Sam Friedman has listed his top ten books on British politics. You will have to read his substack for the list with his comments, reasons, and to see he cheats like mad with supplementary and multi-volume entries but the bare list is:-
Gladstone by Roy Jenkins
The Five Giants by Nick Timmins
A Different Kind of Weather by William Waldegrave
Tales of a New Jerusalem series by David Kynaston
Diaries 1964-1976 by Barbara Castle
The Anatomy of Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin
I’m pretty amazed he gets to use Substack from Federal prison, and indeed that he reads about British politics. Or does he get special privileges ahead of his sentencing? Hopefully some of the Substack subscriptions will go some (small way) to compensating the victims of the FTX disaster.
Sam Friedman has listed his top ten books on British politics. You will have to read his substack for the list with his comments, reasons, and to see he cheats like mad with supplementary and multi-volume entries but the bare list is:-
Gladstone by Roy Jenkins
The Five Giants by Nick Timmins
A Different Kind of Weather by William Waldegrave
Tales of a New Jerusalem series by David Kynaston
Diaries 1964-1976 by Barbara Castle
The Anatomy of Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin
I’m pretty amazed he gets to use Substack from Federal prison, and indeed that he reads about British politics. Or does he get special privileges ahead of his sentencing? Hopefully some of the Substack subscriptions will go some (small way) to compensating the victims of the FTX disaster.
I am convinced that Musk is bipolar or worse. We have the Musk who leads Tesla and SpaceX, and the lunatic who owns X. How can they possibly be the same person?
He has admitted he is autistic - at the Aspie end of things. That is probably sufficient to explain his high intellect combined with intense social awkwardness and - often - weird prickliness. And a peculiar, sometimes maladroit sense of humour
A high-IQ Aspie personality might be seen as ideal for creating and pushing techie companies like SpaceX and Tesla. Less so - to put it mildly - for owning a social media company. Indeed it is hard to think of a worse mix than Social Media plus Asperger's
Musk should set some free speech ground rules for TwiX, then let someone else run the show, and let someone else audit his tweets first. I do believe he has good intentions, he's just incredibly clumsy and prone to tantrums
Its not autism driving his behaviour. Autism is in my family - I understand various autistic traits. Having two completely contrasting personalities is not autism.
He hasn't got two personalities. He has one, and it is Aspie, and it is on show on Twitter, but in a particularly and cruelly exposed way. The medium really does not suit his style, he's obviously shy, for a start
Did we ever see the Elon that ran Tesla or SpaceX? No, apart from a few Rogan interviews
I think the autism is laced with a bit of NPD which is what then comes out in his more objectionable moments.
I am convinced that Musk is bipolar or worse. We have the Musk who leads Tesla and SpaceX, and the lunatic who owns X. How can they possibly be the same person?
He has admitted he is autistic - at the Aspie end of things. That is probably sufficient to explain his high intellect combined with intense social awkwardness and - often - weird prickliness. And a peculiar, sometimes maladroit sense of humour
A high-IQ Aspie personality might be seen as ideal for creating and pushing techie companies like SpaceX and Tesla. Less so - to put it mildly - for owning a social media company. Indeed it is hard to think of a worse mix than Social Media plus Asperger's
Musk should set some free speech ground rules for TwiX, then let someone else run the show, and let someone else audit his tweets first. I do believe he has good intentions, he's just incredibly clumsy and prone to tantrums
Its not autism driving his behaviour. Autism is in my family - I understand various autistic traits. Having two completely contrasting personalities is not autism.
He hasn't got two personalities. He has one, and it is Aspie, and it is on show on Twitter, but in a particularly and cruelly exposed way. The medium really does not suit his style, he's obviously shy, for a start
Did we ever see the Elon that ran Tesla or SpaceX? No, apart from a few Rogan interviews
I think the autism is laced with a bit of NPD which is what then comes out in his more objectionable moments.
He’s likely on the Alzheimer’s end of that spectrum.
Would I be right in suspecting that the SNP is likely to implode even more than the Tories at the next election.
Starmer is indeed a lucky,lucky general, but he does need to sort Labour policy out on this one.
They deserve to. As this thread points out, the GRR Bill rode roughshod over every concern. The SNP stick everything as "you're either for Scotland or you're against it" which is absurdist absolutism.
The fascinating thing for me isn't what this does for gender politics (as the absolutist tide is already retreating), its what it does for nationalism. The SNP can't do what it likes. A short while ago this election was supposed to be an unofficial 2nd referendum. Now it has a tired and confused governing party in retreat unable even to pass laws in their own country.
Just like the Tories with Rwanda, you can't do what you want and impose your ideas on others.
Will you be resigning from the SLDs because they unanimously (along with the Greens the only other party to do so) backed the GRR bill?
Sam Friedman has listed his top ten books on British politics. You will have to read his substack for the list with his comments, reasons, and to see he cheats like mad with supplementary and multi-volume entries but the bare list is:-
Gladstone by Roy Jenkins
The Five Giants by Nick Timmins
A Different Kind of Weather by William Waldegrave
Tales of a New Jerusalem series by David Kynaston
Diaries 1964-1976 by Barbara Castle
The Anatomy of Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin
I’m pretty amazed he gets to use Substack from Federal prison, and indeed that he reads about British politics. Or does he get special privileges ahead of his sentencing? Hopefully some of the Substack subscriptions will go some (small way) to compensating the victims of the FTX disaster.
Also not to be confused with Sam Freedman, a not very well informed policy wonk responsible for many of the current problems causing a crisis in the education system.
I'm assuming this list is from Freedman, but if it was Friedman I apologise.
Lady Haldane determined that Alister Jack (who he?) could overturn the decision of parliament arrived at democratically with cross party support "just because". Haldane knows her law obviously. I'm not sure it's a great constitutional outcome, which is why no-one has triggered a Section 35 before.
The problem with different Parliaments within the same country being able to legislate is fairly obvious and s35 is the answer to it. Ultimately, one Parliament has to have the final say and that is always going to be the Parliament that set up the Scottish Parliament in the first place. The reasons given by the Secretary of State was that the legislation had an effect on UK legislation which the Scottish Parliament is not entitled to do, specifically the Equality Act. Lady Haldane agreed, as she was inevitably going to after her own earlier decision on the effect of a GRC, as argued for by, err, the Scottish government.
The utter incoherence of the Scottish government's position arguing completely contradictory positions in respect of the same legislation simply highlights the dishonesty and evasion that underlies this legislation. Given the substantial effect that a GRC has (Lady Haldane held that it meant the person was a woman "for all purposes", as per the 2004 Act) safeguards are essential. You simply cannot sweep them away.
Such constitutional disputes between different governments in one sovereign state are bound to happen. It's messy but you need to manage it if you think the whole is more than fully independent parts. I don't dispute Lady Haldane's interpretation of the law obviously. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. It's good to have a bit of respect for the democratic institutions you deal with.
I don't really agree with your second paragraph. I think the SG case on Section 35 is coherent even if it fails legally. UKG haven't been particularly coherent either. They certainly haven't acted in good faith, which is the key point I'm making here.
The incoherence was that in the public board case, which requires a percentage of females on a board, the Scottish government successfully argued that a transgender woman was a woman for the purposes of the legislation because that was the effect of the 2004 Act, as applied by the Equality Act. A transgender woman was a woman. In this case, in contrast, they tried to argue that a GRC really didn't change the law and the rights given by the Equality Act at all. It was rightly rejected.
In my opinion, the decision was the right decision, but for the wrong reason. The Scottish Government case was weak and inconsistent, but I have no reason to think that the UK Government were arguing because of their support for women’s rights, but just as a convenient subject to pick a fight with the Scottish Government. Alister Jack seems to be the only Scottish Secretary since the introduction of the Scottish Parliament that would prefer to see it abolished, and the 2019-2024 Conservative government the first UK government that would legislate to abolish it. Maybe abolition of the Scottish and Welsh parliaments will be in their GE manifesto.
Sorry, that is just fantasy. It was a majority Conservative government that passed the Scotland Act 2016, section 1 of which provides:
"The Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government are a permanent part of the United Kingdom’s constitutional arrangements. (2)The purpose of this section is, with due regard to the other provisions of this Act, to signify the commitment of the Parliament and Government of the United Kingdom to the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government. (3)In view of that commitment it is declared that the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government are not to be abolished except on the basis of a decision of the people of Scotland voting in a referendum.”
I have not seen any evidence that either the Tories or the now standing down former SoS for Scotland have departed from that.
Sam Friedman has listed his top ten books on British politics. You will have to read his substack for the list with his comments, reasons, and to see he cheats like mad with supplementary and multi-volume entries but the bare list is:-
Gladstone by Roy Jenkins
The Five Giants by Nick Timmins
A Different Kind of Weather by William Waldegrave
Tales of a New Jerusalem series by David Kynaston
Diaries 1964-1976 by Barbara Castle
The Anatomy of Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin
I’m pretty amazed he gets to use Substack from Federal prison, and indeed that he reads about British politics. Or does he get special privileges ahead of his sentencing? Hopefully some of the Substack subscriptions will go some (small way) to compensating the victims of the FTX disaster.
I am convinced that Musk is bipolar or worse. We have the Musk who leads Tesla and SpaceX, and the lunatic who owns X. How can they possibly be the same person?
He has admitted he is autistic - at the Aspie end of things. That is probably sufficient to explain his high intellect combined with intense social awkwardness and - often - weird prickliness. And a peculiar, sometimes maladroit sense of humour
A high-IQ Aspie personality might be seen as ideal for creating and pushing techie companies like SpaceX and Tesla. Less so - to put it mildly - for owning a social media company. Indeed it is hard to think of a worse mix than Social Media plus Asperger's
Musk should set some free speech ground rules for TwiX, then let someone else run the show, and let someone else audit his tweets first. I do believe he has good intentions, he's just incredibly clumsy and prone to tantrums
Its not autism driving his behaviour. Autism is in my family - I understand various autistic traits. Having two completely contrasting personalities is not autism.
He hasn't got two personalities. He has one, and it is Aspie, and it is on show on Twitter, but in a particularly and cruelly exposed way. The medium really does not suit his style, he's obviously shy, for a start
Did we ever see the Elon that ran Tesla or SpaceX? No, apart from a few Rogan interviews
I think the autism is laced with a bit of NPD which is what then comes out in his more objectionable moments.
He’s likely on the Alzheimer’s end of that spectrum.
That’s very insulting to such a distinguished political scientist. You may not agree with his realist views on international relations but it’s a bit much to compare him with Musk.
Sam Friedman has listed his top ten books on British politics. You will have to read his substack for the list with his comments, reasons, and to see he cheats like mad with supplementary and multi-volume entries but the bare list is:-
Gladstone by Roy Jenkins
The Five Giants by Nick Timmins
A Different Kind of Weather by William Waldegrave
Tales of a New Jerusalem series by David Kynaston
Diaries 1964-1976 by Barbara Castle
The Anatomy of Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin
I’m pretty amazed he gets to use Substack from Federal prison, and indeed that he reads about British politics. Or does he get special privileges ahead of his sentencing? Hopefully some of the Substack subscriptions will go some (small way) to compensating the victims of the FTX disaster.
I am convinced that Musk is bipolar or worse. We have the Musk who leads Tesla and SpaceX, and the lunatic who owns X. How can they possibly be the same person?
He has admitted he is autistic - at the Aspie end of things. That is probably sufficient to explain his high intellect combined with intense social awkwardness and - often - weird prickliness. And a peculiar, sometimes maladroit sense of humour
A high-IQ Aspie personality might be seen as ideal for creating and pushing techie companies like SpaceX and Tesla. Less so - to put it mildly - for owning a social media company. Indeed it is hard to think of a worse mix than Social Media plus Asperger's
Musk should set some free speech ground rules for TwiX, then let someone else run the show, and let someone else audit his tweets first. I do believe he has good intentions, he's just incredibly clumsy and prone to tantrums
Its not autism driving his behaviour. Autism is in my family - I understand various autistic traits. Having two completely contrasting personalities is not autism.
He hasn't got two personalities. He has one, and it is Aspie, and it is on show on Twitter, but in a particularly and cruelly exposed way. The medium really does not suit his style, he's obviously shy, for a start
Did we ever see the Elon that ran Tesla or SpaceX? No, apart from a few Rogan interviews
I think the autism is laced with a bit of NPD which is what then comes out in his more objectionable moments.
Hmm. Maybe
"Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance. "
TBF to Elon is must be easy to have "an unreasonably high sense of your own importance" when you are the richest man in the world, able to change the direction of wars, and maybe able to change the direction of humanity (eg if he succeeds in his desire to put humans on Mars)
There is nothing obscure about it. As you acknowledged it is an essential part of the set up.
Otherwise I agree. The strongest point that the Lord Advocate made was that there was no attempt to engage with this legislation during its passage which, at the least, raises question marks about the motivation for the use of s35.
Right from the moment the Bill was introduced in Holyrood MSPs were repeatedly told plenty of people in Scotland about the issues with the Equality Act and why the Bill was a problem. You can see this in the very first headings of the Bill. They simply refused to listen. The claim now that if only the Westminster government had worked with them is so much self-serving disingenuous rubbish. The SNP refused to listen to anyone other than those who agreed with it.
I am convinced that Musk is bipolar or worse. We have the Musk who leads Tesla and SpaceX, and the lunatic who owns X. How can they possibly be the same person?
He has admitted he is autistic - at the Aspie end of things. That is probably sufficient to explain his high intellect combined with intense social awkwardness and - often - weird prickliness. And a peculiar, sometimes maladroit sense of humour
A high-IQ Aspie personality might be seen as ideal for creating and pushing techie companies like SpaceX and Tesla. Less so - to put it mildly - for owning a social media company. Indeed it is hard to think of a worse mix than Social Media plus Asperger's
Musk should set some free speech ground rules for TwiX, then let someone else run the show, and let someone else audit his tweets first. I do believe he has good intentions, he's just incredibly clumsy and prone to tantrums
Its not autism driving his behaviour. Autism is in my family - I understand various autistic traits. Having two completely contrasting personalities is not autism.
He hasn't got two personalities. He has one, and it is Aspie, and it is on show on Twitter, but in a particularly and cruelly exposed way. The medium really does not suit his style, he's obviously shy, for a start
Did we ever see the Elon that ran Tesla or SpaceX? No, apart from a few Rogan interviews
I think the autism is laced with a bit of NPD which is what then comes out in his more objectionable moments.
Hmm. Maybe
"Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance. "
TBF to Elon is must be easy to have "an unreasonably high sense of your own importance" when you are the richest man in the world, able to change the direction of wars, and maybe able to change the direction of humanity (eg if he succeeds in his desire to put humans on Mars)
Sufferers of NPD have, though, regularly achieved high office or billionaire status throughout history so actual success is no bar to being a narcissist.
Indeed there’s evidence to show they tend to find their way to the top.
https://x.com/luketryl/status/1733526123986706541 — interesting thread on Twitter with, among other things, polling on reasons why people who voted Conservative in 2019 but no longer support the party have left them.
