There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
I wouldn’t want to deprive our Scottish and Irish brethren the chance to benefit from a partnership with England and Wales.
Charles, a large fraction of the population of Scotland and Northern Ireland either wants rid of us or actively detests us, and the balancing portion in the middle are only in it for the money. In what universe is this a healthy state of affairs?
A large part also wants to stay in the UK, 55% of Scots in 2014 and in NI's case many would prefer the bomb to leaving the UK for direct rule by Dublin.
The end of the UK would also mean France decisively overtakes us both in terms of economy and military power, Putin would also benefit from our weaker state
“The end of the UK would also mean France decisively overtakes us both in terms of economy and military power”?????!!!!
That matters to you in the context of this conversation? Are you 12?
Of course it does, as a Tory the UK's maintaining and ideally increasing the UK's economic strength and power in the world should be one of our core aims.
No, it shouldn’t.
The government’s role is to provide security at home and abroad, and a legal and economic framework to support increasing per capita wealth. Anything more than that and they can just F off.
No.
It is not just that, otherwise we may as well just be Switzerland.
In any case you are a classical liberal if anything more than a traditional conservative anyway, a Gladstonian Liberal not a Disraelian Tory
We’ve been Tories since the days of Queen Anne. So well before Disraeli.
Austrian Health Minister Rudolf Anschober resigns, saying he is overworked because of the pandemic. "I do not want to break myself," he says -
Christ. Imagine hearing that, working on their wards.
Hancock looks shattered but I will credit him with not being the sort to say it, because he knows he’s not right at the sharp end.
I think it is a good thing he has said it. Others may well have to work harder, but different people handle things differently. It does no one any good if someone in that position burns out, indeed people staying past the point they should pack it in causes many problems. These are the times our leaders prove if they are worthy of leading us, and that will include enduring things they are not used to, but they are still human, and if they are not up to it, better they tell us than pretend they are up to it.
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
I wouldn’t want to deprive our Scottish and Irish brethren the chance to benefit from a partnership with England and Wales.
Charles, a large fraction of the population of Scotland and Northern Ireland either wants rid of us or actively detests us, and the balancing portion in the middle are only in it for the money. In what universe is this a healthy state of affairs?
A large part also wants to stay in the UK, 55% of Scots in 2014 and in NI's case many would prefer the bomb to leaving the UK for direct rule by Dublin.
The end of the UK would also mean France decisively overtakes us both in terms of economy and military power, Putin would also benefit from our weaker state
“The end of the UK would also mean France decisively overtakes us both in terms of economy and military power”?????!!!!
That matters to you in the context of this conversation? Are you 12?
Of course it does, as a Tory the UK's maintaining and ideally increasing the UK's economic strength and power in the world should be one of our core aims.
No, it shouldn’t.
The government’s role is to provide security at home and abroad, and a legal and economic framework to support increasing per capita wealth. Anything more than that and they can just F off.
No.
It is not just that, otherwise we may as well just be Switzerland.
In any case you are a classical liberal if anything more than a traditional conservative anyway, a Gladstonian Liberal not a Disraelian Tory
We’ve been Tories since the days of Queen Anne. So well before Disraeli.
A postscript to the squirrel story earlier to turn something we could all agree was a sad but possibly unavoidable situation into something half of us can get good and cross about: apparently the requirement to euthanise the squirrels was brought in by the EU in 2019, to the great disappointment of the RSPCA. Apparently.
That is bunk - sorry.
Grey Squirrels are subject to Section 14 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act as originally passed in *1981* as animals for which it is an offence to release into the wild.
It's as stupid as the RSPCA releasing foxes, though that is I think legal.
If I am wrong anyone, please do correct me.
The legislation was introduced, I believe, in an attempt to save the red squirrels, which were seen as a more national breed. They're now extremely rare and it makes sense to be decent to all squirrels, which in my view give much more pleasure to watch than almost any other natural species.
It's not a view shared by everyone, I admit. I remember asking in a pet shop if they have some bird-proof squirrel-feeders rather than the other way round, and getting a very quizzical look.
One of the many pleasures of the Isle of Wight is the red squirrels, which are free of grey competition there. They are more shy, but there are some places that they are easy to spot, including a caravan park near Sandown.
I have found my dog really quite good at keeping grey squirrels away from the bird feeder. My current picture is him and the cat sizing up a bushy tailed tree rat.
Ours is excessively good. Getting him to drop the dead squirrel is problematic though. Four so far and counting :-(
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
The fact our economy would be diminished in size, as would our military and France would overtake us on both measures, our role in the world would be weakened and we would have a hard border with Scotland as well as Ireland plus Scexit talks which would make Brexit look like a walk in the park and a resurgence of loyalist paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland at direct rule from Dublin.
Your Little Englander vision would be a disaster that would rip these islands apart for decades
You seem not to have noticed the nationalists metaphorically running riot in Edinburgh for the last ten years, or the actual rioting (and worse violence) that's been happening in Belfast at regular intervals since the Bronze Age.
It would all be very nice, I'm sure, if there were a future for the British state but it is a disintegrating confederacy of four states united by nothing but money. The game is up. It's over.
So, what do I care, I despise the Nationalists and am quite happy to fight them, I am certainly not going to give in to Sturgeon and Salmond who still at least half of Scots also despise.
There has been relative peace in NI since the GFA, the only reason rioting has emerged in the loyalist community is they see their community is not being listened too and NI is not close enough to GB.
You are an ideological Little Englander, fair enough, though of course the end of the UK would lead to a recession and most likely depression across Britain as well as rip us apart for a decade or more with Nationalism on both sides of the border
The fact that the Britain we grew up in is dead is not the fault of the English. Why we should be expected to try to resuscitate it by means of continually appeasing the Scots or, failing that, by fighting their nationalists (by stonewalling their demands for independence, or even by sending in the tanks as you have so stupidly suggested in the past) is quite beyond me.
It is not dead despite the fact as an ideological Little Englander you have a clear agenda to kill it off as much as the Scottish and Welsh nationalists do.
We are stronger together, weaker divided
The Scottish nationalists are in complete command of the field, and the Welsh ones are following, because they have captured the Labour Party. In case you hadn't noticed, Welsh Labour has started to actively field and promote independence supporters for elected office.
There is exactly one thing holding the British state together now, and that's the transfer payments. If the average Scottish or Welsh voter thought she would be better off out than in by £1 per year then you wouldn't see them for dust.
Once again, none of this is the fault of the English. Everyone else started giving up on Britain. Not us.
Everyone started giving up on Britain when we (The English) started assuming we were Britain.
If as is very possible England votes Tory in 2024 but we get Starmer as PM thanks to SNP and Welsh Labour MPs that will firmly be shown not to be the case.
Just because England has always got the UK government it voted for since 1974 unlike Scotland and Wales does not mean it always will
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
I wouldn’t want to deprive our Scottish and Irish brethren the chance to benefit from a partnership with England and Wales.
Charles, a large fraction of the population of Scotland and Northern Ireland either wants rid of us or actively detests us, and the balancing portion in the middle are only in it for the money. In what universe is this a healthy state of affairs?
A large part also wants to stay in the UK, 55% of Scots in 2014 and in NI's case many would prefer the bomb to leaving the UK for direct rule by Dublin.
The end of the UK would also mean France decisively overtakes us both in terms of economy and military power, Putin would also benefit from our weaker state
“The end of the UK would also mean France decisively overtakes us both in terms of economy and military power”?????!!!!
That matters to you in the context of this conversation? Are you 12?
Of course it does, as a Tory the UK's maintaining and ideally increasing the UK's economic strength and power in the world should be one of our core aims.
No, it shouldn’t.
The government’s role is to provide security at home and abroad, and a legal and economic framework to support increasing per capita wealth. Anything more than that and they can just F off.
No.
It is not just that, otherwise we may as well just be Switzerland.
In any case you are a classical liberal if anything more than a traditional conservative anyway, a Gladstonian Liberal not a Disraelian Tory
We’ve been Tories since the days of Queen Anne. So well before Disraeli.
So, it is a genetic problem?
No, we just quietly do our bit in the background. God has been good to us so we deploy His gifts in the service of others.
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
I wouldn’t want to deprive our Scottish and Irish brethren the chance to benefit from a partnership with England and Wales.
Charles, a large fraction of the population of Scotland and Northern Ireland either wants rid of us or actively detests us, and the balancing portion in the middle are only in it for the money. In what universe is this a healthy state of affairs?
A large part also wants to stay in the UK, 55% of Scots in 2014 and in NI's case many would prefer the bomb to leaving the UK for direct rule by Dublin.
The end of the UK would also mean France decisively overtakes us both in terms of economy and military power, Putin would also benefit from our weaker state
“The end of the UK would also mean France decisively overtakes us both in terms of economy and military power”?????!!!!
That matters to you in the context of this conversation? Are you 12?
Of course it does, as a Tory the UK's maintaining and ideally increasing the UK's economic strength and power in the world should be one of our core aims.
No, it shouldn’t.
The government’s role is to provide security at home and abroad, and a legal and economic framework to support increasing per capita wealth. Anything more than that and they can just F off.
No.
It is not just that, otherwise we may as well just be Switzerland.
In any case you are a classical liberal if anything more than a traditional conservative anyway, a Gladstonian Liberal not a Disraelian Tory
We’ve been Tories since the days of Queen Anne. So well before Disraeli.
I said you are, not your great great grandfather
You said I’m not a traditional conservative...
As I said you are more a Gladstonian Liberal than a Disraelian Tory
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
The fact our economy would be diminished in size, as would our military and France would overtake us on both measures, our role in the world would be weakened and we would have a hard border with Scotland as well as Ireland plus Scexit talks which would make Brexit look like a walk in the park and a resurgence of loyalist paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland at direct rule from Dublin.
Your Little Englander vision would be a disaster that would rip these islands apart for decades
You seem not to have noticed the nationalists metaphorically running riot in Edinburgh for the last ten years, or the actual rioting (and worse violence) that's been happening in Belfast at regular intervals since the Bronze Age.
It would all be very nice, I'm sure, if there were a future for the British state but it is a disintegrating confederacy of four states united by nothing but money. The game is up. It's over.
So, what do I care, I despise the Nationalists and am quite happy to fight them, I am certainly not going to give in to Sturgeon and Salmond who still at least half of Scots also despise.
There has been relative peace in NI since the GFA, the only reason rioting has emerged in the loyalist community is they see their community is not being listened too and NI is not close enough to GB.
You are an ideological Little Englander, fair enough, though of course the end of the UK would lead to a recession and most likely depression across Britain as well as rip us apart for a decade or more with Nationalism on both sides of the border
The fact that the Britain we grew up in is dead is not the fault of the English. Why we should be expected to try to resuscitate it by means of continually appeasing the Scots or, failing that, by fighting their nationalists (by stonewalling their demands for independence, or even by sending in the tanks as you have so stupidly suggested in the past) is quite beyond me.
It is not dead despite the fact as an ideological Little Englander you have a clear agenda to kill it off as much as the Scottish and Welsh nationalists do.
We are stronger together, weaker divided
The Scottish nationalists are in complete command of the field, and the Welsh ones are following, because they have captured the Labour Party. In case you hadn't noticed, Welsh Labour has started to actively field and promote independence supporters for elected office.
There is exactly one thing holding the British state together now, and that's the transfer payments. If the average Scottish or Welsh voter thought she would be better off out than in by £1 per year then you wouldn't see them for dust.
Once again, none of this is the fault of the English. Everyone else started giving up on Britain. Not us.
