Israel has a law prohibiting the entry of any foreign politician who has openly called for boycotts or sanctions on their country. To be honest, I think that's reasonable, especially in the case of Israel which is the only state on the planet which routinely has its right to exist challenged and questioned, and who are surrounded by states chomping at the bit to murder them all.

Both of these MPs have called for economic sanctions and boycots on Israel in the middle of this seven-front war for Israel's very existence.

On top of that, they claimed at the border to be part of a diplomatic delegation which, it turns out, didn't exist. In other words, attempting illegal entry under a false pretext.

All that said, I think Israel would have been better off letting them in. Everyone knows the West Bank (Judea & Samaria) is a shitshow and nothing they said would be particularly new or noteworthy or insightful.

It's the heart of historic Jewish life with clashes between settlers and Palestinians. There's been an enormous upsurge in Palestinian terrorist activity since October 7th and the IDF and Palestinian Authority have had a relentless struggle working together to keep a lid on it ever since. The same people demandin Israel leave never have a coherent plan for how this could be done without leading to another Gaza. That's the last time Israel unilaterally pulled out of Palestinian territory.

But it would be much, much more dangerous, because when you look at a topographical map of Israel and the West Bank, every Jihadi fuck with a mortar would be able to walk up a hill and fire rockets at Tel Aviv Airport any time he fancied it. And it would represent yet another arena into which Iran's money, weapons and influence would pour. If you think October 7th was horrific, I don't want to imagine what a Hamas-run West Bank could do.

There aren't any easy solutions to the West Bank for either side.

If the PA held elections, they'd lose and Hamas would take charge.

If Israel pulls out unilaterally, that may well happen anyway as Hamas and other groups fill the vaccuum left by the Israeli security forces, and Israel has then self-imposed a massively dangerous security situation on its elevated border region.

The only hope has ever been that the Palestinians pull themselves together, set aside the desire to burn the Jewish state, and focus on building their own. Just about the only leader they've ever had who took that seriously was Salam Fayyad, but he was pushed out by Mahmoud "PhD in Holocaust Denial" Abbas back in 2013.

Since the Second Intifada, Israelis have been receiving two different messages at the same time. From the international community: you must pull out of the West Bank.

From the Palestinians: if you pull out of the West Bank we'll use it to murder your children.

Especially after October 7th, most Israelis take that deadly seriously.

So if you want an Israeli withdrawl, you need to convince them that the Palestinians either don't mean it when they say they're coming for their Jewish children's blood, or that there's some credible plan to prevent it, or that the Palestinians are under new, better leadership (that's only hypothetical, there's no credible leadership candidate in Palestine who would represent that atm).

Also why Brits espouse communism and socialism. They never had to experience the Soviet Union or Maoist China. Such people get short thrift in Eastern Europe.

I'm slightly skeptical of "top tens nations" where people make the chart and then fill it with successful nations and then make the relationship to their case

To be fair, the reason I referr to it is that precisely because the Heritage Foundation is a very conservative org, you would think they'd have a reason to shunt countries like Denmark and Sweden to the bottom of the list. But they don't, they actually put them in the top 10. So that's my reasoning for bringing it up.

Canada, Australia, Netherlands, New Zealand have serious housing issues. They all have terrible reproduction rates. The relevant ones have immigration, cultural conflict, far right issues.

Completely agree on this. There aren't really any examples of advanced Western economies where the housing problem has been properly addressed. But there are better and worse examples imo.

I heard him on Tyler Cowen and he got some interesting pushback. Although I don't trust Cowen.

I did enjoy that one. Cowen's a super smart guy and I appreciated that he gave Ezra a serious interview really pushing him on things. I think Ezra did a good job backing up his own side too, but that's what you want from a good interview.

For the liberal Abundance side how does successful programme avoid agglomeration?

It probably sees agglomeration as a good. But that seems like part of the problem of mainstream economics. Mainstream economics does not have a solution to regional wealth concentration as it sees it as success. "Double down on success. Whats the problem?"

But obviously it is a problem for democracy and equality.

I think the worry about entrenched inequality is not quite as closely bound up in this as you think. I suspect you're operating along a rail which says that economic growth leads to widening inequality. And I'm not sure that's really true.

What most of these individuals and organisations are calling for is a relaxation on what the government allows private businesses to build, and for the government to stop preventing itself from building things that matter and are important to the common good, from nuclear and solar power to high-speed rail etc.

Greater supply of housing, whether built by the government or individual human beings, necessarily begins to rectify the supply-demand imbalance in housing, because there's no way of suppressing demand for it. The only lever is supply. And then outside of housing, the main areas are energy and technology, where again I just don't see where this worry about inequality would enter the picture.