#1 Failure to stop illegal immigration #2 NHS has gotten worse #3 General incompetence
Lady Haldane determined that Alister Jack (who he?) could overturn the decision of parliament arrived at democratically with cross party support "just because". Haldane knows her law obviously. I'm not sure it's a great constitutional outcome, which is why no-one has triggered a Section 35 before.
Its a *terrible* constitutional outcome. Set aside the actual policy for a moment and talk about principles. Tories love talking about principled things like sovereignty, yet when it came to this all they talked about was the bill.
Should Scotland be allowed to set laws in Scotland? Yes!
But - and its the same big but that demolishes the Rwanda crayon drawing. Sovereignty applies to the sovereign body. That sovereign body can't impose its will on other sovereign bodies. Just as the Tories can't dictate to Rwanda what Rwanda does in Rwanda, Holyrood can't dictate laws outside of Scotland. And the GRR - regardless of your views on the policy - has been found to stamp on the toes south of the wall.
As Cyclefree rightly labels it - hubris.
Yet there was hardly a murmur when the legal age for marriage was raised to 18 in England. Are Scots married at 16 still recognised as married in England?
I am convinced that Musk is bipolar or worse. We have the Musk who leads Tesla and SpaceX, and the lunatic who owns X. How can they possibly be the same person?
He has admitted he is autistic - at the Aspie end of things. That is probably sufficient to explain his high intellect combined with intense social awkwardness and - often - weird prickliness. And a peculiar, sometimes maladroit sense of humour
A high-IQ Aspie personality might be seen as ideal for creating and pushing techie companies like SpaceX and Tesla. Less so - to put it mildly - for owning a social media company. Indeed it is hard to think of a worse mix than Social Media plus Asperger's
Musk should set some free speech ground rules for TwiX, then let someone else run the show, and let someone else audit his tweets first. I do believe he has good intentions, he's just incredibly clumsy and prone to tantrums
Its not autism driving his behaviour. Autism is in my family - I understand various autistic traits. Having two completely contrasting personalities is not autism.
He hasn't got two personalities. He has one, and it is Aspie, and it is on show on Twitter, but in a particularly and cruelly exposed way. The medium really does not suit his style, he's obviously shy, for a start
Did we ever see the Elon that ran Tesla or SpaceX? No, apart from a few Rogan interviews
I think the autism is laced with a bit of NPD which is what then comes out in his more objectionable moments.
Hmm. Maybe
"Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance. "
TBF to Elon is must be easy to have "an unreasonably high sense of your own importance" when you are the richest man in the world, able to change the direction of wars, and maybe able to change the direction of humanity (eg if he succeeds in his desire to put humans on Mars)
Sufferers of NPD have, though, regularly achieved high office or billionaire status throughout history so actual success is no bar to being a narcissist.
Indeed there’s evidence to show they tend to find their way to the top.
Well, indeed. Look at Trump. Of course, most people with NPD don’t achieve such success and instead just hang out on message boards telling everyone how clever they are. (As also commented on by last night’s Dr Who.)
I am convinced that Musk is bipolar or worse. We have the Musk who leads Tesla and SpaceX, and the lunatic who owns X. How can they possibly be the same person?
He has admitted he is autistic - at the Aspie end of things. That is probably sufficient to explain his high intellect combined with intense social awkwardness and - often - weird prickliness. And a peculiar, sometimes maladroit sense of humour
A high-IQ Aspie personality might be seen as ideal for creating and pushing techie companies like SpaceX and Tesla. Less so - to put it mildly - for owning a social media company. Indeed it is hard to think of a worse mix than Social Media plus Asperger's
Musk should set some free speech ground rules for TwiX, then let someone else run the show, and let someone else audit his tweets first. I do believe he has good intentions, he's just incredibly clumsy and prone to tantrums
Forget about the “autism”
There are a vast number of examples in history of people who were top of one field and utters clowns or monsters in another.
Read the correspondence between Sidney Hook and Einstein. At one point Einstein refused to condemn the use of torture to extract false confessions - because the false confessions brought prominence to an important issue.
There is nothing obscure about it. As you acknowledged it is an essential part of the set up.
Otherwise I agree. The strongest point that the Lord Advocate made was that there was no attempt to engage with this legislation during its passage which, at the least, raises question marks about the motivation for the use of s35.
Right from the moment the Bill was introduced in Holyrood MSPs were repeatedly told plenty of people in Scotland about the issues with the Equality Act and why the Bill was a problem. You can see this in the very first headings of the Bill. They simply refused to listen. The claim now that if only the Westminster government had worked with them is so much self-serving disingenuous rubbish. The SNP refused to listen to anyone other than those who agreed with it.
Oh I agree that there was vociferous opposition within Scotland, led by many women's groups, and that was completely ignored.
But, to the best of my knowledge, that opposition did not include critiques from either Kemi Badenoch or the Secretary of State until the bill had passed. It would have been possible to build in safeguards into the Equality Act to ensure that there were protections for prisons, women's refuges, possibly even toilets but that would have required action by Westminster and it was not forthcoming or suggested.
I have sympathy for the plight of people who want to live as the opposite sex. They can of course do so without any certificate but their lives are precarious because their position is always open to challenge. I am sympathetic to the idea that it really should be up to them how they want to be viewed. But I also think that women and women's hard won rights need to be protected and that there are exceptions where those rights must prevail.
It really was not beyond the wit of man to find an acceptable solution here. There was no inclination to do so on either side, both of whom were playing politics. Neither come out of it with any credit.
I am convinced that Musk is bipolar or worse. We have the Musk who leads Tesla and SpaceX, and the lunatic who owns X. How can they possibly be the same person?
He has admitted he is autistic - at the Aspie end of things. That is probably sufficient to explain his high intellect combined with intense social awkwardness and - often - weird prickliness. And a peculiar, sometimes maladroit sense of humour
A high-IQ Aspie personality might be seen as ideal for creating and pushing techie companies like SpaceX and Tesla. Less so - to put it mildly - for owning a social media company. Indeed it is hard to think of a worse mix than Social Media plus Asperger's
Musk should set some free speech ground rules for TwiX, then let someone else run the show, and let someone else audit his tweets first. I do believe he has good intentions, he's just incredibly clumsy and prone to tantrums
Its not autism driving his behaviour. Autism is in my family - I understand various autistic traits. Having two completely contrasting personalities is not autism.
He hasn't got two personalities. He has one, and it is Aspie, and it is on show on Twitter, but in a particularly and cruelly exposed way. The medium really does not suit his style, he's obviously shy, for a start
Did we ever see the Elon that ran Tesla or SpaceX? No, apart from a few Rogan interviews
Yes - when the video is about the areas he's interested in. so Sandy Munro's videos where he interviews Elon about Tesla are always interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky1Z2klPalw&t=6s as are the interviews Elon has done at SpaceX (don't have that to hand).
There is nothing obscure about it. As you acknowledged it is an essential part of the set up.
Otherwise I agree. The strongest point that the Lord Advocate made was that there was no attempt to engage with this legislation during its passage which, at the least, raises question marks about the motivation for the use of s35.
Right from the moment the Bill was introduced in Holyrood MSPs were repeatedly told plenty of people in Scotland about the issues with the Equality Act and why the Bill was a problem. You can see this in the very first headings of the Bill. They simply refused to listen. The claim now that if only the Westminster government had worked with them is so much self-serving disingenuous rubbish. The SNP refused to listen to anyone other than those who agreed with it.
I’m in a somewhat different place politically from you on the broader issue but this does seem to be yet another example of what happens when a political party or organisation decides “we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor” and tries to push through a badly thought out policy regardless, with usually disastrous results.
The arrogance or wilful blindness that led to the Rwanda debacle, the post office scandal, Blair’s invasion of Iraq, Truss’s budget etc etc.
I am convinced that Musk is bipolar or worse. We have the Musk who leads Tesla and SpaceX, and the lunatic who owns X. How can they possibly be the same person?
He has admitted he is autistic - at the Aspie end of things. That is probably sufficient to explain his high intellect combined with intense social awkwardness and - often - weird prickliness. And a peculiar, sometimes maladroit sense of humour
A high-IQ Aspie personality might be seen as ideal for creating and pushing techie companies like SpaceX and Tesla. Less so - to put it mildly - for owning a social media company. Indeed it is hard to think of a worse mix than Social Media plus Asperger's
Musk should set some free speech ground rules for TwiX, then let someone else run the show, and let someone else audit his tweets first. I do believe he has good intentions, he's just incredibly clumsy and prone to tantrums
Forget about the “autism”
There are a vast number of examples in history of people who were top of one field and utters clowns or monsters in another.
Read the correspondence between Sidney Hook and Einstein. At one point Einstein refused to condemn the use of torture to extract false confessions - because the false confessions brought prominence to an important issue.
Except, of course, many have claimed that Einstein was clearly autistic
Lady Haldane determined that Alister Jack (who he?) could overturn the decision of parliament arrived at democratically with cross party support "just because". Haldane knows her law obviously. I'm not sure it's a great constitutional outcome, which is why no-one has triggered a Section 35 before.
Its a *terrible* constitutional outcome. Set aside the actual policy for a moment and talk about principles. Tories love talking about principled things like sovereignty, yet when it came to this all they talked about was the bill.
Should Scotland be allowed to set laws in Scotland? Yes!
But - and its the same big but that demolishes the Rwanda crayon drawing. Sovereignty applies to the sovereign body. That sovereign body can't impose its will on other sovereign bodies. Just as the Tories can't dictate to Rwanda what Rwanda does in Rwanda, Holyrood can't dictate laws outside of Scotland. And the GRR - regardless of your views on the policy - has been found to stamp on the toes south of the wall.
As Cyclefree rightly labels it - hubris.
Yet there was hardly a murmur when the legal age for marriage was raised to 18 in England. Are Scots married at 16 still recognised as married in England?
There is nothing obscure about it. As you acknowledged it is an essential part of the set up.
Otherwise I agree. The strongest point that the Lord Advocate made was that there was no attempt to engage with this legislation during its passage which, at the least, raises question marks about the motivation for the use of s35.
Right from the moment the Bill was introduced in Holyrood MSPs were repeatedly told plenty of people in Scotland about the issues with the Equality Act and why the Bill was a problem. You can see this in the very first headings of the Bill. They simply refused to listen. The claim now that if only the Westminster government had worked with them is so much self-serving disingenuous rubbish. The SNP refused to listen to anyone other than those who agreed with it.
I’m in a somewhat different place politically from you on the broader issue but this does seem to be yet another example of what happens when a political party or organisation decides “we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor” and tries to push through a badly thought out policy regardless, with usually disastrous results.
The arrogance or wilful blindness that led to the Rwanda debacle, the post office scandal, Blair’s invasion of Iraq, Truss’s budget etc etc.
The S***ch Experts on a roll.
“we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor”
Sam Friedman has listed his top ten books on British politics. You will have to read his substack for the list with his comments, reasons, and to see he cheats like mad with supplementary and multi-volume entries but the bare list is:-
Gladstone by Roy Jenkins
The Five Giants by Nick Timmins
A Different Kind of Weather by William Waldegrave
Tales of a New Jerusalem series by David Kynaston
Diaries 1964-1976 by Barbara Castle
The Anatomy of Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin
The unutterable tedium of that list says quite a lot, none of it good, about British politics
He has also managed to miss out the one of the vanishingly few entertaining books about British politics. Viz: Alastair Campbell’s Diaries.
Campbell the man is a cad and a bounder, but he writes well and the Dairies are compulsively readable. Unlike any of these worthy tomes
Yes Minister and YPM are both good reads.
In fact, you could make a case that they were better than the TV series, and that's not to say the TV series wasn't very good as well.
I find the TV series vastly overrated. Middlebrow radio 4 chortling, always slightly forced, like the laughter you so often get at Shakespeare comedies on stage
I automatically mistrust anyone who likes Yes PM or who quotes it on here
"Middlebrow"
You demur? You find it lowbrow? Highbrow?!
In-jokes.
Some of the events in the series are thinly-disguised vignettes that happened in real life (for example the one where Humphrey gets caught out by the differences in Scottish law), although the events are from the 50s, 60s or 70s: the show was dated from day one. It's very stagey and did deteriorate into Humphrey-reels-out-long-sentence-Jim-looks-askance, although there were reasons for that. It evolved from incident-of-the-week in the first series to a broad arc in YPM, a fact made explicit in the books.
It's an interesting series when you know the background. Paul Eddington was badly ill in the later years, which is why his latter scenes are him sitting down and short sentences. Since this fitted both actors' style, it worked well, but when you know why it stands out.
As for "middlebrow"? I dunno. The term is usually(?) reserved for nondescript writers churning out books to be bought instead of read (see the modern equivalent, "content"). The background, performances, scripts and references I think make it better than that.
Re Alps weather next weekend - is the risk of temperature inversion next weekend reducing a bit? I've been tracking it.
Which is best Alps weather website to use? I like weathertoski.co.uk
I tend to combine the ski focused sores of which my favourite is snow-forecast.com because of its accumulation maps, with the model output on wetterzentrale which has meteograms showing the atmospheric layers, like this one:
Sam Friedman has listed his top ten books on British politics. You will have to read his substack for the list with his comments, reasons, and to see he cheats like mad with supplementary and multi-volume entries but the bare list is:-
Gladstone by Roy Jenkins
The Five Giants by Nick Timmins
A Different Kind of Weather by William Waldegrave
Tales of a New Jerusalem series by David Kynaston
Diaries 1964-1976 by Barbara Castle
The Anatomy of Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin
The unutterable tedium of that list says quite a lot, none of it good, about British politics
He has also managed to miss out the one of the vanishingly few entertaining books about British politics. Viz: Alastair Campbell’s Diaries.
Campbell the man is a cad and a bounder, but he writes well and the Dairies are compulsively readable. Unlike any of these worthy tomes
Yes Minister and YPM are both good reads.
In fact, you could make a case that they were better than the TV series, and that's not to say the TV series wasn't very good as well.
I find the TV series vastly overrated. Middlebrow radio 4 chortling, always slightly forced, like the laughter you so often get at Shakespeare comedies on stage
I automatically mistrust anyone who likes Yes PM or who quotes it on here
"Middlebrow"
You demur? You find it lowbrow? Highbrow?!
In-jokes.
Some of the events in the series are thinly-disguised vignettes that happened in real life (for example the one where Humphrey gets caught out by the differences in Scottish law), although the events are from the 50s, 60s or 70s: the show was dated from day one. It's very stagey and did deteriorate into Humphrey-reels-out-long-sentence-Jim-looks-askance, although there were reasons for that. It evolved from incident-of-the-week in the first series to a broad arc in YPM, a fact made explicit in the books.
It's an interesting series when you know the background. Paul Eddington was badly ill in the later years, which is why his latter scenes are him sitting down and short sentences. Since this fitted both actors' style, it worked well, but when you know why it stands out.
As for "middlebrow"? I dunno. The term is usually(?) reserved for nondescript writers churning out books to be bought instead of read (see the modern equivalent, "content"). The background, performances, scripts and references I think make it better than that.
Thats not my definition of middlebrow, nor one that I remotely recognise
Here's a different definition off Google:
"The goal of middlebrow culture was to introduce unevenly educated adults to somewhat diluted versions of high culture in accessible, engaging and unthreatening ways."
