Carson's Cat

Rangers FC. Linlithgow Rose FC. Libertarian Unionist. Cricket.

[Carson's Cat @CarsonsCat]

@PeteWishart @afneil Scotland is a great place. But, in common with many areas of England, its industrial past has now become an economic burden. It will take decades to solve that problem. In the meantime should we not be glad to get a share of the resources of the more prosperous parts of the UK?

[Carson's Cat @CarsonsCat]

@murdo_fraser The islands ‘belong’ to the people who own the various plots of land. The critical question is which sovereign State these people want to provide them with security and protection.

[Carson's Cat @CarsonsCat]

The motives behind the murder of #AnnWiddecombe are unknown at this stage, but this is the kind of post (from someone who should know better) which puts politician’s lives at risk.

[Jess Phillips @jessphillips]

Ann widdecombe better go this week not only is she a little fascist beast but also an anti abortionist, what a lovely women

[Sammy Morrison 🇬🇧 @SammyMorrison82]

A number of years ago I helped organise an anti Protocol rally in Dromore Orange Hall at which Ann Widdecombe was a guest speaker. This was her opening line. Dreadfully sad news. Hoping and praying justice is done.

[Murdo Fraser MSP @murdo_fraser]

What an utter disgrace @AmnestyUK is. Once a credible human rights organisation, it has been hijacked by women-hating extremists who will even attack a rape crisis centre. Surely time for @ChtyCommission to investigate?

[Carson's Cat @CarsonsCat]

@GeorgeFoulkes You helped create a body which is far too politicised. You would have been better to amalgamate the Scottish Law Commission and the various Westminster standing committees and create a body whose sole function was to scrutinise Scottish legislation.

[Carson's Cat @CarsonsCat]

@GeorgeFoulkes Can’t really fault any of the decisions today. The title was lost because of that dreadful penalty decision at Fir Park.

[Carson's Cat @CarsonsCat]

@AgentP22 @mik61scot From where I’m looking, the only pro-UK party to benefit greatly from tactical was the Lib Dems. Understandably, it’s difficult for Unionists with a socialist instinct to vote Conservative or for those with a libertarian instinct to vote Labour.

[Carson's Cat @CarsonsCat]

For most of us that was an election to choose people to make decisions about education, health, transport. For all those who thought it was an Independence Referendum, the result was:
Yes: 41%
No: 59%
#ScotlandElection

[Carson's Cat @CarsonsCat]

@murdo_fraser @Ardirv51 True, Murdo, but you’ll now have to think very carefully about offering Reform a free run in many of the Central Belt seats in return for them doing the same in rural seats.

[Carson's Cat @CarsonsCat]

@EastRenAsks @Ardirv51 Or idiots running the two Parties who failed to reach a deal on not running against each other at a Constituency level.

[Carson's Cat @CarsonsCat]

The results in so far demonstrate one thing for sure. It is essential that the Conservatives and Reform put their differences aside and agree not to compete against each other at Constituency level. Reform should leave rural Scotland to the Tories.

[Carson's Cat @CarsonsCat]

Fine, but are you going to sack #DavidLammy or do you think #OllieRobbins vetoed the Vetting Committee’s decision without consulting his boss, the Foreign Secretary? #MandlesonScandel

[Carson's Cat @CarsonsCat]

Hugely disappointing outcome today, but I can’t remember a game against that lot which we’ve dominated quite so much. The stats would suggest that Rohl got his tactics right. Sometimes a bit of luck makes all the difference. #OldFirm 🇬🇧

[⎊ An Streachailt V ⎊ @AnStreachailt]

The national flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran proudly hoisted by the Irish Republican Socialist Movement in Free Derry, our own hub of historic resistance.

From Ireland to Iran, we salute you, and we mourn with you. Onwards to victory comrades.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

When the United States launched strikes on Iran, Britain's response was one of the most embarrassing performances by a Western government in living memory. John Healy refused six times to say whether Britain supported the action. Keir Starmer hedged, equivocated, and retreated into legal language while every comparable ally, Canada, Australia, Ukraine, stated their position clearly and without apology. It took Iranian missiles hitting a British base in Cyprus and a second day of bombardment before Starmer would even grant the US permission to use British overseas bases. That is not caution. That is paralysis.

The official explanation is international law. Lord Hermer's legal opinion concluded the strikes had no clear basis in law. That explanation does not hold. The same legal framework did not stop Canada or Australia. It did not stop successive British governments acting alongside the United States in circumstances where legality was equally contested. And it does not explain why Starmer refused to even characterise the Iranian threat, despite sitting on classified intelligence his own security services describe as a tier-one national security concern.

The real explanation is not legal. It is political. And it has been building for over twenty-five years.

Britain is no longer a country whose government can make foreign policy decisions in isolation from domestic demography. In city after city, London, Birmingham, Manchester, Bradford, Leicester, there are large and concentrated populations whose political loyalties, when it comes to conflicts in the Middle East, do not align with the British national interest. Elections have been won and lost on bloc votes organised around overseas conflicts. MPs sit in Parliament who owe their seats to communities for whom the Iran question is not abstract foreign policy but a matter of immediate and passionate concern. Starmer knows this. The calculation is not difficult to reverse-engineer.

When Iranian clerics declared jihad following Khamenei's death and protests spread from Pakistan to Iraq, the question for any British Prime Minister was not only what happens in the Gulf. It was what happens in Tower Hamlets, in Sparkbrook, in Burnley. The threat of domestic unrest and political blowback within his own electoral coalition shaped the response the public saw. The legal opinion was the excuse. The demographic arithmetic was the reason.

This did not happen by accident. It is the consequence of a border policy pursued by governments from Blair to Starmer that prioritised electoral calculation over national cohesion. Mass immigration without integration, without enforceable conditions, without honest public debate, has produced something no one in government will say plainly: a country that has lost the political freedom to act decisively when its interests require it. MI5 has confirmed twenty Iran-backed plots on British soil in two years. The parliamentary intelligence committee is expected to classify Iran as a threat on par with Russia and China. And yet the government cannot proscribe the IRGC, cannot state clearly whose side it is on, and cannot grant an ally access to a military base without waiting for missiles to land first.

In 2006, Muammar Gaddafi predicted that Europe's fifty million Muslims would deliver Islam victory on the continent within a few decades, without swords, without conquest. He framed it as a prophecy. It reads now more like an operational assessment. Britain has not been conquered. It has been rendered impotent, by its own political choices, now visible in the body language of a Prime Minister who cannot say the obvious thing because too many of his voters do not want to hear it.

That is the real answer to why Britain hesitated. Not Hermer. Not international law. Not principle. A governing party held hostage to the consequences of a demographic transformation it helped engineer and now dare not upset.

[Carson's Cat @CarsonsCat]

@RestIsPolitics @RoryStewartUK @campbellclaret These sanctions would then have to be applied to any third party country which refused to adhere to them.

[Carson's Cat @CarsonsCat]

@RestIsPolitics @RoryStewartUK @campbellclaret If you don’t want the USA to be the world’s policeman, then help develop a set of laws which really punishes despotic regimes. Something like a complete ban on ALL exports and imports, an international travel ban on ALL citizens, and no access to global payments systems.

[Alex Armstrong @Alexarmstrong]

How quickly Zack Polanski changes his mind when he has new voters to pander to.