You keep claiming Labour are turning to favour independence because three minor candidates standing are in favour
Drakeford has many faults but he and Labour are committed unionists and the unionist vote in Wales is secure
You do not live in Wales and talk as if you are an expert on Welsh politics
If you think the Welsh are going to follow Scotland than with respect you are barking up the wrong tree
Entirely off-topic, but an interesting piece in The Guardian about Norniron. For me the key paragraph is here:
"Working-class loyalists feel left behind and ignored. I am not here to debate the merits of that, or the so-called siege mentality of loyalism. However there is a deep-rooted anger there that has been both been ignored by mainstream unionism and used time and again by the DUP and the Ulster Unionist party for political machinations when it suited them. The fear of a united Ireland and what that will mean for unionism is amped up at election time, and tensions are stoked by both political unionism and “stakeholders” within loyalism, such as the Loyalist Communities Council. And for what? What has fundamentally changed, or got better for working-class loyalist communities in Northern Ireland? They deserve better than being lied to and led up the hill, then abandoned when violence erupts"
I have to ask, what is it that these working-class loyalists think there is any point in being a loyalist? They have been lied to and led up the hill not only by their elected politicians but by the British government. Rather than doing something about these areas of deep deprivation, the unionist politicians and the UK government have abandoned them.
"The fear of a united Ireland" in case what - they end up deprived and ignored? In deprived working class communities in England, people decided to throw the dice and vote for Brexit. In NI they didn't. Will be interesting to see how the fear of reunification plays out in these communities - even if they only stay at home in a border vote that could be enough to swing a close vote.
I think that Working Class Loyalists would like Devo-Max, so nominally British but effectively under Home Rule. Of course that is rather dependent on there remaining a Unionist majority.
Ulster Loyalists rather remind me of the Afrikaaners in the last days of apartheid. Not just the prospect of losing power, but also their pre-enlightenment Calvinist ideology.
A border poll will only happen if Ireland presses for it.
The prospect of renewed Loyalist terror will push that into the distant future.
The men in balaclavas have a veto both ways, and I can't see that changing for a long time, there won't be a frontier within Ireland, equally, there won't be a United Ireland.
However, if Scotland falls off then there will be precisely zero appetite in England for hanging on to Northern Ireland.
Under such circumstances, the prospect of Northern Ireland as an independent state or, failing that, as a crown dependency should not be discounted.
As a diehard Tory Unionist we could certainly hold onto Antrim and much of Derry and Down at least, even if we hand over Catholic and Nationalist majority Fermanagh, Armagh and Tyrone to the Republic.
Lol, don't you know that the only reason Fermanagh and Tyrone were included in NI in the first place was that even the headbangers of the time realized without them it'd be too small a statelet to be viable?
Which was wrong after all it is not an independent state anyway but part of the UK
Who said "independent"?
"All I boast of is that we are a Protestant parliament and Protestant state." James Craig, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland to the NI House of Commons, 24th April, 1934.
(Often misquoted as "a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people" or "a Protestant state for a Protestant people".)
"Residents of Wandsworth and Lambeth say surge testing has ruined their plans to celebrate easing of lockdown as they face hour-long queues after 70 cases of South African variant were detected"
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
I wouldn’t want to deprive our Scottish and Irish brethren the chance to benefit from a partnership with England and Wales.
Charles, a large fraction of the population of Scotland and Northern Ireland either wants rid of us or actively detests us, and the balancing portion in the middle are only in it for the money. In what universe is this a healthy state of affairs?
A large part also wants to stay in the UK, 55% of Scots in 2014 and in NI's case many would prefer the bomb to leaving the UK for direct rule by Dublin.
The end of the UK would also mean France decisively overtakes us both in terms of economy and military power, Putin would also benefit from our weaker state
“The end of the UK would also mean France decisively overtakes us both in terms of economy and military power”?????!!!!
That matters to you in the context of this conversation? Are you 12?
Of course it does, as a Tory the UK's maintaining and ideally increasing the UK's economic strength and power in the world should be one of our core aims.
No, it shouldn’t.
The government’s role is to provide security at home and abroad, and a legal and economic framework to support increasing per capita wealth. Anything more than that and they can just F off.
No.
It is not just that, otherwise we may as well just be Switzerland.
In any case you are a classical liberal if anything more than a traditional conservative anyway, a Gladstonian Liberal not a Disraelian Tory
We’ve been Tories since the days of Queen Anne. So well before Disraeli.
I said you are, not your great great grandfather
You said I’m not a traditional conservative...
As I said you are more a Gladstonian Liberal than a Disraelian Tory
With respect, you know very little about me. I am not a Gladstonian Liberal. I would not have advocated for intervention in Bulgaria for example
Somewhat misleading headline. It refers to current deaths, but Would be easy to misinterpret the headline to think it applied to the whole pandemic, as indeed I did on seeing the headline...
I think it refers to the way Death Certificates are filled in. So for example if a death occurred from acute renal failure brought on by covid pneumonitis, then the covid would be recorded as an underlying cause rather than the primary cause. Those are the 23% it refers to.
It is a meaningless distinction if the covid caused the acute renal failure.
I’m not sure that’s right TBH. The measure is death of any cause within 28 days of a positive COVID test. So inevitably some deaths will be unrelated to covid?
The article refers to death certification, which is a separate measure kept by the ONS, distinct from the "within 28 days of a test" government measure. Quite a few of the ICU deaths that I saw in Jan/Feb had been on ICU for more than 28 days post testing positive.
The ONS figures are always a couple of weeks behind, and passed 150 000 today.
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
The fact our economy would be diminished in size, as would our military and France would overtake us on both measures, our role in the world would be weakened and we would have a hard border with Scotland as well as Ireland plus Scexit talks which would make Brexit look like a walk in the park and a resurgence of loyalist paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland at direct rule from Dublin.
Your Little Englander vision would be a disaster that would rip these islands apart for decades
You seem not to have noticed the nationalists metaphorically running riot in Edinburgh for the last ten years, or the actual rioting (and worse violence) that's been happening in Belfast at regular intervals since the Bronze Age.
It would all be very nice, I'm sure, if there were a future for the British state but it is a disintegrating confederacy of four states united by nothing but money. The game is up. It's over.
So, what do I care, I despise the Nationalists and am quite happy to fight them, I am certainly not going to give in to Sturgeon and Salmond who still at least half of Scots also despise.
There has been relative peace in NI since the GFA, the only reason rioting has emerged in the loyalist community is they see their community is not being listened too and NI is not close enough to GB.
You are an ideological Little Englander, fair enough, though of course the end of the UK would lead to a recession and most likely depression across Britain as well as rip us apart for a decade or more with Nationalism on both sides of the border
The fact that the Britain we grew up in is dead is not the fault of the English. Why we should be expected to try to resuscitate it by means of continually appeasing the Scots or, failing that, by fighting their nationalists (by stonewalling their demands for independence, or even by sending in the tanks as you have so stupidly suggested in the past) is quite beyond me.
It is not dead despite the fact as an ideological Little Englander you have a clear agenda to kill it off as much as the Scottish and Welsh nationalists do.
We are stronger together, weaker divided
The Scottish nationalists are in complete command of the field, and the Welsh ones are following, because they have captured the Labour Party. In case you hadn't noticed, Welsh Labour has started to actively field and promote independence supporters for elected office.
There is exactly one thing holding the British state together now, and that's the transfer payments. If the average Scottish or Welsh voter thought she would be better off out than in by £1 per year then you wouldn't see them for dust.
Once again, none of this is the fault of the English. Everyone else started giving up on Britain. Not us.
Rubbish, at least half of Scots are still Unionists, 2/3 of the Welsh at least are still noticed.
Even Drakeford has made clear he opposes independence even if he backs a Federal UK.
Little Englanders like you have already given up on Britain, not the 50% of Unionists Scots or the 65%+ of Unionist Welsh
A minority of the Scots are Unionists and a minority want independence at any price. The balancing group are a load of middle class soft nationalists who don't really like rule from London, but don't want to pay for independence with higher taxes. That's how come Cameron and Brown rescued the situation in 2014 by emphasising the state pension pot and the Barnett formula (which, of course, awards large sums of money to Scotland based on an arbitrary calculation that has only been slightly tweaked since Queen Victoria was on the throne.) Hence where we are now.
Wales is not so far down the road, but then again neither was Scotland before devolution. Give it time. I imagine that Mark Drakeford would be delighted to break off if he thought he could afford it; what any suggestions of "radical federalism" are about is, of course, a cakeist settlement in which the Welsh Parliament gets devomax, and fat transfer payments continue every year, and the Welsh electorate continues to send MPs to Westminster (who, under those circumstances, would have little left to do except to muck about with English governance and legislation.) Such a state of affairs would continue for exactly as long as the Welsh Government thought it couldn't afford to dispense with the backing of the UK Treasury, after which it would start to demand independence just as the SNP have done.
It all took off with open-ended devolution, which was ill-conceived, badly executed and which the Conservatives warned would wreck the British state at the time. There's no point in your stamping your little feet at people like me simply for pointing out that your lot circa 1997 have been proven right. Don't blame us, blame Tony Blair.
Somewhat misleading headline. It refers to current deaths, but Would be easy to misinterpret the headline to think it applied to the whole pandemic, as indeed I did on seeing the headline...
I think it refers to the way Death Certificates are filled in. So for example if a death occurred from acute renal failure brought on by covid pneumonitis, then the covid would be recorded as an underlying cause rather than the primary cause. Those are the 23% it refers to.
It is a meaningless distinction if the covid caused the acute renal failure.
I’m not sure that’s right TBH. The measure is death of any cause within 28 days of a positive COVID test. So inevitably some deaths will be unrelated to covid?
Two measures are being reported: Deaths within 28 days of positive test (currently 127,123) and Deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate (currently 150,419).
Somewhat misleading headline. It refers to current deaths, but Would be easy to misinterpret the headline to think it applied to the whole pandemic, as indeed I did on seeing the headline...
I think it refers to the way Death Certificates are filled in. So for example if a death occurred from acute renal failure brought on by covid pneumonitis, then the covid would be recorded as an underlying cause rather than the primary cause. Those are the 23% it refers to.
It is a meaningless distinction if the covid caused the acute renal failure.
I’m not sure that’s right TBH. The measure is death of any cause within 28 days of a positive COVID test. So inevitably some deaths will be unrelated to covid?
The article refers to death certification, which is a separate measure kept by the ONS, distinct from the "within 28 days of a test" government measure. Quite a few of the ICU deaths that I saw in Jan/Feb had been on ICU for more than 28 days post testing positive.
The ONS figures are always a couple of weeks behind, and passed 150 000 today.
The article is muddled, which is unsurprising. For example, they refer to today’s 23 figure, which is under the government’s measure.
Austrian Health Minister Rudolf Anschober resigns, saying he is overworked because of the pandemic. "I do not want to break myself," he says -
Christ. Imagine hearing that, working on their wards.
Hancock looks shattered but I will credit him with not being the sort to say it, because he knows he’s not right at the sharp end.
I think it is a good thing he has said it. Others may well have to work harder, but different people handle things differently. It does no one any good if someone in that position burns out, indeed people staying past the point they should pack it in causes many problems. These are the times our leaders prove if they are worthy of leading us, and that will include enduring things they are not used to, but they are still human, and if they are not up to it, better they tell us than pretend they are up to it.
Fair point. Handled well, I suppose a Minister saying so will flag that anyone might have an issue at any time and they must seek help. On balance I was unfair.
Somewhat misleading headline. It refers to current deaths, but Would be easy to misinterpret the headline to think it applied to the whole pandemic, as indeed I did on seeing the headline...
I think it refers to the way Death Certificates are filled in. So for example if a death occurred from acute renal failure brought on by covid pneumonitis, then the covid would be recorded as an underlying cause rather than the primary cause. Those are the 23% it refers to.
It is a meaningless distinction if the covid caused the acute renal failure.
I’m not sure that’s right TBH. The measure is death of any cause within 28 days of a positive COVID test. So inevitably some deaths will be unrelated to covid?
The article refers to death certification, which is a separate measure kept by the ONS, distinct from the "within 28 days of a test" government measure. Quite a few of the ICU deaths that I saw in Jan/Feb had been on ICU for more than 28 days post testing positive.
The ONS figures are always a couple of weeks behind, and passed 150 000 today.
