Is there anyone that can actually be a Tory by HYUFD's description. He doesn't even meet it himself.
Yes, anyone who supports keeping the monarchy, retaining the remaining hereditary peers and keeping the Church of England as the established Churcg would be a Tory
Sound money? Low taxation? Keeping crime low and the courts and prison system functioning? ....
No, the first two were if anything more supported by 19th century Whigs and Liberals than Tories (albeit both support them more than Labour does after they largely combined to form today's Conservative Party with a few rump free market Liberals still Orange Book Liberals in today's Liberal Democrats).
Keeping crime low and the courts and prison system functioning is something even New Labour could support
In other words, you are happy to debauch the currency, screw the justice system and and send taxation sky-high. As indeed we see now.
1. Sunak knew that Eat out to spread Covid was a stupid idea, but didn't care that more people would catch Covid and die as a result.
2. Bozo is innumerate.
On 1, I was saying this at the time, as were many others. On 2, I think we already knew this.
On Eat Covid to Catch Covid, it had the same impact on the industry as giving someone crack cocaine. A brief buzz, followed immediately by a crashing decline. They could have found other ways to keep hospitality afloat which actually kept hospitality afloat without spreading the pox.
Probably yes. However we still didn’t have a vaccine in summer 2020. If we knew for sure it was coming, we could have just kept things shut and paid for it. But we didn’t, and eat our to help out was part of trying to live with covid with mitigations, but without either (a) widespread disease acquired immunity or (b) vaccination.
Far too many people just know what we should have done, but a lot of it is based on hindsight.
Of course we knew that a vaccine was coming. Just about every pharma company in the world was busy working on it. The correct course of action would have been to hunker down until the vulnerable groups were protected. We'd done the hard part, getting through the first wave. Instead of keeping things that way the government (Sunak) devised a scheme that almost seems to have been devised specifically to bring on a second wave.
Is there anyone that can actually be a Tory by HYUFD's description. He doesn't even meet it himself.
Yes, anyone who supports keeping the monarchy, retaining the remaining hereditary peers and keeping the Church of England as the established would be a Tory
How do you square being democratic and having people pass laws who nobody has voted for? Didn’t you support Brexit so we could vote people out who we didn’t like?
The Tories existed before the 1832 Reform Act at a time when less than 5% of the population could vote for MPs
So you would be happy to bring back slavery, hanging, drawing and quartering (still used in 1820 IIRC), the Test Acts, and so on, on that logic.
No but support for widening the franchise does not make you a Tory (Wilberforce as a Tory helped repeal slavery of course).
As I said the 3 key tests for Toryism are support for retaining the monarchy, keeping the Church of England as the established church (even if we now allow nonconformists and Roman Catholics to worship freely) and retaining the remaining hereditary peers
By the way, whoever on here recommended the musical version of War of the Worlds -narrated by Richard Burton - thank you.
Absolutely bloody brilliant.
I have been listening to it, and enjoying it, all weekend with my bose headphones and I even bought the original H.G Wells paperback at Waterstones yesterday as well.
Loving it. Amazing.
It’s funny - seemed camp as hell when I first heard it in the 70s, but has aged well.
Is there anyone that can actually be a Tory by HYUFD's description. He doesn't even meet it himself.
Yes, anyone who supports keeping the monarchy, retaining the remaining hereditary peers and keeping the Church of England as the established Churcg would be a Tory
Sound money? Low taxation? Keeping crime low and the courts and prison system functioning? ....
No, the first two were if anything more supported by 19th century Whigs and Liberals than Tories (albeit both support them more than Labour does after they largely combined to form today's Conservative Party with a few rump free market Liberals still Orange Book Liberals in today's Liberal Democrats).
Keeping crime low and the courts and prison system functioning is something even New Labour could support
In other words, you are happy to debauch the currency, screw the justice system and and send taxation sky-high. As indeed we see now.
No I'm not, most Tories support sound money too and low taxation with their fellow members of today's Conservative party. However support for that alone does not make you a Tory
Is there anyone that can actually be a Tory by HYUFD's description. He doesn't even meet it himself.
Yes, anyone who supports keeping the monarchy, retaining the remaining hereditary peers and keeping the Church of England as the established Churcg would be a Tory
Is there anyone that can actually be a Tory by HYUFD's description. He doesn't even meet it himself.
Yes, anyone who supports keeping the monarchy, retaining the remaining hereditary peers and keeping the Church of England as the established Churcg would be a Tory
What about Plaid Cymru voters?
Not possible as the Church in Wales is disestablished and with Plaid support
Mr. L, what impact do you think disestablishing the Church of England would have?
For most people none, apart from they couldn't automatically get married or buried in their local Church of England Parish Church anymore unless they regularly attended it or had been baptised there
Buried in the local church? Intramural burials have been banned for almost two centuries, the odd aristo or elite person aside!
Even if you are talking about churchyards, many are closed to new burials except sometimes if you have relatives or a lair there already. Off to the secular cemetery. So even less impact.
In our town burial, either of bodies or of ashes, in the churchyard is the responsibility of the parish council. Not the parochial church council.
It wouldn't be if the Church of England was disestablished. Burial in the churchyard could be refused to those who had not been regular attendees at the Church of England Parish Church
I’m certain that the last two funerals at our local parish church that I attended, where the bodies were buried in the churchyard, were not of men who regularly attended church. One of them, though could be described as an upright and honest citizen; I’m not so sure about the other one!
If he was upright they were a bit premature in holding his funeral.
On FTTP, we are fortunate to have Gigabit broadband upload and download for £33 a month and could have 10 Gbps for £150 if we wanted it; all despite living in a converted barn on top of a hill in the Forest of Bowland. We did, however, raise the investment and install it ourselves together with others in the community.
Paradoxically, it was much easier, and cheaper, to install FTTP to rural properties than it was to do the villages. Mole-ploughing ducts for fibre across farmland and moorland is simple, 2km per day being feasible.
Sunak’s secret meetings about the Lords — and why he thinks it needs reform
With more than 800 members, the upper chamber is second only to the Chinese National People’s Congress in size, and not everyone contributes equally
Male peers, as well as those based in London and the southeast, are overrepresented in the chamber when compared with the general population.
Yet they turn up and speak less than their female counterparts or those from the north and Midlands, our analysis shows....
..More than 45 per cent of current peers reside in London and the southeast, compared with only 27 per cent of the population. The northwest and West Midlands are the least represented, with only 8 per cent of peers living in these regions compared with 20 per cent of the population....
...Peers from ethnic minorities claim less in expenses than their white counterparts, and contribute more to debates. Only 7 per cent of current peers are non-white, versus 18 per cent of the country’s population.
No Sunak won't abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected upper house as Sir Keir is proposing to do. He might reform it however
The House of Lords is an anachronism and needs comprehensive reform
Quite frankly, and somewhat perversely, reform sometimes makes it worse.
The behaviour of the hereditaries is much better than that of the life peers.
If people focus on principle being the issue then the answer is obviously abolition and then there's difficult questions and precisely what to have instead.
If people focus on effectiveness and efficiency being the issue then its far simpler and quicker to sort out, with some big early options to cut down size without doing more than cutting out the time servers and partisan hacks.
The Upper House should be a house of the nations with elected representatives from the 4 constituent countries. At the moment the refusal of the SNP to play means that Scotland is somewhat underrepresented. Personally, I would prefer that the numbers be balanced so that Scotland, Wales and NI can together outvote England, if only just. I think that this would restore some balance to our Union.
I think that the members should have slightly longer terms, say 6 years, and be limited to 2 terms. The membership should be elected by proportional representation with a minimum of, say, 5%. Absolutely no hereditaries, no churchmen and no placemen.
Why can they not just be allocated proportionally according to votes cast in the most recent GE? It's an added incentive to vote without any added complexity.
I'd have lifetime terms with a minimum activity level to avoid a polite letter advising retirement. I'd also keep bishops and hereditaries.
Still leaves the current imbalance in that every vote is decided by England, the rest have no influence and no say whatsoever. Scotland never votes Tory, wanted to stay in EU, etc etc and yet England just crushes them.
I agree (though not to the extent you put it), but you can't expect a mere reform of the HOL to solve all that. Peers allocated to GE vote proportions would make things a bit fairer, reduce the patronage of the UK Government a bit, ensure some smaller parties were able to nominate Peers.
I can't believe that raising corporate taxes would drive corporations away.
Some mistake surely?
It will be interesting to see how Hunt addresses this in the budget.
He will have to do so.
I don't think he will. He seems bereft of imagination. It's not such a bad thing to put corporation tax up but it needs to be coupled with a very big investment incentive so companies can funnel cash into capital growth. We've done the first and not done the second, it's going to result in lower growth.
The ideal scenario is for companies to cut their corporation tax bill to zero by investing all of their profit into capital growth which gives us more and better paid jobs which are taxed at net 25-35% vs CT at 25%. Jeremy Hunt has completely lost sight of business investment as a mechanism to grow the economy. The NHS tax on the pharmaceuticals industry is a disaster atm, a bunch of my university friends are suggesting if it isn't axed then it will result in billions of investment over the next 2-3 years being diverted to Ireland and the Netherlands. It punishes pharma companies who do research and manufacturing in the UK, it's cheaper for them to do it all out of the UK and import the finished product because it won't attract anywhere near the same taxation. Unsurprisingly pharma companies are beginning to do this.
Yes, it's very concerning.
I must say, I've been disappointed by Hunt whilst Sunak has exceeded my expectations.
Hunt seems to be another Hammond. And possibly less than that.
What has Sunak done ? SFA
Avoided scandal and achieved a significant change to the NIP. Not insignificant under the circs.
Hiding away does not encourage me he is much better than previous PM's and the NIP just highlights how second rate Scotland is in the UK. Scotland wanted to remain in EU and if they can do a deal for NI then why not give Scotland teh same deal. Reason is they are shit scared of USA and were forced to do something on NI. Totally and utterly insignificant in my viewpoint. He is just another Tory in London who will do nothing for Scotland other than treat it as second class.
By the way, whoever on here recommended the musical version of War of the Worlds -narrated by Richard Burton - thank you.
Absolutely bloody brilliant.
I have been listening to it, and enjoying it, all weekend with my bose headphones and I even bought the original H.G Wells paperback at Waterstones yesterday as well.
Loving it. Amazing.
When I did plate carrying in my gap year, thr chefs used to listen to it to gee them up if we had a big night on. Not sure if it worked or not.
Mr. G, except that devolved matters exist, and Scotland also sends MPs to Westminster. Not to mention the previous government (if we count the Coalition as Conservative) had 13 years of Scottish Chancellors and 3 years of a Scottish Prime Minister.
Brown counted himself as North British rather than being Scottish and it showed in his utter disregard for it as well, unionist to the core.
Is there anyone that can actually be a Tory by HYUFD's description. He doesn't even meet it himself.
Yes, anyone who supports keeping the monarchy, retaining the remaining hereditary peers and keeping the Church of England as the established would be a Tory
How do you square being democratic and having people pass laws who nobody has voted for? Didn’t you support Brexit so we could vote people out who we didn’t like?
The Tories existed before the 1832 Reform Act at a time when less than 5% of the population could vote for MPs
So you would be happy to bring back slavery, hanging, drawing and quartering (still used in 1820 IIRC), the Test Acts, and so on, on that logic.
No but support for widening the franchise does not make you a Tory (Wilberforce as a Tory helped repeal slavery of course).
As I said the 3 key tests for Toryism are support for retaining the monarchy, keeping the Church of England as the established church (even if we now allow nonconformists and Roman Catholics to worship freely) and retaining the remaining hereditary peers
So are you the Self-appointed Keeper of the Tests of Toryism?
I can't believe that raising corporate taxes would drive corporations away.
Some mistake surely?
It will be interesting to see how Hunt addresses this in the budget.
He will have to do so.
I don't think he will. He seems bereft of imagination. It's not such a bad thing to put corporation tax up but it needs to be coupled with a very big investment incentive so companies can funnel cash into capital growth. We've done the first and not done the second, it's going to result in lower growth.
The ideal scenario is for companies to cut their corporation tax bill to zero by investing all of their profit into capital growth which gives us more and better paid jobs which are taxed at net 25-35% vs CT at 25%. Jeremy Hunt has completely lost sight of business investment as a mechanism to grow the economy. The NHS tax on the pharmaceuticals industry is a disaster atm, a bunch of my university friends are suggesting if it isn't axed then it will result in billions of investment over the next 2-3 years being diverted to Ireland and the Netherlands. It punishes pharma companies who do research and manufacturing in the UK, it's cheaper for them to do it all out of the UK and import the finished product because it won't attract anywhere near the same taxation. Unsurprisingly pharma companies are beginning to do this.
Yes, it's very concerning.
I must say, I've been disappointed by Hunt whilst Sunak has exceeded my expectations.
Hunt seems to be another Hammond. And possibly less than that.
What has Sunak done ? SFA
Avoided scandal and achieved a significant change to the NIP. Not insignificant under the circs.
Hiding away does not encourage me he is much better than previous PM's and the NIP just highlights how second rate Scotland is in the UK. Scotland wanted to remain in EU and if they can do a deal for NI then why not give Scotland teh same deal. Reason is they are shit scared of USA and were forced to do something on NI. Totally and utterly insignificant in my viewpoint. He is just another Tory in London who will do nothing for Scotland other than treat it as second class.
There is no GFA in Scotland and Scotland does not border another EU nation like Northern Ireland does with the Republic of Ireland.
Otherwise if you have special EU Deals for Scotland within GB why not special Deals for other Remain voting areas of GB like London, Cardiff, Cheltenham, Guildford, Elmbridge, Tunbridge Wells and Winchester and Oxford and Cambridge and Manchester?
The House of Lords? Abolish it. Replace it with a British senate. 25 Senators for each home nation copying the US principle where big states can't outvote small states. Add in representatives of the British dependencies - IoM, the Bailiwicks, Gibraltar, Falklands etc.
I'm not aware of any US state having 80% of the population of the whole country...
For this kind of concept to work there first needs to be an equal devolution to an English parliament, and then the UK parliament can deal only with reserved matters for the enitre country. It's bad enough at the moment with the UK parliament legislating for England-only matters; your proposal would be quite absurd.
