On the KPI (Kit-kat Price Index) on the other hand, a 4-finger was was 58p in mid-2021, and it is 70p now. So in Kit-Kats, your £1 then is worth a mere 83p now.
I think as rising energy bills and fuel costs bite people will sadly lose interest in the Ukraine war. Its already getting less attention in the news
Welcome
Last week our daily energy use was about £5
This week it has been about £1.85
We are moving into warmer weather when you can manage without heating and I expect due to tightened household budgets people will just put on another jersey if necessary
Of course from October nobody knows where we will be
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
No they aren't and Canadians and New Zealanders certainly aren't. Plus Australians voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999
1999? That's almost as far back as 1638 in modern politics.
The Aussies and Canucks don't cringe and grovel to royalty.
In Canada Trudeau is a monarchist as are the Conservative opposition, it separates them from the Republic of the USA
I think that's the key point. The retention of the monarchy is a key differential from the mighty neighbour to the South. Most Canadians want to retain a sense of national identity and, curiously, the link to the royals helps them to achieve that. Different in that respect to the Antipodeans.
(Having said that - I kinda wonder if Oz goes Republic whether the NZers will retain the crown just to be different? I was very struck how they rejected the proposal to change the flag, so quite capable of being sticks-in-the-mud.)
That is an important point. Canada lacks unifying features. Hockey, Tim Horton's and not opening fire at the drop of a hat. However. The polling is in one direction.
On the KPI (Kit-kat Price Index) on the other hand, a 4-finger was was 58p in mid-2021, and it is 70p now. So in Kit-Kats, your £1 then is worth a mere 83p now.
BPI (Beer Price Index) is the only thing that matters to some people!
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
Good grief. That's controversial. I would say they are culturally much more American than they mentally like to think they are. Although that differs Province to Province.
It does. I lived in Sydney for a couple of years and that's very different to Melbourne let alone to places like Queensland and Perth and Darwin.
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
No they aren't and Canadians and New Zealanders certainly aren't. Plus Australians voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999
1999? That's almost as far back as 1638 in modern politics.
The Aussies and Canucks don't cringe and grovel to royalty.
In Canada Trudeau is a monarchist as are the Conservative opposition, it separates them from the Republic of the USA
I think that's the key point. The retention of the monarchy is a key differential from the mighty neighbour to the South. Most Canadians want to retain a sense of national identity and, curiously, the link to the royals helps them to achieve that. Different in that respect to the Antipodeans.
(Having said that - I kinda wonder if Oz goes Republic whether the NZers will retain the crown just to be different? I was very struck how they rejected the proposal to change the flag, so quite capable of being sticks-in-the-mud.)
That is an important point. Canada lacks unifying features. Hockey, Tim Horton's and not opening fire at the drop of a hat. However. The polling is in one direction.
"Should the queen step down or die, Canadians’ enthusiasm for the monarchy drops further, with 66 per cent saying they are opposed to recognizing “King Charles” as head of state, a figure that has increased from 54 per cent in 2016." November 2021 report.
On the KPI (Kit-kat Price Index) on the other hand, a 4-finger was was 58p in mid-2021, and it is 70p now. So in Kit-Kats, your £1 then is worth a mere 83p now.
An important point because the official inflation rates are politicised, fudged averages. To compare with nine months ago for one individual, it is better to compare what you want to buy. Hmm. Nine months. Nappies? If this is part of a pay claim, I'd wonder if concentrating on increased value might be better but I've no experience of negotiating salaries, not even my own.
Look carefully, Sunak is holding 2 documents - whispers he'll unveil a separate economic plan or strategy alongside the statement... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-60835481
Which government would be better at managing the economy?
Con gov led by Johnson: 31% (+4) Lab gov led by Starmer: 22% (-2) Neither: 26% (-1)
(Changes from 17 Feb)
YouGov
Which government would be better at improving living standards?
Lab gov led by Keir Starmer: 31% (+1) Con gov led by Boris Johnson: 22% (+3) Neither: 29% (-2)
(Changes from 17 Feb)
Strange, but not surprising. "The economy" is treated as something ethereal and theoretical. What exactly is "managing the economy" other than "improving living standards"?
I can't decide if the public are being obtuse in answering the two questions differently, or if they believe that the connection between the overall health of the economy (GDP growth, etc) and their own living standards has been broken.
There comes a point when the growth in the size of the pie has little relevance if the size of your slice is declining in absolute terms.
My energy bill is doubling from £800 to £1600 a year.
Yes there are still many people on fixed rate deals who won't be feeling the pain yet
I signed a 2 year deal with EDF on the 1st September 2021 and it looks like an inspired move, but at the time it was quite an increase on my old tariff
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
No they aren't and Canadians and New Zealanders certainly aren't. Plus Australians voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999
1999? That's almost as far back as 1638 in modern politics.
The Aussies and Canucks don't cringe and grovel to royalty.
In Canada Trudeau is a monarchist as are the Conservative opposition, it separates them from the Republic of the USA
I think that's the key point. The retention of the monarchy is a key differential from the mighty neighbour to the South. Most Canadians want to retain a sense of national identity and, curiously, the link to the royals helps them to achieve that. Different in that respect to the Antipodeans.
(Having said that - I kinda wonder if Oz goes Republic whether the NZers will retain the crown just to be different? I was very struck how they rejected the proposal to change the flag, so quite capable of being sticks-in-the-mud.)
That is an important point. Canada lacks unifying features. Hockey, Tim Horton's and not opening fire at the drop of a hat. However. The polling is in one direction.
"Should the queen step down or die, Canadians’ enthusiasm for the monarchy drops further, with 66 per cent saying they are opposed to recognizing “King Charles” as head of state, a figure that has increased from 54 per cent in 2016." November 2021 report.
Irrelevant as Trudeau is a monarchist and will be replaced by a monarchist Conservative government
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
They really aren’t “very American”. Have you even been there?
My younger daughter is Australian, I have Australian uncles, aunts, cousins. I know Australia extremely well, probably better than any country after Britain
Australians are Australian. But the culture is closer to the UK than the USA
Australia is also the only foreign country where I’ve felt, immediately, on my first visit, entirely at home
I certainly never felt or feel that in the USA, nor Canada. I’ve not been to NZ
I was thinking more of political connections and alliances. Much stronger Aus-US (as reflected by the hysteria on PB over the tech transfer agreement Aukus). In way of life, yep, it's like California in some ways but with fish and chips. I've been there too.
The former is as least as important as the latter when it comes to going republican.
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
No they aren't and Canadians and New Zealanders certainly aren't. Plus Australians voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999
1999? That's almost as far back as 1638 in modern politics.
The Aussies and Canucks don't cringe and grovel to royalty.
In Canada Trudeau is a monarchist as are the Conservative opposition, it separates them from the Republic of the USA
I think that's the key point. The retention of the monarchy is a key differential from the mighty neighbour to the South. Most Canadians want to retain a sense of national identity and, curiously, the link to the royals helps them to achieve that. Different in that respect to the Antipodeans.
(Having said that - I kinda wonder if Oz goes Republic whether the NZers will retain the crown just to be different? I was very struck how they rejected the proposal to change the flag, so quite capable of being sticks-in-the-mud.)
That is an important point. Canada lacks unifying features. Hockey, Tim Horton's and not opening fire at the drop of a hat. However. The polling is in one direction.
However for republicans to win, they need a thought-through alternative, which is where the Australian campaign went off the rails. I remember, years ago, an Ozzie relative telling me, "do we really want President Bob Hawke?". Actually, he put it rather more robustly than that.
Look carefully, Sunak is holding 2 documents - whispers he'll unveil a separate economic plan or strategy alongside the statement... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-60835481
He's just following the example of his boss to its logical conclusion. He can decide what speech he wants to give later.
I am seeing shocking examples of rising fuel bills...this will now consume peoples attention much more than the war
It's important not to fall for the uber-inflated fixed tariffs offered at present, unless you have thought it through. Fixed tariffs are not regulated, and are being marketed in a quite misleading manner.
I am being offered £2800 as a 12 month fix by Octopus in my account, compared to my current capped (previous supplier went bust) £1168.
They are not mentioning that the new capped variable tariff will be £1900 ish at the new capped rates, and will be default.
There's also been some prominent (completely wrong and thick-as-a-plank as usual) scaremongering by 'Professor' Richard Murphy, who assumes that the entire country will be offered the same as he has been offered for the house he lives in with his family in Downham Market. And is telling all his gullibles that everyone will pay £3000.
Take care to look at all the options.
In my case, the big hit will be gas next winter for heating, so that is one of three things I will target for reductions. The others will be normal incremental improvements and capturing more of the 5.5 MWh my solar panels generate.
Meanwhile I'm delighted to see that Jamaica could be on the road to republicanism.
It comes as a shock to many in this country that we built much of our wealth and success by invading countries, crushing people, stealing their land and their produce and selling their people into slavery. Vladimir Putin has nothing on the British empire.
Reparations are due and the tide has rightly turned.
Nobody alive in Britain today was involved in slavery and we abolished slavery well before most European Empires, the Arab States and USA did. There will be no reparations.
Otherwise we might as well claim reparations from Denmark for Viking raids and from Italy for the slaves the Romans took
I always gave Heathener the benefit of the doubt but I suspect, given the continual deliberately contrary positions, others may be correct. Not that she’s a Russian mole, just a wind up.
Thank you for finally accepting that I am not a Russian mole or a troll. I happen to mask my IP for very good reasons. I just can't expose someone close in Westminster. They would be instantly identified. As a more general point ever since Cambridge Analytica I would never browse the internet without using a VPN. I always reject ALL cookies: a stupid euphemism if ever there was. Cookies are TRACKERS not some delicious biccies I've baked up on the Aga.
I can be a wind up, it's true. Not deliberately as such so I'd ask you and others to hear me out.
First, apart from the occasional seemingly off-beam pov like believing we should back Zelensky and stand up to this bastard Putin with a NFZ (it's a point of view, please everyone get over it), I'm pretty consistently left of centre. But not in a traditional Labour way. I'm anti-capitalist but not anti-semitic and I loathe oligarchies and abuses of power wherever they occur: some of the worst offenders in history have been from the Left. Actually there's probably no 'some' about it. If you really wanted to pigeon hold me then perhaps anarchist is the best adjective. And that's what makes me seem contrary. I am BITTERLY opposed to much of modern society. I hate most capitalist companies and I'm trying to live more and more off-grid in my attitudes and behaviour. And I'm a globalist not a nationalist. Religion and nationhood are responsible for most of the evils of the world as far as I'm concerned.
Second, even if you didn't wish to accept any of that, as a more general point this site would be much the poorer and part of a dystopian nightmare if contrary views were not given air. It's really, really, important that in an age of intolerance and binary thinking (Piers Morgan style) we listen to nuance and complexity.
I don't expect all of you to pay attention to this but I believe you should. And to those who do, thank you.
p.s. I am extremely heartened this morning by the many hoots of derision about the young royals in the Caribbean and the often disdainful views about the monarchy going forward.
It has become an object of ridicule and needs reform.
Except ordinary people in Jamaica seem to be supportive of the monarchy.
If 55% want to remove the monarchy then does that mean 55% of the country is an unaccountable, remote elite?
Most of the non white majority Commonwealth removed the British monarch as head of state decades ago, just the Caribbean finally catching up. No real surprise.
We should focus our efforts on keeping the white majority Commonwealth of mainly British origin as Commonwealth realms ie Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In Australia for instance 55% voted to keep the monarchy in 1999
Why on earth should we "focus our efforts" on anything?
If Canada want to retain the Queen as titular head of state, that's fine. If they want to move to another approach, that's also fine - it's their country. It's got absolutely sod all to do with us, and there's no reason whatsoever for even the most ardent British monarchist to push it on other countries.
No monarchists like me have a duty to promote and support maintaining our monarchy in all its realms as far as we can
The move to republics throughout the commonwealth will rapidly increase post HMQ no matter how much you want to live in the past
I know that the psychology of one individual is not more important than the constitutions of several countries, but imagine what it must do to a person to spend your whole life waiting to do a job - more than seven decades - knowing you can only do the job once your mother drops dead, and then when you get the job to face the prospect of such a public and personal rejection of several countries deciding they don't want you to do the job anyway.
Simply devastating.
Sorry, but tough. And if nothing else, his expensive upbringing should have taught him to face such things with equanimity.
..I know that the psychology of one individual is not more important than the constitutions of several countries, but... Are we to deploy such sympathetic feelings in Putin's direction, too ?
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
No they aren't and Canadians and New Zealanders certainly aren't. Plus Australians voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999
1999? That's almost as far back as 1638 in modern politics.
The Aussies and Canucks don't cringe and grovel to royalty.
In Canada Trudeau is a monarchist as are the Conservative opposition, it separates them from the Republic of the USA
I think that's the key point. The retention of the monarchy is a key differential from the mighty neighbour to the South. Most Canadians want to retain a sense of national identity and, curiously, the link to the royals helps them to achieve that. Different in that respect to the Antipodeans.
(Having said that - I kinda wonder if Oz goes Republic whether the NZers will retain the crown just to be different? I was very struck how they rejected the proposal to change the flag, so quite capable of being sticks-in-the-mud.)
