I was with you Sean until you bizarrely described the Tory Party as Eurosceptic. They are Europhile, supporting membership of the EU. Some of their MPs and voters are Eurosceptic, but you could also say that of Labour. The only Eurosceptic party of any note is Ukip.
I was with you Sean until you bizarrely described the Tory Party as Eurosceptic. They are Europhile, supporting membership of the EU. Some of their MPs and voters are Eurosceptic, but you could also say that of Labour. The only Eurosceptic party of any note is Ukip.
It was the Tories wot took us into Europe in the first place!
@JosiasJessop Stop digging? http://www.reforestingscotland.org/what-we-do/influencing-policy/the-impact-and-management-of-deer-in-scotland/ The loss of the forest over vast areas results in less bio diversity, I repeat, what you percieve as "wilderness" is actually a man made desert. and is one of the reasons the "Great Glen Cattle Ranch failed. When the highlands used to export beef on a large scale, the valleys were open forest, which is far more productive than a windswept bog. The trees acted like natural wind pumps removing moisture from the soil. I am not trying to change the argument, you are trying to defend a logically indefensible position that treeless moorland is preferable to natural open forest. I can only assume you are doing this to defend the idiot landowners who only visit their estates in the autumn. (in several cases, not even then) I bet you, that you think grouse moors are "natural"?
I'm not defending anyone. There are bad landowners but (whisper this quietly) there are also good ones who care for their estates.
"I am not trying to change the argument, you are trying to defend a logically indefensible position that treeless moorland is preferable to natural open forest."
They both have a place. I know you started this discussion by saying the environmental arguments for the decrease in the Caledonian Forest have been destroyed, but they haven't. Environmental change wasn't the only cause, but it was a big one.
Again, I point you to WIki: "An examination of the earliest maps of Scotland suggests that the extent of the Caledonian Forest remnants has changed little since 1600 AD."
and: " The forest reached its maximum extent about 5,000 BC after which the Scottish climate became wetter and windier. This changed climate reduced the extent of the forest significantly by 2,000 BC. From that date, human actions (including the grazing effects of sheep and deer) reduced it to its current extent."
We also have to beware of the definition of forest, particularly when talking about historical records. Some areas declared as 'forests' (such as the Forest of Bowland in northern England) have not had a widespread tree covering in recorded history; the name 'forest' originated as a hunting place for royalty.
I have just read on here that Muslims never go into pubs. Oh dear, what a load of rubbish.
Tons of Muslims go into pubs, try coming down to London. Check out the City on a Friday afternoon and see how long it takes to find a Muslim guy in sharp suit or a pretty girl of Pakistani heritage in heels sipping wine.
I must admit I have a sneaking respect for the way Ed Miliband has refused to be drawn into the immigration promises stakes.
I'm not sure it'll win him any votes, but he has stuck to his guns. Labour are quite clearly a pro-open door, pro-immigration party, and there's nothing wrong with that.
I have just read on here that Muslims never go into pubs. Oh dear, what a load of rubbish.
Tons of Muslims go into pubs, try coming down to London. Check out the City on a Friday afternoon and see how long it takes to find a Muslim guy in sharp suit or a pretty girl of Pakistani heritage in heels sipping wine.
I have just read on here that Muslims never go into pubs. Oh dear, what a load of rubbish.
Tons of Muslims go into pubs, try coming down to London. Check out the City on a Friday afternoon and see how long it takes to find a Muslim guy in sharp suit or a pretty girl of Pakistani heritage in heels sipping wine.
FFS.
What about a muslim guy in a bad suit or a bang average girl of Pakistani heritage?
I have just read on here that Muslims never go into pubs. Oh dear, what a load of rubbish.
Tons of Muslims go into pubs, try coming down to London. Check out the City on a Friday afternoon and see how long it takes to find a Muslim guy in sharp suit or a pretty girl of Pakistani heritage in heels sipping wine.
FFS.
How do you know they are muslims? It isn't a skin colour. FFS.
But if they are, great. You are straw manning. No one sane is against muslims, but against a. some unpleasant habits like FGM and terrorism and b. a politically driven failure to deal with those unpleasant habits for fear of offending sensibilities.
I have just read on here that Muslims never go into pubs. Oh dear, what a load of rubbish.
Tons of Muslims go into pubs, try coming down to London. Check out the City on a Friday afternoon and see how long it takes to find a Muslim guy in sharp suit or a pretty girl of Pakistani heritage in heels sipping wine.
I must admit I have a sneaking respect for the way Ed Miliband has refused to be drawn into the immigration promises stakes.
I'm not sure it'll win him any votes, but he has stuck to his guns. Labour are quite clearly a pro-open door, pro-immigration party, and there's nothing wrong with that.