But I am an open and long-standing advocate of an English parliament. I am proposing the bicameral federal government structure. A very much reduced Commons and an evenly composited Senate as an upper house. Each nation has a unicameral assembly plus gets to send MPs and Senators to Westminster.
Absurd would be carrying on with the current stupid. No English parliament. Mince elected as MPs. The Lords full of Tory donors and archbishops.
Right. But we're not ever going to get an English parliament - the Conservative Party doesn't want any further devolution (for reasons I really don't understand) and insofar as the Labour Party wants further devolution it's through the balkanisation of England.
A devolution of power from the Centre in practice means to the English Regions and Cities. Calling this process a Balkanisation of England leads me to conclude you don't want a devolution of power from the Centre. Which is fair enough, I'm not convinced of it myself, but don't kid yourself it wouldn't be real devolution.
An English parliament otoh isn't. Not really. Westminster is already dominated by England. You wouldn't get much extra devolution by just having an English parliament. People wanting an English parliament imo don't want it for decentralization-of-power reasons. It's more of a nationalist thing, a grievance that England as a 'nation' - as a 'people' even - is being short-changed, typically in relation to Scotland.
"Not fair! They've got one so WE should have one too" ... is what it boils down to.
Mr. L, you might be able to justify that if England had its own Parliament.
Mr. G, you might recall that Scottish constituencies also send MPs to Westminster.
MD, You might have noticed that no matter how they vote that they have ZERO impact as England can outvote them every time. You can pretend and dress it up and whine about no English parliament , still the truth is England only votes count for what happens in all UK countries. Westminster is an English parliament, dressed up as a UK one.
If that were the case then there wouldn't be any examples of English MPs voting in a majority for something and yet it being rejected by the parliament.
Is there anyone that can actually be a Tory by HYUFD's description. He doesn't even meet it himself.
Yes, anyone who supports keeping the monarchy, retaining the remaining hereditary peers and keeping the Church of England as the established would be a Tory
How do you square being democratic and having people pass laws who nobody has voted for? Didn’t you support Brexit so we could vote people out who we didn’t like?
The Tories existed before the 1832 Reform Act at a time when less than 5% of the population could vote for MPs
So you would be happy to bring back slavery, hanging, drawing and quartering (still used in 1820 IIRC), the Test Acts, and so on, on that logic.
No but support for widening the franchise does not make you a Tory (Wilberforce as a Tory helped repeal slavery of course).
As I said the 3 key tests for Toryism are support for retaining the monarchy, keeping the Church of England as the established church (even if we now allow nonconformists and Roman Catholics to worship freely) and retaining the remaining hereditary peers
So are you the Self-appointed Keeper of the Tests of Toryism?
It seems that support for all things inherited is a test of Toryism, which explains their tolerance of inter-generational poverty.
Is there anyone that can actually be a Tory by HYUFD's description. He doesn't even meet it himself.
Yes, anyone who supports keeping the monarchy, retaining the remaining hereditary peers and keeping the Church of England as the established would be a Tory
How do you square being democratic and having people pass laws who nobody has voted for? Didn’t you support Brexit so we could vote people out who we didn’t like?
The Tories existed before the 1832 Reform Act at a time when less than 5% of the population could vote for MPs
So you would be happy to bring back slavery, hanging, drawing and quartering (still used in 1820 IIRC), the Test Acts, and so on, on that logic.
No but support for widening the franchise does not make you a Tory (Wilberforce as a Tory helped repeal slavery of course).
As I said the 3 key tests for Toryism are support for retaining the monarchy, keeping the Church of England as the established church (even if we now allow nonconformists and Roman Catholics to worship freely) and retaining the remaining hereditary peers
So are you the Self-appointed Keeper of the Tests of Toryism?
On PB clearly yes (certainly now Charles has left)
Also, having England the only part of the UK with no devolved Parliament/Assembly, and with voters in English constituencies having dramatically less voting power (from memory, England is about 85% of the population) than everywhere else is not something that can be considered remotely fair or justifiable.
As well as abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected Senate, I also suspect Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies in England without referendum to complete the New Labour project Blair started as PM when he abolished most of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords and created the Scottish Parliament and Welsh, Northern Irish and London Assemblies
If you remember John Prescott, as minister for the regions, after the north-east, its own assembly and in a referendum, it was turned down, if I recall correctly, 85 to 15.
Yes, hence Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies without referendum this time from the North East of England to the South East
Is Essex big enough to be a region on its own or would we be combined with East Anglia? Or perhaps with Hertfordshire?
Essex would be combined with East Anglia and Hertfordshire to form an Eastern region Regional Assembly
What about Cambridgeshire?
Or Huntingdonshire?
Or the Soke of Peterborough?
(My take is that there are lots of things that could/should be devolved from Westminster. England is too big get the benefits from that, and many counties are a bit too small. Administrative Regions as we have them are unloved and unlovely, but voluntary groupings of counties could be sorted in a day or so, if we wanted. I'd still start with the ITV / BBC local news regions as a starting point. Probably before the Oxford and Cambridge programmes were cut.)
I can't believe that raising corporate taxes would drive corporations away.
Some mistake surely?
It will be interesting to see how Hunt addresses this in the budget.
He will have to do so.
I don't think he will. He seems bereft of imagination. It's not such a bad thing to put corporation tax up but it needs to be coupled with a very big investment incentive so companies can funnel cash into capital growth. We've done the first and not done the second, it's going to result in lower growth.
The ideal scenario is for companies to cut their corporation tax bill to zero by investing all of their profit into capital growth which gives us more and better paid jobs which are taxed at net 25-35% vs CT at 25%. Jeremy Hunt has completely lost sight of business investment as a mechanism to grow the economy. The NHS tax on the pharmaceuticals industry is a disaster atm, a bunch of my university friends are suggesting if it isn't axed then it will result in billions of investment over the next 2-3 years being diverted to Ireland and the Netherlands. It punishes pharma companies who do research and manufacturing in the UK, it's cheaper for them to do it all out of the UK and import the finished product because it won't attract anywhere near the same taxation. Unsurprisingly pharma companies are beginning to do this.
Yes, it's very concerning.
I must say, I've been disappointed by Hunt whilst Sunak has exceeded my expectations.
Hunt seems to be another Hammond. And possibly less than that.
What has Sunak done ? SFA
Avoided scandal and achieved a significant change to the NIP. Not insignificant under the circs.
Hiding away does not encourage me he is much better than previous PM's and the NIP just highlights how second rate Scotland is in the UK. Scotland wanted to remain in EU and if they can do a deal for NI then why not give Scotland teh same deal. Reason is they are shit scared of USA and were forced to do something on NI. Totally and utterly insignificant in my viewpoint. He is just another Tory in London who will do nothing for Scotland other than treat it as second class.
There is no GFA in Scotland and Scotland does not border another EU nation like Northern Ireland does with the Republic of Ireland.
Otherwise if you have special EU Deals for Scotland within GB why not special Deals for other Remain voting areas of GB like London, Cheltenham, Guildford, Elmbridge, Tunbridge Wells and Winchester and Oxford and Cambridge and Manchester?
Total shite as I would expect from you , you are incapable or intelligent enough to be able to tell the difference between a shire and a country.
SNP parliamentarians have warned that Humza Yousaf is doomed to fail as Scottish first minister even though he is the frontrunner in the race for the party leadership.
Senior figures including some of his own supporters have privately said that the Scottish health secretary is “lightweight”, “over-promoted” and “not going to be able to deliver” if elected leader.
One ally said Yousaf risked being ousted shortly after next year’s general election should the party not live up to its performance under Nicola Sturgeon.
I've been idly pondering whether Yousaf might be better positioned, career-wise, to do a deal with Forbes and sell it to the membership & SNP voters as a sort of 'I'll be your left/progressive voice in her ear as deputy FM'.
If Forbes does well, he gets some glory and a nice job. If she does badly and gets the heave-ho, he's well placed to - sadly, wipes-tear-from-eye, go-on-then-if-I-must - take over as FM.
But I suspect the idea of winning outright and being FM (for however long) must be a strong pull.
Do we have SNP members on PB who are prepared to report from the closed hustings, just for interest (and betting)? How long is it going on?
Not closed any more - there was a u-turn. Licvestreamed. Haven't checked if they are archived - am too busy on a job.
1. Sunak knew that Eat out to spread Covid was a stupid idea, but didn't care that more people would catch Covid and die as a result.
2. Bozo is innumerate.
On 1, I was saying this at the time, as were many others. On 2, I think we already knew this.
On Eat Covid to Catch Covid, it had the same impact on the industry as giving someone crack cocaine. A brief buzz, followed immediately by a crashing decline. They could have found other ways to keep hospitality afloat which actually kept hospitality afloat without spreading the pox.
Probably yes. However we still didn’t have a vaccine in summer 2020. If we knew for sure it was coming, we could have just kept things shut and paid for it. But we didn’t, and eat our to help out was part of trying to live with covid with mitigations, but without either (a) widespread disease acquired immunity or (b) vaccination.
Far too many people just know what we should have done, but a lot of it is based on hindsight.
Of course we knew that a vaccine was coming. Just about every pharma company in the world was busy working on it. The correct course of action would have been to hunker down until the vulnerable groups were protected. We'd done the hard part, getting through the first wave. Instead of keeping things that way the government (Sunak) devised a scheme that almost seems to have been devised specifically to bring on a second wave.
No, the correct course of action would have been for the vulnerable groups to have been protected until they could be vaccinated. But in summer 2020 IIRC the government was still pretending that there was no such thing as vulnerable groups and that the virus didn't discriminate.
By the way, whoever on here recommended the musical version of War of the Worlds -narrated by Richard Burton - thank you.
Absolutely bloody brilliant.
I have been listening to it, and enjoying it, all weekend with my bose headphones and I even bought the original H.G Wells paperback at Waterstones yesterday as well.
Loving it. Amazing.
I think that was me. Burton's narration is just superb.
I very much hope it has got you in better humour. You have not quite been yourself of late.
Thank you.
Extremely stressed at work. Weeks feel like 7-8 days and weekends 1 day. Become very angry and snappy. Wife made an intervention last night.
We'll see about whether current job works out. I'll give it another 6 months.
Have ordered Starlink. Will be interesting to see if it makes a rapid improvement or if its meh enough to be sent back for a refund...
I had it at my place in France before I sold it and it was very good. I wouldn't have it now because Elon is a fucking shitlord.
Elon is Hank Scorpio. But what are we going to do? Boycott Amazon because Bezos is also a fucking shitlord? I have a very simple policy which is to ignore the machinations of business leaders and artists. That way I don't have to cancel JK Rowling or Michael Jackson or boycott Starlink or do some other pointless shit that doesn't impact the supposed Bad Guys but impacts me quite a lot.
I used to work for Nestle. Some leftie friends would recoil in horror and state firmly that they boycott us. "Great! And do you know how much impact that has on the business? None at all..."
Presumably though, you working for them did have an impact on the business. That was nice. My Mum was in Madagascar in the 70's working on nutrition, and Nestle had convinced all the young mothers to purchase their filthy tinned milk because they said it was better than breast milk.
Mr. L, what impact do you think disestablishing the Church of England would have?
For most people none, apart from they couldn't automatically get married or buried in their local Church of England Parish Church anymore unless they regularly attended it or had been baptised there
Buried in the local church? Intramural burials have been banned for almost two centuries, the odd aristo or elite person aside!
Even if you are talking about churchyards, many are closed to new burials except sometimes if you have relatives or a lair there already. Off to the secular cemetery. So even less impact.
In our town burial, either of bodies or of ashes, in the churchyard is the responsibility of the parish council. Not the parochial church council.
It wouldn't be if the Church of England was disestablished. Burial in the churchyard could be refused to those who had not been regular attendees at the Church of England Parish Church
I’m certain that the last two funerals at our local parish church that I attended, where the bodies were buried in the churchyard, were not of men who regularly attended church. One of them, though could be described as an upright and honest citizen; I’m not so sure about the other one!
Yes because the Church of England is the established church. As long as it remains the established church anyone from the Parish can be buried in the Church of England churchyard
Disestablishment wouldn't prevent the C of E continuing to offer what it does to everyone who asks. Some parishes would probably get snotty, but some parishes manage quite a bit of "of course you can get married here, we'll talk about it once you've done our course" snottiness already.
The House of Lords? Abolish it. Replace it with a British senate. 25 Senators for each home nation copying the US principle where big states can't outvote small states. Add in representatives of the British dependencies - IoM, the Bailiwicks, Gibraltar, Falklands etc.
I'm not aware of any US state having 80% of the population of the whole country...
For this kind of concept to work there first needs to be an equal devolution to an English parliament, and then the UK parliament can deal only with reserved matters for the enitre country. It's bad enough at the moment with the UK parliament legislating for England-only matters; your proposal would be quite absurd.
But I am an open and long-standing advocate of an English parliament. I am proposing the bicameral federal government structure. A very much reduced Commons and an evenly composited Senate as an upper house. Each nation has a unicameral assembly plus gets to send MPs and Senators to Westminster.
Absurd would be carrying on with the current stupid. No English parliament. Mince elected as MPs. The Lords full of Tory donors and archbishops.
Right. But we're not ever going to get an English parliament - the Conservative Party doesn't want any further devolution (for reasons I really don't understand) and insofar as the Labour Party wants further devolution it's through the balkanisation of England.
A devolution of power from the Centre in practice means to the English Regions and Cities. Calling this process a Balkanisation of England leads me to conclude you don't want a devolution of power from the Centre. Which is fair enough, I'm not convinced of it myself, but don't kid yourself it wouldn't be real devolution.
An English parliament otoh isn't. Not really. Westminster is already dominated by England. You wouldn't get much extra devolution by just having an English parliament. People wanting an English parliament imo don't want it for decentralization-of-power reasons. It's more of a nationalist thing, a grievance that England as a 'nation' - as a 'people' even - is being short-changed, typically in relation to Scotland.
"Not fair! They've got one so WE should have one too" ... is what it boils down to.
You'd go from "England not having a parliament and government" to "England having a parliament and government" which is a necessary step (as we saw over Covid - the government is the more important part but I don't see how you get an English government without an English parliament).
If the English parliament then wants to devolve to regious, counties or cities, that should be a decision for England. Just as if the Scottish parliament now wants to devolve some of its powers to regions or cities it should be able to.
Is there anyone that can actually be a Tory by HYUFD's description. He doesn't even meet it himself.