I'd say that exactly nails the appeal of Yes Minister
There is nothing obscure about it. As you acknowledged it is an essential part of the set up.
Otherwise I agree. The strongest point that the Lord Advocate made was that there was no attempt to engage with this legislation during its passage which, at the least, raises question marks about the motivation for the use of s35.
Right from the moment the Bill was introduced in Holyrood MSPs were repeatedly told plenty of people in Scotland about the issues with the Equality Act and why the Bill was a problem. You can see this in the very first headings of the Bill. They simply refused to listen. The claim now that if only the Westminster government had worked with them is so much self-serving disingenuous rubbish. The SNP refused to listen to anyone other than those who agreed with it.
I’m in a somewhat different place politically from you on the broader issue but this does seem to be yet another example of what happens when a political party or organisation decides “we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor” and tries to push through a badly thought out policy regardless, with usually disastrous results.
The arrogance or wilful blindness that led to the Rwanda debacle, the post office scandal, Blair’s invasion of Iraq, Truss’s budget etc etc.
The S***ch Experts on a roll.
“we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor”
The mentality described is spot on. The critical characteristic is the refusal to accept any changes or moderation in the policy.
Similar behaviour has been seen in just about every polity I am aware of. The results of such idiocy are uniformly predictable.
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
Sam Friedman has listed his top ten books on British politics. You will have to read his substack for the list with his comments, reasons, and to see he cheats like mad with supplementary and multi-volume entries but the bare list is:-
Gladstone by Roy Jenkins
The Five Giants by Nick Timmins
A Different Kind of Weather by William Waldegrave
Tales of a New Jerusalem series by David Kynaston
Diaries 1964-1976 by Barbara Castle
The Anatomy of Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin
I’m pretty amazed he gets to use Substack from Federal prison, and indeed that he reads about British politics. Or does he get special privileges ahead of his sentencing? Hopefully some of the Substack subscriptions will go some (small way) to compensating the victims of the FTX disaster.
Also not to be confused with Sam Freedman, a not very well informed policy wonk responsible for many of the current problems causing a crisis in the education system.
I'm assuming this list is from Freedman, but if it was Friedman I apologise.
There is nothing obscure about it. As you acknowledged it is an essential part of the set up.
Otherwise I agree. The strongest point that the Lord Advocate made was that there was no attempt to engage with this legislation during its passage which, at the least, raises question marks about the motivation for the use of s35.
Right from the moment the Bill was introduced in Holyrood MSPs were repeatedly told plenty of people in Scotland about the issues with the Equality Act and why the Bill was a problem. You can see this in the very first headings of the Bill. They simply refused to listen. The claim now that if only the Westminster government had worked with them is so much self-serving disingenuous rubbish. The SNP refused to listen to anyone other than those who agreed with it.
It is still shameful that some arse in England can dictate what does or does not get done in Scotland , regardless that it was utter crap.
Lady Haldane determined that Alister Jack (who he?) could overturn the decision of parliament arrived at democratically with cross party support "just because". Haldane knows her law obviously. I'm not sure it's a great constitutional outcome, which is why no-one has triggered a Section 35 before.
Its a *terrible* constitutional outcome. Set aside the actual policy for a moment and talk about principles. Tories love talking about principled things like sovereignty, yet when it came to this all they talked about was the bill.
Should Scotland be allowed to set laws in Scotland? Yes!
But - and its the same big but that demolishes the Rwanda crayon drawing. Sovereignty applies to the sovereign body. That sovereign body can't impose its will on other sovereign bodies. Just as the Tories can't dictate to Rwanda what Rwanda does in Rwanda, Holyrood can't dictate laws outside of Scotland. And the GRR - regardless of your views on the policy - has been found to stamp on the toes south of the wall.
As Cyclefree rightly labels it - hubris.
Clearly (to me at least) if the UKG has legitimate concerns about specific effects that a Scottish act might have on particular UK law the sensible thing is for the two governments to work together to resolve the specific issues. That has never been UKG's intention. Their aim is to kill democratically determined legislation through the use of an obscure constitutional override.
This is obviously wrong - UKG would have been negligent in not striking it down - but tbf Alister Jack was extremely shrewd in ignoring the advice which told him to hold off. He picked the right fight and bloodied the Nats well and truly.
There is nothing obscure about it. As you acknowledged it is an essential part of the set up.
Otherwise I agree. The strongest point that the Lord Advocate made was that there was no attempt to engage with this legislation during its passage which, at the least, raises question marks about the motivation for the use of s35.
Right from the moment the Bill was introduced in Holyrood MSPs were repeatedly told plenty of people in Scotland about the issues with the Equality Act and why the Bill was a problem. You can see this in the very first headings of the Bill. They simply refused to listen. The claim now that if only the Westminster government had worked with them is so much self-serving disingenuous rubbish. The SNP refused to listen to anyone other than those who agreed with it.
I’m in a somewhat different place politically from you on the broader issue but this does seem to be yet another example of what happens when a political party or organisation decides “we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor” and tries to push through a badly thought out policy regardless, with usually disastrous results.
The arrogance or wilful blindness that led to the Rwanda debacle, the post office scandal, Blair’s invasion of Iraq, Truss’s budget etc etc.
The S***ch Experts on a roll.
“we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor”
The mentality described is spot on. The critical characteristic is the refusal to accept any changes or moderation in the policy.
Similar behaviour has been seen in just about every polity I am aware of. The results of such idiocy are uniformly predictable.
There is an easy assumption here that the GRR is such a idiotic policy rejecting any moderation, whereas it was an intensely debated policy that was reached through consensus. It is also similar to legislation in other countries that don't seem to have introduced significant problems. Nor, to be honest, have they had a transformative effect on those they intend to protect.
There is nothing obscure about it. As you acknowledged it is an essential part of the set up.
Otherwise I agree. The strongest point that the Lord Advocate made was that there was no attempt to engage with this legislation during its passage which, at the least, raises question marks about the motivation for the use of s35.
Right from the moment the Bill was introduced in Holyrood MSPs were repeatedly told plenty of people in Scotland about the issues with the Equality Act and why the Bill was a problem. You can see this in the very first headings of the Bill. They simply refused to listen. The claim now that if only the Westminster government had worked with them is so much self-serving disingenuous rubbish. The SNP refused to listen to anyone other than those who agreed with it.
I’m in a somewhat different place politically from you on the broader issue but this does seem to be yet another example of what happens when a political party or organisation decides “we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor” and tries to push through a badly thought out policy regardless, with usually disastrous results.
The arrogance or wilful blindness that led to the Rwanda debacle, the post office scandal, Blair’s invasion of Iraq, Truss’s budget etc etc.
The S***ch Experts on a roll.
“we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor”
The mentality described is spot on. The critical characteristic is the refusal to accept any changes or moderation in the policy.
Similar behaviour has been seen in just about every polity I am aware of. The results of such idiocy are uniformly predictable.
I'm more a facts based guy. Where's your evidence of democratic opposition (or in Westminster's case non-democratic) offering changes or moderation in the policy, other than a feeling in your water about a far away country of which you know little?
Cue anecdote about a Scottish person wot you once met.
There is nothing obscure about it. As you acknowledged it is an essential part of the set up.
Otherwise I agree. The strongest point that the Lord Advocate made was that there was no attempt to engage with this legislation during its passage which, at the least, raises question marks about the motivation for the use of s35.
Right from the moment the Bill was introduced in Holyrood MSPs were repeatedly told plenty of people in Scotland about the issues with the Equality Act and why the Bill was a problem. You can see this in the very first headings of the Bill. They simply refused to listen. The claim now that if only the Westminster government had worked with them is so much self-serving disingenuous rubbish. The SNP refused to listen to anyone other than those who agreed with it.
I’m in a somewhat different place politically from you on the broader issue but this does seem to be yet another example of what happens when a political party or organisation decides “we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor” and tries to push through a badly thought out policy regardless, with usually disastrous results.
The arrogance or wilful blindness that led to the Rwanda debacle, the post office scandal, Blair’s invasion of Iraq, Truss’s budget etc etc.
The S***ch Experts on a roll.
“we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor”
The mentality described is spot on. The critical characteristic is the refusal to accept any changes or moderation in the policy.
Similar behaviour has been seen in just about every polity I am aware of. The results of such idiocy are uniformly predictable.
HYUFD-levels of party loyalty against all comers are part of the issue. We saw it with the Corbynites to a ludicrous degree, and I remember some very painful arguments with Labour loyalists before Iraq who were contorting themselves to fall in with Blair on something they’d normally have treated with scepticism.
The difference in polling against Biden is quite remarkable.
If Haley is the candidate, the Democrats have a real problem in what to do about Biden. He has, IMO, been a very good president, but he'd very likely lose to Haley now.
I’ve been a fan for years. Probably one of the few people on here who has actually read her book…
I’m not a fan - but compared to Trump (and every other GOP candidate), she’s the only rational choice.
I understand why she has temporised over Trump - she wouldn’t still be in the contest otherwise - but it’s an indelible stain on her record. Contrast with Cheney - who otherwise might have had as good a chance of being the Republican’s first woman nominee - who knowingly sacrificed her career.
Conservatives (quite fairly) point out that Starmer carried water for Corbyn, as an attack on him. But Corbyn, disastrous though he would have been as PM, was never a blatant threat to democracy.
So while I’d celebrate her winning the nomination, and her election as President wouldn’t be a disaster, she just represents the least worst GOP option.
There is nothing obscure about it. As you acknowledged it is an essential part of the set up.
Otherwise I agree. The strongest point that the Lord Advocate made was that there was no attempt to engage with this legislation during its passage which, at the least, raises question marks about the motivation for the use of s35.
Right from the moment the Bill was introduced in Holyrood MSPs were repeatedly told plenty of people in Scotland about the issues with the Equality Act and why the Bill was a problem. You can see this in the very first headings of the Bill. They simply refused to listen. The claim now that if only the Westminster government had worked with them is so much self-serving disingenuous rubbish. The SNP refused to listen to anyone other than those who agreed with it.
I’m in a somewhat different place politically from you on the broader issue but this does seem to be yet another example of what happens when a political party or organisation decides “we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor” and tries to push through a badly thought out policy regardless, with usually disastrous results.
The arrogance or wilful blindness that led to the Rwanda debacle, the post office scandal, Blair’s invasion of Iraq, Truss’s budget etc etc.
The S***ch Experts on a roll.
“we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor”
The mentality described is spot on. The critical characteristic is the refusal to accept any changes or moderation in the policy.
Similar behaviour has been seen in just about every polity I am aware of. The results of such idiocy are uniformly predictable.
HYUFD-levels of party loyalty against all comers are part of the issue. We saw it with the Corbynites to a ludicrous degree, and I remember some very painful arguments with Labour loyalists before Iraq who were contorting themselves to fall in with Blair on something they’d normally have treated with scepticism.
You obviously have trouble reading, TUD showed you that it had support from all parties, even the English ones, except of course the bigoted Tories.
Sam Friedman has listed his top ten books on British politics. You will have to read his substack for the list with his comments, reasons, and to see he cheats like mad with supplementary and multi-volume entries but the bare list is:-
Gladstone by Roy Jenkins
The Five Giants by Nick Timmins
A Different Kind of Weather by William Waldegrave
Tales of a New Jerusalem series by David Kynaston
Diaries 1964-1976 by Barbara Castle
The Anatomy of Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin
The unutterable tedium of that list says quite a lot, none of it good, about British politics
He has also managed to miss out the one of the vanishingly few entertaining books about British politics. Viz: Alastair Campbell’s Diaries.
Campbell the man is a cad and a bounder, but he writes well and the Dairies are compulsively readable. Unlike any of these worthy tomes
Yes Minister and YPM are both good reads.
In fact, you could make a case that they were better than the TV series, and that's not to say the TV series wasn't very good as well.
I find the TV series vastly overrated. Middlebrow radio 4 chortling, always slightly forced, like the laughter you so often get at Shakespeare comedies on stage
I automatically mistrust anyone who likes Yes PM or who quotes it on here
"Middlebrow"
You demur? You find it lowbrow? Highbrow?!
In-jokes.
Some of the events in the series are thinly-disguised vignettes that happened in real life (for example the one where Humphrey gets caught out by the differences in Scottish law), although the events are from the 50s, 60s or 70s: the show was dated from day one. It's very stagey and did deteriorate into Humphrey-reels-out-long-sentence-Jim-looks-askance, although there were reasons for that. It evolved from incident-of-the-week in the first series to a broad arc in YPM, a fact made explicit in the books.
It's an interesting series when you know the background. Paul Eddington was badly ill in the later years, which is why his latter scenes are him sitting down and short sentences. Since this fitted both actors' style, it worked well, but when you know why it stands out.
As for "middlebrow"? I dunno. The term is usually(?) reserved for nondescript writers churning out books to be bought instead of read (see the modern equivalent, "content"). The background, performances, scripts and references I think make it better than that.
Thats not my definition of middlebrow, nor one that I remotely recognise
Here's a different definition off Google:
"The goal of middlebrow culture was to introduce unevenly educated adults to somewhat diluted versions of high culture in accessible, engaging and unthreatening ways."
I'd say that exactly nails the appeal of Yes Minister
If that's the definition of "middlebrow" (and how can Google possibly be in error) than you are right. But that also moves it from an insult to a compliment.
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
If we generate our own oil and gas then we have the option of preventing its export in extremis. One of the reasons we did not need the same storage facilities as those on the continent is that we had a (diminishing) reserve in the north sea.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are: (a) our balance of payments (b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland. (c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
There is nothing obscure about it. As you acknowledged it is an essential part of the set up.
Otherwise I agree. The strongest point that the Lord Advocate made was that there was no attempt to engage with this legislation during its passage which, at the least, raises question marks about the motivation for the use of s35.
Right from the moment the Bill was introduced in Holyrood MSPs were repeatedly told plenty of people in Scotland about the issues with the Equality Act and why the Bill was a problem. You can see this in the very first headings of the Bill. They simply refused to listen. The claim now that if only the Westminster government had worked with them is so much self-serving disingenuous rubbish. The SNP refused to listen to anyone other than those who agreed with it.
I’m in a somewhat different place politically from you on the broader issue but this does seem to be yet another example of what happens when a political party or organisation decides “we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor” and tries to push through a badly thought out policy regardless, with usually disastrous results.
The arrogance or wilful blindness that led to the Rwanda debacle, the post office scandal, Blair’s invasion of Iraq, Truss’s budget etc etc.
The S***ch Experts on a roll.
“we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor”
The mentality described is spot on. The critical characteristic is the refusal to accept any changes or moderation in the policy.
Similar behaviour has been seen in just about every polity I am aware of. The results of such idiocy are uniformly predictable.
There is an easy assumption here that the GRR is such a idiotic policy rejecting any moderation, whereas it was an intensely debated policy that was reached through consensus. It is also similar to legislation in other countries that don't seem to have introduced significant problems. Nor, to be honest, have they had a transformative effect on those they intend to protect.
Careful, you'll be described as a Nat loyalist (a description you would not accept I imagine).
