And Brexit is making it more difficult and expensive than it was previously.
Which is why we will still be talking about it for the next decade (at least)
My guesstimate is five decades. After all, the heid jobs banged on about it incessantly 1973-present.
I won't see it in my lifetime and I'm mid 50s. Although I'll almost certainly be killed in a motorcycle accident in the next 5-10 years.
The most likely long term trajectory is the 6 counties back in via a united Ireland, Scotland fast tracked in to spite England. England and Wales gradually realign into a Norway type relationship with the EU.
I certainly hope not! I was convinced I’d never reach 30. Thank god I was wrong. Surviving cancer was the wake up call I needed, changed my life around. Sell the motorcycle and buy a cabin in the woods, à la James Taylor.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
There are three components to England’s mental breakdown, and they are all interrelated:
- crippling fear of rejection (why do the Scots want to go?) - self-hatred (hating foreigners is ultimately an indication of low self-esteem and lack of self-worth) - and seeking external causes to rage against (Scotland, France, Germany, China, infectious foreigners etc ad infinitum)
Brexit was England’s (over-)reaction to the first Scottish independence referendum. It was entirely avoidable, but their fate was sealed when in 2010 Gordon Brown, in a fit of pique, immediately rejected SNP support for a minority Labour government, thus forcing the astonishingly naive Lib Dems into David Cameron’s rose garden/snake pit. The inevitable SNP landslide the following year sealed the process.
English voters very much do give a toss about Scotland and Scottish independence, not because of Scotland per se, but because of Greater England, otherwise referred to as the United Kingdom: the only thing separating England from the realities of being a modern, normal, average medium-sized country and the global power of her imagination. No Scotland = no Security Council seat, no independent nuclear deterrent and no “special relationship”. English voters do care very, very much about Scotland. Without her they are King Lear bereft of his kingdom.
Claiming that Scots have an “inferiority complex” - standard patter on this board - is pure psychological projection. It is the English who are wracked in self-doubt and insecurity. Ditto “paranoid”.
Sentiment? Biscuit tins? Monarch of the Glen? Not the signs of a serious, well thought-out post.
D-
Sweden’s own Sassanach expert chimes in about “English voters” yet again. A man who knows nothing and projects it into this board every day. Port guy. As I said yesterday, get a job, a hobby, anything. This malevolence is eating your soul you poor man.
Latching onto posts by particular posters on an obscure website seems to fill in a bit of time, maybe Stuart could take that up?
The one thing this is not is an obscure website and I was told yesterday that my post re Brentford scoring was quicker than BBC Sport live reporting
However, there is a polarised and rather unpleasant constant recurring theme on Scotland's Independence and Brexit that is going nowhere
I am not sure how old @StuartDickson is but I suspect he is not as old as myself, who encountered the same bitterness in the early 1950's when I lived in Berwick and when I say it is just plain tedious, posters can see how long I have listened to the debate and of course Berwick itself changed hands 13 times
Talking of Berwick, then Scotland’s main port, 15,000 people were murdered in the English massacre of the townsfolk. No monument had been raised in memory of the slain when this article was published in 2013. Has any been erected since? Have the Scots ever received an apology?
Have the Scot Nats on here ever tried making a persuasive argument for independence, or have they always just called unionists "lickspittles" and hoped that that would do the job?
Many times you sarcastic halfwitted tumshie. Why don't you start sending me your wages every week and I will decide what they are spent on , I will even send you back a few pounds that you can spend on what you want rather than what I think you should want.
Gee we hid a lot o' fun pinchin' totties an' tumshies
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
There are three components to England’s mental breakdown, and they are all interrelated:
- crippling fear of rejection (why do the Scots want to go?) - self-hatred (hating foreigners is ultimately an indication of low self-esteem and lack of self-worth) - and seeking external causes to rage against (Scotland, France, Germany, China, infectious foreigners etc ad infinitum)
Brexit was England’s (over-)reaction to the first Scottish independence referendum. It was entirely avoidable, but their fate was sealed when in 2010 Gordon Brown, in a fit of pique, immediately rejected SNP support for a minority Labour government, thus forcing the astonishingly naive Lib Dems into David Cameron’s rose garden/snake pit. The inevitable SNP landslide the following year sealed the process.
English voters very much do give a toss about Scotland and Scottish independence, not because of Scotland per se, but because of Greater England, otherwise referred to as the United Kingdom: the only thing separating England from the realities of being a modern, normal, average medium-sized country and the global power of her imagination. No Scotland = no Security Council seat, no independent nuclear deterrent and no “special relationship”. English voters do care very, very much about Scotland. Without her they are King Lear bereft of his kingdom.
Claiming that Scots have an “inferiority complex” - standard patter on this board - is pure psychological projection. It is the English who are wracked in self-doubt and insecurity. Ditto “paranoid”.
Sentiment? Biscuit tins? Monarch of the Glen? Not the signs of a serious, well thought-out post.
D-
I don’t think the consequences for England of the end of the Union have even begun to be thought about in England. But it’s hard to see how they will be positive, at least in the short-term. Internationally, it will be regarded as a humiliating emasculation. That will have consequences on many levels. Not least on the home front, where there will be three main reactions: indifference, regret and fury. The latter will mostly be on the right, which will seek revenge on Scotland through the most punishing of divorces and will go very, very heavy on English nationalism. We will not be a happy country to live in or next door to.
BiB - that sounds familiar. I can’t imagine where the inspiration for that would come from...
But in all seriousness, what would a non-punishing divorce look like. How would a nice soft liberal like you handle it? The reality is that any punishment will be self-inflicted.
I would be in the regret camp. I would be looking for the closest and friendliest relationship with Scotland possible, and I would understand that would mean compromise on both sides. I would hope the lessons of Brexit would have been learned. But I am enough of a realist to know that they won’t be. It would not be in England’s interests to have the relationship with Scotland and the EU that so many on the right seem to want.
Would you be happy to have a currency union with Scotland where the BoE is the lender of last resort for banks in a foreign country? Should the rUK taxpayers continue to subsidise Scotland?
Ultimately the currency and social security make Scottish independence an order of magnitude more serious than Brexit. It’s not nasty right-wingers like me who are responsible for that. It’s just the reality of the situation.
rUK does NOT subsidise Scotland, it merely allots a large amount of rUK borrowing to make it appear Scotland is the issue. We have no idea what kind of deficit Scotland would have given it would never follow the mental path of rUK , pretending to strut around the world as a big shot whilst the arse is out of it's trousers. Hard to imagine Scotland would be stupid enough to have a currency union either.
Things that people keep predicting which stubbornly refuse to happen:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Things that people will still be predicting in twenty years' time and still won't have happened:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Well, the collapse of the UK is certainly happening. NI, remember? Not to mention what happened a hundred years ago.
All countries end eventually. The current borders of the U.K. having lasted 100 years is not a bad innings historically.
Thought-provoking and noteworthy post. The previous borders, of course lasted from 1803, when it was thought that the 'Irish Question' had been settled by unification. The only European countries that seem to have managed to be unchanged for a REALLY long time are surely Portugal, ever since it regained it's independence from Spain, and Spain itself, since the loss of Gibraltar.
Two books shaped my current political thinking. “Vanished Kingdoms” by Norman Davies that showed me that countries end, all of them, eventually, and “The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism” by Janet Biehl and Murray Bookchin which has led me to think that the basic political unit should be the municipality, not the nation state. My basic problem with Scottish Independence is that it doesn’t go far enough.
It was someone on here that pointed me towards Vanished Kingdoms, and it was indeed thought-provoking. I'm especially reminded of it when political commentators talk about states and boundaries in the area between the Rhine and the Volga. And I know there's considerable doubt over Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe, but it does point up the significant historical population movements between the Caucasus and the Vistula.
Vanished kingdoms made me wonder how any nation ever formed and lasted as it could be a bloody convoluted process.
-kid with PIMS-TS in multiorgan failure -a teenage death -kids in their 20s in ICU -deaths of healthy unvaccinated 30 & 40 yr olds -clinically vulnerable vaccinated patients who thought they were protected, dying (one had just got married)
seahorse @seahorse4000 · 1h -the worst ever patient journey, from angrily arguing with us in ED that they don't believe in covid, to CPAP, to ICU, to ventilation, to death, those wretched family phone calls -tears and panic attacks and anger (staff). Hugs too -PPE in a heatwave is shit
And Brexit is making it more difficult and expensive than it was previously.
Which is why we will still be talking about it for the next decade (at least)
My guesstimate is five decades. After all, the heid jobs banged on about it incessantly 1973-present.
I won't see it in my lifetime and I'm mid 50s. Although I'll almost certainly be killed in a motorcycle accident in the next 5-10 years.
The most likely long term trajectory is the 6 counties back in via a united Ireland, Scotland fast tracked in to spite England. England and Wales gradually realign into a Norway type relationship with the EU.
Once Scotland and NI have gone the impetus towards independence will be taken up here in Wales for independence too.
Wales is in a tricky position, independence-wise. Scotland is big enough to go it alone and is just off continental Europe. Northern Ireland can fold into a unified Ireland. Welsh nationalism, though, as Alex Salmond observed, is more of a cultural than an economic movement.
I think that probably shows how dated Salmonds views are. Considering that the Welsh Assembly barely scraped approval in a plebiscite in the nineties, there has been more and more movement to Welsh independence in the polls. Massive issues to resolve before it happens, but no longer the fringe view that it was.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
There are three components to England’s mental breakdown, and they are all interrelated:
- crippling fear of rejection (why do the Scots want to go?) - self-hatred (hating foreigners is ultimately an indication of low self-esteem and lack of self-worth) - and seeking external causes to rage against (Scotland, France, Germany, China, infectious foreigners etc ad infinitum)
Brexit was England’s (over-)reaction to the first Scottish independence referendum. It was entirely avoidable, but their fate was sealed when in 2010 Gordon Brown, in a fit of pique, immediately rejected SNP support for a minority Labour government, thus forcing the astonishingly naive Lib Dems into David Cameron’s rose garden/snake pit. The inevitable SNP landslide the following year sealed the process.
English voters very much do give a toss about Scotland and Scottish independence, not because of Scotland per se, but because of Greater England, otherwise referred to as the United Kingdom: the only thing separating England from the realities of being a modern, normal, average medium-sized country and the global power of her imagination. No Scotland = no Security Council seat, no independent nuclear deterrent and no “special relationship”. English voters do care very, very much about Scotland. Without her they are King Lear bereft of his kingdom.
Claiming that Scots have an “inferiority complex” - standard patter on this board - is pure psychological projection. It is the English who are wracked in self-doubt and insecurity. Ditto “paranoid”.
Sentiment? Biscuit tins? Monarch of the Glen? Not the signs of a serious, well thought-out post.
D-
Sweden’s own Sassanach expert chimes in about “English voters” yet again. A man who knows nothing and projects it into this board every day. Port guy. As I said yesterday, get a job, a hobby, anything. This malevolence is eating your soul you poor man.
Latching onto posts by particular posters on an obscure website seems to fill in a bit of time, maybe Stuart could take that up?
The one thing this is not is an obscure website and I was told yesterday that my post re Brentford scoring was quicker than BBC Sport live reporting
However, there is a polarised and rather unpleasant constant recurring theme on Scotland's Independence and Brexit that is going nowhere
I am not sure how old @StuartDickson is but I suspect he is not as old as myself, who encountered the same bitterness in the early 1950's when I lived in Berwick and when I say it is just plain tedious, posters can see how long I have listened to the debate and of course Berwick itself changed hands 13 times
Talking of Berwick, then Scotland’s main port, 15,000 people were murdered in the English massacre of the townsfolk. No monument had been raised in memory of the slain when this article was published in 2013. Has any been erected since? Have the Scots ever received an apology?
I thought countries would move on? Apologising for every massacre or other ills seems like it would take up a lot of valuable time.
I think it's more that the Berwick chap likes to encourage Berwick in every way he can, and is making his point in that sense. He's local and English. Not an apology so much as a reminder of Berwick's identity and history (the locals were very upset when it was subsumed into Northumberland some years back).
And Brexit is making it more difficult and expensive than it was previously.
Which is why we will still be talking about it for the next decade (at least)
My guesstimate is five decades. After all, the heid jobs banged on about it incessantly 1973-present.
I won't see it in my lifetime and I'm mid 50s. Although I'll almost certainly be killed in a motorcycle accident in the next 5-10 years.
The most likely long term trajectory is the 6 counties back in via a united Ireland, Scotland fast tracked in to spite England. England and Wales gradually realign into a Norway type relationship with the EU.
Once Scotland and NI have gone the impetus towards independence will be taken up here in Wales for independence too.
Wales is in a tricky position, independence-wise. Scotland is big enough to go it alone and is just off continental Europe. Northern Ireland can fold into a unified Ireland. Welsh nationalism, though, as Alex Salmond observed, is more of a cultural than an economic movement.
I think that probably shows how dated Salmonds views are. Considering that the Welsh Assembly barely scraped approval in a plebiscite in the nineties, there has been more and more movement to Welsh independence in the polls. Massive issues to resolve before it happens, but no longer the fringe view that it was.