That is an important point. Canada lacks unifying features. Hockey, Tim Horton's and not opening fire at the drop of a hat. However. The polling is in one direction.
"Should the queen step down or die, Canadians’ enthusiasm for the monarchy drops further, with 66 per cent saying they are opposed to recognizing “King Charles” as head of state, a figure that has increased from 54 per cent in 2016." November 2021 report.
Irrelevant as Trudeau is a monarchist and will be replaced by a monarchist Conservative government
Of course, being a Tory monarchist, you don't believe that anyone else's views are worthy of consideration.
Which government would be better at managing the economy?
Con gov led by Johnson: 31% (+4) Lab gov led by Starmer: 22% (-2) Neither: 26% (-1)
(Changes from 17 Feb)
YouGov
Which government would be better at improving living standards?
Lab gov led by Keir Starmer: 31% (+1) Con gov led by Boris Johnson: 22% (+3) Neither: 29% (-2)
(Changes from 17 Feb)
Interesting indication of how the phrasing of the question matters. As an economist I see these two questions as ultimately the same, yet they yield different responses from the public.
Point also made by DixieDean above. My take is that on average people see Con as good for the size of the cake and Lab as good for dividing it up.
That might be part of it, yes. Capitalism is generally (but not always) great at increasing the cake, but frequently (and again not always) terrible at making sure the cake is shared reasonably. The Tories are the party of more capitalism, Labour the party of less capitalism. Although really the standard of living for the average person owes more to the size of the cake than how it is divided, and an economy that doesn't raise living standards broadly cannot be said to be a well functioning economy. So for me they really are the same question. In today's environment given the unprecedented car crash in household real incomes right now I would be much happier to be Labour than the Tories, as I think the second question will determine how people vote.
I think as rising energy bills and fuel costs bite people will sadly lose interest in the Ukraine war. Its already getting less attention in the news
Hello!
I think you are right, though the two are of course linked. Inflation and fuel bills were bad before the war started, they're getting much, much worse now as a result.
Inflation is running at over 6% (officially) and that's excluding a lot of stuff you spend your actual pay cheque on, like, say, a roof over your head.
Interest rates are going to be negative for a long time - raising them to 6% would destroy the economy. Raising them to 4% would destroy the economy. If I recall, in the US, if the Fed raised rates to 7%, they would default on their national debt.
The nearest comparison we have is the early 80s, when Volcker had to raise interest rates in the US to 20% to get inflation back under control, leading to 10% unemployment - both unthinkable today.
Therefore we have to assume that inflation is here to stay. And plan accordingly. A spiral of higher prices and wage demands and a stagnating economy.
I think we are rapidly approaching an event horizon where people lose trust in money. That means people who are able to save are going to have to do so in different ways - gold, equities, crypto, real estate.
Most people however won't be able to save. They will be trapped in jobs with pay rising by less than the cost of living - so will either have far less money to spend, or will quit their jobs, or else you'll see 70s style industrial action again. Either way, all bad news for the economy. Meanwhile the gap between rich (those who have assets that rise with inflation, e.g. a house) and poor (everyone else) will widen, substantially.
It is hard to see a way out of it at the moment, but it does look like we are set for a re-run of the 70s.
I think it was MaxPB who said the other day if we don't get the housing situation under control you're eventually going to get a population that votes to curtail property rights. I'd concur with that analysis.
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
No they aren't and Canadians and New Zealanders certainly aren't. Plus Australians voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999
1999? That's almost as far back as 1638 in modern politics.
The Aussies and Canucks don't cringe and grovel to royalty.
In Canada Trudeau is a monarchist as are the Conservative opposition, it separates them from the Republic of the USA
I think that's the key point. The retention of the monarchy is a key differential from the mighty neighbour to the South. Most Canadians want to retain a sense of national identity and, curiously, the link to the royals helps them to achieve that. Different in that respect to the Antipodeans.
(Having said that - I kinda wonder if Oz goes Republic whether the NZers will retain the crown just to be different? I was very struck how they rejected the proposal to change the flag, so quite capable of being sticks-in-the-mud.)
That is an important point. Canada lacks unifying features. Hockey, Tim Horton's and not opening fire at the drop of a hat. However. The polling is in one direction.
However for republicans to win, they need a thought-through alternative, which is where the Australian campaign went off the rails. I remember, years ago, an Ozzie relative telling me, "do we really want President Bob Hawke?". Actually, he put it rather more robustly than that.
This is true. It is apathy I reckon at the moment. Plus. Canada is pretty much the most devolved Western democracy there is. The introduction of a President with any power whatsoever would be controversial.
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
No they aren't and Canadians and New Zealanders certainly aren't. Plus Australians voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999
1999? That's almost as far back as 1638 in modern politics.
The Aussies and Canucks don't cringe and grovel to royalty.
In Canada Trudeau is a monarchist as are the Conservative opposition, it separates them from the Republic of the USA
I think that's the key point. The retention of the monarchy is a key differential from the mighty neighbour to the South. Most Canadians want to retain a sense of national identity and, curiously, the link to the royals helps them to achieve that. Different in that respect to the Antipodeans.
(Having said that - I kinda wonder if Oz goes Republic whether the NZers will retain the crown just to be different? I was very struck how they rejected the proposal to change the flag, so quite capable of being sticks-in-the-mud.)
That is an important point. Canada lacks unifying features. Hockey, Tim Horton's and not opening fire at the drop of a hat. However. The polling is in one direction.
"Should the queen step down or die, Canadians’ enthusiasm for the monarchy drops further, with 66 per cent saying they are opposed to recognizing “King Charles” as head of state, a figure that has increased from 54 per cent in 2016." November 2021 report.
Irrelevant as Trudeau is a monarchist and will be replaced by a monarchist Conservative government
Of course, being a Tory monarchist, you don't believe that anyone else's views are worthy of consideration.
To have a referendum you have to have a government willing to grant one, neither Trudeau nor the Tories will.
Note too even on that poll 54% of Canadians want to keep the Queen and only 52% to replace the monarchy longer term. Those figures are distorted by French origin majority Quebec where only 10% want to keep the monarchy however every Canadian province has to agree to replace the monarchy under the Canadian constitutional amendment structure, near impossible
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
They really aren’t “very American”. Have you even been there?
My younger daughter is Australian, I have Australian uncles, aunts, cousins. I know Australia extremely well, probably better than any country after Britain
Australians are Australian. But the culture is closer to the UK than the USA
Australia is also the only foreign country where I’ve felt, immediately, on my first visit, entirely at home
I certainly never felt or feel that in the USA, nor Canada. I’ve not been to NZ
I was thinking more of political connections and alliances. Much stronger Aus-US (as reflected by the hysteria on PB over the tech transfer agreement Aukus). In way of life, yep, it's like California in some ways but with fish and chips. I've been there too.
The former is as least as important as the latter when it comes to going republican.
Sure, politically-militarily it is in the American sphere, but so is all of the West. That doesn’t say much
Culturally, Oz is way more British (tho it is of course more itself, and confidently so)
I believe Australia regularly tops the polls of places Brits would like to emigrate to; because we feel at home there. Pubs and pints. Masterchef and mates. Cricket and rugby
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
No they aren't and Canadians and New Zealanders certainly aren't. Plus Australians voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999
1999? That's almost as far back as 1638 in modern politics.
The Aussies and Canucks don't cringe and grovel to royalty.
In Canada Trudeau is a monarchist as are the Conservative opposition, it separates them from the Republic of the USA
I think that's the key point. The retention of the monarchy is a key differential from the mighty neighbour to the South. Most Canadians want to retain a sense of national identity and, curiously, the link to the royals helps them to achieve that. Different in that respect to the Antipodeans.
(Having said that - I kinda wonder if Oz goes Republic whether the NZers will retain the crown just to be different? I was very struck how they rejected the proposal to change the flag, so quite capable of being sticks-in-the-mud.)
That is an important point. Canada lacks unifying features. Hockey, Tim Horton's and not opening fire at the drop of a hat. However. The polling is in one direction.
"Should the queen step down or die, Canadians’ enthusiasm for the monarchy drops further, with 66 per cent saying they are opposed to recognizing “King Charles” as head of state, a figure that has increased from 54 per cent in 2016." November 2021 report.
Irrelevant as Trudeau is a monarchist and will be replaced by a monarchist Conservative government
Of course, being a Tory monarchist, you don't believe that anyone else's views are worthy of consideration.
I think, with respect, you're missing the point that @HYUFD is making. There is no opportunity for constitutional change for years in Canada, and by the time there is, Charles III will probably be well-ensconced and we'll even be looking forward to William V. No guarantees, but the writing isn't really on the wall, just yet.
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
No they aren't and Canadians and New Zealanders certainly aren't. Plus Australians voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999
1999? That's almost as far back as 1638 in modern politics.
The Aussies and Canucks don't cringe and grovel to royalty.
In Canada Trudeau is a monarchist as are the Conservative opposition, it separates them from the Republic of the USA
I think that's the key point. The retention of the monarchy is a key differential from the mighty neighbour to the South. Most Canadians want to retain a sense of national identity and, curiously, the link to the royals helps them to achieve that. Different in that respect to the Antipodeans.
(Having said that - I kinda wonder if Oz goes Republic whether the NZers will retain the crown just to be different? I was very struck how they rejected the proposal to change the flag, so quite capable of being sticks-in-the-mud.)
That is an important point. Canada lacks unifying features. Hockey, Tim Horton's and not opening fire at the drop of a hat. However. The polling is in one direction.
"Should the queen step down or die, Canadians’ enthusiasm for the monarchy drops further, with 66 per cent saying they are opposed to recognizing “King Charles” as head of state, a figure that has increased from 54 per cent in 2016." November 2021 report.
Irrelevant as Trudeau is a monarchist and will be replaced by a monarchist Conservative government
Of course, being a Tory monarchist, you don't believe that anyone else's views are worthy of consideration.
To have a referendum you have to have a government willing to grant one, neither Trudeau nor the Tories will.
Note too even on that poll 54% of Canadians want to keep the Queen and only 52% to replace the monarchy longer term. Those figures are distorted by French origin majority Quebec where only 10% want to keep the monarchy however every Canadian province has to agree to replace the monarchy under the Canadian constitional amendment structure, near impossible
"Queen". I was talking about the future King. Huge difference.
"Only". You were saying hours ago that 55% was a massive majority!
And in any case you have proved my point in that your attitudfe to everything is that if the Tory Party says no it must be ignored.
I don’t understand the total pardon of Scotch witches. Is Sturgeon seriously claiming they were ALL innocent and wrongly burned?
1. I’m pretty sure there were a few who actually did boil up frog’s blood and mutter incantations
2. The blanket pardon sends out a terrible signal, basically inviting toothless crones in Cumbernauld to get out the scrying glass and put hexes on the neighbour’s Xbox. Scotland will now see a resurgence of witchcraft that will spread across the UK. Yet another case of the Devolution Settlement not working as planned
Some of them were not very nice, apparently:
Round about the cauldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Swelter’d venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Second Witch Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver’d by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Definitely not a Delia recipe!
Normally this sort of thing irritates me - but I'm relaxed about the pardon of witches, though of the list of things the Scottish government might want to apologise about I don't think it ranks particularly highly.
The reason this doesn't irritate me is that - based on my understanding of the world - I think it highly likely that none of the individuals found guilty of witchcraft were guilty. They were genuine miscarriages of justice. Whereas the likes of Alan Turing: much as we may not like it, he was, it was likely, guilty of breaking the law of the land at the time. We might well find cause to regret that the law was in place, but it makes no sense to pardon him.
That raises some interesting questions.
1. Suppose you have someone serving a custodial sentence for a crime which is subsequently abolished. Would you keep the person imprisoned for something that's no longer a crime, and where it's acknowledged it shouldn't previously have been a crime?
2. Or, a more extreme example of the same thing, do you support prosecution for something that was a crime at the time the defendant was alleged to have committed the offence, but is no longer?
Seems to me that the logic of your position would be to prosecute and continue imprisonment in those cases, but I think that would be morally repugnant.
There's an important legal principle against retrospectively criminalizing activities - because it makes it impossible for people to obey the law - but I don't think this needs to be symmetrical, that we cannot retrospectively decriminalize activities.
Some may wish to draw a parallel with partygate, but there's a difference in that officially it is still maintained that it was necessary for the law to have criminalized certain activities at that time, even if that is no longer the case now.
Phillips P. OBrien @PhillipsPOBrien · 8m Interesting priority list, no hand held anti-tank weapons and no small arms and ammo. More big ticket, advanced systems. Maybe the supply system for the smaller stuff isn’t too pressing for the Ukrainians.
Euromaidan Press @EuromaidanPress Advisor to Ukrainian President tells Ukraine's partners what Ukraine needs:
1) modern air defense, if you can't close the sky 2) offensive weapons - cruise missiles/shells for heavy rockets 3) tough oil embargo 4) closed ports for all Russian ships
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
No they aren't and Canadians and New Zealanders certainly aren't. Plus Australians voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999
1999? That's almost as far back as 1638 in modern politics.
The Aussies and Canucks don't cringe and grovel to royalty.