Tory MPs are convinced they're facing oblivion. And some now believe a "Dream Ticket" of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage represents their final chance > Mail On Sunday >
I am convinced that Musk is bipolar or worse. We have the Musk who leads Tesla and SpaceX, and the lunatic who owns X. How can they possibly be the same person?
He has admitted he is autistic - at the Aspie end of things. That is probably sufficient to explain his high intellect combined with intense social awkwardness and - often - weird prickliness. And a peculiar, sometimes maladroit sense of humour
A high-IQ Aspie personality might be seen as ideal for creating and pushing techie companies like SpaceX and Tesla. Less so - to put it mildly - for owning a social media company. Indeed it is hard to think of a worse mix than Social Media plus Asperger's
Musk should set some free speech ground rules for TwiX, then let someone else run the show, and let someone else audit his tweets first. I do believe he has good intentions, he's just incredibly clumsy and prone to tantrums
Its not autism driving his behaviour. Autism is in my family - I understand various autistic traits. Having two completely contrasting personalities is not autism.
He hasn't got two personalities. He has one, and it is Aspie, and it is on show on Twitter, but in a particularly and cruelly exposed way. The medium really does not suit his style, he's obviously shy, for a start..
It suited him massively when he didn’t own it. It’s one of the principal things which enabled him to market Tesla without paying a cent in advertising. He was hugely popular, followed by millions, and played the medium brilliantly.
What didn’t suit him in the least was owning and running it. Hubris; nemesis.
There is nothing obscure about it. As you acknowledged it is an essential part of the set up.
Otherwise I agree. The strongest point that the Lord Advocate made was that there was no attempt to engage with this legislation during its passage which, at the least, raises question marks about the motivation for the use of s35.
Right from the moment the Bill was introduced in Holyrood MSPs were repeatedly told plenty of people in Scotland about the issues with the Equality Act and why the Bill was a problem. You can see this in the very first headings of the Bill. They simply refused to listen. The claim now that if only the Westminster government had worked with them is so much self-serving disingenuous rubbish. The SNP refused to listen to anyone other than those who agreed with it.
I’m in a somewhat different place politically from you on the broader issue but this does seem to be yet another example of what happens when a political party or organisation decides “we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor” and tries to push through a badly thought out policy regardless, with usually disastrous results.
The arrogance or wilful blindness that led to the Rwanda debacle, the post office scandal, Blair’s invasion of Iraq, Truss’s budget etc etc.
The S***ch Experts on a roll.
“we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor”
The mentality described is spot on. The critical characteristic is the refusal to accept any changes or moderation in the policy.
Similar behaviour has been seen in just about every polity I am aware of. The results of such idiocy are uniformly predictable.
HYUFD-levels of party loyalty against all comers are part of the issue. We saw it with the Corbynites to a ludicrous degree, and I remember some very painful arguments with Labour loyalists before Iraq who were contorting themselves to fall in with Blair on something they’d normally have treated with scepticism.
You obviously have trouble reading, TUD showed you that it had support from all parties, even the English ones, except of course the bigoted Tories.
Read my original post carefully too then. I agree with the basic politics of self-ID, unlike it seems most on here. But parties - and as Cyclefree shows, this includes the SNP - go heads down as soon as they face opposition and start turning a policy debate into a test of ideological purity.
There is nothing obscure about it. As you acknowledged it is an essential part of the set up.
Otherwise I agree. The strongest point that the Lord Advocate made was that there was no attempt to engage with this legislation during its passage which, at the least, raises question marks about the motivation for the use of s35.
Right from the moment the Bill was introduced in Holyrood MSPs were repeatedly told plenty of people in Scotland about the issues with the Equality Act and why the Bill was a problem. You can see this in the very first headings of the Bill. They simply refused to listen. The claim now that if only the Westminster government had worked with them is so much self-serving disingenuous rubbish. The SNP refused to listen to anyone other than those who agreed with it.
I’m in a somewhat different place politically from you on the broader issue but this does seem to be yet another example of what happens when a political party or organisation decides “we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor” and tries to push through a badly thought out policy regardless, with usually disastrous results.
The arrogance or wilful blindness that led to the Rwanda debacle, the post office scandal, Blair’s invasion of Iraq, Truss’s budget etc etc.
The S***ch Experts on a roll.
“we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor”
The mentality described is spot on. The critical characteristic is the refusal to accept any changes or moderation in the policy.
Similar behaviour has been seen in just about every polity I am aware of. The results of such idiocy are uniformly predictable.
I'm more a facts based guy. Where's your evidence of democratic opposition (or in Westminster's case non-democratic) offering changes or moderation in the policy, other than a feeling in your water about a far away country of which you know little?
Cue anecdote about a Scottish person wot you once met.
The law was made in Scotland. Various people in Scottish politics pointed out the issues. They were ignored.
At that point the law hadn’t been passed - would Westminster have standing to interfere in internal law making in Scotland, *before* it potentially interacted with U.K. law?
Sam Friedman has listed his top ten books on British politics. You will have to read his substack for the list with his comments, reasons, and to see he cheats like mad with supplementary and multi-volume entries but the bare list is:-
Gladstone by Roy Jenkins
The Five Giants by Nick Timmins
A Different Kind of Weather by William Waldegrave
Tales of a New Jerusalem series by David Kynaston
Diaries 1964-1976 by Barbara Castle
The Anatomy of Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin
I’m pretty amazed he gets to use Substack from Federal prison, and indeed that he reads about British politics. Or does he get special privileges ahead of his sentencing? Hopefully some of the Substack subscriptions will go some (small way) to compensating the victims of the FTX disaster.
Also not to be confused with Sam Freedman, a not very well informed policy wonk responsible for many of the current problems causing a crisis in the education system.
I'm assuming this list is from Freedman, but if it was Friedman I apologise.
Tory MPs are convinced they're facing oblivion. And some now believe a "Dream Ticket" of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage represents their final chance > Mail On Sunday >
Tory MPs are convinced they're facing oblivion. And some now believe a "Dream Ticket" of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage represents their final chance > Mail On Sunday >
There is nothing obscure about it. As you acknowledged it is an essential part of the set up.
Otherwise I agree. The strongest point that the Lord Advocate made was that there was no attempt to engage with this legislation during its passage which, at the least, raises question marks about the motivation for the use of s35.
Right from the moment the Bill was introduced in Holyrood MSPs were repeatedly told plenty of people in Scotland about the issues with the Equality Act and why the Bill was a problem. You can see this in the very first headings of the Bill. They simply refused to listen. The claim now that if only the Westminster government had worked with them is so much self-serving disingenuous rubbish. The SNP refused to listen to anyone other than those who agreed with it.
I’m in a somewhat different place politically from you on the broader issue but this does seem to be yet another example of what happens when a political party or organisation decides “we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor” and tries to push through a badly thought out policy regardless, with usually disastrous results.
The arrogance or wilful blindness that led to the Rwanda debacle, the post office scandal, Blair’s invasion of Iraq, Truss’s budget etc etc.
The S***ch Experts on a roll.
“we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor”
The mentality described is spot on. The critical characteristic is the refusal to accept any changes or moderation in the policy.
Similar behaviour has been seen in just about every polity I am aware of. The results of such idiocy are uniformly predictable.
There is an easy assumption here that the GRR is such a idiotic policy rejecting any moderation, whereas it was an intensely debated policy that was reached through consensus. It is also similar to legislation in other countries that don't seem to have introduced significant problems. Nor, to be honest, have they had a transformative effect on those they intend to protect.
The problem with the GRR was (mainly) that it ignored its interaction with the existing UK legislation - see the Equalities Act.
This was driven by the polarisation of the issue into absolutism. Compromise was considered bad.
Sam Friedman has listed his top ten books on British politics. You will have to read his substack for the list with his comments, reasons, and to see he cheats like mad with supplementary and multi-volume entries but the bare list is:-
Gladstone by Roy Jenkins
The Five Giants by Nick Timmins
A Different Kind of Weather by William Waldegrave
Tales of a New Jerusalem series by David Kynaston
Diaries 1964-1976 by Barbara Castle
The Anatomy of Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin
I’m pretty amazed he gets to use Substack from Federal prison, and indeed that he reads about British politics. Or does he get special privileges ahead of his sentencing? Hopefully some of the Substack subscriptions will go some (small way) to compensating the victims of the FTX disaster.
Also not to be confused with Sam Freedman, a not very well informed policy wonk responsible for many of the current problems causing a crisis in the education system.
I'm assuming this list is from Freedman, but if it was Friedman I apologise.
Tory MPs are convinced they're facing oblivion. And some now believe a "Dream Ticket" of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage represents their final chance > Mail On Sunday >
For starters, neither is an MP. Farage has shown he is impossible to get elected into Westminster. He has proved to be the very essence of oblivion with the voters.
And if by some weird political miracle Boris and Farage both got elected, it would be minutes before they were literally at each others throats. "Like fire and powder which as they kiss, consume...."
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
If we generate our own oil and gas then we have the option of preventing its export in extremis. One of the reasons we did not need the same storage facilities as those on the continent is that we had a (diminishing) reserve in the north sea.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are: (a) our balance of payments (b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland. (c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
Thanks, makes more sense than Mercer did.
First paragraph is interesting. In your view would much larger storage facilities for imported gas provide a similar energy security function?
I buy the balance of payments and industry/employment arguments though feel (in abstract) that we are better to embrace the future than to try to preserve the past in this instance ie achieving similar BoP benefits from exporting clean tech, if possible, is far preferable than hanging on to obsolete tech.
Agreed on your last paragraph - any reduction in use of carbon-based fuels clearly needs to be driven by a relative lack of demand for them due to price and availability of renewables. (Though I’d argue the system has feedbacks within it so eg providing a clear and consistent investment environment for renewables is crucial).
I do think Monbiot’s point, that he has been banging on about for years, is pretty irrefutable: unless we leave the stuff in the ground we will use it. But that’s clearly a global argument not a national one.
In any case, thanks, I knew I’d get a thoughtful answer from you.
Tory MPs are convinced they're facing oblivion. And some now believe a "Dream Ticket" of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage represents their final chance > Mail On Sunday >
FoDreamr starters, neither is an MP. Farage has shown he is impossible to get elected into Westminster. He has proved to be the very essence of oblivion with the voters.
And if by some weird political miracle Boris and Farage both got elected, it would be minutes before they were literally at each others throats. "Like fire and powder which as they kiss, consume...."
Tory MPs are convinced they're facing oblivion. And some now believe a "Dream Ticket" of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage represents their final chance > Mail On Sunday >
Tory MPs are convinced they're facing oblivion. And some now believe a "Dream Ticket" of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage represents their final chance > Mail On Sunday >
For starters, neither is an MP. Farage has shown he is impossible to get elected into Westminster. He has proved to be the very essence of oblivion with the voters.
And if by some weird political miracle Boris and Farage both got elected, it would be minutes before they were literally at each others throats. "Like fire and powder which as they kiss, consume...."
Then what is your plan F, fuckwit MPs?
The last stage of a slow, inevitable failure (in business or government) is nearly always ever more absurd attempts to change to the outcome.
Sam Friedman has listed his top ten books on British politics. You will have to read his substack for the list with his comments, reasons, and to see he cheats like mad with supplementary and multi-volume entries but the bare list is:-
Gladstone by Roy Jenkins
The Five Giants by Nick Timmins
A Different Kind of Weather by William Waldegrave
Tales of a New Jerusalem series by David Kynaston
Diaries 1964-1976 by Barbara Castle
The Anatomy of Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin
The unutterable tedium of that list says quite a lot, none of it good, about British politics
He has also managed to miss out the one of the vanishingly few entertaining books about British politics. Viz: Alastair Campbell’s Diaries.
Campbell the man is a cad and a bounder, but he writes well and the Dairies are compulsively readable. Unlike any of these worthy tomes
Yes Minister and YPM are both good reads.
In fact, you could make a case that they were better than the TV series, and that's not to say the TV series wasn't very good as well.
I find the TV series vastly overrated. Middlebrow radio 4 chortling, always slightly forced, like the laughter you so often get at Shakespeare comedies on stage
I automatically mistrust anyone who likes Yes PM or who quotes it on here
"Middlebrow"
You demur? You find it lowbrow? Highbrow?!
In-jokes.
Some of the events in the series are thinly-disguised vignettes that happened in real life (for example the one where Humphrey gets caught out by the differences in Scottish law), although the events are from the 50s, 60s or 70s: the show was dated from day one. It's very stagey and did deteriorate into Humphrey-reels-out-long-sentence-Jim-looks-askance, although there were reasons for that. It evolved from incident-of-the-week in the first series to a broad arc in YPM, a fact made explicit in the books.
It's an interesting series when you know the background. Paul Eddington was badly ill in the later years, which is why his latter scenes are him sitting down and short sentences. Since this fitted both actors' style, it worked well, but when you know why it stands out.
As for "middlebrow"? I dunno. The term is usually(?) reserved for nondescript writers churning out books to be bought instead of read (see the modern equivalent, "content"). The background, performances, scripts and references I think make it better than that.
Thats not my definition of middlebrow, nor one that I remotely recognise
Here's a different definition off Google:
"The goal of middlebrow culture was to introduce unevenly educated adults to somewhat diluted versions of high culture in accessible, engaging and unthreatening ways."
I'd say that exactly nails the appeal of Yes Minister
If that's the definition of "middlebrow" (and how can Google possibly be in error) than you are right. But that also moves it from an insult to a compliment.
It should do, but for some people it doesn't.
Yes, we need an Avant Garde doing edgy new stuff. But middlebrow is where most the action is. Even at Cambridge High Table.
Tory MPs are convinced they're facing oblivion. And some now believe a "Dream Ticket" of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage represents their final chance > Mail On Sunday >
I would still like to know what deal Starmer signed with Satan.
The Tories have gone in less than two years from increasing their majority to complete implosion.
The SNP are weirdly obsessed with trans rights, are clearly clueless and hopelessly confused on their main selling point, their two former leaders arrested and their current one so incompetent even his own colleagues criticise him (even discounting current rumours).
Welsh Labour are completely hopeless to the extent Drakeford endorses criminal behaviour by motorcyclists while cutting speed limits more or less randomly for everyone else, but few people care.
Khan is inept but somehow the Tories have selected a candidate who would make Trump look mainstream to challenge him.
And while doing absolutely nothing except crack the odd joke and have a couple of curries, suddenly Starmer's dominating politics.
Whatever deal he signed, Satan must feel swindled. I'd like Starmer drawing up my next contract, that's for sure.
Tory MPs are convinced they're facing oblivion. And some now believe a "Dream Ticket" of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage represents their final chance > Mail On Sunday >
For starters, neither is an MP. Farage has shown he is impossible to get elected into Westminster. He has proved to be the very essence of oblivion with the voters.
And if by some weird political miracle Boris and Farage both got elected, it would be minutes before they were literally at each others throats. "Like fire and powder which as they kiss, consume...."
Then what is your plan F, fuckwit MPs?
I think it’s either unfair, disingenuous or stupid to say Farage has shown he is impossible to get elected into Westminster. He has only ever stood for a minority party and of the seven attempts, only once did he really have a good chance, which was 2015.