Dr. Foxy, the PM does not understand the concept of responsibility for one's actions. He's a damned fool and we'll all be better off when he's replaced.
Unless by it someone like Corbyn.
So do I take it you'd vote for Starmer's Labour rather than Johnson's Tories?
Mr. kle4, it's a book focused on countries (ish) ending, though.
Consider how long Rome lasted (over two thousand years on the most broad ranging perspective). Or China. Or England (ok, part of the UK now, but still a cohesive area despite the best efforts of cretinous politicians to ignore or fragment it). Or France.
Things that people keep predicting which stubbornly refuse to happen:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Things that people will still be predicting in twenty years' time and still won't have happened:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Well, the collapse of the UK is certainly happening. NI, remember? Not to mention what happened a hundred years ago.
All countries end eventually. The current borders of the U.K. having lasted 100 years is not a bad innings historically.
Thought-provoking and noteworthy post. The previous borders, of course lasted from 1803, when it was thought that the 'Irish Question' had been settled by unification. The only European countries that seem to have managed to be unchanged for a REALLY long time are surely Portugal, ever since it regained it's independence from Spain, and Spain itself, since the loss of Gibraltar.
Two books shaped my current political thinking. “Vanished Kingdoms” by Norman Davies that showed me that countries end, all of them, eventually, and “The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism” by Janet Biehl and Murray Bookchin which has led me to think that the basic political unit should be the municipality, not the nation state. My basic problem with Scottish Independence is that it doesn’t go far enough.
It was someone on here that pointed me towards Vanished Kingdoms, and it was indeed thought-provoking. I'm especially reminded of it when political commentators talk about states and boundaries in the area between the Rhine and the Volga. And I know there's considerable doubt over Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe, but it does point up the significant historical population movements between the Caucasus and the Vistula.
Vanished kingdoms made me wonder how any nation ever formed and lasted as it could be a bloody convoluted process.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
There are three components to England’s mental breakdown, and they are all interrelated:
- crippling fear of rejection (why do the Scots want to go?) - self-hatred (hating foreigners is ultimately an indication of low self-esteem and lack of self-worth) - and seeking external causes to rage against (Scotland, France, Germany, China, infectious foreigners etc ad infinitum)
Brexit was England’s (over-)reaction to the first Scottish independence referendum. It was entirely avoidable, but their fate was sealed when in 2010 Gordon Brown, in a fit of pique, immediately rejected SNP support for a minority Labour government, thus forcing the astonishingly naive Lib Dems into David Cameron’s rose garden/snake pit. The inevitable SNP landslide the following year sealed the process.
English voters very much do give a toss about Scotland and Scottish independence, not because of Scotland per se, but because of Greater England, otherwise referred to as the United Kingdom: the only thing separating England from the realities of being a modern, normal, average medium-sized country and the global power of her imagination. No Scotland = no Security Council seat, no independent nuclear deterrent and no “special relationship”. English voters do care very, very much about Scotland. Without her they are King Lear bereft of his kingdom.
Claiming that Scots have an “inferiority complex” - standard patter on this board - is pure psychological projection. It is the English who are wracked in self-doubt and insecurity. Ditto “paranoid”.
Sentiment? Biscuit tins? Monarch of the Glen? Not the signs of a serious, well thought-out post.
D-
Sweden’s own Sassanach expert chimes in about “English voters” yet again. A man who knows nothing and projects it into this board every day. Port guy. As I said yesterday, get a job, a hobby, anything. This malevolence is eating your soul you poor man.
Latching onto posts by particular posters on an obscure website seems to fill in a bit of time, maybe Stuart could take that up?
The one thing this is not is an obscure website and I was told yesterday that my post re Brentford scoring was quicker than BBC Sport live reporting
However, there is a polarised and rather unpleasant constant recurring theme on Scotland's Independence and Brexit that is going nowhere
I am not sure how old @StuartDickson is but I suspect he is not as old as myself, who encountered the same bitterness in the early 1950's when I lived in Berwick and when I say it is just plain tedious, posters can see how long I have listened to the debate and of course Berwick itself changed hands 13 times
Talking of Berwick, then Scotland’s main port, 15,000 people were murdered in the English massacre of the townsfolk. No monument had been raised in memory of the slain when this article was published in 2013. Has any been erected since? Have the Scots ever received an apology?
I thought countries would move on? Apologising for every massacre or other ills seems like it would take up a lot of valuable time.
I think it's more that the Berwick chap likes to encourage Berwick in every way he can, and is making his point in that sense. He's local and English. Not an apology so much as a reminder of Berwick's identity and history (the locals were very upset when it was subsumed into Northumberland some years back).
Sure, and I'd be all for that, but stuart was talking of apologies, which I think would slow the move on phase.
Lots of what might be termed previously contested areas likely have some fascinatingly dark histories, and I'd love people to be more interested in the local tales and events.
Another element of vanished kingdoms IIRC was how some wider national myths have totally taken over and even the people there dont believe what is provably true.
Mr. Seal, the abuse of language has reached the extent that people use the slogan Defund The Police and then claim it doesn't mean defunding the police. If that's false, they're liars, if it's true then they're literally opposing the precise meaning of the words they've chosen to use.
Plenty of gay and lesbian people have also been pissed off by the BBC redefinition of homosexuality which now is about gender, not sex (ie biology), prioritising subjective perceptions over objective reality.
And let's not forget the daddy of them all - Leveling Up.
Mr. Seal, the abuse of language has reached the extent that people use the slogan Defund The Police and then claim it doesn't mean defunding the police. If that's false, they're liars, if it's true then they're literally opposing the precise meaning of the words they've chosen to use.
Plenty of gay and lesbian people have also been pissed off by the BBC redefinition of homosexuality which now is about gender, not sex (ie biology), prioritising subjective perceptions over objective reality.
And let's not forget the daddy of them all - Leveling Up.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I think that you are over cooking it a bit, but elements of truth in there.
England is a strange place nowadays, and one divided against itself. I cannot see the Union surviving for much longer.
On the currency, Indy Scotland should join the Euro, but stay in the CTA. It works for Ireland. Probably need to have direct ferries to the continent again because of the land border to England. There will be teething problems disentangling from the Union, but in the long term better for Scotland to go its own way.
I have English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish ancestry, so will have some regrets at the end of British identity. I have always been more comfortable as British than English as an identity, but so it goes.
So if you're voting for Scottish independence you're voting to join the Euro?
Interesting.
I won't be voting for it, as I am not registered to vote in Scotland, but yes joining the Euro is the best option for Indy Scotland.
Apart from promising to join being a condition of membership the Euro is a solid reserve currency, and not liable to local debasement. Indeed lack of ability to debate the coinage is one of the criticisms people make of the Euro crisis of a decade ago.
Scotland would need to balance its budget, but individuals and institutions would be assured that their money retains value
Sensible opinion unlike the previous lies that you are forced to join the Euro, it is and always has been subject to meeting a set of rules. As we know some choose never to meet the requirements, but rabid unionists cannot see the woods for the trees.
Mr. kle4, it's a book focused on countries (ish) ending, though.
Consider how long Rome lasted (over two thousand years on the most broad ranging perspective). Or China. Or England (ok, part of the UK now, but still a cohesive area despite the best efforts of cretinous politicians to ignore or fragment it). Or France.
Quite so - but how they got to that strength of position given how hard it is to get going was my point. The development of Prussia from tiny area to german behemoth to, well, today, was a gripping tale in Iron Kingdom.
I see PB has reverted to the well-worn themes of Brexit, Scottish independence and Starmer's prospects.
Do I take it from this that nobody's seen any empty shelves in supermarkets recently?
I can report that Waitrose in Harborough has 2 sorts of flaked parmesan, organic and regular. There were a few gaps on shelves, but idiosyncratic so no Waitrose basmati but branded stuff was there.
Organic and regular. We can all sleep easily in our beds.
Mr. Seal, the abuse of language has reached the extent that people use the slogan Defund The Police and then claim it doesn't mean defunding the police. If that's false, they're liars, if it's true then they're literally opposing the precise meaning of the words they've chosen to use.
Plenty of gay and lesbian people have also been pissed off by the BBC redefinition of homosexuality which now is about gender, not sex (ie biology), prioritising subjective perceptions over objective reality.
And let's not forget the daddy of them all - Leveling Up.
Que?
It's not in itself meaningless. A freind has been putting a lot of work into levelling up a concrete subfloor in his house - mixing and pouring large amounts of allegedly self-levelling screed. The result is leveller and on average slightly higher than before ...
-kid with PIMS-TS in multiorgan failure -a teenage death -kids in their 20s in ICU -deaths of healthy unvaccinated 30 & 40 yr olds -clinically vulnerable vaccinated patients who thought they were protected, dying (one had just got married)
seahorse @seahorse4000 · 1h -the worst ever patient journey, from angrily arguing with us in ED that they don't believe in covid, to CPAP, to ICU, to ventilation, to death, those wretched family phone calls -tears and panic attacks and anger (staff). Hugs too -PPE in a heatwave is shit
Or as I tweeted yesterday in response to the #NewNormal astroturfing:
Our nurses have been drafted again for redeployment to ICU to look after the unvaccinnated on ventilators. This is why #NHS #waitinglists are mushrooming. This sadly is the #NewNormal
Friday afternoon a rolling rota of theatre cancellations and redeployment to ICU were announced in my Trust. ICU cannot staff 10 beds because of a mix of vacancies, maternity leave* and long term sickness. We have 21 covid patients on ICU, all unvaccinated. To say Mrs Foxy and colleagues are unhappy about this is cannot be overstated. I expect a number to go off sick for mental health reasons rather than go back.
*pregnant staff go off on Mat Leave as soon as they can. Seeing pregnant women so poorly with covid tends to do that.
Mr. Seal, the abuse of language has reached the extent that people use the slogan Defund The Police and then claim it doesn't mean defunding the police. If that's false, they're liars, if it's true then they're literally opposing the precise meaning of the words they've chosen to use.
Plenty of gay and lesbian people have also been pissed off by the BBC redefinition of homosexuality which now is about gender, not sex (ie biology), prioritising subjective perceptions over objective reality.
And let's not forget the daddy of them all - Leveling Up.
Que?
That's vague and so can be meaningless, so it might be infuriating, but I don't think its counter productive in the same way.
A slogan meaning the opposite of what it seems like is different to one which is not well defined but at least can be assumed to mean 'improve things, er, somehow'.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
There are three components to England’s mental breakdown, and they are all interrelated:
- crippling fear of rejection (why do the Scots want to go?) - self-hatred (hating foreigners is ultimately an indication of low self-esteem and lack of self-worth) - and seeking external causes to rage against (Scotland, France, Germany, China, infectious foreigners etc ad infinitum)
Brexit was England’s (over-)reaction to the first Scottish independence referendum. It was entirely avoidable, but their fate was sealed when in 2010 Gordon Brown, in a fit of pique, immediately rejected SNP support for a minority Labour government, thus forcing the astonishingly naive Lib Dems into David Cameron’s rose garden/snake pit. The inevitable SNP landslide the following year sealed the process.
English voters very much do give a toss about Scotland and Scottish independence, not because of Scotland per se, but because of Greater England, otherwise referred to as the United Kingdom: the only thing separating England from the realities of being a modern, normal, average medium-sized country and the global power of her imagination. No Scotland = no Security Council seat, no independent nuclear deterrent and no “special relationship”. English voters do care very, very much about Scotland. Without her they are King Lear bereft of his kingdom.
Claiming that Scots have an “inferiority complex” - standard patter on this board - is pure psychological projection. It is the English who are wracked in self-doubt and insecurity. Ditto “paranoid”.
Sentiment? Biscuit tins? Monarch of the Glen? Not the signs of a serious, well thought-out post.
D-
Sweden’s own Sassanach expert chimes in about “English voters” yet again. A man who knows nothing and projects it into this board every day. Port guy. As I said yesterday, get a job, a hobby, anything. This malevolence is eating your soul you poor man.
Latching onto posts by particular posters on an obscure website seems to fill in a bit of time, maybe Stuart could take that up?
The one thing this is not is an obscure website and I was told yesterday that my post re Brentford scoring was quicker than BBC Sport live reporting
However, there is a polarised and rather unpleasant constant recurring theme on Scotland's Independence and Brexit that is going nowhere
I am not sure how old @StuartDickson is but I suspect he is not as old as myself, who encountered the same bitterness in the early 1950's when I lived in Berwick and when I say it is just plain tedious, posters can see how long I have listened to the debate and of course Berwick itself changed hands 13 times
Talking of Berwick, then Scotland’s main port, 15,000 people were murdered in the English massacre of the townsfolk. No monument had been raised in memory of the slain when this article was published in 2013. Has any been erected since? Have the Scots ever received an apology?
I thought countries would move on? Apologising for every massacre or other ills seems like it would take up a lot of valuable time.
I think it's more that the Berwick chap likes to encourage Berwick in every way he can, and is making his point in that sense. He's local and English. Not an apology so much as a reminder of Berwick's identity and history (the locals were very upset when it was subsumed into Northumberland some years back).
Sure, and I'd be all for that, but stuart was talking of apologies, which I think would slow the move on phase.
