white_hart | (no subject)

I always feel that I should prefer Twitter to Facebook for political discussions, but then it goes and reminds me just how easy it is to whip up outrage over almost nothing. Like this morning, when I started to see this tweet being retweeted across my timeline:

Tory minister on #r4today says they will have a vote on reducing time limits on abortion in exchange for DUP support.
— CarolineJMolloy (@carolinejmolloy) 10 June 2017

I have to say that my first thought was "well, yes, but they gave the Lib Dems a referendum on PR in exchange for their support, and look how that turned out", because I'm not convinced Tory coalition promises are worth the paper they're written on. But then I looked at the Grauniad's liveblog for today, from which I discovered that (a) the "Tory minister" was actually former Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Owen Paterson (he of "the badgers have moved the goalposts" fame), and what he actually said was:

I don’t see many major social issues coming up in the next parliament.

You might get a debate I suppose on further reduction of abortion times as medical science advances.

But the stuff you mention like gay rights and all that, which you’re probably referring to, that is all devolved.

It’s not only a free vote issue, most of this, but it’s nearly all devolved and that’s down to the politicians in Northern Ireland to resolve.

And it's not as though there haven't been votes on whether to reduce the abortion time limit before. Most recently, in 2008, under a Labour government. None of which is to say that this isn't an issue I feel strongly about, and I'm very pleased that my new MP has already tweeted her opposition to any proposal to reduce abortion time limits, but it isn't actually the Awful Thing that the Twitter hot-takes are making it appear.

***

And if you are in dire need of a break from politics, may I recommend checking out Mr Darcy's inbox? (Anne Elliot's is also worth a look.)

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Oh, that would make a lot of sense now you mention it. And as the Tories are going to have to climb down on their manifesto around pensions anyway before the next election, they can promise it :-)

It's ironic, given that the DUP don't believe in dinosaurs, that most of them appear to be dinosaurs.

I read (well skimmed) their manifesto before e-mailing my MP and it is pensions and winter fuel allowances and NI tourism.

I don't think they could actually force the House of Commons to undo all the women's rights, environmental and LGBT progress of the past decades but an alliance shifts the boundaries of what sort of opinions are acceptable in the same way that the Brexit vote made it possible for people to reveal their racism in public. There was an English Tory voter on Any Answers yesterday saying an alliance with the DUP would be good because Christians* are persecuted by being unable to hold their ~~homophobic~~ religious views in the workplace. It shifts the climate rightwards and we've seen how quickly that can happen without us noticing.

And that's quite apart from it making it impossible for the UK government to mediate in NI.

Anyway at the point of typing they don't seem to be managing to agree...

*I know far from all Christians