It’s like saying Harry Kane has shown he is impossible to win a title with, when the truth is that until now he never really played for a team expected to win titles
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
If we generate our own oil and gas then we have the option of preventing its export in extremis. One of the reasons we did not need the same storage facilities as those on the continent is that we had a (diminishing) reserve in the north sea.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are: (a) our balance of payments (b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland. (c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
Thanks, makes more sense than Mercer did.
First paragraph is interesting. In your view would much larger storage facilities for imported gas provide a similar energy security function?
I buy the balance of payments and industry/employment arguments though feel (in abstract) that we are better to embrace the future than to try to preserve the past in this instance ie achieving similar BoP benefits from exporting clean tech, if possible, is far preferable than hanging on to obsolete tech.
Agreed on your last paragraph - any reduction in use of carbon-based fuels clearly needs to be driven by a relative lack of demand for them due to price and availability of renewables. (Though I’d argue the system has feedbacks within it so eg providing a clear and consistent investment environment for renewables is crucial).
I do think Monboit’s point, that he has been banging on about for years, is pretty irrefutable: unless we leave the stuff in the ground we will use it. But that’s clearly a global argument not a national one.
In any case, thanks, I knew I’d get a thoughtful answer from you.
The offshore wind auction failure and the delay of the 2030 phasing out of ICE is important context though.
I remain optimistic because after Ukraine, people associate fossil fuels with energy insecurity. If we'd managed to get more wind going before 2022 we would have weathered the energy crisis much better. The crisis DavidL describes (where the UK is entirely isolated from the world energy markets) seems very unlikely - pretty much WW3.
Leith echoes to the sound of the piling for the new renewables facilities.
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
If we generate our own oil and gas then we have the option of preventing its export in extremis. One of the reasons we did not need the same storage facilities as those on the continent is that we had a (diminishing) reserve in the north sea.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are: (a) our balance of payments (b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland. (c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
Thanks, makes more sense than Mercer did.
First paragraph is interesting. In your view would much larger storage facilities for imported gas provide a similar energy security function?
I buy the balance of payments and industry/employment arguments though feel (in abstract) that we are better to embrace the future than to try to preserve the past in this instance ie achieving similar BoP benefits from exporting clean tech, if possible, is far preferable than hanging on to obsolete tech.
Agreed on your last paragraph - any reduction in use of carbon-based fuels clearly needs to be driven by a relative lack of demand for them due to price and availability of renewables. (Though I’d argue the system has feedbacks within it so eg providing a clear and consistent investment environment for renewables is crucial).
I do think Monboit’s point, that he has been banging on about for years, is pretty irrefutable: unless we leave the stuff in the ground we will use it. But that’s clearly a global argument not a national one.
In any case, thanks, I knew I’d get a thoughtful answer from you.
There is also the matter that oil will be required for decades to come for non-burning usages.
While the move away from burning oil is rapidly approaching the final goal, there are a lot of chemical applications that are still with us.
So we need a policy that encompasses
1) change over to non-fossil fuel processes for plastics, chemicals, etc 2) deals with the extraction of oil in a way that encourages 1), but also acknowledges it won’t be overnight. 3) ends oil being extracted for burning
3) is something I haven’t seen discussed - yet it is exactly what we need to do.
IIRC there are still some niche uses of whale oil - required for legacy equipment.
Tory MPs are convinced they're facing oblivion. And some now believe a "Dream Ticket" of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage represents their final chance > Mail On Sunday >
For starters, neither is an MP. Farage has shown he is impossible to get elected into Westminster. He has proved to be the very essence of oblivion with the voters.
And if by some weird political miracle Boris and Farage both got elected, it would be minutes before they were literally at each others throats. "Like fire and powder which as they kiss, consume...."
Then what is your plan F, fuckwit MPs?
I think it’s either unfair, disingenuous or stupid to say Farage has shown he is impossible to get elected into Westminster. He has only ever stood for a minority party and of the seven attempts, only once did he really have a good chance, which was 2015.
It’s like saying Harry Kane has shown he is impossible to win a title with, when the truth is that until now he never really played for a team expected to win titles
I would still like to know what deal Starmer signed with Satan.
The Tories have gone in less than two years from increasing their majority to complete implosion.
The SNP are weirdly obsessed with trans rights, are clearly clueless and hopelessly confused on their main selling point, their two former leaders arrested and their current one so incompetent even his own colleagues criticise him (even discounting current rumours).
Welsh Labour are completely hopeless to the extent Drakeford endorses criminal behaviour by motorcyclists while cutting speed limits more or less randomly for everyone else, but few people care.
Khan is inept but somehow the Tories have selected a candidate who would make Trump look mainstream to challenge him.
And while doing absolutely nothing except crack the odd joke and have a couple of curries, suddenly Starmer's dominating politics.
Whatever deal he signed, Satan must feel swindled. I'd like Starmer drawing up my next contract, that's for sure.
You realise that, given the proximity of the election and the polls, that Starmer *will* be drawing up your next contract?
There is nothing obscure about it. As you acknowledged it is an essential part of the set up.
Otherwise I agree. The strongest point that the Lord Advocate made was that there was no attempt to engage with this legislation during its passage which, at the least, raises question marks about the motivation for the use of s35.
Right from the moment the Bill was introduced in Holyrood MSPs were repeatedly told plenty of people in Scotland about the issues with the Equality Act and why the Bill was a problem. You can see this in the very first headings of the Bill. They simply refused to listen. The claim now that if only the Westminster government had worked with them is so much self-serving disingenuous rubbish. The SNP refused to listen to anyone other than those who agreed with it.
I’m in a somewhat different place politically from you on the broader issue but this does seem to be yet another example of what happens when a political party or organisation decides “we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor” and tries to push through a badly thought out policy regardless, with usually disastrous results.
The arrogance or wilful blindness that led to the Rwanda debacle, the post office scandal, Blair’s invasion of Iraq, Truss’s budget etc etc.
The S***ch Experts on a roll.
“we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor”
The mentality described is spot on. The critical characteristic is the refusal to accept any changes or moderation in the policy.
Similar behaviour has been seen in just about every polity I am aware of. The results of such idiocy are uniformly predictable.
I'm more a facts based guy. Where's your evidence of democratic opposition (or in Westminster's case non-democratic) offering changes or moderation in the policy, other than a feeling in your water about a far away country of which you know little?
Cue anecdote about a Scottish person wot you once met.
The law was made in Scotland. Various people in Scottish politics pointed out the issues. They were ignored.
At that point the law hadn’t been passed - would Westminster have standing to interfere in internal law making in Scotland, *before* it potentially interacted with U.K. law?
C’mon then, a list of these ‘various people’ (preferably ones with a hint of a democratic mandate)?
Tory MPs are convinced they're facing oblivion. And some now believe a "Dream Ticket" of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage represents their final chance > Mail On Sunday >
For starters, neither is an MP. Farage has shown he is impossible to get elected into Westminster. He has proved to be the very essence of oblivion with the voters.
And if by some weird political miracle Boris and Farage both got elected, it would be minutes before they were literally at each others throats. "Like fire and powder which as they kiss, consume...."
Then what is your plan F, fuckwit MPs?
I think it’s either unfair, disingenuous or stupid to say Farage has shown he is impossible to get elected into Westminster. He has only ever stood for a minority party and of the seven attempts, only once did he really have a good chance, which was 2015.
It’s like saying Harry Kane has shown he is impossible to win a title with, when the truth is that until now he never really played for a team expected to win titles
With probably the opposite emotions to you I agree with this. Put a blue rosette on him, stand him somewhere in the East Midlands or Thames Estuary, and he’ll get elected with ease.
He is a dangerous politician for the centre and left to have to face. More dangerous than Johnson because less of a clown and more ideological.
I am convinced that Musk is bipolar or worse. We have the Musk who leads Tesla and SpaceX, and the lunatic who owns X. How can they possibly be the same person?
He has admitted he is autistic - at the Aspie end of things. That is probably sufficient to explain his high intellect combined with intense social awkwardness and - often - weird prickliness. And a peculiar, sometimes maladroit sense of humour
A high-IQ Aspie personality might be seen as ideal for creating and pushing techie companies like SpaceX and Tesla. Less so - to put it mildly - for owning a social media company. Indeed it is hard to think of a worse mix than Social Media plus Asperger's
Musk should set some free speech ground rules for TwiX, then let someone else run the show, and let someone else audit his tweets first. I do believe he has good intentions, he's just incredibly clumsy and prone to tantrums
Forget about the “autism”
There are a vast number of examples in history of people who were top of one field and utters clowns or monsters in another.
Read the correspondence between Sidney Hook and Einstein. At one point Einstein refused to condemn the use of torture to extract false confessions - because the false confessions brought prominence to an important issue.
If you look at his two successful companies (excluding PayPal where he had the germ of a good idea and some money to invest, but was quickly marginalised from decision-making because he was so erratic), Tesla and SpaceX, he's succeeded with what you might call a 'brute force' approach.
You set a tough goal to create something you think the world needs and/or will sell, hire lots of very clever people, give them lots of money and set them very tough goals, and work them and you incredibly hard until you crack it and have something pretty appealing to market in a cultish way as the future.
That works very well for engineering problems as you are dealing with what in effect are very hard maths problems you need to crack. The fact humans don't sooner is because quite often we don't have the resources to allocate our collective brainpower to them. Where Musk may fall down is that once the world cottons on they can probably outstrip you - and like numerous first movers, maybe too arrogant to look over his shoulder.
It is, however, a terrible way to run a social media company - which are incredibly complex ecosystems in which you need to understand human behaviour in all its weirdness, horror, and beauty to get. Musk simply cannot understand that although it had many flaws, before him, Twitter functioned as it did before because it served its users fairly well, and in turn advertisers.
Its rules could be unfair - and needed tweaking every so often to keep up with the ways it changes over time - but it broadly worked at its job of connecting ordinary people with significant, sometimes high-status information, and allowing them to discuss it with the likeminded (or ague with the not).
Because he buys his own myths, and because he sees the site through the lens of a bunch of very online oddballs most users can't stand or avoid as unreliable (hence why they were so upset about amplification and demanded blue ticks). He can't see how doing what he wants completely upsets the ecosystem and will make it unusable in time, no matter how much he throws at such and such a 'cool feature'.
Twitter's community on the whole don't want it to be an 'everything app' where they have to pay for their posts to be ranked above a Nazi's. And its advertisers (its main customer) certainly don't.
Sam Friedman has listed his top ten books on British politics. You will have to read his substack for the list with his comments, reasons, and to see he cheats like mad with supplementary and multi-volume entries but the bare list is:-
Gladstone by Roy Jenkins
The Five Giants by Nick Timmins
A Different Kind of Weather by William Waldegrave
Tales of a New Jerusalem series by David Kynaston
Diaries 1964-1976 by Barbara Castle
The Anatomy of Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin
The unutterable tedium of that list says quite a lot, none of it good, about British politics
He has also managed to miss out the one of the vanishingly few entertaining books about British politics. Viz: Alastair Campbell’s Diaries.
Campbell the man is a cad and a bounder, but he writes well and the Dairies are compulsively readable. Unlike any of these worthy tomes
Yes Minister and YPM are both good reads.
In fact, you could make a case that they were better than the TV series, and that's not to say the TV series wasn't very good as well.
I find the TV series vastly overrated. Middlebrow radio 4 chortling, always slightly forced, like the laughter you so often get at Shakespeare comedies on stage
I automatically mistrust anyone who likes Yes PM or who quotes it on here
"Middlebrow"
You demur? You find it lowbrow? Highbrow?!
In-jokes.
Some of the events in the series are thinly-disguised vignettes that happened in real life (for example the one where Humphrey gets caught out by the differences in Scottish law), although the events are from the 50s, 60s or 70s: the show was dated from day one. It's very stagey and did deteriorate into Humphrey-reels-out-long-sentence-Jim-looks-askance, although there were reasons for that. It evolved from incident-of-the-week in the first series to a broad arc in YPM, a fact made explicit in the books.
It's an interesting series when you know the background. Paul Eddington was badly ill in the later years, which is why his latter scenes are him sitting down and short sentences. Since this fitted both actors' style, it worked well, but when you know why it stands out.
As for "middlebrow"? I dunno. The term is usually(?) reserved for nondescript writers churning out books to be bought instead of read (see the modern equivalent, "content"). The background, performances, scripts and references I think make it better than that.
Thats not my definition of middlebrow, nor one that I remotely recognise
Here's a different definition off Google:
"The goal of middlebrow culture was to introduce unevenly educated adults to somewhat diluted versions of high culture in accessible, engaging and unthreatening ways."
I'd say that exactly nails the appeal of Yes Minister
If that's the definition of "middlebrow" (and how can Google possibly be in error) than you are right. But that also moves it from an insult to a compliment.
It can be insult, compliment, or completely neutral and a mere descriptor
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
If we generate our own oil and gas then we have the option of preventing its export in extremis. One of the reasons we did not need the same storage facilities as those on the continent is that we had a (diminishing) reserve in the north sea.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are: (a) our balance of payments (b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland. (c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
Thanks, makes more sense than Mercer did.
First paragraph is interesting. In your view would much larger storage facilities for imported gas provide a similar energy security function?
I buy the balance of payments and industry/employment arguments though feel (in abstract) that we are better to embrace the future than to try to preserve the past in this instance ie achieving similar BoP benefits from exporting clean tech, if possible, is far preferable than hanging on to obsolete tech.
Agreed on your last paragraph - any reduction in use of carbon-based fuels clearly needs to be driven by a relative lack of demand for them due to price and availability of renewables. (Though I’d argue the system has feedbacks within it so eg providing a clear and consistent investment environment for renewables is crucial).
I do think Monboit’s point, that he has been banging on about for years, is pretty irrefutable: unless we leave the stuff in the ground we will use it. But that’s clearly a global argument not a national one.
In any case, thanks, I knew I’d get a thoughtful answer from you.
The offshore wind auction failure and the delay of the 2030 phasing out of ICE is important context though.
I remain optimistic because after Ukraine, people associate fossil fuels with energy insecurity. If we'd managed to get more wind going before 2022 we would have weathered the energy crisis much better. The crisis DavidL describes (where the UK is entirely isolated from the world energy markets) seems very unlikely - pretty much WW3.
Leith echoes to the sound of the piling for the new renewables facilities.
I’ve been arguing for many years that Ending Oil would pay for itself in not having recessions every time some nutter gets the hiccups… In not sending container ship loads of cash to people who are quite upfront about hating us.
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
If we generate our own oil and gas then we have the option of preventing its export in extremis. One of the reasons we did not need the same storage facilities as those on the continent is that we had a (diminishing) reserve in the north sea.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are: (a) our balance of payments (b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland. (c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
Thanks, makes more sense than Mercer did.
First paragraph is interesting. In your view would much larger storage facilities for imported gas provide a similar energy security function?
I buy the balance of payments and industry/employment arguments though feel (in abstract) that we are better to embrace the future than to try to preserve the past in this instance ie achieving similar BoP benefits from exporting clean tech, if possible, is far preferable than hanging on to obsolete tech.
