CIVIL LIBERTY: UR DOIN IT RONG

[owl]

Just when I thought my opinion of the DUP couldn't sink any lower, they go and vote for the 42 day detention, helping it scrape in.

Does nobody remember how wonderfully internment worked last time?? Obviously the DUP were on the side that wasn't getting locked up without trial, but you'd think they might possibly have caught a clue looking at the results.

Of course, I doubt very much the vote was from conviction. Whatever they were bought for, I hope it was something good. I'll just be off to rearrange my proportional representation order for the next election.

For crying out loud, even the BNP are against 42 days! You know there's got to be something wrong whenever your MPs are less in favour of civil liberties than the neo-Nazis.

Comments

[owl]

The DUP spent years and years being batguanoloco, had a period for a few years where they were relatively sane, at least at the local government level, and are now going batguanoloco in a slightly different direction. It depends a lot on who your MP/MLA/council people are.

The UUP lost massive amounts of ground when people started seeing them as having sold out. Sadly the tendency of the Unionist electorate is to move to the right, and they really can't get much farther in that direction.

The electorate as a whole has moved to the extremes. This is a pretty effective illustration of it. I doubt this vote is going to swing it back to the centre.

[leeflower.livejournal.com]

We learned a bit about the extremes in our politics class--how it was the SDLP and UUP who held the power around the time of the Belfast Agreement, but since then people have been running right and left-- to the DUP and Sinn Fein.

I understand there are people now who think the DUP sold out, too, and are trying to run further to the right than that. I don't know what it would take to cause a sudden shift back to the middle, but a slow, incremental shift could probably happen with a lot of hard campaigning.