Lots of what might be termed previously contested areas likely have some fascinatingly dark histories, and I'd love people to be more interested in the local tales and events.
Another element of vanished kingdoms IIRC was how some wider national myths have totally taken over and even the people there dont believe what is provably true.
Part of my family is from the Borders and there are plenty of traditions and tales - very much remembered in the common ridings and in folk music. Which makes your point nicely.
In this case I think the chap was hoping to get more interest in Berwick history - for obvious reasons of access to upstanding remains most of the English Heritage stuff focusses on the Tudor and later period down to the C18 barracks (IIRC the first purpose built ones in the UK). It's hard to do much with the mediaeval era thanks to the Victorian railway engineers running what would become the ECML right through the Great Hall of the castle, and the goods yard (now car park) in the outer bailey, and the engine shed turntable in the millpond. Hence his article, I expect.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
There are three components to England’s mental breakdown, and they are all interrelated:
- crippling fear of rejection (why do the Scots want to go?) - self-hatred (hating foreigners is ultimately an indication of low self-esteem and lack of self-worth) - and seeking external causes to rage against (Scotland, France, Germany, China, infectious foreigners etc ad infinitum)
Brexit was England’s (over-)reaction to the first Scottish independence referendum. It was entirely avoidable, but their fate was sealed when in 2010 Gordon Brown, in a fit of pique, immediately rejected SNP support for a minority Labour government, thus forcing the astonishingly naive Lib Dems into David Cameron’s rose garden/snake pit. The inevitable SNP landslide the following year sealed the process.
English voters very much do give a toss about Scotland and Scottish independence, not because of Scotland per se, but because of Greater England, otherwise referred to as the United Kingdom: the only thing separating England from the realities of being a modern, normal, average medium-sized country and the global power of her imagination. No Scotland = no Security Council seat, no independent nuclear deterrent and no “special relationship”. English voters do care very, very much about Scotland. Without her they are King Lear bereft of his kingdom.
Claiming that Scots have an “inferiority complex” - standard patter on this board - is pure psychological projection. It is the English who are wracked in self-doubt and insecurity. Ditto “paranoid”.
Sentiment? Biscuit tins? Monarch of the Glen? Not the signs of a serious, well thought-out post.
D-
Sweden’s own Sassanach expert chimes in about “English voters” yet again. A man who knows nothing and projects it into this board every day. Port guy. As I said yesterday, get a job, a hobby, anything. This malevolence is eating your soul you poor man.
Tanktop on , check. Union jack underpants on , check . Right let's tackle this Scottish baddie , even though I never comment on Scotland , ever , promise. That told him off big boy style , he will think twice before daring to impugn rUK again.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
There are three components to England’s mental breakdown, and they are all interrelated:
- crippling fear of rejection (why do the Scots want to go?) - self-hatred (hating foreigners is ultimately an indication of low self-esteem and lack of self-worth) - and seeking external causes to rage against (Scotland, France, Germany, China, infectious foreigners etc ad infinitum)
Brexit was England’s (over-)reaction to the first Scottish independence referendum. It was entirely avoidable, but their fate was sealed when in 2010 Gordon Brown, in a fit of pique, immediately rejected SNP support for a minority Labour government, thus forcing the astonishingly naive Lib Dems into David Cameron’s rose garden/snake pit. The inevitable SNP landslide the following year sealed the process.
English voters very much do give a toss about Scotland and Scottish independence, not because of Scotland per se, but because of Greater England, otherwise referred to as the United Kingdom: the only thing separating England from the realities of being a modern, normal, average medium-sized country and the global power of her imagination. No Scotland = no Security Council seat, no independent nuclear deterrent and no “special relationship”. English voters do care very, very much about Scotland. Without her they are King Lear bereft of his kingdom.
Claiming that Scots have an “inferiority complex” - standard patter on this board - is pure psychological projection. It is the English who are wracked in self-doubt and insecurity. Ditto “paranoid”.
Sentiment? Biscuit tins? Monarch of the Glen? Not the signs of a serious, well thought-out post.
D-
Sweden’s own Sassanach expert chimes in about “English voters” yet again. A man who knows nothing and projects it into this board every day. Port guy. As I said yesterday, get a job, a hobby, anything. This malevolence is eating your soul you poor man.
Tanktop on , check. Union jack underpants on , check . Right let's tackle this Scottish baddie , even though I never comment on Scotland , ever , promise. That told him off big boy style , he will think twice before daring to impugn rUK again.
You poor man. Thinking I am a Unionist FFS shows how far your internalised projection goes. Again, I am here for you if you want to reach out. You are in my prayers.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
Mr. Seal, the abuse of language has reached the extent that people use the slogan Defund The Police and then claim it doesn't mean defunding the police. If that's false, they're liars, if it's true then they're literally opposing the precise meaning of the words they've chosen to use.
Plenty of gay and lesbian people have also been pissed off by the BBC redefinition of homosexuality which now is about gender, not sex (ie biology), prioritising subjective perceptions over objective reality.
And let's not forget the daddy of them all - Leveling Up.
Que?
It's not in itself meaningless. A freind has been putting a lot of work into levelling up a concrete subfloor in his house - mixing and pouring large amounts of allegedly self-levelling screed. The result is leveller and on average slightly higher than before ...
My one experience of laying a concrete floor was that it covered up a multitude of sins and ended in a huge bust up (the one pro there, my brother, was helping as a favour & resented being bossed about). No metaphor intended..
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
There are three components to England’s mental breakdown, and they are all interrelated:
- crippling fear of rejection (why do the Scots want to go?) - self-hatred (hating foreigners is ultimately an indication of low self-esteem and lack of self-worth) - and seeking external causes to rage against (Scotland, France, Germany, China, infectious foreigners etc ad infinitum)
Brexit was England’s (over-)reaction to the first Scottish independence referendum. It was entirely avoidable, but their fate was sealed when in 2010 Gordon Brown, in a fit of pique, immediately rejected SNP support for a minority Labour government, thus forcing the astonishingly naive Lib Dems into David Cameron’s rose garden/snake pit. The inevitable SNP landslide the following year sealed the process.
English voters very much do give a toss about Scotland and Scottish independence, not because of Scotland per se, but because of Greater England, otherwise referred to as the United Kingdom: the only thing separating England from the realities of being a modern, normal, average medium-sized country and the global power of her imagination. No Scotland = no Security Council seat, no independent nuclear deterrent and no “special relationship”. English voters do care very, very much about Scotland. Without her they are King Lear bereft of his kingdom.
Claiming that Scots have an “inferiority complex” - standard patter on this board - is pure psychological projection. It is the English who are wracked in self-doubt and insecurity. Ditto “paranoid”.
Sentiment? Biscuit tins? Monarch of the Glen? Not the signs of a serious, well thought-out post.
D-
Sweden’s own Sassanach expert chimes in about “English voters” yet again. A man who knows nothing and projects it into this board every day. Port guy. As I said yesterday, get a job, a hobby, anything. This malevolence is eating your soul you poor man.
Tanktop on , check. Union jack underpants on , check . Right let's tackle this Scottish baddie , even though I never comment on Scotland , ever , promise. That told him off big boy style , he will think twice before daring to impugn rUK again.
You poor man. Thinking I am a Unionist FFS shows how far your internalised projection goes. Again, I am here for you if you want to reach out. You are in my prayers.
And mine, bless him. He’s so dense light cannot escape from his presence. He had me down as a unionist and a Tory last week when I am neither.
We are all here for you too big Mal. You are in our prayers son.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
I'm slightly mystified why Unionists in Scotland seem to have such a thing about travelling folk, from their nominal leader right down to these bottom feeders. I know they have a rich cornucopia of other bigotries to choose from but gypsies really seem to trigger them.
Not exactly Romani or Shelta celebration day is it there?!
Technically it's not clear to me that that tweeter does live in Scotland. 'She' might live a long way away in a tiny tax haven and be all for doing things differently from the tax haven next door, but when it comes to devolution, never mind independence, oh my ...!
Scottish Tories are even more bigoted and racist than their southern brethern, they have to try harder being just regional appendages.
-kid with PIMS-TS in multiorgan failure -a teenage death -kids in their 20s in ICU -deaths of healthy unvaccinated 30 & 40 yr olds -clinically vulnerable vaccinated patients who thought they were protected, dying (one had just got married)
seahorse @seahorse4000 · 1h -the worst ever patient journey, from angrily arguing with us in ED that they don't believe in covid, to CPAP, to ICU, to ventilation, to death, those wretched family phone calls -tears and panic attacks and anger (staff). Hugs too -PPE in a heatwave is shit
Or as I tweeted yesterday in response to the #NewNormal astroturfing:
Our nurses have been drafted again for redeployment to ICU to look after the unvaccinnated on ventilators. This is why #NHS #waitinglists are mushrooming. This sadly is the #NewNormal
Friday afternoon a rolling rota of theatre cancellations and redeployment to ICU were announced in my Trust. ICU cannot staff 10 beds because of a mix of vacancies, maternity leave* and long term sickness. We have 21 covid patients on ICU, all unvaccinated. To say Mrs Foxy and colleagues are unhappy about this is cannot be overstated. I expect a number to go off sick for mental health reasons rather than go back.
*pregnant staff go off on Mat Leave as soon as they can. Seeing pregnant women so poorly with covid tends to do that.
Money talks. The Government is prepared to let the anti-vaxxers (who can be reasonably estimated to be 10% of the adult population based on the first dose stats; the numbers who can't have a jab for medical reasons are insignificant as a percentage of the entire population) get away with this because it's a burden upon the hospitals, but not enough of a burden to necessitate health-induced economic restrictions.
If refusers were a big enough problem to cause more lockdowns then the pressure to force them into submission would quickly become overwhelming.
I'm slightly mystified why Unionists in Scotland seem to have such a thing about travelling folk, from their nominal leader right down to these bottom feeders. I know they have a rich cornucopia of other bigotries to choose from but gypsies really seem to trigger them.
Not exactly Romani or Shelta celebration day is it there?!
Technically it's not clear to me that that tweeter does live in Scotland. 'She' might live a long way away in a tiny tax haven and be all for doing things differently from the tax haven next door, but when it comes to devolution, never mind independence, oh my ...!
Scottish Tories are even more bigoted and racist than their southern brethern, they have to try harder being just regional appendages.
I wonder why those lickspittles will never vote for independence
Mr. Seal, the abuse of language has reached the extent that people use the slogan Defund The Police and then claim it doesn't mean defunding the police. If that's false, they're liars, if it's true then they're literally opposing the precise meaning of the words they've chosen to use.
Plenty of gay and lesbian people have also been pissed off by the BBC redefinition of homosexuality which now is about gender, not sex (ie biology), prioritising subjective perceptions over objective reality.
And let's not forget the daddy of them all - Leveling Up.
Que?
It's not in itself meaningless. A freind has been putting a lot of work into levelling up a concrete subfloor in his house - mixing and pouring large amounts of allegedly self-levelling screed. The result is leveller and on average slightly higher than before ...
Yes, but he could only do that by using more concrete.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
There are three components to England’s mental breakdown, and they are all interrelated:
- crippling fear of rejection (why do the Scots want to go?) - self-hatred (hating foreigners is ultimately an indication of low self-esteem and lack of self-worth) - and seeking external causes to rage against (Scotland, France, Germany, China, infectious foreigners etc ad infinitum)
Brexit was England’s (over-)reaction to the first Scottish independence referendum. It was entirely avoidable, but their fate was sealed when in 2010 Gordon Brown, in a fit of pique, immediately rejected SNP support for a minority Labour government, thus forcing the astonishingly naive Lib Dems into David Cameron’s rose garden/snake pit. The inevitable SNP landslide the following year sealed the process.
English voters very much do give a toss about Scotland and Scottish independence, not because of Scotland per se, but because of Greater England, otherwise referred to as the United Kingdom: the only thing separating England from the realities of being a modern, normal, average medium-sized country and the global power of her imagination. No Scotland = no Security Council seat, no independent nuclear deterrent and no “special relationship”. English voters do care very, very much about Scotland. Without her they are King Lear bereft of his kingdom.
Claiming that Scots have an “inferiority complex” - standard patter on this board - is pure psychological projection. It is the English who are wracked in self-doubt and insecurity. Ditto “paranoid”.
Sentiment? Biscuit tins? Monarch of the Glen? Not the signs of a serious, well thought-out post.
D-
Sweden’s own Sassanach expert chimes in about “English voters” yet again. A man who knows nothing and projects it into this board every day. Port guy. As I said yesterday, get a job, a hobby, anything. This malevolence is eating your soul you poor man.
Latching onto posts by particular posters on an obscure website seems to fill in a bit of time, maybe Stuart could take that up?
This guy is a Scottish stalker, I cannot shake the halfwit off, obsessive union jack man.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
There are three components to England’s mental breakdown, and they are all interrelated:
- crippling fear of rejection (why do the Scots want to go?) - self-hatred (hating foreigners is ultimately an indication of low self-esteem and lack of self-worth) - and seeking external causes to rage against (Scotland, France, Germany, China, infectious foreigners etc ad infinitum)
Brexit was England’s (over-)reaction to the first Scottish independence referendum. It was entirely avoidable, but their fate was sealed when in 2010 Gordon Brown, in a fit of pique, immediately rejected SNP support for a minority Labour government, thus forcing the astonishingly naive Lib Dems into David Cameron’s rose garden/snake pit. The inevitable SNP landslide the following year sealed the process.
