Classical music, shanties, G & S, British history, RN history, steam railways, poetry quoter, โค๏ธYorkshire, nature, art, ardent European.
Yorkshire, UK
Joined April 2012
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Alan Law ๐ฌ๐ง๐จ๐ฆ ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ป retweeted
Seeing some of the embarrassingly hateful reactions to Starmer's resignation today, I thought it was worth resharing this.
The level of personal hostility directed at Keir Starmer deserves scrutiny in its own right. Not because he should be immune from criticism, but because the tone and intensity of the attacks tell us something unhealthy about the state of democratic politics.
Starmer is a conventional political figure. Cautious, legalistic, incremental. He frustrates people precisely because he is managerial rather than messianic. Yet the reaction to him often goes far beyond disagreement, tipping into visceral hatred more commonly reserved for authoritarians or demagogues.
Much of this hostility is disconnected from concrete policy. It is not about specific votes, proposals or outcomes, but about projection. A belief that Starmer embodies betrayal, bad faith or hidden malice. That kind of politics runs on suspicion rather than evidence.
This matters because democracy depends on the assumption of good faith among opponents. You can think a leader is wrong, timid, or misguided without believing they are fundamentally illegitimate. Once politics becomes moralised to the point of demonisation, compromise is reframed as treachery and pluralism as weakness.
The pattern is familiar. In fragmented, polarised systems, anger concentrates not on extremists, whose intentions are clear, but on moderates, who disappoint maximalists on all sides. The centre becomes the lightning rod precisely because it resists totalising narratives.
There is also a media and online dynamic at work. Incentives reward outrage, not proportionality. Algorithms favour contempt over analysis. Over time, this creates a political culture in which relentless personal attack feels normal, even virtuous, rather than disgusting.
None of this is a defence of Starmerโs decisions, instincts or record. Those should be argued over robustly as you do in a democracy. The problem is the substitution of critique with hostility and the quiet erosion of democratic norms that follows when political opponents are treated as enemies rather than rivals.
A democracy cannot function if every election is framed as an existential struggle against internal evil. At some point, the target may change, but the damage to trust, restraint and culture remains.
Alan Law ๐ฌ๐ง๐จ๐ฆ ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ป retweeted
Retweet if you stand by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni against Trump. Her Quote โItaly And I Never Begโ ๐ฎ๐น
Canada and Greenland never beg either. ๐จ๐ฆ๐ฌ๐ฑ
Alan Law ๐ฌ๐ง๐จ๐ฆ ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ป retweeted
Eureka!! Hope you all are enjoying the World Cup
Alan Law ๐ฌ๐ง๐จ๐ฆ ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ป retweeted
Boris Johnson the most deceitful slug in modern UK history.
He knew full well when he wrote those 2 articles that Brexit would be horrendously damaging to the UK but he put career and personal ambition over the future of the UK by choosing the leave option.
Modern day traitor
Alan Law ๐ฌ๐ง๐จ๐ฆ ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ป retweeted
๐บ๐ธ๐งโAND YOU STILL DARE TO OPEN YOUR MOUTHโฆโ
Sasha Legerman: This is too accurate not to share.
This Australianโs response to Trumpโs rant that โNATO does nothing for Americaโ is absolutely devastating:
โMate. You run a country where 600,000 homeless people will sleep on the streets tonight.
A country where 40% of adults canโt cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money.
A country where insulin costs more than a car payment, and people ration it just to stay alive.
A country where medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy.
A country where women die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid of abortion laws to treat miscarriages.
You imprison more of your own citizens than any country on Earth.
More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea.
In the land of the free, 2 million people sit in cages, and a quarter of them havenโt even been convicted of anything.
Theyโre simply too poor to afford bail.
Your life expectancy is declining. Youโre the only developed nation where thatโs happening.
Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cubaโs.
Your children practice active shooter drills between math and English classes while you sell defense stocks to your friends.
Your minimum wage hasnโt changed in 15 years.
Your teachers work two jobs, your veterans sleep under bridges, and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that never attacked you.