Yes, anyone who supports keeping the monarchy, retaining the remaining hereditary peers and keeping the Church of England as the established Churcg would be a Tory
Sound money? Low taxation? Keeping crime low and the courts and prison system functioning? ....
Exactly. All much more important to me than @HYUFD's list.
Yes but David you are more a Liberal Unionist than an 18th or 19th century Tory.
Indeed the Tories existed in England as the main opponents of the Whigs even before the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland
You are just about the only Tory in the village when we get right down to it.
Is there anyone that can actually be a Tory by HYUFD's description. He doesn't even meet it himself.
Yes, anyone who supports keeping the monarchy, retaining the remaining hereditary peers and keeping the Church of England as the established Churcg would be a Tory
The House of Lords? Abolish it. Replace it with a British senate. 25 Senators for each home nation copying the US principle where big states can't outvote small states. Add in representatives of the British dependencies - IoM, the Bailiwicks, Gibraltar, Falklands etc.
I'm not aware of any US state having 80% of the population of the whole country...
For this kind of concept to work there first needs to be an equal devolution to an English parliament, and then the UK parliament can deal only with reserved matters for the enitre country. It's bad enough at the moment with the UK parliament legislating for England-only matters; your proposal would be quite absurd.
But I am an open and long-standing advocate of an English parliament. I am proposing the bicameral federal government structure. A very much reduced Commons and an evenly composited Senate as an upper house. Each nation has a unicameral assembly plus gets to send MPs and Senators to Westminster.
Absurd would be carrying on with the current stupid. No English parliament. Mince elected as MPs. The Lords full of Tory donors and archbishops.
Right. But we're not ever going to get an English parliament - the Conservative Party doesn't want any further devolution (for reasons I really don't understand) and insofar as the Labour Party wants further devolution it's through the balkanisation of England.
A devolution of power from the Centre in practice means to the English Regions and Cities. Calling this process a Balkanisation of England leads me to conclude you don't want a devolution of power from the Centre. Which is fair enough, I'm not convinced of it myself, but don't kid yourself it wouldn't be real devolution.
An English parliament otoh isn't. Not really. Westminster is already dominated by England. You wouldn't get much extra devolution by just having an English parliament. People wanting an English parliament imo don't want it for decentralization-of-power reasons. It's more of a nationalist thing, a grievance that England as a 'nation' - as a 'people' even - is being short-changed, typically in relation to Scotland.
"Not fair! They've got one so WE should have one too" ... is what it boils down to.
You'd go from "England not having a parliament and government" to "England having a parliament and government" which is a necessary step (as we saw over Covid - the government is the more important part but I don't see how you get an English government without an English parliament).
If the English parliament then wants to devolve to regious, counties or cities, that should be a decision for England. Just as if the Scottish parliament now wants to devolve some of its powers to regions or cities it should be able to.
But if logic holds the latter process would still be Balkanisation and you'd still oppose it. As I say, bemoaning the lack of an EP is in essence a nationalist grievance - defined by reference to Scotland - not a yearning for the decentralization of power.
Sunak’s secret meetings about the Lords — and why he thinks it needs reform
With more than 800 members, the upper chamber is second only to the Chinese National People’s Congress in size, and not everyone contributes equally
Male peers, as well as those based in London and the southeast, are overrepresented in the chamber when compared with the general population.
Yet they turn up and speak less than their female counterparts or those from the north and Midlands, our analysis shows....
..More than 45 per cent of current peers reside in London and the southeast, compared with only 27 per cent of the population. The northwest and West Midlands are the least represented, with only 8 per cent of peers living in these regions compared with 20 per cent of the population....
...Peers from ethnic minorities claim less in expenses than their white counterparts, and contribute more to debates. Only 7 per cent of current peers are non-white, versus 18 per cent of the country’s population.
No Sunak won't abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected upper house as Sir Keir is proposing to do. He might reform it however
The House of Lords is an anachronism and needs comprehensive reform
Quite frankly, and somewhat perversely, reform sometimes makes it worse.
The behaviour of the hereditaries is much better than that of the life peers.
If people focus on principle being the issue then the answer is obviously abolition and then there's difficult questions and precisely what to have instead.
If people focus on effectiveness and efficiency being the issue then its far simpler and quicker to sort out, with some big early options to cut down size without doing more than cutting out the time servers and partisan hacks.
The Upper House should be a house of the nations with elected representatives from the 4 constituent countries. At the moment the refusal of the SNP to play means that Scotland is somewhat underrepresented. Personally, I would prefer that the numbers be balanced so that Scotland, Wales and NI can together outvote England, if only just. I think that this would restore some balance to our Union.
I think that the members should have slightly longer terms, say 6 years, and be limited to 2 terms. The membership should be elected by proportional representation with a minimum of, say, 5%. Absolutely no hereditaries, no churchmen and no placemen.
Excellent post! There was a suggestion some years ago, that members should have a term of 15 years, but only one.
It's a nice idea, but a blocking majority on behalf of less than 17% of the electorate seems also too unbalanced not to be destabilising. If Scotland, Wakes and NI had between them a third of the votes, it would at least require a quarter if English votes too.
One of the destabilising factors in the Union is the overwhelming dominance of England, something that has greatly increased over the last 30 years as most of our mass immigration has chosen to live there. I would not go as far as the US, where even small, largely empty states have as many Senators as California but some sort of balancing is required.
If English Monarchs hadn't lost Hanover, Normandy, Aquitaine, Ireland, etc, then England wouldn't be such a large proportion of the remaining whole.
Sunak’s secret meetings about the Lords — and why he thinks it needs reform
With more than 800 members, the upper chamber is second only to the Chinese National People’s Congress in size, and not everyone contributes equally
Male peers, as well as those based in London and the southeast, are overrepresented in the chamber when compared with the general population.
Yet they turn up and speak less than their female counterparts or those from the north and Midlands, our analysis shows....
..More than 45 per cent of current peers reside in London and the southeast, compared with only 27 per cent of the population. The northwest and West Midlands are the least represented, with only 8 per cent of peers living in these regions compared with 20 per cent of the population....
...Peers from ethnic minorities claim less in expenses than their white counterparts, and contribute more to debates. Only 7 per cent of current peers are non-white, versus 18 per cent of the country’s population.
No Sunak won't abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected upper house as Sir Keir is proposing to do. He might reform it however
The House of Lords is an anachronism and needs comprehensive reform
Quite frankly, and somewhat perversely, reform sometimes makes it worse.
The behaviour of the hereditaries is much better than that of the life peers.
If people focus on principle being the issue then the answer is obviously abolition and then there's difficult questions and precisely what to have instead.
If people focus on effectiveness and efficiency being the issue then its far simpler and quicker to sort out, with some big early options to cut down size without doing more than cutting out the time servers and partisan hacks.
The Upper House should be a house of the nations with elected representatives from the 4 constituent countries. At the moment the refusal of the SNP to play means that Scotland is somewhat underrepresented. Personally, I would prefer that the numbers be balanced so that Scotland, Wales and NI can together outvote England, if only just. I think that this would restore some balance to our Union.
I think that the members should have slightly longer terms, say 6 years, and be limited to 2 terms. The membership should be elected by proportional representation with a minimum of, say, 5%. Absolutely no hereditaries, no churchmen and no placemen.
Excellent post! There was a suggestion some years ago, that members should have a term of 15 years, but only one.
It's a nice idea, but a blocking majority on behalf of less than 17% of the electorate seems also too unbalanced not to be destabilising. If Scotland, Wakes and NI had between them a third of the votes, it would at least require a quarter if English votes too.
One of the destabilising factors in the Union is the overwhelming dominance of England, something that has greatly increased over the last 30 years as most of our mass immigration has chosen to live there. I would not go as far as the US, where even small, largely empty states have as many Senators as California but some sort of balancing is required.
If English Monarchs hadn't lost Hanover, Normandy, Aquitaine, Ireland, etc, then England wouldn't be such a large proportion of the remaining whole.
...and the role of Scotland, Wales and Ireland would have been greatly further diluted.
I can't believe that raising corporate taxes would drive corporations away.
Some mistake surely?
It will be interesting to see how Hunt addresses this in the budget.
He will have to do so.
I don't think he will. He seems bereft of imagination. It's not such a bad thing to put corporation tax up but it needs to be coupled with a very big investment incentive so companies can funnel cash into capital growth. We've done the first and not done the second, it's going to result in lower growth.
The ideal scenario is for companies to cut their corporation tax bill to zero by investing all of their profit into capital growth which gives us more and better paid jobs which are taxed at net 25-35% vs CT at 25%. Jeremy Hunt has completely lost sight of business investment as a mechanism to grow the economy. The NHS tax on the pharmaceuticals industry is a disaster atm, a bunch of my university friends are suggesting if it isn't axed then it will result in billions of investment over the next 2-3 years being diverted to Ireland and the Netherlands. It punishes pharma companies who do research and manufacturing in the UK, it's cheaper for them to do it all out of the UK and import the finished product because it won't attract anywhere near the same taxation. Unsurprisingly pharma companies are beginning to do this.
Yes, it's very concerning.
I must say, I've been disappointed by Hunt whilst Sunak has exceeded my expectations.
Hunt seems to be another Hammond. And possibly less than that.
What has Sunak done ? SFA
Avoided scandal and achieved a significant change to the NIP. Not insignificant under the circs.
Hiding away does not encourage me he is much better than previous PM's and the NIP just highlights how second rate Scotland is in the UK. Scotland wanted to remain in EU and if they can do a deal for NI then why not give Scotland teh same deal. Reason is they are shit scared of USA and were forced to do something on NI. Totally and utterly insignificant in my viewpoint. He is just another Tory in London who will do nothing for Scotland other than treat it as second class.
There is no GFA in Scotland and Scotland does not border another EU nation like Northern Ireland does with the Republic of Ireland.
Otherwise if you have special EU Deals for Scotland within GB why not special Deals for other Remain voting areas of GB like London, Cardiff, Cheltenham, Guildford, Elmbridge, Tunbridge Wells and Winchester and Oxford and Cambridge and Manchester?
So, you are saying that political expediency trumps democracy.
"The UK will give 28 Challenger 2 main battle tanks instead of the earlier promised 14, Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.K. Vadym Prystaiko told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during an interview."
Also, having England the only part of the UK with no devolved Parliament/Assembly, and with voters in English constituencies having dramatically less voting power (from memory, England is about 85% of the population) than everywhere else is not something that can be considered remotely fair or justifiable.
As well as abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected Senate, I also suspect Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies in England without referendum to complete the New Labour project Blair started as PM when he abolished most of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords and created the Scottish Parliament and Welsh, Northern Irish and London Assemblies
If you remember John Prescott, as minister for the regions, after the north-east, its own assembly and in a referendum, it was turned down, if I recall correctly, 85 to 15.
Yes, hence Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies without referendum this time from the North East of England to the South East
Is Essex big enough to be a region on its own or would we be combined with East Anglia? Or perhaps with Hertfordshire?
Essex would be combined with East Anglia and Hertfordshire to form an Eastern region Regional Assembly
What about Cambridgeshire?
Or Huntingdonshire?
Or the Soke of Peterborough?
(My take is that there are lots of things that could/should be devolved from Westminster. England is too big get the benefits from that, and many counties are a bit too small. Administrative Regions as we have them are unloved and unlovely, but voluntary groupings of counties could be sorted in a day or so, if we wanted. I'd still start with the ITV / BBC local news regions as a starting point. Probably before the Oxford and Cambridge programmes were cut.)
It is Treasury “wisdom” that many counties are too small to devolve to.
I call bollocks on that. It is easy to point to successful entities around the world that subvert that idea, from Rhode Island to Iceland and the Australian Capital Territory.
My preferred model is to devolve to the “counties and metros”, which looking at England alone, creates about 50 sub-national units.
In that model, Huntingdonshire steps up as a county. I would leave the Soke as a city/district of Northants to which it properly belongs.
Very much most of what we want done at a sub-national level could operate on this basis.
I can't believe that raising corporate taxes would drive corporations away.
Some mistake surely?
It will be interesting to see how Hunt addresses this in the budget.
He will have to do so.
I don't think he will. He seems bereft of imagination. It's not such a bad thing to put corporation tax up but it needs to be coupled with a very big investment incentive so companies can funnel cash into capital growth. We've done the first and not done the second, it's going to result in lower growth.
The ideal scenario is for companies to cut their corporation tax bill to zero by investing all of their profit into capital growth which gives us more and better paid jobs which are taxed at net 25-35% vs CT at 25%. Jeremy Hunt has completely lost sight of business investment as a mechanism to grow the economy. The NHS tax on the pharmaceuticals industry is a disaster atm, a bunch of my university friends are suggesting if it isn't axed then it will result in billions of investment over the next 2-3 years being diverted to Ireland and the Netherlands. It punishes pharma companies who do research and manufacturing in the UK, it's cheaper for them to do it all out of the UK and import the finished product because it won't attract anywhere near the same taxation. Unsurprisingly pharma companies are beginning to do this.
Yes, it's very concerning.
I must say, I've been disappointed by Hunt whilst Sunak has exceeded my expectations.
Hunt seems to be another Hammond. And possibly less than that.
What has Sunak done ? SFA
Avoided scandal and achieved a significant change to the NIP. Not insignificant under the circs.
Hiding away does not encourage me he is much better than previous PM's and the NIP just highlights how second rate Scotland is in the UK. Scotland wanted to remain in EU and if they can do a deal for NI then why not give Scotland teh same deal. Reason is they are shit scared of USA and were forced to do something on NI. Totally and utterly insignificant in my viewpoint. He is just another Tory in London who will do nothing for Scotland other than treat it as second class.
There is no GFA in Scotland and Scotland does not border another EU nation like Northern Ireland does with the Republic of Ireland.
Otherwise if you have special EU Deals for Scotland within GB why not special Deals for other Remain voting areas of GB like London, Cardiff, Cheltenham, Guildford, Elmbridge, Tunbridge Wells and Winchester and Oxford and Cambridge and Manchester?
So, you are saying that political expediency trumps democracy.
No, reality. No other part of the UK has had a recent history of terrorist warfare as Northern Ireland has and no other part of the UK borders another EU nation as Northern Ireland has.