We've been saddled for decades with a political class who want all the pomp and grandeur of being seen to govern, without ever having to actually govern, with all of the risks, dangers, and trade-offs that involves.

Large parts of the liberal-left are realising at about the same time that you can't have redistribution without economic growth, and the bigger the state, the lower the growth. Abundance is a great book, by the way, and a lot of the problems they discuss map on almost perfectly to the problems we have in the UK. I'd definitely recommend reading it.

In the UK context, most of the similar thinking on this has come from the centre-right, though usually orgs not specifically tied to the Conservative Party for very obvious reasons.

https://ukfoundations.co/ is the major one that's had a significant impact already on the thinking of both Labour and Tory MPs (though obviously not Lib Dems or Greens), which among many other things famously pointed out:

The planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.

Looking For Growth is a similar org that's pretty non-partisan. I was at their London conference/workshops, and they had Labour MP Chris Curtis, Tory MP Andrew Griffith, and Reform UK chairman Zia Yusuf speaking. A lot of attendees there were pretty apolitical businesspeople and entrepreneurs.

The Centre for British Progress is a more centre-left, Labour-aligned group that kicked things off yesterday, having previously been organised as UK Day One. They wrote an interesting piece in the left-wing New Statesman about their diagnosis, goals and policies.

Labour Future is also a new group essentially operating along similar lines but within the Labour PLP.

There's an increasing consensus on the nature and scale of the problems in the UK economy, and how much of it stems from the state's overbearing role in it. As an example of this, I'd point to a recent article by Henry Hill about the Birmingham bin strikes.

Also, economic and public sector deregulation doesn't mean you can't have comprehensive social welfare programmes. That isn't the same thing.

For example, if you look at the right-wing Heritage Foundation's Economic Freedom Index, here's some of the countries in their top 20 most economically free countries:

• Luxembourg (5)
• Australia (6)
• Denmark (7)
• Estonia (8)
• Norway (9)
• The Netherlands (10)
• New Zealand (11)
• Sweden (12)
• Finland (13)
• Canada (14)

The UK ranks 33.

I mention the Index because even a conservative index ranks Sweden, Norway and Denmark above us.

Denmark, Norway and Sweden are substantially more economically free than the UK. They don't actually interfere all that much with stringent requirements on all levels of economic life. The bargain is simple: high taxes on everything to fund high spending on healthcare and public programmes, but how you make your business profitable is largely up to you to do in a free, open, competitive market.

A healthy economy balances the ambition of talented individuals who want to create a successful and profitable businesses with schemes to ensure a maximum on inequality and support to give the poorest a shot at better themselves through good employment opportunities as well.

And double the tarriffs we're being slapped with.

Great idea

The problem isn't that GPs are underpaid, it's that there aren't enough.

And the reason there aren't enough is because GPs have consistently lobbied for very restrictive caps on training places for British doctors.

Why? Because more doctors would mean lower salaries by pushing up supply.

Break the grip of the GPs over the process, train more doctors, and the problem goes away.

It's a result of the breakdown of the traditional family unit, and the gradual erosion of the norm of a two-parent married household.

The reason why boys are doing even worse (and both are doing badly, to be clear) is because of fatherlessness.

23% of all UK families with dependent children are raised in a single-parent household, about 90% of which are single mothers.

Parenting wisdom was for thousands upon thousands of years passed down through the generations. Young mothers would be shown how to parent by their mothers, young fathers by theirs. By breaking the links of marriage which hold together families, that accumulated wisdom has in many cases been lost, leading to parents who simply don't know how to raise children. That's why eventually the state stepped in via schemes like SureStart, but it was stepping in to address a problem created at the social level by cultural changes especially post-1960s.

That did not happen when vast hordes of third world immigrants poured into Huddersfield

Right, so my point is in your original comment you wrote that it was "regenerated" by it.

That's why I suggested you should correct your typo

Wait you think Huddersfield has been regenerated by third-world mass immigration?

Ah, okay, so we do in fact get to debate over which riots we support, as you say?

was that a typo with "regeneration"? Seems like something you should fix pretty swiftly if you don't want people getting a false impression of what you're saying here

Let in millions of people from third-world tribal societies and hope for the best

I wouldn't trust the police to provide accurate information on this.

No.

Glad to clarify that for you

No, it's a Muslim writing an article about Muslims for the BBC using a term Muslims use to describe non-Muslims which no non-Muslim would ever accept.

Islam has an inherently Colonialist mindset.

Everything that came before – Jewish and Christian – was always-already Muslim, in fact, and the problem is Jews and Muslims who don't acknowledge this. They were Muslim, and just didn't realise it. But those who exist today have been offered the word of the Great Prophet and therefore have No Excuse, and are therefore apostates from the religion they were in fact born into.

And we all know what the Islamic punishment for apostasy is.

