Garvan Walshe
@garvanwalshe
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Head of Comms @epc_eu . Founder @article7news Chair @unhackdemeu . RA @MartensCentre Ex: @Conservatives FP adviser @MANCEPT PhD and @EuropeanUni
Brussels, London
Joined May 2012
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Last Seen Profiles
Pinned Tweet
Freedom must be better armed than Tyranny"
@ZelenskyyUa
told the world almost two years ago
So don't dither about supporting Ukraine, instead read my report for
@MartensCentre
ton what Europe can do to boost its defence industrial base:
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You can’t unilaterally amend an international treaty by changing domestic law. If you could there’d be no point in having treaties. It get to the heart of the difference between two ideas of Brexit.
Thread.
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I'm sure that suspending parliament by executive decree will reassure Britain's EU partners that the backstop is not necessary because the London government can be trusted to keep its word at all times.
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Amnesty and Perfidy
A thread on how Amnesty’s Ukraine investigation, carried out against the opposition of its own local branch(!), gets the law of armed conflict wrong. 1/
⚡️ Ukrainian forces have put civilians in harm’s way by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas.
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Quite wrong. The UK could have done all this while in the EU.
Freed of the shackles of Brussels, Brexit Britain is a force to be reckoned with on the world stage. With a renewed sense of confidence, and a determination to strengthen Nato and the transatlantic alliance, the British are leading again.
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Biden will win this, but there are sobering lessons for the opponents of national populism. Thread.
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Four days of protests against Orban...but British papers giving as much coverage to them as Hungarian State TV is. This is a sustained *anti-populist* revolt, and they’re missing the story.
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On the day when a rare public rebuke of the UK by a visiting US president leads
@thetimes
pro-government commentators are wheeling out the excuses. But the reality is that British foreign policy has got into a mess.
A thread about why - and how to get out of it -
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Maybe Brits are most scared to return to work because they have had the most serious outbreak in Europe.
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Why does the US organise a missile wall for Israel, but not Ukraine?
And not just the US — France, and Arab states were also involved.
🧵
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The only person who put the software engineers from Delhi in a queue was herself. No EU rule ever stopped Britain letting people in.
“It will no longer be the case that EU nationals, regardless of the skills or experience they have to offer, can jump the queue ahead of engineers from Sydney or software developers from Delhi.”
Does this mindless rhetoric ever stop?
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Steve Baker's and JRM's attack on the civil service and
@CER_Grant
shows us what Brexitism is really about. Clue: it's not about leaving the European Union.
Thread. /
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We used to do this at Conservative HQ. We would ask the Daily Express to print something unsubtantiated* then get an MP to tell Parliament “I read in the Express that X”, and then pitch to the other papers that “Parliament was told X”
I’m sure Labour** did the same thing…
Swedish TV
@svtnyheter
illustrates how a Russia-linked influence campaign – designed to stop the West's support to Ukraine is planted and laundered before it reaches us in the West.
Follow the path of lies – step by step👇
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Irish independence was successful because the war was waged with targeted force. Had they stormed into say Burnley, and massacred English families in their homes, the Treaty of 1921 would never have been signed
You don’t help Palestinians by endorsing counterproductive savagery
Palestinians hostage in criminal siege of Gaza for 17 yrs.Since 1948 Palestinians victims of ethnic cleansing, murderous occupation & apartheid. They have every right to resist. Shocking double standards of western leaders supporting Ukraine resistance but condemning Palestinian.
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We must give right wing populists what they want, to stop right-wing populism; from someone who completely failed to stop right-wing populism.
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When I was hired to work at Tory Central Office (that long ago, before it was rebranded CCHQ) the first question one of my bosses asked me was "how do we get out of the European convention of human rights?"
Here are several reasons why it's a bad idea 🧵
It's the European Convention on Human Rights...
Human rights...
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File under: only the British are allowed nationalism. Everyone else is a rational economic actor who will see threats as a bribe with the sign reversed.
Leo Varadkar should be very careful what he wishes for. His grandstanding makes 'no deal' more likely. The Irish economy would be far more badly affected by that than ours. Surely he must know that.
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5/ Boris won the election with a type of May’s Brexit, but the
#NIprotocol
bill would convert it, in defiance of the election manifesto into Mogg’s Brexit.
