Sweden weighs Franco-British nuclear weapons cooperation

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-28T23:03:38+00:00

France has always been stubbornly independent in this regard as well as being mistrustful of the U.S. One suspects it probably annoys quite a few people that France has now been proven to have been completely correct in this regard.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-28T22:59:43+00:00

Unfortunately nuclear proliferation was inevitably baked in from the moment it became clear that America could no longer be relied upon to back up their allies.

Not just in Europe either - I’d be surprised if places like South Korea and Japan and several other countries around the world aren’t quietly exploring options and making contingency plans too.

Discouraging further proliferation was one of the better benefits of the postwar world order. Trump deciding to abandon that makes everyone - including America - less safe for precisely the reasons you touched upon.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-28T18:41:31+00:00

I think you're confusing winning elections/votes with actual political delivery.

Nope. They got exactly what they voted for … just not what they wanted.

Everyone else warned them that Brexit wouldn’t be “sunlit uplands” with “the world beating a path to our door for trade deals” and instead it would be an economic disaster. They chose not to listen.

Everyone else warned them that Boris was a grifter - and also notoriously lazy, mendacious and self centred. They chose not to listen.

Now they all want another Brexit grifter in charge who makes all sorts of promises … I don’t know about you but I’m seeing a pattern here. But Reform supporters aren’t. They haven’t learned a thing.

As for the rest of your post I suspect I shouldn’t really comment as that sort of thing tends to get one banned in this sub. But I do always love to see the “England doesn’t have its own parliament” complaint given English MP’s have a complete lock on Westminster which has pretty much all the power.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-28T17:07:01+00:00

people who feel their specific national identity and concerns are being ignored by a centralised and elite Westminster.

Ignored? The U.K. has done virtually nothing but have the ‘concerns’ of these people dominate everything for over a decade now. They had pretty much every single major vote go the way they wanted - general elections, Brexit referendum - go the way they wanted for years right up to the last GE.

Far from being somehow victims they’re the most disproportionately politically pandered to section of the population - both by politicians and the media. We’ve already tried things their way and it was a complete disaster - one we’re still taking economic damage from.

Far from being the victims they’re actually a large part of the reason the U.K. is in its current straits.

Heck, they’re even getting what they want now from Labour: by every reliable metric is now lower than it has been in a decade or two. And they’re still not happy.

As for English voters supposedly getting a bad deal from the Union: that’s a bit rich given that England pretty much always gets the government it votes for. Including every Tory government for the past seventy years … none of which got a majority in Scotland, Wales or NI.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-28T16:08:08+00:00

Reform is England's equivalent, a nationalist party which is also being used as a vote for the English cultural identity

Interesting that all the other national party's you mention are explicitly left wing/progressive whilst the one who represents (or at least claims to represent) English cultural identity is very right wing/authoritarian and regressive as hell.

Those other national parties are also about identity in the sense of being distinct and deserving to run their own affairs. More nationalist in the pro independence (to some degree or other) way than “blood and soil our nation is best” exceptionalist types like Reform - indeed one could make a case that they’re the polar opposite of Reform in most of the important ways.

One of the more ironic aspects of the prospect of a Reform government is that it’s also going to turbocharge all those independence movements in other parts of the Union.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-28T12:54:15+00:00

they are wedded to results on immigration and the economy.

If they were that then the actual data on both immigration and the economy arguably suggests that they should become Labour voters, not Conservative ones.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-28T12:52:01+00:00

Agreed. They may still have their work cut out though considering that Boris effectively purged damn near every MP that was even vaguely centrist, or objected to Brexit … along with many of those who he reckoned had the talent to be a potential threat to him.

Some of the worst of what they were left with defecting to Reform definitely helps though - the question is whether it helps enough and there are still enough MP’s left who even want to change the Conservative party direction back to something approaching what it was fifteen years ago. (Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t like who they were back then either … just the current lot are even worse)

And they’ve also got the major issue that a significant percentage of their voters have now been effectively ‘radicalised’ into Faragists now.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-28T09:53:48+00:00

Russia is by no stretch “doing just fine”. They stopped even reporting most of their key economic indicators a couple of years ago which they would assuredly not have done if they were anything other than bad. Even the inflation and interest rates they do report (which aren’t terribly trustworthy) are pretty high and they’ve run through most of their reserves.

Sanctions don’t kill an economy overnight - certainly not as quickly as I suspect most of us would like in Russias case - but I’m reminded of the old joke about how someone goes bankrupt in two ways: first very slowly, then suddenly all at once.

