Bad-faith commentators are pretending that #BrexitRiots in Northern Ireland couldn't have been predicted

Here's a thread giving CREDIT to those who raised concerns before the EU referendum & DISCREDIT to those who dismissed these legitimate concerns with "project fear" rhetoric
CREDIT: @FrancesOGrady (General Secretary of the TUC) who spoke about the potential threat to the Irish Peace Process a week before the vote

DISCREDIT: Nigel Farage. Need I say more?
CREDIT: @kathryn_gaw who very clearly identified the potential problems in a Guardian column on June 21st 2016.

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
DISCREDIT: Nigel Dodds of the DUP who dismissed concerns about Brexit potentially stoking violence in Northern Ireland as a "cynical ploy" in June 2016.
CREDIT: I'm no huge political fanboy of either Tony Blair or John Major, but despite their many other screw-ups, the Irish Peace Process serves as their positive legacy

They both warned Brexit could potentially destabilise Northern Ireland in June 2016

ft.com/content/30dabf…
DISCREDIT: Tory Northern Ireland Secretary at the time Theresa Villiers, who arrogantly dismissed concerns over the Irish border issue as "scaremongering" in April 2016

irishnews.com/news/2016/04/1…
CREDIT: Again, I'm no huge fan of Bill Clinton, but credit where credit's due, he helped facilitate the Peace process in the '90s, and he warned that Brexit could destabilise Northern Ireland in June 2016, just before the vote.

irishpost.com/business/bill-…
DISCREDIT: Arlene Foster of the DUP, who casually dismissed fears that Brexit would undermine the Good Friday Agreement on the Andrew Marr show, in May 2016.

irishnews.com/news/political…
CREDIT: Former Tory MEP Brendan Donnelly who warned that Brexit could profoundly destabilise Northern Ireland by stoking sectarian tensions. April 2016.

blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2016/04…
DISCREDIT: Former General Secretary of UKIP Jonathan Arnott, who was another Brexiteer who resorted to dismissing legitimate concerns about Brexit's impact on the Irish Peace Process as "scaremongering".

Now we're witnessing scenes like this
CREDIT: @AlMcDonnellSB of the SDLP who raised the Irish border issue at PMQs, the week before the Brexit vote

Cameron's answer is actually good, but he gets no credit because he's the wanker who called the Brexit referendum without any contingency plan in case he lost his gamble
DISCREDIT: Former Tory MP for Peterborough Stewart Jackson, who was yet another to use the term "scaremongering" to dismiss concerns about Brexit and the Irish Peace Process.

He's also a thoroughly nasty piece of work.

huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/ex-tory-…
CREDIT: The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) which ran this piece 3 days before the Brexit vote.

It's noteworthy that much of the incisive journalism about Brexit/Northern Ireland was in non-UK press (especially Ireland & US) while British coverage was dismal.

wsj.com/articles/north…
DISCREDIT: The official Vote Leave campaign hastily scoured their website, and deleted their social media accounts soon after the referendum.

At the time numerous Vote leave figures derided legitimate concerns over the Irish border and Irish Peace Process as "project fear"
CREDIT: Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny, who beseeched people in Great Britain to at least consider Ireland, Northern Ireland, the Irish border, and the implications for Peace Process before voting in the EU referendum.

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
DISCREDIT: Boris Johnson, who promised that leaving the EU would leave the Irish border "absolutely unchanged" in February 2016, then in 2019 hastily scrawled a border down the Irish Sea in order to ram through his shambolic bodge job of a Brexit deal.

bbc.com/news/uk-northe…
CREDIT: @clionamccarney

One thing that really didn't happen during the referendum debate was listening to ordinary Northern Irish people.

The people there majority opposed Brexit, but few in England could be bothered to understand why

DISCREDIT: Kate Hoey. Just mind-boggling complacency.

Also discredit to the Telegraph for publishing her absolute drivel.
CREDIT: British media coverage of the Brexit implications for the Irish Peace Process was utterly inadequate, however there were a few positive exceptions.

