The Prime Minister has torpedoed Sir Keir's speech
I've missed what's going on - is this the lobbying thing?
I think it's this; Breaking News from the BBC Boris Johnson has set out plans to ban MPs from working as paid consultants, in the wake of the row over former Conservative MP Owen Paterson.
In a letter to Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the PM said MPs should adopt a ban "as a matter of urgency".
In the space of about a day he's managed to lose the North, the South and the long-standing Tory MP's.
To be fair to Big G, SKS will have to rewrite some of his speech.
The problem was he was delivering it
You're overegging it a bit. What people will remember from today is the government U-turn, not some inconsequential speech from a no mark opposition leader. The first one damages the government far more than a bit of a wayward speech damages Labour.
That "no-mark opposition leader" has just forced a Conservative (INO) PM to suggest that a law will be brought in to prevent MPs working as paid consultants has he not? I personally think such a move unnecessary and possibly damaging, but the politics is clear: the "no-mark opposition leader" has just completely outflanked The Clown and possibly damaged him seriously.
Amusing nickname.
Wasn't the damage done by no mark's stand in spokesperson during PMQs when no mark was off due to Covid?
If no mark being off causes so much damage to the Tories maybe they should look to replace him permanently? 😉
I don't really have much of an opinion on Starmer, and I am still not convinced I would lend my vote to Labour. I think he is a huge improvement on his predecessor and I think that a lot of you who desperately want to put him down do so because you are disappointed that he isn't Corbyn.
More importantly though Phil, can you please tell us (in your infinite wisdom), are you still Johnson's number one apologist/fanboy? Or are you about to do another flip-flop and tell us what many of us have been telling you for ages that actually he is a shit PM? If it is the former, how shit does he have to prove himself before you emerge from your keyboard warriors armour and accept that he is , well, shit?
I have also had my bottom pinched, when I was a younger man, by rather lascivious older women (I think they are now called stepmoms).
I didn’t appreciate it then, and what’s more look at the power differential in this situation. It must have felt incredibly humiliating for Caroline Noakes.
"France clears Dunkirk migrant camp amid UK tensions"
I think we underestimate the salience of this whole story, and how damaging it is for HMG. We Brexited to Take Control of our Borders. What is the damn point if we then Lose Control of our Borders.
I am sure this is as much to blame for Boris' recent woes as all the sleaze. Meanwhile Poland looks firm and tough, refusing to let people cross the border illegally, even as we dutifully ferry people to Dover to have pizza on our sixpence
Not good optics. Not good at all
We're not giving them pizzas, we're giving them Dominos, which is a crime against humanity.
Surely the home office insist on Ham and Pineapple to scare them to return ASAP..
Apparently, they force them to listen them to Radiohead while eating the pizza. And the only entertainment allowed is a tablet that allows you to read ConHome.
Rumours of the forced Python lessons are so far unconfirmed.
That last bit is beyond cruel - no computer language should use whitespace for anything beyond formatting for easy of reading
Amen. Amen.....
They don't even use whitespace for ease of reading at my new workplace. Seriously, they insist on as little whitespace as possible (apart from indentation), which makes C++ bloody hard to read. They have, however, recently relented on whitespace after commas so that word wrap works properly (rolls eyes).
Why? Sounds like you have a bizarre sound code fascist somewhere in the company....
No idea - it's really weird. I've never seen C++ written like this before - all squashed up together - but they seem to accept it as normal. I've only been there 3 months, but I did ask why they write it like that. Apparently it's so they can search for member variable initialisations more easily, but seems a pretty feeble reason to me. Once I'm more established there, I shall campaign for normal code spacing!
"search for member variable initialisations" - WUT?
You have to write "m_Thing=0;" without spaces so you can search for "m_Thing=0;". Yes, I know!
LOL, this is magnificent, a few weeks ago Boris Johnson wanted Kathryn Stone gone, now he's given her unlimited power.
Will it be up to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to determine what ‘reasonable limits’ on outside activity means? To date MPs have argued its up to them to determine how they fulfil their role - so who can decide if they are fulfilling ‘their range of duties’?
Christopher Chope really should lose the whip. The way he has acted and spoke in the Commons is disgusting. The clip Sky are playing of the way he's talking down to a female Tory MP is awful.
"France clears Dunkirk migrant camp amid UK tensions"
I think we underestimate the salience of this whole story, and how damaging it is for HMG. We Brexited to Take Control of our Borders. What is the damn point if we then Lose Control of our Borders.
I am sure this is as much to blame for Boris' recent woes as all the sleaze. Meanwhile Poland looks firm and tough, refusing to let people cross the border illegally, even as we dutifully ferry people to Dover to have pizza on our sixpence
Not good optics. Not good at all
We're not giving them pizzas, we're giving them Dominos, which is a crime against humanity.
Surely the home office insist on Ham and Pineapple to scare them to return ASAP..
Apparently, they force them to listen them to Radiohead while eating the pizza. And the only entertainment allowed is a tablet that allows you to read ConHome.
Rumours of the forced Python lessons are so far unconfirmed.
That last bit is beyond cruel - no computer language should use whitespace for anything beyond formatting for easy of reading
Amen. Amen.....
They don't even use whitespace for ease of reading at my new workplace. Seriously, they insist on as little whitespace as possible (apart from indentation), which makes C++ bloody hard to read. They have, however, recently relented on whitespace after commas so that word wrap works properly (rolls eyes).
Why? Sounds like you have a bizarre sound code fascist somewhere in the company....
No idea - it's really weird. I've never seen C++ written like this before - all squashed up together - but they seem to accept it as normal. I've only been there 3 months, but I did ask why they write it like that. Apparently it's so they can search for member variable initialisations more easily, but seems a pretty feeble reason to me. Once I'm more established there, I shall campaign for normal code spacing!
"search for member variable initialisations" - WUT?
You have to write "m_Thing=0;" without spaces so you can search for "m_Thing=0;". Yes, I know!
Goodness me - over the last 11 years of Con PMs I must have read literally hundreds if not thousands of posts on here saying "Con backbenchers are sending in letters now, Brady will have enough letters very soon ........."
These posts are always wrong.
It is the Golden Rule of PB - people want something to happen or think it should happen - but rather than just posting that they dress it up as a prediction.
Really, 2018 says hello.
I was lurking at the time but did not the majority of 2018 have inaccurate predictions of the number of letters sent to Sir Graham only for the required number to stagger over the line in December?
Most predictions about letters going in are clearly wrong. I don't think it finally happening, once, affects that.
Cue panic stations from the usual suspects in a few days:
Until the last couple of days, it was only the cases in <30s who were in growth (the top two black lines: 0-4s & 5-9s). But now the 50-70s have nudged back into growth, so I fear hospitalisations at least may start going up in a few days time.</i>
"France clears Dunkirk migrant camp amid UK tensions"
I think we underestimate the salience of this whole story, and how damaging it is for HMG. We Brexited to Take Control of our Borders. What is the damn point if we then Lose Control of our Borders.
I am sure this is as much to blame for Boris' recent woes as all the sleaze. Meanwhile Poland looks firm and tough, refusing to let people cross the border illegally, even as we dutifully ferry people to Dover to have pizza on our sixpence
Not good optics. Not good at all
We're not giving them pizzas, we're giving them Dominos, which is a crime against humanity.
Surely the home office insist on Ham and Pineapple to scare them to return ASAP..
Apparently, they force them to listen them to Radiohead while eating the pizza. And the only entertainment allowed is a tablet that allows you to read ConHome.
Rumours of the forced Python lessons are so far unconfirmed.
That last bit is beyond cruel - no computer language should use whitespace for anything beyond formatting for easy of reading
Amen. Amen.....
They don't even use whitespace for ease of reading at my new workplace. Seriously, they insist on as little whitespace as possible (apart from indentation), which makes C++ bloody hard to read. They have, however, recently relented on whitespace after commas so that word wrap works properly (rolls eyes).
Why? Sounds like you have a bizarre sound code fascist somewhere in the company....
No idea - it's really weird. I've never seen C++ written like this before - all squashed up together - but they seem to accept it as normal. I've only been there 3 months, but I did ask why they write it like that. Apparently it's so they can search for member variable initialisations more easily, but seems a pretty feeble reason to me. Once I'm more established there, I shall campaign for normal code spacing!
"search for member variable initialisations" - WUT?
+1 - rule 1 of coding - in an emergency, someone will need to be able to find the bug in code you've never seen before while senior management are stood behind your chair panicking.
So make the code simple enough that you could follow it after 3 pints and make it clear what is going on.
"France clears Dunkirk migrant camp amid UK tensions"
I think we underestimate the salience of this whole story, and how damaging it is for HMG. We Brexited to Take Control of our Borders. What is the damn point if we then Lose Control of our Borders.
I am sure this is as much to blame for Boris' recent woes as all the sleaze. Meanwhile Poland looks firm and tough, refusing to let people cross the border illegally, even as we dutifully ferry people to Dover to have pizza on our sixpence
Not good optics. Not good at all
We're not giving them pizzas, we're giving them Dominos, which is a crime against humanity.
Surely the home office insist on Ham and Pineapple to scare them to return ASAP..
Apparently, they force them to listen them to Radiohead while eating the pizza. And the only entertainment allowed is a tablet that allows you to read ConHome.
Rumours of the forced Python lessons are so far unconfirmed.
That last bit is beyond cruel - no computer language should use whitespace for anything beyond formatting for easy of reading
Amen. Amen.....
They don't even use whitespace for ease of reading at my new workplace. Seriously, they insist on as little whitespace as possible (apart from indentation), which makes C++ bloody hard to read. They have, however, recently relented on whitespace after commas so that word wrap works properly (rolls eyes).
Why? Sounds like you have a bizarre sound code fascist somewhere in the company....
No idea - it's really weird. I've never seen C++ written like this before - all squashed up together - but they seem to accept it as normal. I've only been there 3 months, but I did ask why they write it like that. Apparently it's so they can search for member variable initialisations more easily, but seems a pretty feeble reason to me. Once I'm more established there, I shall campaign for normal code spacing!
"search for member variable initialisations" - WUT?
You have to write "m_Thing=0;" without spaces so you can search for "m_Thing=0;". Yes, I know!
Why can’t you search for “m_Thing = 0”?
Well, you could, but that would involve typing two more spaces, wouldn't it? Their logic, not mine.
King Cole, the bit after the Western Empire falls and before the Norman Conquest (especially pre-Alfred) is not the most popular in history for the general public.
What annoys me is every single damned documentary or drama (well, the vast majority) are fixated retelling stories of Henry VIII and Elizabeth II when (even just looking at England) there are so many more interesting and neglected events and characters to consider.
"The Vikings" did rather well from depicting the period, and the spin off "Vikings: Valhalla" covering the later period before the Norman conquest looks promising.
The period that seems to be lacking is the early post Roman period. In a generation or two, we abandoned roads, towns and the trappings of urban life, turning back to subsistence farming and more egalitarian social structures.
Perhaps we can find out about the latter in person, second time around?
The Dark Ages were only dark in the sense of the abandonment of Christianity, and also literacy. It happened between 409 and 450 or so, so a couple of generations. There seems surprisingly little evidence of resistance to going back to a simpler more sustainable communitarian lifestyle once the Romans stopped enforcing the alternative.
Who abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so? Not really my period.
(or is that the joke I just edited out?) (Blockquote maybe borked warning)
The reason that there was little resistance was that when armed, competent invaders showed up, the locals had next to no military capability. Sharp swords make sharp arguments.
The process of robbing the locals when you felt like it, evolved into "You can't tax those peasants. They are my peasants"....
You could call that an egalitarian social structure. Depends which end of the sword you are holding, I suppose.
But who (or where) abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so?
New one to me as well - in England, the Saxons who turned up to occupy senior management positions after the Romans divested their offshore holdings were initially pagan, but converted fairly rapidly to Christianity....
It seems very early for that.
Even the Edict of Milan (Constantine) wasn't until 313 (?) AD.
I've always associated Dark Ages with a period in either the second part of the first millenium 1000 AD, or a period in the middle ages, which is why I'm asking.
Dark Ages to me means that period when the absence of Christianity/literacy means there was a bit of a lacuna in recorded history. In England a relatively short period maybe AD400 - 800. We really know very little about the end of Roman Britain and the Germanic settlers had started to make their presence known. In Scandinavia it is different: not a lot is known pre 1000 or so, and in Sweden everything before 1200 might as well be Prehistory.
The absence of a real written record tells its own story of economic collapse and population decline, IMHO.
It would these days when literacy is universal. But remember in early Western Europe, literacy was a Roman thing, perpetuated by the Church. The withdrawal of Roman control over the British provinces probably did result in economic decline, but I am not so sure about population. At least one usurper may have marched off to Europe with a sizeable army, but the Romans had been settling Germanic foederati here for some time and there was obviously an influx of settlers. At that time, human population density seems to suggest that most places weren't fully exploited and there was room for settlers.
I think the evidence from archaeology these days is pretty clear there was a significant decline in population when the Romans left or rather when the links with the Empire were severed. This was on top of major declines due to plagues throughout the 4th century.
Basically the Romans had cleared much of the settlement from southern and Eastern Britain and brought it into the Villa Landscape which covered the whole south-eastern half of the country. There is little evidence of native, non-Roman settlements in the RB period in those areas. When the Villa landscape collapsed because it lost its markets in the cities and internationally, there seems to have been a rapid drop in rural population. I envisage that much of the late 5th and early 6th century migration by the Germanic tribes was into a largely empty landscape.
Although 409/410 is the date traditionally given for the end of Roman rule, there seems evidence that the inhabitants still thought of themselves as part of the Roman Empire past this date. The impression I get is of Roman rule just fading away throughout the Fifth century, across Western Europe, rather than there being any specific date when it ended. Although he was based in Noricum, I think the Life of St, Severinus gives and idea of what Britain would have been like. There were units of the Roman Army still stationed there into the 470's which gradually disbanded due to lack of pay, before Odoacer evacuated the population.
There is evidence that RB control/lifestyle continued along some parts of the Thames Valley almost to the end of the 5th century and a lot of this is put down to the presence of established Germanic communities of foederati who may have been second or third generation within the Roman Empire by then but were still able to negotiate with the new Germanic settlers coming in. There are also indications of Roman Cirencester being cleaned and repaired for several decades after the supposed withdrawal. Gildas is supposed to have been taught Latin there in the late 5th century.
I think urban life continued in Verulamium well past 410, as well as Wroxeter, Bath, Chester, and Exeter. But, I imagine there was increasing disorder as warlords, both RB and German, battled for supremacy.
Discussions like this are one of the reasons I come to pb.com.
I love the period between the Romans and the Normans. It's possible I idealise it as a bit of a golden age that never was.
It is a mystery how completely Romano-Celtic culture disappeared in England.
I've often wondered how Latin died out. Has always seemed weird to me that something so incredibly useful as being able to all communicate could somehow fade away. (I know the arguments - I'm fairly sure I've mentioned it on PB before - nonetheless, despite all of the wise thoughts it still baffles me.)
Probably due to how it was controlled by the Church, which were the only ones which used it, so the 'low people' just continued to develop what they always had and the other languages then just developed.
Latin has always been the language of choice for the high Church, hence it ensured worship was top down and clergy led and no vernacular translations of the bible until the Reformation so the peasants could not challenge what they were told.
Hence the Latin mass too remains the worship of choice of the most traditional and conservative Roman Catholics
Pah! Should be in koine Greek, or better still the original Syriac. None of this translation nonsense for the Good Book.
Is that right? My understanding is the NT was written in Greek, though reporting stuff which was said in Aramaic or Latin, and that Syriac is a version of Aramaic cooked up a bit later in Edessa (now Sanliurfa) (which is a fascinating place which I've been to, and the jumping off point if you want to visit Gobekli teke and/or the site of the battle of Carrhae. Famous for its fish ponds.)
Quite right - should have said Aramaic. (A uni friend of mine was studying Syriac at one point which must have confused me.)
Mel Gibson's 2004 film, the Passion of the Christ, was of course partly in Aramaic, as well as Latin and Hebrew and still managed to be a box office hit, making $612 million worldwide on a $30 million budget
LOL, this is magnificent, a few weeks ago Boris Johnson wanted Kathryn Stone gone, now he's given her unlimited power.
Will it be up to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to determine what ‘reasonable limits’ on outside activity means? To date MPs have argued its up to them to determine how they fulfil their role - so who can decide if they are fulfilling ‘their range of duties’?
You are absolutely right. Can we use logic and work out how this plays out?
It's amazing how weak Johnson is given the size of his majority. He seems to suffer from a kind of low self-confidence, which is odd given his background.
I have also had my bottom pinched, when I was a younger man, by rather lascivious older women (I think they are now called stepmoms).
I didn’t appreciate it then, and what’s more look at the power differential in this situation. It must have felt incredibly humiliating for Caroline Noakes.
I hadn't registered she wasn't a MP then - but a local councillor even then, that's no junior position, which implies how Mr Johnson sen. saw himself vis-a-vis the unfortunate councillor. Interesting that Mr Johnson sen. claims not to remember the incident.
I have also had my bottom pinched, when I was a younger man, by rather lascivious older women (I think they are now called stepmoms).
I didn’t appreciate it then, and what’s more look at the power differential in this situation. It must have felt incredibly humiliating for Caroline Noakes.