The Times reports, ''Ed Miliband promised to put immigration reform at the heart of a Labour government as he visited a seat where Ukip are on course to win a second elected MP.'' This after it was said on hear that Labour were soft peddling.
It must be said they are a bit late. The tories policies can be argued to be not working but they did make an immigration pledge in their 2010 manifesto and have had some impact not least on bogus students. The EU numbers and falling emigrants have blunted the rest but the intent is there. The other thing about all these policies is how will they effect the lives and ability of British people to work abroad. The numbers of Brits working and living in the EU is matched by the numbers of EU people living here. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5cd640f6-9025-11e3-a776-00144feab7de.html#axzz3Gyi2ZUtN
JosiasJessop The "climate" theory was taught in Scottish schools until comparatively recently, and was nonsense. Even the Rannoch moor contained a fair amount of open forest, as you can tell from the place names. The need for timber for ship construction led to the demise of the sizable part of the forest that remained up until that time (dendro chronology), and thereafter sheep and the sporting estates finished the rest off. You are right to define various types of forest in different ways, and Scotland's was mainly "open forest", and not dense woodland. As regards the shipbuilding, oddly it is the reason there are large tracts of forests stretching down from Aberdeenshire. Someone realised the shortage of timber was becoming a problem, and planted huge areas as a future investment. Unfortunately for him and his heirs, the trees started to become fully mature at the time we moved onto steel for ship construction. His loss, our gain.
£59 you could get cheaper tickets if you were prepared to go from newark £22.5 or £55 first class return
Driving to Newark and getting the train from there looks like a superb compromise. And probably the cheapest option.
Are you heading down ?
Think so. I was just looking at the Newark option and trying to decide what time going and coming back.
£22.50 return is amazing isnt it?
15:52 NGG Depart, 12:02 (Saturday) KGX would suit me best I think. Would you be interested in car sharing at all (I warn you mine is a tip so you may want to go in yours :P )
I'm stopping in London overnight at some backpacking hostel atm.
I cant stay over I am afraid so cant car share if you are staying over i am coming back to newark friday night probably on 23.30 from kingsx. I If you wanted to come back on same train happy to car share to newark i think you are less than 10 miles from me. I agree 15.52 looks good going down
Well I'm not a fan of rushing round to KGX at near midnight, hence booking a bed for the night (I may also be over the limit...). I'll meet you at Newark station for the 15:52 train in all likelihood then :O)
Just booked 15.52 going and 23.30 coming back. Total cost was even less £20 for print at home. If you change your mind about staying over happy to give you a lift. Otherwise see you on 21st
Which website did you go through ? Cheapest I can see for your option is £22.50.
Sorry been out
East coast
worked out as 2 singles at £10 each face value of tickets went down when i chose print at home. I am in coach C both ways.
state railway companies always cheapest in my experience!!!!
"That is, all the attention paid to UKIP at present is all very well and good in the sense it helps boost their poll ratings but it also
Associations matter. Many people have had a chance to take a proper look at UKIP and, frankly, they don’t much care for what they see. Many people, you see, are fairly sensible. They have no desire to be associated with a party of dyspeptic misanthropes."
He has little chance of getting up to 30-35%, or forming sensible governing coalitions to pull Britain out, or campaign in the warm, optimistic and internationalist way (as Hannan has said) that would be needed to a win a referendum on UK EU withdrawal.
Silly analysis.
But that's what I'm saying, it depends upon what they want to achieve, what their priorities are. If they want to be a socially conservative power block, that's fine. If they want to maximise the chances of the UK withdrawing from the EU, then it isn't sensible politics.
The latter is the reason they were set up. It is also the reason I have (in the past) voted for them. If they are perceived to be too toxic, no one will do a coalition with them.
Unless UKIP go seriously BNPish (very unlikely)
What like forming an alliance with a party of holocaust deniers ?
That ship may have sailed..
As I've pointed out, the Greens are in a European alliance co-chaired by a ex-commie revolutionary and self confessed pedophile, linked to violent Red terrorism - it doesn't seem to do them any harm.
People don't care about wacky European politicos. As the polling from Rochester implies.
Moreover, all of Europe is swinging right, allowing right wing populist parties to thrive (some of them extremely rightwing).
This is a secular shift and unlikely to stop.
''- it doesn't seem to do them any harm.'' -- it does with me. Since when does two wrongs make a right? The greens are a bunch of numpties so UKIP aping them is supposed to make me like them??
JosiasJessop The "climate" theory was taught in Scottish schools until comparatively recently, and was nonsense. Even the Rannoch moor contained a fair amount of open forest, as you can tell from the place names. The need for timber for ship construction led to the demise of the sizable part of the forest that remained up until that time (dendro chronology), and thereafter sheep and the sporting estates finished the rest off. You are right to define various types of forest in different ways, and Scotland's was mainly "open forest", and not dense woodland. As regards the shipbuilding, oddly it is the reason there are large tracts of forests stretching down from Aberdeenshire. Someone realised the shortage of timber was becoming a problem, and planted huge areas as a future investment. Unfortunately for him and his heirs, the trees started to become fully mature at the time we moved onto steel for ship construction. His loss, our gain.
