The state of the UK

[JimC]

Did he actually do that, or is this channelling Black Mirror?

Someone should conjure the ghost of the dead pig, and ask it...

[Hermit]

Did he actually do that, or is this channelling Black Mirror?

Uncorroborated anecdote. It doesn't ring true, but if it is, I hope the live participant enjoyed the experience.

[pErvinalia]

It must have been where Black Mirror got the inspiration.

[Hermit]

It must have been where Black Mirror got the inspiration.

The anecdote surfaced four years after that Black Mirror episode.

[Svartalf]

I used to get pretty fucked up back in the day, but I never fucked a dead animal in the head...

I'll admit to having skullfucking fantasies, but always about people I thoroughly hated.

[Brian Peacock]

TMI !

[Scot Dutchy]

Oh oh Arlene!! The wee hairy has decided to quit.

Arlene Foster to quit as DUP leader and Northern Ireland first minister

Foster says she will stand aside as DUP leader on 28 May and as first minister a month later

Arlene Foster has announced she is stepping down as leader of the Democratic Unionist party and Northern Ireland’s first minister after a sudden internal party revolt.

Foster issued a statement on Wednesday afternoon saying she would step aside as DUP leader on 28 May and as first minister at the end of June, casting fresh tumult in a region hit by protests over the post-Brexit Irish Sea border.

The announcement came just a day after most of the DUP’s 27 Stormont assembly members and reportedly four of its eight Westminster MPs signed letters calling for an unprecedented leadership contest.

Foster said she had notified the party chair of her decision. “It is important to give space over the next few weeks for the party officers to make arrangements for the election of a new leader. When elected I will work with the new leader on transition arrangements.”

[Scot Dutchy]

Arlene Foster has been thrown to the wolves by Johnson’s Brexit games

Northern Ireland’s first minister has paid the price for believing the promises of the hard Brexiteers

If 23 out of your 27 devolved assembly members, plus four of your eight Westminster MPs, along with lots of your local councillors and party members, have all signed letters calling on you to resign, then politically speaking, you are already toast. This was Arlene Foster’s unhappy fate, duly confirmed today. For the Democratic Unionist party leader and Northern Ireland first minister, it is the end of the road.

Foster’s ousting has many causes and it will have many consequences. It is also an event without local precedent. Remarkably, the DUP has never in its history had a leadership contest (nor, of course, has its rival, Sinn Féin). The DUP’s no-surrender founder, Ian Paisley, led the party into a power-sharing government without being seriously challenged. His successor, Peter Robinson, survived a marital crisis without losing his grip over his socially conservative party. Foster also toughed out the “cash for ash” renewable energy scheme scandal, which shut down the Northern Ireland assembly for three years from January 2017.

So something new is happening in what can seem like the unchanging world of Northern Ireland unionism. Viewed in the round, the issue that has brought Foster down and the DUP close to internal panic is the working of the Northern Ireland Brexit protocol, which creates an Irish Sea border between the region and the rest of Britain. As well as interrupting supplies from Britain, the Irish Sea checks drive a wedge into Northern Ireland unionism’s self-identity as part of the UK. The DUP is terrified that it will lose its hegemony with unionist voters over the issue.

But Foster’s position was also weakened by a certain instinct for practicality that jars with the party’s what-we-have-we-hold fundamentalists. When she is interviewed, Foster may strike many in Britain as just another hardliner. Nevertheless, she always opposed a hard Brexit, preferring “a workable plan”. She also backed attempts to make the protocol work. “We will take any benefits that flow from the protocol,” she said last December, a position she was forced to abandon as more militant protests began.

The wee hairy from the west picked the wrong prick.

[Brian Peacock]

The DUP might try a rebrand but Brexit has finished them. Only the reignition of sectarian violence can give them any sway now, and I doubt even that will halt the region's ultimate acceptance of a united Ireland. Ironically NI may turn out to be the only winners in the Tories never-ending Brexit disaster movie.

[Scot Dutchy]

For NI to join the republic would be the day of freedom. Free from Westminster. Like Scotland they must break away. Leave the English to slowly stew in their wonderful Brexit soup.

[JimC]

The hard-line Protestant loyalists will never let it happen, IMO...

And I suspect that the republic would think twice about accepting such a union, given the turmoil that would occur if it were ever attempted...

[Brian Peacock]

They call themselves loyalists, but they're only loyal to their own power. An open border with the EU will see that power drip slowly into the republic as their economy shrinks. Boris has seen to that. When it's easier to do business in the South than across the Irish sea things will shift, and people with it, like they always do.

[JimC]

They call themselves loyalists, but they're only loyal to their own power. An open border with the EU will see that power drip slowly into the republic as their economy shrinks. Boris has seen to that. When it's easier to do business in the South than across the Irish sea things will shift, and people with it, like they always do.

I think you are underestimating the power of historical grievances linked to religious fundamentalism, Brian...

[Svartalf]

For NI to join the republic would be the day of freedom. Free from Westminster. Like Scotland they must break away. Leave the English to slowly stew in their wonderful Brexit soup.

You don't get it, they WANT to be slaves to Westminster, they dread more than death itself to come under the sway of those horrid plebeian catholics from Dublin. They still mourn that cromwell's 'to Hell or Connaught' was not properly applied.

[Svartalf]

They call themselves loyalists, but they're only loyal to their own power. An open border with the EU will see that power drip slowly into the republic as their economy shrinks. Boris has seen to that. When it's easier to do business in the South than across the Irish sea things will shift, and people with it, like they always do.

I think you are underestimating the power of historical grievances linked to religious fundamentalism, Brian...

I've never managed to get a certitude as to whether religion was really a motive force in the Irish conflict, or just a marker of each side.