LOL, this is magnificent, a few weeks ago Boris Johnson wanted Kathryn Stone gone, now he's given her unlimited power.
Will it be up to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to determine what ‘reasonable limits’ on outside activity means? To date MPs have argued its up to them to determine how they fulfil their role - so who can decide if they are fulfilling ‘their range of duties’?
"France clears Dunkirk migrant camp amid UK tensions"
I think we underestimate the salience of this whole story, and how damaging it is for HMG. We Brexited to Take Control of our Borders. What is the damn point if we then Lose Control of our Borders.
I am sure this is as much to blame for Boris' recent woes as all the sleaze. Meanwhile Poland looks firm and tough, refusing to let people cross the border illegally, even as we dutifully ferry people to Dover to have pizza on our sixpence
Not good optics. Not good at all
We're not giving them pizzas, we're giving them Dominos, which is a crime against humanity.
Surely the home office insist on Ham and Pineapple to scare them to return ASAP..
Apparently, they force them to listen them to Radiohead while eating the pizza. And the only entertainment allowed is a tablet that allows you to read ConHome.
Rumours of the forced Python lessons are so far unconfirmed.
That last bit is beyond cruel - no computer language should use whitespace for anything beyond formatting for easy of reading
Amen. Amen.....
They don't even use whitespace for ease of reading at my new workplace. Seriously, they insist on as little whitespace as possible (apart from indentation), which makes C++ bloody hard to read. They have, however, recently relented on whitespace after commas so that word wrap works properly (rolls eyes).
Why? Sounds like you have a bizarre sound code fascist somewhere in the company....
No idea - it's really weird. I've never seen C++ written like this before - all squashed up together - but they seem to accept it as normal. I've only been there 3 months, but I did ask why they write it like that. Apparently it's so they can search for member variable initialisations more easily, but seems a pretty feeble reason to me. Once I'm more established there, I shall campaign for normal code spacing!
"search for member variable initialisations" - WUT?
You have to write "m_Thing=0;" without spaces so you can search for "m_Thing=0;". Yes, I know!
How did they butcher Visual Studio or whatever you use to even allow you to do that.
King Cole, the bit after the Western Empire falls and before the Norman Conquest (especially pre-Alfred) is not the most popular in history for the general public.
What annoys me is every single damned documentary or drama (well, the vast majority) are fixated retelling stories of Henry VIII and Elizabeth II when (even just looking at England) there are so many more interesting and neglected events and characters to consider.
"The Vikings" did rather well from depicting the period, and the spin off "Vikings: Valhalla" covering the later period before the Norman conquest looks promising.
The period that seems to be lacking is the early post Roman period. In a generation or two, we abandoned roads, towns and the trappings of urban life, turning back to subsistence farming and more egalitarian social structures.
Perhaps we can find out about the latter in person, second time around?
The Dark Ages were only dark in the sense of the abandonment of Christianity, and also literacy. It happened between 409 and 450 or so, so a couple of generations. There seems surprisingly little evidence of resistance to going back to a simpler more sustainable communitarian lifestyle once the Romans stopped enforcing the alternative.
Who abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so? Not really my period.
(or is that the joke I just edited out?) (Blockquote maybe borked warning)
The reason that there was little resistance was that when armed, competent invaders showed up, the locals had next to no military capability. Sharp swords make sharp arguments.
The process of robbing the locals when you felt like it, evolved into "You can't tax those peasants. They are my peasants"....
You could call that an egalitarian social structure. Depends which end of the sword you are holding, I suppose.
But who (or where) abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so?
New one to me as well - in England, the Saxons who turned up to occupy senior management positions after the Romans divested their offshore holdings were initially pagan, but converted fairly rapidly to Christianity....
It seems very early for that.
Even the Edict of Milan (Constantine) wasn't until 313 (?) AD.
I've always associated Dark Ages with a period in either the second part of the first millenium 1000 AD, or a period in the middle ages, which is why I'm asking.
Dark Ages to me means that period when the absence of Christianity/literacy means there was a bit of a lacuna in recorded history. In England a relatively short period maybe AD400 - 800. We really know very little about the end of Roman Britain and the Germanic settlers had started to make their presence known. In Scandinavia it is different: not a lot is known pre 1000 or so, and in Sweden everything before 1200 might as well be Prehistory.
The absence of a real written record tells its own story of economic collapse and population decline, IMHO.
It would these days when literacy is universal. But remember in early Western Europe, literacy was a Roman thing, perpetuated by the Church. The withdrawal of Roman control over the British provinces probably did result in economic decline, but I am not so sure about population. At least one usurper may have marched off to Europe with a sizeable army, but the Romans had been settling Germanic foederati here for some time and there was obviously an influx of settlers. At that time, human population density seems to suggest that most places weren't fully exploited and there was room for settlers.
I think the evidence from archaeology these days is pretty clear there was a significant decline in population when the Romans left or rather when the links with the Empire were severed. This was on top of major declines due to plagues throughout the 4th century.
Basically the Romans had cleared much of the settlement from southern and Eastern Britain and brought it into the Villa Landscape which covered the whole south-eastern half of the country. There is little evidence of native, non-Roman settlements in the RB period in those areas. When the Villa landscape collapsed because it lost its markets in the cities and internationally, there seems to have been a rapid drop in rural population. I envisage that much of the late 5th and early 6th century migration by the Germanic tribes was into a largely empty landscape.
Although 409/410 is the date traditionally given for the end of Roman rule, there seems evidence that the inhabitants still thought of themselves as part of the Roman Empire past this date. The impression I get is of Roman rule just fading away throughout the Fifth century, across Western Europe, rather than there being any specific date when it ended. Although he was based in Noricum, I think the Life of St, Severinus gives and idea of what Britain would have been like. There were units of the Roman Army still stationed there into the 470's which gradually disbanded due to lack of pay, before Odoacer evacuated the population.
There is evidence that RB control/lifestyle continued along some parts of the Thames Valley almost to the end of the 5th century and a lot of this is put down to the presence of established Germanic communities of foederati who may have been second or third generation within the Roman Empire by then but were still able to negotiate with the new Germanic settlers coming in. There are also indications of Roman Cirencester being cleaned and repaired for several decades after the supposed withdrawal. Gildas is supposed to have been taught Latin there in the late 5th century.
I love this stuff, and like to imagine that one or two lonely Latin speakers managed to somehow keep the lights on (floors heated) right up to the Conquest, hah.
Yet you are typing that in an unholy mix of creole Latin and several barbarian tongues from NW Europe, lightly salted with badly spelt and pronounced Latin and Hellenic.
Edit: and the odd bit of Syriac too from the holy books.
It's an interesting question. In France, Latin supplanted Gaulish and then failed to be supplanted by Frankish, although French did borrow quite a lot of words from the language. In Britain, the locals seem to have remained Brittonic-speaking but then it was supplanted by Anglo-Saxon.
LOL, this is magnificent, a few weeks ago Boris Johnson wanted Kathryn Stone gone, now he's given her unlimited power.
Will it be up to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to determine what ‘reasonable limits’ on outside activity means? To date MPs have argued its up to them to determine how they fulfil their role - so who can decide if they are fulfilling ‘their range of duties’?
King Cole, the bit after the Western Empire falls and before the Norman Conquest (especially pre-Alfred) is not the most popular in history for the general public.
What annoys me is every single damned documentary or drama (well, the vast majority) are fixated retelling stories of Henry VIII and Elizabeth II when (even just looking at England) there are so many more interesting and neglected events and characters to consider.
"The Vikings" did rather well from depicting the period, and the spin off "Vikings: Valhalla" covering the later period before the Norman conquest looks promising.
The period that seems to be lacking is the early post Roman period. In a generation or two, we abandoned roads, towns and the trappings of urban life, turning back to subsistence farming and more egalitarian social structures.
Perhaps we can find out about the latter in person, second time around?
The Dark Ages were only dark in the sense of the abandonment of Christianity, and also literacy. It happened between 409 and 450 or so, so a couple of generations. There seems surprisingly little evidence of resistance to going back to a simpler more sustainable communitarian lifestyle once the Romans stopped enforcing the alternative.
Who abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so? Not really my period.
(or is that the joke I just edited out?) (Blockquote maybe borked warning)
The reason that there was little resistance was that when armed, competent invaders showed up, the locals had next to no military capability. Sharp swords make sharp arguments.
The process of robbing the locals when you felt like it, evolved into "You can't tax those peasants. They are my peasants"....
You could call that an egalitarian social structure. Depends which end of the sword you are holding, I suppose.
But who (or where) abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so?
New one to me as well - in England, the Saxons who turned up to occupy senior management positions after the Romans divested their offshore holdings were initially pagan, but converted fairly rapidly to Christianity....
It seems very early for that.
Even the Edict of Milan (Constantine) wasn't until 313 (?) AD.
I've always associated Dark Ages with a period in either the second part of the first millenium 1000 AD, or a period in the middle ages, which is why I'm asking.
Dark Ages to me means that period when the absence of Christianity/literacy means there was a bit of a lacuna in recorded history. In England a relatively short period maybe AD400 - 800. We really know very little about the end of Roman Britain and the Germanic settlers had started to make their presence known. In Scandinavia it is different: not a lot is known pre 1000 or so, and in Sweden everything before 1200 might as well be Prehistory.
The absence of a real written record tells its own story of economic collapse and population decline, IMHO.
It would these days when literacy is universal. But remember in early Western Europe, literacy was a Roman thing, perpetuated by the Church. The withdrawal of Roman control over the British provinces probably did result in economic decline, but I am not so sure about population. At least one usurper may have marched off to Europe with a sizeable army, but the Romans had been settling Germanic foederati here for some time and there was obviously an influx of settlers. At that time, human population density seems to suggest that most places weren't fully exploited and there was room for settlers.
I think the evidence from archaeology these days is pretty clear there was a significant decline in population when the Romans left or rather when the links with the Empire were severed. This was on top of major declines due to plagues throughout the 4th century.
Basically the Romans had cleared much of the settlement from southern and Eastern Britain and brought it into the Villa Landscape which covered the whole south-eastern half of the country. There is little evidence of native, non-Roman settlements in the RB period in those areas. When the Villa landscape collapsed because it lost its markets in the cities and internationally, there seems to have been a rapid drop in rural population. I envisage that much of the late 5th and early 6th century migration by the Germanic tribes was into a largely empty landscape.
Although 409/410 is the date traditionally given for the end of Roman rule, there seems evidence that the inhabitants still thought of themselves as part of the Roman Empire past this date. The impression I get is of Roman rule just fading away throughout the Fifth century, across Western Europe, rather than there being any specific date when it ended. Although he was based in Noricum, I think the Life of St, Severinus gives and idea of what Britain would have been like. There were units of the Roman Army still stationed there into the 470's which gradually disbanded due to lack of pay, before Odoacer evacuated the population.
There is evidence that RB control/lifestyle continued along some parts of the Thames Valley almost to the end of the 5th century and a lot of this is put down to the presence of established Germanic communities of foederati who may have been second or third generation within the Roman Empire by then but were still able to negotiate with the new Germanic settlers coming in. There are also indications of Roman Cirencester being cleaned and repaired for several decades after the supposed withdrawal. Gildas is supposed to have been taught Latin there in the late 5th century.
I think urban life continued in Verulamium well past 410, as well as Wroxeter, Bath, Chester, and Exeter. But, I imagine there was increasing disorder as warlords, both RB and German, battled for supremacy.
Discussions like this are one of the reasons I come to pb.com.
I love the period between the Romans and the Normans. It's possible I idealise it as a bit of a golden age that never was.
It is a mystery how completely Romano-Celtic culture disappeared in England.
I've often wondered how Latin died out. Has always seemed weird to me that something so incredibly useful as being able to all communicate could somehow fade away. (I know the arguments - I'm fairly sure I've mentioned it on PB before - nonetheless, despite all of the wise thoughts it still baffles me.)
Probably due to how it was controlled by the Church, which were the only ones which used it, so the 'low people' just continued to develop what they always had and the other languages then just developed.
Latin has always been the language of choice for the high Church, hence it ensured worship was top down and clergy led and no vernacular translations of the bible until the Reformation so the peasants could not challenge what they were told.
Hence the Latin mass too remains the worship of choice of the most traditional and conservative Roman Catholics
The Latin Mass was completely abandoned (and IIRC actually banned by the Vatican) after Vatican 2. It has gradually seeped back with some traditionalists who are so traditional that they somehow have remembered a tradition that was removed before they were born.
It was but allowed back by Pope Benedict, the hero of traditionalist, conservative Roman Catholics and now Pope Francis, who many of them despise as a wet liberal, is trying to restrict it again.
I have attended mass in German and Spanish when on holiday as a child, but never Latin.
I found it easier to join in with the German, despite not speaking and German.
One amusing element was that worshipers from different countries variously stood, sat or knelt at the same point in the mass.
(While me and my mam were at mass, my dad was drinking San Miguel. The advantages of being a prod.)
Another woman, this time a journalist, alleges she was groped by the PM's Dad.
Although this was story brushed off last night, I’m not sure.
1. Complainant 1 is a TORY MP 2. Without suggesting Boris is guilty of the same (although he has been accused of such by the journalist Charlotte Edwardes), the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree here, does it?
I was wondering how long it would be until we had the old sins of one’s father.
Normally I would agree, but it seems appropriate to draw comparisons between the seemingly feckless, solipsistic and gauche Tory gaffer, and his son Boris.
King Cole, the bit after the Western Empire falls and before the Norman Conquest (especially pre-Alfred) is not the most popular in history for the general public.
What annoys me is every single damned documentary or drama (well, the vast majority) are fixated retelling stories of Henry VIII and Elizabeth II when (even just looking at England) there are so many more interesting and neglected events and characters to consider.
"The Vikings" did rather well from depicting the period, and the spin off "Vikings: Valhalla" covering the later period before the Norman conquest looks promising.
The period that seems to be lacking is the early post Roman period. In a generation or two, we abandoned roads, towns and the trappings of urban life, turning back to subsistence farming and more egalitarian social structures.
Perhaps we can find out about the latter in person, second time around?
The Dark Ages were only dark in the sense of the abandonment of Christianity, and also literacy. It happened between 409 and 450 or so, so a couple of generations. There seems surprisingly little evidence of resistance to going back to a simpler more sustainable communitarian lifestyle once the Romans stopped enforcing the alternative.
Who abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so? Not really my period.
(or is that the joke I just edited out?) (Blockquote maybe borked warning)
The reason that there was little resistance was that when armed, competent invaders showed up, the locals had next to no military capability. Sharp swords make sharp arguments.
The process of robbing the locals when you felt like it, evolved into "You can't tax those peasants. They are my peasants"....
You could call that an egalitarian social structure. Depends which end of the sword you are holding, I suppose.
But who (or where) abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so?
New one to me as well - in England, the Saxons who turned up to occupy senior management positions after the Romans divested their offshore holdings were initially pagan, but converted fairly rapidly to Christianity....
It seems very early for that.
Even the Edict of Milan (Constantine) wasn't until 313 (?) AD.
I've always associated Dark Ages with a period in either the second part of the first millenium 1000 AD, or a period in the middle ages, which is why I'm asking.
Dark Ages to me means that period when the absence of Christianity/literacy means there was a bit of a lacuna in recorded history. In England a relatively short period maybe AD400 - 800. We really know very little about the end of Roman Britain and the Germanic settlers had started to make their presence known. In Scandinavia it is different: not a lot is known pre 1000 or so, and in Sweden everything before 1200 might as well be Prehistory.
The absence of a real written record tells its own story of economic collapse and population decline, IMHO.
It would these days when literacy is universal. But remember in early Western Europe, literacy was a Roman thing, perpetuated by the Church. The withdrawal of Roman control over the British provinces probably did result in economic decline, but I am not so sure about population. At least one usurper may have marched off to Europe with a sizeable army, but the Romans had been settling Germanic foederati here for some time and there was obviously an influx of settlers. At that time, human population density seems to suggest that most places weren't fully exploited and there was room for settlers.
I think the evidence from archaeology these days is pretty clear there was a significant decline in population when the Romans left or rather when the links with the Empire were severed. This was on top of major declines due to plagues throughout the 4th century.
Basically the Romans had cleared much of the settlement from southern and Eastern Britain and brought it into the Villa Landscape which covered the whole south-eastern half of the country. There is little evidence of native, non-Roman settlements in the RB period in those areas. When the Villa landscape collapsed because it lost its markets in the cities and internationally, there seems to have been a rapid drop in rural population. I envisage that much of the late 5th and early 6th century migration by the Germanic tribes was into a largely empty landscape.
Although 409/410 is the date traditionally given for the end of Roman rule, there seems evidence that the inhabitants still thought of themselves as part of the Roman Empire past this date. The impression I get is of Roman rule just fading away throughout the Fifth century, across Western Europe, rather than there being any specific date when it ended. Although he was based in Noricum, I think the Life of St, Severinus gives and idea of what Britain would have been like. There were units of the Roman Army still stationed there into the 470's which gradually disbanded due to lack of pay, before Odoacer evacuated the population.
There is evidence that RB control/lifestyle continued along some parts of the Thames Valley almost to the end of the 5th century and a lot of this is put down to the presence of established Germanic communities of foederati who may have been second or third generation within the Roman Empire by then but were still able to negotiate with the new Germanic settlers coming in. There are also indications of Roman Cirencester being cleaned and repaired for several decades after the supposed withdrawal. Gildas is supposed to have been taught Latin there in the late 5th century.
