Maybe they’re not unified because they believe in a common good, but instead because it serves the interests of each of them to see Farage make a fool of himself and potentially lose support in the polls

I don’t think the US blew up Nord Stream. There’s a Ukrainian man in Poland who is wanted in Germany for blowing up Nord Stream. But a Polish judge refused to extradite the Ukrainian man to Germany because he thought a Ukrainian attack on Nord Stream would have been a justified response to Russia’s “bloody and genocidal attack” on Ukraine:

If Ukraine and its special forces… organised an armed mission to destroy enemy pipelines – which the court does not prejudge – then these actions were not unlawful… On the contrary, they were justified, rational and just

As for your claim of a “coup”, I don’t think that can be considered true in any way. Ukraine’s parliament voted to remove Viktor Yanukovych from the presidency. That’s democracy at work.

I don’t like the current governments of the US or Russia, but let’s remember that Russia is currently waging an invasion of a European country while the US is not. I hope Europe can build sufficient defence capabilities to prevent further Russian aggression towards Europe, or indeed any future American aggression towards Europe.

I think it’s right for the UK and Europe in general to invest in defence. Europe is on its own; nobody else will defend the continent. If Europe can’t defend itself then it probably won’t be long until the US or Russia or China decides they’d like a piece of European land for themselves (well Russia is already trying to take European land of course).

Nice, my sense of Britishness remains intact

Brit here:

I’m British born and bred and I got 88%. Some of those questions are interesting and definitely better questions than asking the height of the London Eye.

Maybe the UK citizenship test should try to select people who support important British principles (rule of law, democracy, religious freedom, legal equality of men and women, etc). But I suppose somebody could pretend to support those things for the purposes of passing a test, and after the test they might decide they don’t believe in democracy after all. Also I’m sure there are born and bred Brits who don’t believe in democracy.

Why would somebody trust AI with access to their production servers, and why would that person also not have remote database backups

Gammons won’t like this

I think that the UK should try to act in accordance with international law, which it seems Sir Keir is trying to do.

The reality is that the UK is not the most powerful nation in the world. If we decide to disregard international law, then it encourages the big powers (US, China, Russia) to disregard international law in their dealings with us. Do we want those powers to treat the UK in illegal ways?

I looked at that article and it quotes Trump as saying:

We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain

Surely this is a reason why Europe should unite in order to protect its interests. Imagine if the EU were to deny the Americans permission to use any EU air base for strikes on Iran. Would Trump then say “we’re going to cut off all trade with the EU”? It would be much more costly for the US economy if they were to cut off trade with the entire EU, rather than just one EU country.

Yes the same issue has brought about Conservative governments. In 2015 the Tories got only 36.8% of the vote but this gave them 50.8% of the seats.

I’d like score/rank voting based mixed member

I will admit that I don’t know the details of the different kinds of proportional voting. As long as a system would result in a House of Commons that more accurately and proportionately reflects voters, I think that would be a good thing

I think the German system looks pretty good. Their voting system leads to a much more representative legislature. Another example when looking at proportional representation is the Netherlands, but their system seems to lead to lots of lengthy coalition negotiations and squabbling before they form a government.

Germany, for much of the last 20 years, has had a coalition government between the big centre-right and big centre-left blocs. E.g. in the 2005 election, 69.4% of voters backed either the Union or SPD, who together made up the subsequent coalition government. Compare that to the UK where we have a Labour government who, whether you like them or not, were only voted for by 33.7% of voters.

Yes the voting systems of both the UK and US are broken because they’re unrepresentative. Hillary Clinton in 2016 got about 3 million more votes than Trump did. In many countries that would have made her the president. But the anti-democratic electoral college system in the US meant that Trump was made president instead.

True. I think voters want to see politicians who embody values that voters like. The pitch of “vote for us just because we’re not quite as bad as the other guys”, without stating appealing values of your own, doesn’t really inspire anybody

They hope to pay on “it is us, or Reform” which is party before country and could backfire and massively damage the country.

True. I don’t think it’s a popular message with the public. Clearly people in Gorton and Denton thought “actually we don’t have to vote for Labour as the only alternative to Reform; we can vote for the Greens instead”.

What’s great about those numbers is Con+Reform is soooo far behind Lab+Lib+Greens.

Because of our crappy first-past-the-post system though, the most likely next government (if an election were held soon) would be a Reform government, or maybe a Reform/Conservative government.

Reform’s support in recent polls has only been around 24% - 30%. So around 70% of British voters don’t support Reform. Nonetheless, because Reform polls better than any other individual party, they could run the next government. Like how Labour in 2024 only got 34% of votes, but this gave them 63% of seats.

If the anti-Reform vote continues to be split between Labour/Greens/LibDems/SNP (and even Tories, since there will be Tory voters who don’t like Reform) then Farage will be the next prime minister. Surely the best counter to Reform would be a big tent centrist or centre-left party with wide appeal.

You claimed that Epstein was “running a child raping blackmail ring on Israel’s behalf in order to manipulate world events”

Maybe Epstein raped children because of his own inclinations; not because Israel made him do it, or because they paid him to do it, etc

Which specific quotes from these articles do you think show that Epstein committed his crimes “on Israel’s behalf”? I suppose it’s possible that all his crimes were directed by Israeli intelligence or something like that. I would have thought it would be bigger news if that were true. Also surely possible is that he was just a wealthy criminal and abuser who didn’t have much to do with Israel.

I think it can easily be interpreted as antisemitism so the artist probably should have avoided it

You claimed Epstein was “running a child raping blackmail ring on Israel’s behalf” but that article doesn’t seem to mention sex or rape

If Epstein had conversations with Israeli officials then okay, but I don’t think that means his sex crimes were some sort of plot masterminded by Israel

You also said “criticizing the government of Israel does not equate to antisemitism” and yes I agree with that. But putting a Star of David on Epstein’s underwear in the artwork seems to me like an antisemitic dog whistle. Epstein was not known for links to Israel (as I said, maybe he had some conversations with Israelis, but this isn’t widely known). He is widely known to be Jewish though.

I just think criticism of public figures should be based upon facts (which seem to be horrible enough in this case) instead of bigotry or conjecture