In Canada Trudeau is a monarchist as are the Conservative opposition, it separates them from the Republic of the USA
I think that's the key point. The retention of the monarchy is a key differential from the mighty neighbour to the South. Most Canadians want to retain a sense of national identity and, curiously, the link to the royals helps them to achieve that. Different in that respect to the Antipodeans.
(Having said that - I kinda wonder if Oz goes Republic whether the NZers will retain the crown just to be different? I was very struck how they rejected the proposal to change the flag, so quite capable of being sticks-in-the-mud.)
That is an important point. Canada lacks unifying features. Hockey, Tim Horton's and not opening fire at the drop of a hat. However. The polling is in one direction.
"Should the queen step down or die, Canadians’ enthusiasm for the monarchy drops further, with 66 per cent saying they are opposed to recognizing “King Charles” as head of state, a figure that has increased from 54 per cent in 2016." November 2021 report.
Irrelevant as Trudeau is a monarchist and will be replaced by a monarchist Conservative government
Of course, being a Tory monarchist, you don't believe that anyone else's views are worthy of consideration.
I think, with respect, you're missing the point that @HYUFD is making. There is no opportunity for constitutional change for years in Canada, and by the time there is, Charles III will probably be well-ensconced and we'll even be looking forward to William V. No guarantees, but the writing isn't really on the wall, just yet.
Fair enough. But HYUFD still needs to do something about his thinking, that there is such a thing as a fervently monarchist Empire. We're not living in 1922.
I don’t understand the total pardon of Scotch witches. Is Sturgeon seriously claiming they were ALL innocent and wrongly burned?
1. I’m pretty sure there were a few who actually did boil up frog’s blood and mutter incantations
2. The blanket pardon sends out a terrible signal, basically inviting toothless crones in Cumbernauld to get out the scrying glass and put hexes on the neighbour’s Xbox. Scotland will now see a resurgence of witchcraft that will spread across the UK. Yet another case of the Devolution Settlement not working as planned
Some of them were not very nice, apparently:
Round about the cauldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Swelter’d venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Second Witch Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver’d by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Definitely not a Delia recipe!
Normally this sort of thing irritates me - but I'm relaxed about the pardon of witches, though of the list of things the Scottish government might want to apologise about I don't think it ranks particularly highly.
The reason this doesn't irritate me is that - based on my understanding of the world - I think it highly likely that none of the individuals found guilty of witchcraft were guilty. They were genuine miscarriages of justice. Whereas the likes of Alan Turing: much as we may not like it, he was, it was likely, guilty of breaking the law of the land at the time. We might well find cause to regret that the law was in place, but it makes no sense to pardon him.
That raises some interesting questions.
1. Suppose you have someone serving a custodial sentence for a crime which is subsequently abolished. Would you keep the person imprisoned for something that's no longer a crime, and where it's acknowledged it shouldn't previously have been a crime?
2. Or, a more extreme example of the same thing, do you support prosecution for something that was a crime at the time the defendant was alleged to have committed the offence, but is no longer?
Seems to me that the logic of your position would be to prosecute and continue imprisonment in those cases, but I think that would be morally repugnant.
There's an important legal principle against retrospectively criminalizing activities - because it makes it impossible for people to obey the law - but I don't think this needs to be symmetrical, that we cannot retrospectively decriminalize activities.
Some may wish to draw a parallel with partygate, but there's a difference in that officially it is still maintained that it was necessary for the law to have criminalized certain activities at that time, even if that is no longer the case now.
A good example of 2 would of course be fixed penalties for breaching Covid regulations. My first thought was such an incredible waste of police time. My second was, wait a minute, this is the Met and it is at least relatively harmless.
I don’t understand the total pardon of Scotch witches. Is Sturgeon seriously claiming they were ALL innocent and wrongly burned?
1. I’m pretty sure there were a few who actually did boil up frog’s blood and mutter incantations
2. The blanket pardon sends out a terrible signal, basically inviting toothless crones in Cumbernauld to get out the scrying glass and put hexes on the neighbour’s Xbox. Scotland will now see a resurgence of witchcraft that will spread across the UK. Yet another case of the Devolution Settlement not working as planned
Some of them were not very nice, apparently:
Round about the cauldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Swelter’d venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Second Witch Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver’d by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Definitely not a Delia recipe!
Normally this sort of thing irritates me - but I'm relaxed about the pardon of witches, though of the list of things the Scottish government might want to apologise about I don't think it ranks particularly highly.
The reason this doesn't irritate me is that - based on my understanding of the world - I think it highly likely that none of the individuals found guilty of witchcraft were guilty. They were genuine miscarriages of justice. Whereas the likes of Alan Turing: much as we may not like it, he was, it was likely, guilty of breaking the law of the land at the time. We might well find cause to regret that the law was in place, but it makes no sense to pardon him.
That raises some interesting questions.
1. Suppose you have someone serving a custodial sentence for a crime which is subsequently abolished. Would you keep the person imprisoned for something that's no longer a crime, and where it's acknowledged it shouldn't previously have been a crime?
2. Or, a more extreme example of the same thing, do you support prosecution for something that was a crime at the time the defendant was alleged to have committed the offence, but is no longer?
Seems to me that the logic of your position would be to prosecute and continue imprisonment in those cases, but I think that would be morally repugnant.
There's an important legal principle against retrospectively criminalizing activities - because it makes it impossible for people to obey the law - but I don't think this needs to be symmetrical, that we cannot retrospectively decriminalize activities.
Some may wish to draw a parallel with partygate, but there's a difference in that officially it is still maintained that it was necessary for the law to have criminalized certain activities at that time, even if that is no longer the case now.
How would this apply regarding laws against homsexuality? Should we be prosecuting pensioners for their activities before it was decriminalised? I think there would be outrage.
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
No they aren't and Canadians and New Zealanders certainly aren't. Plus Australians voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999
1999? That's almost as far back as 1638 in modern politics.
The Aussies and Canucks don't cringe and grovel to royalty.
In Canada Trudeau is a monarchist as are the Conservative opposition, it separates them from the Republic of the USA
I think that's the key point. The retention of the monarchy is a key differential from the mighty neighbour to the South. Most Canadians want to retain a sense of national identity and, curiously, the link to the royals helps them to achieve that. Different in that respect to the Antipodeans.
(Having said that - I kinda wonder if Oz goes Republic whether the NZers will retain the crown just to be different? I was very struck how they rejected the proposal to change the flag, so quite capable of being sticks-in-the-mud.)
That is an important point. Canada lacks unifying features. Hockey, Tim Horton's and not opening fire at the drop of a hat. However. The polling is in one direction.
However for republicans to win, they need a thought-through alternative, which is where the Australian campaign went off the rails. I remember, years ago, an Ozzie relative telling me, "do we really want President Bob Hawke?". Actually, he put it rather more robustly than that.
This is true. It is apathy I reckon at the moment. Plus. Canada is pretty much the most devolved Western democracy there is. The introduction of a President with any power whatsoever would be controversial.
The existence of a constitutional monarchy without any real powers as head of state is a very convenient arrangement for some countries, and its replacement fraught with political difficulty. For others, it's as irksome as the EU to a member whose electorate has a majority, or significant minority of rabid Brexiteers.
It is a ridiculous archaism, but providing it is completely subject to democratic control, up to and including its abolition, then it is mostly harmless.
Phillips P. OBrien @PhillipsPOBrien · 8m Interesting priority list, no hand held anti-tank weapons and no small arms and ammo. More big ticket, advanced systems. Maybe the supply system for the smaller stuff isn’t too pressing for the Ukrainians.
Euromaidan Press @EuromaidanPress Advisor to Ukrainian President tells Ukraine's partners what Ukraine needs:
1) modern air defense, if you can't close the sky 2) offensive weapons - cruise missiles/shells for heavy rockets 3) tough oil embargo 4) closed ports for all Russian ships
As we have seen with P+O. PB consensus would be 4 can't be done. Define "Russian". We can't even define a ferry sailing twice daily between two UK ports and never leaving our waters as anything other than Cypriot.
I don’t understand the total pardon of Scotch witches. Is Sturgeon seriously claiming they were ALL innocent and wrongly burned?
1. I’m pretty sure there were a few who actually did boil up frog’s blood and mutter incantations
2. The blanket pardon sends out a terrible signal, basically inviting toothless crones in Cumbernauld to get out the scrying glass and put hexes on the neighbour’s Xbox. Scotland will now see a resurgence of witchcraft that will spread across the UK. Yet another case of the Devolution Settlement not working as planned
Some of them were not very nice, apparently:
Round about the cauldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Swelter’d venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Second Witch Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver’d by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Definitely not a Delia recipe!
Not Shakespeare but I always very much enjoyed this kids' book version:
Then, with a laugh, Bleach filled the bath Until the bath was brimming And, while she tipped in smelly stuff, Bill heard the old girl singing:
Oh, fizzy, Lilac scented balls, Please hear the words I'm speaking; Oh, apple blossom, lemon zest, Cherry scrub and all the rest, Please do your very smelly best To stop this beast from reeking
Smelly Bill, Daniel Postgate - an absolute favourite in our house
For rentals it is required to be E or better by law. See if your LL will do anything - if you have to leave it is expensive for the LL.
I was talking to one of my Ts in my grandma's solid-walled 2up2down detached cottage who is being told £260 a month (which I think is probably the Fixed Rate Rate unregulated trick I mention in my other post), which will be more like £180 a month.
She has 2 washers and about 8 dogs, and all rooms have 3 outside walls, so uses quite a lot of energy for the size.
When she moved in in 2010 the energy bills were £230 a month, which we reduced to under £100, without switching (which up until last year often gave -25% wrt market average), by investment (eg double glazing, insulation) and targeted reductions (eg she had a washer-dryer costing £15-18 a week to run).
But it's a tricky one this time round, since we've done the low hanging fruit.
Meanwhile I'm delighted to see that Jamaica could be on the road to republicanism.
It comes as a shock to many in this country that we built much of our wealth and success by invading countries, crushing people, stealing their land and their produce and selling their people into slavery. Vladimir Putin has nothing on the British empire.
Reparations are due and the tide has rightly turned.
Nobody alive in Britain today was involved in slavery and we abolished slavery well before most European Empires, the Arab States and USA did. There will be no reparations.
Otherwise we might as well claim reparations from Denmark for Viking raids and from Italy for the slaves the Romans took
I always gave Heathener the benefit of the doubt but I suspect, given the continual deliberately contrary positions, others may be correct. Not that she’s a Russian mole, just a wind up.
Thank you for finally accepting that I am not a Russian mole or a troll. I happen to mask my IP for very good reasons. I just can't expose someone close in Westminster. They would be instantly identified. As a more general point ever since Cambridge Analytica I would never browse the internet without using a VPN. I always reject ALL cookies: a stupid euphemism if ever there was. Cookies are TRACKERS not some delicious biccies I've baked up on the Aga.
I can be a wind up, it's true. Not deliberately as such so I'd ask you and others to hear me out.
First, apart from the occasional seemingly off-beam pov like believing we should back Zelensky and stand up to this bastard Putin with a NFZ (it's a point of view, please everyone get over it), I'm pretty consistently left of centre. But not in a traditional Labour way. I'm anti-capitalist but not anti-semitic and I loathe oligarchies and abuses of power wherever they occur: some of the worst offenders in history have been from the Left. Actually there's probably no 'some' about it. If you really wanted to pigeon hold me then perhaps anarchist is the best adjective. And that's what makes me seem contrary. I am BITTERLY opposed to much of modern society. I hate most capitalist companies and I'm trying to live more and more off-grid in my attitudes and behaviour. And I'm a globalist not a nationalist. Religion and nationhood are responsible for most of the evils of the world as far as I'm concerned.
Second, even if you didn't wish to accept any of that, as a more general point this site would be much the poorer and part of a dystopian nightmare if contrary views were not given air. It's really, really, important that in an age of intolerance and binary thinking (Piers Morgan style) we listen to nuance and complexity.
I don't expect all of you to pay attention to this but I believe you should. And to those who do, thank you.
p.s. I am extremely heartened this morning by the many hoots of derision about the young royals in the Caribbean and the often disdainful views about the monarchy going forward.
It has become an object of ridicule and needs reform.
Except ordinary people in Jamaica seem to be supportive of the monarchy.
If 55% want to remove the monarchy then does that mean 55% of the country is an unaccountable, remote elite?
Most of the non white majority Commonwealth removed the British monarch as head of state decades ago, just the Caribbean finally catching up. No real surprise.
We should focus our efforts on keeping the white majority Commonwealth of mainly British origin as Commonwealth realms ie Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In Australia for instance 55% voted to keep the monarchy in 1999
Why on earth should we "focus our efforts" on anything?
If Canada want to retain the Queen as titular head of state, that's fine. If they want to move to another approach, that's also fine - it's their country. It's got absolutely sod all to do with us, and there's no reason whatsoever for even the most ardent British monarchist to push it on other countries.
No monarchists like me have a duty to promote and support maintaining our monarchy in all its realms as far as we can
The move to republics throughout the commonwealth will rapidly increase post HMQ no matter how much you want to live in the past
I know that the psychology of one individual is not more important than the constitutions of several countries, but imagine what it must do to a person to spend your whole life waiting to do a job - more than seven decades - knowing you can only do the job once your mother drops dead, and then when you get the job to face the prospect of such a public and personal rejection of several countries deciding they don't want you to do the job anyway.
