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The end of the UK(?)

Ruairi said:
I grew up in West Belfast in the 80s. The last thing I want is a return to those sorts of days but I firmly believe we will never again see the likes of that, in any Ireland. Those days are gone.
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I used to go to NI a lot in the mid to late 80's and for much of that I was serving military (Navy, so there was never any chance I'd have to serve there) so used to have to get permission each time I went including receiving security briefings and training how to do stuff like checking my car for a bomb. Not that I ever did check my car for a bomb when I was over there as I reckoned that while the first time I did an obviously professional job of checking for one there wasn't likely to be there, it was rather more likely if anyone spotted me doing the checks! I relied more on trying to look as scruffy/studenty as possible as well as having a Scotland sticker on my car.
 
Ruairi said:
The last thing I want is a return to those sorts of days but I firmly believe we will never again see the likes of that, in any Ireland. Those days are gone.
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I hope they are. I hope that folk are happy to have nice shops not being blown up all the time, no security gates, no searches at every shop entrance. There are naturally still nutcases on both sides, but hopefully they represent a minority. And, as an IRA man once observed, when the wee women in the streets turn against you, you know you have problems.
 
Ruairi said:
Me too. The time the troubles erupted life was totally different. There will be civil disorder but it will fizzle out. Unionists won't have Bombay St, Ballymurphy or Bloody Sunday or Internment. They will be afforded the opportunity to have an input into a new state and they won't be discriminated against. There was no opportunity like that in the 60s or 70s. When people marched peacefully for civil rights look what happened. I live and have a young family in Belfast. I grew up in West Belfast in the 80s. The last thing I want is a return to those sorts of days but I firmly believe we will never again see the likes of that, in any Ireland. Those days are gone.
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I sincerely hope and pray that your generation wins out. However, it's the old bastards who tend to run these things. You can hear the seemingly never-ending hatred in the voices of the DUP leaders. To me the similarities with the Ian Paisley of old are plain. They know how to exploit the gullible.
 
Vinny said:
Substantially more than somewhat irrelevant IMO.

I would also not put too much faith in your logic in/out UK v. in/out EU. It is as likely as not that Spain would regard allowing Scotland in as reward for the split.
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However the basic point I'm making is that the majority of the people in Scotland may simply not agree with you. I also have doubts, but I can see the attraction of being rid of the Tories and their kleptocratic tax-dodging chums who rule via Westminster.
 
Ruairi said:
Me too. The time the troubles erupted life was totally different. There will be civil disorder but it will fizzle out. Unionists won't have Bombay St, Ballymurphy or Bloody Sunday or Internment. They will be afforded the opportunity to have an input into a new state and they won't be discriminated against. There was no opportunity like that in the 60s or 70s. When people marched peacefully for civil rights look what happened. I live and have a young family in Belfast. I grew up in West Belfast in the 80s. The last thing I want is a return to those sorts of days but I firmly believe we will never again see the likes of that, in any Ireland. Those days are gone.
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My fear is that Johnson and what he’s helped turn the Tory Party into are prepared to sell decades of hard work and compromise in Northern Ireland for factional gain in Britain.
 
TheDecameron said:
My fear is that Johnson and what he’s helped turn the Tory Party into are prepared to sell decades of hard work and compromise in Northern Ireland for factional gain in Britain.
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Too late, that horse has already bolted thanks to the EU's blindly focused creativity in throwing the Irish border into 5 years of anti-brexit contorting, and latterly of Von der Lyin's fit of pique over the EC's own disastrous vaccine rollout.

The credibility of the EU project is imploding in front of you, and all you can see is Johnson.
 
I can't see a return to the 70s style as who would fund it now, it was US money getting weapons from Libya back then.
 
davidsrsb said:
I can't see a return to the 70s style as who would fund it now, it was US money getting weapons from Libya back then.
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I remember when Bernadette Devlin spoke at the local Knights of Columbus. A lot of money for the IRA was fund-raised through adjuncts of the Catholic Church in the US.
 
eternumviti said:
Too late, that horse has already bolted thanks to the EU's blindly focused creativity in throwing the Irish border into 5 years of anti-brexit contorting, and latterly of Von der Lyin's fit of pique over the EC's own disastrous vaccine rollout.