This from @MishalHusain & @BBCr4today, in May 2016, was about as good as it got.

bbc.com/news/uk-politi…
In researching this thread, the most shocking thing I found was the pathetically inadequate amount of attention people were paying on social media.

Only a few dozen Tweets mentioning both "Northern Ireland" & "Brexit" between Jan 1 & Jun 23 2016.

Because hardly anyone cared.

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More from @Angry_Voice

8 Apr
After a week of silence on the Northern Ireland riots, Boris Johnson finally deigned to actually comment on the situation, saying that he's "deeply concerned"

But if he's as "deeply concerned" as he says he is, why on earth did it take him a week to even say anything?
The BBC and corporate media outlets, who have been dutifully downplaying the riots, suddenly sprung into action, pumping out articles uncritically framing the riots through Boris Johnson's self-declared "deep concerns".
BBC, ITV, Sky News, Express, Times, Evening Standard, MSN, City AM, & others all ran news reports & articles uncritically headlining Boris Johnson's "concerns", without bothering to mention the fact that the border he's created down the Irish Sea as one of the main causal factors
Read 6 tweets
6 Apr
Here's an occasionally updated Twitter thread of Another Angry Voice quotation pictures. Image
It was bad enough in Asimov's day when people tried to give parity to expert knowledge and ignorant opinion.

These days people have learned how to game Twitter by having deliberately shitty opinions for attention (far more attention than experts get for well-structured analyses) Image
The whole art of Tory politics is tricking poor and ordinary people into supporting policies that massively advantage the mega-rich, at the expense of everyone else. Image
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23 Feb
I've seen a large increase in the amount of people trying to discredit my point by slinging mental health abuse & weaponised mental health terminology at me

At first this increase was driven by CUK supporters, then it was "Jo Swinson's Lib-Dems", now it's often Starmtroopers

1/
It's not like I never had Tories and assorted far-right polemicists coming at me with mental health abuse in the past, but it was usually just crude insults from that lot.

Liberal-capitalists are a lot more insidious with it, and there seems to be ever more of them.

2/
The most distasteful thing about it is how glib and sanctimonious they are about it

It's clearly one of the lowest debating tactics imaginable to try to attack and undermine the mental health of the person you disagree with, rather than debating the point they actually made.

3/
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11 Dec 19
If you're terrified of @jeremycorbyn's radical hard-left economic plans, I've got some REALLY IMPORTANT ADVICE for you, should he become Prime Minister [thread]
You'll obviously be thinking about leaving the UK, but you'll want to be extra careful to avoid making the mistake of relocating to countries that already have scary hard-left policies like commie Corbyn's in place ... so you'll need to draw up a "No Go" list ...
If it's tuition-free university education you're afraid of, then Germany, France, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Belgium, Spain, Austria, Greece, Argentina, India, Brazil, Mexico ... are out of the question.

Add them to your "No Go" list now.
Read 24 tweets
18 Jun 19
So let me get this right:

Rory Stewart, an absolute bastard who voted in favour of Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment is the guy everyone's suddenly fawning over.

Have you all lost your tiny little minds?
So let me get this right:

Rory Stewart, an absolute git who voted to slash disability benefits for people who have been declared too unwell to work is the guy everyone thinks is lovely?

Has everyone gone completely crazy?
So let me get this right:

Rory Stewart, an pro-Brexit Tory who backed Theresa May's shambolic deal x3, refused to rule out a "no deal" meltdown, and reaches out to Farage to help him deliver Brexit is the guy the #FBPE drones are drooling over?

What are you people thinking?
Read 15 tweets
21 May 19
British Steel need a £30 million rescue package in order to avoid insolvency and save 4,600 jobs.

This may seem like a lot of cash, but here's a THREAD to provide some context:

1/10
£30 million to save British Steel is less than the £43 million in public cash Boris Johnson and the Tories spaffed on a "garden bridge" in London that never even got built!

2/10
£30 million to save British Steel is less than 1/4 of the £133m the Tories wasted on hiring ferries that didn't exist/paying for ferry services that didn't operate/compensating rival transport companies over the unlawful 'no bid' ferry contracts they were handing out.

3/10
Read 10 tweets

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