The article is muddled, which is unsurprising. For example, they refer to today’s 23 figure, which is under the government’s measure.
Entirely off-topic, but an interesting piece in The Guardian about Norniron. For me the key paragraph is here:
"Working-class loyalists feel left behind and ignored. I am not here to debate the merits of that, or the so-called siege mentality of loyalism. However there is a deep-rooted anger there that has been both been ignored by mainstream unionism and used time and again by the DUP and the Ulster Unionist party for political machinations when it suited them. The fear of a united Ireland and what that will mean for unionism is amped up at election time, and tensions are stoked by both political unionism and “stakeholders” within loyalism, such as the Loyalist Communities Council. And for what? What has fundamentally changed, or got better for working-class loyalist communities in Northern Ireland? They deserve better than being lied to and led up the hill, then abandoned when violence erupts"
I have to ask, what is it that these working-class loyalists think there is any point in being a loyalist? They have been lied to and led up the hill not only by their elected politicians but by the British government. Rather than doing something about these areas of deep deprivation, the unionist politicians and the UK government have abandoned them.
"The fear of a united Ireland" in case what - they end up deprived and ignored? In deprived working class communities in England, people decided to throw the dice and vote for Brexit. In NI they didn't. Will be interesting to see how the fear of reunification plays out in these communities - even if they only stay at home in a border vote that could be enough to swing a close vote.
I think that Working Class Loyalists would like Devo-Max, so nominally British but effectively under Home Rule. Of course that is rather dependent on there remaining a Unionist majority.
Ulster Loyalists rather remind me of the Afrikaaners in the last days of apartheid. Not just the prospect of losing power, but also their pre-enlightenment Calvinist ideology.
A border poll will only happen if Ireland presses for it.
The prospect of renewed Loyalist terror will push that into the distant future.
The men in balaclavas have a veto both ways, and I can't see that changing for a long time, there won't be a frontier within Ireland, equally, there won't be a United Ireland.
However, if Scotland falls off then there will be precisely zero appetite in England for hanging on to Northern Ireland.
Under such circumstances, the prospect of Northern Ireland as an independent state or, failing that, as a crown dependency should not be discounted.
As a diehard Tory Unionist we could certainly hold onto Antrim and much of Derry and Down at least, even if we hand over Catholic and Nationalist majority Fermanagh, Armagh and Tyrone to the Republic.
Lol, don't you know that the only reason Fermanagh and Tyrone were included in NI in the first place was that even the headbangers of the time realized without them it'd be too small a statelet to be viable?
Which was wrong after all it is not an independent state anyway but part of the UK
Who said "independent"?
"All I boast of is that we are a Protestant parliament and Protestant state." James Craig, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland to the NI House of Commons, 24th April, 1934.
(Often misquoted as "a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people" or "a Protestant state for a Protestant people".)
Yes and then every Northern Ireland county bar Fermanagh and Tyrone had a Protestant majority, now only Antrim and Down are majority Protestant still
"Exclusive: We won't make customers show Covid passports, hospitality firms warn Boris Johnson Letter to Prime Minister makes clear opposition to coronavirus status certification being used in hospitality settings
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
The fact our economy would be diminished in size, as would our military and France would overtake us on both measures, our role in the world would be weakened and we would have a hard border with Scotland as well as Ireland plus Scexit talks which would make Brexit look like a walk in the park and a resurgence of loyalist paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland at direct rule from Dublin.
Your Little Englander vision would be a disaster that would rip these islands apart for decades
You seem not to have noticed the nationalists metaphorically running riot in Edinburgh for the last ten years, or the actual rioting (and worse violence) that's been happening in Belfast at regular intervals since the Bronze Age.
It would all be very nice, I'm sure, if there were a future for the British state but it is a disintegrating confederacy of four states united by nothing but money. The game is up. It's over.
So, what do I care, I despise the Nationalists and am quite happy to fight them, I am certainly not going to give in to Sturgeon and Salmond who still at least half of Scots also despise.
There has been relative peace in NI since the GFA, the only reason rioting has emerged in the loyalist community is they see their community is not being listened too and NI is not close enough to GB.
You are an ideological Little Englander, fair enough, though of course the end of the UK would lead to a recession and most likely depression across Britain as well as rip us apart for a decade or more with Nationalism on both sides of the border
The fact that the Britain we grew up in is dead is not the fault of the English. Why we should be expected to try to resuscitate it by means of continually appeasing the Scots or, failing that, by fighting their nationalists (by stonewalling their demands for independence, or even by sending in the tanks as you have so stupidly suggested in the past) is quite beyond me.
It is not dead despite the fact as an ideological Little Englander you have a clear agenda to kill it off as much as the Scottish and Welsh nationalists do.
We are stronger together, weaker divided
The Scottish nationalists are in complete command of the field, and the Welsh ones are following, because they have captured the Labour Party. In case you hadn't noticed, Welsh Labour has started to actively field and promote independence supporters for elected office.
There is exactly one thing holding the British state together now, and that's the transfer payments. If the average Scottish or Welsh voter thought she would be better off out than in by £1 per year then you wouldn't see them for dust.
Once again, none of this is the fault of the English. Everyone else started giving up on Britain. Not us.
Rubbish, at least half of Scots are still Unionists, 2/3 of the Welsh at least are still noticed.
Even Drakeford has made clear he opposes independence even if he backs a Federal UK.
Little Englanders like you have already given up on Britain, not the 50% of Unionists Scots or the 65%+ of Unionist Welsh
A minority of the Scots are Unionists and a minority want independence at any price. The balancing group are a load of middle class soft nationalists who don't really like rule from London, but don't want to pay for independence with higher taxes. That's how come Cameron and Brown rescued the situation in 2014 by emphasising the state pension pot and the Barnett formula (which, of course, awards large sums of money to Scotland based on an arbitrary calculation that has only been slightly tweaked since Queen Victoria was on the throne.) Hence where we are now.
Wales is not so far down the road, but then again neither was Scotland before devolution. Give it time. I imagine that Mark Drakeford would be delighted to break off if he thought he could afford it; what any suggestions of "radical federalism" are about is, of course, a cakeist settlement in which the Welsh Parliament gets devomax, and fat transfer payments continue every year, and the Welsh electorate continues to send MPs to Westminster (who, under those circumstances, would have little left to do except to muck about with English governance and legislation.) Such a state of affairs would continue for exactly as long as the Welsh Government thought it couldn't afford to dispense with the backing of the UK Treasury, after which it would start to demand independence just as the SNP have done.
It all took off with open-ended devolution, which was ill-conceived, badly executed and which the Conservatives warned would wreck the British state at the time. There's no point in your stamping your little feet at people like me simply for pointing out that your lot circa 1997 have been proven right. Don't blame us, blame Tony Blair.
Wrong, 55% of Scots ie a majority, voted to stay in the UK in 2014 and at least half still want to stay in the UK regardless of their motivation.
Plaid only gets a pathetic less than a quarter of Welsh voters to vote for it, the majority of Welsh voters vote for Unionist parties which still includes Welsh Labour.
I agree Blair should have created an English Parliament or regional assemblies too with equivalent powers to the devolved legislatures of other home nations but devolution itself does not mean the Union is doomed, otherwise Federal states like the USA or Germany would have broken apart long ago. Even Quebec remains in Canada with devomax despite 49% voting for independence in 1995
Somewhat misleading headline. It refers to current deaths, but Would be easy to misinterpret the headline to think it applied to the whole pandemic, as indeed I did on seeing the headline...
It’s inevitable now that a significant proportion of the reported numbers are going to be “with the virus” rather than “from the virus” , because the absolute numbers are very small. It’s not clear what we can do about it, as that’s always been the measure and to change it now means the data is not comparable.
But undoubtedly the effect is magnified when absolute numbers are very low.
That's not right. The numbers of people who are infected with Covid have declined, and so the absolute number of people who just happened to die coincidentally after catching Covid will also have declined.
The vaccine effect will increase this proportion somewhat - but that is separate from the argument you are making. And we might expect that a majority of our Covid deaths will be among those unvaccinated - where any vaccine effect does not apply - except insofar as they are less likely to catch it in the first place.
We are getting a lot of warnings from various monitoring bodies of cases to look out for. I think the numbers will expand, but clearly need confirmation before officially recording them.
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
The fact our economy would be diminished in size, as would our military and France would overtake us on both measures, our role in the world would be weakened and we would have a hard border with Scotland as well as Ireland plus Scexit talks which would make Brexit look like a walk in the park and a resurgence of loyalist paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland at direct rule from Dublin.
Your Little Englander vision would be a disaster that would rip these islands apart for decades
You seem not to have noticed the nationalists metaphorically running riot in Edinburgh for the last ten years, or the actual rioting (and worse violence) that's been happening in Belfast at regular intervals since the Bronze Age.
It would all be very nice, I'm sure, if there were a future for the British state but it is a disintegrating confederacy of four states united by nothing but money. The game is up. It's over.
So, what do I care, I despise the Nationalists and am quite happy to fight them, I am certainly not going to give in to Sturgeon and Salmond who still at least half of Scots also despise.
There has been relative peace in NI since the GFA, the only reason rioting has emerged in the loyalist community is they see their community is not being listened too and NI is not close enough to GB.
You are an ideological Little Englander, fair enough, though of course the end of the UK would lead to a recession and most likely depression across Britain as well as rip us apart for a decade or more with Nationalism on both sides of the border
The fact that the Britain we grew up in is dead is not the fault of the English. Why we should be expected to try to resuscitate it by means of continually appeasing the Scots or, failing that, by fighting their nationalists (by stonewalling their demands for independence, or even by sending in the tanks as you have so stupidly suggested in the past) is quite beyond me.
It is not dead despite the fact as an ideological Little Englander you have a clear agenda to kill it off as much as the Scottish and Welsh nationalists do.
We are stronger together, weaker divided
The Scottish nationalists are in complete command of the field, and the Welsh ones are following, because they have captured the Labour Party. In case you hadn't noticed, Welsh Labour has started to actively field and promote independence supporters for elected office.
There is exactly one thing holding the British state together now, and that's the transfer payments. If the average Scottish or Welsh voter thought she would be better off out than in by £1 per year then you wouldn't see them for dust.
Once again, none of this is the fault of the English. Everyone else started giving up on Britain. Not us.
You keep claiming Labour are turning to favour independence because three minor candidates standing are in favour
Drakeford has many faults but he and Labour are committed unionists and the unionist vote in Wales is secure
You do not live in Wales and talk as if you are an expert on Welsh politics
If you think the Welsh are going to follow Scotland than with respect you are barking up the wrong tree
Until quite recently I was sympathetic to the idea that Wales was primarily interested in upholding its cultural distinctiveness, and was content with something not unlike the integrationist political settlement that existed in the previous century. The initial lukewarm embrace of the assembly certainly suggested that. Now I am not so sure.
I am sorry, but you can't ignore that Labour welcomes independence backers and offers them to the electorate. Nor, for that matter, that increasing support for independence is beginning to filter through into the opinion polls.
Change, however unwelcome we may regard it as being, can come along surprisingly quickly. No significant fraction of public opinion in Scotland was mapping out a path to independence 25 years ago. As recently as 2010 the SNP returned 6 MPs to Westminster. In 2011 it won outright control of the Scottish Parliament, in 2014 it convinced 45% of the population to ditch the Union - that is, quite explicitly to reject a common future with, and turn its back on, the rest of us - and in 2015 it captured 56 out of 59 Commons seats. Scottish independence still threatens to destroy the United Kingdom, the Unionist parties are hopelessly weak and divided, and we are faced with a Nationalist landslide again next month.
Wales may not ultimately go down the motorway to independence with no exits as well, but there's no particular reason to suppose that it won't, even if the car may have started off in the slow lane. The same basic conditions - of open-ended devolution coupled to growing emotional and political detachment from the centre, along with the plain simple fact that the UK is not so much a nation but a confederacy of four distinct, and diverging, nations - exist there as in Scotland.