I think urban life continued in Verulamium well past 410, as well as Wroxeter, Bath, Chester, and Exeter. But, I imagine there was increasing disorder as warlords, both RB and German, battled for supremacy.
Has there been much literature or drama set in the later and immediate post-Roman period?
It would seem to be a fascinating setting to look at a society falling apart, and would be an opportunity to do a post-apocalypse scenario that wasn't in an imagined near future.
At least one Alfred Duggan novel. Checking my memory with Wikipedia:
Conscience of the King (1951). A speculative life of Cerdic, founder of the kingdom of Wessex - about 450 The Little Emperors (1951). A succession of coups in late Roman Britain - about 405-410
Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles, and Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliffe are very good on this period.
The Prime Minister has torpedoed Sir Keir's speech
I've missed what's going on - is this the lobbying thing?
I think it's this; Breaking News from the BBC Boris Johnson has set out plans to ban MPs from working as paid consultants, in the wake of the row over former Conservative MP Owen Paterson.
In a letter to Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the PM said MPs should adopt a ban "as a matter of urgency".
In the space of about a day he's managed to lose the North, the South and the long-standing Tory MP's.
To be fair to Big G, SKS will have to rewrite some of his speech.
The problem was he was delivering it
You're overegging it a bit. What people will remember from today is the government U-turn, not some inconsequential speech from a no mark opposition leader. The first one damages the government far more than a bit of a wayward speech damages Labour.
That "no-mark opposition leader" has just forced a Conservative (INO) PM to suggest that a law will be brought in to prevent MPs working as paid consultants has he not? I personally think such a move unnecessary and possibly damaging, but the politics is clear: the "no-mark opposition leader" has just completely outflanked The Clown and possibly damaged him seriously.
Amusing nickname.
Wasn't the damage done by no mark's stand in spokesperson during PMQs when no mark was off due to Covid?
If no mark being off causes so much damage to the Tories maybe they should look to replace him permanently? 😉
I don't really have much of an opinion on Starmer, and I am still not convinced I would lend my vote to Labour. I think he is a huge improvement on his predecessor and I think that a lot of you who desperately want to put him down do so because you are disappointed that he isn't Corbyn.
More importantly though Phil, can you please tell us (in your infinite wisdom), are you still Johnson's number one apologist/fanboy? Or are you about to do another flip-flop and tell us what many of us have been telling you for ages that actually he is a shit PM? If it is the former, how shit does he have to prove himself before you emerge from your keyboard warriors armour and accept that he is , well, shit?
I never was his biggest fan. I agreed with him on Europe but not everything else.
I think he's done many things badly, but overall on balance I'd rate him as the second-best PM of my lifetime (as a child of the 80s).
LOL, this is magnificent, a few weeks ago Boris Johnson wanted Kathryn Stone gone, now he's given her unlimited power.
Will it be up to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to determine what ‘reasonable limits’ on outside activity means? To date MPs have argued its up to them to determine how they fulfil their role - so who can decide if they are fulfilling ‘their range of duties’?
Tricky to see how Douglas Ross, Ben Bradley, Dan Jarvis etc who all have big public jobs away from Westminster as an MSP, Council chief or Mayor will get past the Government's adoption of Standards Committee recommendation one: that they "prioritise" the Commons.
"France clears Dunkirk migrant camp amid UK tensions"
I think we underestimate the salience of this whole story, and how damaging it is for HMG. We Brexited to Take Control of our Borders. What is the damn point if we then Lose Control of our Borders.
I am sure this is as much to blame for Boris' recent woes as all the sleaze. Meanwhile Poland looks firm and tough, refusing to let people cross the border illegally, even as we dutifully ferry people to Dover to have pizza on our sixpence
Not good optics. Not good at all
We're not giving them pizzas, we're giving them Dominos, which is a crime against humanity.
Surely the home office insist on Ham and Pineapple to scare them to return ASAP..
Apparently, they force them to listen them to Radiohead while eating the pizza. And the only entertainment allowed is a tablet that allows you to read ConHome.
Rumours of the forced Python lessons are so far unconfirmed.
That last bit is beyond cruel - no computer language should use whitespace for anything beyond formatting for easy of reading
Amen. Amen.....
They don't even use whitespace for ease of reading at my new workplace. Seriously, they insist on as little whitespace as possible (apart from indentation), which makes C++ bloody hard to read. They have, however, recently relented on whitespace after commas so that word wrap works properly (rolls eyes).
Why? Sounds like you have a bizarre sound code fascist somewhere in the company....
No idea - it's really weird. I've never seen C++ written like this before - all squashed up together - but they seem to accept it as normal. I've only been there 3 months, but I did ask why they write it like that. Apparently it's so they can search for member variable initialisations more easily, but seems a pretty feeble reason to me. Once I'm more established there, I shall campaign for normal code spacing!
"search for member variable initialisations" - WUT?
+1 - rule 1 of coding - in an emergency, someone will need to be able to find the bug in code you've never seen before while senior management are stood behind your chair panicking.
So make the code simple enough that you could follow it after 3 pints and make it clear what is going on.
I have spent the last few months acquainting myself with a vast, monolithic 30-year-old C++ code base written by programmers of wildly varying ability under the auspices of a whitespace-hater. Pity me!
Christopher Chope really should lose the whip. The way he has acted and spoke in the Commons is disgusting. The clip Sky are playing of the way he's talking down to a female Tory MP is awful.
But he's the elected member for Upskirting-in-the=Marsh. They seem happy to have him. Including the local constituency association. The upskirting thing was in June 2018 and we've had at least one GE since then.
The implication is that threatening his colleagues' fiddles is more serious than ...
LOL, this is magnificent, a few weeks ago Boris Johnson wanted Kathryn Stone gone, now he's given her unlimited power.
Will it be up to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to determine what ‘reasonable limits’ on outside activity means? To date MPs have argued its up to them to determine how they fulfil their role - so who can decide if they are fulfilling ‘their range of duties’?
Christopher Chope really should lose the whip. The way he has acted and spoke in the Commons is disgusting. The clip Sky are playing of the way he's talking down to a female Tory MP is awful.
Tricky to see how Douglas Ross, Ben Bradley, Dan Jarvis etc who all have big public jobs away from Westminster as an MSP, Council chief or Mayor will get past the Government's adoption of Standards Committee recommendation one: that they "prioritise" the Commons.
King Cole, the bit after the Western Empire falls and before the Norman Conquest (especially pre-Alfred) is not the most popular in history for the general public.
What annoys me is every single damned documentary or drama (well, the vast majority) are fixated retelling stories of Henry VIII and Elizabeth II when (even just looking at England) there are so many more interesting and neglected events and characters to consider.
"The Vikings" did rather well from depicting the period, and the spin off "Vikings: Valhalla" covering the later period before the Norman conquest looks promising.
The period that seems to be lacking is the early post Roman period. In a generation or two, we abandoned roads, towns and the trappings of urban life, turning back to subsistence farming and more egalitarian social structures.
Perhaps we can find out about the latter in person, second time around?
The Dark Ages were only dark in the sense of the abandonment of Christianity, and also literacy. It happened between 409 and 450 or so, so a couple of generations. There seems surprisingly little evidence of resistance to going back to a simpler more sustainable communitarian lifestyle once the Romans stopped enforcing the alternative.
Who abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so? Not really my period.
(or is that the joke I just edited out?) (Blockquote maybe borked warning)
The reason that there was little resistance was that when armed, competent invaders showed up, the locals had next to no military capability. Sharp swords make sharp arguments.
The process of robbing the locals when you felt like it, evolved into "You can't tax those peasants. They are my peasants"....
You could call that an egalitarian social structure. Depends which end of the sword you are holding, I suppose.
But who (or where) abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so?
New one to me as well - in England, the Saxons who turned up to occupy senior management positions after the Romans divested their offshore holdings were initially pagan, but converted fairly rapidly to Christianity....
It seems very early for that.
Even the Edict of Milan (Constantine) wasn't until 313 (?) AD.
I've always associated Dark Ages with a period in either the second part of the first millenium 1000 AD, or a period in the middle ages, which is why I'm asking.
Dark Ages to me means that period when the absence of Christianity/literacy means there was a bit of a lacuna in recorded history. In England a relatively short period maybe AD400 - 800. We really know very little about the end of Roman Britain and the Germanic settlers had started to make their presence known. In Scandinavia it is different: not a lot is known pre 1000 or so, and in Sweden everything before 1200 might as well be Prehistory.
The absence of a real written record tells its own story of economic collapse and population decline, IMHO.
It would these days when literacy is universal. But remember in early Western Europe, literacy was a Roman thing, perpetuated by the Church. The withdrawal of Roman control over the British provinces probably did result in economic decline, but I am not so sure about population. At least one usurper may have marched off to Europe with a sizeable army, but the Romans had been settling Germanic foederati here for some time and there was obviously an influx of settlers. At that time, human population density seems to suggest that most places weren't fully exploited and there was room for settlers.
I think the evidence from archaeology these days is pretty clear there was a significant decline in population when the Romans left or rather when the links with the Empire were severed. This was on top of major declines due to plagues throughout the 4th century.
Basically the Romans had cleared much of the settlement from southern and Eastern Britain and brought it into the Villa Landscape which covered the whole south-eastern half of the country. There is little evidence of native, non-Roman settlements in the RB period in those areas. When the Villa landscape collapsed because it lost its markets in the cities and internationally, there seems to have been a rapid drop in rural population. I envisage that much of the late 5th and early 6th century migration by the Germanic tribes was into a largely empty landscape.
Although 409/410 is the date traditionally given for the end of Roman rule, there seems evidence that the inhabitants still thought of themselves as part of the Roman Empire past this date. The impression I get is of Roman rule just fading away throughout the Fifth century, across Western Europe, rather than there being any specific date when it ended. Although he was based in Noricum, I think the Life of St, Severinus gives and idea of what Britain would have been like. There were units of the Roman Army still stationed there into the 470's which gradually disbanded due to lack of pay, before Odoacer evacuated the population.
There is evidence that RB control/lifestyle continued along some parts of the Thames Valley almost to the end of the 5th century and a lot of this is put down to the presence of established Germanic communities of foederati who may have been second or third generation within the Roman Empire by then but were still able to negotiate with the new Germanic settlers coming in. There are also indications of Roman Cirencester being cleaned and repaired for several decades after the supposed withdrawal. Gildas is supposed to have been taught Latin there in the late 5th century.
I think urban life continued in Verulamium well past 410, as well as Wroxeter, Bath, Chester, and Exeter. But, I imagine there was increasing disorder as warlords, both RB and German, battled for supremacy.
Has there been much literature or drama set in the later and immediate post-Roman period?
It would seem to be a fascinating setting to look at a society falling apart, and would be an opportunity to do a post-apocalypse scenario that wasn't in an imagined near future.
At least one Alfred Duggan novel. Checking my memory with Wikipedia:
Conscience of the King (1951). A speculative life of Cerdic, founder of the kingdom of Wessex - about 450 The Little Emperors (1951). A succession of coups in late Roman Britain - about 405-410
Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles, and Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliffe are very good on this period.
The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe is a bit earlier than you are after but deserves a shout out on general principles.
A former Tory MP in one of my WhatsApp groups messages
'If Sir Graham Brady doesn't have enough letter to trigger a VONC he certainly will now after this [the banning of lobbying].'
Obviously bad news for Sir Keir.
Surely the letters won't be being sent now - but they will be being prepared ready for the first justification that would allow them to be sent without them appearing to be self-serving.
They are secret. No one knows who sent a letter, when, or why. Indeed, you don't even need to state a reason AIUI. Least they haven't before. So they can be as self-serving as they like. There is a serious point here for some. If they get banned, I cannot foresee the circumstances in which they will ever be unbanned again, regardless of who is in charge. Which means quite a few lose a sizeable amount for good. And those with aspirations to milk the system in a few years do too. This is an existential crisis for those who see politics as a stepping stone to easy wealth.
BIG questions about how the PM's proposals work 1. Who decides how this works? 2. Will they be able to define "reasonable limits" to outside activity - is that by hours or pay or other 3. Will ban be based on type of organisation you do work for or type of job you do for them?
And if there isn't a cross party consensus because - for EG Labour want to draw definitions wider than Tories - does it collapse? And can it conclude in a timely way?
Shall I just send in my recent header along with a copy of a standard Outside Business Interests policy, of a type which me and thousands of others have had to follow for years?
Tricky to see how Douglas Ross, Ben Bradley, Dan Jarvis etc who all have big public jobs away from Westminster as an MSP, Council chief or Mayor will get past the Government's adoption of Standards Committee recommendation one: that they "prioritise" the Commons.
The reports on YCCC are awful, but so is the reporting. We do not need to have Paki and Monkey etc bleeped out - lets hear it. Its not being used as an abuse term now, its being used to call out the racists. Lets hear it so that we can shame them.
Naive. People have lost careers for using the n word, even when in context - eg to show how the word was used by someone else. That can now get you fired and cancelled
How is anyone to know if and when this arbitrary rule will be extended to the P word and beyond? They can’t. So they are understandably super cautious
I recall predicting many years ago that one day racist terms would be seen as much more toxic and offensive than swear words in the 1950s
And so it is. Perhaps that is a good thing, but my inner libertarian still thinks “they are just words, however stupid and ugly”
I don't see a binary distinction between words and actions. Words are the result of an action - the action of writing or speaking. And this action, the writing or speaking of words, can do real damage. It can do just as much damage as other types of actions, eg punching and slapping, sometimes more.
Do you think someone should lose their job for just quoting someone else using the N word?
Maybe. I'd have to know the circumstances. Also 'lose their job' would need clarifying. Eg fired vs feeling shamed out vs loss of freelance income, these are different.
General point, though, is that I sometimes hear "it's only words" as if words exist in a separate milder dimension to actions, and I don't really view it like that myself.
You're so tediously myopic. Do you never do any research? Explore? Find out stuff? Or is it just easier to sit in a contented little bien pensant bubble in your leafy Belsize Park pub.
I'm bored of educating you, and I shall stop interacting with you shortly. But there are countless examples of people being sacked for using the N word
One of my favourites, a professor replaced for using a Chinese word that SOUNDS like the N word
"In a controversial decision, the University of Southern California replaced a professor of business communication with another instructor in one of his classes for saying a Chinese word that sounds like an English slur."
There's hundreds. That's 2 minutes Googling. Which you are apparently unable to do
I'm aware there are sometimes false accusations of racism which can lead to injustices to the individuals on the receiving end. However imo the problem of real and actual racism in society dwarfs that of false accusations of racism or hair trigger sensitivity to it. So I simply cannot get as animated as you do about the latter stuff. Indeed I find it pretty odd when people do. I also disagree that 'words' are inherently and always less harmful than actions and that the 'policing' of them is an affront to liberty. I find that view pretty odd too. So, you know, fine, you plough on in your 'space', but don't pretend you're educating anybody on this. All you're doing is riding a hobby horse.
There is a clip going round of AI Wei Wei. He says that we are already living in an authoritarian society, but don't yet realise it.
If we are we need a new term for societies where freedom of speech and behaviour is severely restricted.
Has it entered your tiny tiny brain that when you have Vladimir Putin AND Ai Weiwei both saying the exact same thing: the West is having a Cultural Revolution, Woke is like Marxism, we are damaging our own societies, then there may just be a fucking problem? Maybe they have a point?
Excitable reactionary bloke who thinks the West is committing suicide so that men can go into women's toilets argues with a slightly calmer and less reactionary bloke who rather doubts this. He mentions brain size for some odd reason. And Vladimir Putin.
Quite funny that PB Tories are representing Ai Weiei as a critic of political correctness, when in fact he was comparing Donald Trump to Chairman Mao!
That truly is something to worry about - the influence of Trump and the chance he might return to the presidency.
But, Ai Weiwei is criticising - very very harshly - political correctness. Wokeness. He sees it as a much bigger threat than Trump
Well he's wrong in that case imo. Me and he must agree to disagree.
It's not that wokery isn't an issue, it is. The issue is a puritanical intolerance about language in certain quarters and the pushing by some people of a narrative about society that brooks no debate. I happen to think the narrative has much to commend it, and I don't think we lose a great deal by cancelling outdated terms from our bantz, nevertheless I get that there's an issue here, and it's not crazy to be concerned about it.
What's crazy, imo, is to have this even bubbling under a hit parade of things to worry about. Globally there are so many problems that even climate change - the actual fate of the planet - struggles to dominate. And just looking at this country we have a top 5 looking something like - (i) horrid levels of hard-coded inequality, (ii) an infrastructure and housing crisis, (iii) a health service on the point of collapse, (iv) an old-fashioned elitist education system, (v) highly stressed public finances and a fragile frothy economy propped up mainly by near zero interest rates and printed money. Then to cap it all we have an absolute nonsense of a person as our PM. I mean, wokery? C'mon.
But still, hands across the water, I agree it isn't a complete non-issue, therefore (eg and topically) the matter of whether Vaughners and Bumble are victims of a witchhunt as opposed to being belatedly revealed as racist and brought to account accordingly is a genuinely interesting question - as evidenced by people being split about it.
