The state of the UK

[laklak]

I think a mix would be nice. The last several years I worked from home, and it got boring as shit. I really looked forward to trips back to the UK and to client sites.

[pErvinalia]

That's because you got on the hookers and blow on your trips away.

[Scot Dutchy]

The DUP are loosing it in NI. The wee hairy herself is saying it.

Arlene Foster may preach unity now, but she led with division

The DUP has wildly exaggerated the harms done by power sharing – and now Northern Ireland is slipping out of its grasp

The Democratic Unionist party had a front-page ad in the Belfast News Letter yesterday. “This union works,” it declared. “Lets build for the #next100.” As the first minister and leader of the DUP, Arlene Foster should have been leading this week’s celebrations for the centenary of the establishment of the Northern Irish state. Instead, the DUP has gone to war with itself. Foster has been humiliatingly ousted and the future of the “precious union” has been put at risk, not by republicans, but by Northern Ireland’s self-proclaimed most loyal sons.

Last Tuesday Foster made a rare visit to a youth project on the Shankill Road. In this west Belfast loyalist heartland, hundreds of families now rely on food banks, and children were recently sent out with petrol bombs to riot by protesters whose politics were expressed when they attacked a press photographer and called him a “fenian cunt”. A reporter asked the first minister what she made of reports that individuals within her party were plotting to move against her. She brushed him off with trademark arrogance.

Hours later it emerged that most of Foster’s members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) and most of her members of parliament had signed a letter of no confidence in her leadership. She went home to County Fermanagh for a long night of soul-searching and quoted a psalm, on Facebook: “It is God who arms me with strength and keeps my way secure.”

Her resignation speech the next day was extraordinary. Foster had tried, she said, to lead her party and Northern Ireland “away from division”. People who identified as British, Irish, Northern Irish or a mixture of all three, as well as those whose identities were “new and emerging” needed to “learn to be generous to each other” and to share “this wonderful country”. That was where the future of unionism lay.

[Brian Peacock]

Every time I think about the DUP I reach for Jim's luger.

[Scot Dutchy]

A 100 grams of Semtex would be enough for the wee hairy.

[Scot Dutchy]

The UK still does not understand where it is. The old dreams are still vivid.

UK sends navy vessels to Jersey amid post-Brexit fishing row with France

Boris Johnson dispatches two gunboats to protect island from feared blockade

Boris Johnson has dispatched two Royal Navy patrol boats to protect Jersey from a feared blockade by French fishing vessels, in an escalation of a dispute over post-Brexit access to waters around the Channel island.

The move followed talks on Wednesday evening between the prime minister and the chief minister of the British crown dependency, John Le Fondré, who had warned Downing Street of imminent movements by French fishing boats to cut off the island’s main port.

Jersey’s government had already been reeling from comments on Tuesday from France’s minister for maritime affairs, Annick Girardin, who had warned that the island’s electricity supply could be turned off in retaliation over a lack of access for the French fishing fleet to its waters.

The two Royal Navy river class patrol boats, HMS Severn and HMS Tamar, are being deployed on Wednesday and Thursday respectively. Both vessels are armed with a cannon designed to protect against fast moving attack crafts and two on-deck machine guns.

HMS Tamar, which at 90.5m (295ft) is the larger of the two vessels, has an additional two mini guns. Last month it became the first Royal Navy warship to be painted in dazzle camouflage since the second world war, designed to make it more difficult for the enemy it judge its speed and heading.

Boy's Own!

[Seabass]

Getting a bit pythonesque...

[Brian Peacock]

I wonder which carbon budget the deployment of that ship came out of.

[Scot Dutchy]

Must be some money left after doing up his flat.

[Scot Dutchy]

Jersey row: fishing leader says French threats ‘close to act of war’

Don Thompson says response from France is ‘like something you would see from Iran or Russia’

France’s response to post-Brexit fishing restrictions around the island of Jersey has been described as “pretty close to an act of war” by fishing community leaders in St Helier. They say they have been told 100 boats are being lined up in France for a 6am blockade at the main Channel Island port on Thursday, threatening food and energy supplies.

“It was inevitable that the French would kick off,” said the head of the Jersey Fishermen’s Association, Don Thompson. “But the reaction we’re seeing from France is almost like something you would see from Iran or Russia. They’re not just saying they can cut off the electricity supply, French fishermen are saying that they’re coming tomorrow [Thursday] to blockade the harbour in time to stop the ferries from coming in so there’ll be no food supply and no fuel coming into the island either. So it comes pretty close to an act of war, this.”

The French maritime minister hinted on Tuesday that France could cut off electricity supplies to Jersey in retaliation for restrictions the self-governing island has imposed on French vessels.

At the centre of the dispute is post-Brexit arrangements for the shared waters in the 13-mile stretch between France and Jersey. New licences were issued on Friday, the last day of a four-month grace period after Brexit, which ended the Granville Bay treaty on shared fishing rights which dates back to 1839.

JFCOAPS

[Brian Peacock]

French sent there frigates in first, but it's dick waving nonsense all round.

[Scot Dutchy]

It is so... 19th century.

[JimC]

Where's Hornblower when you need him!

[Brian Peacock]

But it whipped up a bit of patriotism on election day eh? The papers aren't allowed to say much about politics on election day, but the Tory press were all fulminating about the 'arrogant French' on their front pages this morning.

[JimC]

"Death to the French!"

(the title of a novel by C. S. Forester... )