J&J acting out of "an abundance of caution". Newsnight.
A damnable phrase much misued in recent months, to present any caution as inherently positive in effect.
It competes with "stay safe" for the most irritating phrase of recent times. I can't remember anyone ever saying "stay safe" when I was at school, for instance.
Did you read the article? I’ve just read the whole thing. Absolutely classic example of the extract not reflecting the tone of the piece. It’s an interesting pivot by the Wharf. The piece leans towards optimism, if anything.
J&J acting out of "an abundance of caution". Newsnight.
A damnable phrase much misued in recent months, to present any caution as inherently positive in effect.
It competes with "stay safe" for the most irritating phrase of recent times. I can't remember anyone ever saying "stay safe" when I was at school, for instance.
... the Barnett formula (which, of course, awards large sums of money to Scotland based on an arbitrary calculation that has only been slightly tweaked since Queen Victoria was on the throne.)
The Barnett Formula - the myth that will not die.
There have been two major modifications to the UK funding settlement since Victorian times - and both were intended to end up with equal per capita spending in Scotland and England. That they failed to achieve this has been entirely because Scotland's population has continued to decline relative to that of England's - nothing to do with the Barnett formula itself, or indeed the original funding settlement formula devised by Goschen.
For a start, it's way to early to call time on the office. Flexible working isn't a new thing, especially in professional services firms. A lot of the finance firms will be are regulated, so there may be issues with perma WFH there too.
I used to live within spitting distance of the 'Wharf, and it's a bit silly to imply that it is trying to re-invent itself as a result of the pandemic, as the diversification has been going on for years. The malls, bars and restaurants always seemed to good trade, and there's substantial high end resi around there as well as the local populace who use the facilities. Loads of arty events held to pull people in who wouldn't otherwise come.
Yeah, I guess the rate of growth will probably slow, but that doesn't make for a great headline.
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
The fact our economy would be diminished in size, as would our military and France would overtake us on both measures, our role in the world would be weakened and we would have a hard border with Scotland as well as Ireland plus Scexit talks which would make Brexit look like a walk in the park and a resurgence of loyalist paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland at direct rule from Dublin.
Your Little Englander vision would be a disaster that would rip these islands apart for decades
You seem not to have noticed the nationalists metaphorically running riot in Edinburgh for the last ten years, or the actual rioting (and worse violence) that's been happening in Belfast at regular intervals since the Bronze Age.
It would all be very nice, I'm sure, if there were a future for the British state but it is a disintegrating confederacy of four states united by nothing but money. The game is up. It's over.
So, what do I care, I despise the Nationalists and am quite happy to fight them, I am certainly not going to give in to Sturgeon and Salmond who still at least half of Scots also despise.
There has been relative peace in NI since the GFA, the only reason rioting has emerged in the loyalist community is they see their community is not being listened too and NI is not close enough to GB.
You are an ideological Little Englander, fair enough, though of course the end of the UK would lead to a recession and most likely depression across Britain as well as rip us apart for a decade or more with Nationalism on both sides of the border
The fact that the Britain we grew up in is dead is not the fault of the English. Why we should be expected to try to resuscitate it by means of continually appeasing the Scots or, failing that, by fighting their nationalists (by stonewalling their demands for independence, or even by sending in the tanks as you have so stupidly suggested in the past) is quite beyond me.
It is not dead despite the fact as an ideological Little Englander you have a clear agenda to kill it off as much as the Scottish and Welsh nationalists do.
We are stronger together, weaker divided
The Scottish nationalists are in complete command of the field, and the Welsh ones are following, because they have captured the Labour Party. In case you hadn't noticed, Welsh Labour has started to actively field and promote independence supporters for elected office.
There is exactly one thing holding the British state together now, and that's the transfer payments. If the average Scottish or Welsh voter thought she would be better off out than in by £1 per year then you wouldn't see them for dust.
Once again, none of this is the fault of the English. Everyone else started giving up on Britain. Not us.
You keep claiming Labour are turning to favour independence because three minor candidates standing are in favour
Drakeford has many faults but he and Labour are committed unionists and the unionist vote in Wales is secure
You do not live in Wales and talk as if you are an expert on Welsh politics
If you think the Welsh are going to follow Scotland than with respect you are barking up the wrong tree
Until quite recently I was sympathetic to the idea that Wales was primarily interested in upholding its cultural distinctiveness, and was content with something not unlike the integrationist political settlement that existed in the previous century. The initial lukewarm embrace of the assembly certainly suggested that. Now I am not so sure.
I am sorry, but you can't ignore that Labour welcomes independence backers and offers them to the electorate. Nor, for that matter, that increasing support for independence is beginning to filter through into the opinion polls.
Change, however unwelcome we may regard it as being, can come along surprisingly quickly. No significant fraction of public opinion in Scotland was mapping out a path to independence 25 years ago. As recently as 2010 the SNP returned 6 MPs to Westminster. In 2011 it won outright control of the Scottish Parliament, in 2014 it convinced 45% of the population to ditch the Union - that is, quite explicitly to reject a common future with, and turn its back on, the rest of us - and in 2015 it captured 56 out of 59 Commons seats. Scottish independence still threatens to destroy the United Kingdom, the Unionist parties are hopelessly weak and divided, and we are faced with a Nationalist landslide again next month.
Wales may not ultimately go down the motorway to independence with no exits as well, but there's no particular reason to suppose that it won't, even if the car may have started off in the slow lane. The same basic conditions - of open-ended devolution coupled to growing emotional and political detachment from the centre, along with the plain simple fact that the UK is not so much a nation but a confederacy of four distinct, and diverging, nations - exist there as in Scotland.
Your diagnosis is partly correct, but overly tinged with despair.
All this has happened because no one was thinking of the Union, in London. It was assumed to be safe. Nothing to worry about
That has now changed. Nationalism within the UK is a clear and present danger not just to our constitutional settlement, but to our economic wellbeing. I am pretty sure the Tories are alive to the need to sell a positive case (and make the UK work for everyone). Labour are totally aware of this, because it will be almost impossible for them to win in Westminster without keeping Wales onside and reviving, politically, north of the Border
Everyone knows the stakes are high. Complacency has gone. That's the first necessary step for a fightback
And with that statement of mild optimism, goodnight
On topic, much as I would have voted for Trump, I don't like this tactic. It's bullying and there is no need to do it. If your person is good enough, people will contribute. They shouldn't feel pressurised to do so.
Reason that Trumpsky & Co went played the shell game so aggressively with their online donors last Fall, was precisely because he/they DID need the money - desperately - for media ads. That was the rationale.
Besides of course raking their cut right off the top, as per usual for this particular RICO operation.
American Psycho is a portrait of New York on the UP. Recovering from the 70s and powering into the 80s, in an excess of greed and materialism. That's the whole point
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
The fact our economy would be diminished in size, as would our military and France would overtake us on both measures, our role in the world would be weakened and we would have a hard border with Scotland as well as Ireland plus Scexit talks which would make Brexit look like a walk in the park and a resurgence of loyalist paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland at direct rule from Dublin.
Your Little Englander vision would be a disaster that would rip these islands apart for decades
You seem not to have noticed the nationalists metaphorically running riot in Edinburgh for the last ten years, or the actual rioting (and worse violence) that's been happening in Belfast at regular intervals since the Bronze Age.
It would all be very nice, I'm sure, if there were a future for the British state but it is a disintegrating confederacy of four states united by nothing but money. The game is up. It's over.
So, what do I care, I despise the Nationalists and am quite happy to fight them, I am certainly not going to give in to Sturgeon and Salmond who still at least half of Scots also despise.
There has been relative peace in NI since the GFA, the only reason rioting has emerged in the loyalist community is they see their community is not being listened too and NI is not close enough to GB.
You are an ideological Little Englander, fair enough, though of course the end of the UK would lead to a recession and most likely depression across Britain as well as rip us apart for a decade or more with Nationalism on both sides of the border
The fact that the Britain we grew up in is dead is not the fault of the English. Why we should be expected to try to resuscitate it by means of continually appeasing the Scots or, failing that, by fighting their nationalists (by stonewalling their demands for independence, or even by sending in the tanks as you have so stupidly suggested in the past) is quite beyond me.
It is not dead despite the fact as an ideological Little Englander you have a clear agenda to kill it off as much as the Scottish and Welsh nationalists do.
We are stronger together, weaker divided
The Scottish nationalists are in complete command of the field, and the Welsh ones are following, because they have captured the Labour Party. In case you hadn't noticed, Welsh Labour has started to actively field and promote independence supporters for elected office.
There is exactly one thing holding the British state together now, and that's the transfer payments. If the average Scottish or Welsh voter thought she would be better off out than in by £1 per year then you wouldn't see them for dust.
Once again, none of this is the fault of the English. Everyone else started giving up on Britain. Not us.
You keep claiming Labour are turning to favour independence because three minor candidates standing are in favour
Drakeford has many faults but he and Labour are committed unionists and the unionist vote in Wales is secure
You do not live in Wales and talk as if you are an expert on Welsh politics
If you think the Welsh are going to follow Scotland than with respect you are barking up the wrong tree
Until quite recently I was sympathetic to the idea that Wales was primarily interested in upholding its cultural distinctiveness, and was content with something not unlike the integrationist political settlement that existed in the previous century. The initial lukewarm embrace of the assembly certainly suggested that. Now I am not so sure.
I am sorry, but you can't ignore that Labour welcomes independence backers and offers them to the electorate. Nor, for that matter, that increasing support for independence is beginning to filter through into the opinion polls.
Change, however unwelcome we may regard it as being, can come along surprisingly quickly. No significant fraction of public opinion in Scotland was mapping out a path to independence 25 years ago. As recently as 2010 the SNP returned 6 MPs to Westminster. In 2011 it won outright control of the Scottish Parliament, in 2014 it convinced 45% of the population to ditch the Union - that is, quite explicitly to reject a common future with, and turn its back on, the rest of us - and in 2015 it captured 56 out of 59 Commons seats. Scottish independence still threatens to destroy the United Kingdom, the Unionist parties are hopelessly weak and divided, and we are faced with a Nationalist landslide again next month.
Wales may not ultimately go down the motorway to independence with no exits as well, but there's no particular reason to suppose that it won't, even if the car may have started off in the slow lane. The same basic conditions - of open-ended devolution coupled to growing emotional and political detachment from the centre, along with the plain simple fact that the UK is not so much a nation but a confederacy of four distinct, and diverging, nations - exist there as in Scotland.
The UK is older than most of the Federal nations in the world today, from the USA to Germany, Australia and India and Canada.
On your argument every Federal nation on earth would be destined to break up along with the UK because Federations of states or nations are unworkable
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
The fact our economy would be diminished in size, as would our military and France would overtake us on both measures, our role in the world would be weakened and we would have a hard border with Scotland as well as Ireland plus Scexit talks which would make Brexit look like a walk in the park and a resurgence of loyalist paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland at direct rule from Dublin.
Your Little Englander vision would be a disaster that would rip these islands apart for decades
You seem not to have noticed the nationalists metaphorically running riot in Edinburgh for the last ten years, or the actual rioting (and worse violence) that's been happening in Belfast at regular intervals since the Bronze Age.
It would all be very nice, I'm sure, if there were a future for the British state but it is a disintegrating confederacy of four states united by nothing but money. The game is up. It's over.
So, what do I care, I despise the Nationalists and am quite happy to fight them, I am certainly not going to give in to Sturgeon and Salmond who still at least half of Scots also despise.
There has been relative peace in NI since the GFA, the only reason rioting has emerged in the loyalist community is they see their community is not being listened too and NI is not close enough to GB.
You are an ideological Little Englander, fair enough, though of course the end of the UK would lead to a recession and most likely depression across Britain as well as rip us apart for a decade or more with Nationalism on both sides of the border
The fact that the Britain we grew up in is dead is not the fault of the English. Why we should be expected to try to resuscitate it by means of continually appeasing the Scots or, failing that, by fighting their nationalists (by stonewalling their demands for independence, or even by sending in the tanks as you have so stupidly suggested in the past) is quite beyond me.