The whole of the UK has left the EU in line with the 2016 Leave vote and 2019 EU referendum result. Northern Ireland just has a special deal to avoid a hard border in Ireland
I can't believe that raising corporate taxes would drive corporations away.
Some mistake surely?
It will be interesting to see how Hunt addresses this in the budget.
He will have to do so.
I don't think he will. He seems bereft of imagination. It's not such a bad thing to put corporation tax up but it needs to be coupled with a very big investment incentive so companies can funnel cash into capital growth. We've done the first and not done the second, it's going to result in lower growth.
The ideal scenario is for companies to cut their corporation tax bill to zero by investing all of their profit into capital growth which gives us more and better paid jobs which are taxed at net 25-35% vs CT at 25%. Jeremy Hunt has completely lost sight of business investment as a mechanism to grow the economy. The NHS tax on the pharmaceuticals industry is a disaster atm, a bunch of my university friends are suggesting if it isn't axed then it will result in billions of investment over the next 2-3 years being diverted to Ireland and the Netherlands. It punishes pharma companies who do research and manufacturing in the UK, it's cheaper for them to do it all out of the UK and import the finished product because it won't attract anywhere near the same taxation. Unsurprisingly pharma companies are beginning to do this.
Yes, it's very concerning.
I must say, I've been disappointed by Hunt whilst Sunak has exceeded my expectations.
Hunt seems to be another Hammond. And possibly less than that.
What has Sunak done ? SFA
Avoided scandal and achieved a significant change to the NIP. Not insignificant under the circs.
Hiding away does not encourage me he is much better than previous PM's and the NIP just highlights how second rate Scotland is in the UK. Scotland wanted to remain in EU and if they can do a deal for NI then why not give Scotland teh same deal. Reason is they are shit scared of USA and were forced to do something on NI. Totally and utterly insignificant in my viewpoint. He is just another Tory in London who will do nothing for Scotland other than treat it as second class.
There is no GFA in Scotland and Scotland does not border another EU nation like Northern Ireland does with the Republic of Ireland.
Otherwise if you have special EU Deals for Scotland within GB why not special Deals for other Remain voting areas of GB like London, Cardiff, Cheltenham, Guildford, Elmbridge, Tunbridge Wells and Winchester and Oxford and Cambridge and Manchester?
So, you are saying that political expediency trumps democracy.
TBF, that's been true of every reform attempted to British democracy since Catholic Emancipation in 1829.
And I'm not sure I need to limit it to British democracy either.
Rather than consider the make-up of the HoL a first question should be what should it do??? It should only eject a law (or send it back for redrafting) under limited circumstances, eg not complying with constitution (whatever that is); or discriminatory; or contradictory; etc. It should not be able to block for partisan reasons.
Thinking a bit more about English Regional Devolution:
It sounds great per the general - and very excellent - sentiment that political power should rest as close as possible to the people impacted by political decisions.
However it would create extra layers of government, maybe unhealthy competition, and therefore division, bring politics into things that might be better if apolitical, and give scope for local poundland populists to inflate to a size considerably in excess of their boots.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
Is there anyone that can actually be a Tory by HYUFD's description. He doesn't even meet it himself.
Yes, anyone who supports keeping the monarchy, retaining the remaining hereditary peers and keeping the Church of England as the established Churcg would be a Tory
So not many then
The true ideological Tories rather than libertarians or Brexiteers or social conservatives who are also part of today's Conservative party probably equate to the 9% who voted for Theresa May's Conservative Party even in the 2019 European elections like me (with perhaps a few more who lent their votes to the Brexit Party) and have always voted Conservative at general elections.
However true ideological socialists, social democrats, libertarians, social conservatives etc aren't that much higher either. Labour and the LDs, even as is now clear the SNP, are coalitions of ideological factions too
Also, having England the only part of the UK with no devolved Parliament/Assembly, and with voters in English constituencies having dramatically less voting power (from memory, England is about 85% of the population) than everywhere else is not something that can be considered remotely fair or justifiable.
As well as abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected Senate, I also suspect Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies in England without referendum to complete the New Labour project Blair started as PM when he abolished most of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords and created the Scottish Parliament and Welsh, Northern Irish and London Assemblies
If you remember John Prescott, as minister for the regions, after the north-east, its own assembly and in a referendum, it was turned down, if I recall correctly, 85 to 15.
Yes, hence Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies without referendum this time from the North East of England to the South East
Is Essex big enough to be a region on its own or would we be combined with East Anglia? Or perhaps with Hertfordshire?
Essex would be combined with East Anglia and Hertfordshire to form an Eastern region Regional Assembly
What about Cambridgeshire?
Or Huntingdonshire?
Or the Soke of Peterborough?
(My take is that there are lots of things that could/should be devolved from Westminster. England is too big get the benefits from that, and many counties are a bit too small. Administrative Regions as we have them are unloved and unlovely, but voluntary groupings of counties could be sorted in a day or so, if we wanted. I'd still start with the ITV / BBC local news regions as a starting point. Probably before the Oxford and Cambridge programmes were cut.)
It is Treasury “wisdom” that many counties are too small to devolve to.
I call bollocks on that. It is easy to point to successful entities around the world that subvert that idea, from Rhode Island to Iceland and the Australian Capital Territory.
My preferred model is to devolve to the “counties and metros”, which looking at England alone, creates about 50 sub-national units.
In that model, Huntingdonshire steps up as a county. I would leave the Soke as a city/district of Northants to which it properly belongs.
Very much most of what we want done at a sub-national level could operate on this basis.
You have to wonder which 1973 counties, or even current ones would be 'too poor, too wee, too stupid' to function as such units. It might not be that many. Cornwall and Cumbria, perhaps. Rutland and Herefordshire of current counties. But some, like Kent, Sussex, Essex, Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire would be a fair match certainly for Wales and Northern Ireland and arguably for Scotland in terms of population and economic importance.
It does rather break down when you consider how badly many counties have been run - but then Stormont and Y Bae are hardly an advert for devolution but nobody's seriously suggesting abolition.
I can't believe that raising corporate taxes would drive corporations away.
Some mistake surely?
It will be interesting to see how Hunt addresses this in the budget.
He will have to do so.
I don't think he will. He seems bereft of imagination. It's not such a bad thing to put corporation tax up but it needs to be coupled with a very big investment incentive so companies can funnel cash into capital growth. We've done the first and not done the second, it's going to result in lower growth.
The ideal scenario is for companies to cut their corporation tax bill to zero by investing all of their profit into capital growth which gives us more and better paid jobs which are taxed at net 25-35% vs CT at 25%. Jeremy Hunt has completely lost sight of business investment as a mechanism to grow the economy. The NHS tax on the pharmaceuticals industry is a disaster atm, a bunch of my university friends are suggesting if it isn't axed then it will result in billions of investment over the next 2-3 years being diverted to Ireland and the Netherlands. It punishes pharma companies who do research and manufacturing in the UK, it's cheaper for them to do it all out of the UK and import the finished product because it won't attract anywhere near the same taxation. Unsurprisingly pharma companies are beginning to do this.
Yes, it's very concerning.
I must say, I've been disappointed by Hunt whilst Sunak has exceeded my expectations.
Hunt seems to be another Hammond. And possibly less than that.
What has Sunak done ? SFA
Avoided scandal and achieved a significant change to the NIP. Not insignificant under the circs.
Hiding away does not encourage me he is much better than previous PM's and the NIP just highlights how second rate Scotland is in the UK. Scotland wanted to remain in EU and if they can do a deal for NI then why not give Scotland teh same deal. Reason is they are shit scared of USA and were forced to do something on NI. Totally and utterly insignificant in my viewpoint. He is just another Tory in London who will do nothing for Scotland other than treat it as second class.
There is no GFA in Scotland and Scotland does not border another EU nation like Northern Ireland does with the Republic of Ireland.
Otherwise if you have special EU Deals for Scotland within GB why not special Deals for other Remain voting areas of GB like London, Cardiff, Cheltenham, Guildford, Elmbridge, Tunbridge Wells and Winchester and Oxford and Cambridge and Manchester?
So, you are saying that political expediency trumps democracy.
There are border checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. NI is in the single market for goods but not services. I'm not sure a similar deal for Scotland would be of great benefit to you.
Rather than consider the make-up of the HoL a first question should be what should it do??? It should only eject a law (or send it back for redrafting) under limited circumstances, eg not complying with constitution (whatever that is); or discriminatory; or contradictory; etc. It should not be able to block for partisan reasons.
Mr. L, what impact do you think disestablishing the Church of England would have?
For most people none, apart from they couldn't automatically get married or buried in their local Church of England Parish Church anymore unless they regularly attended it or had been baptised there
Buried in the local church? Intramural burials have been banned for almost two centuries, the odd aristo or elite person aside!
Even if you are talking about churchyards, many are closed to new burials except sometimes if you have relatives or a lair there already. Off to the secular cemetery. So even less impact.
In our town burial, either of bodies or of ashes, in the churchyard is the responsibility of the parish council. Not the parochial church council.
It wouldn't be if the Church of England was disestablished. Burial in the churchyard could be refused to those who had not been regular attendees at the Church of England Parish Church
I’m certain that the last two funerals at our local parish church that I attended, where the bodies were buried in the churchyard, were not of men who regularly attended church. One of them, though could be described as an upright and honest citizen; I’m not so sure about the other one!
Yes because the Church of England is the established church. As long as it remains the established church anyone from the Parish can be buried in the Church of England churchyard
Disestablishment wouldn't prevent the C of E continuing to offer what it does to everyone who asks. Some parishes would probably get snotty, but some parishes manage quite a bit of "of course you can get married here, we'll talk about it once you've done our course" snottiness already.
It would to an extent. Far more Church of England Vicars would take the line of Roman Catholic priests or evangelical ministers who won't marry you in their Church unless you regularly attend it or have been baptised there
"The UK will give 28 Challenger 2 main battle tanks instead of the earlier promised 14, Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.K. Vadym Prystaiko told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during an interview."
Doesn't seem to have been confirmed by the MoD or any ministers.
Sunak’s secret meetings about the Lords — and why he thinks it needs reform
With more than 800 members, the upper chamber is second only to the Chinese National People’s Congress in size, and not everyone contributes equally
Male peers, as well as those based in London and the southeast, are overrepresented in the chamber when compared with the general population.
Yet they turn up and speak less than their female counterparts or those from the north and Midlands, our analysis shows....
..More than 45 per cent of current peers reside in London and the southeast, compared with only 27 per cent of the population. The northwest and West Midlands are the least represented, with only 8 per cent of peers living in these regions compared with 20 per cent of the population....
...Peers from ethnic minorities claim less in expenses than their white counterparts, and contribute more to debates. Only 7 per cent of current peers are non-white, versus 18 per cent of the country’s population.
No Sunak won't abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected upper house as Sir Keir is proposing to do. He might reform it however
The House of Lords is an anachronism and needs comprehensive reform
Quite frankly, and somewhat perversely, reform sometimes makes it worse.
The behaviour of the hereditaries is much better than that of the life peers.
If people focus on principle being the issue then the answer is obviously abolition and then there's difficult questions and precisely what to have instead.
If people focus on effectiveness and efficiency being the issue then its far simpler and quicker to sort out, with some big early options to cut down size without doing more than cutting out the time servers and partisan hacks.
The Upper House should be a house of the nations with elected representatives from the 4 constituent countries. At the moment the refusal of the SNP to play means that Scotland is somewhat underrepresented. Personally, I would prefer that the numbers be balanced so that Scotland, Wales and NI can together outvote England, if only just. I think that this would restore some balance to our Union.
I think that the members should have slightly longer terms, say 6 years, and be limited to 2 terms. The membership should be elected by proportional representation with a minimum of, say, 5%. Absolutely no hereditaries, no churchmen and no placemen.
Excellent post! There was a suggestion some years ago, that members should have a term of 15 years, but only one.
It's a nice idea, but a blocking majority on behalf of less than 17% of the electorate seems also too unbalanced not to be destabilising. If Scotland, Wakes and NI had between them a third of the votes, it would at least require a quarter if English votes too.
One of the destabilising factors in the Union is the overwhelming dominance of England, something that has greatly increased over the last 30 years as most of our mass immigration has chosen to live there. I would not go as far as the US, where even small, largely empty states have as many Senators as California but some sort of balancing is required.
If English Monarchs hadn't lost Hanover, Normandy, Aquitaine, Ireland, etc, then England wouldn't be such a large proportion of the remaining whole.
It’s an interesting counterfactual had Newfoundland, Malta, the Seychelles and various other places that were not to keen on independence been incorporated into the UK
Sunak should appoint HYUFD as his Membership Tsar. Nobody should be allowed to join, or stay in, the Party unless they have successfully passed the stringent tests that our friend from Essex will set. Sod the broad church - I think the Tory Party should be pure in word and deed.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
I can't believe that raising corporate taxes would drive corporations away.
Some mistake surely?
It will be interesting to see how Hunt addresses this in the budget.
He will have to do so.
I don't think he will. He seems bereft of imagination. It's not such a bad thing to put corporation tax up but it needs to be coupled with a very big investment incentive so companies can funnel cash into capital growth. We've done the first and not done the second, it's going to result in lower growth.
The ideal scenario is for companies to cut their corporation tax bill to zero by investing all of their profit into capital growth which gives us more and better paid jobs which are taxed at net 25-35% vs CT at 25%. Jeremy Hunt has completely lost sight of business investment as a mechanism to grow the economy. The NHS tax on the pharmaceuticals industry is a disaster atm, a bunch of my university friends are suggesting if it isn't axed then it will result in billions of investment over the next 2-3 years being diverted to Ireland and the Netherlands. It punishes pharma companies who do research and manufacturing in the UK, it's cheaper for them to do it all out of the UK and import the finished product because it won't attract anywhere near the same taxation. Unsurprisingly pharma companies are beginning to do this.
Yes, it's very concerning.
I must say, I've been disappointed by Hunt whilst Sunak has exceeded my expectations.
Hunt seems to be another Hammond. And possibly less than that.
What has Sunak done ? SFA
Avoided scandal and achieved a significant change to the NIP. Not insignificant under the circs.
Hiding away does not encourage me he is much better than previous PM's and the NIP just highlights how second rate Scotland is in the UK. Scotland wanted to remain in EU and if they can do a deal for NI then why not give Scotland teh same deal. Reason is they are shit scared of USA and were forced to do something on NI. Totally and utterly insignificant in my viewpoint. He is just another Tory in London who will do nothing for Scotland other than treat it as second class.