"Any outside activity undertaken by a MP, whether remunerated or unremunerated, should be within reasonable limits and should not prevent them from fully carrying out their range of duties."
When I was doing translation at weekends in 2008+, I'd certainly have argued that it was "within reasonable limits" and that I was fully carrying out my duties as an MP. Who would judge whether that was true, and on what basis? It sounds very much a matter of opinion, and I can imagine someone honestly thinking he was doing his job properly and someone else disagreeing. Moreover, that is also true even without outside work. I knew MPs who never answered constituent letters ("My job is to hold the government to account, not attend to someone's drains").
Who decides what constitutes fully carrying out duties?
Parliament is in danger of bringing in some half-cocked rules in haste which will produce all sorts of unforeseen consequences.
As I said the other day the public simultaneously wants MPs to earn no more than their salary whilst not wanting career-politicians.
I don't see the contradiction there at all.
People want politician's with different experiences, but that doesn't mean they want them to carry on doing those jobs while they're still MPs.
No second jobs (apart perhaps from the bare minimum of professional development work), and a limit to how long someone can spend in Parliament would likely satisfy most of the public in this area.
If an MP wants experience in a particular area to help with their role in Parliament, then they can do it for free
The Prime Minister has torpedoed Sir Keir's speech
I've missed what's going on - is this the lobbying thing?
I think it's this; Breaking News from the BBC Boris Johnson has set out plans to ban MPs from working as paid consultants, in the wake of the row over former Conservative MP Owen Paterson.
In a letter to Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the PM said MPs should adopt a ban "as a matter of urgency".
In the space of about a day he's managed to lose the North, the South and the long-standing Tory MP's.
To be fair to Big G, SKS will have to rewrite some of his speech.
The problem was he was delivering it
You're overegging it a bit. What people will remember from today is the government U-turn, not some inconsequential speech from a no mark opposition leader. The first one damages the government far more than a bit of a wayward speech damages Labour.
That "no-mark opposition leader" has just forced a Conservative (INO) PM to suggest that a law will be brought in to prevent MPs working as paid consultants has he not? I personally think such a move unnecessary and possibly damaging, but the politics is clear: the "no-mark opposition leader" has just completely outflanked The Clown and possibly damaged him seriously.
Amusing nickname.
Wasn't the damage done by no mark's stand in spokesperson during PMQs when no mark was off due to Covid?
If no mark being off causes so much damage to the Tories maybe they should look to replace him permanently? 😉
I don't really have much of an opinion on Starmer, and I am still not convinced I would lend my vote to Labour. I think he is a huge improvement on his predecessor and I think that a lot of you who desperately want to put him down do so because you are disappointed that he isn't Corbyn.
More importantly though Phil, can you please tell us (in your infinite wisdom), are you still Johnson's number one apologist/fanboy? Or are you about to do another flip-flop and tell us what many of us have been telling you for ages that actually he is a shit PM? If it is the former, how shit does he have to prove himself before you emerge from your keyboard warriors armour and accept that he is , well, shit?
I never was his biggest fan. I agreed with him on Europe but not everything else.
I think he's done many things badly, but overall on balance I'd rate him as the second-best PM of my lifetime (as a child of the 80s).
Oh dear. You are clearly still a fan! The old adage that you can fool some of the people all of the time rings true. Your hero loves you, but he probably wouldn't invite you round for tea.
The Indie has it in for the PM's Dad; like son, like father? 'Two women — including Tory MP Caroline Nokes — have accused Boris Johnson’s father Stanley of inappropriately touching them.
Ms Nokes, who is the chair of the parliamentary women and equalities committee, said the 81-year-old smacked her “on the backside about as hard as he could” during a party conference in 2003.
The elder Mr Johnson declined to comment about her allegation made to Sky News, other than to say he has “no recollection of Caroline Nokes at all”.'
Apparently he smacked her hard on the bum and said, "oh, Romsey, you've got a lovely seat." Romsey being her constituency.
It doesn't sound sexual assault territory, and indeed many will find it absolutely trivial and even borderline funny, but I just don't understand the brain chemistry of blokes who behave like this. Where does it come from?
It comes in part from the fact that too many men (not you, I hope) do think it is "trivial" and "borderline funny" and so do not call it out.
How many times were you smacked hard on the bottom at a work event? And how would you have reacted if you had been?
And yet, as I have written, women routinely endure this sort of stuff and worse. Perhaps if we slapped men or punched them in the face every time they did this, the extensive bruising they would suffer might give men a bit of a clue? Dunno. Not in favour of violence. But relying on men being good chaps and calling out those chaps who are being bad chaps hasn't really worked, has it?
Interesting that you added "at a work event". Are you implying that it may be different at a social event??
For the record I, 100% male, have had my bottom pinched many times in busy nightclubs. Not recently though I admit.
Not in the last thirty years probably.
I only added it because the bottom slapping by Johnson Senior was said to have occurred at a Tory party Conference ie a work event.
Conservative MPs with paid consultancies are "keeping their heads down" in Tory WhatsApp groups so far apparently, while they try to work out how how to "redefine" their existing jobs so they don't get caught out by the new rules, one Tory MP tells me.
LOL, this is magnificent, a few weeks ago Boris Johnson wanted Kathryn Stone gone, now he's given her unlimited power.
Will it be up to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to determine what ‘reasonable limits’ on outside activity means? To date MPs have argued its up to them to determine how they fulfil their role - so who can decide if they are fulfilling ‘their range of duties’?
LOL, this is magnificent, a few weeks ago Boris Johnson wanted Kathryn Stone gone, now he's given her unlimited power.
Will it be up to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to determine what ‘reasonable limits’ on outside activity means? To date MPs have argued its up to them to determine how they fulfil their role - so who can decide if they are fulfilling ‘their range of duties’?
> Just read in my morning paper, that US Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) has announced he is NOT running for re-election next year; currently longest-serving senator first elected in 1974, indeed the last of the once-numerous congressional Democrats elected in the wake of Watergate. Fun fact - Leahy is the ONLY Democrat ever elected (as such) since the Civil War from the Green Mountain State.
> Also read that in Texas, Beto O'Rourke announced he IS running in 2022 for governor versus incumbent Republican Greg Abbot.
> In the great State of Washington, our redistricting commission (two Ds, two Rs, one non-party chair) has voted to approve new congressional & legislative districts for 2022 and following decade; word on the streets is that the Democrats caved; certainly the congressional map that I just saw confirms this, for example the new 8th congressional district currently held (narrowly in 2020) by Democrat Kim Schrier, has lost Seattle suburb of Bellevue (very Democratic these days) and gained exurban & rural parts of Pierce and Snohomish counties (reliably Republican turf).
King Cole, the bit after the Western Empire falls and before the Norman Conquest (especially pre-Alfred) is not the most popular in history for the general public.
What annoys me is every single damned documentary or drama (well, the vast majority) are fixated retelling stories of Henry VIII and Elizabeth II when (even just looking at England) there are so many more interesting and neglected events and characters to consider.
"The Vikings" did rather well from depicting the period, and the spin off "Vikings: Valhalla" covering the later period before the Norman conquest looks promising.
The period that seems to be lacking is the early post Roman period. In a generation or two, we abandoned roads, towns and the trappings of urban life, turning back to subsistence farming and more egalitarian social structures.
Perhaps we can find out about the latter in person, second time around?
The Dark Ages were only dark in the sense of the abandonment of Christianity, and also literacy. It happened between 409 and 450 or so, so a couple of generations. There seems surprisingly little evidence of resistance to going back to a simpler more sustainable communitarian lifestyle once the Romans stopped enforcing the alternative.
Who abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so? Not really my period.
(or is that the joke I just edited out?) (Blockquote maybe borked warning)
The reason that there was little resistance was that when armed, competent invaders showed up, the locals had next to no military capability. Sharp swords make sharp arguments.
The process of robbing the locals when you felt like it, evolved into "You can't tax those peasants. They are my peasants"....
You could call that an egalitarian social structure. Depends which end of the sword you are holding, I suppose.
But who (or where) abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so?
New one to me as well - in England, the Saxons who turned up to occupy senior management positions after the Romans divested their offshore holdings were initially pagan, but converted fairly rapidly to Christianity....
It seems very early for that.
Even the Edict of Milan (Constantine) wasn't until 313 (?) AD.
I've always associated Dark Ages with a period in either the second part of the first millenium 1000 AD, or a period in the middle ages, which is why I'm asking.
Dark Ages to me means that period when the absence of Christianity/literacy means there was a bit of a lacuna in recorded history. In England a relatively short period maybe AD400 - 800. We really know very little about the end of Roman Britain and the Germanic settlers had started to make their presence known. In Scandinavia it is different: not a lot is known pre 1000 or so, and in Sweden everything before 1200 might as well be Prehistory.
The absence of a real written record tells its own story of economic collapse and population decline, IMHO.
It would these days when literacy is universal. But remember in early Western Europe, literacy was a Roman thing, perpetuated by the Church. The withdrawal of Roman control over the British provinces probably did result in economic decline, but I am not so sure about population. At least one usurper may have marched off to Europe with a sizeable army, but the Romans had been settling Germanic foederati here for some time and there was obviously an influx of settlers. At that time, human population density seems to suggest that most places weren't fully exploited and there was room for settlers.
I think the evidence from archaeology these days is pretty clear there was a significant decline in population when the Romans left or rather when the links with the Empire were severed. This was on top of major declines due to plagues throughout the 4th century.
Basically the Romans had cleared much of the settlement from southern and Eastern Britain and brought it into the Villa Landscape which covered the whole south-eastern half of the country. There is little evidence of native, non-Roman settlements in the RB period in those areas. When the Villa landscape collapsed because it lost its markets in the cities and internationally, there seems to have been a rapid drop in rural population. I envisage that much of the late 5th and early 6th century migration by the Germanic tribes was into a largely empty landscape.
Although 409/410 is the date traditionally given for the end of Roman rule, there seems evidence that the inhabitants still thought of themselves as part of the Roman Empire past this date. The impression I get is of Roman rule just fading away throughout the Fifth century, across Western Europe, rather than there being any specific date when it ended. Although he was based in Noricum, I think the Life of St, Severinus gives and idea of what Britain would have been like. There were units of the Roman Army still stationed there into the 470's which gradually disbanded due to lack of pay, before Odoacer evacuated the population.
There is evidence that RB control/lifestyle continued along some parts of the Thames Valley almost to the end of the 5th century and a lot of this is put down to the presence of established Germanic communities of foederati who may have been second or third generation within the Roman Empire by then but were still able to negotiate with the new Germanic settlers coming in. There are also indications of Roman Cirencester being cleaned and repaired for several decades after the supposed withdrawal. Gildas is supposed to have been taught Latin there in the late 5th century.
I think urban life continued in Verulamium well past 410, as well as Wroxeter, Bath, Chester, and Exeter. But, I imagine there was increasing disorder as warlords, both RB and German, battled for supremacy.
Has there been much literature or drama set in the later and immediate post-Roman period?
It would seem to be a fascinating setting to look at a society falling apart, and would be an opportunity to do a post-apocalypse scenario that wasn't in an imagined near future.
At least one Alfred Duggan novel. Checking my memory with Wikipedia:
Conscience of the King (1951). A speculative life of Cerdic, founder of the kingdom of Wessex - about 450 The Little Emperors (1951). A succession of coups in late Roman Britain - about 405-410
Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles, and Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliffe are very good on this period.
Oh yes. Cornwell's hero is often very depressed on how his time is so useless compared to the Romans.
Founded in reality - vide the A/S poem about the ruins of Bath:
King Cole, the bit after the Western Empire falls and before the Norman Conquest (especially pre-Alfred) is not the most popular in history for the general public.
What annoys me is every single damned documentary or drama (well, the vast majority) are fixated retelling stories of Henry VIII and Elizabeth II when (even just looking at England) there are so many more interesting and neglected events and characters to consider.
"The Vikings" did rather well from depicting the period, and the spin off "Vikings: Valhalla" covering the later period before the Norman conquest looks promising.
The period that seems to be lacking is the early post Roman period. In a generation or two, we abandoned roads, towns and the trappings of urban life, turning back to subsistence farming and more egalitarian social structures.
Perhaps we can find out about the latter in person, second time around?
The Dark Ages were only dark in the sense of the abandonment of Christianity, and also literacy. It happened between 409 and 450 or so, so a couple of generations. There seems surprisingly little evidence of resistance to going back to a simpler more sustainable communitarian lifestyle once the Romans stopped enforcing the alternative.
Who abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so? Not really my period.
(or is that the joke I just edited out?) (Blockquote maybe borked warning)
The reason that there was little resistance was that when armed, competent invaders showed up, the locals had next to no military capability. Sharp swords make sharp arguments.
The process of robbing the locals when you felt like it, evolved into "You can't tax those peasants. They are my peasants"....
You could call that an egalitarian social structure. Depends which end of the sword you are holding, I suppose.
But who (or where) abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so?
New one to me as well - in England, the Saxons who turned up to occupy senior management positions after the Romans divested their offshore holdings were initially pagan, but converted fairly rapidly to Christianity....
It seems very early for that.
Even the Edict of Milan (Constantine) wasn't until 313 (?) AD.
I've always associated Dark Ages with a period in either the second part of the first millenium 1000 AD, or a period in the middle ages, which is why I'm asking.
Dark Ages to me means that period when the absence of Christianity/literacy means there was a bit of a lacuna in recorded history. In England a relatively short period maybe AD400 - 800. We really know very little about the end of Roman Britain and the Germanic settlers had started to make their presence known. In Scandinavia it is different: not a lot is known pre 1000 or so, and in Sweden everything before 1200 might as well be Prehistory.
The absence of a real written record tells its own story of economic collapse and population decline, IMHO.
It would these days when literacy is universal. But remember in early Western Europe, literacy was a Roman thing, perpetuated by the Church. The withdrawal of Roman control over the British provinces probably did result in economic decline, but I am not so sure about population. At least one usurper may have marched off to Europe with a sizeable army, but the Romans had been settling Germanic foederati here for some time and there was obviously an influx of settlers. At that time, human population density seems to suggest that most places weren't fully exploited and there was room for settlers.
I think the evidence from archaeology these days is pretty clear there was a significant decline in population when the Romans left or rather when the links with the Empire were severed. This was on top of major declines due to plagues throughout the 4th century.
Basically the Romans had cleared much of the settlement from southern and Eastern Britain and brought it into the Villa Landscape which covered the whole south-eastern half of the country. There is little evidence of native, non-Roman settlements in the RB period in those areas. When the Villa landscape collapsed because it lost its markets in the cities and internationally, there seems to have been a rapid drop in rural population. I envisage that much of the late 5th and early 6th century migration by the Germanic tribes was into a largely empty landscape.
Although 409/410 is the date traditionally given for the end of Roman rule, there seems evidence that the inhabitants still thought of themselves as part of the Roman Empire past this date. The impression I get is of Roman rule just fading away throughout the Fifth century, across Western Europe, rather than there being any specific date when it ended. Although he was based in Noricum, I think the Life of St, Severinus gives and idea of what Britain would have been like. There were units of the Roman Army still stationed there into the 470's which gradually disbanded due to lack of pay, before Odoacer evacuated the population.
There is evidence that RB control/lifestyle continued along some parts of the Thames Valley almost to the end of the 5th century and a lot of this is put down to the presence of established Germanic communities of foederati who may have been second or third generation within the Roman Empire by then but were still able to negotiate with the new Germanic settlers coming in. There are also indications of Roman Cirencester being cleaned and repaired for several decades after the supposed withdrawal. Gildas is supposed to have been taught Latin there in the late 5th century.
I think urban life continued in Verulamium well past 410, as well as Wroxeter, Bath, Chester, and Exeter. But, I imagine there was increasing disorder as warlords, both RB and German, battled for supremacy.
Carlisle too. Or LVGVVALIVM as it should be wrote proper.
One of the few texts to survive from that era is the Vita Sancti Germani, about the life of Saint Germanus of Auxerre (378-448) who visited England around 429 including the Shrine of St Albans.
LOL, this is magnificent, a few weeks ago Boris Johnson wanted Kathryn Stone gone, now he's given her unlimited power.
Will it be up to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to determine what ‘reasonable limits’ on outside activity means? To date MPs have argued its up to them to determine how they fulfil their role - so who can decide if they are fulfilling ‘their range of duties’?
You are absolutely right. Can we use logic and work out how this plays out?
It's amazing how weak Johnson is given the size of his majority. He seems to suffer from a kind of low self-confidence, which is odd given his background.
He desperately wants to be loved. Possibly resultant from feeling unloved by his parents. I would feel sorry for him if he wasn't such a twat.
The Prime Minister has torpedoed Sir Keir's speech
I've missed what's going on - is this the lobbying thing?
I think it's this; Breaking News from the BBC Boris Johnson has set out plans to ban MPs from working as paid consultants, in the wake of the row over former Conservative MP Owen Paterson.
In a letter to Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the PM said MPs should adopt a ban "as a matter of urgency".
In the space of about a day he's managed to lose the North, the South and the long-standing Tory MP's.
To be fair to Big G, SKS will have to rewrite some of his speech.
The problem was he was delivering it
You're overegging it a bit. What people will remember from today is the government U-turn, not some inconsequential speech from a no mark opposition leader. The first one damages the government far more than a bit of a wayward speech damages Labour.