The bill isn’t just immoral or illegal. It’s also dammed foolish.
ENDS
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This is going to end up with an election isn’t it.
If the bill doesn’t get through the Lords there won’t be time to use the Parliament Act. So the Government would need to be elected on a new manifesto.
Sorry Brenda.
NEW: Prime Minister to address the parliamentary party this afternoon 17:30 – MPs have not been given details of the purpose of the meeting
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Spain to demand Gibraltar protocol in Brexit agreement. You’d forgotten about Gibraltar hadn’t you...
Points for the first headline writer to say Brexit: between the rock and a hard border
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UK Defence Policy
European Army 👎
European Navy 👍
France has agreed to the UK proposal of the creation of an European naval force in the Gulf and will assign military means to it.
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17/ Amnesty’s suggestion that Ukraine not fight from cities, but instead from wooded areas outside is militarily absurd. Even if Ukrainian troops had other cover to hide in, Russia would simply take the cities, and carry out human rights abuses against the people living there.
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Real gutter stuff from Media Guido. Embarrasing what an originally entertaining gossip site has become.
Wonder what
@Twitter
would have done if Churchill had tweeted "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender..."
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19/19 We know Russia had drawn up lists of human rights defenders to target during its invasion.
Had the Ukrainian army done what Amnesty wanted, Russia would have kidnapped, tortured and killed
@Amnesty
’s activists in the cities Ukraine would have been unable to defend.
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Too many people are saying that Christopher Chope and Philip Davies are being stupid or bad communicators. That's not it. They're misogynists and should have the whip removed. The government needs to make time in parliament for the bill banning upskirt photography to go through.
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I’m surprised no Brexiteer has appeared on my timeline quoting Paradise Lost to the effect of better to be free in Hell than a slave in Heaven but I suppose that’s algorithms for you.
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Nothing to see here. Just the Joint Chiefs of Staff reminding the entire US Armed Forces that their oath is to obey the Constitution and not, the Pres.
Also interesting
- that they leaked it before putting it on their official twitter account
- the date is handwritten
1/
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
#GenMilley
:
"We all committed our lives to the idea that is America--We will stay true to that oath and the American people."
Read the Chairman's full message to the Joint Force:
@DeptofDefense
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15/ And far from using civilians as human shields, Ukraine has done everything it could to evacuate civilians from the warzone. It is Russia that has trapped the civilians there by firing on evacuation convoys and conducting sieges.
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What stands out about the new british hard right? It’s obsession with stuff that’s not actually a problem. Some examples. Thread. 1/
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14/ Russia hasn’t tried to avoid hitting civilians. It deliberately targets them. It bombs hospitals in operation, civilian areas of cities, and places marked as shelters like the Mariupol drama theatre. It conducts massacres and disappearances in occupied territory.
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Bribing Hungary to release money for Ukraine is a mistake. The EU should do what they did with David Cameron, and organise a separate treaty to bypass Orbán’s pro-russian obstructionism
In Argentina, President Zelenskyy had a conversation with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Presumably, the conversation was about Orban's objections to the start of negotiations on Ukraine joining the European Union.
According to a member of the Ukrainian delegation, the
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11/ It needs to understand that the sovereignty of all medium-sized countries is highly circumscribed. Leaving the EU increases the number of decisions the UK can make, but reduces its ability to shape the environment in which it makes them.
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Only a very insecure government resorts to antidemocratic intimidation of business like this.
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16/ Third, Russia is attacking cities, and Ukraine is entitled to defend them. It inevitably means military installations will be near civilians who haven’t been able to leave, abandoned schools (not schools in which classes are being held!) and other civil infrastructure.
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What does it say about British politics that the most aggressive deselection attempt is against someone proposing compromise?
Grantham and Stamford Association Chairman expects proceedings against
@NickBoles
to begin next week
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Brexiters: stop contemplating war with Spain, or threatening antiterror cooperation. It won't help the Govt. It just makes you look mad.
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Things Brexiteers said wouldn't happen
1. Leave SM
2. Leave Customs Union
3. Hard border with Ireland
4. Govt abuse of Henry VIII powers
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18/ Finally, this report was done without involving Amnesty’s own Ukraine section, which has disavowed the report.
