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If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere wellIt were done quickly – politicalbetting.com
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere wellIt were done quickly – politicalbetting.com
Times Scotland: Yousaf set to resign as survival hopes fade #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/uyuikysy5M
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The problem for the SNP is that the favourite for leader would be Forbes and her mutual contempt for the Greens is infamous. Are the Greens really going to get to have a decisive say in who is the SNP leader?
Create your own:
https://nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/shakespeare-insults/
ETA and as I understand it, Kate Forbes is not a unifying figure.
A former minister sanctioned by China was detained and deported by an East African country with close ties to the Chinese state, The Telegraph can reveal.
Tim Loughton, a senior member of the Commons’ home affairs committee, believes his unprecedented and “intimidating” detention and expulsion by the Djibouti authorities was a “direct consequence” of his criticism of the Chinese regime.
It is understood the Foreign Office is seeking an explanation from the Djiboutis over his treatment. Mr Loughton has raised the affair with Andrew Mitchell, the deputy Foreign Secretary, and written to the Djibouti ambassador via the Foreign Office to protest about the “outrageous” behaviour.
Mr Loughton arrived in Djibouti on April 8 for a 24-hour visit including meeting the British ambassador, but was detained for more than seven hours at the airport, barred entry to the country and told he was being removed on the next available flight.
Mr Loughton is one of seven parliamentarians sanctioned by the Chinese more than three years ago for speaking out against the “industrial scale” of human rights abuses by China against the Uighurs, Tibetans and Hong Kongers.
Djibouti, Africa’s smallest nation, has received billions of dollars of investment from China, including a new stadium, hospital and $1 billion (£791 million) space port. China has built a naval base in the country, stationed 2,000 troops there and holds more than $1.4 billion of Djibouti’s debt, 45 per cent of its GDP.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/04/28/tim-loughton-djibouti-detained-deported-china-sanctions/
So something about renewables instead.
We had a brief discussion a couple of days back about the cost/benefit of a large scale battery plant being built, and whether it was economic.
I noted briefly that its value was considerably more than just the cost per kW of the electricity it stores and then provides.
Here's an article about the world's largest flywheel, recently constructed in Ireland. Its cost per kW is considerable greater than that for batteries - but it's even better providing grid inertia (ie dealing with instantaneous grid instabilities - mismatches between supply and demand).
https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/stories/irelands-great-grid-stabilizer.html
A large battery storage plant will have greater storage capacity, but probably can't provide the same instantaneous response.
But both types of management will be needed to manage the grid as we increase the percentage of renewables - and to allow us to use a greater proportion of the (eg wind) energy generated at source.
I am amazed some PBers have ever got laid let alone sired issue.
(There's a neat essay to be written on the parallels between Brexit Conservatism and the SNP. Rising at the same time, responding to the same sense of sticking it to the system. Both a mess of internal contradictions, neither that bothered at how to make the project work. Succeeding because a charismatic leader was able to be a projection screen, despite being [REDACTED]. And once a sincere nonentity took over, it rather fell apart.
Important difference is that BrexCons got their project over the line in time, whereas the SNP didn't. I'm not sure this is good news for BrexCons.)
The Indian Ocean is theirs, as it was once Britain’s
Yet she was marginalised by her party and relegated to the backbenches simply for stating the scientific truth – shared by the overwhelming majority of reasonably-minded Scots – that trans women are men.
What made this image so poignant was that Ms Cherry was surrounded by empty chairs. Not one of her party colleagues had chosen to support their colleague deliver her disquisition. The principle reason for their absence is rooted in the cowardice, misogyny and lesbophobia which has hollowed out the SNP in the Sturgeon/Yousaf era.
It exposed them as supine frauds. They claim to be supportive of gay and lesbian rights, but only so long as these are secondary to the rights of men who decide they want to be women. Ms Cherry rejects this lie and is thus considered by her party to be the wrong type of lesbian. Shame on them.
In standing up for women’s and lesbian rights Ms Cherry has endured a campaign of hostility and intimidation orchestrated by the SNP leadership.
https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/24283857.joanna-cherrys-top-form-commons-lesbian-visibility-speech/
China is of course entirely self interested, and will take advantage of them (as the west has also done), but from the POV of developing countries, it can now seem a more attractive option than the west.
Its technology is cheaper (and in the case of renewables, superior), and it has very deep pockets.
The SNP has no majority. Any leader it proposes needs the confidence of some non-SNP MSPs. So anyone they want to propose needs to win the blessing of the Greens as well as their own.
Fun, isn’t it!
Hoist with his own petard; and 't shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon.
One suspects this is the type of sentiment prevailing in Scottish Green circles presently.
So it comes down to the SNP picking the most electorally friendly candidate because there is now an election coming sooner rather than later.
Second problem is that I suspect the SNP have zero money to fight an election with...
I appreciate no overlap in views on independence, but it seems safe to say no one really wants to call a referendum right now given the mess the SNP has found itself in recently. Better wait until new independence leadership has been established that warrants the name.
The rise of China is the biggest story of the next two decades, and the West seems totally flat-footed about how to respond.
Dijibouti[sp]: tons of countries have bases there (weirdly, we don't). China's relatively recent, the US, Italians, French, and others all have military bases. That's not to say China isn't buying its way to influence or using debt traps, but Dijibouti is in perhaps a unique position for an African nation.
NEW: Humza Yousaf will resign today as First Minister ahead of a no confidence vote in his leadership, according to a senior party source.
2) The insider said he wants former deputy first minister John Swinney to take over.