It is not dead despite the fact as an ideological Little Englander you have a clear agenda to kill it off as much as the Scottish and Welsh nationalists do.
We are stronger together, weaker divided
The Scottish nationalists are in complete command of the field, and the Welsh ones are following, because they have captured the Labour Party. In case you hadn't noticed, Welsh Labour has started to actively field and promote independence supporters for elected office.
There is exactly one thing holding the British state together now, and that's the transfer payments. If the average Scottish or Welsh voter thought she would be better off out than in by £1 per year then you wouldn't see them for dust.
Once again, none of this is the fault of the English. Everyone else started giving up on Britain. Not us.
Rubbish, at least half of Scots are still Unionists, 2/3 of the Welsh at least are still noticed.
Even Drakeford has made clear he opposes independence even if he backs a Federal UK.
Little Englanders like you have already given up on Britain, not the 50% of Unionists Scots or the 65%+ of Unionist Welsh
A minority of the Scots are Unionists and a minority want independence at any price. The balancing group are a load of middle class soft nationalists who don't really like rule from London, but don't want to pay for independence with higher taxes. That's how come Cameron and Brown rescued the situation in 2014 by emphasising the state pension pot and the Barnett formula (which, of course, awards large sums of money to Scotland based on an arbitrary calculation that has only been slightly tweaked since Queen Victoria was on the throne.) Hence where we are now.
Wales is not so far down the road, but then again neither was Scotland before devolution. Give it time. I imagine that Mark Drakeford would be delighted to break off if he thought he could afford it; what any suggestions of "radical federalism" are about is, of course, a cakeist settlement in which the Welsh Parliament gets devomax, and fat transfer payments continue every year, and the Welsh electorate continues to send MPs to Westminster (who, under those circumstances, would have little left to do except to muck about with English governance and legislation.) Such a state of affairs would continue for exactly as long as the Welsh Government thought it couldn't afford to dispense with the backing of the UK Treasury, after which it would start to demand independence just as the SNP have done.
It all took off with open-ended devolution, which was ill-conceived, badly executed and which the Conservatives warned would wreck the British state at the time. There's no point in your stamping your little feet at people like me simply for pointing out that your lot circa 1997 have been proven right. Don't blame us, blame Tony Blair.
Wrong, 55% of Scots ie a majority, voted to stay in the UK in 2014 and at least half still want to stay in the UK regardless of their motivation.
Plaid only gets a pathetic less than a quarter of Welsh voters to vote for it, the majority of Welsh voters vote for Unionist parties which still includes Welsh Labour.
I agree Blair should have created an English Parliament or regional assemblies too with equivalent powers to the devolved legislatures of other home nations but devolution itself does not mean the Union is doomed, otherwise Federal states like the USA or Germany would have broken apart long ago. Even Quebec remains in Canada with devomax despite 49% voting for independence in 1995
Canada got lucky - and Quebec, as distinct an entity as it is, is not a thousand year old, ancient nation state. Even if Scotland gets a second chance to vote for independence and turns it down for a second time, I am not at all sure that it would be the end of the matter. Maybe the pro-independence voters would give up in despair? Just as likely it would make them more angry, the push for the third referendum would start immediately, and the unbroken series of wrecking nationalist administrations would continue.
The United States and Germany, in contrast, both constitutionally forbid secession. Now, you could argue that we should've created a fully functional federal system *and* drafted a written constitution for the UK that expressly forbade secession at the same time, in an effort to pre-empt the awful problems that devolution has created - but I am afraid it is far too late. The clock cannot be turned back. The principle of the right of secession has already been conceded, and the limits of devolved power have never been defined and locked in place, either. What has been done cannot be undone.
The result of all of this can be seen both in the growing support for independence and in the census returns. Those who identify as British are already a minority in their own country, based on data collected ten years ago. God alone knows how much further the cultural dissolution of the UK has progressed since. The next set of results, when eventually collated and released, will give us answers.
This is not necessarily a desirable state of affairs, but we are where we are. As I said earlier on in this discussion, the land in which those of us now in middle or old age grew up is gone. At some point, we need to come to terms with that.
American Psycho is a portrait of New York on the UP. Recovering from the 70s and powering into the 80s, in an excess of greed and materialism. That's the whole point
Apart from Phil Collins. So long as he isn't back then all will be well.
We are getting a lot of warnings from various monitoring bodies of cases to look out for. I think the numbers will expand, but clearly need confirmation before officially recording them.
We are getting a lot of warnings from various monitoring bodies of cases to look out for. I think the numbers will expand, but clearly need confirmation before officially recording them.
I know you are a medical doctor, but would we have noticed by now if this was a significant risk? Millions have had AZ!
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
The fact our economy would be diminished in size, as would our military and France would overtake us on both measures, our role in the world would be weakened and we would have a hard border with Scotland as well as Ireland plus Scexit talks which would make Brexit look like a walk in the park and a resurgence of loyalist paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland at direct rule from Dublin.
Your Little Englander vision would be a disaster that would rip these islands apart for decades
You seem not to have noticed the nationalists metaphorically running riot in Edinburgh for the last ten years, or the actual rioting (and worse violence) that's been happening in Belfast at regular intervals since the Bronze Age.
It would all be very nice, I'm sure, if there were a future for the British state but it is a disintegrating confederacy of four states united by nothing but money. The game is up. It's over.
So, what do I care, I despise the Nationalists and am quite happy to fight them, I am certainly not going to give in to Sturgeon and Salmond who still at least half of Scots also despise.
There has been relative peace in NI since the GFA, the only reason rioting has emerged in the loyalist community is they see their community is not being listened too and NI is not close enough to GB.
You are an ideological Little Englander, fair enough, though of course the end of the UK would lead to a recession and most likely depression across Britain as well as rip us apart for a decade or more with Nationalism on both sides of the border
The fact that the Britain we grew up in is dead is not the fault of the English. Why we should be expected to try to resuscitate it by means of continually appeasing the Scots or, failing that, by fighting their nationalists (by stonewalling their demands for independence, or even by sending in the tanks as you have so stupidly suggested in the past) is quite beyond me.
It is not dead despite the fact as an ideological Little Englander you have a clear agenda to kill it off as much as the Scottish and Welsh nationalists do.
We are stronger together, weaker divided
The Scottish nationalists are in complete command of the field, and the Welsh ones are following, because they have captured the Labour Party. In case you hadn't noticed, Welsh Labour has started to actively field and promote independence supporters for elected office.
There is exactly one thing holding the British state together now, and that's the transfer payments. If the average Scottish or Welsh voter thought she would be better off out than in by £1 per year then you wouldn't see them for dust.
Once again, none of this is the fault of the English. Everyone else started giving up on Britain. Not us.
Rubbish, at least half of Scots are still Unionists, 2/3 of the Welsh at least are still noticed.
Even Drakeford has made clear he opposes independence even if he backs a Federal UK.
Little Englanders like you have already given up on Britain, not the 50% of Unionists Scots or the 65%+ of Unionist Welsh
A minority of the Scots are Unionists and a minority want independence at any price. The balancing group are a load of middle class soft nationalists who don't really like rule from London, but don't want to pay for independence with higher taxes. That's how come Cameron and Brown rescued the situation in 2014 by emphasising the state pension pot and the Barnett formula (which, of course, awards large sums of money to Scotland based on an arbitrary calculation that has only been slightly tweaked since Queen Victoria was on the throne.) Hence where we are now.
Wales is not so far down the road, but then again neither was Scotland before devolution. Give it time. I imagine that Mark Drakeford would be delighted to break off if he thought he could afford it; what any suggestions of "radical federalism" are about is, of course, a cakeist settlement in which the Welsh Parliament gets devomax, and fat transfer payments continue every year, and the Welsh electorate continues to send MPs to Westminster (who, under those circumstances, would have little left to do except to muck about with English governance and legislation.) Such a state of affairs would continue for exactly as long as the Welsh Government thought it couldn't afford to dispense with the backing of the UK Treasury, after which it would start to demand independence just as the SNP have done.
It all took off with open-ended devolution, which was ill-conceived, badly executed and which the Conservatives warned would wreck the British state at the time. There's no point in your stamping your little feet at people like me simply for pointing out that your lot circa 1997 have been proven right. Don't blame us, blame Tony Blair.
Wrong, 55% of Scots ie a majority, voted to stay in the UK in 2014 and at least half still want to stay in the UK regardless of their motivation.
Plaid only gets a pathetic less than a quarter of Welsh voters to vote for it, the majority of Welsh voters vote for Unionist parties which still includes Welsh Labour.
I agree Blair should have created an English Parliament or regional assemblies too with equivalent powers to the devolved legislatures of other home nations but devolution itself does not mean the Union is doomed, otherwise Federal states like the USA or Germany would have broken apart long ago. Even Quebec remains in Canada with devomax despite 49% voting for independence in 1995
Canada got lucky - and Quebec, as distinct an entity as it is, is not a thousand year old, ancient nation state. Even if Scotland gets a second chance to vote for independence and turns it down for a second time, I am not at all sure that it would be the end of the matter. Maybe the pro-independence voters would give up in despair? Just as likely it would make them more angry, the push for the third referendum would start immediately, and the unbroken series of wrecking nationalist administrations would continue.
The United States and Germany, in contrast, both constitutionally forbid secession. Now, you could argue that we should've created a fully functional federal system *and* drafted a written constitution for the UK that expressly forbade secession at the same time, in an effort to solve the awful problems that devolution has created - but I am afraid it is far too late. The clock cannot be turned back. The principle of the right of secession has already been conceded, and the limits of devolved power have never been defined and locked in place, either. What has been done cannot be undone.
The result of all of this can be seen both in the growing support for independence and in the census returns. Those who identify as British are already a minority in their own country, based on data collected ten years ago. God alone knows how much further the cultural dissolution of the UK has progressed since. The next set of results, when eventually collated and released, will give us answers.
This is not necessarily a desirable state of affairs, but we are where we are. As I said earlier on in this discussion, the land in which those of us now in middle or old age grew up is gone. At some point, we need to come to terms with that.
You seem to have forgotten the US fought a civil war when its southern states broke away from the Union, nothing prevents attempts at secession if the will is there, what stops that secession is the iron will of the Federal leadership to defeat and crush that Nationalist attempt to secede at all costs. That can be a stick as in Spain in Catalonia or a carrot as in the devomax Canada gave Quebec.
No principle of the right of secession has been given, this government has correctly said it will refuse the Nationalists any independence referendum again for a generation.
Most people in Scotland and England still consider themselves partly British too
Somewhat misleading headline. It refers to current deaths, but Would be easy to misinterpret the headline to think it applied to the whole pandemic, as indeed I did on seeing the headline...
It’s inevitable now that a significant proportion of the reported numbers are going to be “with the virus” rather than “from the virus” , because the absolute numbers are very small. It’s not clear what we can do about it, as that’s always been the measure and to change it now means the data is not comparable.
But undoubtedly the effect is magnified when absolute numbers are very low.
That's not right. The numbers of people who are infected with Covid have declined, and so the absolute number of people who just happened to die coincidentally after catching Covid will also have declined.
The vaccine effect will increase this proportion somewhat - but that is separate from the argument you are making. And we might expect that a majority of our Covid deaths will be among those unvaccinated - where any vaccine effect does not apply - except insofar as they are less likely to catch it in the first place.
No. I’m talking about the proportion, as I clearly said in my OP. All I’m saying is when absolute numbers are very low, the proportion of those who died with the virus not of the virus is magnified as a proportion of the overall number. It’s possible in the near future three or four deaths are recorded within 28 days of a covid test and none of them are actually due to the virus, for example.
In any case, I think the story is probably trivial: it doesn’t matter hugely. The numbers are now so low, why does is matter if 25% are misattributed? Is 15 materially different from 20?