Statement from my brave & extremely courageous colleagues from Amnesty International Ukraine. I fully stand with them.
@OPokalchuk
is a big role model for me & I stand by her & every single colleague of mine from Ukraine.
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This shows how deep the gulf is between British *remainer* opinion and the EU. Thread. 1/
This is a piece of Euro theology which is not a ‘fact’ in any other sense - that the four freedoms are ‘indivisible.’
We aren’t talking about the Holy Trinity! No intrinsic reason why freedom to trade, travel and invest must necessitate unrestricted right to work across the EU
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This is a bit rich since
@TomTugendhat
, who asked the toughest questions, is a Conservative. CCHQ needs to give its troops better lines.
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3/ The other, let’s call it Mogg’s Brexit, doesn’t actually approve of binding international agreements at all. It may seem to its British proponents that this gives the UK maximum freedom to do as it likes, but it actually just puts the UK outside international law.
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4/Disputes with the EU would then be decided by power politics, which might have worked when the British Empire dominated the globe, but now puts the much smaller UK at a huge disadvantage.
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17/ That is the reality to which the UK has to adjust. It needs to develop better ways to influence EU decision-making now that it has left (hint: inviting Orbán to No. 10 and alienating Ireland is not a good plan)
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Swiss defeat populists in referendum. It's not a wave. They can be beaten.
Switzerland, preliminary final result:
Referendum: Federal Constitution should rank higher than international law
Yes: 33.8%
No: 66.2%
Turnout: 47.7%
#Selbstbestimmungsinitiative
#CHVote
#abst18
Chart:
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7/ If your plan now is to do something that will put you in the same club as Alexandr Lukashenko and Vladimir Putin, it's time to get a new plan. ENDS
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Why has Britain been in decline in the last few years. This graph provides a clue. 🧵
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We need to ask ourselves - what does the Danish governmen think it’s doing?
How low can you go to say that people should be sent back to Assad’s syria? 1/
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Yes, because it reduced the number of women forced to have children against their will. Good.
"Did feminism kill the birth rate? The circumstantial evidence is damning." |
@moveincircles
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Characteristic misunderstanding of Brussels. They care about whether the single market’s integrity is protected. Not whether Brexit is hard or soft.
Cabinet agreement to Brexit plan matters as it undermines the “we can’t really negotiate because you won’t tell us what you want” excuse used by Brussels. EU27 must now whether to take plan seriously or reject it in hope parliament votes for softer deal.
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At the
#presidentielles2022
debate last night Marine Le Pen showed a print-out of an old tweet.
My team at
@article7news
have been looking into Rassamblement National officials' tweets over the last few years...
There's a lot in there she wouldn't want us to see 🧵
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From today's Times (Irish edition). If no deal 55% of NI voters would support a United Ireland including crucially 11% of people who identify as "unionists".
Can we nominate the DUP for a Darwin award?
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Make a note of this: this idea will spread, it's the logical consequence of an English nationalism that will run through all scapegoats before it comes to terms with its failure.
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15/It isn’t very useful, for example, to sign up to a new corporate tax minimum, only to ask for an exemption for our main industry the next day. The impression given is of a government that is all over the place.
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A friend just posted an short video of migrants beaching their dinghy on the Spanish coast. I'm not reposting because the image will be taken out of context. Here is the question:
Why do people risk their lives in such dangerous means of transport in the 21st century? Thread 1/
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What should Amnesty have done instead?
1 - Take their Ukrainian branch seriously. The strength of their objections should have shown something was wrong.
2 - Train their investigators in the law of armed conflict as it is actually applied by good quality militaries in wartime.
Amnesty and Perfidy
A thread on how Amnesty’s Ukraine investigation, carried out against the opposition of its own local branch(!), gets the law of armed conflict wrong. 1/
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Orbán's Hungary has vetoed the latest EU aid to Ukraine €18 billion.
What can be done about it? Thread.
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Before the referendum I wrote that a vote to Leave would turn Britain into Argentina, with Peronist politics, a volatile currency, leading to long term relative economic decline. 1/
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All Brexit mistakes come down to not understanding two things
1. The EU is bigger and more United than than the UK
2. Brexit is opposed by half the country, not just the elite.
After the supreme court judgement we're going to see a lot of 2.