And now a convicted criminal โ found liable for sexual abuse, defending a pedophile, sleeping with a porn star, and running the biggest dumpster-fire campaign since the Taliban โ is thanking you for yet another disaster.
And you call Greenland badly governed?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world.
Nobody there goes bankrupt because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because insurance refused treatment.
โNATO wasnโt there when we needed them.โ
When exactly was that, champ?
September 11?
Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU.
Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU.
Australia wasnโt even in NATO, and we still showed up. For twenty years.
And then you left at 2 a.m. without telling anyone and left everybody else to clean up the mess.
You donโt care that a great nation is being terrorized by your friend, and you havenโt shown it a single ounce of sympathy.
So maybe before calling other countries badly governed, take a look at your own backyard, you aluminum siding salesman with a spray tan.
The only thing badly managed in this picture is your damn mouth.
And you still dare to lecture the rest of the world?โ
Alan Law ๐ฌ๐ง๐จ๐ฆ ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ป retweeted
On this day in 1941, the British Empire saved its oil supply with a force smaller than a London police precinct.
Almost nobody remembers it.
Two months earlier, a pro-Nazi colonel named Rashid Ali had seized power in Baghdad in a four-man military coup. He immediately offered Iraq's oil fields, airfields and railways to Hitler in exchange for German support against the British, who had controlled Iraq under treaty since the 1930s.
Hitler said yes. Luftwaffe squadrons were dispatched to Mosul. A handful of Heinkels and Messerschmitts painted in Iraqi colors were already on the ground.
If Iraq fell, Britain lost its main wartime oil supply, the route to India through Basra, and any chance of holding the Middle East against Rommel pushing east and the Germans driving south through the Caucasus.
Britain had almost nothing in Iraq to stop it.
What it had was RAF Habbaniya. A flight training school on a desert plateau 50 miles west of Baghdad. The aircraft were obsolete biplane trainers: Hawker Audaxes, Airspeed Oxfords, a handful of Gloster Gladiators meant for student pilots. The garrison was 1,200 men: airmen, mechanics, flight instructors, six companies of Assyrian Christian Levies, and a few hundred student pilots who had never seen combat.
On May 2, an Iraqi army of 9,000 men with field artillery surrounded the plateau on the surrounding cliffs and ordered them to surrender.
They didn't.
For five days the obsolete trainers flew 647 sorties against the Iraqi positions, instructors leading their own students into combat over the wire. They lost a third of their aircraft. They lost 13 men. They broke the siege and chased the Iraqi army back toward Baghdad.
Meanwhile a scratch relief column called Habforce had set out across 500 miles of open desert from Transjordan with no maps and almost no water. At its head rode a column of Arab Legion soldiers led by an Englishman who had gone native, John Bagot Glubb, whose Bedouin troops called him Abu Hunaik, "father of the little jaw," after a wound he had taken in the trenches in 1917.
Glubb's men reached the outskirts of Baghdad on May 30.
The coup leaders fled to Iran in the night. The Mufti of Jerusalem went with them. Rashid Ali eventually made it to Berlin and spent the rest of the war as Hitler's guest.
Iraq's oil kept flowing west for the next four years.
Hitler had been hours from controlling the Persian Gulf and never knew it.
Is it? Wait a few moments. Yes! My first swift of the season. East Yorkshire. @swifts_uk @swiftsweek
Alan Law ๐ฌ๐ง๐จ๐ฆ ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ป retweeted
How would the Church of England deal with the statement that "The cat sat on the mat" if it appeared in the Bible?
The liberal theologians would point out that such a passage did not, of course, mean that the cat literally sat on the mat. Also, cat and mat had different meanings in those days from today, and anyway, the text should be interpreted according to the customs and practices of the period.
This would lead to an immediate backlash from the Evangelicals.
They would make it an essential condition of faith that a real physical, living cat, being a domestic pet of the species Domesticus, and having a whiskered head, a furry body, four legs and a tail, did physically place its whole body on a floor covering, designed for that purpose, and which is on the floor but not of the floor. The expression "on the floor but not of the floor" would be explained in a leaflet.