American Psycho is a portrait of New York on the UP. Recovering from the 70s and powering into the 80s, in an excess of greed and materialism. That's the whole point
Apart from Phil Collins. So long as he isn't back then all will be well.
Hip To Be Square by Huey Lewis and the News is a truly fine song.
For a start, it's way to early to call time on the office. Flexible working isn't a new thing, especially in professional services firms. A lot of the finance firms will be are regulated, so there may be issues with perma WFH there too.
I used to live within spitting distance of the 'Wharf, and it's a bit silly to imply that it is trying to re-invent itself as a result of the pandemic, as the diversification has been going on for years. The malls, bars and restaurants always seemed to good trade, and there's substantial high end resi around there as well as the local populace who use the facilities. Loads of arty events held to pull people in who wouldn't otherwise come.
Yeah, I guess the rate of growth will probably slow, but that doesn't make for a great headline.
Wired have a habit of publishing pseudo-analytical articles on socioeconomic trends that are lacking in substance. In this case, the article itself was fairly underwhelming and as you say didn’t even reflect the headline.
For a start, it's way to early to call time on the office. Flexible working isn't a new thing, especially in professional services firms. A lot of the finance firms will be are regulated, so there may be issues with perma WFH there too.
I used to live within spitting distance of the 'Wharf, and it's a bit silly to imply that it is trying to re-invent itself as a result of the pandemic, as the diversification has been going on for years. The malls, bars and restaurants always seemed to good trade, and there's substantial high end resi around there as well as the local populace who use the facilities. Loads of arty events held to pull people in who wouldn't otherwise come.
Yeah, I guess the rate of growth will probably slow, but that doesn't make for a great headline.
Wired have a habit of publishing pseudo-analytical articles on socioeconomic trends that are lacking in substance. In this case, the article itself was fairly underwhelming and as you say didn’t even reflect the headline.
I've always thought UK Wired is a pale imitation of the US version (at least in its heyday, haven't bought it for years)
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
The fact our economy would be diminished in size, as would our military and France would overtake us on both measures, our role in the world would be weakened and we would have a hard border with Scotland as well as Ireland plus Scexit talks which would make Brexit look like a walk in the park and a resurgence of loyalist paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland at direct rule from Dublin.
Your Little Englander vision would be a disaster that would rip these islands apart for decades
You seem not to have noticed the nationalists metaphorically running riot in Edinburgh for the last ten years, or the actual rioting (and worse violence) that's been happening in Belfast at regular intervals since the Bronze Age.
It would all be very nice, I'm sure, if there were a future for the British state but it is a disintegrating confederacy of four states united by nothing but money. The game is up. It's over.
So, what do I care, I despise the Nationalists and am quite happy to fight them, I am certainly not going to give in to Sturgeon and Salmond who still at least half of Scots also despise.
There has been relative peace in NI since the GFA, the only reason rioting has emerged in the loyalist community is they see their community is not being listened too and NI is not close enough to GB.
You are an ideological Little Englander, fair enough, though of course the end of the UK would lead to a recession and most likely depression across Britain as well as rip us apart for a decade or more with Nationalism on both sides of the border
The fact that the Britain we grew up in is dead is not the fault of the English. Why we should be expected to try to resuscitate it by means of continually appeasing the Scots or, failing that, by fighting their nationalists (by stonewalling their demands for independence, or even by sending in the tanks as you have so stupidly suggested in the past) is quite beyond me.
It is not dead despite the fact as an ideological Little Englander you have a clear agenda to kill it off as much as the Scottish and Welsh nationalists do.
We are stronger together, weaker divided
The Scottish nationalists are in complete command of the field, and the Welsh ones are following, because they have captured the Labour Party. In case you hadn't noticed, Welsh Labour has started to actively field and promote independence supporters for elected office.
There is exactly one thing holding the British state together now, and that's the transfer payments. If the average Scottish or Welsh voter thought she would be better off out than in by £1 per year then you wouldn't see them for dust.
Once again, none of this is the fault of the English. Everyone else started giving up on Britain. Not us.
You keep claiming Labour are turning to favour independence because three minor candidates standing are in favour
Drakeford has many faults but he and Labour are committed unionists and the unionist vote in Wales is secure
You do not live in Wales and talk as if you are an expert on Welsh politics
If you think the Welsh are going to follow Scotland than with respect you are barking up the wrong tree
Until quite recently I was sympathetic to the idea that Wales was primarily interested in upholding its cultural distinctiveness, and was content with something not unlike the integrationist political settlement that existed in the previous century. The initial lukewarm embrace of the assembly certainly suggested that. Now I am not so sure.
I am sorry, but you can't ignore that Labour welcomes independence backers and offers them to the electorate. Nor, for that matter, that increasing support for independence is beginning to filter through into the opinion polls.
Change, however unwelcome we may regard it as being, can come along surprisingly quickly. No significant fraction of public opinion in Scotland was mapping out a path to independence 25 years ago. As recently as 2010 the SNP returned 6 MPs to Westminster. In 2011 it won outright control of the Scottish Parliament, in 2014 it convinced 45% of the population to ditch the Union - that is, quite explicitly to reject a common future with, and turn its back on, the rest of us - and in 2015 it captured 56 out of 59 Commons seats. Scottish independence still threatens to destroy the United Kingdom, the Unionist parties are hopelessly weak and divided, and we are faced with a Nationalist landslide again next month.
Wales may not ultimately go down the motorway to independence with no exits as well, but there's no particular reason to suppose that it won't, even if the car may have started off in the slow lane. The same basic conditions - of open-ended devolution coupled to growing emotional and political detachment from the centre, along with the plain simple fact that the UK is not so much a nation but a confederacy of four distinct, and diverging, nations - exist there as in Scotland.
The UK is older than most of the Federal nations in the world today, from the USA to Germany, Australia and India and Canada.
On your argument every Federal nation on earth would be destined to break up along with the UK because Federations of states or nations are unworkable
The UK was and is a collection of countries that was welded together into one body by varying degrees of force, and then held together first by the will of the monarch, then by pre-democratic, noble and gentry politicians, and finally by empire.
We now live in a post imperial, democratic world. The common project is gone, the component nations of the Union are identifying and magnifying their own differences (or reacting against those of the others,) and so the whole thing is cracking.
It would likely be a very different matter if the component nations of the Union had merged fully into a unified cultural whole, but they did not. The United States consists of territories like North Carolina. Wyoming and Colorado that were, for the most part, never nations in their own right - merely parcels of land seized from indigenous people. Germany consists of elements like Bavaria and Hanover that were kingdoms, but have also long since merged into the common culture and given up on the notion of separation.
England, Wales and Scotland are all still nations. They never stopped being nations and started being regions of Britain. There's the UK's root problem. Just like Yugoslavia, it's a collection of nations, liable to fall apart if administered a sufficiently hard blow.
For a start, it's way to early to call time on the office. Flexible working isn't a new thing, especially in professional services firms. A lot of the finance firms will be are regulated, so there may be issues with perma WFH there too.
I used to live within spitting distance of the 'Wharf, and it's a bit silly to imply that it is trying to re-invent itself as a result of the pandemic, as the diversification has been going on for years. The malls, bars and restaurants always seemed to good trade, and there's substantial high end resi around there as well as the local populace who use the facilities. Loads of arty events held to pull people in who wouldn't otherwise come.
Yeah, I guess the rate of growth will probably slow, but that doesn't make for a great headline.
Wired have a habit of publishing pseudo-analytical articles on socioeconomic trends that are lacking in substance. In this case, the article itself was fairly underwhelming and as you say didn’t even reflect the headline.
I've always thought UK Wired is a pale imitation of the US version (at least in its heyday, haven't bought it for years)
It used to be a decent tech-culture magazine didn’t it? It’s attempts to become all things to all men haven’t been an unbridled success.
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
The fact our economy would be diminished in size, as would our military and France would overtake us on both measures, our role in the world would be weakened and we would have a hard border with Scotland as well as Ireland plus Scexit talks which would make Brexit look like a walk in the park and a resurgence of loyalist paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland at direct rule from Dublin.
Your Little Englander vision would be a disaster that would rip these islands apart for decades
You seem not to have noticed the nationalists metaphorically running riot in Edinburgh for the last ten years, or the actual rioting (and worse violence) that's been happening in Belfast at regular intervals since the Bronze Age.
It would all be very nice, I'm sure, if there were a future for the British state but it is a disintegrating confederacy of four states united by nothing but money. The game is up. It's over.
So, what do I care, I despise the Nationalists and am quite happy to fight them, I am certainly not going to give in to Sturgeon and Salmond who still at least half of Scots also despise.
There has been relative peace in NI since the GFA, the only reason rioting has emerged in the loyalist community is they see their community is not being listened too and NI is not close enough to GB.
You are an ideological Little Englander, fair enough, though of course the end of the UK would lead to a recession and most likely depression across Britain as well as rip us apart for a decade or more with Nationalism on both sides of the border
The fact that the Britain we grew up in is dead is not the fault of the English. Why we should be expected to try to resuscitate it by means of continually appeasing the Scots or, failing that, by fighting their nationalists (by stonewalling their demands for independence, or even by sending in the tanks as you have so stupidly suggested in the past) is quite beyond me.
It is not dead despite the fact as an ideological Little Englander you have a clear agenda to kill it off as much as the Scottish and Welsh nationalists do.
We are stronger together, weaker divided
The Scottish nationalists are in complete command of the field, and the Welsh ones are following, because they have captured the Labour Party. In case you hadn't noticed, Welsh Labour has started to actively field and promote independence supporters for elected office.
There is exactly one thing holding the British state together now, and that's the transfer payments. If the average Scottish or Welsh voter thought she would be better off out than in by £1 per year then you wouldn't see them for dust.
Once again, none of this is the fault of the English. Everyone else started giving up on Britain. Not us.
You keep claiming Labour are turning to favour independence because three minor candidates standing are in favour
Drakeford has many faults but he and Labour are committed unionists and the unionist vote in Wales is secure
You do not live in Wales and talk as if you are an expert on Welsh politics
If you think the Welsh are going to follow Scotland than with respect you are barking up the wrong tree
Until quite recently I was sympathetic to the idea that Wales was primarily interested in upholding its cultural distinctiveness, and was content with something not unlike the integrationist political settlement that existed in the previous century. The initial lukewarm embrace of the assembly certainly suggested that. Now I am not so sure.
I am sorry, but you can't ignore that Labour welcomes independence backers and offers them to the electorate. Nor, for that matter, that increasing support for independence is beginning to filter through into the opinion polls.
Change, however unwelcome we may regard it as being, can come along surprisingly quickly. No significant fraction of public opinion in Scotland was mapping out a path to independence 25 years ago. As recently as 2010 the SNP returned 6 MPs to Westminster. In 2011 it won outright control of the Scottish Parliament, in 2014 it convinced 45% of the population to ditch the Union - that is, quite explicitly to reject a common future with, and turn its back on, the rest of us - and in 2015 it captured 56 out of 59 Commons seats. Scottish independence still threatens to destroy the United Kingdom, the Unionist parties are hopelessly weak and divided, and we are faced with a Nationalist landslide again next month.
Wales may not ultimately go down the motorway to independence with no exits as well, but there's no particular reason to suppose that it won't, even if the car may have started off in the slow lane. The same basic conditions - of open-ended devolution coupled to growing emotional and political detachment from the centre, along with the plain simple fact that the UK is not so much a nation but a confederacy of four distinct, and diverging, nations - exist there as in Scotland.
The UK is older than most of the Federal nations in the world today, from the USA to Germany, Australia and India and Canada.
On your argument every Federal nation on earth would be destined to break up along with the UK because Federations of states or nations are unworkable
The UK was and is a collection of countries that was welded together into one body by varying degrees of force, and then held together first by the will of the monarch, then by pre-democratic, noble and gentry politicians, and finally by empire.
We now live in a post imperial, democratic world. The common project is gone, the component nations of the Union are identifying and magnifying their own differences (or reacting against those of the others,) and so the whole thing is cracking.