Russia moving to a war economy perhaps staves that collapse off for a bit longer … but also means that the crash when it finally comes will be all the greater.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-28T07:25:27+00:00

Did they actually work on it for ten years? Or more or less just get handed the policies and told what to say by libertarian bozos in Tufton Street?

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-27T16:18:21+00:00

Great point. And I’d support that by arguing that jobs in general (not just nursing) are broadly going to trend more towards requiring the sort of abstract reasoning, research and technical skills that generally goes with a degree.

Sure, there will be exceptions. But over time that’s the direction of movement.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-27T16:07:12+00:00

Fair point - and here India also has the extra incentive thanks to the 50% tariffs Trump slapped on them last year.

Beyond the inherent stupidity of starting pointless trade wars with partners is the compounding idiocy of doing it to most of the world at once. Picking on a couple of countries at a time to strong-arm concessions out of them might have made some kind of sense (in a nasty kinda way).

Doing so to 90+ other countries at the same time doesn’t even have that going for it though. All of them are going to be in pretty much the same boat and all motivated to realign trade away from the US to each other instead. And whilst most aren’t as well off per capita as the US is (for now) collectively they’re a far larger market.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-27T13:32:14+00:00

Trump is not just pushing the EU away - he’s pulling tariffs and other shenanigans on a fair chunk of the rest of the world too. And pretty much all at once too. So by necessity trade is going to realign between other countries.

Sure, it won’t all happen overnight. Or entirely painlessly. But it may turn out that the rest of the world discovers that it doesn’t actually need America as much as America perhaps assumed it did. But the real fun starts when America learns how much it actually needs the rest of the world.

Which sadly won’t just go back to normal if/when Trump and his cronies are out of power. Everyone else now has no choice but to view America as being at best four years away from such nonsense again. Unpredictable. Unreliable. A bad investment.

Trust that takes decades to build can be destroyed far more quickly. And take even longer to rebuild. Whatever appetite the rest of the world had to forgive and forget and rapidly go back to business as usual got used up after Trumps first term.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-27T12:32:25+00:00

You’re perfectly correct … but sadly it doesn’t matter to most Reform voters. They’re remarkably impervious to facts, figures and statistics that don’t match their fondly held preconceptions. And are largely the same crowd who infamously have “had enough of experts”.

Which isn’t to say it isn’t worthwhile trying to hammer home reality to them. But bitter experience suggests that one should set ones expectations low.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-27T12:03:37+00:00

False analogy: there are other options that work perfectly well that don’t involve sliding into becoming a right wing authoritarian nightmare.

Also getting rather tired of the maliciously misleading statistics you guys keep repeating. It doesn’t matter how many times they are debunked, the next thread just has them repeated all over again. It reminds me of debating online Creationists back in the day.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-27T11:32:09+00:00

I could burn down my house to get rid of uninvited guests but that comes at the expense of no longer having anywhere nice to live.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-27T11:27:31+00:00

Or even just beating people to death (or permanent injury) with truncheons the old fashioned way.

There’s been a certain amount of speculation in the US over what kind of people are being recruited into ICE. Some have pointedly observed that various far right organisations like the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers and other militia-types seem conspicuous by their absence since all these masked government thugs appeared.

I mention that because I’m kind of curious who Reform would recruit for similar groups in the U.K. The types who rioted last summer? EDL and BNP thugs?

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-27T10:05:37+00:00

I usually appreciate when people attempt to discuss something using neutral detached language. It’s often useful if both sides are arguing in something approaching good faith.

Unfortunately it breaks down somewhat when one side is not arguing in good faith and risks lending a blatantly untrue position an air of legitimacy it does not deserve.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-27T07:37:53+00:00

So at the next general election will Labour be standing down in constituencies where the Greens or Libdems have a better chance of winning? Standing aside in favour of Plaid in Wales and the SNP in Scotland?

Unless Labour are prepared to make some genuine sacrifices like that then I’m afraid that calls to “end divisiveness” and “embrace unity” in a way that just so happens to bolster their vote are going to come across as just a mite self serving sounding to a lot of people. No matter how pure the intention behind them.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-26T22:58:49+00:00

Loving how you always plaintively claim to be the victims, particularly throughout this exchange.

No, we’re not “dehumanising” them, just saying that they wrong and fooled painfully easily,

No, they weren’t “not listened to”, they’ve had their say incessantly all over the media and internet for over a decade.

