about Argentina's modern military, but remind me how long it would take to get all that fancy hardware down to the Falklands and exactly what good the UK would be to her NATO allies whilst engaged in the oh so critical defence of that key territory?

That was the reason for extending Mt Pleasant runway immediately after the war - to be able to land heavy lift aircraft & fighters without relying on Ascension staging

The runway is key to keeping the islands

[Troll]

The defence capability is already there to counter anything the Argies are capable of deploying.

You mean the pile of poo Rapier anti aircraft missiles - such stunning failures in 82 - have they improved at all?

[DodgyAgent]

You mean the pile of poo Rapier anti aircraft missiles - such stunning failures in 82 - have they improved at all?

The British have always been woefully ill prepared for war

British troops are set to test the Falkland's defence to prove its strength | UK | News | Daily Express

[Troll]

The British have always been woefully ill prepared for war

British troops are set to test the Falkland's defence to prove its strength | UK | News | Daily Express

Oh dear ... sounds like another Blowpipe debacle
"the Blowpipe operator had about 20 seconds to spot the target, align the unit and fire. Brigadier Julian Thompson compared using the weapon to "trying to shoot pheasants with a drainpipe"

[DodgyAgent]

Understanding the mentality of the middle class left

Very good article in the FT that sums up many of the "metropolitan" left. There is nothing more sickening than the patronising lefties who pretend to know what it is like to be working class and white and why UKIP will become the natural choice of the left as labour implodes under Corbyn


A jaded town on the Essex riviera is all the UK Independence party has to show for its nearly 4m votes at last year’s general election. Economically, Clacton struggles. Electorally, the Thames estuary seat is the most expensive in parliament.
Inequity in the voting system is one reason to believe Ukip has no future. Internal acrimony is another cue to start readying the party’s mausoleum. When it flunked a promising by-election last month, a commentator who has seen political sensations flicker brightly and fizzle out sensed that this populist movement — an English National party by another name — was “finished”.

It need not be. Years will pass before we know the consequences of Jeremy Corbyn’s time as leader of the opposition Labour party but the alienation of working-class whites, Ukip’s quarry, has to be among them. His socialism will merely lose him the next election resoundingly. It is his cultural (or countercultural) instincts that carry the potential to stain his party forever, especially in the eyes of the people Labour was founded to help.
There are many votes in lavish spending, confiscatory taxes on the rich and wage protection: not enough to win an election, or even to lose respectably, but many. There are virtually none in unilateral nuclear disarmament, moral equivocation over terrorism and the yapping identity politics of the university campus and the mid-afternoon Twitter timeline.
When people have forgotten Mr Corbyn wanted to stop companies paying dividends unless they paid staff a living wage, they will remember his search for a “reasonable accommodation” with Argentina over the Falklands. When they strain to recall which of the utilities he targeted for renationalisation, they will know him for abjuring any shoot-to-kill policy against terrorists. Nobody recalls the marginal tax rates favoured by Labour in its manifesto of 1983. They recall its leader turning up to a war memorial in a slightly askew overcoat.
Britons tell themselves that culture wars are gauchely American but politics is not a species of economics here either. There is the same potency of symbols and values. There is the same pang of dispossession among poor whites, especially those who line the eastern edge of England and populate the deindustrialised north. Labour began losing these people long ago but Mr Corbyn can seal the estrangement.
If the apologetic metropolitanism of his predecessor, Ed Miliband, was too much for the northerners who went over to Ukip, the only mystery is where those riled by Mr Corbyn’s unapologetic version end up going. Many will not vote. A few who can swallow their ancestral aversion will go Tory. But Ukip still has what it takes to win the larger share of these votes: economic populism, rhetorical bluntness, name recognition. The shambles of its leadership is not fatal. Populism does not attract people looking for a government but people bored of having their plain sensibilities laughed at. If Mr Corbyn leads Labour into a general election, Ukip need only stand still to move forward.

New Labour was always misread as a middle-class takeover of a working-class movement. It was something close to the opposite. By hardening its line on crime and defence, by cloaking it unsqueamishly in the British flag, by taking school standards and welfare abuse seriously, Tony Blair returned a party captured by the whims of the Brahmin left to actual working people. Cabinet members such as David Blunkett, John Reid and George Robertson, the rightwing union leader Ken Jackson: each a notch in the spine of New Labour, and none a perfumed Islingtonian.
Let us not be coy: there are some on the left who are stumped by poor white people. Their ethnic majority status seems to muffle sympathy for them. Their toughness on immigration is an intra-family embarrassment in Labour, like a grandparent’s enduring taste for minstrel comedy. Their lifestyles can arouse a priggish distaste.
Poor white Americans have their stories told faithfully. There are John Updike novels and Bruce Springsteen albums about the banality and frustration of the rust belt. The people around Mr Corbyn are less clear-eyed. They think of poor white Britons as improbably romantic heroes — the Jarrow marchers, the miners in the film Pride — if they think about them at all.
Even at their worst, as a lobby group for established wealth, something can be said for Conservatives: they like the people they are trying to help. Ukip has a future as long as Labour is run by people who embrace everything about the working classes apart from what they say, do and think.

[darmstadt]

Don't forget to credit that article to Janan Ganesh, co-author of Compassionate Conservatism and author of George Osborne: The Austerity Chancellor, a biography of current British Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne (I see he also has an entry in Debretts!)

[Troll]

Back in the 50s there was a suggestion that nuclear tests should take place in Scotland rather than Australia.

Probably a step too far - Anthrax testing was OK