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“To a less-than-enthused crowd of several dozen, they set out their case for leadership of a party for whom only a miniscule percentage of the local population has ever voted. In all my time growing up in Northern Ireland I never once met someone who had.” theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
2/
“Just five weeks ago, the country’s sole Tory candidate, Amandeep Singh Bhogal, acquired a desultory count of 662 votes in the European elections which, even accounting for low turnout, is the kind of tally you’d manage if you pinned a rosette to a jar of wasps.”
“Just five weeks ago, the country’s sole Tory candidate, Amandeep Singh Bhogal, acquired a desultory count of 662 votes in the European elections which, even accounting for low turnout, is the kind of tally you’d manage if you pinned a rosette to a jar of wasps.”
3/
“Both leadership contenders were uninspiring. Hunt was slick in the neutered, tedious way of a hotshot sales executive giving the keynote at a conference for people who sell lanyards.
“Both leadership contenders were uninspiring. Hunt was slick in the neutered, tedious way of a hotshot sales executive giving the keynote at a conference for people who sell lanyards.
4/
“Johnson did that shaggy-dog, waffling vicar act that only really works when he’s in a good mood. Here, with the life sucked from his eyes, his stumbles and prevarications seemed rote and joyless”
“Johnson did that shaggy-dog, waffling vicar act that only really works when he’s in a good mood. Here, with the life sucked from his eyes, his stumbles and prevarications seemed rote and joyless”
5/ “What unites both is their inability to pretend they care about issues facing Northern Irish people, and more especially how those issues relate to the rest of the UK.
6/. “Both reject any change to Northern Ireland’s draconian reproductive rights, just a week after legal proceedings began against a woman for procuring abortion pills,”
both dismiss any suggestion that marriage equality would be extended to the entirety of the UK. Most striking of all, both offer low-fat answers to the border issue that hinge on “technical solutions” without ever getting too technical about what those solutions might actually be
8/ The lack of invested informed coverage of our concerns may go some way to explaining why the border issue –understood by the farmers & petrol station attendants who grew up beside me in rural Derry – appears to have taken so many seasoned politicians & commentators by surprise
9/ “. I once thought Brexiters were downplaying the threat of a hard border out of callous indifference. This was an unfair assessment, since I now know they had simply never realised that the UK had a 300-mile border with the EU,
10/. “and the callous indifference only kicked in once this was explained to them.
And this disregard has only grown, since it is much more expedient for them to ignore the issue than admit it exists.”
And this disregard has only grown, since it is much more expedient for them to ignore the issue than admit it exists.”