Meanwhile, the Catholics would have developed the Feast of the Sedentation of the Blessed Cat.
This would teach that the cat was white, and majestically reclined on a mat of gold thread before its assumption to the Great Cat Basket of Heaven. This is commemorated by singing the "Magnificat" and "Felix namque", lighting three candles, and ringing a bell five times.
This would cause a schism with the Orthodox Church, which believes tradition requires Holy Cats Days (as it is colloquially known) to be marked by lighting SIX candles and ringing the bell FOUR times. This would partly be resolved by the Cuckoo Land Declaration, recognising the traditional validity of each.
Eventually, the House of Bishops would issue a statement on the Doctrine of the Feline Sedentation.
It would explain that traditionally, the text describes a domestic feline quadruped superjacent to an unattached covering on a fundamental surface.
For determining its salvific and eschatological significations, we follow the heuristic analytical principles adopted in dealing with the Canine Fenestration Question (How much is that doggie in the window?) and the Affirmative Musaceous Paradox (Yes, we have no bananas). And so on, for another 210 pages.
The General Synod would then commend this report as helpful resource material for clergy to explain to the man in the pew the difficult doctrine of 'The cat sat on the mat.'
Alan Law ๐ฌ๐ง๐จ๐ฆ ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ป retweeted
1/ Please repost if you want the full restoration of our EU Freedom of Movement. โ at Brighton, England
Alan Law ๐ฌ๐ง๐จ๐ฆ ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ป retweeted
They thought the cat was stuck up there and organized a whole rescue operation for it ๐
Alan Law ๐ฌ๐ง๐จ๐ฆ ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ป retweeted
Like if you are on the side of the BBC against Trump.
Repost if you are appalled at Reform siding with Trump in his attempt to bankrupt the BBC.
Alan Law ๐ฌ๐ง๐จ๐ฆ ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ป retweeted
Iโd be surprised if the Greeks didnโt have a word for this kind of entomological predetermination too.
Alan Law ๐ฌ๐ง๐จ๐ฆ ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ป retweeted
This deserves revisiting โ Farage squirms as Rep. Jamie Raskin obliterates the "Putin-loving, free speech imposter, Trump sycophant."
Please share as widely as possible. We need an antidote to media promotion and protection of Farage. โ at Brighton, England
Alan Law ๐ฌ๐ง๐จ๐ฆ ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ป retweeted
This needs to be retweeted again, and again, and again
The Great Brexit Betrayal must never be forgotten
Farage is not a patriot
Heโs a traitor
Alan Law ๐ฌ๐ง๐จ๐ฆ ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ป retweeted
Thereโs been a huge overreaction to a temporary artistic installation in Canterbury Cathedral.
Iโll be honest โ itโs not to my personal taste. But I value what the Cathedral is trying to do. Through a series of workshops, groups were invited to collaborate around a simple but profound question: โWhat would you ask God?โ
The resulting installation, created by poet Alex Vellis and curator Jacquiline Creswell, gives voice to the spiritual curiosity and honesty of those who took part. Among the questions displayed are: โWhy did you create hate when love is by far more powerful?โ and โDoes everything have a soul?โ
Rather than seeing this as an act of provocation, perhaps we could see it as an act of invitation โ a call to listen, to engage, and to recognise that even our hardest questions can be part of our search for truth.
I have seen US commentators claim this is the fall of Britain and some claim this is sacrilege. Wait till they read the Psalms where the scriptures give voice to some even more outrageous prayers.
The Church of England decided this week to cover the interior of the oldest cathedral in England in graffiti in order to represent the voices of โmarginalised communities.โ
The Very Rev David Monteith, Dean of Canterbury, said: โThere is a rawness which is magnified by the graffiti style, which is disruptive. It is unfiltered and not sanitised.โ
โThis exhibition intentionally builds bridges between cultures, styles and genres and allows us to receive the gifts of younger people who have much to say.โ
Itโs actually stunning how much the elite of Britain hate their own culture and civilisation.
You couldnโt even invent this as satire.
They are literally scrawling graffiti on the walls of ancient cathedrals. Everything beautiful is just torn down and destroyed.