That "no-mark opposition leader" has just forced a Conservative (INO) PM to suggest that a law will be brought in to prevent MPs working as paid consultants has he not? I personally think such a move unnecessary and possibly damaging, but the politics is clear: the "no-mark opposition leader" has just completely outflanked The Clown and possibly damaged him seriously.
Amusing nickname.
Wasn't the damage done by no mark's stand in spokesperson during PMQs when no mark was off due to Covid?
If no mark being off causes so much damage to the Tories maybe they should look to replace him permanently? 😉
I don't really have much of an opinion on Starmer, and I am still not convinced I would lend my vote to Labour. I think he is a huge improvement on his predecessor and I think that a lot of you who desperately want to put him down do so because you are disappointed that he isn't Corbyn.
More importantly though Phil, can you please tell us (in your infinite wisdom), are you still Johnson's number one apologist/fanboy? Or are you about to do another flip-flop and tell us what many of us have been telling you for ages that actually he is a shit PM? If it is the former, how shit does he have to prove himself before you emerge from your keyboard warriors armour and accept that he is , well, shit?
I never was his biggest fan. I agreed with him on Europe but not everything else.
I think he's done many things badly, but overall on balance I'd rate him as the second-best PM of my lifetime (as a child of the 80s).
“I never was his *biggest* fan”, says Deputy Chair of the Boris Appreciation Society.
King Cole, the bit after the Western Empire falls and before the Norman Conquest (especially pre-Alfred) is not the most popular in history for the general public.
What annoys me is every single damned documentary or drama (well, the vast majority) are fixated retelling stories of Henry VIII and Elizabeth II when (even just looking at England) there are so many more interesting and neglected events and characters to consider.
"The Vikings" did rather well from depicting the period, and the spin off "Vikings: Valhalla" covering the later period before the Norman conquest looks promising.
The period that seems to be lacking is the early post Roman period. In a generation or two, we abandoned roads, towns and the trappings of urban life, turning back to subsistence farming and more egalitarian social structures.
Perhaps we can find out about the latter in person, second time around?
The Dark Ages were only dark in the sense of the abandonment of Christianity, and also literacy. It happened between 409 and 450 or so, so a couple of generations. There seems surprisingly little evidence of resistance to going back to a simpler more sustainable communitarian lifestyle once the Romans stopped enforcing the alternative.
Who abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so? Not really my period.
(or is that the joke I just edited out?) (Blockquote maybe borked warning)
The reason that there was little resistance was that when armed, competent invaders showed up, the locals had next to no military capability. Sharp swords make sharp arguments.
The process of robbing the locals when you felt like it, evolved into "You can't tax those peasants. They are my peasants"....
You could call that an egalitarian social structure. Depends which end of the sword you are holding, I suppose.
But who (or where) abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so?
New one to me as well - in England, the Saxons who turned up to occupy senior management positions after the Romans divested their offshore holdings were initially pagan, but converted fairly rapidly to Christianity....
It seems very early for that.
Even the Edict of Milan (Constantine) wasn't until 313 (?) AD.
I've always associated Dark Ages with a period in either the second part of the first millenium 1000 AD, or a period in the middle ages, which is why I'm asking.
Dark Ages to me means that period when the absence of Christianity/literacy means there was a bit of a lacuna in recorded history. In England a relatively short period maybe AD400 - 800. We really know very little about the end of Roman Britain and the Germanic settlers had started to make their presence known. In Scandinavia it is different: not a lot is known pre 1000 or so, and in Sweden everything before 1200 might as well be Prehistory.
The absence of a real written record tells its own story of economic collapse and population decline, IMHO.
It would these days when literacy is universal. But remember in early Western Europe, literacy was a Roman thing, perpetuated by the Church. The withdrawal of Roman control over the British provinces probably did result in economic decline, but I am not so sure about population. At least one usurper may have marched off to Europe with a sizeable army, but the Romans had been settling Germanic foederati here for some time and there was obviously an influx of settlers. At that time, human population density seems to suggest that most places weren't fully exploited and there was room for settlers.
I think the evidence from archaeology these days is pretty clear there was a significant decline in population when the Romans left or rather when the links with the Empire were severed. This was on top of major declines due to plagues throughout the 4th century.
Basically the Romans had cleared much of the settlement from southern and Eastern Britain and brought it into the Villa Landscape which covered the whole south-eastern half of the country. There is little evidence of native, non-Roman settlements in the RB period in those areas. When the Villa landscape collapsed because it lost its markets in the cities and internationally, there seems to have been a rapid drop in rural population. I envisage that much of the late 5th and early 6th century migration by the Germanic tribes was into a largely empty landscape.
Although 409/410 is the date traditionally given for the end of Roman rule, there seems evidence that the inhabitants still thought of themselves as part of the Roman Empire past this date. The impression I get is of Roman rule just fading away throughout the Fifth century, across Western Europe, rather than there being any specific date when it ended. Although he was based in Noricum, I think the Life of St, Severinus gives and idea of what Britain would have been like. There were units of the Roman Army still stationed there into the 470's which gradually disbanded due to lack of pay, before Odoacer evacuated the population.
There is evidence that RB control/lifestyle continued along some parts of the Thames Valley almost to the end of the 5th century and a lot of this is put down to the presence of established Germanic communities of foederati who may have been second or third generation within the Roman Empire by then but were still able to negotiate with the new Germanic settlers coming in. There are also indications of Roman Cirencester being cleaned and repaired for several decades after the supposed withdrawal. Gildas is supposed to have been taught Latin there in the late 5th century.
I think urban life continued in Verulamium well past 410, as well as Wroxeter, Bath, Chester, and Exeter. But, I imagine there was increasing disorder as warlords, both RB and German, battled for supremacy.
Has there been much literature or drama set in the later and immediate post-Roman period?
It would seem to be a fascinating setting to look at a society falling apart, and would be an opportunity to do a post-apocalypse scenario that wasn't in an imagined near future.
At least one Alfred Duggan novel. Checking my memory with Wikipedia:
Conscience of the King (1951). A speculative life of Cerdic, founder of the kingdom of Wessex - about 450 The Little Emperors (1951). A succession of coups in late Roman Britain - about 405-410
Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles, and Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliffe are very good on this period.
Oh yes. Cornwell's hero is often very depressed on how his time is so useless compared to the Romans.
Founded in reality - vide the A/S poem about the ruins of Bath:
How would you test for Alzheimers in animals.....there's got to be a punchline
I think you can look for physiological changes in the brain including plaques and then research behavioural ability such as how to remember the way to food sources compared with a control
King Cole, the bit after the Western Empire falls and before the Norman Conquest (especially pre-Alfred) is not the most popular in history for the general public.
What annoys me is every single damned documentary or drama (well, the vast majority) are fixated retelling stories of Henry VIII and Elizabeth II when (even just looking at England) there are so many more interesting and neglected events and characters to consider.
"The Vikings" did rather well from depicting the period, and the spin off "Vikings: Valhalla" covering the later period before the Norman conquest looks promising.
The period that seems to be lacking is the early post Roman period. In a generation or two, we abandoned roads, towns and the trappings of urban life, turning back to subsistence farming and more egalitarian social structures.
Perhaps we can find out about the latter in person, second time around?
The Dark Ages were only dark in the sense of the abandonment of Christianity, and also literacy. It happened between 409 and 450 or so, so a couple of generations. There seems surprisingly little evidence of resistance to going back to a simpler more sustainable communitarian lifestyle once the Romans stopped enforcing the alternative.
Who abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so? Not really my period.
(or is that the joke I just edited out?) (Blockquote maybe borked warning)
The reason that there was little resistance was that when armed, competent invaders showed up, the locals had next to no military capability. Sharp swords make sharp arguments.
The process of robbing the locals when you felt like it, evolved into "You can't tax those peasants. They are my peasants"....
You could call that an egalitarian social structure. Depends which end of the sword you are holding, I suppose.
But who (or where) abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so?
New one to me as well - in England, the Saxons who turned up to occupy senior management positions after the Romans divested their offshore holdings were initially pagan, but converted fairly rapidly to Christianity....
It seems very early for that.
Even the Edict of Milan (Constantine) wasn't until 313 (?) AD.
I've always associated Dark Ages with a period in either the second part of the first millenium 1000 AD, or a period in the middle ages, which is why I'm asking.
Dark Ages to me means that period when the absence of Christianity/literacy means there was a bit of a lacuna in recorded history. In England a relatively short period maybe AD400 - 800. We really know very little about the end of Roman Britain and the Germanic settlers had started to make their presence known. In Scandinavia it is different: not a lot is known pre 1000 or so, and in Sweden everything before 1200 might as well be Prehistory.
The absence of a real written record tells its own story of economic collapse and population decline, IMHO.
It would these days when literacy is universal. But remember in early Western Europe, literacy was a Roman thing, perpetuated by the Church. The withdrawal of Roman control over the British provinces probably did result in economic decline, but I am not so sure about population. At least one usurper may have marched off to Europe with a sizeable army, but the Romans had been settling Germanic foederati here for some time and there was obviously an influx of settlers. At that time, human population density seems to suggest that most places weren't fully exploited and there was room for settlers.
I think the evidence from archaeology these days is pretty clear there was a significant decline in population when the Romans left or rather when the links with the Empire were severed. This was on top of major declines due to plagues throughout the 4th century.
Basically the Romans had cleared much of the settlement from southern and Eastern Britain and brought it into the Villa Landscape which covered the whole south-eastern half of the country. There is little evidence of native, non-Roman settlements in the RB period in those areas. When the Villa landscape collapsed because it lost its markets in the cities and internationally, there seems to have been a rapid drop in rural population. I envisage that much of the late 5th and early 6th century migration by the Germanic tribes was into a largely empty landscape.
Although 409/410 is the date traditionally given for the end of Roman rule, there seems evidence that the inhabitants still thought of themselves as part of the Roman Empire past this date. The impression I get is of Roman rule just fading away throughout the Fifth century, across Western Europe, rather than there being any specific date when it ended. Although he was based in Noricum, I think the Life of St, Severinus gives and idea of what Britain would have been like. There were units of the Roman Army still stationed there into the 470's which gradually disbanded due to lack of pay, before Odoacer evacuated the population.
There is evidence that RB control/lifestyle continued along some parts of the Thames Valley almost to the end of the 5th century and a lot of this is put down to the presence of established Germanic communities of foederati who may have been second or third generation within the Roman Empire by then but were still able to negotiate with the new Germanic settlers coming in. There are also indications of Roman Cirencester being cleaned and repaired for several decades after the supposed withdrawal. Gildas is supposed to have been taught Latin there in the late 5th century.
I think urban life continued in Verulamium well past 410, as well as Wroxeter, Bath, Chester, and Exeter. But, I imagine there was increasing disorder as warlords, both RB and German, battled for supremacy.
Discussions like this are one of the reasons I come to pb.com.
I love the period between the Romans and the Normans. It's possible I idealise it as a bit of a golden age that never was.
It is a mystery how completely Romano-Celtic culture disappeared in England.
While it endured in Gaul and Spain.
One can see why earlier historians would conclude that the Roman British population were just massacred/driven out by the incoming Germans, but as Richard will point out, the evidence from archaeology and DNA argues against this. White English people are very much the descendants of people who have lived thousands of years in this country. But, the cultural impact of the incoming Germans, like the later Danes and Normans, was immense.
Do we have evidence as to which DNA is it? Paternal or maternal. Maternal would to some extent tick the massacre box..... slaughter the men and rape the women. However, I wonder if the effect of the climate change was greater in England that perhaps in France, while leaving the West less affected.
I think both Richard Tyndall and Sean T linked to articles that the DNA evidence points to a relatively small admixture of German blood among the population, even in East Anglia, which one would expect to be a major area of settlement.
I don't doubt that massacres took place, but probably more a case of one warlord destroying the followers of another, rather than a concerted effort by Germans to eliminate the Roman British.
Cue panic stations from the usual suspects in a few days:
Until the last couple of days, it was only the cases in <30s who were in growth (the top two black lines: 0-4s & 5-9s). But now the 50-70s have nudged back into growth, so I fear hospitalisations at least may start going up in a few days time.</i>
Of course. If you are a job seeker you need to evidence 35 hours a week job searching. And be sanctioned if you don't. Why can't MP's have to show they have done this amount of work per week, not including travel time? Nor Party meetings. And be prepared to defend their evidence in public? Then they can do what they want on their free time.
The reports on YCCC are awful, but so is the reporting. We do not need to have Paki and Monkey etc bleeped out - lets hear it. Its not being used as an abuse term now, its being used to call out the racists. Lets hear it so that we can shame them.
Naive. People have lost careers for using the n word, even when in context - eg to show how the word was used by someone else. That can now get you fired and cancelled
How is anyone to know if and when this arbitrary rule will be extended to the P word and beyond? They can’t. So they are understandably super cautious
I recall predicting many years ago that one day racist terms would be seen as much more toxic and offensive than swear words in the 1950s
And so it is. Perhaps that is a good thing, but my inner libertarian still thinks “they are just words, however stupid and ugly”
I don't see a binary distinction between words and actions. Words are the result of an action - the action of writing or speaking. And this action, the writing or speaking of words, can do real damage. It can do just as much damage as other types of actions, eg punching and slapping, sometimes more.
Do you think someone should lose their job for just quoting someone else using the N word?
Maybe. I'd have to know the circumstances. Also 'lose their job' would need clarifying. Eg fired vs feeling shamed out vs loss of freelance income, these are different.
General point, though, is that I sometimes hear "it's only words" as if words exist in a separate milder dimension to actions, and I don't really view it like that myself.
You're so tediously myopic. Do you never do any research? Explore? Find out stuff? Or is it just easier to sit in a contented little bien pensant bubble in your leafy Belsize Park pub.
I'm bored of educating you, and I shall stop interacting with you shortly. But there are countless examples of people being sacked for using the N word
One of my favourites, a professor replaced for using a Chinese word that SOUNDS like the N word
"In a controversial decision, the University of Southern California replaced a professor of business communication with another instructor in one of his classes for saying a Chinese word that sounds like an English slur."
There's hundreds. That's 2 minutes Googling. Which you are apparently unable to do
I'm aware there are sometimes false accusations of racism which can lead to injustices to the individuals on the receiving end. However imo the problem of real and actual racism in society dwarfs that of false accusations of racism or hair trigger sensitivity to it. So I simply cannot get as animated as you do about the latter stuff. Indeed I find it pretty odd when people do. I also disagree that 'words' are inherently and always less harmful than actions and that the 'policing' of them is an affront to liberty. I find that view pretty odd too. So, you know, fine, you plough on in your 'space', but don't pretend you're educating anybody on this. All you're doing is riding a hobby horse.
There is a clip going round of AI Wei Wei. He says that we are already living in an authoritarian society, but don't yet realise it.
If we are we need a new term for societies where freedom of speech and behaviour is severely restricted.
Has it entered your tiny tiny brain that when you have Vladimir Putin AND Ai Weiwei both saying the exact same thing: the West is having a Cultural Revolution, Woke is like Marxism, we are damaging our own societies, then there may just be a fucking problem? Maybe they have a point?
Excitable reactionary bloke who thinks the West is committing suicide so that men can go into women's toilets argues with a slightly calmer and less reactionary bloke who rather doubts this. He mentions brain size for some odd reason. And Vladimir Putin.
Quite funny that PB Tories are representing Ai Weiei as a critic of political correctness, when in fact he was comparing Donald Trump to Chairman Mao!
That truly is something to worry about - the influence of Trump and the chance he might return to the presidency.
But, Ai Weiwei is criticising - very very harshly - political correctness. Wokeness. He sees it as a much bigger threat than Trump
Well he's wrong in that case imo. Me and he must agree to disagree.
It's not that wokery isn't an issue, it is. The issue is a puritanical intolerance about language in certain quarters and the pushing by some people of a narrative about society that brooks no debate. I happen to think the narrative has much to commend it, and I don't think we lose a great deal by cancelling outdated terms from our bantz, nevertheless I get that there's an issue here, and it's not crazy to be concerned about it.
What's crazy, imo, is to have this even bubbling under a hit parade of things to worry about. Globally there are so many problems that even climate change - the actual fate of the planet - struggles to dominate. And just looking at this country we have a top 5 looking something like - (i) horrid levels of hard-coded inequality, (ii) an infrastructure and housing crisis, (iii) a health service on the point of collapse, (iv) an old-fashioned elitist education system, (v) highly stressed public finances and a fragile frothy economy propped up mainly by near zero interest rates and printed money. Then to cap it all we have an absolute nonsense of a person as our PM. I mean, wokery? C'mon.
But still, hands across the water, I agree it isn't a complete non-issue, therefore (eg and topically) the matter of whether Vaughners and Bumble are victims of a witchhunt as opposed to being belatedly revealed as racist and brought to account accordingly is a genuinely interesting question - as evidenced by people being split about it.
That's sensible enough. The whole planet would after all have to shut down if action were taken against those that 'once made a daft remark on PB'. I may of course exaggerate.
Another woman, this time a journalist, alleges she was groped by the PM's Dad.
Although this was story brushed off last night, I’m not sure.
1. Complainant 1 is a TORY MP 2. Without suggesting Boris is guilty of the same (although he has been accused of such by the journalist Charlotte Edwardes), the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree here, does it?
