🗣️#SueGrayDay
🗣️Peter Hitchens supports Johnson shock
🗣️The #Saville Attack
🗣️DEBATE: We should NOT #DefundTheBBC
🗣️DEBATE: Reassessing Appeasement and Neville Chamberlain
Do join -- but bring your debating chops. Last week, after our weekly politics chat, we had quite the debate on abolishing the police. I wonder if @calvinrobinson would like to explain why we should defund the BBC (and then likely crush my conservative argument for keeping it)?
🧵 Happy Sunday THREAD about the fragility of modern civilisation.
I've been feeling shivery and feverish since Friday night (better now) so I decided to watch Band of Brothers again. It's a wonderfully produced, directed, scripted and acted series, and it's must watch for...1/n
...anybody who hasn't seen it. I had to turn it off, though. It wasn't the horror of the battle scenes -- the death, the jaws ripped open by shrapnel, or the amputations by 105mm mortar round -- that got me. It was the liberation of Eindhoven. It shows in that scene the...2/n
...rank moral degeneration war causes on all sides, much of which is tragically necessary for military operations, but a lot of which is forced on populations who must survive through it. In Western Europe, we have been lucky for the last 80 years that we haven't seen any...3/n
Our story centres on three events in 1955-56. Two are barely known and the third is misunderstood, but they created modern Britain. The first event was the publication of The Future of Socialism by Anthony Crosland, the Oxford academic and Labour MP. No book has had more... 2/n
...influence on postwar British society. In it, Crosland argued that the Labour Party should stop focusing solely on economic policy as a means to achieve its socialist ends: there was more than one way to skin a cat. Instead of attempting to control the commanding...3/n
For the last 20 years, the Western Alliance has focused its warfighting capacity on Counter Insurgency Warfare. Driven by reckless engagements in the Middle East, the Hindu Kush and North Africa, our thinking, equipment procurement...1/n
...force organisation and training has been focused on this type of war. Often, it involves fighting in urban or mountainous environments, but always in small scale, low intensity engagements against a lightly armed enemy, while having total air, informational and EM...2/n
...dominance. Armour isn't much used, and artillery is static and used for fire support against outmatched opponents. Mechanised, high-intensity, combined arms warfare is an entirely different matter. It requires a great deal of training in mass to be able to manoeuvre...3/n
The third is a superb piece from Rob Lee (@RALee85) on the current military buildup on the Ukrainian borders and what might come next. I also recommend following his Twitter feed, which is cataloguing the build-up in real time.
People might also like to take ten minutes to listen to the below podcast, which offers an insight into Russia's vulnerability to sanctions, and thus Western leverage.
🇪🇺 This is the sort of 'strategic autonomy' Macron (and many in Brussels) want: deciding European issues to the exclusion of the US. It's exactly what they *should* be doing if that's what they want.
🇷🇺 If not handled carefully, it might...2/n
...allow Russia to triangulate and weaken everybody's negotiating position.
🇪🇺 It must have infuriated the EU that the US was deciding on the affairs of the EU's near abroad but excluding Brussels, Paris and Berlin.
🇪🇺 This is likely to help France cleave closer to Germany...3/n