There is no GFA in Scotland and Scotland does not border another EU nation like Northern Ireland does with the Republic of Ireland.
Otherwise if you have special EU Deals for Scotland within GB why not special Deals for other Remain voting areas of GB like London, Cardiff, Cheltenham, Guildford, Elmbridge, Tunbridge Wells and Winchester and Oxford and Cambridge and Manchester?
So, you are saying that political expediency trumps democracy.
There are border checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. NI is in the single market for goods but not services. I'm not sure a similar deal for Scotland would be of great benefit to you.
On the contrary, the advantages of being in the single market, including free movement of people, would outweigh the current brexit “benefits”, especially with the resumption of direct ferries from Scotland to the continent of Europe.
Sunak should appoint HYUFD as his Membership Tsar. Nobody should be allowed to join, or stay in, the Party unless they have successfully passed the stringent tests that our friend from Essex will set. Sod the broad church - I think the Tory Party should be pure in word and deed.
That might mean I have to expel Liz Truss and Mark Francois, as I am not sure even now they are fully committed to keeping the Church of England as the established church and Truss is not keen on retaining hereditary peers in the Lords and was once a republican
Sunak should appoint HYUFD as his Membership Tsar. Nobody should be allowed to join, or stay in, the Party unless they have successfully passed the stringent tests that our friend from Essex will set. Sod the broad church - I think the Tory Party should be pure in word and deed.
That might mean I have to expel Liz Truss and Mark Francois, as I am not sure even now they are fully committed to keeping the Church of England as the established church and Truss is not keen on retaining hereditary peers in the Lords and was once a republican
You could expel everyone and appoint yourself party leader!
Is there anyone that can actually be a Tory by HYUFD's description. He doesn't even meet it himself.
Yes, anyone who supports keeping the monarchy, retaining the remaining hereditary peers and keeping the Church of England as the established Churcg would be a Tory
So not many then
The true ideological Tories rather than libertarians or Brexiteers or social conservatives who are also part of today's Conservative party probably equate to the 9% who voted for Theresa May's Conservative Party even in the 2019 European elections like me (with perhaps a few more who lent their votes to the Brexit Party) and have always voted Conservative at general elections.
However true ideological socialists, social democrats, libertarians, social conservatives etc aren't that much higher either. Labour and the LDs, even as is now clear the SNP, are coalitions of ideological factions too
You most certainly are not representative of conservatives but rather a unique offering that is a source of great hilarity
"The UK will give 28 Challenger 2 main battle tanks instead of the earlier promised 14, Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.K. Vadym Prystaiko told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during an interview."
I am quite surprised that we have that many capable of moving under their own steam. We must be doing some serious back maintenance.
I can't believe that raising corporate taxes would drive corporations away.
Some mistake surely?
It will be interesting to see how Hunt addresses this in the budget.
He will have to do so.
I don't think he will. He seems bereft of imagination. It's not such a bad thing to put corporation tax up but it needs to be coupled with a very big investment incentive so companies can funnel cash into capital growth. We've done the first and not done the second, it's going to result in lower growth.
The ideal scenario is for companies to cut their corporation tax bill to zero by investing all of their profit into capital growth which gives us more and better paid jobs which are taxed at net 25-35% vs CT at 25%. Jeremy Hunt has completely lost sight of business investment as a mechanism to grow the economy. The NHS tax on the pharmaceuticals industry is a disaster atm, a bunch of my university friends are suggesting if it isn't axed then it will result in billions of investment over the next 2-3 years being diverted to Ireland and the Netherlands. It punishes pharma companies who do research and manufacturing in the UK, it's cheaper for them to do it all out of the UK and import the finished product because it won't attract anywhere near the same taxation. Unsurprisingly pharma companies are beginning to do this.
Yes, it's very concerning.
I must say, I've been disappointed by Hunt whilst Sunak has exceeded my expectations.
Hunt seems to be another Hammond. And possibly less than that.
What has Sunak done ? SFA
Avoided scandal and achieved a significant change to the NIP. Not insignificant under the circs.
Hiding away does not encourage me he is much better than previous PM's and the NIP just highlights how second rate Scotland is in the UK. Scotland wanted to remain in EU and if they can do a deal for NI then why not give Scotland teh same deal. Reason is they are shit scared of USA and were forced to do something on NI. Totally and utterly insignificant in my viewpoint. He is just another Tory in London who will do nothing for Scotland other than treat it as second class.
There is no GFA in Scotland and Scotland does not border another EU nation like Northern Ireland does with the Republic of Ireland.
Otherwise if you have special EU Deals for Scotland within GB why not special Deals for other Remain voting areas of GB like London, Cardiff, Cheltenham, Guildford, Elmbridge, Tunbridge Wells and Winchester and Oxford and Cambridge and Manchester?
So, you are saying that political expediency trumps democracy.
There are border checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. NI is in the single market for goods but not services. I'm not sure a similar deal for Scotland would be of great benefit to you.
On the contrary, the advantages of being in the single market, including free movement of people, would outweigh the current brexit “benefits”, especially with the resumption of direct ferries from Scotland to the continent of Europe.
Did you not read the notes? Don't mention ferries!
Also, having England the only part of the UK with no devolved Parliament/Assembly, and with voters in English constituencies having dramatically less voting power (from memory, England is about 85% of the population) than everywhere else is not something that can be considered remotely fair or justifiable.
As well as abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected Senate, I also suspect Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies in England without referendum to complete the New Labour project Blair started as PM when he abolished most of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords and created the Scottish Parliament and Welsh, Northern Irish and London Assemblies
If you remember John Prescott, as minister for the regions, after the north-east, its own assembly and in a referendum, it was turned down, if I recall correctly, 85 to 15.
Wasn’t that plan for most of the power to come upwards from local authorities, rather than downwards from central government? So it was an extra bunch of politicians to be paid for, but with the power ending up further from the people.
As I recall it, yes, you are right. Might well have been part of the reason it was defeated. However, I can’t see regional assemblies replacing counties.
Yes, I would devolve more power to counties, and make them raise more of their own money. They can co-operate on projects that cross boundaries, such as transport infrastructure, and can compete with each other on property taxes and business rates.
Which counties?
All of them! I’d reduce income taxes, perhaps to rates of 15% and 35%, but reduce subsidy to local authorities by the amount lost, allowing them to raise local taxes instead.
So you’d bankrupt half the LAs in the country. Granted just a speeding up of what successive governments have done for the last couple of decades, but people might actually notice.
It would result in the same income for LAs, just that council tax would go up significantly and central government subsidy would fall.
It would also encourage housebuilding, as the LA would see more money for every new house built.
It really wouldn’t. It would massively exacerbate what’s already the case. Local taxes in areas of greater deprivation are almost certain to fall short.
https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/English-local-government-funding-trends-and-challenges-in-2019-and-beyond-IFS-Report-166.pdf … Spending cuts per person in the most deprived tenth of council areas have averaged 31% (£432), compared with 16% (£134) in the least deprived tenth. This reflects the fact that between 2009–10 and 2015–16, the system for determining how much central government funding councils should get did not fully take into account how much councils relied on such funding relative to their own council tax revenues. Changes to the way grants were allocated from 2016–17 have remedied this issue since then – but not undone the previous pattern. Spending cuts have also varied across regions, again largely driven by differences in reliance on central government funding. For example, spending per person has fallen by 30% in the North East compared with 15% in the South West. Spending per person has fallen by 32% in London reflecting the fact that the government also significantly reduced funding for the Greater London Authority to subsidise buses and tubes, and councils in London have generally taken less advantage of the scope to increase council tax in recent years. However, despite larger cuts in more deprived areas, revenues and spending are still higher. For example, spending per person in the most deprived councils is 1.3 times the level in the least deprived – although this is down from 1.6 times in 2009–10. We cannot easily say whether the new or old funding and spending relativities are more appropriate though. To do this would require three things: (1) defining what we expect from councils in terms of service range and quality; (2) a robust way of estimating how much councils need to meet these expectations; and (3) a subjective judgement on how much it is appropriate to redistribute revenues in order to help all councils..
I can't believe that raising corporate taxes would drive corporations away.
Some mistake surely?
It will be interesting to see how Hunt addresses this in the budget.
He will have to do so.
I don't think he will. He seems bereft of imagination. It's not such a bad thing to put corporation tax up but it needs to be coupled with a very big investment incentive so companies can funnel cash into capital growth. We've done the first and not done the second, it's going to result in lower growth.
The ideal scenario is for companies to cut their corporation tax bill to zero by investing all of their profit into capital growth which gives us more and better paid jobs which are taxed at net 25-35% vs CT at 25%. Jeremy Hunt has completely lost sight of business investment as a mechanism to grow the economy. The NHS tax on the pharmaceuticals industry is a disaster atm, a bunch of my university friends are suggesting if it isn't axed then it will result in billions of investment over the next 2-3 years being diverted to Ireland and the Netherlands. It punishes pharma companies who do research and manufacturing in the UK, it's cheaper for them to do it all out of the UK and import the finished product because it won't attract anywhere near the same taxation. Unsurprisingly pharma companies are beginning to do this.
Yes, it's very concerning.
I must say, I've been disappointed by Hunt whilst Sunak has exceeded my expectations.
Hunt seems to be another Hammond. And possibly less than that.
What has Sunak done ? SFA
Avoided scandal and achieved a significant change to the NIP. Not insignificant under the circs.
Hiding away does not encourage me he is much better than previous PM's and the NIP just highlights how second rate Scotland is in the UK. Scotland wanted to remain in EU and if they can do a deal for NI then why not give Scotland teh same deal. Reason is they are shit scared of USA and were forced to do something on NI. Totally and utterly insignificant in my viewpoint. He is just another Tory in London who will do nothing for Scotland other than treat it as second class.
There is no GFA in Scotland and Scotland does not border another EU nation like Northern Ireland does with the Republic of Ireland.
Otherwise if you have special EU Deals for Scotland within GB why not special Deals for other Remain voting areas of GB like London, Cardiff, Cheltenham, Guildford, Elmbridge, Tunbridge Wells and Winchester and Oxford and Cambridge and Manchester?
So, you are saying that political expediency trumps democracy.
TBF, that's been true of every reform attempted to British democracy since Catholic Emancipation in 1829.
And I'm not sure I need to limit it to British democracy either.
You are suggesting political expediency in politics?
Rather than consider the make-up of the HoL a first question should be what should it do??? It should only eject a law (or send it back for redrafting) under limited circumstances, eg not complying with constitution (whatever that is); or discriminatory; or contradictory; etc. It should not be able to block for partisan reasons.
Sounds more like a Supreme Court.
One thing that is definitely right in the current system is the refusal of the Supreme Court to legislate. Despite a number of attempts to drag it there.
A Supreme Court is not quite worst legislative body conceivable. But it is way up there.
By the way, whoever on here recommended the musical version of War of the Worlds -narrated by Richard Burton - thank you.
Absolutely bloody brilliant.
I have been listening to it, and enjoying it, all weekend with my bose headphones and I even bought the original H.G Wells paperback at Waterstones yesterday as well.
Loving it. Amazing.
I think that was me. Burton's narration is just superb.
I very much hope it has got you in better humour. You have not quite been yourself of late.
Thank you.
Extremely stressed at work. Weeks feel like 7-8 days and weekends 1 day. Become very angry and snappy. Wife made an intervention last night.
We'll see about whether current job works out. I'll give it another 6 months.
Rather than consider the make-up of the HoL a first question should be what should it do??? It should only eject a law (or send it back for redrafting) under limited circumstances, eg not complying with constitution (whatever that is); or discriminatory; or contradictory; etc. It should not be able to block for partisan reasons.
Sounds more like a Supreme Court.
One thing that is definitely right in the current system is the refusal of the Supreme Court to legislate. Despite a number of attempts to drag it there.
A Supreme Court is not quite worst legislative body conceivable. But it is way up there.
Ironically, until very recently the jurisdiction of the U.K. Supreme Court was held by a house of the U.K. legislature, albeit in practice only exercised by a committee of it.
Also, having England the only part of the UK with no devolved Parliament/Assembly, and with voters in English constituencies having dramatically less voting power (from memory, England is about 85% of the population) than everywhere else is not something that can be considered remotely fair or justifiable.
As well as abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected Senate, I also suspect Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies in England without referendum to complete the New Labour project Blair started as PM when he abolished most of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords and created the Scottish Parliament and Welsh, Northern Irish and London Assemblies
If you remember John Prescott, as minister for the regions, after the north-east, its own assembly and in a referendum, it was turned down, if I recall correctly, 85 to 15.
Yes, hence Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies without referendum this time from the North East of England to the South East
Is Essex big enough to be a region on its own or would we be combined with East Anglia? Or perhaps with Hertfordshire?
Essex would be combined with East Anglia and Hertfordshire to form an Eastern region Regional Assembly
What about Cambridgeshire?
Or Huntingdonshire?
Or the Soke of Peterborough?
(My take is that there are lots of things that could/should be devolved from Westminster. England is too big get the benefits from that, and many counties are a bit too small. Administrative Regions as we have them are unloved and unlovely, but voluntary groupings of counties could be sorted in a day or so, if we wanted. I'd still start with the ITV / BBC local news regions as a starting point. Probably before the Oxford and Cambridge programmes were cut.)
It is Treasury “wisdom” that many counties are too small to devolve to.
I call bollocks on that. It is easy to point to successful entities around the world that subvert that idea, from Rhode Island to Iceland and the Australian Capital Territory.
My preferred model is to devolve to the “counties and metros”, which looking at England alone, creates about 50 sub-national units.
In that model, Huntingdonshire steps up as a county. I would leave the Soke as a city/district of Northants to which it properly belongs.
Very much most of what we want done at a sub-national level could operate on this basis.
You have to wonder which 1973 counties, or even current ones would be 'too poor, too wee, too stupid' to function as such units. It might not be that many. Cornwall and Cumbria, perhaps. Rutland and Herefordshire of current counties. But some, like Kent, Sussex, Essex, Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire would be a fair match certainly for Wales and Northern Ireland and arguably for Scotland in terms of population and economic importance.