English voters very much do give a toss about Scotland and Scottish independence, not because of Scotland per se, but because of Greater England, otherwise referred to as the United Kingdom: the only thing separating England from the realities of being a modern, normal, average medium-sized country and the global power of her imagination. No Scotland = no Security Council seat, no independent nuclear deterrent and no “special relationship”. English voters do care very, very much about Scotland. Without her they are King Lear bereft of his kingdom.
Claiming that Scots have an “inferiority complex” - standard patter on this board - is pure psychological projection. It is the English who are wracked in self-doubt and insecurity. Ditto “paranoid”.
Sentiment? Biscuit tins? Monarch of the Glen? Not the signs of a serious, well thought-out post.
D-
Sweden’s own Sassanach expert chimes in about “English voters” yet again. A man who knows nothing and projects it into this board every day. Port guy. As I said yesterday, get a job, a hobby, anything. This malevolence is eating your soul you poor man.
Latching onto posts by particular posters on an obscure website seems to fill in a bit of time, maybe Stuart could take that up?
This guy is a Scottish stalker, I cannot shake the halfwit off, obsessive union jack man.
Because I love you. I hate to see the hatred consume a man. I want you to join me in prayer that we can cure what ails you.
Mr. Seal, the abuse of language has reached the extent that people use the slogan Defund The Police and then claim it doesn't mean defunding the police. If that's false, they're liars, if it's true then they're literally opposing the precise meaning of the words they've chosen to use.
Plenty of gay and lesbian people have also been pissed off by the BBC redefinition of homosexuality which now is about gender, not sex (ie biology), prioritising subjective perceptions over objective reality.
And let's not forget the daddy of them all - Leveling Up.
Que?
That's vague and so can be meaningless, so it might be infuriating, but I don't think its counter productive in the same way.
A slogan meaning the opposite of what it seems like is different to one which is not well defined but at least can be assumed to mean 'improve things, er, somehow'.
Ok. But what slogan are you referring to that means the opposite of what it seems to?
On topic I am sure that @Quincel is right. Labour stuck by Corbyn, even when the vast majority of his MPs could see that he was a disaster and gave a vote of no confidence in him. SKS has clear and strong support amongst those MPs, even if he does not engender anything like the same level of fanaticism in the membership.
The MPs support him because he is decent, intelligent, reasonably principled and not obviously subject to the same delusional mindset that Corbyn was. I personally think that he would be much better suited to being a PM than he is LOTO. I think opposing for the sake of it is not something that he is comfortable with; he is really uncomfortable with the sort of cheap shots and gimmicks that LOTOs have to indulge in to get attention, he is in many ways the epitome of the reasonable man.
I would have been utterly horrified if someone with Corbyn's mindset had ever become our PM. I would be disappointed if SKS did but not overly alarmed or concerned. The incompetence of government would probably continue at a normal rate but would not increase exponentially. The competence and quality of his Shadow Cabinet is a bit of a concern but there are some complete muppets in the current cabinet such as Williamson and the damage is localised if significant.
All of which is a typically long winded lawyers way of agreeing that @Casino_Royale has hit the nail on the head. He is not a politician, he's actually a better person than that.
Yes, but it also illustrates the problem. Making people feel that you are merely disappointing rather than horrific gets you precisely zero votes - DavidL is not comsidering voting Labour although he sees no great difference in the front benches and if anything seems to prefer Starmer to Johnson. Thus replacing Corbyn with Starmer loses the interest of left-wingers (although perhaps not their votes) without gaining votes from people like DavidL.
Being respected is a good starting point, but you need some positive appeal too. If you don't mind being a sample, David, what would make you actually vote Labour?
Mr. Seal, the abuse of language has reached the extent that people use the slogan Defund The Police and then claim it doesn't mean defunding the police. If that's false, they're liars, if it's true then they're literally opposing the precise meaning of the words they've chosen to use.
Plenty of gay and lesbian people have also been pissed off by the BBC redefinition of homosexuality which now is about gender, not sex (ie biology), prioritising subjective perceptions over objective reality.
And let's not forget the daddy of them all - Leveling Up.
Que?
That's vague and so can be meaningless, so it might be infuriating, but I don't think its counter productive in the same way.
A slogan meaning the opposite of what it seems like is different to one which is not well defined but at least can be assumed to mean 'improve things, er, somehow'.
Ok. But what slogan are you referring to that means the opposite of what it seems to?
@mrstrangefact Genghis Khan and his empire cooled the earth. After killing 40 million people, vast areas of farmland were reclaimed by forests, removing 700 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
Things that people keep predicting which stubbornly refuse to happen:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Things that people will still be predicting in twenty years' time and still won't have happened:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Well, the collapse of the UK is certainly happening. NI, remember? Not to mention what happened a hundred years ago.
All countries end eventually. The current borders of the U.K. having lasted 100 years is not a bad innings historically.
Thought-provoking and noteworthy post. The previous borders, of course lasted from 1803, when it was thought that the 'Irish Question' had been settled by unification. The only European countries that seem to have managed to be unchanged for a REALLY long time are surely Portugal, ever since it regained it's independence from Spain, and Spain itself, since the loss of Gibraltar.
Two books shaped my current political thinking. “Vanished Kingdoms” by Norman Davies that showed me that countries end, all of them, eventually, and “The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism” by Janet Biehl and Murray Bookchin which has led me to think that the basic political unit should be the municipality, not the nation state. My basic problem with Scottish Independence is that it doesn’t go far enough.
The Scottish concept of nation goes back 1000 years and has been fixed more or less on current borders for most of that time. There are few nations in Europe with that consistency of nationhood. England is one of the rare other ones.
It is a mistake to see the Scottish debate about independence in terms of nationalism. 80% of Scots are nationalists, including many Unionists. The debate is about where Scotland's interest and destiny lie: as part of a United Kingdom or as an independent state.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
There are three components to England’s mental breakdown, and they are all interrelated:
- crippling fear of rejection (why do the Scots want to go?) - self-hatred (hating foreigners is ultimately an indication of low self-esteem and lack of self-worth) - and seeking external causes to rage against (Scotland, France, Germany, China, infectious foreigners etc ad infinitum)
Brexit was England’s (over-)reaction to the first Scottish independence referendum. It was entirely avoidable, but their fate was sealed when in 2010 Gordon Brown, in a fit of pique, immediately rejected SNP support for a minority Labour government, thus forcing the astonishingly naive Lib Dems into David Cameron’s rose garden/snake pit. The inevitable SNP landslide the following year sealed the process.
English voters very much do give a toss about Scotland and Scottish independence, not because of Scotland per se, but because of Greater England, otherwise referred to as the United Kingdom: the only thing separating England from the realities of being a modern, normal, average medium-sized country and the global power of her imagination. No Scotland = no Security Council seat, no independent nuclear deterrent and no “special relationship”. English voters do care very, very much about Scotland. Without her they are King Lear bereft of his kingdom.
Claiming that Scots have an “inferiority complex” - standard patter on this board - is pure psychological projection. It is the English who are wracked in self-doubt and insecurity. Ditto “paranoid”.
Sentiment? Biscuit tins? Monarch of the Glen? Not the signs of a serious, well thought-out post.
D-
Sweden’s own Sassanach expert chimes in about “English voters” yet again. A man who knows nothing and projects it into this board every day. Port guy. As I said yesterday, get a job, a hobby, anything. This malevolence is eating your soul you poor man.
Tanktop on , check. Union jack underpants on , check . Right let's tackle this Scottish baddie , even though I never comment on Scotland , ever , promise. That told him off big boy style , he will think twice before daring to impugn rUK again.
You poor man. Thinking I am a Unionist FFS shows how far your internalised projection goes. Again, I am here for you if you want to reach out. You are in my prayers.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
There are three components to England’s mental breakdown, and they are all interrelated:
- crippling fear of rejection (why do the Scots want to go?) - self-hatred (hating foreigners is ultimately an indication of low self-esteem and lack of self-worth) - and seeking external causes to rage against (Scotland, France, Germany, China, infectious foreigners etc ad infinitum)
Brexit was England’s (over-)reaction to the first Scottish independence referendum. It was entirely avoidable, but their fate was sealed when in 2010 Gordon Brown, in a fit of pique, immediately rejected SNP support for a minority Labour government, thus forcing the astonishingly naive Lib Dems into David Cameron’s rose garden/snake pit. The inevitable SNP landslide the following year sealed the process.
English voters very much do give a toss about Scotland and Scottish independence, not because of Scotland per se, but because of Greater England, otherwise referred to as the United Kingdom: the only thing separating England from the realities of being a modern, normal, average medium-sized country and the global power of her imagination. No Scotland = no Security Council seat, no independent nuclear deterrent and no “special relationship”. English voters do care very, very much about Scotland. Without her they are King Lear bereft of his kingdom.
Claiming that Scots have an “inferiority complex” - standard patter on this board - is pure psychological projection. It is the English who are wracked in self-doubt and insecurity. Ditto “paranoid”.
Sentiment? Biscuit tins? Monarch of the Glen? Not the signs of a serious, well thought-out post.
D-
Sweden’s own Sassanach expert chimes in about “English voters” yet again. A man who knows nothing and projects it into this board every day. Port guy. As I said yesterday, get a job, a hobby, anything. This malevolence is eating your soul you poor man.
Latching onto posts by particular posters on an obscure website seems to fill in a bit of time, maybe Stuart could take that up?
This guy is a Scottish stalker, I cannot shake the halfwit off, obsessive union jack man.
Because I love you. I hate to see the hatred consume a man. I want you to join me in prayer that we can cure what ails you.
A religious zealot into the bargain, have you any redeeming features.
Mr. Seal, the abuse of language has reached the extent that people use the slogan Defund The Police and then claim it doesn't mean defunding the police. If that's false, they're liars, if it's true then they're literally opposing the precise meaning of the words they've chosen to use.
Plenty of gay and lesbian people have also been pissed off by the BBC redefinition of homosexuality which now is about gender, not sex (ie biology), prioritising subjective perceptions over objective reality.
And let's not forget the daddy of them all - Leveling Up.
Que?
It's not in itself meaningless. A freind has been putting a lot of work into levelling up a concrete subfloor in his house - mixing and pouring large amounts of allegedly self-levelling screed. The result is leveller and on average slightly higher than before ...
Yes, but he could only do that by using more concrete.
On topic I am sure that @Quincel is right. Labour stuck by Corbyn, even when the vast majority of his MPs could see that he was a disaster and gave a vote of no confidence in him. SKS has clear and strong support amongst those MPs, even if he does not engender anything like the same level of fanaticism in the membership.
The MPs support him because he is decent, intelligent, reasonably principled and not obviously subject to the same delusional mindset that Corbyn was. I personally think that he would be much better suited to being a PM than he is LOTO. I think opposing for the sake of it is not something that he is comfortable with; he is really uncomfortable with the sort of cheap shots and gimmicks that LOTOs have to indulge in to get attention, he is in many ways the epitome of the reasonable man.
I would have been utterly horrified if someone with Corbyn's mindset had ever become our PM. I would be disappointed if SKS did but not overly alarmed or concerned. The incompetence of government would probably continue at a normal rate but would not increase exponentially. The competence and quality of his Shadow Cabinet is a bit of a concern but there are some complete muppets in the current cabinet such as Williamson and the damage is localised if significant.
All of which is a typically long winded lawyers way of agreeing that @Casino_Royale has hit the nail on the head. He is not a politician, he's actually a better person than that.
Yes, but it also illustrates the problem. Making people feel that you are merely disappointing rather than horrific gets you precisely zero votes - DavidL is not comsidering voting Labour although he sees no great difference in the front benches and if anything seems to prefer Starmer to Johnson. Thus replacing Corbyn with Starmer loses the interest of left-wingers (although perhaps not their votes) without gaining votes from people like DavidL.
Being respected is a good starting point, but you need some positive appeal too. If you don't mind being a sample, David, what would make you actually vote Labour?
I cannot see myself voting LAB in 2024 if still led by this useless nonentity
I'm slightly mystified why Unionists in Scotland seem to have such a thing about travelling folk, from their nominal leader right down to these bottom feeders. I know they have a rich cornucopia of other bigotries to choose from but gypsies really seem to trigger them.
Not exactly Romani or Shelta celebration day is it there?!
Technically it's not clear to me that that tweeter does live in Scotland. 'She' might live a long way away in a tiny tax haven and be all for doing things differently from the tax haven next door, but when it comes to devolution, never mind independence, oh my ...!
Scottish Tories are even more bigoted and racist than their southern brethern, they have to try harder being just regional appendages.