I was wondering how long it would be until we had the old sins of one’s father.
Normally I would agree, but it seems appropriate to draw comparisons between the seemingly feckless, solipsistic and gauche Tory gaffer, and his son Boris.
It would be cutting off nose to spite face, for MPs to VONC Johnson over this. An alternative PM isn't going to row back on it. Johnson is annoying from a troughing MP's perspective because of his huge post PMship earning power, but what if the replacement is billionaire Rishi? who can afford to come in and be even more stringent about all this stuff.
The Prime Minister has torpedoed Sir Keir's speech
I've missed what's going on - is this the lobbying thing?
I think it's this; Breaking News from the BBC Boris Johnson has set out plans to ban MPs from working as paid consultants, in the wake of the row over former Conservative MP Owen Paterson.
In a letter to Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the PM said MPs should adopt a ban "as a matter of urgency".
In the space of about a day he's managed to lose the North, the South and the long-standing Tory MP's.
To be fair to Big G, SKS will have to rewrite some of his speech.
The problem was he was delivering it
You're overegging it a bit. What people will remember from today is the government U-turn, not some inconsequential speech from a no mark opposition leader. The first one damages the government far more than a bit of a wayward speech damages Labour.
That "no-mark opposition leader" has just forced a Conservative (INO) PM to suggest that a law will be brought in to prevent MPs working as paid consultants has he not? I personally think such a move unnecessary and possibly damaging, but the politics is clear: the "no-mark opposition leader" has just completely outflanked The Clown and possibly damaged him seriously.
Amusing nickname.
Wasn't the damage done by no mark's stand in spokesperson during PMQs when no mark was off due to Covid?
If no mark being off causes so much damage to the Tories maybe they should look to replace him permanently? 😉
I don't really have much of an opinion on Starmer, and I am still not convinced I would lend my vote to Labour. I think he is a huge improvement on his predecessor and I think that a lot of you who desperately want to put him down do so because you are disappointed that he isn't Corbyn.
More importantly though Phil, can you please tell us (in your infinite wisdom), are you still Johnson's number one apologist/fanboy? Or are you about to do another flip-flop and tell us what many of us have been telling you for ages that actually he is a shit PM? If it is the former, how shit does he have to prove himself before you emerge from your keyboard warriors armour and accept that he is , well, shit?
I never was his biggest fan. I agreed with him on Europe but not everything else.
I think he's done many things badly, but overall on balance I'd rate him as the second-best PM of my lifetime (as a child of the 80s).
“I never was his *biggest* fan”, says Deputy Chair of the Boris Appreciation Society.
The Indie has it in for the PM's Dad; like son, like father? 'Two women — including Tory MP Caroline Nokes — have accused Boris Johnson’s father Stanley of inappropriately touching them.
Ms Nokes, who is the chair of the parliamentary women and equalities committee, said the 81-year-old smacked her “on the backside about as hard as he could” during a party conference in 2003.
The elder Mr Johnson declined to comment about her allegation made to Sky News, other than to say he has “no recollection of Caroline Nokes at all”.'
Apparently he smacked her hard on the bum and said, "oh, Romsey, you've got a lovely seat." Romsey being her constituency.
It doesn't sound sexual assault territory, and indeed many will find it absolutely trivial and even borderline funny, but I just don't understand the brain chemistry of blokes who behave like this. Where does it come from?
It comes in part from the fact that too many men (not you, I hope) do think it is "trivial" and "borderline funny" and so do not call it out.
How many times were you smacked hard on the bottom at a work event? And how would you have reacted if you had been?
And yet, as I have written, women routinely endure this sort of stuff and worse. Perhaps if we slapped men or punched them in the face every time they did this, the extensive bruising they would suffer might give men a bit of a clue? Dunno. Not in favour of violence. But relying on men being good chaps and calling out those chaps who are being bad chaps hasn't really worked, has it?
Interesting that you added "at a work event". Are you implying that it may be different at a social event??
For the record I, 100% male, have had my bottom pinched many times in busy nightclubs. Not recently though I admit.
Not in the last thirty years probably.
I only added it because the bottom slapping by Johnson Senior was said to have occurred at a Tory party Conference ie a work event.
A friend of mine (male) found his bottom being stroked at a Young Conservative Conference in the 1980's, and discovered that the culprit was a Cabinet Minister. He was not impressed.
LOL, this is magnificent, a few weeks ago Boris Johnson wanted Kathryn Stone gone, now he's given her unlimited power.
Will it be up to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to determine what ‘reasonable limits’ on outside activity means? To date MPs have argued its up to them to determine how they fulfil their role - so who can decide if they are fulfilling ‘their range of duties’?
You are absolutely right. Can we use logic and work out how this plays out?
It's amazing how weak Johnson is given the size of his majority. He seems to suffer from a kind of low self-confidence, which is odd given his background.
We know some of Boris is an act, an brand. True of all of us, to an extent; you can't do a public-facing job like politician, teacher or whatever without having an adopted persona that isn't you.
But Boris seems to take that further than most. Some of his story hangs together as amessed-up kid who needs the public adulation because he can't do it for himself. There must be a real human being somewhere beneath all the stage makeup... mustn't there?
Tricky to see how Douglas Ross, Ben Bradley, Dan Jarvis etc who all have big public jobs away from Westminster as an MSP, Council chief or Mayor will get past the Government's adoption of Standards Committee recommendation one: that they "prioritise" the Commons.
King Cole, the bit after the Western Empire falls and before the Norman Conquest (especially pre-Alfred) is not the most popular in history for the general public.
What annoys me is every single damned documentary or drama (well, the vast majority) are fixated retelling stories of Henry VIII and Elizabeth II when (even just looking at England) there are so many more interesting and neglected events and characters to consider.
"The Vikings" did rather well from depicting the period, and the spin off "Vikings: Valhalla" covering the later period before the Norman conquest looks promising.
The period that seems to be lacking is the early post Roman period. In a generation or two, we abandoned roads, towns and the trappings of urban life, turning back to subsistence farming and more egalitarian social structures.
Perhaps we can find out about the latter in person, second time around?
The Dark Ages were only dark in the sense of the abandonment of Christianity, and also literacy. It happened between 409 and 450 or so, so a couple of generations. There seems surprisingly little evidence of resistance to going back to a simpler more sustainable communitarian lifestyle once the Romans stopped enforcing the alternative.
Who abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so? Not really my period.
(or is that the joke I just edited out?) (Blockquote maybe borked warning)
The reason that there was little resistance was that when armed, competent invaders showed up, the locals had next to no military capability. Sharp swords make sharp arguments.
The process of robbing the locals when you felt like it, evolved into "You can't tax those peasants. They are my peasants"....
You could call that an egalitarian social structure. Depends which end of the sword you are holding, I suppose.
But who (or where) abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so?
New one to me as well - in England, the Saxons who turned up to occupy senior management positions after the Romans divested their offshore holdings were initially pagan, but converted fairly rapidly to Christianity....
It seems very early for that.
Even the Edict of Milan (Constantine) wasn't until 313 (?) AD.
I've always associated Dark Ages with a period in either the second part of the first millenium 1000 AD, or a period in the middle ages, which is why I'm asking.
Dark Ages to me means that period when the absence of Christianity/literacy means there was a bit of a lacuna in recorded history. In England a relatively short period maybe AD400 - 800. We really know very little about the end of Roman Britain and the Germanic settlers had started to make their presence known. In Scandinavia it is different: not a lot is known pre 1000 or so, and in Sweden everything before 1200 might as well be Prehistory.
The absence of a real written record tells its own story of economic collapse and population decline, IMHO.
It would these days when literacy is universal. But remember in early Western Europe, literacy was a Roman thing, perpetuated by the Church. The withdrawal of Roman control over the British provinces probably did result in economic decline, but I am not so sure about population. At least one usurper may have marched off to Europe with a sizeable army, but the Romans had been settling Germanic foederati here for some time and there was obviously an influx of settlers. At that time, human population density seems to suggest that most places weren't fully exploited and there was room for settlers.
I think the evidence from archaeology these days is pretty clear there was a significant decline in population when the Romans left or rather when the links with the Empire were severed. This was on top of major declines due to plagues throughout the 4th century.
Basically the Romans had cleared much of the settlement from southern and Eastern Britain and brought it into the Villa Landscape which covered the whole south-eastern half of the country. There is little evidence of native, non-Roman settlements in the RB period in those areas. When the Villa landscape collapsed because it lost its markets in the cities and internationally, there seems to have been a rapid drop in rural population. I envisage that much of the late 5th and early 6th century migration by the Germanic tribes was into a largely empty landscape.
Although 409/410 is the date traditionally given for the end of Roman rule, there seems evidence that the inhabitants still thought of themselves as part of the Roman Empire past this date. The impression I get is of Roman rule just fading away throughout the Fifth century, across Western Europe, rather than there being any specific date when it ended. Although he was based in Noricum, I think the Life of St, Severinus gives and idea of what Britain would have been like. There were units of the Roman Army still stationed there into the 470's which gradually disbanded due to lack of pay, before Odoacer evacuated the population.
There is evidence that RB control/lifestyle continued along some parts of the Thames Valley almost to the end of the 5th century and a lot of this is put down to the presence of established Germanic communities of foederati who may have been second or third generation within the Roman Empire by then but were still able to negotiate with the new Germanic settlers coming in. There are also indications of Roman Cirencester being cleaned and repaired for several decades after the supposed withdrawal. Gildas is supposed to have been taught Latin there in the late 5th century.
I think urban life continued in Verulamium well past 410, as well as Wroxeter, Bath, Chester, and Exeter. But, I imagine there was increasing disorder as warlords, both RB and German, battled for supremacy.
Has there been much literature or drama set in the later and immediate post-Roman period?
It would seem to be a fascinating setting to look at a society falling apart, and would be an opportunity to do a post-apocalypse scenario that wasn't in an imagined near future.
At least one Alfred Duggan novel. Checking my memory with Wikipedia:
Conscience of the King (1951). A speculative life of Cerdic, founder of the kingdom of Wessex - about 450 The Little Emperors (1951). A succession of coups in late Roman Britain - about 405-410
Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles, and Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliffe are very good on this period.
The most apposite Rosemary Sutcliffe is the series that begins with The Eagle of the Ninth; it's followed by the Silver Branch (which is about the period leading up to the Roman departure) and the Lantern Bearers, in which the Lantern is literally the Pharos at Rutupiae harbour, but figuratively the lantern of roman civilization in Britain. The Lantern Bearers is followed by Sword at Sunset
Another woman, this time a journalist, alleges she was groped by the PM's Dad.
Although this was story brushed off last night, I’m not sure.
1. Complainant 1 is a TORY MP 2. Without suggesting Boris is guilty of the same (although he has been accused of such by the journalist Charlotte Edwardes), the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree here, does it?
I was wondering how long it would be until we had the old sins of one’s father.
Normally I would agree, but it seems appropriate to draw comparisons between the seemingly feckless, solipsistic and gauche Tory gaffer, and his son Boris.
Not really. It’s just a smear.
A “smear” by a serving Tory MP against her party leader’s father.
On another subject, another thing this shows is that local media isn't dead yet. My view - and this is blether rather than me knowing what I'm talking about - is that the MEN is more influential in GM than any of the national papers. I'm sure the same is true of the Echo on Merseyside, the Chronicle in the North East, the Yorkshire Post in Yorkshire, and so on. This makes me happy and slightly proud for reasons I can't quite place.
Jennifer Williams is a very fine journalist. I have been following her work for a while. Well worth reading.
Did you see Simon Reeve’s new show, ‘The Lakes’ at the weekend? All about Cumbria
I didn't even know of its existence. But thank you. I will look out for it.
We watched the first episode last night - featured a woman who hunts grey squirrels and makes Waistcoats, fishing tackle, and curry out of them!
Was that the one that then went on to feature the nicer parts of Barrow-in-Furness?
That must have been a short segment.
Fighting talk! There is actually a surprising amount of interest there and some beautiful parts.
Actually the part they showed made me want to visit. Lines of austere six/seven story grey black buildings which looked like they could double as a rough East European sea port.
Of course. If you are a job seeker you need to evidence 35 hours a week job searching. And be sanctioned if you don't. Why can't MP's have to show they have done this amount of work per week, not including travel time? Nor Party meetings. And be prepared to defend their evidence in public? Then they can do what they want on their free time.
Sorry, but this is a bollocks idea. Who's going to mark their homework? And how much will we have to pay them?
No, we don't need this. Every five years we get to give our verdict at the ballot box.
King Cole, the bit after the Western Empire falls and before the Norman Conquest (especially pre-Alfred) is not the most popular in history for the general public.
What annoys me is every single damned documentary or drama (well, the vast majority) are fixated retelling stories of Henry VIII and Elizabeth II when (even just looking at England) there are so many more interesting and neglected events and characters to consider.
"The Vikings" did rather well from depicting the period, and the spin off "Vikings: Valhalla" covering the later period before the Norman conquest looks promising.
The period that seems to be lacking is the early post Roman period. In a generation or two, we abandoned roads, towns and the trappings of urban life, turning back to subsistence farming and more egalitarian social structures.
Perhaps we can find out about the latter in person, second time around?
The Dark Ages were only dark in the sense of the abandonment of Christianity, and also literacy. It happened between 409 and 450 or so, so a couple of generations. There seems surprisingly little evidence of resistance to going back to a simpler more sustainable communitarian lifestyle once the Romans stopped enforcing the alternative.
Who abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so? Not really my period.
(or is that the joke I just edited out?) (Blockquote maybe borked warning)
The reason that there was little resistance was that when armed, competent invaders showed up, the locals had next to no military capability. Sharp swords make sharp arguments.
The process of robbing the locals when you felt like it, evolved into "You can't tax those peasants. They are my peasants"....
You could call that an egalitarian social structure. Depends which end of the sword you are holding, I suppose.
But who (or where) abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so?
New one to me as well - in England, the Saxons who turned up to occupy senior management positions after the Romans divested their offshore holdings were initially pagan, but converted fairly rapidly to Christianity....
It seems very early for that.
Even the Edict of Milan (Constantine) wasn't until 313 (?) AD.
I've always associated Dark Ages with a period in either the second part of the first millenium 1000 AD, or a period in the middle ages, which is why I'm asking.
Dark Ages to me means that period when the absence of Christianity/literacy means there was a bit of a lacuna in recorded history. In England a relatively short period maybe AD400 - 800. We really know very little about the end of Roman Britain and the Germanic settlers had started to make their presence known. In Scandinavia it is different: not a lot is known pre 1000 or so, and in Sweden everything before 1200 might as well be Prehistory.
The absence of a real written record tells its own story of economic collapse and population decline, IMHO.
It would these days when literacy is universal. But remember in early Western Europe, literacy was a Roman thing, perpetuated by the Church. The withdrawal of Roman control over the British provinces probably did result in economic decline, but I am not so sure about population. At least one usurper may have marched off to Europe with a sizeable army, but the Romans had been settling Germanic foederati here for some time and there was obviously an influx of settlers. At that time, human population density seems to suggest that most places weren't fully exploited and there was room for settlers.
I think the evidence from archaeology these days is pretty clear there was a significant decline in population when the Romans left or rather when the links with the Empire were severed. This was on top of major declines due to plagues throughout the 4th century.
Basically the Romans had cleared much of the settlement from southern and Eastern Britain and brought it into the Villa Landscape which covered the whole south-eastern half of the country. There is little evidence of native, non-Roman settlements in the RB period in those areas. When the Villa landscape collapsed because it lost its markets in the cities and internationally, there seems to have been a rapid drop in rural population. I envisage that much of the late 5th and early 6th century migration by the Germanic tribes was into a largely empty landscape.
Although 409/410 is the date traditionally given for the end of Roman rule, there seems evidence that the inhabitants still thought of themselves as part of the Roman Empire past this date. The impression I get is of Roman rule just fading away throughout the Fifth century, across Western Europe, rather than there being any specific date when it ended. Although he was based in Noricum, I think the Life of St, Severinus gives and idea of what Britain would have been like. There were units of the Roman Army still stationed there into the 470's which gradually disbanded due to lack of pay, before Odoacer evacuated the population.
There is evidence that RB control/lifestyle continued along some parts of the Thames Valley almost to the end of the 5th century and a lot of this is put down to the presence of established Germanic communities of foederati who may have been second or third generation within the Roman Empire by then but were still able to negotiate with the new Germanic settlers coming in. There are also indications of Roman Cirencester being cleaned and repaired for several decades after the supposed withdrawal. Gildas is supposed to have been taught Latin there in the late 5th century.
I think urban life continued in Verulamium well past 410, as well as Wroxeter, Bath, Chester, and Exeter. But, I imagine there was increasing disorder as warlords, both RB and German, battled for supremacy.
Discussions like this are one of the reasons I come to pb.com.
I love the period between the Romans and the Normans. It's possible I idealise it as a bit of a golden age that never was.
It is a mystery how completely Romano-Celtic culture disappeared in England.
While it endured in Gaul and Spain.
One can see why earlier historians would conclude that the Roman British population were just massacred/driven out by the incoming Germans, but as Richard will point out, the evidence from archaeology and DNA argues against this. White English people are very much the descendants of people who have lived thousands of years in this country. But, the cultural impact of the incoming Germans, like the later Danes and Normans, was immense.