Simply devastating.
Sorry, but tough. And if nothing else, his expensive upbringing should have taught him to face such things with equanimity.
..I know that the psychology of one individual is not more important than the constitutions of several countries, but... Are we to deploy such sympathetic feelings in Putin's direction, too ?
I'm not asking you to feel any sympathy - though if you do, a Republic is the obvious way to prevent similar psychological damage to future generations of the family - I raise the situation from a point of view of scientific curiosity.
For rentals it is required to be E or better by law. See if your LL will do anything - if you have to leave it is expensive for the LL.
I was talking to one of my Ts in my grandma's solid-walled 2up2down detached cottage who is being told £260 a month (which I think is probably the Fixed Rate Rate unregulated trick I mention in my other post), which will be more like £180 a month.
She has 2 washers and about 8 dogs, and all rooms have 3 outside walls, so uses quite a lot of energy for the size.
When she moved in in 2010 the bills were £230 a month, which we reducted to under £100, without switching, by investment (eg double glazing, insulation) and targeted reductions (eg she had a washer-dryer costing £15-18 a week to run).
But it's a tricky one this time round.
"What's the EPC (Energy Efficiency) number for your house, now, Horse?"
I don’t understand the total pardon of Scotch witches. Is Sturgeon seriously claiming they were ALL innocent and wrongly burned?
1. I’m pretty sure there were a few who actually did boil up frog’s blood and mutter incantations
2. The blanket pardon sends out a terrible signal, basically inviting toothless crones in Cumbernauld to get out the scrying glass and put hexes on the neighbour’s Xbox. Scotland will now see a resurgence of witchcraft that will spread across the UK. Yet another case of the Devolution Settlement not working as planned
Some of them were not very nice, apparently:
Round about the cauldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Swelter’d venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Second Witch Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver’d by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Definitely not a Delia recipe!
Normally this sort of thing irritates me - but I'm relaxed about the pardon of witches, though of the list of things the Scottish government might want to apologise about I don't think it ranks particularly highly.
The reason this doesn't irritate me is that - based on my understanding of the world - I think it highly likely that none of the individuals found guilty of witchcraft were guilty. They were genuine miscarriages of justice. Whereas the likes of Alan Turing: much as we may not like it, he was, it was likely, guilty of breaking the law of the land at the time. We might well find cause to regret that the law was in place, but it makes no sense to pardon him.
That raises some interesting questions.
1. Suppose you have someone serving a custodial sentence for a crime which is subsequently abolished. Would you keep the person imprisoned for something that's no longer a crime, and where it's acknowledged it shouldn't previously have been a crime?
2. Or, a more extreme example of the same thing, do you support prosecution for something that was a crime at the time the defendant was alleged to have committed the offence, but is no longer?
Seems to me that the logic of your position would be to prosecute and continue imprisonment in those cases, but I think that would be morally repugnant.
There's an important legal principle against retrospectively criminalizing activities - because it makes it impossible for people to obey the law - but I don't think this needs to be symmetrical, that we cannot retrospectively decriminalize activities.
Some may wish to draw a parallel with partygate, but there's a difference in that officially it is still maintained that it was necessary for the law to have criminalized certain activities at that time, even if that is no longer the case now.
How would this apply regarding laws against homsexuality? Should we be prosecuting pensioners for their activities before it was decriminalised? I think there would be outrage.
Edit. Not just pensioners in Scotland.
Good questions: I'd say we release people who are imprisoned for something which is no longer a crime (what public interest does not doing so serve) and that we don't people retrospectively for things we no longer consider crimes (for the same reasons). I should add that my views here are not strong and are driven primarily by pedantry: pardoning someone, to me, implies that the state concedes that the person did not actually do what they were accused of, not that the state no longer has a problem with what they were accused of. (I may not even be right about this.)
Poland's line is hardening all the time here. They, of course, are bearing the brunt of the refugees too. I think that they are looking at the Russian performance in Ukraine and thinking, we could take that lot. When you see videos like the one downthread the moral cowardice of simply standing by whilst this evil is perpetrated is hard to bear.
If Russia did not have nuclear weapons I suspect this war would already have spread and we might even be involved. But it does and we cower as a result whilst evil reigns. I cannot argue the sense of it but it feels so wrong.
I get the feeling that if Russia did not have Nuclear weapons and NATO had become involved, NATO troops would be in Moscow already. There's simply no comparison, on a conventional basis, between the kit of NATO/US versus what Russia seem to wheel-out. We need to reassess our assumption Russia is the USSR with their huge Red Army. They're nothing more than a middle-ranking (at best) conventional military power. All this toss about Russian hypersonic this and that sounds like Hitler with his "Superweapons" at the fag-end of WW2. Sure he may have one or two, with some nice prototypes or things on the drawing board. But really? The F35 alone has cost the best part of half-a-trillion dollars to develop. So much that even the US has to bring in partners to make it viable. Russia cannot afford large-scale deployment of advanced weaponry, considering what it takes to even get this stuff off the drawing board.
The ONLY thing they have is their nukes. Which obviously goes a long way. (Added to which their Nukes are probably being maintained using glue and sticky tape. I'd be surprised if even half their deployed Nukes would even work).
The key difference is that in the US the magnificent dachas belong to those who run or own the defence industry but in Russia they belong to the politicians and the generals.
'Those who run or own the defence industry' and indeed other industries in Russia prudently have some at least of their 'magnificent dachas' well away from Russia.
I don’t understand the total pardon of Scotch witches. Is Sturgeon seriously claiming they were ALL innocent and wrongly burned?
1. I’m pretty sure there were a few who actually did boil up frog’s blood and mutter incantations
2. The blanket pardon sends out a terrible signal, basically inviting toothless crones in Cumbernauld to get out the scrying glass and put hexes on the neighbour’s Xbox. Scotland will now see a resurgence of witchcraft that will spread across the UK. Yet another case of the Devolution Settlement not working as planned
Some of them were not very nice, apparently:
Round about the cauldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Swelter’d venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Second Witch Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver’d by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Definitely not a Delia recipe!
Normally this sort of thing irritates me - but I'm relaxed about the pardon of witches, though of the list of things the Scottish government might want to apologise about I don't think it ranks particularly highly.
The reason this doesn't irritate me is that - based on my understanding of the world - I think it highly likely that none of the individuals found guilty of witchcraft were guilty. They were genuine miscarriages of justice. Whereas the likes of Alan Turing: much as we may not like it, he was, it was likely, guilty of breaking the law of the land at the time. We might well find cause to regret that the law was in place, but it makes no sense to pardon him.
That raises some interesting questions.
1. Suppose you have someone serving a custodial sentence for a crime which is subsequently abolished. Would you keep the person imprisoned for something that's no longer a crime, and where it's acknowledged it shouldn't previously have been a crime?
2. Or, a more extreme example of the same thing, do you support prosecution for something that was a crime at the time the defendant was alleged to have committed the offence, but is no longer?
Seems to me that the logic of your position would be to prosecute and continue imprisonment in those cases, but I think that would be morally repugnant.
There's an important legal principle against retrospectively criminalizing activities - because it makes it impossible for people to obey the law - but I don't think this needs to be symmetrical, that we cannot retrospectively decriminalize activities.
Some may wish to draw a parallel with partygate, but there's a difference in that officially it is still maintained that it was necessary for the law to have criminalized certain activities at that time, even if that is no longer the case now.
A good example of 2 would of course be fixed penalties for breaching Covid regulations. My first thought was such an incredible waste of police time. My second was, wait a minute, this is the Met and it is at least relatively harmless.
The difference is that you can make the case that the Covid regulations were necessary at the time, but you can't do that for an issue like witchcraft or homosexuality.
Meanwhile I'm delighted to see that Jamaica could be on the road to republicanism.
It comes as a shock to many in this country that we built much of our wealth and success by invading countries, crushing people, stealing their land and their produce and selling their people into slavery. Vladimir Putin has nothing on the British empire.
Reparations are due and the tide has rightly turned.
Nobody alive in Britain today was involved in slavery and we abolished slavery well before most European Empires, the Arab States and USA did. There will be no reparations.
Otherwise we might as well claim reparations from Denmark for Viking raids and from Italy for the slaves the Romans took
I always gave Heathener the benefit of the doubt but I suspect, given the continual deliberately contrary positions, others may be correct. Not that she’s a Russian mole, just a wind up.
Thank you for finally accepting that I am not a Russian mole or a troll. I happen to mask my IP for very good reasons. I just can't expose someone close in Westminster. They would be instantly identified. As a more general point ever since Cambridge Analytica I would never browse the internet without using a VPN. I always reject ALL cookies: a stupid euphemism if ever there was. Cookies are TRACKERS not some delicious biccies I've baked up on the Aga.
I can be a wind up, it's true. Not deliberately as such so I'd ask you and others to hear me out.
First, apart from the occasional seemingly off-beam pov like believing we should back Zelensky and stand up to this bastard Putin with a NFZ (it's a point of view, please everyone get over it), I'm pretty consistently left of centre. But not in a traditional Labour way. I'm anti-capitalist but not anti-semitic and I loathe oligarchies and abuses of power wherever they occur: some of the worst offenders in history have been from the Left. Actually there's probably no 'some' about it. If you really wanted to pigeon hold me then perhaps anarchist is the best adjective. And that's what makes me seem contrary. I am BITTERLY opposed to much of modern society. I hate most capitalist companies and I'm trying to live more and more off-grid in my attitudes and behaviour. And I'm a globalist not a nationalist. Religion and nationhood are responsible for most of the evils of the world as far as I'm concerned.
Second, even if you didn't wish to accept any of that, as a more general point this site would be much the poorer and part of a dystopian nightmare if contrary views were not given air. It's really, really, important that in an age of intolerance and binary thinking (Piers Morgan style) we listen to nuance and complexity.
I don't expect all of you to pay attention to this but I believe you should. And to those who do, thank you.
p.s. I am extremely heartened this morning by the many hoots of derision about the young royals in the Caribbean and the often disdainful views about the monarchy going forward.
It has become an object of ridicule and needs reform.
Except ordinary people in Jamaica seem to be supportive of the monarchy.
If 55% want to remove the monarchy then does that mean 55% of the country is an unaccountable, remote elite?
Most of the non white majority Commonwealth removed the British monarch as head of state decades ago, just the Caribbean finally catching up. No real surprise.
We should focus our efforts on keeping the white majority Commonwealth of mainly British origin as Commonwealth realms ie Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In Australia for instance 55% voted to keep the monarchy in 1999
Why on earth should we "focus our efforts" on anything?
If Canada want to retain the Queen as titular head of state, that's fine. If they want to move to another approach, that's also fine - it's their country. It's got absolutely sod all to do with us, and there's no reason whatsoever for even the most ardent British monarchist to push it on other countries.
No monarchists like me have a duty to promote and support maintaining our monarchy in all its realms as far as we can
The move to republics throughout the commonwealth will rapidly increase post HMQ no matter how much you want to live in the past
I know that the psychology of one individual is not more important than the constitutions of several countries, but imagine what it must do to a person to spend your whole life waiting to do a job - more than seven decades - knowing you can only do the job once your mother drops dead, and then when you get the job to face the prospect of such a public and personal rejection of several countries deciding they don't want you to do the job anyway.
Simply devastating.
Sorry, but tough. And if nothing else, his expensive upbringing should have taught him to face such things with equanimity.
..I know that the psychology of one individual is not more important than the constitutions of several countries, but... Are we to deploy such sympathetic feelings in Putin's direction, too ?
I'm not asking you to feel any sympathy - though if you do, a Republic is the obvious way to prevent similar psychological damage to future generations of the family - I raise the situation from a point of view of scientific curiosity.
That's fair. My point was that if having a monarchy results in such psychological cruelty towards an individual, then it's a strong argument against having one.
Despite high house prices whats kept the young on side so far has been cheap foreign travel and cheap consumer goods. Take that away and things could get interesting
Things those massive fuel/power increases are going to kill are big tellies, latest phones, foreign holidays. Holidays are especially going to be missed after 2 years of Covid.
We are going to be given a shock lesson in the importance of saving for a rainy day, now an alien concept to many.
The girls, aged 15 to 18, were transferred to the UK’s biggest prison for boys following the enforced closure of a privately run centre for safety reasons last year, the Guardian has learned.
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
They really aren’t “very American”. Have you even been there?
My younger daughter is Australian, I have Australian uncles, aunts, cousins. I know Australia extremely well, probably better than any country after Britain
Australians are Australian. But the culture is closer to the UK than the USA
Australia is also the only foreign country where I’ve felt, immediately, on my first visit, entirely at home
I certainly never felt or feel that in the USA, nor Canada. I’ve not been to NZ
I was thinking more of political connections and alliances. Much stronger Aus-US (as reflected by the hysteria on PB over the tech transfer agreement Aukus). In way of life, yep, it's like California in some ways but with fish and chips. I've been there too.
The former is as least as important as the latter when it comes to going republican.