I wonder why those lickspittles will never vote for independence
Stockholm syndrome, many are institutionalised and brainwashed.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
There are three components to England’s mental breakdown, and they are all interrelated:
- crippling fear of rejection (why do the Scots want to go?) - self-hatred (hating foreigners is ultimately an indication of low self-esteem and lack of self-worth) - and seeking external causes to rage against (Scotland, France, Germany, China, infectious foreigners etc ad infinitum)
Brexit was England’s (over-)reaction to the first Scottish independence referendum. It was entirely avoidable, but their fate was sealed when in 2010 Gordon Brown, in a fit of pique, immediately rejected SNP support for a minority Labour government, thus forcing the astonishingly naive Lib Dems into David Cameron’s rose garden/snake pit. The inevitable SNP landslide the following year sealed the process.
English voters very much do give a toss about Scotland and Scottish independence, not because of Scotland per se, but because of Greater England, otherwise referred to as the United Kingdom: the only thing separating England from the realities of being a modern, normal, average medium-sized country and the global power of her imagination. No Scotland = no Security Council seat, no independent nuclear deterrent and no “special relationship”. English voters do care very, very much about Scotland. Without her they are King Lear bereft of his kingdom.
Claiming that Scots have an “inferiority complex” - standard patter on this board - is pure psychological projection. It is the English who are wracked in self-doubt and insecurity. Ditto “paranoid”.
Sentiment? Biscuit tins? Monarch of the Glen? Not the signs of a serious, well thought-out post.
D-
Sweden’s own Sassanach expert chimes in about “English voters” yet again. A man who knows nothing and projects it into this board every day. Port guy. As I said yesterday, get a job, a hobby, anything. This malevolence is eating your soul you poor man.
Latching onto posts by particular posters on an obscure website seems to fill in a bit of time, maybe Stuart could take that up?
This guy is a Scottish stalker, I cannot shake the halfwit off, obsessive union jack man.
Because I love you. I hate to see the hatred consume a man. I want you to join me in prayer that we can cure what ails you.
A religious zealot into the bargain, have you any redeeming features.
To be fair, Mr Seal is not threatening to invade. Which is a big improvement on some PBers.
Things that people keep predicting which stubbornly refuse to happen:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Things that people will still be predicting in twenty years' time and still won't have happened:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Well, the collapse of the UK is certainly happening. NI, remember? Not to mention what happened a hundred years ago.
All countries end eventually. The current borders of the U.K. having lasted 100 years is not a bad innings historically.
Thought-provoking and noteworthy post. The previous borders, of course lasted from 1803, when it was thought that the 'Irish Question' had been settled by unification. The only European countries that seem to have managed to be unchanged for a REALLY long time are surely Portugal, ever since it regained it's independence from Spain, and Spain itself, since the loss of Gibraltar.
Two books shaped my current political thinking. “Vanished Kingdoms” by Norman Davies that showed me that countries end, all of them, eventually, and “The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism” by Janet Biehl and Murray Bookchin which has led me to think that the basic political unit should be the municipality, not the nation state. My basic problem with Scottish Independence is that it doesn’t go far enough.
The Scottish concept of nation goes back 1000 years and has been fixed more or less on current borders for most of that time. There are few nations in Europe with that consistency of nationhood. England is one of the rare other ones.
It is a mistake to see the Scottish debate about independence in terms of nationalism. 80% of Scots are nationalists. The debate is about where Scotland's interest and destiny lie: as part of a United Kingdom or as an independent state.
There are indeed few nations in Europe with that consistency of nationhood. The same could be said of the Eastern Roman Empire/Byzantium between roughly 143BCE and 1453CE. Scotland will likely become independent but what happens then is up for grabs, it could last until the heat death of the universe, or it could be shorter lived. But it will end - everything does. England too.
Things that people keep predicting which stubbornly refuse to happen:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Things that people will still be predicting in twenty years' time and still won't have happened:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Well, the collapse of the UK is certainly happening. NI, remember? Not to mention what happened a hundred years ago.
All countries end eventually. The current borders of the U.K. having lasted 100 years is not a bad innings historically.
Thought-provoking and noteworthy post. The previous borders, of course lasted from 1803, when it was thought that the 'Irish Question' had been settled by unification. The only European countries that seem to have managed to be unchanged for a REALLY long time are surely Portugal, ever since it regained it's independence from Spain, and Spain itself, since the loss of Gibraltar.
Two books shaped my current political thinking. “Vanished Kingdoms” by Norman Davies that showed me that countries end, all of them, eventually, and “The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism” by Janet Biehl and Murray Bookchin which has led me to think that the basic political unit should be the municipality, not the nation state. My basic problem with Scottish Independence is that it doesn’t go far enough.
The Scottish concept of nation goes back 1000 years and has been fixed more or less on current borders for most of that time. There are few nations in Europe with that consistency of nationhood. England is one of the rare other ones.
It is a mistake to see the Scottish debate about independence in terms of nationalism. 80% of Scots are nationalists, including many Unionists. The debate is about where Scotland's interest and destiny lie: as part of a United Kingdom or as an independent state.
Does the Scots concept really go back that far? The Northern Isles, for a start were Scandinavian until medieval times, and I would have thought the linguistic differences would have counted against it. However, I'm willing to be told, and of course the Lord of the Isles was a Scottish nobleman quite early.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
There are three components to England’s mental breakdown, and they are all interrelated:
- crippling fear of rejection (why do the Scots want to go?) - self-hatred (hating foreigners is ultimately an indication of low self-esteem and lack of self-worth) - and seeking external causes to rage against (Scotland, France, Germany, China, infectious foreigners etc ad infinitum)
Brexit was England’s (over-)reaction to the first Scottish independence referendum. It was entirely avoidable, but their fate was sealed when in 2010 Gordon Brown, in a fit of pique, immediately rejected SNP support for a minority Labour government, thus forcing the astonishingly naive Lib Dems into David Cameron’s rose garden/snake pit. The inevitable SNP landslide the following year sealed the process.
English voters very much do give a toss about Scotland and Scottish independence, not because of Scotland per se, but because of Greater England, otherwise referred to as the United Kingdom: the only thing separating England from the realities of being a modern, normal, average medium-sized country and the global power of her imagination. No Scotland = no Security Council seat, no independent nuclear deterrent and no “special relationship”. English voters do care very, very much about Scotland. Without her they are King Lear bereft of his kingdom.
Claiming that Scots have an “inferiority complex” - standard patter on this board - is pure psychological projection. It is the English who are wracked in self-doubt and insecurity. Ditto “paranoid”.
Sentiment? Biscuit tins? Monarch of the Glen? Not the signs of a serious, well thought-out post.
D-
Sweden’s own Sassanach expert chimes in about “English voters” yet again. A man who knows nothing and projects it into this board every day. Port guy. As I said yesterday, get a job, a hobby, anything. This malevolence is eating your soul you poor man.
Latching onto posts by particular posters on an obscure website seems to fill in a bit of time, maybe Stuart could take that up?
This guy is a Scottish stalker, I cannot shake the halfwit off, obsessive union jack man.
Because I love you. I hate to see the hatred consume a man. I want you to join me in prayer that we can cure what ails you.
A religious zealot into the bargain, have you any redeeming features.
To be fair, Mr Seal is not threatening to invade. Which is a big improvement on some PBers.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
There are three components to England’s mental breakdown, and they are all interrelated:
- crippling fear of rejection (why do the Scots want to go?) - self-hatred (hating foreigners is ultimately an indication of low self-esteem and lack of self-worth) - and seeking external causes to rage against (Scotland, France, Germany, China, infectious foreigners etc ad infinitum)
Brexit was England’s (over-)reaction to the first Scottish independence referendum. It was entirely avoidable, but their fate was sealed when in 2010 Gordon Brown, in a fit of pique, immediately rejected SNP support for a minority Labour government, thus forcing the astonishingly naive Lib Dems into David Cameron’s rose garden/snake pit. The inevitable SNP landslide the following year sealed the process.
English voters very much do give a toss about Scotland and Scottish independence, not because of Scotland per se, but because of Greater England, otherwise referred to as the United Kingdom: the only thing separating England from the realities of being a modern, normal, average medium-sized country and the global power of her imagination. No Scotland = no Security Council seat, no independent nuclear deterrent and no “special relationship”. English voters do care very, very much about Scotland. Without her they are King Lear bereft of his kingdom.
Claiming that Scots have an “inferiority complex” - standard patter on this board - is pure psychological projection. It is the English who are wracked in self-doubt and insecurity. Ditto “paranoid”.
Sentiment? Biscuit tins? Monarch of the Glen? Not the signs of a serious, well thought-out post.
D-
Sweden’s own Sassanach expert chimes in about “English voters” yet again. A man who knows nothing and projects it into this board every day. Port guy. As I said yesterday, get a job, a hobby, anything. This malevolence is eating your soul you poor man.
Latching onto posts by particular posters on an obscure website seems to fill in a bit of time, maybe Stuart could take that up?
This guy is a Scottish stalker, I cannot shake the halfwit off, obsessive union jack man.
Because I love you. I hate to see the hatred consume a man. I want you to join me in prayer that we can cure what ails you.
A religious zealot into the bargain, have you any redeeming features.
You are right. I am but a lowly sinner, as are we all, with nothing to offer but love Malc, nothing but love.
Mr. Seal, the abuse of language has reached the extent that people use the slogan Defund The Police and then claim it doesn't mean defunding the police. If that's false, they're liars, if it's true then they're literally opposing the precise meaning of the words they've chosen to use.
Plenty of gay and lesbian people have also been pissed off by the BBC redefinition of homosexuality which now is about gender, not sex (ie biology), prioritising subjective perceptions over objective reality.
And let's not forget the daddy of them all - Leveling Up.
Que?
That's vague and so can be meaningless, so it might be infuriating, but I don't think its counter productive in the same way.
A slogan meaning the opposite of what it seems like is different to one which is not well defined but at least can be assumed to mean 'improve things, er, somehow'.
Ok. But what slogan are you referring to that means the opposite of what it seems to?
It was a generic point though Morris Dancer suggested Defund the Police. If not the opposite, it definitely over simplifies (more than a slogan would anyway) the aim in a misleading way, and some have definitely whinged about the confusion rather than addressing it.
-kid with PIMS-TS in multiorgan failure -a teenage death -kids in their 20s in ICU -deaths of healthy unvaccinated 30 & 40 yr olds -clinically vulnerable vaccinated patients who thought they were protected, dying (one had just got married)
seahorse @seahorse4000 · 1h -the worst ever patient journey, from angrily arguing with us in ED that they don't believe in covid, to CPAP, to ICU, to ventilation, to death, those wretched family phone calls -tears and panic attacks and anger (staff). Hugs too -PPE in a heatwave is shit
Or as I tweeted yesterday in response to the #NewNormal astroturfing:
Our nurses have been drafted again for redeployment to ICU to look after the unvaccinnated on ventilators. This is why #NHS #waitinglists are mushrooming. This sadly is the #NewNormal
Friday afternoon a rolling rota of theatre cancellations and redeployment to ICU were announced in my Trust. ICU cannot staff 10 beds because of a mix of vacancies, maternity leave* and long term sickness. We have 21 covid patients on ICU, all unvaccinated. To say Mrs Foxy and colleagues are unhappy about this is cannot be overstated. I expect a number to go off sick for mental health reasons rather than go back.
*pregnant staff go off on Mat Leave as soon as they can. Seeing pregnant women so poorly with covid tends to do that.
Money talks. The Government is prepared to let the anti-vaxxers (who can be reasonably estimated to be 10% of the adult population based on the first dose stats; the numbers who can't have a jab for medical reasons are insignificant as a percentage of the entire population) get away with this because it's a burden upon the hospitals, but not enough of a burden to necessitate health-induced economic restrictions.
If refusers were a big enough problem to cause more lockdowns then the pressure to force them into submission would quickly become overwhelming.
To be honest I don't think society wide measures are viable with Delta. It is too infectious, and people have no stomach for it any longer.
The occupation of ICU by so many antivaxxers is going to be a major drag on NHS recovery plans though. It isn't about money. We cannot staff ICU by other means. I expect further staff departures as a form of attrition.
On topic I am sure that @Quincel is right. Labour stuck by Corbyn, even when the vast majority of his MPs could see that he was a disaster and gave a vote of no confidence in him. SKS has clear and strong support amongst those MPs, even if he does not engender anything like the same level of fanaticism in the membership.
The MPs support him because he is decent, intelligent, reasonably principled and not obviously subject to the same delusional mindset that Corbyn was. I personally think that he would be much better suited to being a PM than he is LOTO. I think opposing for the sake of it is not something that he is comfortable with; he is really uncomfortable with the sort of cheap shots and gimmicks that LOTOs have to indulge in to get attention, he is in many ways the epitome of the reasonable man.
I would have been utterly horrified if someone with Corbyn's mindset had ever become our PM. I would be disappointed if SKS did but not overly alarmed or concerned. The incompetence of government would probably continue at a normal rate but would not increase exponentially. The competence and quality of his Shadow Cabinet is a bit of a concern but there are some complete muppets in the current cabinet such as Williamson and the damage is localised if significant.
All of which is a typically long winded lawyers way of agreeing that @Casino_Royale has hit the nail on the head. He is not a politician, he's actually a better person than that.
