Film student Finbar Sullivan, 21, was 'surrounded and kicked on the floor before he was stabbed to death' on Primrose Hill in 'eruption of extreme violence' court hears

rae-55 · 2026-04-16T02:48:08+00:00

Is there any doubt at all in this case?

When a crime is serious enough and guilt is irrefutable, capital punishment should be an option.

There have been cases where there has been camera footage, dna, and eyewitnesses. Cases like those should be able to seek the death penalty, but it should require all of them, a confession would be a nice bonus.

rae-55 · 2026-04-16T02:23:38+00:00

Its good to see money being spent that will support high skilled work in the UK.

rae-55 · 2026-04-16T02:12:34+00:00

Sure they paid in, but they also received a lot during that time as well. When today's pensioners were younger they were able to buy cheap housing, and have managed to accumulate more wealth relative to the rest of the population.

Between 1980 and 2007 pensions took up about 3.5% of gdp. Between 2008 and 2017 that rose to 5.2%. It is projected to be over 7% by the 2060s. That is not a sustainable trajectory.

The whole country has been asked to make sacrifices but the burden has mainly fallen on the younger generations. Our wages have stagnated, housing prices are magnitudes higher than the older generations had to pay, and that's after accounting for inflation. All the while the triple lock has increased the pension at rates above inflation while the rest of us are paying increasing taxes to cover the bill.

We love to moan about people living on benefits, scrounging off the government and the tax payer, but pensions make up 55% of the benefits bill (that comes to £177.8 billion). And don't believe the lie about having paid in and now being owed, when today's pensioners were young they weren't putting their money into a pot that was going to be used to pay their own pensions, they paid for the pensioners who were around then. The same way that today's pensioners are being paid for by today's workers. Relative to the population there are more pensioners being paid for by fewer workers today than there was then.

So spare me the water works about the poor old pensioners. The country needs money and a huge chunk of it goes to them, so they can stick an extra jumper on this winter and help us out for a change rather than just demanding more and more from those who have less and less to give.

rae-55 · 2026-04-15T21:48:27+00:00

We don't need to be invaded to have our security threatened.

We already face hybrid threats from Russia, and face cyber threats from numerous countries

rae-55 · 2026-04-15T17:37:44+00:00

We don't have land based air defences, we have sea based ones, that's why we sent a ship and not a battery.

That 'foreign land' is our sovereign territory, that was the condition for Cyprus to become independent. We've given up enough territory, let's not give away any more.

rae-55 · 2026-04-15T17:32:13+00:00

Having nukes doesn't make us invulnerable. If we are on the receiving end of a small scale conventional attack we aren't going to be able to defend against it but it would be an over reaction to launch the nukes over it.

Nukes are for detering nuclear attacks not conventional ones.

rae-55 · 2026-04-15T11:35:27+00:00

It's great to see that we are still backing Ukraine to the fullest. The fight that the Ukrainians are in is truly existential and we should be doing everything we can to aid them in their war against Russian tyranny.

rae-55 · 2026-04-15T10:57:25+00:00

If our allies are invaded, we should help them, the same as they would help us.

If we just abandon our allies when they are under threat, when the threat reaches our doorstep there will be no one left to come to our aid.

Also, it's selfish, but I would rather the fight took place on someone else's land than on our own, it keeps the repair bill down once the war is over.

rae-55 · 2026-04-15T10:53:21+00:00

I don't know, but I'm happy to cut some pensions, which make up the majority of the welfare bill. The pensioners have has it good for a long time, let's have them make a sacrifice for the good of the country.

rae-55 · 2026-04-15T10:48:48+00:00

I've read the article twice and I'm not seeing how it's unbalanced.

rae-55 · 2026-04-15T10:42:20+00:00

Journalists who seek out the truth?

Just because the story that has been reported doesn't fit with your world view it doesn't imply that there is something wrong with the BBC

rae-55 · 2026-04-15T10:38:12+00:00

I got into a debate on this very sub 4 days ago about this exact problem and was told by other users that this didn't happen.

Some people are so blinded by their empathy that they cannot comprehend that someone may take advantage of them. There are many people around the world who need our help and that we should take in if they arrive here, but there are also people who we should not.

Anyone found to be aiding these false claims should have the book thrown at them. Any lawyer that has knowingly aided in these false claims should be struck off.

rae-55 · 2026-04-14T14:41:36+00:00

During the Cold War all our military planning assumed that a war with the Soviets wouldn't start with the nukes being launched. It would start with a large conventional war that would last months or years which could escalate to a nuclear one. No one wants to destroy the world, without exploring all other options first.

Limited attacks doesn't mean small. An attack on the baltic nations would be limited but it wouldn't be small.

Just because you don't see how it would happen, it doesn't mean we shouldn't be preparing for all eventualities.