Agreed on your last paragraph - any reduction in use of carbon-based fuels clearly needs to be driven by a relative lack of demand for them due to price and availability of renewables. (Though I’d argue the system has feedbacks within it so eg providing a clear and consistent investment environment for renewables is crucial).
I do think Monbiot’s point, that he has been banging on about for years, is pretty irrefutable: unless we leave the stuff in the ground we will use it. But that’s clearly a global argument not a national one.
In any case, thanks, I knew I’d get a thoughtful answer from you.
A further thought on the energy security question-if that’s part of the argument would it not be better to leave the gas in the North Sea until we find ourselves in extremis? Even if it’s there for the next 50 years, it only provides security until we extract and sell it surely? I realise there are some questions here about extraction infrastructure and readiness.
I am convinced that Musk is bipolar or worse. We have the Musk who leads Tesla and SpaceX, and the lunatic who owns X. How can they possibly be the same person?
He has admitted he is autistic - at the Aspie end of things. That is probably sufficient to explain his high intellect combined with intense social awkwardness and - often - weird prickliness. And a peculiar, sometimes maladroit sense of humour
A high-IQ Aspie personality might be seen as ideal for creating and pushing techie companies like SpaceX and Tesla. Less so - to put it mildly - for owning a social media company. Indeed it is hard to think of a worse mix than Social Media plus Asperger's
Musk should set some free speech ground rules for TwiX, then let someone else run the show, and let someone else audit his tweets first. I do believe he has good intentions, he's just incredibly clumsy and prone to tantrums
Forget about the “autism”
There are a vast number of examples in history of people who were top of one field and utters clowns or monsters in another.
Read the correspondence between Sidney Hook and Einstein. At one point Einstein refused to condemn the use of torture to extract false confessions - because the false confessions brought prominence to an important issue.
Except, of course, many have claimed that Einstein was clearly autistic
Tho I tend to think these historical, after-the-fact diagnoses have limited utility
If the definition of autism is just being highly intelligent, lacking in social skills, and obsessed with fringe issues to the point of monomania, 90% of PB qualifies.
I suspect like ADHD, PTSD, etc, it's just become a bit of a catch-all for people with a certain personality type.
This may help to make the story a little sexier for those that can't cope with the tedious facts of the Post Office scandal.
It's got to be the most boring political scandal of all time, fusing the unholy trifecta of tedium: lawyers, IT wankers and the type of people who want to measure out the precious days of their mortal span running a sub post office in Jaywick.
I am convinced that Musk is bipolar or worse. We have the Musk who leads Tesla and SpaceX, and the lunatic who owns X. How can they possibly be the same person?
He has admitted he is autistic - at the Aspie end of things. That is probably sufficient to explain his high intellect combined with intense social awkwardness and - often - weird prickliness. And a peculiar, sometimes maladroit sense of humour
A high-IQ Aspie personality might be seen as ideal for creating and pushing techie companies like SpaceX and Tesla. Less so - to put it mildly - for owning a social media company. Indeed it is hard to think of a worse mix than Social Media plus Asperger's
Musk should set some free speech ground rules for TwiX, then let someone else run the show, and let someone else audit his tweets first. I do believe he has good intentions, he's just incredibly clumsy and prone to tantrums
Forget about the “autism”
There are a vast number of examples in history of people who were top of one field and utters clowns or monsters in another.
Read the correspondence between Sidney Hook and Einstein. At one point Einstein refused to condemn the use of torture to extract false confessions - because the false confessions brought prominence to an important issue.
If you look at his two successful companies (excluding PayPal where he had the germ of a good idea and some money to invest, but was quickly marginalised from decision-making because he was so erratic), Tesla and SpaceX, he's succeeded with what you might call a 'brute force' approach.
You set a tough goal to create something you think the world needs and/or will sell, hire lots of very clever people, give them lots of money and set them very tough goals, and work them and you incredibly hard until you crack it and have something pretty appealing to market in a cultish way as the future.
That works very well for engineering problems as you are dealing with what in effect are very hard maths problems you need to crack. The fact humans don't sooner is because quite often we don't have the resources to allocate our collective brainpower to them. Where Musk may fall down is that once the world cottons on they can probably outstrip you - and like numerous first movers, maybe too arrogant to look over his shoulder.
It is, however, a terrible way to run a social media company - which are incredibly complex ecosystems in which you need to understand human behaviour in all its weirdness, horror, and beauty to get. Musk simply cannot understand that although it had many flaws, before him, Twitter functioned as it did before because it served its users fairly well, and in turn advertisers.
Its rules could be unfair - and needed tweaking every so often to keep up with the ways it changes over time - but it broadly worked at its job of connecting ordinary people with significant, sometimes high-status information, and allowing them to discuss it with the likeminded (or ague with the not).
Because he buys his own myths, and because he sees the site through the lens of a bunch of very online oddballs most users can't stand or avoid as unreliable (hence why they were so upset about amplification and demanded blue ticks). He can't see how doing what he wants completely upsets the ecosystem and will make it unusable in time, no matter how much he throws at such and such a 'cool feature'.
Twitter's community on the whole don't want it to be an 'everything app' where they have to pay for their posts to be ranked above a Nazi's. And its advertisers (its main customer) certainly don't.
You are talking as if TwiX has already failed. Which, last time I checked, it hasn't. Indeed it is STILL very much THE public square - see how the entire OpenAI saga was played out on TwiX
However Musk has made several major errors. The worst was renaming it X. Utterly stupid and pointless. He had a great brand - a brand so powerful it had created its own terminology - tweet, retweet - why the F would you change that? Idiot!
He has also done some good things. eg Community Notes
And TBF to him he is trying to make it profitable, which is not easy, given that his predecessors essentially never achieved that
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
If we generate our own oil and gas then we have the option of preventing its export in extremis. One of the reasons we did not need the same storage facilities as those on the continent is that we had a (diminishing) reserve in the north sea.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are: (a) our balance of payments (b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland. (c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
Thanks, makes more sense than Mercer did.
First paragraph is interesting. In your view would much larger storage facilities for imported gas provide a similar energy security function?
I buy the balance of payments and industry/employment arguments though feel (in abstract) that we are better to embrace the future than to try to preserve the past in this instance ie achieving similar BoP benefits from exporting clean tech, if possible, is far preferable than hanging on to obsolete tech.
Agreed on your last paragraph - any reduction in use of carbon-based fuels clearly needs to be driven by a relative lack of demand for them due to price and availability of renewables. (Though I’d argue the system has feedbacks within it so eg providing a clear and consistent investment environment for renewables is crucial).
I do think Monboit’s point, that he has been banging on about for years, is pretty irrefutable: unless we leave the stuff in the ground we will use it. But that’s clearly a global argument not a national one.
In any case, thanks, I knew I’d get a thoughtful answer from you.
The offshore wind auction failure and the delay of the 2030 phasing out of ICE is important context though.
I remain optimistic because after Ukraine, people associate fossil fuels with energy insecurity. If we'd managed to get more wind going before 2022 we would have weathered the energy crisis much better. The crisis DavidL describes (where the UK is entirely isolated from the world energy markets) seems very unlikely - pretty much WW3.
Leith echoes to the sound of the piling for the new renewables facilities.
I wish I shared your optimism! I think we’re about 20-30 years too late to get the global change we need, and are better served thinking about how we make the transition to a climate changed world as peaceful and painless as possible.
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
If we generate our own oil and gas then we have the option of preventing its export in extremis. One of the reasons we did not need the same storage facilities as those on the continent is that we had a (diminishing) reserve in the north sea.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are: (a) our balance of payments (b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland. (c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
Thanks, makes more sense than Mercer did.
First paragraph is interesting. In your view would much larger storage facilities for imported gas provide a similar energy security function?
I buy the balance of payments and industry/employment arguments though feel (in abstract) that we are better to embrace the future than to try to preserve the past in this instance ie achieving similar BoP benefits from exporting clean tech, if possible, is far preferable than hanging on to obsolete tech.
Agreed on your last paragraph - any reduction in use of carbon-based fuels clearly needs to be driven by a relative lack of demand for them due to price and availability of renewables. (Though I’d argue the system has feedbacks within it so eg providing a clear and consistent investment environment for renewables is crucial).
I do think Monbiot’s point, that he has been banging on about for years, is pretty irrefutable: unless we leave the stuff in the ground we will use it. But that’s clearly a global argument not a national one.
In any case, thanks, I knew I’d get a thoughtful answer from you.
A further thought on the energy security question-if that’s part of the argument would it not be better to leave the gas in the North Sea until we find ourselves in extremis? Even if it’s there for the next 50 years, it only provides security until we extract and sell it surely? I realise there are some questions here about extraction infrastructure and readiness.
I would suspect that reducing to a very low rate of production on existing fields would work better than shut in.
It would be pretty much impossible to stockpile knowledge. Even infrastructure would be hard, since it evolves and improves over time. So a future re-start in the North Sea would, certainly, require importing the skills and equipment. Which kills a chunk of the energy security argument.
Unless you did something truly strange, like pay to drill wells and then immediately close them off, permanently. While building and rebuilding pipelines that don’t carry anything to refineries that don’t refine. Except for small test amounts.
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
If we generate our own oil and gas then we have the option of preventing its export in extremis. One of the reasons we did not need the same storage facilities as those on the continent is that we had a (diminishing) reserve in the north sea.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are: (a) our balance of payments (b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland. (c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
Thanks, makes more sense than Mercer did.
First paragraph is interesting. In your view would much larger storage facilities for imported gas provide a similar energy security function?
I buy the balance of payments and industry/employment arguments though feel (in abstract) that we are better to embrace the future than to try to preserve the past in this instance ie achieving similar BoP benefits from exporting clean tech, if possible, is far preferable than hanging on to obsolete tech.
Agreed on your last paragraph - any reduction in use of carbon-based fuels clearly needs to be driven by a relative lack of demand for them due to price and availability of renewables. (Though I’d argue the system has feedbacks within it so eg providing a clear and consistent investment environment for renewables is crucial).
I do think Monbiot’s point, that he has been banging on about for years, is pretty irrefutable: unless we leave the stuff in the ground we will use it. But that’s clearly a global argument not a national one.
In any case, thanks, I knew I’d get a thoughtful answer from you.
A further thought on the energy security question-if that’s part of the argument would it not be better to leave the gas in the North Sea until we find ourselves in extremis? Even if it’s there for the next 50 years, it only provides security until we extract and sell it surely? I realise there are some questions here about extraction infrastructure and readiness.
Good morning everyone.
That's more than 6 months away; no member of any UK government would contemplate it.
(That's an important point btw - it's the same reason I don't believe a national wealth fund or sovereign investment portfolio will work here. The next lot or next lot but one of either party will demand that their immediate revenue needs are more important 'to meet manifesto commitments', and will spend the capital.)
I am convinced that Musk is bipolar or worse. We have the Musk who leads Tesla and SpaceX, and the lunatic who owns X. How can they possibly be the same person?
He has admitted he is autistic - at the Aspie end of things. That is probably sufficient to explain his high intellect combined with intense social awkwardness and - often - weird prickliness. And a peculiar, sometimes maladroit sense of humour
A high-IQ Aspie personality might be seen as ideal for creating and pushing techie companies like SpaceX and Tesla. Less so - to put it mildly - for owning a social media company. Indeed it is hard to think of a worse mix than Social Media plus Asperger's
Musk should set some free speech ground rules for TwiX, then let someone else run the show, and let someone else audit his tweets first. I do believe he has good intentions, he's just incredibly clumsy and prone to tantrums
Forget about the “autism”
There are a vast number of examples in history of people who were top of one field and utters clowns or monsters in another.
Read the correspondence between Sidney Hook and Einstein. At one point Einstein refused to condemn the use of torture to extract false confessions - because the false confessions brought prominence to an important issue.
Except, of course, many have claimed that Einstein was clearly autistic
Tho I tend to think these historical, after-the-fact diagnoses have limited utility
If the definition of autism is just being highly intelligent, lacking in social skills, and obsessed with fringe issues to the point of monomania, 90% of PB qualifies.
I suspect like ADHD, PTSD, etc, it's just become a bit of a catch-all for people with a certain personality type.
Even on the strictest medical definitions I strongly suspect 90% of PB commenters qualify as autistic
I am one of the rare exceptions, but I am a bipolar alcoholic with hints of NPD. You do what you can!
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
If we generate our own oil and gas then we have the option of preventing its export in extremis. One of the reasons we did not need the same storage facilities as those on the continent is that we had a (diminishing) reserve in the north sea.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are: (a) our balance of payments (b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland. (c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
Thanks, makes more sense than Mercer did.
First paragraph is interesting. In your view would much larger storage facilities for imported gas provide a similar energy security function?
I buy the balance of payments and industry/employment arguments though feel (in abstract) that we are better to embrace the future than to try to preserve the past in this instance ie achieving similar BoP benefits from exporting clean tech, if possible, is far preferable than hanging on to obsolete tech.
Agreed on your last paragraph - any reduction in use of carbon-based fuels clearly needs to be driven by a relative lack of demand for them due to price and availability of renewables. (Though I’d argue the system has feedbacks within it so eg providing a clear and consistent investment environment for renewables is crucial).
I do think Monbiot’s point, that he has been banging on about for years, is pretty irrefutable: unless we leave the stuff in the ground we will use it. But that’s clearly a global argument not a national one.
In any case, thanks, I knew I’d get a thoughtful answer from you.
You're very kind.
What I do agree is that the sooner we have the price ratio working against carbon based fuels the better. Monbiot wants to create an artificial scarcity even faster but we are rapidly seeing the price of wind and solar fall to competitive levels. If we can improve further on that burning gas, let alone oil, for energy will no longer happen because it will not be sensible to do it. Until then, however, I think we use what we have.
Tory MPs are convinced they're facing oblivion. And some now believe a "Dream Ticket" of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage represents their final chance > Mail On Sunday >
For starters, neither is an MP. Farage has shown he is impossible to get elected into Westminster. He has proved to be the very essence of oblivion with the voters.
And if by some weird political miracle Boris and Farage both got elected, it would be minutes before they were literally at each others throats. "Like fire and powder which as they kiss, consume...."
Then what is your plan F, fuckwit MPs?
If I was a Tory MP, I might want to resurrect this idea:
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
If we generate our own oil and gas then we have the option of preventing its export in extremis. One of the reasons we did not need the same storage facilities as those on the continent is that we had a (diminishing) reserve in the north sea.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are: (a) our balance of payments (b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland. (c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
Thanks, makes more sense than Mercer did.
First paragraph is interesting. In your view would much larger storage facilities for imported gas provide a similar energy security function?
I buy the balance of payments and industry/employment arguments though feel (in abstract) that we are better to embrace the future than to try to preserve the past in this instance ie achieving similar BoP benefits from exporting clean tech, if possible, is far preferable than hanging on to obsolete tech.
Agreed on your last paragraph - any reduction in use of carbon-based fuels clearly needs to be driven by a relative lack of demand for them due to price and availability of renewables. (Though I’d argue the system has feedbacks within it so eg providing a clear and consistent investment environment for renewables is crucial).
I do think Monboit’s point, that he has been banging on about for years, is pretty irrefutable: unless we leave the stuff in the ground we will use it. But that’s clearly a global argument not a national one.