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No ECHR impossible within GFA. Breach GFA say goodbye to US trade deal.
If govt wants its Brexit to work it needs to prioritise and focus on the essential, not pick spurious fights.
Thread 1/
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2/ One kind of brexit, let’s call it May’s Brexit, is about redefining the arrangements the UK has with the EU. Those different arrangements, agreed by the UK and EU would then be understood as binding on both parties.
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We're not a failed state. We're making plans to stockpile food in case an official govt policy option is implemented.
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This is the core argument of a certain kind of radicalism currently popular on the right. It's deeply antidemocratic. Here is why. Thread.
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7/ But even if you think that’s right, and doesn’t play into the hands of dictators (imagine the 1940s: “Allies: indiscriminate bombing of German cities must stop; Axis: stop blocking investigation into claims of persecution of Jewish civilians”) Amnesty got this one wrong.
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UK admits Brexit will lead to a permanently smaller British economy to justify a smaller Brexit bill. (FT)
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5/ Amnesty think they’re doing that. Had they been around in World War II they would I’m sure have written reports condemning the allied raids on Hamburg.
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Oh this is embarrassing
These 6 politicians are plotting to cancel the votes of 17.4 million people.
🔵 We respect the result of the EU Referendum.
🔵 We will get Brexit done by October 31st and take this country forward.
✍️ Show them they can't ignore it.
➡️
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Going over Barnier's head again, because it worked so well before
Theresa May will embark on a 10-day diplomatic blitz by phoning round EU leaders ahead of this month's summit, which Brussels chiefs say is the 'moment of truth' for Brexit. EU wants a divorce deal ready to go by 15th. Latest from
@tnewtondunn
and myself.
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16/ Nor does it make much sense to denounce the “pure legalism” of the EU. The EU is legalistic in enforcing its treaties with third countries, because it’s powerful enough to negotiate them in its favour.
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1/ In East Germany they used to say "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work". This Sunday Times story shows that's how the government intend to sell the deal: DDR Brexit
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The UK signed up to the protocol, validated it in a general election and ratified it in Parliament.
You might want to revise it, but shouting at the EU and US won’t get you anywhere. You need to think up creative solutions and persuade the EU to accept them. (1/2)
Did Bogdanor not read or understand the Protocol at the time?
Latter years Bogdanor is very odd indeed
Via
@swgannon
@KeohaneDan
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13/ Perfidy is strongly condemned by the GCs because it’s dishonourable, and denies their opponent the chance to fight while obeying the rules of war. But it is relevant only when the opponent tries to do so.
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5/ The question for Poland's government is: whose side is it on?
Ukraine or Orbán?
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Two deputy leaders can articulate Labour’s brexit policy. One for Remain and the other for Leave.
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What matters in the long term is not whether the UK is in or outside the EU, but whether it can operate institutional government outside it. Everything we've seen so far from the Brexit movement suggests it can't. 27/
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Very questionable editorial judgement
'Donald Trump is the victim' - we speak to one of his legal team,
@AlinaHabba
- full interview on
#bbclaurak
tomorrow morning, along with everything you need to know on
#GE2024
week 2
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Largely peaceful and voluntary dismantling. This is such an absurd rewriting of history and unbecoming of Danny Kruger who really should know better.
Here is a thread showing some peaceful and voluntary dismantling of the British empire. 1/
The salient fact about the British & slavery is not that we practised it (so did every civilisation in history) but that we abolished it. The salient fact about the British Empire was not its existence (it was the universal model) but its largely peaceful & voluntary dismantling.
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Brexit cutting red tape again
UK steps up plans to train 50,000 form fillers for post-Brexit trade
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3/ The Geneva Conventions (GC’s) rely on reciprocity (e.g: treat our POWs well and we’ll treat yours well), chivalry (soldiers want to feel they’re honourable warriors, not barbarian brutes), and an internal system of military discipline.
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1/ National populist candidates have appeal across different countries, and ethnic groups. They’re dangerous, and they’re not going away.