Yes, but it also illustrates the problem. Making people feel that you are merely disappointing rather than horrific gets you precisely zero votes - DavidL is not comsidering voting Labour although he sees no great difference in the front benches and if anything seems to prefer Starmer to Johnson. Thus replacing Corbyn with Starmer loses the interest of left-wingers (although perhaps not their votes) without gaining votes from people like DavidL.
Being respected is a good starting point, but you need some positive appeal too. If you don't mind being a sample, David, what would make you actually vote Labour?
I cannot see myself voting LAB in 2024 if still led by this useless nonentity
Because like most of the hard left your enemy is the Labour Party. If you are a Labour party member then voting Labour shouldn't even be a question.
@mrstrangefact Genghis Khan and his empire cooled the earth. After killing 40 million people, vast areas of farmland were reclaimed by forests, removing 700 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
Things that people keep predicting which stubbornly refuse to happen:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Things that people will still be predicting in twenty years' time and still won't have happened:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Well, the collapse of the UK is certainly happening. NI, remember? Not to mention what happened a hundred years ago.
All countries end eventually. The current borders of the U.K. having lasted 100 years is not a bad innings historically.
Thought-provoking and noteworthy post. The previous borders, of course lasted from 1803, when it was thought that the 'Irish Question' had been settled by unification. The only European countries that seem to have managed to be unchanged for a REALLY long time are surely Portugal, ever since it regained it's independence from Spain, and Spain itself, since the loss of Gibraltar.
Two books shaped my current political thinking. “Vanished Kingdoms” by Norman Davies that showed me that countries end, all of them, eventually, and “The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism” by Janet Biehl and Murray Bookchin which has led me to think that the basic political unit should be the municipality, not the nation state. My basic problem with Scottish Independence is that it doesn’t go far enough.
The Scottish concept of nation goes back 1000 years and has been fixed more or less on current borders for most of that time. There are few nations in Europe with that consistency of nationhood. England is one of the rare other ones.
It is a mistake to see the Scottish debate about independence in terms of nationalism. 80% of Scots are nationalists, including many Unionists. The debate is about where Scotland's interest and destiny lie: as part of a United Kingdom or as an independent state.
Does the Scots concept really go back that far? The Northern Isles, for a start were Scandinavian until medieval times, and I would have thought the linguistic differences would have counted against it. However, I'm willing to be told, and of course the Lord of the Isles was a Scottish nobleman quite early.
1231 for the Scots aristocrats to take over the Northern Isles; 1471 for formal annexation.
The English border was however stable once the Debatable Lands were divided ca 1530, but nobody cared much about them, and there was also that football field on the Tweed. That's about it.
(Nobody seems to have answered my questionm about the 1972 change: it was the annexation of Rockall.)
Mainland Scots is quite strongly cognate with Danish anyway though the Norwegian (Norn) survived till quite late in the Northern Isles and of course the Scots spoken there is still full of grammatical and word survivors.
Lord of the Isles was on the western side - though that was also Viking influenced: Sudreyar = Southern Isles = Hebrides, hence Sodor and Man (and ultimately Thomas the T. Engine, somehow).
@mrstrangefact Genghis Khan and his empire cooled the earth. After killing 40 million people, vast areas of farmland were reclaimed by forests, removing 700 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
I'm slightly mystified why Unionists in Scotland seem to have such a thing about travelling folk, from their nominal leader right down to these bottom feeders. I know they have a rich cornucopia of other bigotries to choose from but gypsies really seem to trigger them.
Not exactly Romani or Shelta celebration day is it there?!
Technically it's not clear to me that that tweeter does live in Scotland. 'She' might live a long way away in a tiny tax haven and be all for doing things differently from the tax haven next door, but when it comes to devolution, never mind independence, oh my ...!
Scottish Tories are even more bigoted and racist than their southern brethern, they have to try harder being just regional appendages.
I wonder why those lickspittles will never vote for independence
Stockholm syndrome, many are institutionalised and brainwashed.
Ha ha, not an issue that would trouble you old mucked 😂😂😂😂
Things that people keep predicting which stubbornly refuse to happen:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Things that people will still be predicting in twenty years' time and still won't have happened:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Well, the collapse of the UK is certainly happening. NI, remember? Not to mention what happened a hundred years ago.
All countries end eventually. The current borders of the U.K. having lasted 100 years is not a bad innings historically.
Thought-provoking and noteworthy post. The previous borders, of course lasted from 1803, when it was thought that the 'Irish Question' had been settled by unification. The only European countries that seem to have managed to be unchanged for a REALLY long time are surely Portugal, ever since it regained it's independence from Spain, and Spain itself, since the loss of Gibraltar.
Two books shaped my current political thinking. “Vanished Kingdoms” by Norman Davies that showed me that countries end, all of them, eventually, and “The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism” by Janet Biehl and Murray Bookchin which has led me to think that the basic political unit should be the municipality, not the nation state. My basic problem with Scottish Independence is that it doesn’t go far enough.
The Scottish concept of nation goes back 1000 years and has been fixed more or less on current borders for most of that time. There are few nations in Europe with that consistency of nationhood. England is one of the rare other ones.
It is a mistake to see the Scottish debate about independence in terms of nationalism. 80% of Scots are nationalists, including many Unionists. The debate is about where Scotland's interest and destiny lie: as part of a United Kingdom or as an independent state.
Does the Scots concept really go back that far? The Northern Isles, for a start were Scandinavian until medieval times, and I would have thought the linguistic differences would have counted against it. However, I'm willing to be told, and of course the Lord of the Isles was a Scottish nobleman quite early.
1231 for the Scots aristocrats to take over the Northern Isles; 1471 for formal annexation.
The English border was however stable once the Debatable Lands were divided ca 1530, but nobody cared much about them, and there was also that football field on the Tweed. That's about it.
(Nobody seems to have answered my questionm about the 1972 change: it was the annexation of Rockall.)
Mainland Scots is quite strongly cognate with Danish anyway though the Norwegian (Norn) survived till quite late in the Northern Isles and of course the Scots spoken there is still full of grammatical and word survivors.
Lord of the Isles was on the western side - though that was also Viking influenced: Sudreyar = Southern Isles = Hebrides, hence Sodor and Man (and ultimately Thomas the T. Engine, somehow).
Not long ago did a WEA Zoom course on Icelandic Sagas and Ketill Flatnose was a significant character.
On topic I am sure that @Quincel is right. Labour stuck by Corbyn, even when the vast majority of his MPs could see that he was a disaster and gave a vote of no confidence in him. SKS has clear and strong support amongst those MPs, even if he does not engender anything like the same level of fanaticism in the membership.
The MPs support him because he is decent, intelligent, reasonably principled and not obviously subject to the same delusional mindset that Corbyn was. I personally think that he would be much better suited to being a PM than he is LOTO. I think opposing for the sake of it is not something that he is comfortable with; he is really uncomfortable with the sort of cheap shots and gimmicks that LOTOs have to indulge in to get attention, he is in many ways the epitome of the reasonable man.
I would have been utterly horrified if someone with Corbyn's mindset had ever become our PM. I would be disappointed if SKS did but not overly alarmed or concerned. The incompetence of government would probably continue at a normal rate but would not increase exponentially. The competence and quality of his Shadow Cabinet is a bit of a concern but there are some complete muppets in the current cabinet such as Williamson and the damage is localised if significant.
All of which is a typically long winded lawyers way of agreeing that @Casino_Royale has hit the nail on the head. He is not a politician, he's actually a better person than that.
Yes, but it also illustrates the problem. Making people feel that you are merely disappointing rather than horrific gets you precisely zero votes - DavidL is not comsidering voting Labour although he sees no great difference in the front benches and if anything seems to prefer Starmer to Johnson. Thus replacing Corbyn with Starmer loses the interest of left-wingers (although perhaps not their votes) without gaining votes from people like DavidL.
Being respected is a good starting point, but you need some positive appeal too. If you don't mind being a sample, David, what would make you actually vote Labour?
Moving house to Morningside? But that is a detail qualification: the wider principle stands, so I look forward to hearing the man himself.
Things that people keep predicting which stubbornly refuse to happen:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Things that people will still be predicting in twenty years' time and still won't have happened:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Well, the collapse of the UK is certainly happening. NI, remember? Not to mention what happened a hundred years ago.
All countries end eventually. The current borders of the U.K. having lasted 100 years is not a bad innings historically.
Thought-provoking and noteworthy post. The previous borders, of course lasted from 1803, when it was thought that the 'Irish Question' had been settled by unification. The only European countries that seem to have managed to be unchanged for a REALLY long time are surely Portugal, ever since it regained it's independence from Spain, and Spain itself, since the loss of Gibraltar.
Two books shaped my current political thinking. “Vanished Kingdoms” by Norman Davies that showed me that countries end, all of them, eventually, and “The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism” by Janet Biehl and Murray Bookchin which has led me to think that the basic political unit should be the municipality, not the nation state. My basic problem with Scottish Independence is that it doesn’t go far enough.
The Scottish concept of nation goes back 1000 years and has been fixed more or less on current borders for most of that time. There are few nations in Europe with that consistency of nationhood. England is one of the rare other ones.
It is a mistake to see the Scottish debate about independence in terms of nationalism. 80% of Scots are nationalists, including many Unionists. The debate is about where Scotland's interest and destiny lie: as part of a United Kingdom or as an independent state.
Does the Scots concept really go back that far? The Northern Isles, for a start were Scandinavian until medieval times, and I would have thought the linguistic differences would have counted against it. However, I'm willing to be told, and of course the Lord of the Isles was a Scottish nobleman quite early.
1231 for the Scots aristocrats to take over the Northern Isles; 1471 for formal annexation.
The English border was however stable once the Debatable Lands were divided ca 1530, but nobody cared much about them, and there was also that football field on the Tweed. That's about it.
(Nobody seems to have answered my questionm about the 1972 change: it was the annexation of Rockall.)
Mainland Scots is quite strongly cognate with Danish anyway though the Norwegian (Norn) survived till quite late in the Northern Isles and of course the Scots spoken there is still full of grammatical and word survivors.
Lord of the Isles was on the western side - though that was also Viking influenced: Sudreyar = Southern Isles = Hebrides, hence Sodor and Man (and ultimately Thomas the T. Engine, somehow).
Not long ago did a WEA Zoom course on Icelandic Sagas and Ketill Flatnose was a significant character.
I have a very soft spot for the Orkneymens' Saga myself.
On topic I am sure that @Quincel is right. Labour stuck by Corbyn, even when the vast majority of his MPs could see that he was a disaster and gave a vote of no confidence in him. SKS has clear and strong support amongst those MPs, even if he does not engender anything like the same level of fanaticism in the membership.
The MPs support him because he is decent, intelligent, reasonably principled and not obviously subject to the same delusional mindset that Corbyn was. I personally think that he would be much better suited to being a PM than he is LOTO. I think opposing for the sake of it is not something that he is comfortable with; he is really uncomfortable with the sort of cheap shots and gimmicks that LOTOs have to indulge in to get attention, he is in many ways the epitome of the reasonable man.
I would have been utterly horrified if someone with Corbyn's mindset had ever become our PM. I would be disappointed if SKS did but not overly alarmed or concerned. The incompetence of government would probably continue at a normal rate but would not increase exponentially. The competence and quality of his Shadow Cabinet is a bit of a concern but there are some complete muppets in the current cabinet such as Williamson and the damage is localised if significant.
All of which is a typically long winded lawyers way of agreeing that @Casino_Royale has hit the nail on the head. He is not a politician, he's actually a better person than that.
Yes, but it also illustrates the problem. Making people feel that you are merely disappointing rather than horrific gets you precisely zero votes - DavidL is not comsidering voting Labour although he sees no great difference in the front benches and if anything seems to prefer Starmer to Johnson. Thus replacing Corbyn with Starmer loses the interest of left-wingers (although perhaps not their votes) without gaining votes from people like DavidL.
Being respected is a good starting point, but you need some positive appeal too. If you don't mind being a sample, David, what would make you actually vote Labour?
Speaking for myself, I have no problem with the concept of voting for Labour (or the Lib Dems, or Conservatives...) Leaving aside the quality of local candidates, what matters is the party, and that thrives or rots from its head. That is as true for Labour as it is the Conservatives.
IMO Starmer appears a little grey - but then so was Major. He also has the disadvantage of being a lawyer - a section of the populace less regarded than tax exiles. (runs for cover).
His big issue is that I have little idea what he stands for, aside from not being Corbyn. It must be very hard time to be opposition leader during an event like Covid, but it's also a good opportunity to build a policy platform and start selling it to the nation. I'm really not seeing that.
I'm far from convinced that he has the ability to promote such a platform (which Corbyn did), and I'm unconvinced there are enough A-list stars in the shadow cabinet to do it, either. Rayner, perhaps.
So I'd love to see more of the big picture from Starmer. His vision. For him to forget everything the government's doing wrong, and to see his vision for the country in ten and twenty years time.
Things that people keep predicting which stubbornly refuse to happen:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Things that people will still be predicting in twenty years' time and still won't have happened:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Well, the collapse of the UK is certainly happening. NI, remember? Not to mention what happened a hundred years ago.