It does rather break down when you consider how badly many counties have been run - but then Stormont and Y Bae are hardly an advert for devolution but nobody's seriously suggesting abolition.
Depends a lot on what responsibilities and powers are being devolved. After all, right now, county councils largely have responsibility (e.g. social care) without power. As Sir Humphrey put it, the prerogative of the eunuch.
Sunak should appoint HYUFD as his Membership Tsar. Nobody should be allowed to join, or stay in, the Party unless they have successfully passed the stringent tests that our friend from Essex will set. Sod the broad church - I think the Tory Party should be pure in word and deed.
That might mean I have to expel Liz Truss and Mark Francois, as I am not sure even now they are fully committed to keeping the Church of England as the established church and Truss is not keen on retaining hereditary peers in the Lords and was once a republican
Sorry, I haven't been following the discussion.
Are you fantasising about being leader of the Conservative Party at the moment? Or about being Archbishop of Canterbury?
I know what he is trying to say, people do use the term that way, but I think he may have missed the negative connotations of smothering.
[Harry] also said he made sure to "smother" his children with affection to avoid passing on any "traumas" or "negative experiences" from his own upbringing.
That's interesting. Smothering could also be phrased "controlling".
My own experience is that my father was quite distant because (I think) he was scared of his emotions, and having his father's temper. His history was that *his* father was violent - in part due to consequences from war trauma from WW1. That was to the extent he was found a place at boarding school by creative routes (via Methodist Church connections) when his family were in quite deep poverty.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
Interesting that you mention land. One possible approach to electing the Lords on a different basis to the Commons, would be to create constituencies of equal-area for the Lords. 500 Lords at just under 190 square miles for each Lordship constituency. Scotland would get about one-third of the Lords, England a bit more than half, Wales just under a tenth and Northern Ireland a bit more than a twentieth.
I feel like the point of having two chambers is so that they can represent different interests, and so we could set it up with a House of the Old and the House of the Young, or a House of Men and a House of Women, or a House for rural areas and a House for urban areas, or even a House for net Taxpayers, and a House for everyone else.
"The UK will give 28 Challenger 2 main battle tanks instead of the earlier promised 14, Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.K. Vadym Prystaiko told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during an interview."
I am quite surprised that we have that many capable of moving under their own steam. We must be doing some serious back maintenance.
I hadn't realised they were steam-powered. Yet another complication for the logistics team...
Mr. L, what impact do you think disestablishing the Church of England would have?
For most people none, apart from they couldn't automatically get married or buried in their local Church of England Parish Church anymore unless they regularly attended it or had been baptised there
Buried in the local church? Intramural burials have been banned for almost two centuries, the odd aristo or elite person aside!
Even if you are talking about churchyards, many are closed to new burials except sometimes if you have relatives or a lair there already. Off to the secular cemetery. So even less impact.
In our town burial, either of bodies or of ashes, in the churchyard is the responsibility of the parish council. Not the parochial church council.
It wouldn't be if the Church of England was disestablished. Burial in the churchyard could be refused to those who had not been regular attendees at the Church of England Parish Church
I’m certain that the last two funerals at our local parish church that I attended, where the bodies were buried in the churchyard, were not of men who regularly attended church. One of them, though could be described as an upright and honest citizen; I’m not so sure about the other one!
Yes because the Church of England is the established church. As long as it remains the established church anyone from the Parish can be buried in the Church of England churchyard
Disestablishment wouldn't prevent the C of E continuing to offer what it does to everyone who asks. Some parishes would probably get snotty, but some parishes manage quite a bit of "of course you can get married here, we'll talk about it once you've done our course" snottiness already.
It would to an extent. Far more Church of England Vicars would take the line of Roman Catholic priests or evangelical ministers who won't marry you in their Church unless you regularly attend it or have been baptised there
But if the local authority is running the churchyard burial business, what does it matter?
Rather than consider the make-up of the HoL a first question should be what should it do??? It should only eject a law (or send it back for redrafting) under limited circumstances, eg not complying with constitution (whatever that is); or discriminatory; or contradictory; etc. It should not be able to block for partisan reasons.
Sounds more like a Supreme Court.
One thing that is definitely right in the current system is the refusal of the Supreme Court to legislate. Despite a number of attempts to drag it there.
A Supreme Court is not quite worst legislative body conceivable. But it is way up there.
Ironically, until very recently the jurisdiction of the U.K. Supreme Court was held by a house of the U.K. legislature, albeit in practice only exercised by a committee of it.
What was interesting about that was the way that it was handled, by convention, as very much a judicial function. In the US that would have been horrific in the extreme.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
Interesting that you mention land. One possible approach to electing the Lords on a different basis to the Commons, would be to create constituencies of equal-area for the Lords. 500 Lords at just under 190 square miles for each Lordship constituency. Scotland would get about one-third of the Lords, England a bit more than half, Wales just under a tenth and Northern Ireland a bit more than a twentieth.
I feel like the point of having two chambers is so that they can represent different interests, and so we could set it up with a House of the Old and the House of the Young, or a House of Men and a House of Women, or a House for rural areas and a House for urban areas, or even a House for net Taxpayers, and a House for everyone else.
We could be much more imaginative.
I like that idea.
As a conservative (small c), I value stability and tradition and want to respect the heritage of our institutions, and work with its grain rather than abolish it.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
Interesting that you mention land. One possible approach to electing the Lords on a different basis to the Commons, would be to create constituencies of equal-area for the Lords. 500 Lords at just under 190 square miles for each Lordship constituency. Scotland would get about one-third of the Lords, England a bit more than half, Wales just under a tenth and Northern Ireland a bit more than a twentieth.
I feel like the point of having two chambers is so that they can represent different interests, and so we could set it up with a House of the Old and the House of the Young, or a House of Men and a House of Women, or a House for rural areas and a House for urban areas, or even a House for net Taxpayers, and a House for everyone else.
We could be much more imaginative.
I like that idea.
As a conservative (small c), I value stability and tradition and want to respect the heritage of our institutions, and work with its grain rather than abolish it.
All too often that respect is manipulated by those who want to exploit and abuse it. I don't see institutional heritage as particularly worthy of respect, therefore.
"The UK will give 28 Challenger 2 main battle tanks instead of the earlier promised 14, Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.K. Vadym Prystaiko told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during an interview."
I am quite surprised that we have that many capable of moving under their own steam. We must be doing some serious back maintenance.
I hadn't realised they were steam-powered. Yet another complication for the logistics team...
Chieftain had a supposedly multifuel engine running IIRC on everything from petrol to salad oil. Would have worked better if they had used those to boil water for a steam engine!
Mr. L, what impact do you think disestablishing the Church of England would have?
For most people none, apart from they couldn't automatically get married or buried in their local Church of England Parish Church anymore unless they regularly attended it or had been baptised there
Buried in the local church? Intramural burials have been banned for almost two centuries, the odd aristo or elite person aside!
Even if you are talking about churchyards, many are closed to new burials except sometimes if you have relatives or a lair there already. Off to the secular cemetery. So even less impact.
In our town burial, either of bodies or of ashes, in the churchyard is the responsibility of the parish council. Not the parochial church council.
It wouldn't be if the Church of England was disestablished. Burial in the churchyard could be refused to those who had not been regular attendees at the Church of England Parish Church
I’m certain that the last two funerals at our local parish church that I attended, where the bodies were buried in the churchyard, were not of men who regularly attended church. One of them, though could be described as an upright and honest citizen; I’m not so sure about the other one!
Yes because the Church of England is the established church. As long as it remains the established church anyone from the Parish can be buried in the Church of England churchyard
Disestablishment wouldn't prevent the C of E continuing to offer what it does to everyone who asks. Some parishes would probably get snotty, but some parishes manage quite a bit of "of course you can get married here, we'll talk about it once you've done our course" snottiness already.
It would to an extent. Far more Church of England Vicars would take the line of Roman Catholic priests or evangelical ministers who won't marry you in their Church unless you regularly attend it or have been baptised there
AIUI CofE Parish Governing Bodies have an option to close their churchyards and make the Local Authority (which is District or Unitary Council) take them on for maintenance. It is one very attractive option if the church is spending £Xk or £X10k maintaining it, in purely financial terms.
Another option, as often happens in London or some other places, is for the churchyard to be turned into essentially a park with gravestones made into low maintenance as is possible, looked after by the parish. Alternatively it can be let run riot in part for nature reasons, apart from occasional strimming.
Personally I'd disestablish marriage, and leave the Church established for future consideration, as imo Cameron should have done when he did same gender marriage. Religious or other communities can do whatever they like in line with their beliefs, but the only one with legal weight is the State Marriage Registration, which would be a pure rubber stamp on paper.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
That's a bit Alien v Predator though. I don't see why we can't devise a 'Sanity & Reasonableness Check' body with a diverse selection of good and able people without all the bloat and privilege and cronyism of the Lords.
"The UK will give 28 Challenger 2 main battle tanks instead of the earlier promised 14, Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.K. Vadym Prystaiko told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during an interview."
Doesn't seem to have been confirmed by the MoD or any ministers.
Just the Ukrainians trying to bounce the UK into doing it. It'll probably work.
Also, having England the only part of the UK with no devolved Parliament/Assembly, and with voters in English constituencies having dramatically less voting power (from memory, England is about 85% of the population) than everywhere else is not something that can be considered remotely fair or justifiable.
As well as abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected Senate, I also suspect Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies in England without referendum to complete the New Labour project Blair started as PM when he abolished most of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords and created the Scottish Parliament and Welsh, Northern Irish and London Assemblies
If you remember John Prescott, as minister for the regions, after the north-east, its own assembly and in a referendum, it was turned down, if I recall correctly, 85 to 15.
Yes, hence Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies without referendum this time from the North East of England to the South East
Is Essex big enough to be a region on its own or would we be combined with East Anglia? Or perhaps with Hertfordshire?
Essex would be combined with East Anglia and Hertfordshire to form an Eastern region Regional Assembly
What about Cambridgeshire?
Or Huntingdonshire?
Or the Soke of Peterborough?
(My take is that there are lots of things that could/should be devolved from Westminster. England is too big get the benefits from that, and many counties are a bit too small. Administrative Regions as we have them are unloved and unlovely, but voluntary groupings of counties could be sorted in a day or so, if we wanted. I'd still start with the ITV / BBC local news regions as a starting point. Probably before the Oxford and Cambridge programmes were cut.)
It is Treasury “wisdom” that many counties are too small to devolve to.
I call bollocks on that. It is easy to point to successful entities around the world that subvert that idea, from Rhode Island to Iceland and the Australian Capital Territory.
My preferred model is to devolve to the “counties and metros”, which looking at England alone, creates about 50 sub-national units.
In that model, Huntingdonshire steps up as a county. I would leave the Soke as a city/district of Northants to which it properly belongs.
Very much most of what we want done at a sub-national level could operate on this basis.
You have to wonder which 1973 counties, or even current ones would be 'too poor, too wee, too stupid' to function as such units. It might not be that many. Cornwall and Cumbria, perhaps. Rutland and Herefordshire of current counties. But some, like Kent, Sussex, Essex, Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire would be a fair match certainly for Wales and Northern Ireland and arguably for Scotland in terms of population and economic importance.
It does rather break down when you consider how badly many counties have been run - but then Stormont and Y Bae are hardly an advert for devolution but nobody's seriously suggesting abolition.
Depends a lot on what responsibilities and powers are being devolved. After all, right now, county councils largely have responsibility (e.g. social care) without power. As Sir Humphrey put it, the prerogative of the eunuch.
County Councils and larger unitaries (such as London Boroughs, Manchester, Liverpool or Birmingham) are businesses with budgets of excess of one billion per annum.
Yet Whitehall rules them with an incredibly tight leash - Councils have no control over how much tax they can raise, or on what they can spend their money. They are given responsibilities without adequate resources (public health) and led much of the visible public response to Covid from building temporary mortuaries to providing food for those forced to shelter. In addition, they are told when and how Councillors are elected.
Councils are forced to bid for targeted packets of money from the Treasury often having to complete convoluted business cases for "approval" by Whitehall as well as having to provide vast amounts of information to central Government.
I'm not suggesting a free-for-all - there is a place for central coordination but the current heavily centralised system supported by consecutive Conservative and Labour Governments is no longer fit for purpose. If Newham or Elmbridge want to elect councillors using PR, why shouldn't they? If a Council wants to raise its Council Tax by 10%, let it consult the local electorate. There are plenty of responsibilities which belong much closer to the people than either Whitehall or Westminster.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
Interesting that you mention land. One possible approach to electing the Lords on a different basis to the Commons, would be to create constituencies of equal-area for the Lords. 500 Lords at just under 190 square miles for each Lordship constituency. Scotland would get about one-third of the Lords, England a bit more than half, Wales just under a tenth and Northern Ireland a bit more than a twentieth.
I feel like the point of having two chambers is so that they can represent different interests, and so we could set it up with a House of the Old and the House of the Young, or a House of Men and a House of Women, or a House for rural areas and a House for urban areas, or even a House for net Taxpayers, and a House for everyone else.
We could be much more imaginative.
I like that idea.
As a conservative (small c), I value stability and tradition and want to respect the heritage of our institutions, and work with its grain rather than abolish it.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
Interesting that you mention land. One possible approach to electing the Lords on a different basis to the Commons, would be to create constituencies of equal-area for the Lords. 500 Lords at just under 190 square miles for each Lordship constituency. Scotland would get about one-third of the Lords, England a bit more than half, Wales just under a tenth and Northern Ireland a bit more than a twentieth.
I feel like the point of having two chambers is so that they can represent different interests, and so we could set it up with a House of the Old and the House of the Young, or a House of Men and a House of Women, or a House for rural areas and a House for urban areas, or even a House for net Taxpayers, and a House for everyone else.
We could be much more imaginative.
Or have one for serious stuff and one for messing around and being all colourful and raffish like Boris Johnson. The House of Laws and the House of Cards.
"The UK will give 28 Challenger 2 main battle tanks instead of the earlier promised 14, Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.K. Vadym Prystaiko told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during an interview."
I am quite surprised that we have that many capable of moving under their own steam. We must be doing some serious back maintenance.
We are also going to be providing 28 tractors to pull them.....
Also, having England the only part of the UK with no devolved Parliament/Assembly, and with voters in English constituencies having dramatically less voting power (from memory, England is about 85% of the population) than everywhere else is not something that can be considered remotely fair or justifiable.
