10 years old​…​…​…​…

close
more_vert
dhajjieboy D
dhajjieboy Dec 6, 2015 22:36:16
Replying to thesweetcheat

thesweetcheat wrote:
dhajjieboy wrote:
thesweetcheat wrote:
You and over half of the population now.
This is interesting indeed.
Can you post a reliable poll or news organization link that substantiates this ?
We have several members within various organizations that i am affiliated with here in the states who have origins from the U.K. (retired mostly here in Florida}, they have voiced empahtic distain of these 'situations' as of late...and very vocal support of shall we say, 'a need to address this'.
It may come as a surprise that they are all most welcome in my home as friends too.
The Times (hardly a left-leaning publication) published figures a couple of days ago that from a YouGov independent poll (it's an opinion poll, not a referendum) that stated that only 48% of people in the UK support airstrikes, which has fallen by 11% since the parliamentary debates:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/12/02/analysis-sharp-fall-support-air-strikes-syria/

As for your acquaintances, what bearing does their views have on the feeling of the UK populace? They don't live here.

It's interesting that you immediately assumed 'they don't live here'...
In fact they do by and large. They are amongst many who winter over in Florida and still maintain there U.K. citizenships. They are 'snowbirds'.
They worked all there lives and enjoy retirement here in the winter months.
I can assure you they maintain very active interest in goings on at home.
They have opininions that matter. As much as your feelings about America.
I will be maintaining a very active interest in the UK position in matters of late. I for one (as mentioned elsewhere} am very proud of your Parliaments stance in solidarity with the west, and so are citizens of the U.K. that i actually know.
As mentioned elsewhere too....
"Expats have, in my opinion, the bad habit of poking their nose in the affairs of the old country"....
Wow, just wow....
The solutions we need now way exceed borders.
Also regarding your link...same organization just days before:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/11/25/strong-and-continued-support-raf-air-strikes-syria/

59% public support.
Help me out here...
UK opinion that fickle?

S sanshee
sanshee Dec 6, 2015 23:09:47
Replying to dhajjieboy

Well...last dictator we toppled was Gaddaffi, utter c*nt by anyone's standards but now place is over run by I.S.
Oh aye we all got to see his head being bashed in but you'd have to be incredibly incurious not to think 'hang on a moment, what happens next? We hope for peace? Are we seeing peaceful people in action here?
Tunisian beach attack terrorist was trained in Libya.
When Gaddaffi was in power, was certainly more peaceful for us.
Much of the queasiness around these current bombing campaigns is that we may be unleashing something even 'worse'.
So now who do we topple and what happens next?
I.S doesn't even seem to be that much of an enemy to Assad, certainly not much of an enemy to Russia.

T thesweetcheat
thesweetcheat Dec 6, 2015 23:13:21
Replying to dhajjieboy

Yes, one was before the parliamentary debates, one was after.

T thesweetcheat
thesweetcheat Dec 6, 2015 23:29:59
Replying to dhajjieboy

dhajjieboy wrote:
I can assure you they maintain very active interest in goings on at home.
They have opininions that matter. As much as your feelings about America.
I will be maintaining a very active interest in the UK position in matters of late. I for one (as mentioned elsewhere} am very proud of your Parliaments stance in solidarity with the west, and so are citizens of the U.K. that i actually know.
A bunch of retired people who have moved to America are not representative of the British people, any more than Nigel Farage is.

And as for "as much as your feelings about America":

I have no interest in the US. I never want to go there, I don't have any interest in the scenery or the limited history and by and large the culture leaves me absolutely cold. I don't like guns, I don't eat meat, I don't drive a car. I don't really give a toss about domestic goings on in the US. I only care when US foreign policy affects the rest of us.

Not one single person I know from my place of work or elsewhere (so that's a pretty broad range of UK citizens with a cross-section of very different politics) thinks that the decision to drop bombs on Syria will have any beneficial effect on stopping IS whatsoever. Most (probably all) agree that IS are Bad, but dropping bombs with no other strategy isn't viewed as a sensible solution at all.

In fact, most people here are now feeling much less safe, despite the assertions of our hopeless Foreign Secretary. None of them have expressed any pride in our parliament's stance - for the most part because they don't like the idea of pointlessly killing civilians while making a bad situation worse in a way that will directly come back to haunt us.

Even Blair has admitted that IS only exist because of Iraq and the West's catastrophic meddling in the Middle East.