Though my angler friends don’t rate her as rural affairs minister (the post Kate Forbes was too precious for).
But it's been Tory orthodoxy for some time to cut it.
Whole as the marble, founded as the rock,
As broad and general as the casing air.
But now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in
To saucy doubts and fears...
There the grown serpent lies. The worm that’s fled
Hath nature that in time will venom breed.
(I'm disappointed other posters tried to sidetrack us with extracts from Hamlet and Merchant of Venice. They should, like Coriolanus, have kept a gracious silence.)
Salmond and Sturgeon had the poltical smarts to survive with a deal here, a concession there and never annoying everyone simultaneously.
Yousaf, bless him, doesn't.
If so, that's utterly ridiculous.
I'm no starry-eyed admirer of our politicians but if we're paying the PM so little no wonder we struggle to attract anyone with actual talent.
(Although plenty of firms pay millions and still can't get anyone good enough to deal with the problems their size cause.)
But Ireland may inadvertently be giving Rishi the support he needs wrt his immigration/Rwanda policy. Pass a law saying they must go back to the last country they came from, eh? Well I never.
I just cannot see any way out for Yousaf than resignation and what follows next is anyone's guess
This may trigger some but it does seem the Irish are seeking legislation to return asylum seekers to UK who are currently crossing into Ireland from Northern Ireland citing the Rwanda policy and UK is not a safe country
Meetings are to take place between Irish and UK officials but UK has affirmed it will not accept return asylum seekers from Ireland unless France accepts them from the UK
This is developing into an Irish - UK - France - EU issue and let's hope that it sees joint action to stop the boats and further cooperation across Europe and UK in addressing the wider problem of asylum seekers
I assume flights to Rwanda will commence, but it would be an excellent outcome if the deterrent effect of the Rwanda programme sees joint cooperation on this problem and makes the Rwanda scheme unnecessary
Instead he decided to unceremoniously sack them and humiliate them, and then attacked every other party in the chamber afterwards.
FWIW, I don’t like the Scottish Greens one iota, but there is much to be said for basic courtesy in politics and it is the reason for his downfall.
If they convinced another party to tolerate them continuing as a minority by abstaining then that would happen.
The Kelvin Hall Putsch.
The funniest thing you’ll read today.
The inside story of the Greens in meltdown as rebels demand leaders go | The Herald
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24283157.inside-story-green-rebels-want-rid-leadership/
Djibouti, incidentally, has a number of foreign naval bases.
https://www.pressenza.com/2023/12/close-the-foreign-bases-in-djibouti/
..Within this space, we can find numerous military bases belonging to France, China, the United States, Japan, Germany, Spain, and Italy, including:
U.S.: Camp Lemonnier, (4,000 troops),
France and Spain: Les forces françaises stationnées à Djibouti, (1,500 troops),
China: People’s Liberation Army Support Base, (1,500 troops with room for 10,000),
Japan: “Self-Defense” Force Base,
Italy: Base militare italiana di supporto “Amedeo Guillet,”
France, U.S., Japan, and Italy: Djibouti–Ambouli International Airport,
France, U.S., and Germany: Chabelley Airfield,
Saudi Arabia: reportedly building a base..
Someone has edited Humza Yousaf's Wikipedia profile to have him quitting as first minister today...
I hope Humza's resignation speech will be an hour-long lecture on how great he is, like Sturgeon's was.
Sunak has accepted that his policy dumps asylum seekers on Ireland, that he is essentially in the same position as Belarus, shoving people across the Polish border, and so that puts Ireland in a much stronger position to demand that he does something about it.
If he hadn't been so stupid he would have responded to the Irish claims with a gallic shrug, said that the Rwanda policy was intended to stop the boat crossings, and left British voters to join the dots. But he couldn't help himself.
Only a fool would say that there's no correlation between renumeration and the quality of employee, but I suspect it's quite a lot weaker than the one most people carry in their mental map of how the world works.
Not just Starmer that's a lucky general for Labour!
Either the Greens bring down the government, and face the electoral backlash, or they don't, and the new SNP leader has to admit they are only there on Green sufferance.
No bunting, no celebrations.
Is this Conservative Party going to be able to restrain themselves like that? Is Rishi going to be able to restrain himself like that?
https://x.com/Jebadoo2/status/1784842983449260175
Bless.
Yep.
We could be back here again soon. I get the impression that the mood is growing more fractious not less. Unless of course the Tories decide to soil themselves and back the SNP because otherwise it’s an election and they’re going to get hammered.
DRoss is a man of principle and propriety. I’m sure he won’t turn out to be frit. Naah… 😂
But that's not the point. Decent-minded people will find it strange that Ireland is screaming and shouting about asylum seekers coming from the UK to Ireland, while any hint of the UK doing the same wrt France is met with disdain.
If you wanted that gig you should never have left the Conservative Party.
True for most failed politicians. See also the current tenant of Downing Street.
How and where this ends up, I've no idea, as these countries themselves are one day going to wake up and suddenly realise (if they haven't already) that they're just Chinese puppets rather than European ones.
The characterisation you have posted does not represent me. Of course France should do more to stop the boats, but we hurled out any treaty that would resolve to send them back to France in our "oven ready for the microwave" Brexit deal. Ironically it is Dublin that is now crying foul.
Quiet news day @STVNews #HumzaYousaf #RishiSunak
ˈal̪ˠəpə
https://x.com/dalgetysusan/status/1784854534071705797
Let me put out a spoiler for a @TSE future headline:
Out, damned Scot !
I've not visited the parts of Spain you're in at all, looks interesting though.