#MakingToughDecisions - Twitter Hashtag

4 months ago

This. Pls read this. A superb analysis if ever there was. #Conservatives #Coherent #Capability #Conviction #Leadership #MakingToughDecisions #Learning #Support #VoteConservatives

Vodka & Seledka 🇬🇧

@seledka_vodka

4 months ago

Farage’s backpedalling, and Jenrick’s before him, has nothing to do with conviction or suddenly wanting to do the right thing. It is poll-reading, pure and simple. They saw how little support there was for direct British involvement, clocked the spike in oil prices and the obvious knock-on effect on energy, petrol and diesel, and then slapped themselves on the wrist and changed the brief. That is why the rhetoric shifted so quickly from chest-beating to nervous talk about the domestic consequences of the war. It was a knee-jerk reaction. Reform got spooked. Jenrick then had to dress that retreat up in a pompous Telegraph piece to make the backpedal look principled. It wasn’t principled. It was damage control. The irony is obvious. Oil surged as fears grew around the Strait of Hormuz, then climbed down again once the immediate threat to shipping and supply was degraded by US action with Israeli assistance. So while Reform were discovering their inner doves - or more accurately their inner pigeons, professionally trained to sit on the fence - the hawks solved the problem Reform were panicking about. That tells you exactly what Reform is. No backbone, no spine, no conviction, no settled belief. They can generate noise and create content, but consistency is not their modus operandi. Politicians always face the choice between siding with public opinion and going against it. Sometimes the public is wrong, and if you are going to go against them, you have to explain why, make the argument properly, spend the political capital and accept the consequences. That is called doing politics. Lazy politicians do not do that. They spot the right instinct for half a second, then run a poll and reverse out of it before anyone notices. That is what happened here. Reform briefly showed a tiny glimmer of understanding that the right thing was to let the US use our bases when requested and, once our bases were attacked, to suppress enemy fire by striking launch sites. Instead, Britain ended up doing the stupid thing - sending expensive RAF jets and irreplaceable pilots after expendable metal. Chasing the arrows when you should be striking the archers. The @Conservatives, whatever else can be said about us, understood this faster and more instinctively. @KemiBadenoch and her team grasped the alliance logic, the military logic and the basic fact that once British bases are attacked, Britain is already involved. We were attacked. We were already a party to the conflict. Pretending otherwise was theatre. And let’s be clear about all this talk of Britain needing to stand up to US pressure. Yes, Europe - and Britain - needs to carry more of the burden for its own defence. Yes, Britain needs a serious defence posture that does not rely on pretending America will solve everything forever. That is true and it has been true for years. But that is not the pressure we need to resist here. The real pressure distorting British foreign policy is domestic. It is Islamism - organised, sectarian, disciplined, politically assertive Islamism - exerting influence through voting blocs and intimidation on questions of foreign policy. People keep shifting the focus to the United States because it is easier and safer. It is also wrong. The US has not forced this dithering on Britain - if anything, Washington has given Britain the jolt it badly needed on defence, burden-sharing and strategic seriousness. The deeper problem is that Britain is becoming afraid to act in its own security interests when those interests collide with organised Islamist sentiment at home. That is why the dithering happens. That is why obvious military responses suddenly become politically fraught. So no, the main thing Britain needs to do is not stand up to America. It is stand up to the forces inside Britain that are warping our politics, weakening our nerve and increasingly shaping our foreign policy. That is the real issue. And we should stop pretending otherwise.

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Stevie Chavez @steviegurl

over 6 years ago

@SteveBenjaminSC So thankful you are leading our City. Imagine with a stay in place order what our numbers would be?! #realleadership #makingtoughdecisions

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Waterbird Society @WaterbirdSociet

over 6 years ago

Have you ever wondered what a Wbs Council Meeting looks like? Here is a sneak peek of what's happening now. #makingtoughdecisions #WaterbirdSociety2019