Sure, politically-militarily it is in the American sphere, but so is all of the West. That doesn’t say much
Culturally, Oz is way more British (tho it is of course more itself, and confidently so)
I believe Australia regularly tops the polls of places Brits would like to emigrate to; because we feel at home there. Pubs and pints. Masterchef and mates. Cricket and rugby
But with sun and (probably too much) space
And deadly spiders. And droughts. And plagues of mice.
For rentals it is required to be E or better by law. See if your LL will do anything - if you have to leave it is expensive for the LL.
I was talking to one of my Ts in my grandma's solid-walled 2up2down detached cottage who is being told £260 a month (which I think is probably the Fixed Rate Rate unregulated trick I mention in my other post), which will be more like £180 a month.
She has 2 washers and about 8 dogs, and all rooms have 3 outside walls, so uses quite a lot of energy for the size.
When she moved in in 2010 the bills were £230 a month, which we reducted to under £100, without switching, by investment (eg double glazing, insulation) and targeted reductions (eg she had a washer-dryer costing £15-18 a week to run).
But it's a tricky one this time round.
"What's the EPC (Energy Efficiency) number for your house, now, Horse?"
I don’t understand the total pardon of Scotch witches. Is Sturgeon seriously claiming they were ALL innocent and wrongly burned?
1. I’m pretty sure there were a few who actually did boil up frog’s blood and mutter incantations
2. The blanket pardon sends out a terrible signal, basically inviting toothless crones in Cumbernauld to get out the scrying glass and put hexes on the neighbour’s Xbox. Scotland will now see a resurgence of witchcraft that will spread across the UK. Yet another case of the Devolution Settlement not working as planned
Some of them were not very nice, apparently:
Round about the cauldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Swelter’d venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Second Witch Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver’d by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Definitely not a Delia recipe!
Normally this sort of thing irritates me - but I'm relaxed about the pardon of witches, though of the list of things the Scottish government might want to apologise about I don't think it ranks particularly highly.
The reason this doesn't irritate me is that - based on my understanding of the world - I think it highly likely that none of the individuals found guilty of witchcraft were guilty. They were genuine miscarriages of justice. Whereas the likes of Alan Turing: much as we may not like it, he was, it was likely, guilty of breaking the law of the land at the time. We might well find cause to regret that the law was in place, but it makes no sense to pardon him.
That raises some interesting questions.
1. Suppose you have someone serving a custodial sentence for a crime which is subsequently abolished. Would you keep the person imprisoned for something that's no longer a crime, and where it's acknowledged it shouldn't previously have been a crime?
2. Or, a more extreme example of the same thing, do you support prosecution for something that was a crime at the time the defendant was alleged to have committed the offence, but is no longer?
Seems to me that the logic of your position would be to prosecute and continue imprisonment in those cases, but I think that would be morally repugnant.
There's an important legal principle against retrospectively criminalizing activities - because it makes it impossible for people to obey the law - but I don't think this needs to be symmetrical, that we cannot retrospectively decriminalize activities.
Some may wish to draw a parallel with partygate, but there's a difference in that officially it is still maintained that it was necessary for the law to have criminalized certain activities at that time, even if that is no longer the case now.
A good example of 2 would of course be fixed penalties for breaching Covid regulations. My first thought was such an incredible waste of police time. My second was, wait a minute, this is the Met and it is at least relatively harmless.
The difference is that you can make the case that the Covid regulations were necessary at the time, but you can't do that for an issue like witchcraft or homosexuality.
But that's a value judgement isn't it? Witchcraft and homosexuality laws were widely thought to be of the utmost necessity then. Equally. Some didn't see the COVID stuff as vital at all. Quite the opposite.
Despite high house prices whats kept the young on side so far has been cheap foreign travel and cheap consumer goods. Take that away and things could get interesting
Things those massive fuel/power increases are going to kill are big tellies, latest phones, foreign holidays. Holidays are especially going to be missed after 2 years of Covid.
We are going to be given a shock lesson in the importance of saving for a rainy day, now an alien concept to many.
Having a shiny new motor every couple of years on the never never is the one that will really hit home. That is an outward sign of status.
I don’t understand the total pardon of Scotch witches. Is Sturgeon seriously claiming they were ALL innocent and wrongly burned?
1. I’m pretty sure there were a few who actually did boil up frog’s blood and mutter incantations
2. The blanket pardon sends out a terrible signal, basically inviting toothless crones in Cumbernauld to get out the scrying glass and put hexes on the neighbour’s Xbox. Scotland will now see a resurgence of witchcraft that will spread across the UK. Yet another case of the Devolution Settlement not working as planned
Some of them were not very nice, apparently:
Round about the cauldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Swelter’d venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Second Witch Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver’d by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Definitely not a Delia recipe!
Normally this sort of thing irritates me - but I'm relaxed about the pardon of witches, though of the list of things the Scottish government might want to apologise about I don't think it ranks particularly highly.
The reason this doesn't irritate me is that - based on my understanding of the world - I think it highly likely that none of the individuals found guilty of witchcraft were guilty. They were genuine miscarriages of justice. Whereas the likes of Alan Turing: much as we may not like it, he was, it was likely, guilty of breaking the law of the land at the time. We might well find cause to regret that the law was in place, but it makes no sense to pardon him.
That raises some interesting questions.
1. Suppose you have someone serving a custodial sentence for a crime which is subsequently abolished. Would you keep the person imprisoned for something that's no longer a crime, and where it's acknowledged it shouldn't previously have been a crime?
2. Or, a more extreme example of the same thing, do you support prosecution for something that was a crime at the time the defendant was alleged to have committed the offence, but is no longer?
Seems to me that the logic of your position would be to prosecute and continue imprisonment in those cases, but I think that would be morally repugnant.
There's an important legal principle against retrospectively criminalizing activities - because it makes it impossible for people to obey the law - but I don't think this needs to be symmetrical, that we cannot retrospectively decriminalize activities.
Some may wish to draw a parallel with partygate, but there's a difference in that officially it is still maintained that it was necessary for the law to have criminalized certain activities at that time, even if that is no longer the case now.
A good example of 2 would of course be fixed penalties for breaching Covid regulations. My first thought was such an incredible waste of police time. My second was, wait a minute, this is the Met and it is at least relatively harmless.
The difference is that you can make the case that the Covid regulations were necessary at the time, but you can't do that for an issue like witchcraft or homosexuality.
But that's a value judgement isn't it? Witchcraft and homosexuality were widely thought to be of the utmost importance then. Equally. Some didn't see the COVID stuff as vital at all.
Witchcraft is highly unusual inasmuch as it relates to a belief system - magic - which is not just out-of-date, but which we regard with derisive disbelief. This confuses our reaction
See @cookie’s bizarre remarks about ‘miscarriages of justice’ against all convicted 17th century Scottish witches
It’s very likely some of those convicted WERE witches, inasmuch as they cast spells to harm people. Did the spells work? Of course not. Was there evil intent? Malefice? Yes, probably
So pardoning them all is arguably daft, unless you are pardoning them because we now know their ‘magic’ was useless and they couldn’t have harmed anyone.
But THEY didn’t know that; they really thought they could summon the devil
I think as rising energy bills and fuel costs bite people will sadly lose interest in the Ukraine war. Its already getting less attention in the news
Hello!
I think you are right, though the two are of course linked. Inflation and fuel bills were bad before the war started, they're getting much, much worse now as a result.
Inflation is running at over 6% (officially) and that's excluding a lot of stuff you spend your actual pay cheque on, like, say, a roof over your head.
Interest rates are going to be negative for a long time - raising them to 6% would destroy the economy. Raising them to 4% would destroy the economy. If I recall, in the US, if the Fed raised rates to 7%, they would default on their national debt.
The nearest comparison we have is the early 80s, when Volcker had to raise interest rates in the US to 20% to get inflation back under control, leading to 10% unemployment - both unthinkable today.
Therefore we have to assume that inflation is here to stay. And plan accordingly. A spiral of higher prices and wage demands and a stagnating economy.
I think we are rapidly approaching an event horizon where people lose trust in money. That means people who are able to save are going to have to do so in different ways - gold, equities, crypto, real estate.
Most people however won't be able to save. They will be trapped in jobs with pay rising by less than the cost of living - so will either have far less money to spend, or will quit their jobs, or else you'll see 70s style industrial action again. Either way, all bad news for the economy. Meanwhile the gap between rich (those who have assets that rise with inflation, e.g. a house) and poor (everyone else) will widen, substantially.
It is hard to see a way out of it at the moment, but it does look like we are set for a re-run of the 70s.
I think it was MaxPB who said the other day if we don't get the housing situation under control you're eventually going to get a population that votes to curtail property rights. I'd concur with that analysis.
Yes its interesting how the stockmarket has risen throughout all this bad news. In Zimbabwe stocks were an inflation hedge and went parabolic as of course did inflation. And look how uk property prices continue to rise despite rising interest rates
This is a good long watch on Ray Dalio's YouTube channel
TL;DR, as empires fall, you see rising wealth inequality, money printing and conflict between rival powers. His thesis is that we are living through such a decline (from US hegemony) now. And buckle up, because things are going to get worse...
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
They really aren’t “very American”. Have you even been there?
My younger daughter is Australian, I have Australian uncles, aunts, cousins. I know Australia extremely well, probably better than any country after Britain
Australians are Australian. But the culture is closer to the UK than the USA
Australia is also the only foreign country where I’ve felt, immediately, on my first visit, entirely at home
I certainly never felt or feel that in the USA, nor Canada. I’ve not been to NZ
I was thinking more of political connections and alliances. Much stronger Aus-US (as reflected by the hysteria on PB over the tech transfer agreement Aukus). In way of life, yep, it's like California in some ways but with fish and chips. I've been there too.
The former is as least as important as the latter when it comes to going republican.
Sure, politically-militarily it is in the American sphere, but so is all of the West. That doesn’t say much
Culturally, Oz is way more British (tho it is of course more itself, and confidently so)
I believe Australia regularly tops the polls of places Brits would like to emigrate to; because we feel at home there. Pubs and pints. Masterchef and mates. Cricket and rugby
But with sun and (probably too much) space
And deadly spiders. And droughts. And plagues of mice.
Phillips P. OBrien @PhillipsPOBrien · 8m Interesting priority list, no hand held anti-tank weapons and no small arms and ammo. More big ticket, advanced systems. Maybe the supply system for the smaller stuff isn’t too pressing for the Ukrainians.
Euromaidan Press @EuromaidanPress Advisor to Ukrainian President tells Ukraine's partners what Ukraine needs:
1) modern air defense, if you can't close the sky 2) offensive weapons - cruise missiles/shells for heavy rockets 3) tough oil embargo 4) closed ports for all Russian ships
As we have seen with P+O. PB consensus would be 4 can't be done. Define "Russian". We can't even define a ferry sailing twice daily between two UK ports and never leaving our waters as anything other than Cypriot.
I think the anti-tank-weapons and the small arms are in place and continuing, which is why they are missing from that list.
It would not surprise me if there is a training camp somewhere near Ukr where some UKr personnel are being trained at a rapid pace to use StarStreak, and other similar, missiles; that has been noticeably quiet, but takes quite a bit of training to use efficiently. I'm also wondering what is being considered to enable a serious assault on the Black Sea Fleet when it coms close enough.
Agree that the ship thing seems strangely inconsistent. I think the oil embargo will gradually tighten. There are noises around the EU about oil being an easier one to manage than gas.
I don’t understand the total pardon of Scotch witches. Is Sturgeon seriously claiming they were ALL innocent and wrongly burned?
1. I’m pretty sure there were a few who actually did boil up frog’s blood and mutter incantations
2. The blanket pardon sends out a terrible signal, basically inviting toothless crones in Cumbernauld to get out the scrying glass and put hexes on the neighbour’s Xbox. Scotland will now see a resurgence of witchcraft that will spread across the UK. Yet another case of the Devolution Settlement not working as planned
Some of them were not very nice, apparently:
Round about the cauldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Swelter’d venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Second Witch Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver’d by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Definitely not a Delia recipe!
Normally this sort of thing irritates me - but I'm relaxed about the pardon of witches, though of the list of things the Scottish government might want to apologise about I don't think it ranks particularly highly.
The reason this doesn't irritate me is that - based on my understanding of the world - I think it highly likely that none of the individuals found guilty of witchcraft were guilty. They were genuine miscarriages of justice. Whereas the likes of Alan Turing: much as we may not like it, he was, it was likely, guilty of breaking the law of the land at the time. We might well find cause to regret that the law was in place, but it makes no sense to pardon him.
That raises some interesting questions.
1. Suppose you have someone serving a custodial sentence for a crime which is subsequently abolished. Would you keep the person imprisoned for something that's no longer a crime, and where it's acknowledged it shouldn't previously have been a crime?
2. Or, a more extreme example of the same thing, do you support prosecution for something that was a crime at the time the defendant was alleged to have committed the offence, but is no longer?
Seems to me that the logic of your position would be to prosecute and continue imprisonment in those cases, but I think that would be morally repugnant.
There's an important legal principle against retrospectively criminalizing activities - because it makes it impossible for people to obey the law - but I don't think this needs to be symmetrical, that we cannot retrospectively decriminalize activities.
Some may wish to draw a parallel with partygate, but there's a difference in that officially it is still maintained that it was necessary for the law to have criminalized certain activities at that time, even if that is no longer the case now.