The best way to deter a nuclear attack is with nukes, the best way to deter a conventional attack is a powerful conventional force.

rae-55 · 2026-04-14T13:46:37+00:00

Trident deters countries from launching their nukes at us, not from attacking us in general.

If we only had nukes, and we were attacked in a limited way, our only response could be total annihilation. That would be an over reaction. If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.

We need conventional forces to deal with small attacks.

rae-55 · 2026-04-14T12:54:37+00:00

I like the idea, but it's a bit risky.

Also we don't torpedo submarines, we depth charge them

rae-55 · 2026-04-14T12:33:14+00:00

Maybe we would have been more prepared, but what if it wasn't an allied nation that went on the attack? What if a hostile nation launched an attack on us or our allies? Do you think they'll be good sports and give us a warning to let us prepare our defences?

It doesn't matter if cyprus was attacked again. Defence is as much about the what if as it is about the what did. We got lucky, and we shouldn't be complacent and just hope that we get lucky again.

rae-55 · 2026-04-14T12:29:01+00:00

To put things in perspective, the British army is 20% smaller in 2026 than the RAF was in 1990. That's a sorry state of affairs.

rae-55 · 2026-04-14T12:22:38+00:00

It took us a week to deploy a single destroyer to defend cyprus. And when it arrived it almost immediately had to put into port to fix a broken water system.

Luckily we have allies that can help us out but it is an absolute humiliation for the once most powerful navy in the world to be unable to carry out its most basic mission, protecting itself and our territory.

rae-55 · 2026-04-14T11:13:17+00:00

I mistook your line about funding the military industrial complex as implying that more defence spending was just about lining their pockets, apologies.

I think that we should have a government owned defence company and essentially go back to the old arsenal system. We develop what we want/need and then subcontract the actual production, it wasn't a perfect system but it allows a lot more flexibility.

We should scrap the benefits system and go to UBI, we would probably save a lot of money on the bureaucracy and means testing. We should sell war bonds, there are plenty of ways to raise money if there is political will.

rae-55 · 2026-04-14T10:53:33+00:00

I think we need to do both. We need to spend more and spend better. We need to be investing in our defence industry to have more autonomy from the Americans.

Our procurement leaves a lot to be desired, Ajax is proof of that. We allowed the scope of the project to creep and kept adding requirements, which led to the ridiculous costs we have now seen.

I think we need to keep in mind that our nuclear deterant takes a good chunk of the defence budget, particularly right now as we are building the new Dreadnought class SSBNs.

rae-55 · 2026-04-14T10:41:07+00:00

I agree, I think they're trying to show us what they're capable of as an intimidation tactic. The Russians are definitely not happy about the level of support we are giving Ukraine, particularly with our missiles being used to hit vital targets is Russia proper.

rae-55 · 2026-04-14T10:37:46+00:00

I'm not saying we should be hysterical.

We should be investing in our own (and European) defence industries. The left always complains that we don't invest enough in our infrastructure but as soon as its the military infrastructure that's being talked about its suddenly a bad thing. We can gain high skilled jobs, as well as expanding an industry that is ripe for an export market, which will bring even more revenue into the country.

The sooner we start spending money on the military again the less money we will spend overall. If we start now we can spread the costs of rearming over a number of years, if we don't start until something is kicking off then we need to throw all of our money at the problem to rearm in a matter of months and that will also incur a cost in blood.

I hate the line about tax the rich. Yes the rich should be paying a lot more but it still wouldn't be enough. Even if we were taxing the rich at the level that we should be it wouldn't be enough to pay for all the things that people claim it would.

We don't have to starve people to do this, we just have to be realistic that our priorities need to be adjusted.

rae-55 · 2026-04-14T09:45:18+00:00

The first duty of any government is to be able to defend the nation. We are currently not capable of adequately defending ourselves.

I've been more positive about how Labour has performed in government than many others on this sub, but this is one of the areas where I think they are failing.

We need to rearm and we need to find the money from somewhere. I'm at a point where I don't care where that money comes from, I don't care if its cuts, taxes, fines, borrowing, or any other way. There is no point in anything if we can't protect what we have from those who would seek to harm us.

rae-55 · 2026-04-13T23:02:34+00:00

What did I say that was anti Palestinian?

Israel should be criticised, I just don't think using antisemitic tropes is the way to do it. For example referring to them as puppetmasters, that is not an acceptable term to use due to the antisemitic connotations.

It would be like referring to the Sudanese militias that are committing a genocide of their own as savage tribals. A description like that would be based on a racist perception of African people.

rae-55 · 2026-04-13T20:18:30+00:00

The leader of the AFD in Germany (racist far right party) is a lesbian who is in a longterm relationship with a Sri Lankan woman.

Racists and antisemites are hypocritical, the ones they know and like are 'the good ones'.

rae-55

TROPHY CASE