As a black-and-white example of this, look at a picture of the Islamic Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, built ~685-692 AD.

It's of course deliberately built on the single holiest site on the entire planet for Jews, the Second Temple, and part of that is to signify Islam's domination over the Jews. That's why it so profoundly irks the Islamic world that they now have to negotiate with Jews over access to their own third-holiest site.

And the foundation of that Muslim temple is the Jewish Second Temple, constructed ~516 BC, itself built upon the ruins of the Jewish first temple, Solomon's Temple, constructed ~10-8th century BC.

Part of the remains of this foundation make up the so-called Wailing Wall, at which Jews have for more than 2,000 years prayed and worshipped.

The classic meme still sums it nicely.

You also find the same exact pattern in much of India, by the way. Muslims would demolish Hindu temples, then build devout Muslim Mosques on the rubble of those same temples. Today, many Hindus – having finally regained national sovereignty and self-determination – have been determined to bulldoze those Mosques and rebuild their own Hindu temples.

Muslims around the world now regard this as colonialism and Islamophobia.

This is more or less what Prof. Betz predicts.

Specifically, he thinks the closest analogue would be a Latin American 'dirty war', but yes also uses the Troubles as an analogue.

It would involve attacks on politicians, lawyers, and judges, as well as acts of sabotage on key infrastructure, especially energy, which could turn major cities into total chaos because cities are, by definition, not self-sufficient.

He thinks that style of war is likely to escalate into a more open civil war which would take on rural-vs-urban character reflecting the stark demographic differences between the rural and urban populations, but often involving similar tactics.

"The primary anti-status quo starategy of those involved will be to collapse the major cities through physical infrastructure attacks with a view to causing cascading crises in those cities which will lead to systemic failure and a period of mass chaos which they would hope to wait out in the relative security of the rural provinces. What all this in the aid of? I think the primary aim, logically speaking, and to listen to the kinds of discourse around these ideas, the primary aim – I don't want to call it a 'strategic' aim because it implies a kind of directedness to this which it doesn't actually possess – I think it's more like a collective volcanic urge which is to affect a retrograde change in the population demography on a large scale, and rapidly. And a second impulse that is very clear in popular discourse now is to punish our domestic elites for having failed willfully oor simply neglectfully for this perceived failure to maintain the social contract. In character, I think the conflict is probably going to echo the peasant revolts of the distant past more so than the progressive left revolution sof the previous century and a half."
Source (~25:00)

There's also precedents to this in the literature. The far-left anarchist publication The Coming Insurrection explicitly took this as their own proposed strategy to collapse Western states, just for obviously very different ends.

The claim he references in the piece comes from Prof. David Betz at King's College London.

Professor David Betz obtained his BA and MA at Carleton University, Ottawa and his PhD at the University of Glasgow. He joined the Department immediately after completing my PhD in 2002. His main research interests are insurgency and counterinsurgency, information warfare and cyberwar, propaganda, also civil-military relations and strategy and especially fortifications both historic and contemporary. He was the academic director of the War Studies Online MA  for its first five years.

His writing is on a diverse range of subjects including information warfare, the future of land forces, the virtual dimension of insurgency, propaganda of the deed, cyberspace and insurgency, and British counterinsurgency in such journals as the Journal of Strategic Studies, the Journal of Contemporary Security Studies, and Orbis. His book written with Dr Tim Stevens, Cyberspace and the State, was published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in 2012.

He headed a 2-year US Defense Department Minerva-funded project on ‘Strategy and the Network Society. Beyond the department he is also a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

He has advised or worked with the UK MOD and GCHQ on strategic issues, counterinsurgency and stabilisation doctrine, cyberspace and cyber strategy and advised British commanders in Afghanistan. He lectures abroad (United States, Israel and Italy) as well as at the UK at the Defence Academy to the Advanced and Intermediate Command and Staff.

It's written on the basis of an article he published in 2023 in the peer-reviewed academic War Studies journal Military Strategy Magazine.

The article is here:

https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west/

Betz, David, “Civil War Comes to the West,” Military Strategy Magazine, Volume 9, Issue 1, summer 2023, pages 20-26.

This isn't some far-right lunatic with a webcam saying this. He's a renowned professor at a top-tier university, who's advised the US DOD, UK MOD and GCHQ on counterinsurgency, whose basic thesis on this was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal.

I don't think it is outrageous and I'm not sure why you think I should

Morality is irrelevant to international relations. Grow up.

This is literally the single dumbest thing the UK could do in response to Trump's actions.

I'm therefore not surprised to see the single dumbest response being highly upvoted towards the top.

About what I'd expect in this subreddit and from most fellow Brits' understanding of geopolitics.

Appease the fascists 

Yeah, you realise nobody should take you seriously after these words, right?