It would likely be a very different matter if the component nations of the Union had merged fully into a unified cultural whole, but they did not. The United States consists of territories like North Carolina. Wyoming and Colorado that were, for the most part, never nations in their own right - merely parcels of land seized from indigenous people. Germany consists of elements like Bavaria and Hanover that were kingdoms, but have also long since merged into the common culture and given up on the notion of separation.
England, Wales and Scotland are all still nations. They never stopped being nations and started being regions of Britain. There's the UK's root problem. Just like Yugoslavia, it's a collection of nations, liable to fall apart if administered a sufficiently hard blow.
The Union is just moving into a Federal state like any other Federal state, the only piece missing is an English Parliament or regional assemblies with powers to match those of the other home nations.
There are bigger cultural differences between Texas and Massachussetts or indeed arguably Bavaria and northern and eastern Germany than there are between the nations of the UK let alone the huge difference between Quebec and the rest of Canada, they do not even speak the same language.
Yugoslavia was created less than a hundred years before it broke apart, the Union is over 3 centuries apart and of course Yugoslavia only broke apart after the bloodiest European civil war for centuries
Somewhat misleading headline. It refers to current deaths, but Would be easy to misinterpret the headline to think it applied to the whole pandemic, as indeed I did on seeing the headline...
It’s inevitable now that a significant proportion of the reported numbers are going to be “with the virus” rather than “from the virus” , because the absolute numbers are very small. It’s not clear what we can do about it, as that’s always been the measure and to change it now means the data is not comparable.
But undoubtedly the effect is magnified when absolute numbers are very low.
That's not right. The numbers of people who are infected with Covid have declined, and so the absolute number of people who just happened to die coincidentally after catching Covid will also have declined.
The vaccine effect will increase this proportion somewhat - but that is separate from the argument you are making. And we might expect that a majority of our Covid deaths will be among those unvaccinated - where any vaccine effect does not apply - except insofar as they are less likely to catch it in the first place.
No. I’m talking about the proportion, as I clearly said in my OP. All I’m saying is when absolute numbers are very low, the proportion of those who died with the virus not of the virus is magnified as a proportion of the overall number. It’s possible in the near future three or four deaths are recorded within 28 days of a covid test and none of them are actually due to the virus, for example.
In any case, I think the story is probably trivial: it doesn’t matter hugely. The numbers are now so low, why does is matter if 25% are misattributed? Is 15 materially different from 20?
Your argument is wrongheaded. The proportion would only increase as the absolute numbers decreased because of the vaccine effect, not because the overall numbers are low.
There isn't a constant absolute number of people dying of other things while infected with covid - that will also be a proportion of the number infected, and so also declines as infection levels decline.
A postscript to the squirrel story earlier to turn something we could all agree was a sad but possibly unavoidable situation into something half of us can get good and cross about: apparently the requirement to euthanise the squirrels was brought in by the EU in 2019, to the great disappointment of the RSPCA. Apparently.
That is bunk - sorry.
Grey Squirrels are subject to Section 14 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act as originally passed in *1981* as animals for which it is an offence to release into the wild.
It's as stupid as the RSPCA releasing foxes, though that is I think legal.
If I am wrong anyone, please do correct me.
The legislation was introduced, I believe, in an attempt to save the red squirrels, which were seen as a more national breed. They're now extremely rare and it makes sense to be decent to all squirrels, which in my view give much more pleasure to watch than almost any other natural species.
It's not a view shared by everyone, I admit. I remember asking in a pet shop if they have some bird-proof squirrel-feeders rather than the other way round, and getting a very quizzical look.
A total menace to gardeners. Every year they steal my bulbs. Or try to. We have ongoing battles every autumn trying to outwit each other.
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
I wouldn’t want to deprive our Scottish and Irish brethren the chance to benefit from a partnership with England and Wales.
Charles, a large fraction of the population of Scotland and Northern Ireland either wants rid of us or actively detests us, and the balancing portion in the middle are only in it for the money. In what universe is this a healthy state of affairs?
A large part also wants to stay in the UK, 55% of Scots in 2014 and in NI's case many would prefer the bomb to leaving the UK for direct rule by Dublin.
The end of the UK would also mean France decisively overtakes us both in terms of economy and military power, Putin would also benefit from our weaker state
“The end of the UK would also mean France decisively overtakes us both in terms of economy and military power”?????!!!!
That matters to you in the context of this conversation? Are you 12?
Of course it does, as a Tory the UK's maintaining and ideally increasing the UK's economic strength and power in the world should be one of our core aims.
No, it shouldn’t.
The government’s role is to provide security at home and abroad, and a legal and economic framework to support increasing per capita wealth. Anything more than that and they can just F off.
No.
It is not just that, otherwise we may as well just be Switzerland.
In any case you are a classical liberal if anything more than a traditional conservative anyway, a Gladstonian Liberal not a Disraelian Tory
We’ve been Tories since the days of Queen Anne. So well before Disraeli.
I said you are, not your great great grandfather
You said I’m not a traditional conservative...
As I said you are more a Gladstonian Liberal than a Disraelian Tory
Somewhat misleading headline. It refers to current deaths, but Would be easy to misinterpret the headline to think it applied to the whole pandemic, as indeed I did on seeing the headline...
It’s inevitable now that a significant proportion of the reported numbers are going to be “with the virus” rather than “from the virus” , because the absolute numbers are very small. It’s not clear what we can do about it, as that’s always been the measure and to change it now means the data is not comparable.
But undoubtedly the effect is magnified when absolute numbers are very low.
That's not right. The numbers of people who are infected with Covid have declined, and so the absolute number of people who just happened to die coincidentally after catching Covid will also have declined.
The vaccine effect will increase this proportion somewhat - but that is separate from the argument you are making. And we might expect that a majority of our Covid deaths will be among those unvaccinated - where any vaccine effect does not apply - except insofar as they are less likely to catch it in the first place.
No. I’m talking about the proportion, as I clearly said in my OP. All I’m saying is when absolute numbers are very low, the proportion of those who died with the virus not of the virus is magnified as a proportion of the overall number. It’s possible in the near future three or four deaths are recorded within 28 days of a covid test and none of them are actually due to the virus, for example.
In any case, I think the story is probably trivial: it doesn’t matter hugely. The numbers are now so low, why does is matter if 25% are misattributed? Is 15 materially different from 20?
This is something I thought of as our death numbers dropped but @LostPassword is correct. The only time you might get your effect is if case numbers dropped very very quickly indeed but that hasn't happened.
American Psycho is a portrait of New York on the UP. Recovering from the 70s and powering into the 80s, in an excess of greed and materialism. That's the whole point
Apart from Phil Collins. So long as he isn't back then all will be well.
Hip To Be Square by Huey Lewis and the News is a truly fine song.
All except Phil Collins are exempt. HL and the News are fine and righteous.
There is no solution to the asymmetry of the UK. We can ameliorate it by making the Lords an elected Federal chamber (with two Lords from each UK county?), but there is no optimal arrangement
This is a rare occasion when I agree with Kinabalu. Apart from that change to the Lords, the fudge we have now is probably the best we can hope for. It's a good deal for Scotland, Wales and NI, but that's the price England pays for keeping the Union.
The Scots would be mad to reject it for something worse, but ultimately they must decide that (in about 10 years time)
The answer is to create regions of England with their own interests.
Manchester thinks they are ignored? Give Greater Manchester two senators, same as London. 2 for the Summer Country (including Devon and Cornwall) 2 for Yorkshire etc
What about the towns and villages across the country? What do they get?
I've got an idea, why don't we divide the country into blocs, we could call them constituencies, and each of those blocs elects one person to represent them - we could call that a Member of Parliament.
I’m a fan of replacing the Lords with an elected body but it needs to be in a different basis to the Commons. Making it a federal parliament is a reasonable approach.
Towns and counties would be represented in rough areas of similar interests of approximately similar size. Consider dividing Scotland into highlands and lowlands (I don’t know them well enough but people complain there is too much focus on Glasgow/Edinburgh)
All of these complicated solutions can easily be dispensed with if we also dispense with the Union. The endless, insoluble discontent of the Scots and the Irish border dispute would be made instantly to disappear if they were not attached to England, as would the West Lothian Question and the arguments about fiscal transfers. What's not to like?
I wouldn’t want to deprive our Scottish and Irish brethren the chance to benefit from a partnership with England and Wales.
Charles, a large fraction of the population of Scotland and Northern Ireland either wants rid of us or actively detests us, and the balancing portion in the middle are only in it for the money. In what universe is this a healthy state of affairs?
A large part also wants to stay in the UK, 55% of Scots in 2014 and in NI's case many would prefer the bomb to leaving the UK for direct rule by Dublin.
The end of the UK would also mean France decisively overtakes us both in terms of economy and military power, Putin would also benefit from our weaker state
“The end of the UK would also mean France decisively overtakes us both in terms of economy and military power”?????!!!!
That matters to you in the context of this conversation? Are you 12?
Of course it does, as a Tory the UK's maintaining and ideally increasing the UK's economic strength and power in the world should be one of our core aims.
No, it shouldn’t.
The government’s role is to provide security at home and abroad, and a legal and economic framework to support increasing per capita wealth. Anything more than that and they can just F off.
No.
It is not just that, otherwise we may as well just be Switzerland.
In any case you are a classical liberal if anything more than a traditional conservative anyway, a Gladstonian Liberal not a Disraelian Tory
We’ve been Tories since the days of Queen Anne. So well before Disraeli.
I said you are, not your great great grandfather
You said I’m not a traditional conservative...
As I said you are more a Gladstonian Liberal than a Disraelian Tory
Is anyone other than you a true Tory?
It was looking pretty good for 3rd Marquess of Salisbury.
Until that is it came to light (via his lordship's wiki page) that as Prime Minister Salisbury had caved in to American demands re: the Alaska - Canada border.
No true blue Tory could ever be guilty of surrendering an inch of British soil, even in the interests of the (then non-existent "special relationship".
The partition was originally intended to be four counties. Armagh and Fermanagh were added to the occupation zone as four counties was felt to be economically nonviable by London.
A postscript to the squirrel story earlier to turn something we could all agree was a sad but possibly unavoidable situation into something half of us can get good and cross about: apparently the requirement to euthanise the squirrels was brought in by the EU in 2019, to the great disappointment of the RSPCA. Apparently.
That is bunk - sorry.
Grey Squirrels are subject to Section 14 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act as originally passed in *1981* as animals for which it is an offence to release into the wild.
It's as stupid as the RSPCA releasing foxes, though that is I think legal.
If I am wrong anyone, please do correct me.
The legislation was introduced, I believe, in an attempt to save the red squirrels, which were seen as a more national breed. They're now extremely rare and it makes sense to be decent to all squirrels, which in my view give much more pleasure to watch than almost any other natural species.
It's not a view shared by everyone, I admit. I remember asking in a pet shop if they have some bird-proof squirrel-feeders rather than the other way round, and getting a very quizzical look.
A total menace to gardeners. Every year they steal my bulbs. Or try to. We have ongoing battles every autumn trying to outwit each other.
Cyclefree and the squirrels sounds like a good subject for a Marf cartoon.
A postscript to the squirrel story earlier to turn something we could all agree was a sad but possibly unavoidable situation into something half of us can get good and cross about: apparently the requirement to euthanise the squirrels was brought in by the EU in 2019, to the great disappointment of the RSPCA. Apparently.
That is bunk - sorry.
Grey Squirrels are subject to Section 14 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act as originally passed in *1981* as animals for which it is an offence to release into the wild.
It's as stupid as the RSPCA releasing foxes, though that is I think legal.
If I am wrong anyone, please do correct me.
The legislation was introduced, I believe, in an attempt to save the red squirrels, which were seen as a more national breed. They're now extremely rare and it makes sense to be decent to all squirrels, which in my view give much more pleasure to watch than almost any other natural species.