Same in Southern England isn't it. Only this time it was the Admiralty!
Paradoxically, the more the Left brands UKIP as racist, anti-immigrant or Islamophobic the more frustrated voters will quietly think "ooh, they sound like the party for me".
The connection between UKIP and the voters is subliminal. There are no plans to target islamic immigration specifically, or change our attitude to the muslim community in Britain. In fact Farage goes out of his way to avoid this area.
And yet there he is, in the pub, the one place in Britain the muslim community never go.
Agreed. UKIP don't have to shout about Islam because they get all the "Islamophobic votes" anyway. Especially since the Gangrape Caliphate of Rotherham Council tried to take ethnic kids away from nice UKIP foster parents for not being multiculti enough
Especially since their labeling them (their own supporters even) as ting tongs. Was this recent poll commissioned by Gerald Ratner.
What you and Taffys are admitting is that Farage is issuing racist dog whistles to a miserable sector of society, a sector which the poll seems to suggest has not voted before. Good luck to kippers who want to go along with all that.
I must admit I have a sneaking respect for the way Ed Miliband has refused to be drawn into the immigration promises stakes.
I'm not sure it'll win him any votes, but he has stuck to his guns. Labour are quite clearly a pro-open door, pro-immigration party, and there's nothing wrong with that.
The Times reports, ''Ed Miliband promised to put immigration reform at the heart of a Labour government as he visited a seat where Ukip are on course to win a second elected MP.'' This after it was said on hear that Labour were soft peddling.
It must be said they are a bit late. The tories policies can be argued to be not working but they did make an immigration pledge in their 2010 manifesto and have had some impact not least on bogus students. The EU numbers and falling emigrants have blunted the rest but the intent is there. The other thing about all these policies is how will they effect the lives and ability of British people to work abroad. The numbers of Brits working and living in the EU is matched by the numbers of EU people living here. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5cd640f6-9025-11e3-a776-00144feab7de.html#axzz3Gyi2ZUtN
That's not true. Non-EU immigration is up this year.
The key point though is that the Conservatives have tinkered with the New Labour immigration rules, rather than reverting to the pre-1997 system.
JosiasJessop The "climate" theory was taught in Scottish schools until comparatively recently, and was nonsense. Even the Rannoch moor contained a fair amount of open forest, as you can tell from the place names. The need for timber for ship construction led to the demise of the sizable part of the forest that remained up until that time (dendro chronology), and thereafter sheep and the sporting estates finished the rest off. You are right to define various types of forest in different ways, and Scotland's was mainly "open forest", and not dense woodland. As regards the shipbuilding, oddly it is the reason there are large tracts of forests stretching down from Aberdeenshire. Someone realised the shortage of timber was becoming a problem, and planted huge areas as a future investment. Unfortunately for him and his heirs, the trees started to become fully mature at the time we moved onto steel for ship construction. His loss, our gain.
Your claim that Rannoch Moor was cleared of trees for shipbuilding is one of the more ludicrous spouted on here, amongst illustrious company.
I remember that Mike once put up a graph comparing road fuel prices with the vote share for the government. Fans of that hypothesis will be interested to note that weekly road fuel prices are now at their lowest level since the first week of 2011.
During the second week of January 2011, one YouGov poll put Labour and the Conservatives level-pegging at 41%. The UKIP share was 2%.
Mr. F, I can't help but feel UKIP would gain more mainstream acceptance if it adopted the Morris Dancer approach towards justice, and moving the emphasis away from community service and towards flinging miscreants from a trebuchet into the North Sea.
Objection; there’s too much rubbish in the North Sea already! And you’d need a powered trebuchet to get them past the wind farms!
Sounds bad, but there's some odd phrasing within that article which makes it hard to know what the truth is. For example, it says:
"Over the same period, fewer than 2,000 acres of trees have been replanted within wind farm sites."
My emphasis. Does this mean that there have been more trees planted elsewhere? The article also says:
"The cull has been implemented despite the Scottish Government previously insisting it expected energy companies to undertake “compensatory replanting” when trees are destroyed in this way. "
It seems obvious to me that a lot of this compensatory planting would have to be on land some distance from the wind farm - perhaps on another site? - so perhaps there hasn't been a net loss of trees?
I could be reading too much into sloppy wording, and it's entirely possible that the wind energy companies aren't being held to their legal obligation to spend money planting trees to replace ones they chop down - it would hardly be the first time that governments failed to enforce environmental obligations on private companies.
Maybe we need a stronger, more effective state to sort these penny-pinching private companies out?