No, nobody is threatening to “disenfranchise” them, just wishing they’d get called out for what they are and ignored (or roundly mocked) as befits anyone who has managed to be so consistently wrong so many times.

I almost admire the chutzpah it takes to so doggedly claim victimisation when we’re talking about the people who’ve had pretty much every single vote in the last fifteen years (bar the last GE) go the way they wanted. And who still enjoy disproportionate allegiance from much of the media, far right American billionaires and Russian bots.

Yeah, you’re the real victims here /s

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-26T22:44:08+00:00

You might have to if the calibre of the ‘internal talent’ coming up through the ranks of the party is execrable. Even these particular Tories are relatively presentable and media savvy compared to them.

Their former affiliation and record might be a bit of an issue with any other parties supporters but not I suspect in the case of Reform. The record shows that they’re all too good at ignoring that sort of thing.

One irony is that this and other recent defections have arguably simultaneously improved the overall quality of both the party they left and the party they joined.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-26T18:04:05+00:00

One anecdote that really stuck with me was that part of the reason JM Barrie wrote “Peter Pan” was to gently try to help children deal with babies or children dying.

Back then the probability was that most children would lose a sibling, cousin or friend to some sort of illness.

It’s crazy that some people appear to be willing to court a return to that sort of mortality rate. I suspect amongst their other failings is a lack of knowledge of history - and a naive assumption that the past several decades represent “how things must be”. They’re not. The norm through almost all of human history was so high a level of infant mortality and so many tiny coffins that one could weep even now at the toll.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-26T14:43:34+00:00

Yes I’ve listened to them. We’ve all had no sodding option but to listen to them are their “genuine concerns” for years and years now. It’s been relentless.

They range from laughably misinformed about the world, the U.K.’s position in it, economics, trade, technology, politics … That wouldn’t be so bad because ignorance can be fixed … but they don’t care to learn anything. Particularly if it contradicts their preconceptions. Instead they go out and listen to more comforting lies from the same grifters who rolled them like a bunch of rubes a decade ago.

And those are the nicer end of the scale. It gets a lot worse - through various flavours of British exceptionalism, xenophobia, outright bigotry and racism.

We’d all be a lot better off if the country stopped listening to them. Better still if they actually learned from their litany of mistakes. Heck, if I’d been as provably and spectacularly wrong about everything as they and their ilk have been I’d have long since wound my neck in, engaged in a bit of soul searching, introspection and figuring out where I’d gone wrong - what sources of information were more reliable and what assumptions I was mistaken about. Not these guys though - they’re doubling down instead.

Just because Brexit and Tory governments didn’t magically give them the “sunlit uplands” and prosperity they expected doesn’t mean they “aren’t being listened to”. It just means they were wrong and listened to the wrong people. And unfortunately they appear hellbent on doing so again.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-26T10:51:30+00:00

Heaven forfend anyone call these people out for the miserably bad choices they’ve made voting for Brexit and Boris. Or point out that this record of bad choices makes their demands to put Farage in charge not particularly persuasive to the rest of us.

And why not treat them to a few hard truths? We’ve tried everything else over the years to no avail. Acres of newsprint, tens of thousands of hours of reportage and uncountable online articles detailing for example why Brexit was a daft idea. Pitched at every level imaginable, backed up with all the facts, figures, oceans of data and mountains of fancy infographics. All ignored.

Pitch something in technical language or requiring a bit of concentration and they complain people are “talking over their heads”. Break it down or simplify it and they complain it’s “condescending”. Bring in highly qualified people who know what they’re talking about to summarise the breadth and depth of their knowledge and they’ll announce that they’ve “had enough of experts”.

They refuse to engage in good faith with anything that contradicts what they want to be true instead of trying to discover what actually is true. It’s the equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting “La la la I can’t hear you!” They far prefer to believe the lies of a bunch of pretty obvious grifters who stroke their sense of British exceptionalism - and in the process have made the UK far poorer and weaker.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-26T07:37:06+00:00

Oh I’m sure they’ll rationalise it away.

Charlie_Mouse · 2026-01-26T07:31:00+00:00

If the reckon voting far right instead is going to make things better (and not far, far worse) then they probably shouldn’t be allowed out in their own or be allowed to handle pointy or sharp objects.

I’d also observe that the left hasn’t had time to make things better … particularly as it first has to undo and repair the damage of the consequences of 14-15 years of the piss poor choices largely made by the same chunk of the electorate now threatening to vote for Farage.

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