It's not a view shared by everyone, I admit. I remember asking in a pet shop if they have some bird-proof squirrel-feeders rather than the other way round, and getting a very quizzical look.
A total menace to gardeners. Every year they steal my bulbs. Or try to. We have ongoing battles every autumn trying to outwit each other.
A postscript to the squirrel story earlier to turn something we could all agree was a sad but possibly unavoidable situation into something half of us can get good and cross about: apparently the requirement to euthanise the squirrels was brought in by the EU in 2019, to the great disappointment of the RSPCA. Apparently.
That is bunk - sorry.
Grey Squirrels are subject to Section 14 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act as originally passed in *1981* as animals for which it is an offence to release into the wild.
It's as stupid as the RSPCA releasing foxes, though that is I think legal.
If I am wrong anyone, please do correct me.
The legislation was introduced, I believe, in an attempt to save the red squirrels, which were seen as a more national breed. They're now extremely rare and it makes sense to be decent to all squirrels, which in my view give much more pleasure to watch than almost any other natural species.
It's not a view shared by everyone, I admit. I remember asking in a pet shop if they have some bird-proof squirrel-feeders rather than the other way round, and getting a very quizzical look.
A total menace to gardeners. Every year they steal my bulbs. Or try to. We have ongoing battles every autumn trying to outwit each other.
Decent cat or decent air rifle, perhaps.
Thinking further, there are actually quite a lot of Reds in the Lakes:
There are also quite a lot of places now where Greys are being culled to keep them down.
A postscript to the squirrel story earlier to turn something we could all agree was a sad but possibly unavoidable situation into something half of us can get good and cross about: apparently the requirement to euthanise the squirrels was brought in by the EU in 2019, to the great disappointment of the RSPCA. Apparently.
That is bunk - sorry.
Grey Squirrels are subject to Section 14 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act as originally passed in *1981* as animals for which it is an offence to release into the wild.
It's as stupid as the RSPCA releasing foxes, though that is I think legal.
If I am wrong anyone, please do correct me.
The legislation was introduced, I believe, in an attempt to save the red squirrels, which were seen as a more national breed. They're now extremely rare and it makes sense to be decent to all squirrels, which in my view give much more pleasure to watch than almost any other natural species.
It's not a view shared by everyone, I admit. I remember asking in a pet shop if they have some bird-proof squirrel-feeders rather than the other way round, and getting a very quizzical look.
A total menace to gardeners. Every year they steal my bulbs. Or try to. We have ongoing battles every autumn trying to outwit each other.
Decent cat or decent air rifle, perhaps.
Thinking further, there are actually quite a lot of Reds in the Lakes:
There are also quite a lot of places now where Greys are being culled to keep them down.
Yep, our back garden for one, courtesy of our dog Troy.
Comments
Just because England has always got the UK government it voted for since 1974 unlike Scotland and Wales does not mean it always will
Drakeford has many faults but he and Labour are committed unionists and the unionist vote in Wales is secure
You do not live in Wales and talk as if you are an expert on Welsh politics
If you think the Welsh are going to follow Scotland than with respect you are barking up the wrong tree
"All I boast of is that we are a Protestant parliament and Protestant state." James Craig, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland to the NI House of Commons, 24th April, 1934.
(Often misquoted as "a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people" or "a Protestant state for a Protestant people".)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9465035/London-health-official-urges-Lambeth-Wandsworth-come-forward-Covid-tests.html
The ONS figures are always a couple of weeks behind, and passed 150 000 today.
Wales is not so far down the road, but then again neither was Scotland before devolution. Give it time. I imagine that Mark Drakeford would be delighted to break off if he thought he could afford it; what any suggestions of "radical federalism" are about is, of course, a cakeist settlement in which the Welsh Parliament gets devomax, and fat transfer payments continue every year, and the Welsh electorate continues to send MPs to Westminster (who, under those circumstances, would have little left to do except to muck about with English governance and legislation.) Such a state of affairs would continue for exactly as long as the Welsh Government thought it couldn't afford to dispense with the backing of the UK Treasury, after which it would start to demand independence just as the SNP have done.
It all took off with open-ended devolution, which was ill-conceived, badly executed and which the Conservatives warned would wreck the British state at the time. There's no point in your stamping your little feet at people like me simply for pointing out that your lot circa 1997 have been proven right. Don't blame us, blame Tony Blair.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths
How UK doctor linked rare blood-clotting to AstraZeneca Covid jab
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/apr/13/how-uk-doctor-marie-scully-blood-clotting-link-astrazeneca-covid-jab-university-college-london-hospital
Letter to Prime Minister makes clear opposition to coronavirus status certification being used in hospitality settings
By Ben Riley-Smith,
POLITICAL EDITOR"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/04/13/exclusive-wont-make-customers-show-covid-passports-hospitality
Plaid only gets a pathetic less than a quarter of Welsh voters to vote for it, the majority of Welsh voters vote for Unionist parties which still includes Welsh Labour.
I agree Blair should have created an English Parliament or regional assemblies too with equivalent powers to the devolved legislatures of other home nations but devolution itself does not mean the Union is doomed, otherwise Federal states like the USA or Germany would have broken apart long ago. Even Quebec remains in Canada with devomax despite 49% voting for independence in 1995
Excellent. Riz Ahmed really deserves the Oscar although I realise it will go to Chadwick Boseman because he died.
London’s iconic financial district is trying to reinvent itself as a place to work and play after the pandemic. But the numbers don’t add up"
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/canary-wharf-pandemic-return-work
https://twitter.com/JessicaMABlair/status/1382034577112375299
Moderna says new data shows its Covid vaccine is more than 90% effective against virus six months after second shot
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/13/covid-vaccine-moderna-says-new-data-shows-its-90percent-effective-six-months-after-second-dose.html
The vaccine effect will increase this proportion somewhat - but that is separate from the argument you are making. And we might expect that a majority of our Covid deaths will be among those unvaccinated - where any vaccine effect does not apply - except insofar as they are less likely to catch it in the first place.
We are getting a lot of warnings from various monitoring bodies of cases to look out for. I think the numbers will expand, but clearly need confirmation before officially recording them.
I am sorry, but you can't ignore that Labour welcomes independence backers and offers them to the electorate. Nor, for that matter, that increasing support for independence is beginning to filter through into the opinion polls.
Change, however unwelcome we may regard it as being, can come along surprisingly quickly. No significant fraction of public opinion in Scotland was mapping out a path to independence 25 years ago. As recently as 2010 the SNP returned 6 MPs to Westminster. In 2011 it won outright control of the Scottish Parliament, in 2014 it convinced 45% of the population to ditch the Union - that is, quite explicitly to reject a common future with, and turn its back on, the rest of us - and in 2015 it captured 56 out of 59 Commons seats. Scottish independence still threatens to destroy the United Kingdom, the Unionist parties are hopelessly weak and divided, and we are faced with a Nationalist landslide again next month.
Wales may not ultimately go down the motorway to independence with no exits as well, but there's no particular reason to suppose that it won't, even if the car may have started off in the slow lane. The same basic conditions - of open-ended devolution coupled to growing emotional and political detachment from the centre, along with the plain simple fact that the UK is not so much a nation but a confederacy of four distinct, and diverging, nations - exist there as in Scotland.
There have been two major modifications to the UK funding settlement since Victorian times - and both were intended to end up with equal per capita spending in Scotland and England. That they failed to achieve this has been entirely because Scotland's population has continued to decline relative to that of England's - nothing to do with the Barnett formula itself, or indeed the original funding settlement formula devised by Goschen.
For a start, it's way to early to call time on the office. Flexible working isn't a new thing, especially in professional services firms. A lot of the finance firms will be are regulated, so there may be issues with perma WFH there too.
I used to live within spitting distance of the 'Wharf, and it's a bit silly to imply that it is trying to re-invent itself as a result of the pandemic, as the diversification has been going on for years. The malls, bars and restaurants always seemed to good trade, and there's substantial high end resi around there as well as the local populace who use the facilities. Loads of arty events held to pull people in who wouldn't otherwise come.
Yeah, I guess the rate of growth will probably slow, but that doesn't make for a great headline.
All this has happened because no one was thinking of the Union, in London. It was assumed to be safe. Nothing to worry about
That has now changed. Nationalism within the UK is a clear and present danger not just to our constitutional settlement, but to our economic wellbeing. I am pretty sure the Tories are alive to the need to sell a positive case (and make the UK work for everyone). Labour are totally aware of this, because it will be almost impossible for them to win in Westminster without keeping Wales onside and reviving, politically, north of the Border
Everyone knows the stakes are high. Complacency has gone. That's the first necessary step for a fightback
And with that statement of mild optimism, goodnight
The first is that your death can only happen once
Alternatively I make it roughly 1 in 6 million.
Excluding those car enterings where a journey is not made.
Besides of course raking their cut right off the top, as per usual for this particular RICO operation.
On your argument every Federal nation on earth would be destined to break up along with the UK because Federations of states or nations are unworkable
The United States and Germany, in contrast, both constitutionally forbid secession. Now, you could argue that we should've created a fully functional federal system *and* drafted a written constitution for the UK that expressly forbade secession at the same time, in an effort to pre-empt the awful problems that devolution has created - but I am afraid it is far too late. The clock cannot be turned back. The principle of the right of secession has already been conceded, and the limits of devolved power have never been defined and locked in place, either. What has been done cannot be undone.
The result of all of this can be seen both in the growing support for independence and in the census returns. Those who identify as British are already a minority in their own country, based on data collected ten years ago. God alone knows how much further the cultural dissolution of the UK has progressed since. The next set of results, when eventually collated and released, will give us answers.
This is not necessarily a desirable state of affairs, but we are where we are. As I said earlier on in this discussion, the land in which those of us now in middle or old age grew up is gone. At some point, we need to come to terms with that.
So long as he isn't back then all will be well.
No principle of the right of secession has been given, this government has correctly said it will refuse the Nationalists any independence referendum again for a generation.
Most people in Scotland and England still consider themselves partly British too
In any case, I think the story is probably trivial: it doesn’t matter hugely. The numbers are now so low, why does is matter if 25% are misattributed? Is 15 materially different from 20?
We now live in a post imperial, democratic world. The common project is gone, the component nations of the Union are identifying and magnifying their own differences (or reacting against those of the others,) and so the whole thing is cracking.
It would likely be a very different matter if the component nations of the Union had merged fully into a unified cultural whole, but they did not. The United States consists of territories like North Carolina. Wyoming and Colorado that were, for the most part, never nations in their own right - merely parcels of land seized from indigenous people. Germany consists of elements like Bavaria and Hanover that were kingdoms, but have also long since merged into the common culture and given up on the notion of separation.
England, Wales and Scotland are all still nations. They never stopped being nations and started being regions of Britain. There's the UK's root problem. Just like Yugoslavia, it's a collection of nations, liable to fall apart if administered a sufficiently hard blow.
There are bigger cultural differences between Texas and Massachussetts or indeed arguably Bavaria and northern and eastern Germany than there are between the nations of the UK let alone the huge difference between Quebec and the rest of Canada, they do not even speak the same language.
Yugoslavia was created less than a hundred years before it broke apart, the Union is over 3 centuries apart and of course Yugoslavia only broke apart after the bloodiest European civil war for centuries
There isn't a constant absolute number of people dying of other things while infected with covid - that will also be a proportion of the number infected, and so also declines as infection levels decline.
Until that is it came to light (via his lordship's wiki page) that as Prime Minister Salisbury had caved in to American demands re: the Alaska - Canada border.
No true blue Tory could ever be guilty of surrendering an inch of British soil, even in the interests of the (then non-existent "special relationship".
He was an iconoclast who cheerfully smashed the revered verities of progressive modernity.
By Gerard Baker"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/prince-philip-is-gone-just-when-america-needs-him-most-11618246329?mod=trending_now_opn_5
https://twitter.com/galileocheng/status/1381976967365292041
There are also quite a lot of places now where Greys are being culled to keep them down.