All countries end eventually. The current borders of the U.K. having lasted 100 years is not a bad innings historically.
Thought-provoking and noteworthy post. The previous borders, of course lasted from 1803, when it was thought that the 'Irish Question' had been settled by unification. The only European countries that seem to have managed to be unchanged for a REALLY long time are surely Portugal, ever since it regained it's independence from Spain, and Spain itself, since the loss of Gibraltar.
Two books shaped my current political thinking. “Vanished Kingdoms” by Norman Davies that showed me that countries end, all of them, eventually, and “The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism” by Janet Biehl and Murray Bookchin which has led me to think that the basic political unit should be the municipality, not the nation state. My basic problem with Scottish Independence is that it doesn’t go far enough.
The Scottish concept of nation goes back 1000 years and has been fixed more or less on current borders for most of that time. There are few nations in Europe with that consistency of nationhood. England is one of the rare other ones.
It is a mistake to see the Scottish debate about independence in terms of nationalism. 80% of Scots are nationalists, including many Unionists. The debate is about where Scotland's interest and destiny lie: as part of a United Kingdom or as an independent state.
Does the Scots concept really go back that far? The Northern Isles, for a start were Scandinavian until medieval times, and I would have thought the linguistic differences would have counted against it. However, I'm willing to be told, and of course the Lord of the Isles was a Scottish nobleman quite early.
1231 for the Scots aristocrats to take over the Northern Isles; 1471 for formal annexation.
The English border was however stable once the Debatable Lands were divided ca 1530, but nobody cared much about them, and there was also that football field on the Tweed. That's about it.
(Nobody seems to have answered my questionm about the 1972 change: it was the annexation of Rockall.)
Mainland Scots is quite strongly cognate with Danish anyway though the Norwegian (Norn) survived till quite late in the Northern Isles and of course the Scots spoken there is still full of grammatical and word survivors.
Lord of the Isles was on the western side - though that was also Viking influenced: Sudreyar = Southern Isles = Hebrides, hence Sodor and Man (and ultimately Thomas the T. Engine, somehow).
Concepts of nationality and nationalism across Europe are very different now to what they were. A lot of people had only a very dim idea of what country they were in at the turn of the 2nd millennium. The only visible connection with central government in vast areas were heads on coins and most saw precious few of those. It took the printing press and the expansion of literacy to allow today’s recognisable concepts of national identity to take place. Now the biggest revolution in communication since the printing press, the Internet, is tearing them back down again.
Things that people keep predicting which stubbornly refuse to happen:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Things that people will still be predicting in twenty years' time and still won't have happened:
The collapse of the Euro The collapse of the UK The collapse of house prices
Well, the collapse of the UK is certainly happening. NI, remember? Not to mention what happened a hundred years ago.
All countries end eventually. The current borders of the U.K. having lasted 100 years is not a bad innings historically.
Thought-provoking and noteworthy post. The previous borders, of course lasted from 1803, when it was thought that the 'Irish Question' had been settled by unification. The only European countries that seem to have managed to be unchanged for a REALLY long time are surely Portugal, ever since it regained it's independence from Spain, and Spain itself, since the loss of Gibraltar.
Two books shaped my current political thinking. “Vanished Kingdoms” by Norman Davies that showed me that countries end, all of them, eventually, and “The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism” by Janet Biehl and Murray Bookchin which has led me to think that the basic political unit should be the municipality, not the nation state. My basic problem with Scottish Independence is that it doesn’t go far enough.
The Scottish concept of nation goes back 1000 years and has been fixed more or less on current borders for most of that time. There are few nations in Europe with that consistency of nationhood. England is one of the rare other ones.
It is a mistake to see the Scottish debate about independence in terms of nationalism. 80% of Scots are nationalists, including many Unionists. The debate is about where Scotland's interest and destiny lie: as part of a United Kingdom or as an independent state.
Does the Scots concept really go back that far? The Northern Isles, for a start were Scandinavian until medieval times, and I would have thought the linguistic differences would have counted against it. However, I'm willing to be told, and of course the Lord of the Isles was a Scottish nobleman quite early.
The Battle of Largs in 1263 pushed the Norwegians out of the West coast - their hold was tenuous for some time before that. Since then Scotland has lost Berwick, its main port in mediaeval times, and gained Orkney and Shetland. Fairly minor adjustments compared with today's borders, except for people living there of course.
Like everywhere else, Scotland was a feudal state in the Middle Ages. The modern idea of nationalism probably dates to the Wars of Independence and specifically the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320. That remarkable document isn't quite what it seems at face value however. It was a piece of Brucian propaganda designed to shore up the position of a usurper on grounds of his competence in serving Scotland's national interest.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
I shouldn't think any of the Scot Nat posters will care but, for the record..
I'm against Scottish independence because I like the UK. It's the country I feel I've always lived in, and it's a special one because we get to be English/Scottish/Welsh/Irish, or a mix, as well or instead if we want. But I'm not particularly attached to that, and would wish an independent Scotland well while supporting constructive engagement between Scot/RUK governments and people.
I can easily imagine that if I were born, raised and living in Scotland, I might be an independence supporter. For much the same reasons that I supported Brexit as a Brit.
I sometimes enjoy the banter on here over the divide, but sometimes it just seems to get unnecessarily nasty. I don't know if there's really anything in that, or if it's just down to my mood on reading it.
Nick, what is your current view on the UK-Australia Trade Deal?
I thought it had gone quiet - no press coverage - then I picked up from Which that there seems to be a firm commitment to exclude hormone treated beef, and a chapter in the agreement on animal welfare, which seems to have received no coverage outside the specialist press.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
On topic I am sure that @Quincel is right. Labour stuck by Corbyn, even when the vast majority of his MPs could see that he was a disaster and gave a vote of no confidence in him. SKS has clear and strong support amongst those MPs, even if he does not engender anything like the same level of fanaticism in the membership.
The MPs support him because he is decent, intelligent, reasonably principled and not obviously subject to the same delusional mindset that Corbyn was. I personally think that he would be much better suited to being a PM than he is LOTO. I think opposing for the sake of it is not something that he is comfortable with; he is really uncomfortable with the sort of cheap shots and gimmicks that LOTOs have to indulge in to get attention, he is in many ways the epitome of the reasonable man.
I would have been utterly horrified if someone with Corbyn's mindset had ever become our PM. I would be disappointed if SKS did but not overly alarmed or concerned. The incompetence of government would probably continue at a normal rate but would not increase exponentially. The competence and quality of his Shadow Cabinet is a bit of a concern but there are some complete muppets in the current cabinet such as Williamson and the damage is localised if significant.
All of which is a typically long winded lawyers way of agreeing that @Casino_Royale has hit the nail on the head. He is not a politician, he's actually a better person than that.
Yes, but it also illustrates the problem. Making people feel that you are merely disappointing rather than horrific gets you precisely zero votes - DavidL is not comsidering voting Labour although he sees no great difference in the front benches and if anything seems to prefer Starmer to Johnson. Thus replacing Corbyn with Starmer loses the interest of left-wingers (although perhaps not their votes) without gaining votes from people like DavidL.
Being respected is a good starting point, but you need some positive appeal too. If you don't mind being a sample, David, what would make you actually vote Labour?
Speaking for myself, I have no problem with the concept of voting for Labour (or the Lib Dems, or Conservatives...) Leaving aside the quality of local candidates, what matters is the party, and that thrives or rots from its head. That is as true for Labour as it is the Conservatives.
IMO Starmer appears a little grey - but then so was Major. He also has the disadvantage of being a lawyer - a section of the populace less regarded than tax exiles. (runs for cover).
His big issue is that I have little idea what he stands for, aside from not being Corbyn. It must be very hard time to be opposition leader during an event like Covid, but it's also a good opportunity to build a policy platform and start selling it to the nation. I'm really not seeing that.
I'm far from convinced that he has the ability to promote such a platform (which Corbyn did), and I'm unconvinced there are enough A-list stars in the shadow cabinet to do it, either. Rayner, perhaps.
So I'd love to see more of the big picture from Starmer. His vision. For him to forget everything the government's doing wrong, and to see his vision for the country in ten and twenty years time.
I’d like to see that from someone, anyone. I am convinced this Government is a complete shower, I don’t need anyone to tell me that, I need to be able to buy into a future vision.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
There’s a Doric Arch pub in Euston I’m guessing it’s not the same thing
No; but they both refer to the Doric element of Ancient Greece. Doric = northern populations, dialect, hence Scotland but most often NE Scotland esp Aberdeen; but also Doric = column with a very simple style of capital, hence Doric Arch that used to be in front of Euston Station
Nick, what is your current view on the UK-Australia Trade Deal?
I thought it had gone quiet - no press coverage - then I picked up from Which that there seems to be a firm commitment to exclude hormone treated beef, and a chapter in the agreement on animal welfare, which seems to have received no coverage outside the specialist press.
On topic: I can’t see any way that Starmer/Labour can win the next general election. However, I can see several ways that Johnson/Tories can lose it. If Labour won most seats, but not an overall majority, I think they would be more likely to try and operate a minority government, than to try to form a coalition with the SNP or any other party, except possibly the Lib Dems and Greens.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
Mr. Seal, the abuse of language has reached the extent that people use the slogan Defund The Police and then claim it doesn't mean defunding the police. If that's false, they're liars, if it's true then they're literally opposing the precise meaning of the words they've chosen to use.
Plenty of gay and lesbian people have also been pissed off by the BBC redefinition of homosexuality which now is about gender, not sex (ie biology), prioritising subjective perceptions over objective reality.
And let's not forget the daddy of them all - Leveling Up.
Que?
That's vague and so can be meaningless, so it might be infuriating, but I don't think its counter productive in the same way.
A slogan meaning the opposite of what it seems like is different to one which is not well defined but at least can be assumed to mean 'improve things, er, somehow'.
Ok. But what slogan are you referring to that means the opposite of what it seems to?
It was a generic point though Morris Dancer suggested Defund the Police. If not the opposite, it definitely over simplifies (more than a slogan would anyway) the aim in a misleading way, and some have definitely whinged about the confusion rather than addressing it.
Ah that one. It makes sense in America - people know what it means there - but it doesn't make the journey over here too well.
And Brexit is making it more difficult and expensive than it was previously.
Which is why we will still be talking about it for the next decade (at least)
My guesstimate is five decades. After all, the heid jobs banged on about it incessantly 1973-present.
I won't see it in my lifetime and I'm mid 50s. Although I'll almost certainly be killed in a motorcycle accident in the next 5-10 years.
The most likely long term trajectory is the 6 counties back in via a united Ireland, Scotland fast tracked in to spite England. England and Wales gradually realign into a Norway type relationship with the EU.
Once Scotland and NI have gone the impetus towards independence will be taken up here in Wales for independence too.
Wales is in a tricky position, independence-wise. Scotland is big enough to go it alone and is just off continental Europe. Northern Ireland can fold into a unified Ireland. Welsh nationalism, though, as Alex Salmond observed, is more of a cultural than an economic movement.
I think that probably shows how dated Salmonds views are. Considering that the Welsh Assembly barely scraped approval in a plebiscite in the nineties, there has been more and more movement to Welsh independence in the polls. Massive issues to resolve before it happens, but no longer the fringe view that it was.
On topic I am sure that @Quincel is right. Labour stuck by Corbyn, even when the vast majority of his MPs could see that he was a disaster and gave a vote of no confidence in him. SKS has clear and strong support amongst those MPs, even if he does not engender anything like the same level of fanaticism in the membership.
The MPs support him because he is decent, intelligent, reasonably principled and not obviously subject to the same delusional mindset that Corbyn was. I personally think that he would be much better suited to being a PM than he is LOTO. I think opposing for the sake of it is not something that he is comfortable with; he is really uncomfortable with the sort of cheap shots and gimmicks that LOTOs have to indulge in to get attention, he is in many ways the epitome of the reasonable man.
I would have been utterly horrified if someone with Corbyn's mindset had ever become our PM. I would be disappointed if SKS did but not overly alarmed or concerned. The incompetence of government would probably continue at a normal rate but would not increase exponentially. The competence and quality of his Shadow Cabinet is a bit of a concern but there are some complete muppets in the current cabinet such as Williamson and the damage is localised if significant.
All of which is a typically long winded lawyers way of agreeing that @Casino_Royale has hit the nail on the head. He is not a politician, he's actually a better person than that.
Yes, but it also illustrates the problem. Making people feel that you are merely disappointing rather than horrific gets you precisely zero votes - DavidL is not comsidering voting Labour although he sees no great difference in the front benches and if anything seems to prefer Starmer to Johnson. Thus replacing Corbyn with Starmer loses the interest of left-wingers (although perhaps not their votes) without gaining votes from people like DavidL.
Being respected is a good starting point, but you need some positive appeal too. If you don't mind being a sample, David, what would make you actually vote Labour?
I cannot see myself voting LAB in 2024 if still led by this useless nonentity
Because like most of the hard left your enemy is the Labour Party. If you are a Labour party member then voting Labour shouldn't even be a question.