A good example of 2 would of course be fixed penalties for breaching Covid regulations. My first thought was such an incredible waste of police time. My second was, wait a minute, this is the Met and it is at least relatively harmless.
The difference is that you can make the case that the Covid regulations were necessary at the time, but you can't do that for an issue like witchcraft or homosexuality.
But that's a value judgement isn't it? Witchcraft and homosexuality were widely thought to be of the utmost importance then. Equally. Some didn't see the COVID stuff as vital at all.
Witchcraft is highly unusual inasmuch as it relates to a belief system - magic - which is not just out-of-date, but which we regard with derisive disbelief. This confuses our reaction
See @cookie’s bizarre remarks about ‘miscarriages of justice’ against all convicted 17th century Scottish witches
It’s very likely some of those convicted WERE witches, inasmuch as they cast spells to harm people. Did the spells work? Of course not. Was there evil intent? Malefice? Yes, probably
So pardoning them all is arguably daft, unless you are pardoning them because we now know their ‘magic’ was useless and they couldn’t have harmed anyone.
But THEY didn’t know that; they really thought they could summon the devil
In some cases. Mostly it was a way of settling petty grudges.
For rentals it is required to be E or better by law. See if your LL will do anything - if you have to leave it is expensive for the LL.
I was talking to one of my Ts in my grandma's solid-walled 2up2down detached cottage who is being told £260 a month (which I think is probably the Fixed Rate Rate unregulated trick I mention in my other post), which will be more like £180 a month.
She has 2 washers and about 8 dogs, and all rooms have 3 outside walls, so uses quite a lot of energy for the size.
When she moved in in 2010 the energy bills were £230 a month, which we reduced to under £100, without switching (which up until last year often gave -25% wrt market average), by investment (eg double glazing, insulation) and targeted reductions (eg she had a washer-dryer costing £15-18 a week to run).
But it's a tricky one this time round, since we've done the low hanging fruit.
Just checked my EPC, which seemed almost pointless. The inspector "assumed" the roof has no insulation, they didn't actually look.
Any sense that they might have considered, or measured, the effectiveness of the double-glazing (which is old and seems a bit leaky around the edges), or details like the paper thin external walls for the bay windows, seems pretty unlikely when they didn't even poke their head into the loft to see what amount of insulation there was, or not.
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
They really aren’t “very American”. Have you even been there?
My younger daughter is Australian, I have Australian uncles, aunts, cousins. I know Australia extremely well, probably better than any country after Britain
Australians are Australian. But the culture is closer to the UK than the USA
Australia is also the only foreign country where I’ve felt, immediately, on my first visit, entirely at home
I certainly never felt or feel that in the USA, nor Canada. I’ve not been to NZ
I was thinking more of political connections and alliances. Much stronger Aus-US (as reflected by the hysteria on PB over the tech transfer agreement Aukus). In way of life, yep, it's like California in some ways but with fish and chips. I've been there too.
The former is as least as important as the latter when it comes to going republican.
Sure, politically-militarily it is in the American sphere, but so is all of the West. That doesn’t say much
Culturally, Oz is way more British (tho it is of course more itself, and confidently so)
I believe Australia regularly tops the polls of places Brits would like to emigrate to; because we feel at home there. Pubs and pints. Masterchef and mates. Cricket and rugby
But with sun and (probably too much) space
i would say that maps quite often, but not always, onto a Brexiter/Remainer cultural divide. Several people I know feel much more at home in places like Scandinavia, France, Holland, or Spain, and indeed several people I know of my former peer group have moved to places like that over the years.
I don’t understand the total pardon of Scotch witches. Is Sturgeon seriously claiming they were ALL innocent and wrongly burned?
1. I’m pretty sure there were a few who actually did boil up frog’s blood and mutter incantations
2. The blanket pardon sends out a terrible signal, basically inviting toothless crones in Cumbernauld to get out the scrying glass and put hexes on the neighbour’s Xbox. Scotland will now see a resurgence of witchcraft that will spread across the UK. Yet another case of the Devolution Settlement not working as planned
Some of them were not very nice, apparently:
Round about the cauldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Swelter’d venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Second Witch Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver’d by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Definitely not a Delia recipe!
Normally this sort of thing irritates me - but I'm relaxed about the pardon of witches, though of the list of things the Scottish government might want to apologise about I don't think it ranks particularly highly.
The reason this doesn't irritate me is that - based on my understanding of the world - I think it highly likely that none of the individuals found guilty of witchcraft were guilty. They were genuine miscarriages of justice. Whereas the likes of Alan Turing: much as we may not like it, he was, it was likely, guilty of breaking the law of the land at the time. We might well find cause to regret that the law was in place, but it makes no sense to pardon him.
That raises some interesting questions.
1. Suppose you have someone serving a custodial sentence for a crime which is subsequently abolished. Would you keep the person imprisoned for something that's no longer a crime, and where it's acknowledged it shouldn't previously have been a crime?
2. Or, a more extreme example of the same thing, do you support prosecution for something that was a crime at the time the defendant was alleged to have committed the offence, but is no longer?
Seems to me that the logic of your position would be to prosecute and continue imprisonment in those cases, but I think that would be morally repugnant.
There's an important legal principle against retrospectively criminalizing activities - because it makes it impossible for people to obey the law - but I don't think this needs to be symmetrical, that we cannot retrospectively decriminalize activities.
Some may wish to draw a parallel with partygate, but there's a difference in that officially it is still maintained that it was necessary for the law to have criminalized certain activities at that time, even if that is no longer the case now.
A good example of 2 would of course be fixed penalties for breaching Covid regulations. My first thought was such an incredible waste of police time. My second was, wait a minute, this is the Met and it is at least relatively harmless.
The difference is that you can make the case that the Covid regulations were necessary at the time, but you can't do that for an issue like witchcraft or homosexuality.
But that's a value judgement isn't it? Witchcraft and homosexuality were widely thought to be of the utmost importance then. Equally. Some didn't see the COVID stuff as vital at all.
Witchcraft is highly unusual inasmuch as it relates to a belief system - magic - which is not just out-of-date, but which we regard with derisive disbelief. This confuses our reaction
See @cookie’s bizarre remarks about ‘miscarriages of justice’ against all convicted 17th century Scottish witches
It’s very likely some of those convicted WERE witches, inasmuch as they cast spells to harm people. Did the spells work? Of course not. Was there evil intent? Malefice? Yes, probably
So pardoning them all is arguably daft, unless you are pardoning them because we now know their ‘magic’ was useless and they couldn’t have harmed anyone.
But THEY didn’t know that; they really thought they could summon the devil
In some cases. Mostly it was a way of settling petty grudges.
But not all. Yet all have been pardoned
It’s fucking ludicrous. Scotland is a ludicrous region
Despite high house prices whats kept the young on side so far has been cheap foreign travel and cheap consumer goods. Take that away and things could get interesting
Things those massive fuel/power increases are going to kill are big tellies, latest phones, foreign holidays. Holidays are especially going to be missed after 2 years of Covid.
We are going to be given a shock lesson in the importance of saving for a rainy day, now an alien concept to many.
Having a shiny new motor every couple of years on the never never is the one that will really hit home. That is an outward sign of status.
Yeah, after the holiday, that’s probably going to be the second major sacrifice for most of the PAYE working population.
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
They really aren’t “very American”. Have you even been there?
My younger daughter is Australian, I have Australian uncles, aunts, cousins. I know Australia extremely well, probably better than any country after Britain
Australians are Australian. But the culture is closer to the UK than the USA
Australia is also the only foreign country where I’ve felt, immediately, on my first visit, entirely at home
I certainly never felt or feel that in the USA, nor Canada. I’ve not been to NZ
I was thinking more of political connections and alliances. Much stronger Aus-US (as reflected by the hysteria on PB over the tech transfer agreement Aukus). In way of life, yep, it's like California in some ways but with fish and chips. I've been there too.
The former is as least as important as the latter when it comes to going republican.
Sure, politically-militarily it is in the American sphere, but so is all of the West. That doesn’t say much
Culturally, Oz is way more British (tho it is of course more itself, and confidently so)
I believe Australia regularly tops the polls of places Brits would like to emigrate to; because we feel at home there. Pubs and pints. Masterchef and mates. Cricket and rugby
But with sun and (probably too much) space
i would say that maps quite often, but not always, onto a Brexiter/Remainer cultural divide. Several people I know feel much more at home in places like Scandinavia, France, Holland, or Italy, and indeed several of my former peer group have also moved to countries like these over the years.
There is no way we are culturally closer to France or Italy, than we are to Oz
And I love France and Italy (and all of mainland Europe). I am greatly looking forward to going there this summer
Europe is my civilisation. My home. I am European. We are an extended family
But Aussies are more like siblings who moved away.
Phillips P. OBrien @PhillipsPOBrien · 8m Interesting priority list, no hand held anti-tank weapons and no small arms and ammo. More big ticket, advanced systems. Maybe the supply system for the smaller stuff isn’t too pressing for the Ukrainians.
Euromaidan Press @EuromaidanPress Advisor to Ukrainian President tells Ukraine's partners what Ukraine needs:
1) modern air defense, if you can't close the sky 2) offensive weapons - cruise missiles/shells for heavy rockets 3) tough oil embargo 4) closed ports for all Russian ships
As we have seen with P+O. PB consensus would be 4 can't be done. Define "Russian". We can't even define a ferry sailing twice daily between two UK ports and never leaving our waters as anything other than Cypriot.
I think the anti-tank-weapons and the small arms are in place and continuing, which is why they are missing from that list.
It would not surprise me if there is a training camp somewhere near Ukr where some UKr personnel are being trained at a rapid pace to use StarStreak, and other similar, missiles; that has been noticeably quiet, but takes quite a bit of training to use efficiently. I'm also wondering what is being considered to enable a serious assault on the Black Sea Fleet when it coms close enough.
Agree that the ship thing seems strangely inconsistent. I think the oil embargo will gradually tighten. There are noises around the EU about oil being an easier one to manage than gas.
I would bet that the training is taking place across the border in an Eastern European country.
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
They really aren’t “very American”. Have you even been there?
My younger daughter is Australian, I have Australian uncles, aunts, cousins. I know Australia extremely well, probably better than any country after Britain
Australians are Australian. But the culture is closer to the UK than the USA
Australia is also the only foreign country where I’ve felt, immediately, on my first visit, entirely at home
I certainly never felt or feel that in the USA, nor Canada. I’ve not been to NZ
I was thinking more of political connections and alliances. Much stronger Aus-US (as reflected by the hysteria on PB over the tech transfer agreement Aukus). In way of life, yep, it's like California in some ways but with fish and chips. I've been there too.
The former is as least as important as the latter when it comes to going republican.
Sure, politically-militarily it is in the American sphere, but so is all of the West. That doesn’t say much
Culturally, Oz is way more British (tho it is of course more itself, and confidently so)
I believe Australia regularly tops the polls of places Brits would like to emigrate to; because we feel at home there. Pubs and pints. Masterchef and mates. Cricket and rugby
But with sun and (probably too much) space
i would say that maps quite often, but not always, onto a Brexiter/Remainer cultural divide. Several people I know feel much more at home in places like Scandinavia, France, Holland, or Italy, and indeed several of my former peer group have also moved to countries like these over the years.
There is no way we are culturally closer to France or Italy, than we are to Oz
And I love France and Italy (and all of mainland Europe). I am greatly looking forward to going there this summer
Europe is my civilisation. My home. I am European. We are an extended family
But Aussies are more like siblings who moved away.
Well, you may feel that, as I say, but in my experience quite a few people feel quite differently. The very mixed emigration figures seem to back that up too, from what I understand.
Despite high house prices whats kept the young on side so far has been cheap foreign travel and cheap consumer goods. Take that away and things could get interesting
Things those massive fuel/power increases are going to kill are big tellies, latest phones, foreign holidays. Holidays are especially going to be missed after 2 years of Covid.
We are going to be given a shock lesson in the importance of saving for a rainy day, now an alien concept to many.
Having a shiny new motor every couple of years on the never never is the one that will really hit home. That is an outward sign of status.
Yeah, after the holiday, that’s probably going to be the second major sacrifice for most of the PAYE working population.
After that, it starts to really hit home.
Scary times ahead.
Talking of pricey holidays, I’ve been trying to arrange a trip to Eastern Turkey for a while. Every time I go back to Opodo or Kayak the air tickets have gone up 20%. Must be inflation in fuel prices?
Unidentified nutter on Russian state TV yesterday saying Warsaw will be wiped out with nukes in 30 seconds in event of NATO peacekeeping force in Ukraine
I am really enjoying getting back to face to face consultations, they are so much more productive, but I've just had a text stating that one of the people I consulted with earlier this week is now positive for Covid. Another LFT beckons.
I don’t understand the total pardon of Scotch witches. Is Sturgeon seriously claiming they were ALL innocent and wrongly burned?
1. I’m pretty sure there were a few who actually did boil up frog’s blood and mutter incantations
2. The blanket pardon sends out a terrible signal, basically inviting toothless crones in Cumbernauld to get out the scrying glass and put hexes on the neighbour’s Xbox. Scotland will now see a resurgence of witchcraft that will spread across the UK. Yet another case of the Devolution Settlement not working as planned
Some of them were not very nice, apparently:
Round about the cauldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Swelter’d venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Second Witch Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver’d by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Definitely not a Delia recipe!