Do we have evidence as to which DNA is it? Paternal or maternal. Maternal would to some extent tick the massacre box..... slaughter the men and rape the women. However, I wonder if the effect of the climate change was greater in England that perhaps in France, while leaving the West less affected.
I think both Richard Tyndall and Sean T linked to articles that the DNA evidence points to a relatively small admixture of German blood among the population, even in East Anglia, which one would expect to be a major area of settlement.
I don't doubt that massacres took place, but probably more a case of one warlord destroying the followers of another, rather than a concerted effort by Germans to eliminate the Roman British.
Massive generalisation but I think population genetics almost always shows that where we used to think population A drove out population B, actually B hung in there and interbred.
I have also had my bottom pinched, when I was a younger man, by rather lascivious older women (I think they are now called stepmoms).
I didn’t appreciate it then, and what’s more look at the power differential in this situation. It must have felt incredibly humiliating for Caroline Noakes.
I have had that too, when I was younger at work, and also by girls in my class at school. I have also received a fair bit of homophobic abuse in a past job when I worked for a tier 1 automotive supplier. I’m not even gay. I was single at the time and flopping on the dating side. It was very much a laddish environment and ‘only banter’ type of place. Not nice though.
"France clears Dunkirk migrant camp amid UK tensions"
I think we underestimate the salience of this whole story, and how damaging it is for HMG. We Brexited to Take Control of our Borders. What is the damn point if we then Lose Control of our Borders.
I am sure this is as much to blame for Boris' recent woes as all the sleaze. Meanwhile Poland looks firm and tough, refusing to let people cross the border illegally, even as we dutifully ferry people to Dover to have pizza on our sixpence
Not good optics. Not good at all
We're not giving them pizzas, we're giving them Dominos, which is a crime against humanity.
Surely the home office insist on Ham and Pineapple to scare them to return ASAP..
Apparently, they force them to listen them to Radiohead while eating the pizza. And the only entertainment allowed is a tablet that allows you to read ConHome.
Rumours of the forced Python lessons are so far unconfirmed.
That last bit is beyond cruel - no computer language should use whitespace for anything beyond formatting for easy of reading
Amen. Amen.....
They don't even use whitespace for ease of reading at my new workplace. Seriously, they insist on as little whitespace as possible (apart from indentation), which makes C++ bloody hard to read. They have, however, recently relented on whitespace after commas so that word wrap works properly (rolls eyes).
Why? Sounds like you have a bizarre sound code fascist somewhere in the company....
No idea - it's really weird. I've never seen C++ written like this before - all squashed up together - but they seem to accept it as normal. I've only been there 3 months, but I did ask why they write it like that. Apparently it's so they can search for member variable initialisations more easily, but seems a pretty feeble reason to me. Once I'm more established there, I shall campaign for normal code spacing!
"search for member variable initialisations" - WUT?
You have to write "m_Thing=0;" without spaces so you can search for "m_Thing=0;". Yes, I know!
Why can’t you search for “m_Thing = 0”?
Well, you could, but that would involve typing two more spaces, wouldn't it? Their logic, not mine.
^m_Thing\s*=.*
or summat
Surprised your editor doesn't allow you to just jump straight to the the initialisation though!
Another woman, this time a journalist, alleges she was groped by the PM's Dad.
Although this was story brushed off last night, I’m not sure.
1. Complainant 1 is a TORY MP 2. Without suggesting Boris is guilty of the same (although he has been accused of such by the journalist Charlotte Edwardes), the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree here, does it?
I was wondering how long it would be until we had the old sins of one’s father.
Normally I would agree, but it seems appropriate to draw comparisons between the seemingly feckless, solipsistic and gauche Tory gaffer, and his son Boris.
Not really. It’s just a smear.
A “smear” by a serving Tory MP against her party leader’s father.
The Indie has it in for the PM's Dad; like son, like father? 'Two women — including Tory MP Caroline Nokes — have accused Boris Johnson’s father Stanley of inappropriately touching them.
Ms Nokes, who is the chair of the parliamentary women and equalities committee, said the 81-year-old smacked her “on the backside about as hard as he could” during a party conference in 2003.
The elder Mr Johnson declined to comment about her allegation made to Sky News, other than to say he has “no recollection of Caroline Nokes at all”.'
Apparently he smacked her hard on the bum and said, "oh, Romsey, you've got a lovely seat." Romsey being her constituency.
It doesn't sound sexual assault territory, and indeed many will find it absolutely trivial and even borderline funny, but I just don't understand the brain chemistry of blokes who behave like this. Where does it come from?
It comes in part from the fact that too many men (not you, I hope) do think it is "trivial" and "borderline funny" and so do not call it out.
How many times were you smacked hard on the bottom at a work event? And how would you have reacted if you had been?
And yet, as I have written, women routinely endure this sort of stuff and worse. Perhaps if we slapped men or punched them in the face every time they did this, the extensive bruising they would suffer might give men a bit of a clue? Dunno. Not in favour of violence. But relying on men being good chaps and calling out those chaps who are being bad chaps hasn't really worked, has it?
Interesting that you added "at a work event". Are you implying that it may be different at a social event??
For the record I, 100% male, have had my bottom pinched many times in busy nightclubs. Not recently though I admit.
Not in the last thirty years probably.
I only added it because the bottom slapping by Johnson Senior was said to have occurred at a Tory party Conference ie a work event.
A friend of mine (male) found his bottom being stroked at a Young Conservative Conference in the 1980's, and discovered that the culprit was a Cabinet Minister. He was not impressed.
I thought that was the main reason to go to a Young Conservative Conference, tbh.
LOL, this is magnificent, a few weeks ago Boris Johnson wanted Kathryn Stone gone, now he's given her unlimited power.
Will it be up to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to determine what ‘reasonable limits’ on outside activity means? To date MPs have argued its up to them to determine how they fulfil their role - so who can decide if they are fulfilling ‘their range of duties’?
You are absolutely right. Can we use logic and work out how this plays out?
Good to see you Mr MoonRabbit newbie.
I've got a 5 quid Paddy Power voucher to use up. Given the travel costs and the terms of conditions I need a horsey to bet on tomorrow?
Can you help? I don't mind a odds on if it's a dead cert.
Okay.
Okay - are you doing the research now?
Yes. I hadn’t looked at it yet today, still catching up on sleep from weekend this afternoon. Winter race day at Hexham and the weather is dry. The fastest horse will win. 3pm HEART OF KERNOW
Goodness me - over the last 11 years of Con PMs I must have read literally hundreds if not thousands of posts on here saying "Con backbenchers are sending in letters now, Brady will have enough letters very soon ........."
These posts are always wrong.
It is the Golden Rule of PB - people want something to happen or think it should happen - but rather than just posting that they dress it up as a prediction.
Really, 2018 says hello.
OK, fair enough - so it's actually happened once in 11 years - and that was a total damp squib with May easily defeating the No Confidence vote.
And how does that compare to the endless posts telling us it's happening or about to happen - year after year after year.
A stopped clock is right twice a day.
The reality is that if Betfair had a market up right now saying:
"In the next four weeks will Brady declare the required letters have been received and there will now be a No Confidence vote?" then the odds would be about Yes 50 to 100, No 1.01 to 1.02 and deep down everyone on here knows it.
King Cole, the bit after the Western Empire falls and before the Norman Conquest (especially pre-Alfred) is not the most popular in history for the general public.
What annoys me is every single damned documentary or drama (well, the vast majority) are fixated retelling stories of Henry VIII and Elizabeth II when (even just looking at England) there are so many more interesting and neglected events and characters to consider.
"The Vikings" did rather well from depicting the period, and the spin off "Vikings: Valhalla" covering the later period before the Norman conquest looks promising.
The period that seems to be lacking is the early post Roman period. In a generation or two, we abandoned roads, towns and the trappings of urban life, turning back to subsistence farming and more egalitarian social structures.
Perhaps we can find out about the latter in person, second time around?
The Dark Ages were only dark in the sense of the abandonment of Christianity, and also literacy. It happened between 409 and 450 or so, so a couple of generations. There seems surprisingly little evidence of resistance to going back to a simpler more sustainable communitarian lifestyle once the Romans stopped enforcing the alternative.
Who abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so? Not really my period.
(or is that the joke I just edited out?) (Blockquote maybe borked warning)
The reason that there was little resistance was that when armed, competent invaders showed up, the locals had next to no military capability. Sharp swords make sharp arguments.
The process of robbing the locals when you felt like it, evolved into "You can't tax those peasants. They are my peasants"....
You could call that an egalitarian social structure. Depends which end of the sword you are holding, I suppose.
But who (or where) abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so?
New one to me as well - in England, the Saxons who turned up to occupy senior management positions after the Romans divested their offshore holdings were initially pagan, but converted fairly rapidly to Christianity....
It seems very early for that.
Even the Edict of Milan (Constantine) wasn't until 313 (?) AD.
I've always associated Dark Ages with a period in either the second part of the first millenium 1000 AD, or a period in the middle ages, which is why I'm asking.
Dark Ages to me means that period when the absence of Christianity/literacy means there was a bit of a lacuna in recorded history. In England a relatively short period maybe AD400 - 800. We really know very little about the end of Roman Britain and the Germanic settlers had started to make their presence known. In Scandinavia it is different: not a lot is known pre 1000 or so, and in Sweden everything before 1200 might as well be Prehistory.
The absence of a real written record tells its own story of economic collapse and population decline, IMHO.
It would these days when literacy is universal. But remember in early Western Europe, literacy was a Roman thing, perpetuated by the Church. The withdrawal of Roman control over the British provinces probably did result in economic decline, but I am not so sure about population. At least one usurper may have marched off to Europe with a sizeable army, but the Romans had been settling Germanic foederati here for some time and there was obviously an influx of settlers. At that time, human population density seems to suggest that most places weren't fully exploited and there was room for settlers.
I think the evidence from archaeology these days is pretty clear there was a significant decline in population when the Romans left or rather when the links with the Empire were severed. This was on top of major declines due to plagues throughout the 4th century.
Basically the Romans had cleared much of the settlement from southern and Eastern Britain and brought it into the Villa Landscape which covered the whole south-eastern half of the country. There is little evidence of native, non-Roman settlements in the RB period in those areas. When the Villa landscape collapsed because it lost its markets in the cities and internationally, there seems to have been a rapid drop in rural population. I envisage that much of the late 5th and early 6th century migration by the Germanic tribes was into a largely empty landscape.
Although 409/410 is the date traditionally given for the end of Roman rule, there seems evidence that the inhabitants still thought of themselves as part of the Roman Empire past this date. The impression I get is of Roman rule just fading away throughout the Fifth century, across Western Europe, rather than there being any specific date when it ended. Although he was based in Noricum, I think the Life of St, Severinus gives and idea of what Britain would have been like. There were units of the Roman Army still stationed there into the 470's which gradually disbanded due to lack of pay, before Odoacer evacuated the population.
There is evidence that RB control/lifestyle continued along some parts of the Thames Valley almost to the end of the 5th century and a lot of this is put down to the presence of established Germanic communities of foederati who may have been second or third generation within the Roman Empire by then but were still able to negotiate with the new Germanic settlers coming in. There are also indications of Roman Cirencester being cleaned and repaired for several decades after the supposed withdrawal. Gildas is supposed to have been taught Latin there in the late 5th century.
I think urban life continued in Verulamium well past 410, as well as Wroxeter, Bath, Chester, and Exeter. But, I imagine there was increasing disorder as warlords, both RB and German, battled for supremacy.
Discussions like this are one of the reasons I come to pb.com.
I love the period between the Romans and the Normans. It's possible I idealise it as a bit of a golden age that never was.
It is a mystery how completely Romano-Celtic culture disappeared in England.
While it endured in Gaul and Spain.
One can see why earlier historians would conclude that the Roman British population were just massacred/driven out by the incoming Germans, but as Richard will point out, the evidence from archaeology and DNA argues against this. White English people are very much the descendants of people who have lived thousands of years in this country. But, the cultural impact of the incoming Germans, like the later Danes and Normans, was immense.
Do we have evidence as to which DNA is it? Paternal or maternal. Maternal would to some extent tick the massacre box..... slaughter the men and rape the women. However, I wonder if the effect of the climate change was greater in England that perhaps in France, while leaving the West less affected.
I think both Richard Tyndall and Sean T linked to articles that the DNA evidence points to a relatively small admixture of German blood among the population, even in East Anglia, which one would expect to be a major area of settlement.
I don't doubt that massacres took place, but probably more a case of one warlord destroying the followers of another, rather than a concerted effort by Germans to eliminate the Roman British.
Massive generalisation but I think population genetics almost always shows that where we used to think population A drove out population B, actually B hung in there and interbred.
LOL, this is magnificent, a few weeks ago Boris Johnson wanted Kathryn Stone gone, now he's given her unlimited power.
Will it be up to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to determine what ‘reasonable limits’ on outside activity means? To date MPs have argued its up to them to determine how they fulfil their role - so who can decide if they are fulfilling ‘their range of duties’?
A former Tory MP in one of my WhatsApp groups messages
'If Sir Graham Brady doesn't have enough letter to trigger a VONC he certainly will now after this [the banning of lobbying].'
Obviously bad news for Sir Keir.
Surely the letters won't be being sent now - but they will be being prepared ready for the first justification that would allow them to be sent without them appearing to be self-serving.
They are secret. No one knows who sent a letter, when, or why. Indeed, you don't even need to state a reason AIUI. Least they haven't before. So they can be as self-serving as they like. There is a serious point here for some. If they get banned, I cannot foresee the circumstances in which they will ever be unbanned again, regardless of who is in charge. Which means quite a few lose a sizeable amount for good. And those with aspirations to milk the system in a few years do too. This is an existential crisis for those who see politics as a stepping stone to easy wealth.
BIG questions about how the PM's proposals work 1. Who decides how this works? 2. Will they be able to define "reasonable limits" to outside activity - is that by hours or pay or other 3. Will ban be based on type of organisation you do work for or type of job you do for them?
And if there isn't a cross party consensus because - for EG Labour want to draw definitions wider than Tories - does it collapse? And can it conclude in a timely way?
Shall I just send in my recent header along with a copy of a standard Outside Business Interests policy, of a type which me and thousands of others have had to follow for years?
This isn't rocket science - but oh no, they'll just have to go and re-invent the wheel. Worse than the original.
I doubt there will be much (if any) public sympathy for MPs who can't get by on £80,000 a year.
King Cole, the bit after the Western Empire falls and before the Norman Conquest (especially pre-Alfred) is not the most popular in history for the general public.
What annoys me is every single damned documentary or drama (well, the vast majority) are fixated retelling stories of Henry VIII and Elizabeth II when (even just looking at England) there are so many more interesting and neglected events and characters to consider.
"The Vikings" did rather well from depicting the period, and the spin off "Vikings: Valhalla" covering the later period before the Norman conquest looks promising.
The period that seems to be lacking is the early post Roman period. In a generation or two, we abandoned roads, towns and the trappings of urban life, turning back to subsistence farming and more egalitarian social structures.
Perhaps we can find out about the latter in person, second time around?
The Dark Ages were only dark in the sense of the abandonment of Christianity, and also literacy. It happened between 409 and 450 or so, so a couple of generations. There seems surprisingly little evidence of resistance to going back to a simpler more sustainable communitarian lifestyle once the Romans stopped enforcing the alternative.
Who abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so? Not really my period.
(or is that the joke I just edited out?) (Blockquote maybe borked warning)
The reason that there was little resistance was that when armed, competent invaders showed up, the locals had next to no military capability. Sharp swords make sharp arguments.
The process of robbing the locals when you felt like it, evolved into "You can't tax those peasants. They are my peasants"....
You could call that an egalitarian social structure. Depends which end of the sword you are holding, I suppose.
But who (or where) abandoned Christianity in 409->450 or so?
New one to me as well - in England, the Saxons who turned up to occupy senior management positions after the Romans divested their offshore holdings were initially pagan, but converted fairly rapidly to Christianity....
It seems very early for that.
Even the Edict of Milan (Constantine) wasn't until 313 (?) AD.
I've always associated Dark Ages with a period in either the second part of the first millenium 1000 AD, or a period in the middle ages, which is why I'm asking.
Dark Ages to me means that period when the absence of Christianity/literacy means there was a bit of a lacuna in recorded history. In England a relatively short period maybe AD400 - 800. We really know very little about the end of Roman Britain and the Germanic settlers had started to make their presence known. In Scandinavia it is different: not a lot is known pre 1000 or so, and in Sweden everything before 1200 might as well be Prehistory.
The absence of a real written record tells its own story of economic collapse and population decline, IMHO.
It would these days when literacy is universal. But remember in early Western Europe, literacy was a Roman thing, perpetuated by the Church. The withdrawal of Roman control over the British provinces probably did result in economic decline, but I am not so sure about population. At least one usurper may have marched off to Europe with a sizeable army, but the Romans had been settling Germanic foederati here for some time and there was obviously an influx of settlers. At that time, human population density seems to suggest that most places weren't fully exploited and there was room for settlers.
I think the evidence from archaeology these days is pretty clear there was a significant decline in population when the Romans left or rather when the links with the Empire were severed. This was on top of major declines due to plagues throughout the 4th century.