As well as abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected Senate, I also suspect Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies in England without referendum to complete the New Labour project Blair started as PM when he abolished most of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords and created the Scottish Parliament and Welsh, Northern Irish and London Assemblies
If you remember John Prescott, as minister for the regions, after the north-east, its own assembly and in a referendum, it was turned down, if I recall correctly, 85 to 15.
Yes, hence Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies without referendum this time from the North East of England to the South East
Is Essex big enough to be a region on its own or would we be combined with East Anglia? Or perhaps with Hertfordshire?
Essex would be combined with East Anglia and Hertfordshire to form an Eastern region Regional Assembly
What about Cambridgeshire?
Or Huntingdonshire?
Or the Soke of Peterborough?
(My take is that there are lots of things that could/should be devolved from Westminster. England is too big get the benefits from that, and many counties are a bit too small. Administrative Regions as we have them are unloved and unlovely, but voluntary groupings of counties could be sorted in a day or so, if we wanted. I'd still start with the ITV / BBC local news regions as a starting point. Probably before the Oxford and Cambridge programmes were cut.)
It is Treasury “wisdom” that many counties are too small to devolve to.
I call bollocks on that. It is easy to point to successful entities around the world that subvert that idea, from Rhode Island to Iceland and the Australian Capital Territory.
My preferred model is to devolve to the “counties and metros”, which looking at England alone, creates about 50 sub-national units.
In that model, Huntingdonshire steps up as a county. I would leave the Soke as a city/district of Northants to which it properly belongs.
Very much most of what we want done at a sub-national level could operate on this basis.
You have to wonder which 1973 counties, or even current ones would be 'too poor, too wee, too stupid' to function as such units. It might not be that many. Cornwall and Cumbria, perhaps. Rutland and Herefordshire of current counties. But some, like Kent, Sussex, Essex, Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire would be a fair match certainly for Wales and Northern Ireland and arguably for Scotland in terms of population and economic importance.
It does rather break down when you consider how badly many counties have been run - but then Stormont and Y Bae are hardly an advert for devolution but nobody's seriously suggesting abolition.
Depends a lot on what responsibilities and powers are being devolved. After all, right now, county councils largely have responsibility (e.g. social care) without power. As Sir Humphrey put it, the prerogative of the eunuch.
County Councils and larger unitaries (such as London Boroughs, Manchester, Liverpool or Birmingham) are businesses with budgets of excess of one billion per annum.
Yet Whitehall rules them with an incredibly tight leash - Councils have no control over how much tax they can raise, or on what they can spend their money. They are given responsibilities without adequate resources (public health) and led much of the visible public response to Covid from building temporary mortuaries to providing food for those forced to shelter. In addition, they are told when and how Councillors are elected.
Councils are forced to bid for targeted packets of money from the Treasury often having to complete convoluted business cases for "approval" by Whitehall as well as having to provide vast amounts of information to central Government.
I'm not suggesting a free-for-all - there is a place for central coordination but the current heavily centralised system supported by consecutive Conservative and Labour Governments is no longer fit for purpose. If Newham or Elmbridge want to elect councillors using PR, why shouldn't they? If a Council wants to raise its Council Tax by 10%, let it consult the local electorate. There are plenty of responsibilities which belong much closer to the people than either Whitehall or Westminster.
The problem is that councils have frequently shown their complete inability to run their operations and finances.
This is because they have been neutered, so they don’t attract high calibre people. It is also the case that they were neutered in attempt to prevent such disasters. The cure is the disease.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
That's a bit Alien v Predator though. I don't see why we can't devise a 'Sanity & Reasonableness Check' body with a diverse selection of good and able people without all the bloat and privilege and cronyism of the Lords.
Indeed. How did those old families get where they are? By theft, rapine and manipulation of the law. Your example oif the commons is an excellent instance.
"The UK will give 28 Challenger 2 main battle tanks instead of the earlier promised 14, Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.K. Vadym Prystaiko told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during an interview."
I am quite surprised that we have that many capable of moving under their own steam. We must be doing some serious back maintenance.
We are also going to be providing 28 tractors to pull them.....
CR2 isn't that bad - you are thinking of Chieftain.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
Interesting that you mention land. One possible approach to electing the Lords on a different basis to the Commons, would be to create constituencies of equal-area for the Lords. 500 Lords at just under 190 square miles for each Lordship constituency. Scotland would get about one-third of the Lords, England a bit more than half, Wales just under a tenth and Northern Ireland a bit more than a twentieth.
I feel like the point of having two chambers is so that they can represent different interests, and so we could set it up with a House of the Old and the House of the Young, or a House of Men and a House of Women, or a House for rural areas and a House for urban areas, or even a House for net Taxpayers, and a House for everyone else.
We could be much more imaginative.
I like that idea.
As a conservative (small c), I value stability and tradition and want to respect the heritage of our institutions, and work with its grain rather than abolish it.
All too often that respect is manipulated by those who want to exploit and abuse it. I don't see institutional heritage as particularly worthy of respect, therefore.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
That's a bit Alien v Predator though. I don't see why we can't devise a 'Sanity & Reasonableness Check' body with a diverse selection of good and able people without all the bloat and privilege and cronyism of the Lords.
Indeed. How did those old families get where they are? By theft, rapine and manipulation of the law. Your example oif the commons is an excellent instance.
Cheers - nice new word banked. Or nice old word rather, I'm guessing.
Also, having England the only part of the UK with no devolved Parliament/Assembly, and with voters in English constituencies having dramatically less voting power (from memory, England is about 85% of the population) than everywhere else is not something that can be considered remotely fair or justifiable.
As well as abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected Senate, I also suspect Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies in England without referendum to complete the New Labour project Blair started as PM when he abolished most of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords and created the Scottish Parliament and Welsh, Northern Irish and London Assemblies
If you remember John Prescott, as minister for the regions, after the north-east, its own assembly and in a referendum, it was turned down, if I recall correctly, 85 to 15.
Yes, hence Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies without referendum this time from the North East of England to the South East
Is Essex big enough to be a region on its own or would we be combined with East Anglia? Or perhaps with Hertfordshire?
Essex would be combined with East Anglia and Hertfordshire to form an Eastern region Regional Assembly
What about Cambridgeshire?
Or Huntingdonshire?
Or the Soke of Peterborough?
(My take is that there are lots of things that could/should be devolved from Westminster. England is too big get the benefits from that, and many counties are a bit too small. Administrative Regions as we have them are unloved and unlovely, but voluntary groupings of counties could be sorted in a day or so, if we wanted. I'd still start with the ITV / BBC local news regions as a starting point. Probably before the Oxford and Cambridge programmes were cut.)
It is Treasury “wisdom” that many counties are too small to devolve to.
I call bollocks on that. It is easy to point to successful entities around the world that subvert that idea, from Rhode Island to Iceland and the Australian Capital Territory.
My preferred model is to devolve to the “counties and metros”, which looking at England alone, creates about 50 sub-national units.
In that model, Huntingdonshire steps up as a county. I would leave the Soke as a city/district of Northants to which it properly belongs.
Very much most of what we want done at a sub-national level could operate on this basis.
You have to wonder which 1973 counties, or even current ones would be 'too poor, too wee, too stupid' to function as such units. It might not be that many. Cornwall and Cumbria, perhaps. Rutland and Herefordshire of current counties. But some, like Kent, Sussex, Essex, Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire would be a fair match certainly for Wales and Northern Ireland and arguably for Scotland in terms of population and economic importance.
It does rather break down when you consider how badly many counties have been run - but then Stormont and Y Bae are hardly an advert for devolution but nobody's seriously suggesting abolition.
Depends a lot on what responsibilities and powers are being devolved. After all, right now, county councils largely have responsibility (e.g. social care) without power. As Sir Humphrey put it, the prerogative of the eunuch.
County Councils and larger unitaries (such as London Boroughs, Manchester, Liverpool or Birmingham) are businesses with budgets of excess of one billion per annum.
Yet Whitehall rules them with an incredibly tight leash - Councils have no control over how much tax they can raise, or on what they can spend their money. They are given responsibilities without adequate resources (public health) and led much of the visible public response to Covid from building temporary mortuaries to providing food for those forced to shelter. In addition, they are told when and how Councillors are elected.
Councils are forced to bid for targeted packets of money from the Treasury often having to complete convoluted business cases for "approval" by Whitehall as well as having to provide vast amounts of information to central Government.
I'm not suggesting a free-for-all - there is a place for central coordination but the current heavily centralised system supported by consecutive Conservative and Labour Governments is no longer fit for purpose. If Newham or Elmbridge want to elect councillors using PR, why shouldn't they? If a Council wants to raise its Council Tax by 10%, let it consult the local electorate. There are plenty of responsibilities which belong much closer to the people than either Whitehall or Westminster.
The problem is that councils have frequently shown their complete inability to run their operations and finances.
This is because they have been neutered, so they don’t attract high calibre people. It is also the case that they were neutered in attempt to prevent such disasters. The cure is the disease.
While the analysis is valid, it's generalising in extremis to say councils can't run their operations and finances.
For every Croydon, Thurrock or Woking, there are dozens of councils where costs are kept low and Services continue to be provided and that's true whatever the political stripe of the administration.
The unique nature of the relationship between elected Councillor and senior Officer (unique because it's not reflected in the private sector) can mean problems especially if the relationship goes sour.
Are there Officers promoted above their ability who then get things wrong? Yes, of course but many others are doing a competent job. I'd also argue local authority failings are symptomatic of the failure of a national approach to a national problems whether it be the provision of SEN places, failings in rural transport services, housing or in the care of vulnerable adults and children.
"The UK will give 28 Challenger 2 main battle tanks instead of the earlier promised 14, Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.K. Vadym Prystaiko told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during an interview."
I am quite surprised that we have that many capable of moving under their own steam. We must be doing some serious back maintenance.
We are also going to be providing 28 tractors to pull them.....
CR2 isn't that bad - you are thinking of Chieftain.
When provided with a decent array of spares, and proper maintenance, Challenger was among the *more* reliable tanks in the first Gulf War.
Also, having England the only part of the UK with no devolved Parliament/Assembly, and with voters in English constituencies having dramatically less voting power (from memory, England is about 85% of the population) than everywhere else is not something that can be considered remotely fair or justifiable.
As well as abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected Senate, I also suspect Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies in England without referendum to complete the New Labour project Blair started as PM when he abolished most of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords and created the Scottish Parliament and Welsh, Northern Irish and London Assemblies
If you remember John Prescott, as minister for the regions, after the north-east, its own assembly and in a referendum, it was turned down, if I recall correctly, 85 to 15.
Yes, hence Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies without referendum this time from the North East of England to the South East
Is Essex big enough to be a region on its own or would we be combined with East Anglia? Or perhaps with Hertfordshire?
Essex would be combined with East Anglia and Hertfordshire to form an Eastern region Regional Assembly
What about Cambridgeshire?
Or Huntingdonshire?
Or the Soke of Peterborough?
(My take is that there are lots of things that could/should be devolved from Westminster. England is too big get the benefits from that, and many counties are a bit too small. Administrative Regions as we have them are unloved and unlovely, but voluntary groupings of counties could be sorted in a day or so, if we wanted. I'd still start with the ITV / BBC local news regions as a starting point. Probably before the Oxford and Cambridge programmes were cut.)
It is Treasury “wisdom” that many counties are too small to devolve to.
I call bollocks on that. It is easy to point to successful entities around the world that subvert that idea, from Rhode Island to Iceland and the Australian Capital Territory.
My preferred model is to devolve to the “counties and metros”, which looking at England alone, creates about 50 sub-national units.
In that model, Huntingdonshire steps up as a county. I would leave the Soke as a city/district of Northants to which it properly belongs.
Very much most of what we want done at a sub-national level could operate on this basis.
You have to wonder which 1973 counties, or even current ones would be 'too poor, too wee, too stupid' to function as such units. It might not be that many. Cornwall and Cumbria, perhaps. Rutland and Herefordshire of current counties. But some, like Kent, Sussex, Essex, Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire would be a fair match certainly for Wales and Northern Ireland and arguably for Scotland in terms of population and economic importance.
It does rather break down when you consider how badly many counties have been run - but then Stormont and Y Bae are hardly an advert for devolution but nobody's seriously suggesting abolition.
Depends a lot on what responsibilities and powers are being devolved. After all, right now, county councils largely have responsibility (e.g. social care) without power. As Sir Humphrey put it, the prerogative of the eunuch.
County Councils and larger unitaries (such as London Boroughs, Manchester, Liverpool or Birmingham) are businesses with budgets of excess of one billion per annum.
Yet Whitehall rules them with an incredibly tight leash - Councils have no control over how much tax they can raise, or on what they can spend their money. They are given responsibilities without adequate resources (public health) and led much of the visible public response to Covid from building temporary mortuaries to providing food for those forced to shelter. In addition, they are told when and how Councillors are elected.
Councils are forced to bid for targeted packets of money from the Treasury often having to complete convoluted business cases for "approval" by Whitehall as well as having to provide vast amounts of information to central Government.
I'm not suggesting a free-for-all - there is a place for central coordination but the current heavily centralised system supported by consecutive Conservative and Labour Governments is no longer fit for purpose. If Newham or Elmbridge want to elect councillors using PR, why shouldn't they? If a Council wants to raise its Council Tax by 10%, let it consult the local electorate. There are plenty of responsibilities which belong much closer to the people than either Whitehall or Westminster.
The problem is that councils have frequently shown their complete inability to run their operations and finances.
This is because they have been neutered, so they don’t attract high calibre people. It is also the case that they were neutered in attempt to prevent such disasters. The cure is the disease.
(Cheeky answer) So when is Westminster being shut down?
(Less cheeky answer) FPTP, with its tendency for one party states at local level, isn't helpful here.
The other thing that doesn't help is how little day-to-day media scrutiny councils get. In part because local press and radio have shrivelled to a shrivelled up thing in many places.
Yes it's boring, yes there's not much in it, but go and buy your local paper, people.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
Interesting that you mention land. One possible approach to electing the Lords on a different basis to the Commons, would be to create constituencies of equal-area for the Lords. 500 Lords at just under 190 square miles for each Lordship constituency. Scotland would get about one-third of the Lords, England a bit more than half, Wales just under a tenth and Northern Ireland a bit more than a twentieth.