In any case, thanks, I knew I’d get a thoughtful answer from you.
The offshore wind auction failure and the delay of the 2030 phasing out of ICE is important context though.
I remain optimistic because after Ukraine, people associate fossil fuels with energy insecurity. If we'd managed to get more wind going before 2022 we would have weathered the energy crisis much better. The crisis DavidL describes (where the UK is entirely isolated from the world energy markets) seems very unlikely - pretty much WW3.
Leith echoes to the sound of the piling for the new renewables facilities.
I’ve been arguing for many years that Ending Oil would pay for itself in not having recessions every time some nutter gets the hiccups… In not sending container ship loads of cash to people who are quite upfront about hating us.
Slowing Global Warming to a stop is a free extra.
I had a dig around the UK gas imports - Qatar - Hamas relationships and couldn't find anything. I assume that's being considered by HMG.
This may help to make the story a little sexier for those that can't cope with the tedious facts of the Post Office scandal.
It's got to be the most boring political scandal of all time, fusing the unholy trifecta of tedium: lawyers, IT wankers and the type of people who want to measure out the precious days of their mortal span running a sub post office in Jaywick.
“type of people who want to measure out the precious days of their mortal span running a sub post office in Jaywick”
What was the line about the basic duties of government - “Guard the coasts, build the roads, deliver the mail”?
Can’t all be Cromwells, guilty of our country's blood.
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
If we generate our own oil and gas then we have the option of preventing its export in extremis. One of the reasons we did not need the same storage facilities as those on the continent is that we had a (diminishing) reserve in the north sea.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are: (a) our balance of payments (b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland. (c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
Thanks, makes more sense than Mercer did.
First paragraph is interesting. In your view would much larger storage facilities for imported gas provide a similar energy security function?
I buy the balance of payments and industry/employment arguments though feel (in abstract) that we are better to embrace the future than to try to preserve the past in this instance ie achieving similar BoP benefits from exporting clean tech, if possible, is far preferable than hanging on to obsolete tech.
Agreed on your last paragraph - any reduction in use of carbon-based fuels clearly needs to be driven by a relative lack of demand for them due to price and availability of renewables. (Though I’d argue the system has feedbacks within it so eg providing a clear and consistent investment environment for renewables is crucial).
I do think Monboit’s point, that he has been banging on about for years, is pretty irrefutable: unless we leave the stuff in the ground we will use it. But that’s clearly a global argument not a national one.
In any case, thanks, I knew I’d get a thoughtful answer from you.
The offshore wind auction failure and the delay of the 2030 phasing out of ICE is important context though.
I remain optimistic because after Ukraine, people associate fossil fuels with energy insecurity. If we'd managed to get more wind going before 2022 we would have weathered the energy crisis much better. The crisis DavidL describes (where the UK is entirely isolated from the world energy markets) seems very unlikely - pretty much WW3.
Leith echoes to the sound of the piling for the new renewables facilities.
I wish I shared your optimism! I think we’re about 20-30 years too late to get the global change we need, and are better served thinking about how we make the transition to a climate changed world as peaceful and painless as possible.
Oh don't get me wrong - I'm pessimistic about worldwide emissions and the cost of damage (eg flooding) and adaptation (flood defence) here in the UK.
Otoh, I'm optimistic about reducing emissions in the UK because the other benefits of plentiful clean energy it are huge, and the cost not particularly high. Once we sort food security out we're pretty much good to go.
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
If we generate our own oil and gas then we have the option of preventing its export in extremis. One of the reasons we did not need the same storage facilities as those on the continent is that we had a (diminishing) reserve in the north sea.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are: (a) our balance of payments (b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland. (c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
Thanks, makes more sense than Mercer did.
First paragraph is interesting. In your view would much larger storage facilities for imported gas provide a similar energy security function?
I buy the balance of payments and industry/employment arguments though feel (in abstract) that we are better to embrace the future than to try to preserve the past in this instance ie achieving similar BoP benefits from exporting clean tech, if possible, is far preferable than hanging on to obsolete tech.
Agreed on your last paragraph - any reduction in use of carbon-based fuels clearly needs to be driven by a relative lack of demand for them due to price and availability of renewables. (Though I’d argue the system has feedbacks within it so eg providing a clear and consistent investment environment for renewables is crucial).
I do think Monboit’s point, that he has been banging on about for years, is pretty irrefutable: unless we leave the stuff in the ground we will use it. But that’s clearly a global argument not a national one.
In any case, thanks, I knew I’d get a thoughtful answer from you.
The offshore wind auction failure and the delay of the 2030 phasing out of ICE is important context though.
I remain optimistic because after Ukraine, people associate fossil fuels with energy insecurity. If we'd managed to get more wind going before 2022 we would have weathered the energy crisis much better. The crisis DavidL describes (where the UK is entirely isolated from the world energy markets) seems very unlikely - pretty much WW3.
Leith echoes to the sound of the piling for the new renewables facilities.
I’ve been arguing for many years that Ending Oil would pay for itself in not having recessions every time some nutter gets the hiccups… In not sending container ship loads of cash to people who are quite upfront about hating us.
Slowing Global Warming to a stop is a free extra.
I had a dig around the UK gas imports - Qatar - Hamas relationships and couldn't find anything. I assume that's being considered by HMG.
This is a system of government where lying to a government minister (Rory Stewart) about directly funding a bunch of violent arseholes was How Things Are Done.
Where taking 3 months to get the PM to ask a question is considered a useful expenditure if time and a goal.
This may help to make the story a little sexier for those that can't cope with the tedious facts of the Post Office scandal.
Mm, was wondering about the often-stated impact of 'Cathy Come Home' on the BBC as regarded the homelessness issue (was too youing or not interested at the time so can't speak from first person).
Though as we still have homelessness perhaps it's not such a happy precedent!
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
If we generate our own oil and gas then we have the option of preventing its export in extremis. One of the reasons we did not need the same storage facilities as those on the continent is that we had a (diminishing) reserve in the north sea.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are: (a) our balance of payments (b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland. (c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
Thanks, makes more sense than Mercer did.
First paragraph is interesting. In your view would much larger storage facilities for imported gas provide a similar energy security function?
I buy the balance of payments and industry/employment arguments though feel (in abstract) that we are better to embrace the future than to try to preserve the past in this instance ie achieving similar BoP benefits from exporting clean tech, if possible, is far preferable than hanging on to obsolete tech.
Agreed on your last paragraph - any reduction in use of carbon-based fuels clearly needs to be driven by a relative lack of demand for them due to price and availability of renewables. (Though I’d argue the system has feedbacks within it so eg providing a clear and consistent investment environment for renewables is crucial).
I do think Monbiot’s point, that he has been banging on about for years, is pretty irrefutable: unless we leave the stuff in the ground we will use it. But that’s clearly a global argument not a national one.
In any case, thanks, I knew I’d get a thoughtful answer from you.
A further thought on the energy security question-if that’s part of the argument would it not be better to leave the gas in the North Sea until we find ourselves in extremis? Even if it’s there for the next 50 years, it only provides security until we extract and sell it surely? I realise there are some questions here about extraction infrastructure and readiness.
I would suspect that reducing to a very low rate of production on existing fields would work better than shut in.
It would be pretty much impossible to stockpile knowledge. Even infrastructure would be hard, since it evolves and improves over time. So a future re-start in the North Sea would, certainly, require importing the skills and equipment. Which kills a chunk of the energy security argument.
Unless you did something truly strange, like pay to drill wells and then immediately close them off, permanently. While building and rebuilding pipelines that don’t carry anything to refineries that don’t refine. Except for small test amounts.
Yes that’s what I mean essentially-license extraction but at very low rates. Though it would make no economic sense for a private company-perhaps a good argument for a nationalised industry with subsidies to keep the gas (very slowly) flowing and with capacity to scale up at short notice.
Something else to put on labour’s shopping list eh?
Rishi Sunak is the most politically inept PM I think we have ever had. He seems to have a unique ability to make every call wrong and to dig himself further and further into a hole. It is actually quite extraordinary to watch.
Of course, this was plainly obvious during his "eat out to spread COVID about" phase but people seemed to think he was some kind of amazing politician for no apparent reason.
Tory MPs are convinced they're facing oblivion. And some now believe a "Dream Ticket" of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage represents their final chance > Mail On Sunday >
Not quite up there with the Clarke/Redwood pact but I presume this is a couple of factions joining forces. They might as well accept that they are hopelessly split and hope the economy edges up. US oil production might help.
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
If we generate our own oil and gas then we have the option of preventing its export in extremis. One of the reasons we did not need the same storage facilities as those on the continent is that we had a (diminishing) reserve in the north sea.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are: (a) our balance of payments (b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland. (c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
Thanks, makes more sense than Mercer did.
First paragraph is interesting. In your view would much larger storage facilities for imported gas provide a similar energy security function?
I buy the balance of payments and industry/employment arguments though feel (in abstract) that we are better to embrace the future than to try to preserve the past in this instance ie achieving similar BoP benefits from exporting clean tech, if possible, is far preferable than hanging on to obsolete tech.
Agreed on your last paragraph - any reduction in use of carbon-based fuels clearly needs to be driven by a relative lack of demand for them due to price and availability of renewables. (Though I’d argue the system has feedbacks within it so eg providing a clear and consistent investment environment for renewables is crucial).
I do think Monbiot’s point, that he has been banging on about for years, is pretty irrefutable: unless we leave the stuff in the ground we will use it. But that’s clearly a global argument not a national one.
In any case, thanks, I knew I’d get a thoughtful answer from you.
A further thought on the energy security question-if that’s part of the argument would it not be better to leave the gas in the North Sea until we find ourselves in extremis? Even if it’s there for the next 50 years, it only provides security until we extract and sell it surely? I realise there are some questions here about extraction infrastructure and readiness.
I would suspect that reducing to a very low rate of production on existing fields would work better than shut in.
It would be pretty much impossible to stockpile knowledge. Even infrastructure would be hard, since it evolves and improves over time. So a future re-start in the North Sea would, certainly, require importing the skills and equipment. Which kills a chunk of the energy security argument.
Unless you did something truly strange, like pay to drill wells and then immediately close them off, permanently. While building and rebuilding pipelines that don’t carry anything to refineries that don’t refine. Except for small test amounts.
Yes that’s what I mean essentially-license extraction but at very low rates. Though it would make no economic sense for a private company-perhaps a good argument for a nationalised industry with subsidies to keep the gas (very slowly) flowing and with capacity to scale up at short notice.
Something else to put on labour’s shopping list eh?
Consider decommissioning - a big employer in Aberdeen and a major ongoing cost for O&G firms. We wouldn't want that to end up being the Gov's responsibility.
(We need to Mr Tyndall to confirm - my understanding of it is about 10 years out of date)
Would I be right in suspecting that the SNP is likely to implode even more than the Tories at the next election.
Starmer is indeed a lucky,lucky general, but he does need to sort Labour policy out on this one.
I think the Nats are very sticky. While it's quite likely that SLAB may well be a majority again of Scottish Westminster seats, that looks less likely in Holyrood.
The SNP is the only viable vehicle to Scottish Independence, so is a bit like Brexit in that it has to combine very disparate people and ideas that unite only around one idea, but agree on little else. It therefore has to choose being small and fairly united, or large and riven by internal conflict.
I think it very likely to regenerate like Doctor Who under Starmerism. The main driver has always been resentment at foreign control, mattering little how benign or autocratic that control is.
That’s the thing about a nationalist party, isn’t it? If your aim is independence from whoever you consider as the foreign ruling state, then it doesn’t matter very much whether you’re a libertarian, a liberal or socialist; you just want the oppressors is gone! You worry about the new government, when it happens!
But…but they refused to say how much a first class stamp would be after independence!
Rishi Sunak is the most politically inept PM I think we have ever had. He seems to have a unique ability to make every call wrong and to dig himself further and further into a hole. It is actually quite extraordinary to watch.
Of course, this was plainly obvious during his "eat out to spread COVID about" phase but people seemed to think he was some kind of amazing politician for no apparent reason.
Lots of voters like politicians who splash cash about. They forget that they end up paying for it, or believe that others will do so.
Rishi Sunak is the most politically inept PM I think we have ever had. He seems to have a unique ability to make every call wrong and to dig himself further and further into a hole. It is actually quite extraordinary to watch.
Of course, this was plainly obvious during his "eat out to spread COVID about" phase but people seemed to think he was some kind of amazing politician for no apparent reason.
@Luckyguy1983@DavidL (I think!) and others who are in favour of new extraction licenses for oil and gas from the North Sea…
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
If we generate our own oil and gas then we have the option of preventing its export in extremis. One of the reasons we did not need the same storage facilities as those on the continent is that we had a (diminishing) reserve in the north sea.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are: (a) our balance of payments (b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland. (c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
Thanks, makes more sense than Mercer did.
First paragraph is interesting. In your view would much larger storage facilities for imported gas provide a similar energy security function?
I buy the balance of payments and industry/employment arguments though feel (in abstract) that we are better to embrace the future than to try to preserve the past in this instance ie achieving similar BoP benefits from exporting clean tech, if possible, is far preferable than hanging on to obsolete tech.
Agreed on your last paragraph - any reduction in use of carbon-based fuels clearly needs to be driven by a relative lack of demand for them due to price and availability of renewables. (Though I’d argue the system has feedbacks within it so eg providing a clear and consistent investment environment for renewables is crucial).
I do think Monboit’s point, that he has been banging on about for years, is pretty irrefutable: unless we leave the stuff in the ground we will use it. But that’s clearly a global argument not a national one.
In any case, thanks, I knew I’d get a thoughtful answer from you.
The offshore wind auction failure and the delay of the 2030 phasing out of ICE is important context though.
I remain optimistic because after Ukraine, people associate fossil fuels with energy insecurity. If we'd managed to get more wind going before 2022 we would have weathered the energy crisis much better. The crisis DavidL describes (where the UK is entirely isolated from the world energy markets) seems very unlikely - pretty much WW3.
Leith echoes to the sound of the piling for the new renewables facilities.
I’ve been arguing for many years that Ending Oil would pay for itself in not having recessions every time some nutter gets the hiccups… In not sending container ship loads of cash to people who are quite upfront about hating us.
Slowing Global Warming to a stop is a free extra.
Happy to be proven wrong on this by people who know more, but...
The energy security argument for offshore wind has always seemed a bit barmy to me. One quick snip of the cable via undersea sub and the lights go out. Surely a distributed onshore wind / solar / nuclear mix makes more sense from an energy perspective. Plus a bit of tidal.
This may help to make the story a little sexier for those that can't cope with the tedious facts of the Post Office scandal.
It's got to be the most boring political scandal of all time, fusing the unholy trifecta of tedium: lawyers, IT wankers and the type of people who want to measure out the precious days of their mortal span running a sub post office in Jaywick.
This may help to make the story a little sexier for those that can't cope with the tedious facts of the Post Office scandal.
I see former Hollyoaks and 2 Pints star Will Mellor has a part, so I suspect it will be slightly more populist and drama filled and rather less legal and technical than the latest Cyclefree post on the matter
Rishi Sunak is the most politically inept PM I think we have ever had. He seems to have a unique ability to make every call wrong and to dig himself further and further into a hole. It is actually quite extraordinary to watch.