Basically the Romans had cleared much of the settlement from southern and Eastern Britain and brought it into the Villa Landscape which covered the whole south-eastern half of the country. There is little evidence of native, non-Roman settlements in the RB period in those areas. When the Villa landscape collapsed because it lost its markets in the cities and internationally, there seems to have been a rapid drop in rural population. I envisage that much of the late 5th and early 6th century migration by the Germanic tribes was into a largely empty landscape.
Although 409/410 is the date traditionally given for the end of Roman rule, there seems evidence that the inhabitants still thought of themselves as part of the Roman Empire past this date. The impression I get is of Roman rule just fading away throughout the Fifth century, across Western Europe, rather than there being any specific date when it ended. Although he was based in Noricum, I think the Life of St, Severinus gives and idea of what Britain would have been like. There were units of the Roman Army still stationed there into the 470's which gradually disbanded due to lack of pay, before Odoacer evacuated the population.
There is evidence that RB control/lifestyle continued along some parts of the Thames Valley almost to the end of the 5th century and a lot of this is put down to the presence of established Germanic communities of foederati who may have been second or third generation within the Roman Empire by then but were still able to negotiate with the new Germanic settlers coming in. There are also indications of Roman Cirencester being cleaned and repaired for several decades after the supposed withdrawal. Gildas is supposed to have been taught Latin there in the late 5th century.
I think urban life continued in Verulamium well past 410, as well as Wroxeter, Bath, Chester, and Exeter. But, I imagine there was increasing disorder as warlords, both RB and German, battled for supremacy.
Has there been much literature or drama set in the later and immediate post-Roman period?
It would seem to be a fascinating setting to look at a society falling apart, and would be an opportunity to do a post-apocalypse scenario that wasn't in an imagined near future.
At least one Alfred Duggan novel. Checking my memory with Wikipedia:
Conscience of the King (1951). A speculative life of Cerdic, founder of the kingdom of Wessex - about 450 The Little Emperors (1951). A succession of coups in late Roman Britain - about 405-410
Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles, and Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliffe are very good on this period.
Oh yes. Cornwell's hero is often very depressed on how his time is so useless compared to the Romans.
Founded in reality - vide the A/S poem about the ruins of Bath:
You can see how the Eastern Empire enjoyed such prestige and diplomatic success among "barbarian" peoples.
The great palaces and churches, and the cathedral of Haga Sophia, intact and not ruins, would be like nothing that an Irishman, or Ango-Saxon, or Scandinavian had ever experienced. As one delegation put it "We knew not whether we were in Heaven or on Earth".
LOL, this is magnificent, a few weeks ago Boris Johnson wanted Kathryn Stone gone, now he's given her unlimited power.
Will it be up to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to determine what ‘reasonable limits’ on outside activity means? To date MPs have argued its up to them to determine how they fulfil their role - so who can decide if they are fulfilling ‘their range of duties’?
You are absolutely right. Can we use logic and work out how this plays out?
It's amazing how weak Johnson is given the size of his majority. He seems to suffer from a kind of low self-confidence, which is odd given his background.
Goodness me - over the last 11 years of Con PMs I must have read literally hundreds if not thousands of posts on here saying "Con backbenchers are sending in letters now, Brady will have enough letters very soon ........."
These posts are always wrong.
It is the Golden Rule of PB - people want something to happen or think it should happen - but rather than just posting that they dress it up as a prediction.
Really, 2018 says hello.
I was lurking at the time but did not the majority of 2018 have inaccurate predictions of the number of letters sent to Sir Graham only for the required number to stagger over the line in December?
PB gets things right but in human, politics time not 24-hr rolling news time. People on here (bonjour) said that May was not up to it and would eventually be found out as soon as she became PM but the wheels take time to turn and it was some time later that it transpired.
Just like people on here (bonjour x2) said that Boris was a useless twat and would be found out. Now in this case we have been proven right from day 1 but people continue to love him. What will be the catalyst for his downfall I have said before that I have no idea but it will come to him at some point.
Tricky to see how Douglas Ross, Ben Bradley, Dan Jarvis etc who all have big public jobs away from Westminster as an MSP, Council chief or Mayor will get past the Government's adoption of Standards Committee recommendation one: that they "prioritise" the Commons.
Of course. If you are a job seeker you need to evidence 35 hours a week job searching. And be sanctioned if you don't. Why can't MP's have to show they have done this amount of work per week, not including travel time? Nor Party meetings. And be prepared to defend their evidence in public? Then they can do what they want on their free time.
Sorry, but this is a bollocks idea. Who's going to mark their homework? And how much will we have to pay them?
No, we don't need this. Every five years we get to give our verdict at the ballot box.
That would be all fine and dandy if we didn't have a phenomena called "the safe seat"
The reports on YCCC are awful, but so is the reporting. We do not need to have Paki and Monkey etc bleeped out - lets hear it. Its not being used as an abuse term now, its being used to call out the racists. Lets hear it so that we can shame them.
Naive. People have lost careers for using the n word, even when in context - eg to show how the word was used by someone else. That can now get you fired and cancelled
How is anyone to know if and when this arbitrary rule will be extended to the P word and beyond? They can’t. So they are understandably super cautious
I recall predicting many years ago that one day racist terms would be seen as much more toxic and offensive than swear words in the 1950s
And so it is. Perhaps that is a good thing, but my inner libertarian still thinks “they are just words, however stupid and ugly”
I don't see a binary distinction between words and actions. Words are the result of an action - the action of writing or speaking. And this action, the writing or speaking of words, can do real damage. It can do just as much damage as other types of actions, eg punching and slapping, sometimes more.
Do you think someone should lose their job for just quoting someone else using the N word?
Maybe. I'd have to know the circumstances. Also 'lose their job' would need clarifying. Eg fired vs feeling shamed out vs loss of freelance income, these are different.
General point, though, is that I sometimes hear "it's only words" as if words exist in a separate milder dimension to actions, and I don't really view it like that myself.
You're so tediously myopic. Do you never do any research? Explore? Find out stuff? Or is it just easier to sit in a contented little bien pensant bubble in your leafy Belsize Park pub.
I'm bored of educating you, and I shall stop interacting with you shortly. But there are countless examples of people being sacked for using the N word
One of my favourites, a professor replaced for using a Chinese word that SOUNDS like the N word
"In a controversial decision, the University of Southern California replaced a professor of business communication with another instructor in one of his classes for saying a Chinese word that sounds like an English slur."
There's hundreds. That's 2 minutes Googling. Which you are apparently unable to do
I'm aware there are sometimes false accusations of racism which can lead to injustices to the individuals on the receiving end. However imo the problem of real and actual racism in society dwarfs that of false accusations of racism or hair trigger sensitivity to it. So I simply cannot get as animated as you do about the latter stuff. Indeed I find it pretty odd when people do. I also disagree that 'words' are inherently and always less harmful than actions and that the 'policing' of them is an affront to liberty. I find that view pretty odd too. So, you know, fine, you plough on in your 'space', but don't pretend you're educating anybody on this. All you're doing is riding a hobby horse.
There is a clip going round of AI Wei Wei. He says that we are already living in an authoritarian society, but don't yet realise it.
If we are we need a new term for societies where freedom of speech and behaviour is severely restricted.
Has it entered your tiny tiny brain that when you have Vladimir Putin AND Ai Weiwei both saying the exact same thing: the West is having a Cultural Revolution, Woke is like Marxism, we are damaging our own societies, then there may just be a fucking problem? Maybe they have a point?
Excitable reactionary bloke who thinks the West is committing suicide so that men can go into women's toilets argues with a slightly calmer and less reactionary bloke who rather doubts this. He mentions brain size for some odd reason. And Vladimir Putin.
Quite funny that PB Tories are representing Ai Weiei as a critic of political correctness, when in fact he was comparing Donald Trump to Chairman Mao!
That truly is something to worry about - the influence of Trump and the chance he might return to the presidency.
But, Ai Weiwei is criticising - very very harshly - political correctness. Wokeness. He sees it as a much bigger threat than Trump
Well he's wrong in that case imo. Me and he must agree to disagree.
It's not that wokery isn't an issue, it is. The issue is a puritanical intolerance about language in certain quarters and the pushing by some people of a narrative about society that brooks no debate. I happen to think the narrative has much to commend it, and I don't think we lose a great deal by cancelling outdated terms from our bantz, nevertheless I get that there's an issue here, and it's not crazy to be concerned about it.
What's crazy, imo, is to have this even bubbling under a hit parade of things to worry about. Globally there are so many problems that even climate change - the actual fate of the planet - struggles to dominate. And just looking at this country we have a top 5 looking something like - (i) horrid levels of hard-coded inequality, (ii) an infrastructure and housing crisis, (iii) a health service on the point of collapse, (iv) an old-fashioned elitist education system, (v) highly stressed public finances and a fragile frothy economy propped up mainly by near zero interest rates and printed money. Then to cap it all we have an absolute nonsense of a person as our PM. I mean, wokery? C'mon.
But still, hands across the water, I agree it isn't a complete non-issue, therefore (eg and topically) the matter of whether Vaughners and Bumble are victims of a witchhunt as opposed to being belatedly revealed as racist and brought to account accordingly is a genuinely interesting question - as evidenced by people being split about it.
That's sensible enough. The whole planet would after all have to shut down if action were taken against those that 'once made a daft remark on PB'. I may of course exaggerate.
Well I am sensible. Not for me the wild extremes on anything. Plod my way around and don't get distracted.
The reports on YCCC are awful, but so is the reporting. We do not need to have Paki and Monkey etc bleeped out - lets hear it. Its not being used as an abuse term now, its being used to call out the racists. Lets hear it so that we can shame them.
Naive. People have lost careers for using the n word, even when in context - eg to show how the word was used by someone else. That can now get you fired and cancelled
How is anyone to know if and when this arbitrary rule will be extended to the P word and beyond? They can’t. So they are understandably super cautious
I recall predicting many years ago that one day racist terms would be seen as much more toxic and offensive than swear words in the 1950s
And so it is. Perhaps that is a good thing, but my inner libertarian still thinks “they are just words, however stupid and ugly”
I don't see a binary distinction between words and actions. Words are the result of an action - the action of writing or speaking. And this action, the writing or speaking of words, can do real damage. It can do just as much damage as other types of actions, eg punching and slapping, sometimes more.
I think there's a big difference between words and actions.
The reports on YCCC are awful, but so is the reporting. We do not need to have Paki and Monkey etc bleeped out - lets hear it. Its not being used as an abuse term now, its being used to call out the racists. Lets hear it so that we can shame them.
Naive. People have lost careers for using the n word, even when in context - eg to show how the word was used by someone else. That can now get you fired and cancelled
How is anyone to know if and when this arbitrary rule will be extended to the P word and beyond? They can’t. So they are understandably super cautious
I recall predicting many years ago that one day racist terms would be seen as much more toxic and offensive than swear words in the 1950s
And so it is. Perhaps that is a good thing, but my inner libertarian still thinks “they are just words, however stupid and ugly”
I don't see a binary distinction between words and actions. Words are the result of an action - the action of writing or speaking. And this action, the writing or speaking of words, can do real damage. It can do just as much damage as other types of actions, eg punching and slapping, sometimes more.
I think there's a big difference between words and actions.
Yep. But also between words and words and between actions and actions.
Point is, some words can be more potent (for good or ill) than some actions.
Comments
More importantly though Phil, can you please tell us (in your infinite wisdom), are you still Johnson's number one apologist/fanboy? Or are you about to do another flip-flop and tell us what many of us have been telling you for ages that actually he is a shit PM? If it is the former, how shit does he have to prove himself before you emerge from your keyboard warriors armour and accept that he is , well, shit?
I didn’t appreciate it then, and what’s more look at the power differential in this situation. It must have felt incredibly humiliating for Caroline Noakes.
Until the last couple of days, it was only the cases in <30s who were in growth (the top two black lines: 0-4s & 5-9s). But now the 50-70s have nudged back into growth, so I fear hospitalisations at least may start going up in a few days time.</i>
https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1460647188791533569?s=20
So make the code simple enough that you could follow it after 3 pints and make it clear what is going on.
I've got a 5 quid Paddy Power voucher to use up. Given the travel costs and the terms of conditions I need a horsey to bet on tomorrow?
Can you help? I don't mind a odds on if it's a dead cert.
I found it easier to join in with the German, despite not speaking and German.
One amusing element was that worshipers from different countries variously stood, sat or knelt at the same point in the mass.
(While me and my mam were at mass, my dad was drinking San Miguel. The advantages of being a prod.)
I think he's done many things badly, but overall on balance I'd rate him as the second-best PM of my lifetime (as a child of the 80s).
Tricky to see how Douglas Ross, Ben Bradley, Dan Jarvis etc who all have big public jobs away from Westminster as an MSP, Council chief or Mayor will get past the Government's adoption of Standards Committee recommendation one: that they "prioritise" the Commons.
https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1460658773081661446
The implication is that threatening his colleagues' fiddles is more serious than ...
It's not that wokery isn't an issue, it is. The issue is a puritanical intolerance about language in certain quarters and the pushing by some people of a narrative about society that brooks no debate. I happen to think the narrative has much to commend it, and I don't think we lose a great deal by cancelling outdated terms from our bantz, nevertheless I get that there's an issue here, and it's not crazy to be concerned about it.
What's crazy, imo, is to have this even bubbling under a hit parade of things to worry about. Globally there are so many problems that even climate change - the actual fate of the planet - struggles to dominate. And just looking at this country we have a top 5 looking something like - (i) horrid levels of hard-coded inequality, (ii) an infrastructure and housing crisis, (iii) a health service on the point of collapse, (iv) an old-fashioned elitist education system, (v) highly stressed public finances and a fragile frothy economy propped up mainly by near zero interest rates and printed money. Then to cap it all we have an absolute nonsense of a person as our PM. I mean, wokery? C'mon.
But still, hands across the water, I agree it isn't a complete non-issue, therefore (eg and topically) the matter of whether Vaughners and Bumble are victims of a witchhunt as opposed to being belatedly revealed as racist and brought to account accordingly is a genuinely interesting question - as evidenced by people being split about it.
People want politician's with different experiences, but that doesn't mean they want them to carry on doing those jobs while they're still MPs.
No second jobs (apart perhaps from the bare minimum of professional development work), and a limit to how long someone can spend in Parliament would likely satisfy most of the public in this area.
If an MP wants experience in a particular area to help with their role in Parliament, then they can do it for free
https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1460659699469139972
> Just read in my morning paper, that US Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) has announced he is NOT running for re-election next year; currently longest-serving senator first elected in 1974, indeed the last of the once-numerous congressional Democrats elected in the wake of Watergate. Fun fact - Leahy is the ONLY Democrat ever elected (as such) since the Civil War from the Green Mountain State.
> Also read that in Texas, Beto O'Rourke announced he IS running in 2022 for governor versus incumbent Republican Greg Abbot.
> In the great State of Washington, our redistricting commission (two Ds, two Rs, one non-party chair) has voted to approve new congressional & legislative districts for 2022 and following decade; word on the streets is that the Democrats caved; certainly the congressional map that I just saw confirms this, for example the new 8th congressional district currently held (narrowly in 2020) by Democrat Kim Schrier, has lost Seattle suburb of Bellevue (very Democratic these days) and gained exurban & rural parts of Pierce and Snohomish counties (reliably Republican turf).
Founded in reality - vide the A/S poem about the ruins of Bath:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruin
http://www.vortigernstudies.org.uk/artsou/constex.htm provides a translation of some of the texts.
I don't doubt that massacres took place, but probably more a case of one warlord destroying the followers of another, rather than a concerted effort by Germans to eliminate the Roman British.
https://twitter.com/BumbleCricket/status/1460650330627186694
Why can't MP's have to show they have done this amount of work per week, not including travel time? Nor Party meetings. And be prepared to defend their evidence in public?
Then they can do what they want on their free time.
But Boris seems to take that further than most. Some of his story hangs together as amessed-up kid who needs the public adulation because he can't do it for himself. There must be a real human being somewhere beneath all the stage makeup... mustn't there?
https://twitter.com/Niall_Burke26/status/1460650707078557700
Start the car
Some mayors are, and some, like Jarvis aren't.
No, we don't need this. Every five years we get to give our verdict at the ballot box.
or summat
Surprised your editor doesn't allow you to just jump straight to the the initialisation though!
Winter race day at Hexham and the weather is dry. The fastest horse will win.
3pm HEART OF KERNOW
And how does that compare to the endless posts telling us it's happening or about to happen - year after year after year.
A stopped clock is right twice a day.
The reality is that if Betfair had a market up right now saying:
"In the next four weeks will Brady declare the required letters have been received and there will now be a No Confidence vote?" then the odds would be about Yes 50 to 100, No 1.01 to 1.02 and deep down everyone on here knows it.
I doubt there will be much (if any) public sympathy for MPs who can't get by on £80,000 a year.
The great palaces and churches, and the cathedral of Haga Sophia, intact and not ruins, would be like nothing that an Irishman, or Ango-Saxon, or Scandinavian had ever experienced. As one delegation put it "We knew not whether we were in Heaven or on Earth".
Just like people on here (bonjour x2) said that Boris was a useless twat and would be found out. Now in this case we have been proven right from day 1 but people continue to love him. What will be the catalyst for his downfall I have said before that I have no idea but it will come to him at some point.
But again not in 24-hr rolling news time.
Point is, some words can be more potent (for good or ill) than some actions.