The credibility of the EU project is imploding in front of you, and all you can see is Johnson.
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That’s quite fruity even for you and I’m note talking about the prose style.
 
TheDecameron said:
... I’m note talking about the prose style.
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Interesting language, there's something slightly... threatening about it, something of the party commissar, the note slipped under the apartment door at night. You do it quite a lot, I've noticed.
 
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eternumviti said:
Too late, that horse has already bolted thanks to the EU's blindly focused creativity in throwing the Irish border into 5 years of anti-brexit contorting, and latterly of Von der Lyin's fit of pique over the EC's own disastrous vaccine rollout.
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EV - I have to ask, how so ?
Surely trying to resolve whether for trade NI is in the EU or out and/or keeping a fully open border with the rest of the UK is one of those circles which is just impossible to square - no ?
 
The will appears to involve some non existent technology, magic unicorns or the EU stepping away from some of the basic rules that it's founded on. After 4 years it appears that many still think the outcomes we are now seeing are still "project fear." Reveillez-vous et sentir le café.
 
-alan- said:
EV - I have to ask, how so ?
Surely trying to resolve whether for trade NI is in the EU or out and/or keeping a fully open border with the rest of the UK is one of those circles which is just impossible to square - no ?
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The situation with NI & Eire is something that Brexiteers never had an answer to, hence the introduction of this last minute mess which is already looking pretty idiotic. Especially given it's in some very key areas put some of the Union's biggest supporters (the DUP and other loyalists) outside the UK.
 
eternumviti said:
Interesting language, there's something slightly... threatening about it, something of the party commissar, the note slipped under the apartment door at night. You do it quite a lot, I've noticed.
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Erroneous e. Underneath your style of writing* there’s a fundament of nutty beliefs about national identity best illustrated in your utter obsession with Germany and more generally, the constant whiff of xenophobia.

*it reads like this looks-


From 2:58 onwards
 
eternumviti said:
Where there's a will...
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If we were all to be very gracious for a moment, and picture a world where both sides (UK and the EU) set aside hostilities with a view to making it work - I can't for the life of me envisage how on earth would one go about creating tariff-free, frictionless trade and regulatory harmony between NI and both ROI and the rest of the UK : one entity stuck on the middle between two others where different rules apply.

A serious question - is there a working version of that out there anywhere, or has anybody ever managed to introduce something even reasonably similar anywhere else ?
 
-alan- said:
If we were all to be very gracious for a moment, and picture a world where both sides (UK and the EU) set aside hostilities with a view to making it work - I can't for the life of me envisage how on earth would one go about creating tariff-free, frictionless trade and regulatory harmony between NI and both ROI and the rest of the UK : one entity stuck on the middle between two others where different rules apply.

A serious question - is there a working version of that out there anywhere, or has anybody ever managed to introduce something even reasonably similar anywhere else ?
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Sadly, I can't think of one. The cynic in me says that, as England has been making a howling mess of Ireland for the last 800-odd years, why should it stop now? Partition was a desperate compromise, trying to please simultaneously two diametrically-opposed sides and failing ultimately to please either. Common membership of the EU went part-way towards a solution, basically creating a completely porous border, and the volume of cross-border trade disappeared into the stratosphere. But Brexit rudely yanked the rug out from under their feet, and now poor Northern Ireland inhabits this unfortunate limbo, with the threat of violence back again (Norn Iron port workers being threatened). I can see the whole enterprise crashing and burning. I desperately hope not.
 
davidsrsb said:
No, I commented on what happened in the TPP negotiations for the Pacific countries. The USA was trying to put the agreement into a position where they could force all the small countries away from China and under their IPR control. Most SE Asian countries try very hard to be neutral.
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There was an interesting note on one of the IP blogs this morning concerning the TPP. The major countries, Australia and Japan, both have grace periods (periods in which an invention can be worked in public without jeopardising novelty in a patent application). It seems that the UK would have to offer such a provision, should it join. As I mentioned previously, this is contrary to the absolute novelty provisions of the European Patent Convention, so UK applicants would have to file any European application prior to any public use, otherwise that would be the end of the European patent. It could mean that the UK would have essentially two parallel patent streams, one for UK-only, the other for EP patents. For small inventors interested only in the UK market, this could work quite well, not so well for folk with ideas of broader filings.
 
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