Normally this sort of thing irritates me - but I'm relaxed about the pardon of witches, though of the list of things the Scottish government might want to apologise about I don't think it ranks particularly highly.
The reason this doesn't irritate me is that - based on my understanding of the world - I think it highly likely that none of the individuals found guilty of witchcraft were guilty. They were genuine miscarriages of justice. Whereas the likes of Alan Turing: much as we may not like it, he was, it was likely, guilty of breaking the law of the land at the time. We might well find cause to regret that the law was in place, but it makes no sense to pardon him.
That raises some interesting questions.
1. Suppose you have someone serving a custodial sentence for a crime which is subsequently abolished. Would you keep the person imprisoned for something that's no longer a crime, and where it's acknowledged it shouldn't previously have been a crime?
2. Or, a more extreme example of the same thing, do you support prosecution for something that was a crime at the time the defendant was alleged to have committed the offence, but is no longer?
Seems to me that the logic of your position would be to prosecute and continue imprisonment in those cases, but I think that would be morally repugnant.
There's an important legal principle against retrospectively criminalizing activities - because it makes it impossible for people to obey the law - but I don't think this needs to be symmetrical, that we cannot retrospectively decriminalize activities.
Some may wish to draw a parallel with partygate, but there's a difference in that officially it is still maintained that it was necessary for the law to have criminalized certain activities at that time, even if that is no longer the case now.
A good example of 2 would of course be fixed penalties for breaching Covid regulations. My first thought was such an incredible waste of police time. My second was, wait a minute, this is the Met and it is at least relatively harmless.
The difference is that you can make the case that the Covid regulations were necessary at the time, but you can't do that for an issue like witchcraft or homosexuality.
But that's a value judgement isn't it? Witchcraft and homosexuality laws were widely thought to be of the utmost necessity then. Equally. Some didn't see the COVID stuff as vital at all. Quite the opposite.
Making value judgements isn't wrong. I think that's essentially my point, that Cookie is looking at the situation through the prism of a simple principle, but it's actually one where making more complex, and contested, value judgements is more appropriate.
Most of politics is about arguing the toss about different value judgements - though the debate is often dressed up in a way to try to obscure that, so as to make dissent more difficult.
I do worry, one consequence of the coming financial repression is going to be people opting out of pension contributions.
Realistically that is the most sensible short term option for many if their alternative options are going without heating, food or a trip to the local loan shark. The poorest workers will be giving up their own pensions to fund the entitled Tory client base as usual.
Despite high house prices whats kept the young on side so far has been cheap foreign travel and cheap consumer goods. Take that away and things could get interesting
Things those massive fuel/power increases are going to kill are big tellies, latest phones, foreign holidays. Holidays are especially going to be missed after 2 years of Covid.
We are going to be given a shock lesson in the importance of saving for a rainy day, now an alien concept to many.
To be fair there is no reason now to upgrade your phone every 2 years and smaller tvs are still very cheap.
"there is no reason now to upgrade your phone every 2 years" - if TSE is around, that's the ban-hammer, right there....
Despite high house prices whats kept the young on side so far has been cheap foreign travel and cheap consumer goods. Take that away and things could get interesting
Things those massive fuel/power increases are going to kill are big tellies, latest phones, foreign holidays. Holidays are especially going to be missed after 2 years of Covid.
We are going to be given a shock lesson in the importance of saving for a rainy day, now an alien concept to many.
To be fair there is no reason now to upgrade your phone every 2 years and smaller tvs are still very cheap.
"there is no reason now to upgrade your phone every 2 years" - if TSE is around, that's the ban-hammer, right there....
Nonsense. If everyone did it he wouldn't be such a show off, which is surely the point.
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
They really aren’t “very American”. Have you even been there?
My younger daughter is Australian, I have Australian uncles, aunts, cousins. I know Australia extremely well, probably better than any country after Britain
Australians are Australian. But the culture is closer to the UK than the USA
Australia is also the only foreign country where I’ve felt, immediately, on my first visit, entirely at home
I certainly never felt or feel that in the USA, nor Canada. I’ve not been to NZ
I was thinking more of political connections and alliances. Much stronger Aus-US (as reflected by the hysteria on PB over the tech transfer agreement Aukus). In way of life, yep, it's like California in some ways but with fish and chips. I've been there too.
The former is as least as important as the latter when it comes to going republican.
Sure, politically-militarily it is in the American sphere, but so is all of the West. That doesn’t say much
Culturally, Oz is way more British (tho it is of course more itself, and confidently so)
I believe Australia regularly tops the polls of places Brits would like to emigrate to; because we feel at home there. Pubs and pints. Masterchef and mates. Cricket and rugby
But with sun and (probably too much) space
i would say that maps quite often, but not always, onto a Brexiter/Remainer cultural divide. Several people I know feel much more at home in places like Scandinavia, France, Holland, or Italy, and indeed several of my former peer group have also moved to countries like these over the years.
There is no way we are culturally closer to France or Italy, than we are to Oz
And I love France and Italy (and all of mainland Europe). I am greatly looking forward to going there this summer
Europe is my civilisation. My home. I am European. We are an extended family
But Aussies are more like siblings who moved away.
Well, you may feel that, as I say, but in my experience quite a few people feel differently. The very mixed emigration figures would appear to back that up, too, I think.
1. Australia 1,300,000 2 Spain 761,000 3 United States 678,000 4 Canada 603,000 5 Ireland 291,000 6 India 250,000 7 New Zealand 215,000 8 South Africa 212,000 9 France 200,000 10 Germany 115,000
Australia is a trillion miles away, on the other side of the world. Yet six times as many Brits have moved there, than have hopped across the channel to france. And this despite emigration to France being infinitely easier from 1975-2018
Good deed of the day done before lunchtime. Two Ukranian refugees (friend of my wife and her daughter, from Kiev) put in touch with willing hosts in the UK (neighbours of my parents) and starting the process.
‘Our’ refugees (father-in-law and lady friend) planning their trip to our place in the sandpit at the moment too.
Feel like that good deed will cover you for at least a week.
For rentals it is required to be E or better by law. See if your LL will do anything - if you have to leave it is expensive for the LL.
I was talking to one of my Ts in my grandma's solid-walled 2up2down detached cottage who is being told £260 a month (which I think is probably the Fixed Rate Rate unregulated trick I mention in my other post), which will be more like £180 a month.
She has 2 washers and about 8 dogs, and all rooms have 3 outside walls, so uses quite a lot of energy for the size.
When she moved in in 2010 the energy bills were £230 a month, which we reduced to under £100, without switching (which up until last year often gave -25% wrt market average), by investment (eg double glazing, insulation) and targeted reductions (eg she had a washer-dryer costing £15-18 a week to run).
But it's a tricky one this time round, since we've done the low hanging fruit.
Just checked my EPC, which seemed almost pointless. The inspector "assumed" the roof has no insulation, they didn't actually look.
Any sense that they might have considered, or measured, the effectiveness of the double-glazing (which is old and seems a bit leaky around the edges), or details like the paper thin external walls for the bay windows, seems pretty unlikely when they didn't even poke their head into the loft to see what amount of insulation there was, or not.
Um. Three things.
1 - I would wonder why you didn't tell him what was there, then make him look, then query the result when it did not come out accurately.
They are instructed to make default assumptions where evidence is not available, as part of the methodology - to prevent false over-positives. That seems the reasonable green way to call it.
If you want it the other way, provide proof. If it was done before you moved in, then shell out £40-50 for a new one and provide the needed evidence.
2 - For @Horse, the point is that this is how his LL is regulated, so that is how to get things done. Personally, I take care to keep records of work done so I *can* provide proof.
3 - EPC is a basic system, and an EU standard. We have it because we did not choose to pay the money for something better to be done universally, so we get what we pay for. It was an Yvette Cooper thing in the noughties, under pressure from a lot of people wanting something as cheap as possible.
Anyone who wants something better can pay for a SAP analysis, rather than the normal RDSAP analysis (RD = "Reduced Data"). It will cost £300-400. If you build a house iirc you do an "As Designed" full SAP with your Detailed Planning Application submission, and an "As built" one afterwards, which includes things like a leakage test.
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
They really aren’t “very American”. Have you even been there?
My younger daughter is Australian, I have Australian uncles, aunts, cousins. I know Australia extremely well, probably better than any country after Britain
Australians are Australian. But the culture is closer to the UK than the USA
Australia is also the only foreign country where I’ve felt, immediately, on my first visit, entirely at home
I certainly never felt or feel that in the USA, nor Canada. I’ve not been to NZ
I was thinking more of political connections and alliances. Much stronger Aus-US (as reflected by the hysteria on PB over the tech transfer agreement Aukus). In way of life, yep, it's like California in some ways but with fish and chips. I've been there too.
The former is as least as important as the latter when it comes to going republican.
Sure, politically-militarily it is in the American sphere, but so is all of the West. That doesn’t say much
Culturally, Oz is way more British (tho it is of course more itself, and confidently so)
I believe Australia regularly tops the polls of places Brits would like to emigrate to; because we feel at home there. Pubs and pints. Masterchef and mates. Cricket and rugby
But with sun and (probably too much) space
i would say that maps quite often, but not always, onto a Brexiter/Remainer cultural divide. Several people I know feel much more at home in places like Scandinavia, France, Holland, or Italy, and indeed several of my former peer group have also moved to countries like these over the years.
There is no way we are culturally closer to France or Italy, than we are to Oz
And I love France and Italy (and all of mainland Europe). I am greatly looking forward to going there this summer
Europe is my civilisation. My home. I am European. We are an extended family
But Aussies are more like siblings who moved away.
Well, you may feel that, as I say, but in my experience quite a few people feel differently. The very mixed emigration figures would appear to back that up, too, I think.
1. Australia 1,300,000 2 Spain 761,000 3 United States 678,000 4 Canada 603,000 5 Ireland 291,000 6 India 250,000 7 New Zealand 215,000 8 South Africa 212,000 9 France 200,000 10 Germany 115,000
Australia is a trillion miles away, on the other side of the world. Yet five times as many Brits have moved there, than have hopped across the channel to france. And thus despite emigration to France being infinitely easier from 1975-2018
That's a list of the diaspora, not a timeframe of emigration. I suspect many of the figures for Spain, France, Germany and are more recent than for Australia, for instance. Also, even with possibly very out-of-date figures, the continental European total comes up quite similar to the Australian, as i would roughly expect.
55% Republic, 30% Queen to remain HoS, 15% don't know/care.
Poll from 2 years ago. Given it is non white, non British origin majority unlike say Australia or Canada or New Zealand hardly that surprising and realistically those are the only nations we can keep as Commonwealth realms going forward even if they stay in the Commonwealth.
Though 55% is hardly a landslide
What's the point of a White-only Commonwealth? Aussies and NZers and Canadians have their own independent views, and losing the other Commonwealth members is a disastrous blow to what some like to call soft power.
The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are already Republics or have their own heads of state. I was talking Commonwealth realms.
We will not be losing them from the Commonwealth, Barbados is staying in the Commonwealth too. Jamaica is tiny and will have zero impact on our soft power whether a Commonwealth realm or not. The vast majority of the population of the remaining Commonwealth realms live in white majority nations of mainly British origin ie Australia, Canada and New Zealand and will likely continue to do so.
Australia itself voted 55% to keep the monarchy in 1999, in Canada both Trudeau and the Conservatives are monarchists
"British". You're forgetting the Irish in Australia. And 2022 is not 1999, sill less so when HMtQ moves on.
In any case, the Commonwealth is nothing to do with royalty.
Some of them Northern Irish. The majority of Australians have British or Northern Irish ancestry still.
It does not matter if it is 2032, or 2092, culturally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will still be culturally closer to the UK than any other nations on earth.
The Commonwealth realms are still to do with royalty
Ever been to Canada or Australia?
77% of Canadians and 86% of Australians are still white and most of them still of British or Northern Irish ancestry
But mentally they are very American. The Aussies had a very bad fright during WW2 when Churchill let them down (again) and have never been that British since.
They really aren’t “very American”. Have you even been there?
My younger daughter is Australian, I have Australian uncles, aunts, cousins. I know Australia extremely well, probably better than any country after Britain
Australians are Australian. But the culture is closer to the UK than the USA
Australia is also the only foreign country where I’ve felt, immediately, on my first visit, entirely at home
I certainly never felt or feel that in the USA, nor Canada. I’ve not been to NZ
I was thinking more of political connections and alliances. Much stronger Aus-US (as reflected by the hysteria on PB over the tech transfer agreement Aukus). In way of life, yep, it's like California in some ways but with fish and chips. I've been there too.
The former is as least as important as the latter when it comes to going republican.
Sure, politically-militarily it is in the American sphere, but so is all of the West. That doesn’t say much
Culturally, Oz is way more British (tho it is of course more itself, and confidently so)
I believe Australia regularly tops the polls of places Brits would like to emigrate to; because we feel at home there. Pubs and pints. Masterchef and mates. Cricket and rugby
But with sun and (probably too much) space
i would say that maps quite often, but not always, onto a Brexiter/Remainer cultural divide. Several people I know feel much more at home in places like Scandinavia, France, Holland, or Italy, and indeed several of my former peer group have also moved to countries like these over the years.