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3/ A proportion of their supporters are what we might call anti-leftists: they find the left wing view of the world naive, preachy, smug and so on.
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Do those donors know that Farage owns the company and can pay himself dividends out of their donations?
EXCLUSIVE: Footage from a private meeting at the Ritz shows Nigel Farage soliciting Brexit Party donations from a millionaire Putin cheerleader and an influencer who has made a string of anti-Muslim comments
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But they are wrong. Politics is a normative business. The last time the west allowed such prejudices free rein it nearly destroyed itself.
"Many people in the West feel that immigration is now completely out of control and that their much cherished ways of life are under imminent threat"
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11/ Perfidy is where a side in war takes advantage of protections for civilians to advance its war effort by hiding among them (which is why citizens who fight are supposed to war an armband showing they’re combatants, or hospitals are marked with a red cross).
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1/ The convention, spearheaded by a certain Winston Churchill, exists to protect individual rights, which is what the Conservatives once stood for. It gives signatory states' judiciaries a large margin of freedom to interpret it.
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5/ That Rwanda plan is a moral disgrace and a waste of money. Here the court is saving the UK from international embarrassment. The government should take the chance to escape a mess of its own creation.
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2/ They appeal to their voters in a genuine way, not only because of propaganda and disinformation. Voting for these candidates meets a need, and isn’t because people have been fooled.
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2/ How do you regulate something as inherently violent as war? What does it even mean, cynics will ask? “War is Hell” said General Sherman (and he went on to burn Atlanta)
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It’s an issue caused by the complete inability of Western countries to process small numbers of people in line with international law and maritime decency.
Hopefully an end to the unbelievably crass and out of touch twitter hot take that the small boats crisis is a non issue being exaggerated for political reasons
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12/ Perfidy includes taking of human shields (as the Bosnian Serbs did by chaining UN troops to their tanks) or conducting military operations from a school or hospital in operation.
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8/The GC’s include some absolute prohibitions on torturing civilians, murdering and raping civilians.
But most rules are relative either to how you treat your own side (you must offer their troops healthcare no worse than your troops) or the military objective being pursued.
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Orban’s no longer just fighting a culture war. He’s destroying the people educating the next generation of Hungarians.
We're appalled by the grotesque 'revenge' law just passed by the Hungarian Parliament
It will serve as a dangerous tool to punish & scare teachers who are critical of Orban’s regime, by - for instance - monitoring their private devices & social media
This authorism can't go on!
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9/The relation to the military objective is known as “proportionality.” It is often misunderstood.
It does not mean equality of force (if they shoot at you with rifles, you can only fire back with rifles, not artillery).
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The Malthouse compromise is another example of the British negotiating like Palestinians.
Obsessed with their internal politics, they demand concessions from a more powerful opponent it has no incentive to agree to.
Historical note: it doesn’t work.
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4/They also apply the same principles to all sides in the war, regardless of the justice of the cause in which they fight. An old part of the Western tradition of military ethics, which distinguishes going to war (ius ad bellum) from fighting in war (ius in bello)
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That is in fact their intended purpose. To secure peace and wealth in Europe by tempering the people's desires through institutions. They were created after the alternative was tested to destruction. 26/
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Why the UK's ATTORNEY GENERAL is claiming the UK is constitutionally incapable of incurring treaty obligations.
It follows from her argument that the UK cannot consider any treaty binding because that would breach parliamentary sovereignty.
Yes, really.
.
@SuellaBraverman
asserts that parliamentary sovereignty means Parliament is free to disapply treaties. This is not correct. If it were, as I explain in
@ConHome
today, the government would actually not have the power to make treaties. Thread.
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British foreign policy is being run for domestic politics. That’s self-defeating, I argue in
@NewStatesman
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10/ Proportionality means that if the military objective is legitimate (i.e. doesn’t consist of absolutely prohibited war crimes) is the harm done to noncombatants excessive.
This is where “perfidy” comes in.
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The UK cabinet is being given hours to read a c 500 pg document that they can't take away with them containing painful compromises so deeply buried that they might as well be encrypted.
This is not a process that can give a deal of this importance deal the legitimacy it needs.
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14/ But if the UK wants to play an important role in the rebuilding of the international order it needs to start acting like it believes in order.
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