Useless nonentities do not win GEs
Useless nonentities like RLB /SKS do not win GEs
Its not a factional thing its a useless nonentity thing.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
And Brexit is making it more difficult and expensive than it was previously.
Which is why we will still be talking about it for the next decade (at least)
My guesstimate is five decades. After all, the heid jobs banged on about it incessantly 1973-present.
I won't see it in my lifetime and I'm mid 50s. Although I'll almost certainly be killed in a motorcycle accident in the next 5-10 years.
The most likely long term trajectory is the 6 counties back in via a united Ireland, Scotland fast tracked in to spite England. England and Wales gradually realign into a Norway type relationship with the EU.
Nope, Unionist parties still win more votes than Nationalists in NI and Antrim will never accept rule by Dublin.
BTW Tyrone and Fermanagh both had Nationalist AND Catholic majorities at the time of partition.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
True in that North Sea Oil money was used as a magic money tree to hide the Thatcher government's economic policy failures. But less useful today because Nicola Sturgeon does not have a Tardis to go back to 1980 and set up a sovereign wealth fund like Norway's.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
On the other hand, I am sitting on a sun-burned rooftop bar in Athens, eating prawn Saganaki salad, drinking cold Pirik beer, and staring right at the Acropolis, with the deep blue Med beyond. So there's that
Ken Loach & Sixteen Films @KenLoachSixteen · 1h 'Labour HQ finally decided I'm not fit to be a member of their party, as I will not disown those already expelled. Well...' KL
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
There’s a Doric Arch pub in Euston I’m guessing it’s not the same thing
No; but they both refer to the Doric element of Ancient Greece. Doric = northern populations, dialect, hence Scotland but most often NE Scotland esp Aberdeen; but also Doric = column with a very simple style of capital, hence Doric Arch that used to be in front of Euston Station
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
There’s a Doric Arch pub in Euston I’m guessing it’s not the same thing
No; but they both refer to the Doric element of Ancient Greece. Doric = northern populations, dialect, hence Scotland but most often NE Scotland esp Aberdeen; but also Doric = column with a very simple style of capital, hence Doric Arch that used to be in front of Euston Station
Interesting. Never knew that. Used to drink there regularly before catching my train home when I used to work down there. Thanks.
There's also a Doric Tavern right next to Waverley Station in Edinburgh - been there a few times. Not sure if it means Scotland generally or the route to the NE!
On the other hand, I am sitting on a sun-burned rooftop bar in Athens, eating prawn Saganaki salad, drinking cold Pirik beer, and staring right at the Acropolis, with the deep blue Med beyond. So there's that
Did you get to commune with any more ancient philosophers?
My gut feeling is that the Conservatives are going to lose those 40-50 seats you mention.
Labour really ought to have large VI leads in England at this stage in the electoral cycle, but perhaps the combined effect of the three megashocks - IndyRefs 2014-present, Brexit 2016-present and Covid19 pandemic 2019-present - have created an English immune response to Labour?
Labour, perhaps unfairly, are widely blamed for the first (eg Johnson calling devolution a "disaster" and Tony Blair's "biggest mistake"); made utter fools of themselves during the second; and have been mute bystanders to the third.
England has been rejected, felt hurt and sore, turned her back on the world and sulked. The Conservatives put their arms round that nation and comforted and reassured, telling her don’t mind those ungrateful Caledonians, we’ll fix them good and proper; we’ll kick out those dodgy foreigners; and we are the best in the world at fighting foreign pests. All unmitigated nonsense, but England has totally lost the plot in the last decade and the Tories have been their comfort blanket during the mental breakdown.
But the Tory cure has been much more harmful than the three diseases of rebellious Scots, repulsive Poles and rampaging Chinese virus. The time will come, and probably quite soon, when the English are going to realise that the blanket is no longer comforting them but smothering them.
I doubt the average English voter gives a toss about Scotland one way or the other. Maybe that should be the rationale for Scottish independence, rather than what looks like a paranoid inferiority complex. We like the Scots but in a sentimental, biscuit tin, Monarch of the Glen way. Perhaps Nicola could use this as the SNP's new slogan: England doesn't know; England doesn't care.
Yes, I agree with that. Most English people only notice Scotland when it complains particularly loudly, or demands even more subsidies.
Another ignoramus, go get educated dummy, we have been propping you up since the 70's.
I don’t know why you are so angry, Malc, and I don’t need to. What I can tell, though, is that you are clearly suffering and constantly reaching out with your nastiness to get some attention. Well, you certainly have mine. You have my attention and concern and my hand is reached out to you in prayer that whatever makes you so angry ends soon. I don’t have to know your needs to ask whatever higher power you believe in to heal your damaged soul and surround you in the love you so obviously need.
There’s a Doric Arch pub in Euston I’m guessing it’s not the same thing
No; but they both refer to the Doric element of Ancient Greece. Doric = northern populations, dialect, hence Scotland but most often NE Scotland esp Aberdeen; but also Doric = column with a very simple style of capital, hence Doric Arch that used to be in front of Euston Station
On the other hand, I am sitting on a sun-burned rooftop bar in Athens, eating prawn Saganaki salad, drinking cold Pirik beer, and staring right at the Acropolis, with the deep blue Med beyond. So there's that
And yet you’re on PB nevertheless? That’s commitment. Or something.
Comments
Hard to imagine Scotland would be stupid enough to have a currency union either.
@seahorse4000
My summer wave, so far.
-kid with PIMS-TS in multiorgan failure
-a teenage death
-kids in their 20s in ICU
-deaths of healthy unvaccinated 30 & 40 yr olds
-clinically vulnerable vaccinated patients who thought they were protected, dying (one had just got married)
seahorse
@seahorse4000
·
1h
-the worst ever patient journey, from angrily arguing with us in ED that they don't believe in covid, to CPAP, to ICU, to ventilation, to death, those wretched family phone calls
-tears and panic attacks and anger (staff). Hugs too
-PPE in a heatwave is shit
Consider how long Rome lasted (over two thousand years on the most broad ranging perspective). Or China. Or England (ok, part of the UK now, but still a cohesive area despite the best efforts of cretinous politicians to ignore or fragment it). Or France.
Lots of what might be termed previously contested areas likely have some fascinatingly dark histories, and I'd love people to be more interested in the local tales and events.
Another element of vanished kingdoms IIRC was how some wider national myths have totally taken over and even the people there dont believe what is provably true.
Que?
Our nurses have been drafted again for redeployment to ICU to look after the unvaccinnated on ventilators. This is why #NHS #waitinglists are mushrooming. This sadly is the #NewNormal
https://twitter.com/foxinsoxuk/status/1426244801985384455?s=19
Friday afternoon a rolling rota of theatre cancellations and redeployment to ICU were announced in my Trust. ICU cannot staff 10 beds because of a mix of vacancies, maternity leave* and long term sickness. We have 21 covid patients on ICU, all unvaccinated. To say Mrs Foxy and colleagues are unhappy about this is cannot be overstated. I expect a number to go off sick for mental health reasons rather than go back.
*pregnant staff go off on Mat Leave as soon as they can. Seeing pregnant women so poorly with covid tends to do that.
A slogan meaning the opposite of what it seems like is different to one which is not well defined but at least can be assumed to mean 'improve things, er, somehow'.
In this case I think the chap was hoping to get more interest in Berwick history - for obvious reasons of access to upstanding remains most of the English Heritage stuff focusses on the Tudor and later period down to the C18 barracks (IIRC the first purpose built ones in the UK). It's hard to do much with the mediaeval era thanks to the Victorian railway engineers running what would become the ECML right through the Great Hall of the castle, and the goods yard (now car park) in the outer bailey, and the engine shed turntable in the millpond. Hence his article, I expect.
We are all here for you too big Mal. You are in our prayers son.
If refusers were a big enough problem to cause more lockdowns then the pressure to force them into submission would quickly become overwhelming.
Being respected is a good starting point, but you need some positive appeal too. If you don't mind being a sample, David, what would make you actually vote Labour?
Cue 43k new expulsions
CAC CLP representatives election results:
CHANDWANI Seema – 42,844 – ELECTED
HAYES Billy – 39,486 – ELECTED
TATLER Shama – 33,865
WIMBURY Mary – 36,593
Genghis Khan and his empire cooled the earth. After killing 40 million people, vast areas of farmland were reclaimed by forests, removing 700 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
https://twitter.com/mrstrangefact/status/1426482931418255362
It is a mistake to see the Scottish debate about independence in terms of nationalism. 80% of Scots are nationalists, including many Unionists. The debate is about where Scotland's interest and destiny lie: as part of a United Kingdom or as an independent state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_Danish_general_election
The occupation of ICU by so many antivaxxers is going to be a major drag on NHS recovery plans though. It isn't about money. We cannot staff ICU by other means. I expect further staff departures as a form of attrition.
Perhaps a supervolcano could erupt to cool the earth for a year or two as well.
The English border was however stable once the Debatable Lands were divided ca 1530, but nobody cared much about them, and there was also that football field on the Tweed. That's about it.
(Nobody seems to have answered my questionm about the 1972 change: it was the annexation of Rockall.)
Mainland Scots is quite strongly cognate with Danish anyway though the Norwegian (Norn) survived till quite late in the Northern Isles and of course the Scots spoken there is still full of grammatical and word survivors.
Lord of the Isles was on the western side - though that was also Viking influenced: Sudreyar = Southern Isles = Hebrides, hence Sodor and Man (and ultimately Thomas the T. Engine, somehow).
https://twitter.com/sajidjavid/status/1426446910609629186?s=21
IMO Starmer appears a little grey - but then so was Major. He also has the disadvantage of being a lawyer - a section of the populace less regarded than tax exiles. (runs for cover).
His big issue is that I have little idea what he stands for, aside from not being Corbyn. It must be very hard time to be opposition leader during an event like Covid, but it's also a good opportunity to build a policy platform and start selling it to the nation. I'm really not seeing that.
I'm far from convinced that he has the ability to promote such a platform (which Corbyn did), and I'm unconvinced there are enough A-list stars in the shadow cabinet to do it, either. Rayner, perhaps.
So I'd love to see more of the big picture from Starmer. His vision. For him to forget everything the government's doing wrong, and to see his vision for the country in ten and twenty years time.
Like everywhere else, Scotland was a feudal state in the Middle Ages. The modern idea of nationalism probably dates to the Wars of Independence and specifically the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320. That remarkable document isn't quite what it seems at face value however. It was a piece of Brucian propaganda designed to shore up the position of a usurper on grounds of his competence in serving Scotland's national interest.
I'm against Scottish independence because I like the UK. It's the country I feel I've always lived in, and it's a special one because we get to be English/Scottish/Welsh/Irish, or a mix, as well or instead if we want. But I'm not particularly attached to that, and would wish an independent Scotland well while supporting constructive engagement between Scot/RUK governments and people.
I can easily imagine that if I were born, raised and living in Scotland, I might be an independence supporter. For much the same reasons that I supported Brexit as a Brit.
I sometimes enjoy the banter on here over the divide, but sometimes it just seems to get unnecessarily nasty. I don't know if there's really anything in that, or if it's just down to my mood on reading it.
Please play nicely
One for @NickPalmer .
Nick, what is your current view on the UK-Australia Trade Deal?
I thought it had gone quiet - no press coverage - then I picked up from Which that there seems to be a firm commitment to exclude hormone treated beef, and a chapter in the agreement on animal welfare, which seems to have received no coverage outside the specialist press.
Which Link:
https://www.which.co.uk/news/2021/07/five-changes-the-uk-australia-trade-deal-could-make-to-your-food-finances-and-data-rights/
Parliamentary Report:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9204/
Do you have any knowledge as to where we are on this?
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/nov/07/euston-arch-rail-london-demolished-1961
Back off topic, like most of the rest of you: You are all welcome in Scotland, and will still be welcome in an Independent Scotland, as long as you don’t want to tour the North Coast 500 in a motorhome. https://www.thenational.scot/news/19509224.nc500-motorhome-hire-company-urges-customers-avoid-route/. I would also recommend you to avoid Glasgow on September 18, unless you enjoy the company of thousands of aggressive, drunken bigots who will assault you if you try to cross the road. Thankfully, I will be on holiday in Yorkshire on that day. https://news.stv.tv/west-central/thousands-to-march-through-glasgow-as-34-orange-walks-planned?top
https://news.sky.com/story/nicola-sturgeons-sister-gillian-charged-over-alleged-domestic-incident-12381112
Useless nonentities like RLB /SKS do not win GEs
Its not a factional thing its a useless nonentity thing.
KOTN types stand a chance of winning a GE
1918 Election:
Tyrone total vote:
Nat 54.6%
Uni 45.4%
Fermanagh total vote:
Nat 53.6%
Uni 46.4%
1911 Census:
Tyrone 55.4% Catholic
Fermanagh 56.2%
1926 Census:
Tyrone 55.5% Catholic
Fermanagh 56.0%
Ken Loach & Sixteen Films
@KenLoachSixteen
·
1h
'Labour HQ finally decided I'm not fit to be a member of their party, as I will not disown those already expelled. Well...' KL
A Scotsman wears a kilt and Walt Disnae!