There is no way we are culturally closer to France or Italy, than we are to Oz
And I love France and Italy (and all of mainland Europe). I am greatly looking forward to going there this summer
Europe is my civilisation. My home. I am European. We are an extended family
But Aussies are more like siblings who moved away.
Well, you may feel that, as I say, but in my experience quite a few people feel differently. The very mixed emigration figures would appear to back that up, too, I think.
1. Australia 1,300,000 2 Spain 761,000 3 United States 678,000 4 Canada 603,000 5 Ireland 291,000 6 India 250,000 7 New Zealand 215,000 8 South Africa 212,000 9 France 200,000 10 Germany 115,000
Australia is a trillion miles away, on the other side of the world. Yet five times as many Brits have moved there, than have hopped across the channel to france. And thus despite emigration to France being infinitely easier from 1975-2018
That's a list of the diaspora, not a timeframe of emigration. I suspect many of the figures for France, Germany and Spain are more recent than for Australia, for instance.
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Last week our daily energy use was about £5
This week it has been about £1.85
We are moving into warmer weather when you can manage without heating and I expect due to tightened household budgets people will just put on another jersey if necessary
Of course from October nobody knows where we will be
However. The polling is in one direction.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/vancouversun.com/news/support-for-monarchy-dwindling-among-canadians-poll/wcm/26dba003-1b35-40c3-8ed7-7545371bc5e5/amp/
There comes a point when the growth in the size of the pie has little relevance if the size of your slice is declining in absolute terms.
...
The former is as least as important as the latter when it comes to going republican.
What a great Xmas present we will get.
I am being offered £2800 as a 12 month fix by Octopus in my account, compared to my current capped (previous supplier went bust) £1168.
They are not mentioning that the new capped variable tariff will be £1900 ish at the new capped rates, and will be default.
There's also been some prominent (completely wrong and thick-as-a-plank as usual) scaremongering by 'Professor' Richard Murphy, who assumes that the entire country will be offered the same as he has been offered for the house he lives in with his family in Downham Market. And is telling all his gullibles that everyone will pay £3000.
Take care to look at all the options.
In my case, the big hit will be gas next winter for heating, so that is one of three things I will target for reductions. The others will be normal incremental improvements and capturing more of the 5.5 MWh my solar panels generate.
And if nothing else, his expensive upbringing should have taught him to face such things with equanimity.
..I know that the psychology of one individual is not more important than the constitutions of several countries, but...
Are we to deploy such sympathetic feelings in Putin's direction, too ?
Although really the standard of living for the average person owes more to the size of the cake than how it is divided, and an economy that doesn't raise living standards broadly cannot be said to be a well functioning economy. So for me they really are the same question.
In today's environment given the unprecedented car crash in household real incomes right now I would be much happier to be Labour than the Tories, as I think the second question will determine how people vote.
Renting is a scam.
I think you are right, though the two are of course linked. Inflation and fuel bills were bad before the war started, they're getting much, much worse now as a result.
Inflation is running at over 6% (officially) and that's excluding a lot of stuff you spend your actual pay cheque on, like, say, a roof over your head.
Interest rates are going to be negative for a long time - raising them to 6% would destroy the economy. Raising them to 4% would destroy the economy. If I recall, in the US, if the Fed raised rates to 7%, they would default on their national debt.
The nearest comparison we have is the early 80s, when Volcker had to raise interest rates in the US to 20% to get inflation back under control, leading to 10% unemployment - both unthinkable today.
Therefore we have to assume that inflation is here to stay. And plan accordingly. A spiral of higher prices and wage demands and a stagnating economy.
I think we are rapidly approaching an event horizon where people lose trust in money. That means people who are able to save are going to have to do so in different ways - gold, equities, crypto, real estate.
Most people however won't be able to save. They will be trapped in jobs with pay rising by less than the cost of living - so will either have far less money to spend, or will quit their jobs, or else you'll see 70s style industrial action again. Either way, all bad news for the economy. Meanwhile the gap between rich (those who have assets that rise with inflation, e.g. a house) and poor (everyone else) will widen, substantially.
It is hard to see a way out of it at the moment, but it does look like we are set for a re-run of the 70s.
I think it was MaxPB who said the other day if we don't get the housing situation under control you're eventually going to get a population that votes to curtail property rights. I'd concur with that analysis.
Plus. Canada is pretty much the most devolved Western democracy there is. The introduction of a President with any power whatsoever would be controversial.
Note too even on that poll 54% of Canadians want to keep the Queen and only 52% to replace the monarchy longer term. Those figures are distorted by French origin majority Quebec where only 10% want to keep the monarchy however every Canadian province has to agree to replace the monarchy under the Canadian constitutional amendment structure, near impossible
Culturally, Oz is way more British (tho it is of course more itself, and confidently so)
I believe Australia regularly tops the polls of places Brits would like to emigrate to; because we feel at home there. Pubs and pints. Masterchef and mates. Cricket and rugby
But with sun and (probably too much) space
Isn't this very short-sighted of Aipac?
"Only". You were saying hours ago that 55% was a massive majority!
And in any case you have proved my point in that your attitudfe to everything is that if the Tory Party says no it must be ignored.
1. Suppose you have someone serving a custodial sentence for a crime which is subsequently abolished. Would you keep the person imprisoned for something that's no longer a crime, and where it's acknowledged it shouldn't previously have been a crime?
2. Or, a more extreme example of the same thing, do you support prosecution for something that was a crime at the time the defendant was alleged to have committed the offence, but is no longer?
Seems to me that the logic of your position would be to prosecute and continue imprisonment in those cases, but I think that would be morally repugnant.
There's an important legal principle against retrospectively criminalizing activities - because it makes it impossible for people to obey the law - but I don't think this needs to be symmetrical, that we cannot retrospectively decriminalize activities.
Some may wish to draw a parallel with partygate, but there's a difference in that officially it is still maintained that it was necessary for the law to have criminalized certain activities at that time, even if that is no longer the case now.
@PhillipsPOBrien
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8m
Interesting priority list, no hand held anti-tank weapons and no small arms and ammo. More big ticket, advanced systems. Maybe the supply system for the smaller stuff isn’t too pressing for the Ukrainians.
Euromaidan Press
@EuromaidanPress
Advisor to Ukrainian President tells Ukraine's partners what Ukraine needs:
1) modern air defense, if you can't close the sky
2) offensive weapons - cruise missiles/shells for heavy rockets
3) tough oil embargo
4) closed ports for all Russian ships
https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1506588297417695232
Should we be prosecuting pensioners for their activities before it was decriminalised?
I think there would be outrage.
Edit. Not just pensioners in Scotland.
For others, it's as irksome as the EU to a member whose electorate has a majority, or significant minority of rabid Brexiteers.
It is a ridiculous archaism, but providing it is completely subject to democratic control, up to and including its abolition, then it is mostly harmless.
Then, with a laugh, Bleach filled the bath
Until the bath was brimming
And, while she tipped in smelly stuff,
Bill heard the old girl singing:
Oh, fizzy, Lilac scented balls,
Please hear the words I'm speaking;
Oh, apple blossom, lemon zest,
Cherry scrub and all the rest,
Please do your very smelly best
To stop this beast from reeking
Smelly Bill, Daniel Postgate - an absolute favourite in our house
https://www.gov.uk/find-energy-certificate
For rentals it is required to be E or better by law. See if your LL will do anything - if you have to leave it is expensive for the LL.
I was talking to one of my Ts in my grandma's solid-walled 2up2down detached cottage who is being told £260 a month (which I think is probably the Fixed Rate Rate unregulated trick I mention in my other post), which will be more like £180 a month.
She has 2 washers and about 8 dogs, and all rooms have 3 outside walls, so uses quite a lot of energy for the size.
When she moved in in 2010 the energy bills were £230 a month, which we reduced to under £100, without switching (which up until last year often gave -25% wrt market average), by investment (eg double glazing, insulation) and targeted reductions (eg she had a washer-dryer costing £15-18 a week to run).
But it's a tricky one this time round, since we've done the low hanging fruit.
I think you mean "stable"
I should add that my views here are not strong and are driven primarily by pedantry: pardoning someone, to me, implies that the state concedes that the person did not actually do what they were accused of, not that the state no longer has a problem with what they were accused of. (I may not even be right about this.)
My point was that if having a monarchy results in such psychological cruelty towards an individual, then it's a strong argument against having one.
Politicians at least volunteer for the ordeal.
1) modern air defense, if you can't close the sky
2) offensive weapons - cruise missiles/shells for heavy rockets
3) tough oil embargo
4) closed ports for all Russian ships
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1506585833301762051
We are going to be given a shock lesson in the importance of saving for a rainy day, now an alien concept to many.
The girls, aged 15 to 18, were transferred to the UK’s biggest prison for boys following the enforced closure of a privately run centre for safety reasons last year, the Guardian has learned.
Thoroughly appalling.
Sky News
Hmmm
Hope all OK.
Witchcraft and homosexuality laws were widely thought to be of the utmost necessity then.
Equally. Some didn't see the COVID stuff as vital at all. Quite the opposite.
I see you get a personal endorsement from Putin. Ashamed yet?
https://twitter.com/RhonddaBryant/status/1506578205301526529
~12.35ish
That is an outward sign of status.
See @cookie’s bizarre remarks about ‘miscarriages of justice’ against all convicted 17th century Scottish witches
It’s very likely some of those convicted WERE witches, inasmuch as they cast spells to harm people. Did the spells work? Of course not. Was there evil intent? Malefice? Yes, probably
So pardoning them all is arguably daft, unless you are pardoning them because we now know their ‘magic’ was useless and they couldn’t have harmed anyone.
But THEY didn’t know that; they really thought they could summon the devil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8
TL;DR, as empires fall, you see rising wealth inequality, money printing and conflict between rival powers. His thesis is that we are living through such a decline (from US hegemony) now. And buckle up, because things are going to get worse...
Worst of all, plagues of Aussies.....
It would not surprise me if there is a training camp somewhere near Ukr where some UKr personnel are being trained at a rapid pace to use StarStreak, and other similar, missiles; that has been noticeably quiet, but takes quite a bit of training to use efficiently.
I'm also wondering what is being considered to enable a serious assault on the Black Sea Fleet when it coms close enough.
Agree that the ship thing seems strangely inconsistent. I think the oil embargo will gradually tighten. There are noises around the EU about oil being an easier one to manage than gas.
Mostly it was a way of settling petty grudges.
Any sense that they might have considered, or measured, the effectiveness of the double-glazing (which is old and seems a bit leaky around the edges), or details like the paper thin external walls for the bay windows, seems pretty unlikely when they didn't even poke their head into the loft to see what amount of insulation there was, or not.
It’s fucking ludicrous. Scotland is a ludicrous region
After that, it starts to really hit home.
Scary times ahead.
While on the subject, never, ever put Polyclay in a furnace.
And I love France and Italy (and all of mainland Europe). I am greatly looking forward to going there this summer
Europe is my civilisation. My home. I am European. We are an extended family
But Aussies are more like siblings who moved away.
Scary, indeed
Unidentified nutter on Russian state TV yesterday saying Warsaw will be wiped out with nukes in 30 seconds in event of NATO peacekeeping force in Ukraine
https://twitter.com/carlbildt/status/1506315902169534464
The govt planned to do something about the planning side to make it easier but Nimbysim and political opportunism put the brake on that.
Bad luck.
Most of politics is about arguing the toss about different value judgements - though the debate is often dressed up in a way to try to obscure that, so as to make dissent more difficult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_diaspora
1. Australia 1,300,000
2 Spain 761,000
3 United States 678,000
4 Canada 603,000
5 Ireland 291,000
6 India 250,000
7 New Zealand 215,000
8 South Africa 212,000
9 France 200,000
10 Germany 115,000
Australia is a trillion miles away, on the other side of the world. Yet six times as many Brits have moved there, than have hopped across the channel to france. And this despite emigration to France being infinitely easier from 1975-2018
1 - I would wonder why you didn't tell him what was there, then make him look, then query the result when it did not come out accurately.
They are instructed to make default assumptions where evidence is not available, as part of the methodology - to prevent false over-positives. That seems the reasonable green way to call it.
If you want it the other way, provide proof. If it was done before you moved in, then shell out £40-50 for a new one and provide the needed evidence.
2 - For @Horse, the point is that this is how his LL is regulated, so that is how to get things done. Personally, I take care to keep records of work done so I *can* provide proof.
3 - EPC is a basic system, and an EU standard. We have it because we did not choose to pay the money for something better to be done universally, so we get what we pay for. It was an Yvette Cooper thing in the noughties, under pressure from a lot of people wanting something as cheap as possible.
Anyone who wants something better can pay for a SAP analysis, rather than the normal RDSAP analysis (RD = "Reduced Data"). It will cost £300-400. If you build a house iirc you do an "As Designed" full SAP with your Detailed Planning Application submission, and an "As built" one afterwards, which includes things like a leakage test.
I would also class the US qute separately.