I would guess that in almost all cases it would be factory forest plantations that are being cleared, i.e. ugly coniferous blots on the landscape that have zero bio/wildlife diversity and often only existed due to perverse tax incentives back in the day.
And that were always going to be chopped down anyways.
Comments
"I am not trying to change the argument, you are trying to defend a logically indefensible position that treeless moorland is preferable to natural open forest."
They both have a place. I know you started this discussion by saying the environmental arguments for the decrease in the Caledonian Forest have been destroyed, but they haven't. Environmental change wasn't the only cause, but it was a big one.
Again, I point you to WIki: "An examination of the earliest maps of Scotland suggests that the extent of the Caledonian Forest remnants has changed little since 1600 AD."
and: " The forest reached its maximum extent about 5,000 BC after which the Scottish climate became wetter and windier. This changed climate reduced the extent of the forest significantly by 2,000 BC. From that date, human actions (including the grazing effects of sheep and deer) reduced it to its current extent."
We also have to beware of the definition of forest, particularly when talking about historical records. Some areas declared as 'forests' (such as the Forest of Bowland in northern England) have not had a widespread tree covering in recorded history; the name 'forest' originated as a hunting place for royalty.
Tons of Muslims go into pubs, try coming down to London. Check out the City on a Friday afternoon and see how long it takes to find a Muslim guy in sharp suit or a pretty girl of Pakistani heritage in heels sipping wine.
FFS.
I'm not sure it'll win him any votes, but he has stuck to his guns. Labour are quite clearly a pro-open door, pro-immigration party, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Will see you in Newark.
But if they are, great. You are straw manning. No one sane is against muslims, but against a. some unpleasant habits like FGM and terrorism and b. a politically driven failure to deal with those unpleasant habits for fear of offending sensibilities.
'Strood resident just been in our shop to show us the 18 letters his household has received from PM @MichaelLCrick'
Can't complain they are being ignored.
This after it was said on hear that Labour were soft peddling.
It must be said they are a bit late. The tories policies can be argued to be not working but they did make an immigration pledge in their 2010 manifesto and have had some impact not least on bogus students. The EU numbers and falling emigrants have blunted the rest but the intent is there.
The other thing about all these policies is how will they effect the lives and ability of British people to work abroad. The numbers of Brits working and living in the EU is matched by the numbers of EU people living here.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5cd640f6-9025-11e3-a776-00144feab7de.html#axzz3Gyi2ZUtN
The "climate" theory was taught in Scottish schools until comparatively recently, and was nonsense.
Even the Rannoch moor contained a fair amount of open forest, as you can tell from the place names. The need for timber for ship construction led to the demise of the sizable part of the forest that remained up until that time (dendro chronology), and thereafter sheep and the sporting estates finished the rest off.
You are right to define various types of forest in different ways, and Scotland's was mainly "open forest", and not dense woodland.
As regards the shipbuilding, oddly it is the reason there are large tracts of forests stretching down from Aberdeenshire. Someone realised the shortage of timber was becoming a problem, and planted huge areas as a future investment. Unfortunately for him and his heirs, the trees started to become fully mature at the time we moved onto steel for ship construction. His loss, our gain.
East coast
worked out as 2 singles at £10 each face value of tickets went down when i chose print at home. I am in coach C both ways.
state railway companies always cheapest in my experience!!!!
What you and Taffys are admitting is that Farage is issuing racist dog whistles to a miserable sector of society, a sector which the poll seems to suggest has not voted before. Good luck to kippers who want to go along with all that.
The key point though is that the Conservatives have tinkered with the New Labour immigration rules, rather than reverting to the pre-1997 system.
http://www.migrationwatchuk.org/latest-immigration-statistics
During the second week of January 2011, one YouGov poll put Labour and the Conservatives level-pegging at 41%. The UKIP share was 2%.
"Over the same period, fewer than 2,000 acres of trees have been replanted within wind farm sites."
My emphasis. Does this mean that there have been more trees planted elsewhere? The article also says:
"The cull has been implemented despite the Scottish Government previously insisting it expected energy companies to undertake “compensatory replanting” when trees are destroyed in this way. "
It seems obvious to me that a lot of this compensatory planting would have to be on land some distance from the wind farm - perhaps on another site? - so perhaps there hasn't been a net loss of trees?
I could be reading too much into sloppy wording, and it's entirely possible that the wind energy companies aren't being held to their legal obligation to spend money planting trees to replace ones they chop down - it would hardly be the first time that governments failed to enforce environmental obligations on private companies.
Maybe we need a stronger, more effective state to sort these penny-pinching private companies out?
I would guess that in almost all cases it would be factory forest plantations that are being cleared, i.e. ugly coniferous blots on the landscape that have zero bio/wildlife diversity and often only existed due to perverse tax incentives back in the day.
And that were always going to be chopped down anyways.