Of course, this was plainly obvious during his "eat out to spread COVID about" phase but people seemed to think he was some kind of amazing politician for no apparent reason.
What a journey this candidate has been on - Conservative to Greens!!
She received an apology 2 days ago from the Tory MP for Redditch.
Happy to say she is open to question and on a (Churchillian?) journey, but the Conservatives seem even more insanely dedicated to blowing themselves up than the Scottish Greens.
Perhaps they need to move their headquarters to Malinta Hill?
Rishi Sunak is the most politically inept PM I think we have ever had. He seems to have a unique ability to make every call wrong and to dig himself further and further into a hole. It is actually quite extraordinary to watch.
Of course, this was plainly obvious during his "eat out to spread COVID about" phase but people seemed to think he was some kind of amazing politician for no apparent reason.
Comments
I'm assuming this list is from Freedman, but if it was Friedman I apologise.
"The Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government are a permanent part of the United Kingdom’s constitutional arrangements.
(2)The purpose of this section is, with due regard to the other provisions of this Act, to signify the commitment of the Parliament and Government of the United Kingdom to the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government.
(3)In view of that commitment it is declared that the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government are not to be abolished except on the basis of a decision of the people of Scotland voting in a referendum.”
I have not seen any evidence that either the Tories or the now standing down former SoS for Scotland have departed from that.
I wonder if all of those, mainly Democrat, politicians who he donated to will give the cash back.
Didn’t know he’d been at LSE. My understanding was he attended MIT.
"Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance. "
TBF to Elon is must be easy to have "an unreasonably high sense of your own importance" when you are the richest man in the world, able to change the direction of wars, and maybe able to change the direction of humanity (eg if he succeeds in his desire to put humans on Mars)
Indeed there’s evidence to show they tend to find their way to the top.
#1 Failure to stop illegal immigration
#2 NHS has gotten worse
#3 General incompetence
Re Alps weather next weekend - is the risk of temperature inversion next weekend reducing a bit? I've been tracking it.
Which is best Alps weather website to use? I like weathertoski.co.uk
There are a vast number of examples in history of people who were top of one field and utters clowns or monsters in another.
Read the correspondence between Sidney Hook and Einstein. At one point Einstein refused to condemn the use of torture to extract false confessions - because the false confessions brought prominence to an important issue.
But, to the best of my knowledge, that opposition did not include critiques from either Kemi Badenoch or the Secretary of State until the bill had passed. It would have been possible to build in safeguards into the Equality Act to ensure that there were protections for prisons, women's refuges, possibly even toilets but that would have required action by Westminster and it was not forthcoming or suggested.
I have sympathy for the plight of people who want to live as the opposite sex. They can of course do so without any certificate but their lives are precarious because their position is always open to challenge. I am sympathetic to the idea that it really should be up to them how they want to be viewed. But I also think that women and women's hard won rights need to be protected and that there are exceptions where those rights must prevail.
It really was not beyond the wit of man to find an acceptable solution here. There was no inclination to do so on either side, both of whom were playing politics. Neither come out of it with any credit.
The arrogance or wilful blindness that led to the Rwanda debacle, the post office scandal, Blair’s invasion of Iraq, Truss’s budget etc etc.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3676-einstein-and-newton-showed-signs-of-autism/
Tho I tend to think these historical, after-the-fact diagnoses have limited utility
https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/scotland/family/living-together-marriage-and-civil-partnership-s/getting-married-s
“we are right, and anyone who disagrees is bad/evil/misguided/a traitor”
Some of the events in the series are thinly-disguised vignettes that happened in real life (for example the one where Humphrey gets caught out by the differences in Scottish law), although the events are from the 50s, 60s or 70s: the show was dated from day one. It's very stagey and did deteriorate into Humphrey-reels-out-long-sentence-Jim-looks-askance, although there were reasons for that. It evolved from incident-of-the-week in the first series to a broad arc in YPM, a fact made explicit in the books.
It's an interesting series when you know the background. Paul Eddington was badly ill in the later years, which is why his latter scenes are him sitting down and short sentences. Since this fitted both actors' style, it worked well, but when you know why it stands out.
As for "middlebrow"? I dunno. The term is usually(?) reserved for nondescript writers churning out books to be bought instead of read (see the modern equivalent, "content"). The background, performances, scripts and references I think make it better than that.
https://www.wetterzentrale.de/en/show_diagrams.php?geoid=45855&model=gfs&var=210&run=0&lid=OP&bw=1
Pretty inversiony (but sunny) by next weekend but just mild and damp before then.
Here's a different definition off Google:
"The goal of middlebrow culture was to introduce unevenly educated adults to somewhat diluted versions of high culture in accessible, engaging and unthreatening ways."
I'd say that exactly nails the appeal of Yes Minister
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPkvYXufpAY
Similar behaviour has been seen in just about every polity I am aware of. The results of such idiocy are uniformly predictable.
Can you give a better answer than Mercer’s woeful attempt on QT as to why the extracted fossil fuels won’t simply be sold to the highest bidder and do nothing for energy security (nor anything meaningful on the cost of living). Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t4t5 (46 mins in)
Genuine question - this is an area where my instincts lie with Monbiot and on the face of it it looks like a simple case of the Tory party being captured by business interests that conflict with humanity’s interests. However I am also open to the idea that it is a nuanced question without simple answers. I’d appreciate an answer that avoids the canard that because we are small anything we do is pointless.
Cue anecdote about a Scottish person wot you once met.
I understand why she has temporised over Trump - she wouldn’t still be in the contest otherwise - but it’s an indelible stain on her record.
Contrast with Cheney - who otherwise might have had as good a chance of being the Republican’s first woman nominee - who knowingly sacrificed her career.
Conservatives (quite fairly) point out that Starmer carried water for Corbyn, as an attack on him. But Corbyn, disastrous though he would have been as PM, was never a blatant threat to democracy.
So while I’d celebrate her winning the nomination, and her election as President wouldn’t be a disaster, she just represents the least worst GOP option.
We have also seen the catastrophic closure of Grangemouth which is being denied its feedstock which it was built to process. So the issues are:
(a) our balance of payments
(b) the knock on consequences for industry and employment, specifically in Scotland.
(c) the reduction in our energy security.
I completely agree that we need to reduce our consumption of carbon based fuels. We want to cut these back as fast as we can. Until we achieve that I would much rather use our own fuel from the north sea than pretty much any supplier of carbon based fuels on the planet.
https://x.com/dpjhodges/status/1733773573502685623?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
It’s one of the principal things which enabled him to market Tesla without paying a cent in advertising.
He was hugely popular, followed by millions, and played the medium brilliantly.
What didn’t suit him in the least was owning and running it.
Hubris; nemesis.
At that point the law hadn’t been passed - would Westminster have standing to interfere in internal law making in Scotland, *before* it potentially interacted with U.K. law?
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1547548/
Not sure that is a dream ticket for the Tories although they would campaign well I guess.
This was driven by the polarisation of the issue into absolutism. Compromise was considered bad.
For starters, neither is an MP. Farage has shown he is impossible to get elected into Westminster. He has proved to be the very essence of oblivion with the voters.
And if by some weird political miracle Boris and Farage both got elected, it would be minutes before they were literally at each others throats. "Like fire and powder which as they kiss, consume...."
Then what is your plan F, fuckwit MPs?
First paragraph is interesting. In your view would much larger storage facilities for imported gas provide a similar energy security function?
I buy the balance of payments and industry/employment arguments though feel (in abstract) that we are better to embrace the future than to try to preserve the past in this instance ie achieving similar BoP benefits from exporting clean tech, if possible, is far preferable than hanging on to obsolete tech.
Agreed on your last paragraph - any reduction in use of carbon-based fuels clearly needs to be driven by a relative lack of demand for them due to price and availability of renewables. (Though I’d argue the system has feedbacks within it so eg providing a clear and consistent investment environment for renewables is crucial).
I do think Monbiot’s point, that he has been banging on about for years, is pretty irrefutable: unless we leave the stuff in the ground we will use it. But that’s clearly a global argument not a national one.
In any case, thanks, I knew I’d get a thoughtful answer from you.
A man who eats bollocks and a man who talks them.
Dignity is a rarely taken option.
Yes, we need an Avant Garde doing edgy new stuff. But middlebrow is where most the action is. Even at Cambridge High Table.
Though Tory MPs have shown a propensity to swallow whole any amount of bollocks, so you can see how they came up with this plan.
The Tories have gone in less than two years from increasing their majority to complete implosion.
The SNP are weirdly obsessed with trans rights, are clearly clueless and hopelessly confused on their main selling point, their two former leaders arrested and their current one so incompetent even his own colleagues criticise him (even discounting current rumours).
Welsh Labour are completely hopeless to the extent Drakeford endorses criminal behaviour by motorcyclists while cutting speed limits more or less randomly for everyone else, but few people care.
Khan is inept but somehow the Tories have selected a candidate who would make Trump look mainstream to challenge him.
And while doing absolutely nothing except crack the odd joke and have a couple of curries, suddenly Starmer's dominating politics.
Whatever deal he signed, Satan must feel swindled. I'd like Starmer drawing up my next contract, that's for sure.
It’s like saying Harry Kane has shown he is impossible to win a title with, when the truth is that until now he never really played for a team expected to win titles
I remain optimistic because after Ukraine, people associate fossil fuels with energy insecurity. If we'd managed to get more wind going before 2022 we would have weathered the energy crisis much better. The crisis DavidL describes (where the UK is entirely isolated from the world energy markets) seems very unlikely - pretty much WW3.
Leith echoes to the sound of the piling for the new renewables facilities.
While the move away from burning oil is rapidly approaching the final goal, there are a lot of chemical applications that are still with us.
So we need a policy that encompasses
1) change over to non-fossil fuel processes for plastics, chemicals, etc
2) deals with the extraction of oil in a way that encourages 1), but also acknowledges it won’t be overnight.
3) ends oil being extracted for burning
3) is something I haven’t seen discussed - yet it is exactly what we need to do.
IIRC there are still some niche uses of whale oil - required for legacy equipment.
As an employer….
He is a dangerous politician for the centre and left to have to face. More dangerous than Johnson because less of a clown and more ideological.
You set a tough goal to create something you think the world needs and/or will sell, hire lots of very clever people, give them lots of money and set them very tough goals, and work them and you incredibly hard until you crack it and have something pretty appealing to market in a cultish way as the future.
That works very well for engineering problems as you are dealing with what in effect are very hard maths problems you need to crack. The fact humans don't sooner is because quite often we don't have the resources to allocate our collective brainpower to them. Where Musk may fall down is that once the world cottons on they can probably outstrip you - and like numerous first movers, maybe too arrogant to look over his shoulder.
It is, however, a terrible way to run a social media company - which are incredibly complex ecosystems in which you need to understand human behaviour in all its weirdness, horror, and beauty to get. Musk simply cannot understand that although it had many flaws, before him, Twitter functioned as it did before because it served its users fairly well, and in turn advertisers.
Its rules could be unfair - and needed tweaking every so often to keep up with the ways it changes over time - but it broadly worked at its job of connecting ordinary people with significant, sometimes high-status information, and allowing them to discuss it with the likeminded (or ague with the not).
Because he buys his own myths, and because he sees the site through the lens of a bunch of very online oddballs most users can't stand or avoid as unreliable (hence why they were so upset about amplification and demanded blue ticks). He can't see how doing what he wants completely upsets the ecosystem and will make it unusable in time, no matter how much he throws at such and such a 'cool feature'.
Twitter's community on the whole don't want it to be an 'everything app' where they have to pay for their posts to be ranked above a Nazi's. And its advertisers (its main customer) certainly don't.
I was using it insultingly
Slowing Global Warming to a stop is a free extra.
I suspect like ADHD, PTSD, etc, it's just become a bit of a catch-all for people with a certain personality type.
However Musk has made several major errors. The worst was renaming it X. Utterly stupid and pointless. He had a great brand - a brand so powerful it had created its own terminology - tweet, retweet - why the F would you change that? Idiot!
He has also done some good things. eg Community Notes
And TBF to him he is trying to make it profitable, which is not easy, given that his predecessors essentially never achieved that
It would be pretty much impossible to stockpile knowledge. Even infrastructure would be hard, since it evolves and improves over time. So a future re-start in the North Sea would, certainly, require importing the skills and equipment. Which kills a chunk of the energy security argument.
Unless you did something truly strange, like pay to drill wells and then immediately close them off, permanently. While building and rebuilding pipelines that don’t carry anything to refineries that don’t refine. Except for small test amounts.
That's more than 6 months away; no member of any UK government would contemplate it.
(That's an important point btw - it's the same reason I don't believe a national wealth fund or sovereign investment portfolio will work here. The next lot or next lot but one of either party will demand that their immediate revenue needs are more important 'to meet manifesto commitments', and will spend the capital.)
I am one of the rare exceptions, but I am a bipolar alcoholic with hints of NPD. You do what you can!
What I do agree is that the sooner we have the price ratio working against carbon based fuels the better. Monbiot wants to create an artificial scarcity even faster but we are rapidly seeing the price of wind and solar fall to competitive levels. If we can improve further on that burning gas, let alone oil, for energy will no longer happen because it will not be sensible to do it. Until then, however, I think we use what we have.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/10/jeremy-hunt-to-pick-esther-mcvey-as-deputy-pm-if-he-becomes-tory-leader
Hunt as PM would be a safe pair of hands and have Blue Wall appeal.
McVey as Deputy PM would help to keep the Red Wallers and - if she was given the role - would probably be more credible on the levelling up agenda.
As an added bonus, we would get McVey vs Rayner once in a while.
What was the line about the basic duties of government - “Guard the coasts, build the roads, deliver the mail”?
Can’t all be Cromwells, guilty of our country's blood.
Otoh, I'm optimistic about reducing emissions in the UK because the other benefits of plentiful clean energy it are huge, and the cost not particularly high. Once we sort food security out we're pretty much good to go.
Where taking 3 months to get the PM to ask a question is considered a useful expenditure if time and a goal.
Remember what the great philosopher said about assumption - https://youtu.be/YS3i-irQ0L0?si=ZCnfrjB3TKcb3Ic1
Though as we still have homelessness perhaps it's not such a happy precedent!
Something else to put on labour’s shopping list eh?
Of course, this was plainly obvious during his "eat out to spread COVID about" phase but people seemed to think he was some kind of amazing politician for no apparent reason.
(We need to Mr Tyndall to confirm - my understanding of it is about 10 years out of date)
The energy security argument for offshore wind has always seemed a bit barmy to me. One quick snip of the cable via undersea sub and the lights go out. Surely a distributed onshore wind / solar / nuclear mix makes more sense from an energy perspective. Plus a bit of tidal.
Happy to say she is open to question and on a (Churchillian?) journey, but the Conservatives seem even more insanely dedicated to blowing themselves up than the Scottish Greens.
Perhaps they need to move their headquarters to Malinta Hill?
https://redditchstandard.co.uk/news/redditch-mp-apologises-over-green-candidate-comments/