ALB
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I am not sure whether he’d be throwing NI under the bus. The DUP and other hardline unionists, yes, but most other members of the Stormont assembly support the protocol, not just the nationalist Sinn Fein and the SDLP but also the Alliance Party and the Green Party.
To prevent the re-erection of customs posts on the border between the two parts of Ireland, the withdrawal agreement and subsequent trade agreement provided that Northern Ireland should remain in the Single Market.
This means that what is produced or sold there has to conform to the Singke Market regulations. These include provision for controls and checks on imports of certain foodstuffs. The understanding was that these controls should take place in “Irish Sea”, in practice either before leaving Great Britain or on entering Northern Ireland.
When Theresa May brought back an agreement which included this Johnson denounced it as an affront to British sovereignty, and that there could/would never be customs controls between two integral parts of the United Kingdom, etc, etc, and the deal was scuttled thanks to him and the other hard core brexiteers.
But the deal he got negotiated contained the same arrangements. Even so, he still went around saying that would be no controls between two parts of the UK, thus indicating, I think it can be inferred, that he had no intention of implementing it.
A six month period of grace was granted from 1 January this year and so is due to expire, in a few weeks time, on 30 June. After that the agreement has to be implemented.
The overall withdrawal agreement also provides that if one party does not implement the agreement the other party can impose proportionate sanctions, such as quotas on imports. Which the EU is indicating it might do if the UK doesn’t implement the agreement. Meanwhile Johnson is turning up the nationalist rhetoric.
Of course both sides might just be manoeuvring to strengthen their negotiating position. There are plenty of compromises possible. Personally, I can’t see how Johnson can get out of implementing it. He will have to compromise.
Looks as if that after all Boris didn’t get Brexit done like he said and won an election on the basis of it.
He seems to have signed the Northern Ireland Protocol with no intention of implementing it, just so he could say he had got Brexit done.
No wonder the EU are pissed off. They thought they had a signed agreement whose implications were known to both sides. But now they find out that the Britain is trying to wriggle out of it.
All the arguments that Boris is using to try to get out of it were known before, that the unionists wouldn’t like it and might threaten to pull out of the Peace Process. As to sausages, you can’t take them into Australia either and won’t be under the proposed trade agreement with them.
It remains to be seen if Boris really will push it to the point of provoking a trade war with the EU, stirring up the unionists as a bargaining chip
I have called them UAPs for many years. It’s the proper description as that’s what they are — unidentified aerial phenomena, though in the end most of them do end up being identified of course. But the subject is so boring that I don’t even both to read the articles on them in the Skeptical Inquirer.
I didn’t know that. So it’s the pot calling the kettle black. No wonder the US hasn’t joined the ICC either.
And of course it’s capitalism that’s the big crime against humanity (if you want to use that nebulous term).
Like I said on another thread, you can’t trust either side in the propaganda war reflecting the conflict of economic and strategic interests between China and the US. Both are peddling fabrications and exaggerations. It is unusual, though, that one side should admit that it went too far.
That’s the point. There are minorities all over Asia, Africa and Latin America that are the subject of state oppression. So why single out China? Easy. It’s because it has become a threat to US domination of the Pacific area. So the US propaganda machine and its offshoots such as Radio Free Asia and the Victims of Communism Foundation have gone into action, mixing fact and fiction and exaggerating.
I don’t doubt that, for strategic and commercial reasons, the Chinese authorities want to change the demographic composition of Sinkiang. But frankly I don’t believe that they are deliberately sterilising Uigher women to bring this about. I can believe that sterilisations have been carried out but as part of the one-child policy that the authorities enforced throughout China.
The Chinese authorities have teams of people spreading their propaganda on social media. The US doesn’t do so so obviously but relies on ordinary people to spread theirs. We should be wary of inadvertently helping them by spreading their propaganda.
It seems to be agreed by everyone that the Chinese government is not carrying out a policy of mass killings, death camps etc (which is what most people will understand them to be doing if they are accused of “genocide”). So what are they doing besides the “normal” policy pursued by many other states, today and in the past, of oppressing some “national” minority?
The end result may be that the Uighers end up a minority in Sinkiang but will their culture and language have been suppressed? Is their language banned?
Thanks, Alan, for who invented his own definition and somehow got it incorporated into that scrap of paper known as international law.
Joanne Smith Finlay writes:
•It’s genocide, full stop. It’s not immediate, shocking, mass-killing on the spot type genocide, but it’s slow, painful, creeping genocide. These are direct means of genetically reducing the Uighur population.”I don’t know who introduced this dubious extension of the meaning of the word “genocide” into the English language or what axe they had to grind, but the suffix -cide has always implied physical extermination as in homicide, suicide, parricide, regicide etc. Persecuting someone does not amount to homicide. Nor are republicans regicides just because they want to abolish monarchies.
The word for killing off a culture or language should not be “cultural genocide” but something like “culturecide” or “linguacide” if you want a word for it.
Extending the meaning of genocide to include this sort of thing weakens its original meaning and reduces what the Nazis did in the end to the Jews to the same level as attempts to discourage the use of the Welsh language in the 19th century.
The Chinese government is oppressing the Uighers but it is not seeking to exterminate them as applying the word “genocide” to this implies and in many cases is deliberately meant to imply.
And what does she mean by “genetically reducing”? She appears to mean reducing the proportion of Uighurs in the population of Sinkiang. This would seem to be the policy of the Chinese government, or at least a consequence of it, but it doesn’t involve killing anybody. It’s the language of the propagandist rather than of the objective academic researcher.
Let’s not accept this manipulation of language any more than we accept the attempt to extend anti-semitism to mean anti-Zionism.
I am not denying that something funny is going on in Sinkiang and that the Chinese government is giving the Uighers there a hard time. That was not my point. It was that we should not use material supplied by a rabid anti-Communust and fundamentalist Christian (raptures and all) like Zerz. It grants him credibility and it tarnishes our reputation.
I don’t agree with YMS’s statement and will explain why on that thread (because of the misuse of the word “genocide”).
Zenz is a notorious religious fanatic and sinophobe. As to the Victims of Communism Memorial here’s their latest stunt (referenced from Wikipedia on them).
“In April 2020, the organization announced they would be adding the global victims of the COVID-19 pandemic to their death toll of Communism, blaming the Chinese government for the outbreak and every death caused by it”.
We should not be touching these people with a barge pole.
Here’s what the Chinese authorities think of Zenz.
To tell the truth, I didn’t think it was any good. At no point was capitalism defined, though the assumption by all four of them seems to have been that it was production for private profit. I suppose it might have some use as showing what some politically interested young people today think about “capitalism”, and the fact that the word is now part of the standard political vocabulary gives us a chance to say what we mean by it and what we think is the alternative to it.