I feel like the point of having two chambers is so that they can represent different interests, and so we could set it up with a House of the Old and the House of the Young, or a House of Men and a House of Women, or a House for rural areas and a House for urban areas, or even a House for net Taxpayers, and a House for everyone else.
We could be much more imaginative.
I like that idea.
As a conservative (small c), I value stability and tradition and want to respect the heritage of our institutions, and work with its grain rather than abolish it.
All too often that respect is manipulated by those who want to exploit and abuse it. I don't see institutional heritage as particularly worthy of respect, therefore.
Double Plus Like
The problem with this attitude is that it leads to abolishing “old fashioned” things, while ignoring the reasons they were there in the first place.
The original “cure” may be a bad plan. But is worth considering why it was there.
Consider Harvey Weinstein, the old fashioned attitudes towards the performing arts, chaperoning etc. The answer is not returning to Victorian times, but recognising that they were seeing exactly the same issues.
Or consider the modernisation of treason laws. To the point we can’t actually use them. Apparently.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
Interesting that you mention land. One possible approach to electing the Lords on a different basis to the Commons, would be to create constituencies of equal-area for the Lords. 500 Lords at just under 190 square miles for each Lordship constituency. Scotland would get about one-third of the Lords, England a bit more than half, Wales just under a tenth and Northern Ireland a bit more than a twentieth.
I feel like the point of having two chambers is so that they can represent different interests, and so we could set it up with a House of the Old and the House of the Young, or a House of Men and a House of Women, or a House for rural areas and a House for urban areas, or even a House for net Taxpayers, and a House for everyone else.
We could be much more imaginative.
I like that idea.
As a conservative (small c), I value stability and tradition and want to respect the heritage of our institutions, and work with its grain rather than abolish it.
My view on this is informed by two contentions.
1. Democracy is about a lot more than simply voting in elections. The people who advocate simply abolishing the Lords, or replacing it with an elected Senate* are, I think, guilty of placing too much emphasis on seeing democracy = voting, and therefore, more voting = more democracy.
2. What democracy is more fundamentally about, is finding ways to peacefully resolve disputes. You can see that our current set-up does this somewhat poorly, by the way in which it dealt with the vote to leave the EU.
Prior to the 1911 Parliament Act, the division between Lords and Commons allowed Parliament to resolve disputes between two different sets of interests - those of the Lords and the Commons. But since then, we've almost had a unicameral system, as the Lords has been repeatedly weakened to present less of an impediment to the Commons, which represents, most of the time, the will of the largest plurality of the electorate, not particularly giving voice to the divisions within that electorate.
So I believe that we can use our institutions to more easily resolve the conflicts between different sections of society, if we are prepared to use more flexible franchises to elect at least one of the chambers. And, in some respects, this would be to return to the pre-1911 constitutional position, but updated to reflect modern society.
* I am increasingly coming to the view that anyone who suggests replacing the House of Lords with a Senate hasn't thought about the issue properly, otherwise they wouldn't use such a boring name for the second chamber. Similarly, I'd much prefer if the UK Supreme Court had a more distinctive name. Supreme Court is just so dull.
Have ordered Starlink. Will be interesting to see if it makes a rapid improvement or if its meh enough to be sent back for a refund...
I had it at my place in France before I sold it and it was very good. I wouldn't have it now because Elon is a fucking shitlord.
Elon is Hank Scorpio. But what are we going to do? Boycott Amazon because Bezos is also a fucking shitlord? I have a very simple policy which is to ignore the machinations of business leaders and artists. That way I don't have to cancel JK Rowling or Michael Jackson or boycott Starlink or do some other pointless shit that doesn't impact the supposed Bad Guys but impacts me quite a lot.
I used to work for Nestle. Some leftie friends would recoil in horror and state firmly that they boycott us. "Great! And do you know how much impact that has on the business? None at all..."
Presumably though, you working for them did have an impact on the business. That was nice. My Mum was in Madagascar in the 70's working on nutrition, and Nestle had convinced all the young mothers to purchase their filthy tinned milk because they said it was better than breast milk.
They're the evil empire. Then again, me working for a UK business division in the 2000s has sod all to do with an African division in the 1970s. And opting to boycott KitKat in 2023 does literally nothing either to what happened in he 70s or elsewhere in the world or to the bit of Nestle that makes KitKats in 2023.
And yes. My conscience is perfectly intact thanks.
Comments
As I said the 3 key tests for Toryism are support for retaining the monarchy, keeping the Church of England as the established church (even if we now allow nonconformists and Roman Catholics to worship freely) and retaining the remaining hereditary peers
Paradoxically, it was much easier, and cheaper, to install FTTP to rural properties than it was to do the villages. Mole-ploughing ducts for fibre across farmland and moorland is simple, 2km per day being feasible.
Totally and utterly insignificant in my viewpoint. He is just another Tory in London who will do nothing for Scotland other than treat it as second class.
Otherwise if you have special EU Deals for Scotland within GB why not
special Deals for other Remain voting areas of GB like London, Cardiff, Cheltenham, Guildford, Elmbridge, Tunbridge Wells and Winchester and Oxford and Cambridge and Manchester?
An English parliament otoh isn't. Not really. Westminster is already dominated by England. You wouldn't get much extra devolution by just having an English parliament. People wanting an English parliament imo don't want it for decentralization-of-power reasons. It's more of a nationalist thing, a grievance that England as a 'nation' - as a 'people' even - is being short-changed, typically in relation to Scotland.
"Not fair! They've got one so WE should have one too" ... is what it boils down to.
And there are.
Anyway, I must be off. Let's hope the race is entertaining, and profitable.
Or the Soke of Peterborough?
(My take is that there are lots of things that could/should be devolved from Westminster. England is too big get the benefits from that, and many counties are a bit too small. Administrative Regions as we have them are unloved and unlovely, but voluntary groupings of counties could be sorted in a day or so, if we wanted. I'd still start with the ITV / BBC local news regions as a starting point. Probably before the Oxford and Cambridge programmes were cut.)
Extremely stressed at work. Weeks feel like 7-8 days and weekends 1 day. Become very angry and snappy. Wife made an intervention last night.
We'll see about whether current job works out. I'll give it another 6 months.
If the English parliament then wants to devolve to regious, counties or cities, that should be a decision for England. Just as if the Scottish parliament now wants to devolve some of its powers to regions or cities it should be able to.
I said I wasn't convinced of the merits of regional devolution.
"The UK will give 28 Challenger 2 main battle tanks instead of the earlier promised 14, Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.K. Vadym Prystaiko told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during an interview."
I call bollocks on that.
It is easy to point to successful entities around the world that subvert that idea, from Rhode Island to Iceland and the Australian Capital Territory.
My preferred model is to devolve to the “counties and metros”, which looking at England alone, creates about 50 sub-national units.
In that model, Huntingdonshire steps up as a county. I would leave the Soke as a city/district of Northants to which it properly belongs.
Very much most of what we want done at a sub-national level could operate on this basis.
The whole of the UK has left the EU in line with the 2016 Leave vote and 2019 EU referendum result. Northern Ireland just has a special deal to avoid a hard border in Ireland
And I'm not sure I need to limit it to British democracy either.
It sounds great per the general - and very excellent - sentiment that political power should rest as close as possible to the people impacted by political decisions.
However it would create extra layers of government, maybe unhealthy competition, and therefore division, bring politics into things that might be better if apolitical, and give scope for local poundland populists to inflate to a size considerably in excess of their boots.
So I'm really not sure about it.
However true ideological socialists, social democrats, libertarians, social conservatives etc aren't that much higher either. Labour and the LDs, even as is now clear the SNP, are coalitions of ideological factions too
It does rather break down when you consider how badly many counties have been run - but then Stormont and Y Bae are hardly an advert for devolution but nobody's seriously suggesting abolition.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
It would massively exacerbate what’s already the case. Local taxes in areas of greater deprivation are almost certain to fall short.
https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/English-local-government-funding-trends-and-challenges-in-2019-and-beyond-IFS-Report-166.pdf
… Spending cuts per person in the most deprived tenth of council areas have averaged 31% (£432), compared with 16% (£134) in the least deprived tenth. This reflects the fact that between 2009–10 and 2015–16, the system for determining how much central government funding councils should get did not fully take into account how much councils relied on such funding relative to their own council tax revenues. Changes to the way grants were allocated from 2016–17 have remedied this issue since then – but not undone the previous pattern.
Spending cuts have also varied across regions, again largely driven by differences in reliance on central government funding. For example, spending per person has fallen by 30% in the North East compared with 15% in the South West. Spending per person has fallen by 32% in London reflecting the fact that the government also significantly reduced funding for the Greater London Authority to subsidise buses and tubes, and councils in London have generally taken less advantage of the scope to increase council tax in recent years.
However, despite larger cuts in more deprived areas, revenues and spending are still higher. For example, spending per person in the most deprived councils is 1.3 times the level in the least deprived – although this is down from 1.6 times in 2009–10. We cannot easily say whether the new or old funding and spending relativities are more appropriate though. To do this would require three things: (1) defining what we expect from councils in terms of service range and quality; (2) a robust way of estimating how much councils need to meet these expectations; and (3) a subjective judgement on how much it is appropriate to redistribute revenues in order to help all councils..
I shocked, shocked etc.
A Supreme Court is not quite worst legislative body conceivable. But it is way up there.
https://www.rferl.org/a/manhoff-archive-part-one-stalins-funeral/28359561.html
Are you fantasising about being leader of the Conservative Party at the moment? Or about being Archbishop of Canterbury?
My own experience is that my father was quite distant because (I think) he was scared of his emotions, and having his father's temper. His history was that *his* father was violent - in part due to consequences from war trauma from WW1. That was to the extent he was found a place at boarding school by creative routes (via Methodist Church connections) when his family were in quite deep poverty.
I feel like the point of having two chambers is so that they can represent different interests, and so we could set it up with a House of the Old and the House of the Young, or a House of Men and a House of Women, or a House for rural areas and a House for urban areas, or even a House for net Taxpayers, and a House for everyone else.
We could be much more imaginative.
https://twitter.com/shakked_noy/status/1631322405078548480
“…benefitting lower skilled workers more..mostly substitutes for worker effort…”
As a conservative (small c), I value stability and tradition and want to respect the heritage of our institutions, and work with its grain rather than abolish it.
Another option, as often happens in London or some other places, is for the churchyard to be turned into essentially a park with gravestones made into low maintenance as is possible, looked after by the parish. Alternatively it can be let run riot in part for nature reasons, apart from occasional strimming.
Personally I'd disestablish marriage, and leave the Church established for future consideration, as imo Cameron should have done when he did same gender marriage. Religious or other communities can do whatever they like in line with their beliefs, but the only one with legal weight is the State Marriage Registration, which would be a pure rubber stamp on paper.
Yet Whitehall rules them with an incredibly tight leash - Councils have no control over how much tax they can raise, or on what they can spend their money. They are given responsibilities without adequate resources (public health) and led much of the visible public response to Covid from building temporary mortuaries to providing food for those forced to shelter. In addition, they are told when and how Councillors are elected.
Councils are forced to bid for targeted packets of money from the Treasury often having to complete convoluted business cases for "approval" by Whitehall as well as having to provide vast amounts of information to central Government.
I'm not suggesting a free-for-all - there is a place for central coordination but the current heavily centralised system supported by consecutive Conservative and Labour Governments is no longer fit for purpose. If Newham or Elmbridge want to elect councillors using PR, why shouldn't they? If a Council wants to raise its Council Tax by 10%, let it consult the local electorate. There are plenty of responsibilities which belong much closer to the people than either Whitehall or Westminster.
Sorry.
This is because they have been neutered, so they don’t attract high calibre people. It is also the case that they were neutered in attempt to prevent such disasters. The cure is the disease.
For every Croydon, Thurrock or Woking, there are dozens of councils where costs are kept low and Services continue to be provided and that's true whatever the political stripe of the administration.
The unique nature of the relationship between elected Councillor and senior Officer (unique because it's not reflected in the private sector) can mean problems especially if the relationship goes sour.
Are there Officers promoted above their ability who then get things wrong? Yes, of course but many others are doing a competent job. I'd also argue local authority failings are symptomatic of the failure of a national approach to a national problems whether it be the provision of SEN places, failings in rural transport services, housing or in the care of vulnerable adults and children.
(Less cheeky answer) FPTP, with its tendency for one party states at local level, isn't helpful here.
The other thing that doesn't help is how little day-to-day media scrutiny councils get. In part because local press and radio have shrivelled to a shrivelled up thing in many places.
Yes it's boring, yes there's not much in it, but go and buy your local paper, people.
The original “cure” may be a bad plan. But is worth considering why it was there.
Consider Harvey Weinstein, the old fashioned attitudes towards the performing arts, chaperoning etc. The answer is not returning to Victorian times, but recognising that they were seeing exactly the same issues.
Or consider the modernisation of treason laws. To the point we can’t actually use them. Apparently.
1. Democracy is about a lot more than simply voting in elections. The people who advocate simply abolishing the Lords, or replacing it with an elected Senate* are, I think, guilty of placing too much emphasis on seeing democracy = voting, and therefore, more voting = more democracy.
2. What democracy is more fundamentally about, is finding ways to peacefully resolve disputes. You can see that our current set-up does this somewhat poorly, by the way in which it dealt with the vote to leave the EU.
Prior to the 1911 Parliament Act, the division between Lords and Commons allowed Parliament to resolve disputes between two different sets of interests - those of the Lords and the Commons. But since then, we've almost had a unicameral system, as the Lords has been repeatedly weakened to present less of an impediment to the Commons, which represents, most of the time, the will of the largest plurality of the electorate, not particularly giving voice to the divisions within that electorate.
So I believe that we can use our institutions to more easily resolve the conflicts between different sections of society, if we are prepared to use more flexible franchises to elect at least one of the chambers. And, in some respects, this would be to return to the pre-1911 constitutional position, but updated to reflect modern society.
* I am increasingly coming to the view that anyone who suggests replacing the House of Lords with a Senate hasn't thought about the issue properly, otherwise they wouldn't use such a boring name for the second chamber. Similarly, I'd much prefer if the UK Supreme Court had a more distinctive name. Supreme Court is just so dull.
And yes. My conscience is perfectly intact thanks.