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The matter of Britain – politicalbetting.com
The matter of Britain – politicalbetting.com
The “Matter of Britain” is the name given to a corpus of literature and legends associated with the first-millennium island of Great Britain and associated places. A mishmash of historical fact, out-and-out fiction and points in between, it gave national myths to a land which arguably did not exist, and created a patria around which patriotism could coalesce.
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What fresh hell is this?
Police investigate ‘Turkish’ barber shops over money laundering
The National Crime Agency has overseen dozens of raids in the past month and believes many are a front for money laundering, tax fraud and illegal immigrants
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-investigate-turkish-barber-shops-over-money-laundering-jw7vtzhxx
What an interesting header.
My first note of the day - I had not copped that Costa Coffee is owned by Coca Cola.
Or are you suggesting that in the future people may not be fans of Quatermass?
This need is to be able to view the planet however minimally in a single, universal way, so that one structure links all places both in imagination and in some basic practicalities. These are things like the postal service, running of air transport and shipping, communication between powers. However imaginary the structure, it is still needed.
Only a finite number of possibilities for this exist.
Kant's idea was a single universal government - think UN x a million. Which will never work. It's a vision of unreal peacniks and Napoleon.
The one we have adopted - and this is as close to universal as is possible really - is the 'state'; everywhere is to be identified by: borders, internal sovereignty (at least in theory), a leadership.
This much arises out of a sort of necessity. You can intellectualise it by reading Hegel (don't try) or theorise about its merits. But, as we are shown daily, the alternative is anarchy.
The rest is all contingent, like evolution. It's the survival of survivors. You get what you get, including suprises. The USA is springing one right now.
No time to read the header now but look forward to doing so early afternoon - when you've probably all moved on to another thread.
So thanks in anticipation, @viewcode.
Maybe the NCA should have a look at mobile phone thieves who also fiddle the tax on their ill-gotten gains, before moving on to drug dealers and northern child rape gangs driving minicabs on the side. It worked for Eliot Ness.
Benedict Anderson in his influential book "Imagined Communities" linked the rise of the nation state to the rise of a national press, and increased literacy. Communication as the spark to nationalism.
That is now history. On this board I can argue politics with people on different continents, while my neighbours watch either Al Jazeera or satellite TV from India. I can read the Rand Daily Mail as easily as the British one.
On my travels, I note that middle class and professional people are increasingly alike and internationalisd. We have common interests and aspirations and similar lifestyles. It's not just deluxe hotels serving gin and tonics to ageing roues that have become homogeneous.
Is this the end of the Westphalian nation state? Or simply a return to what existed before? A return to polyglot multicultural empires, where loyalty was to class and individual, where French, German, Italian and British nobles felt more in common with each other than with the peasants that they ruled.
In other words are we back under the Hapsburgs, Ottomans, Aztecs and Manchus?
Is this not the same as "consecutive" or "concurrent" prison sentences?
To be fair, he isn't Turkish either but pretends to be. Syrian Kurds.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Borderlines-History-Europe-told-edges-ebook/dp/B0CCD38ZZY
It's not a page turner, but discusses exactly this in various places over time
The money laundering going on through fronts like Turkish barbers, Taxi companies and American candy stores does rather make a mockery of the bonkers AML bureaucracy around buying and selling property or even opening a bank account for my church.
Remember when every Big Criminal owned a scrap yard?
In the case of the barbers, a number of them are associated with known drug dealers.
Similarly, this book on the horsetrading around the Versailles conference in 1919 has a lot on how borders were decided, including for such contentious places as the Sudetenland, and Sud-Tirol. Lots of other fascinating bits on reparations and demilitarisation too. Sad to see the cases belli of the next war being set up in advance, but isn't it ever so?
https://amzn.eu/d/dnY44x1
Decline of cash credited for drop in NHS surgery for children swallowing objects
Figures reveal 29% fall in operations in England to remove foreign bodies from children’s airways, noses and throats
The Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCSE), which obtained the figures, collated from hospital admission data, identified the rise of the cashless society as the main reason.
“Historically, coins accounted for over 75% of objects swallowed by children under six years old, and fewer coins in homes due to contactless payments have likely helped reduce the number of these procedures,” it said.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/mar/28/decline-of-cash-credited-for-drop-in-nhs-surgery-for-children-swallowing-objects
They do not use references like a scholarly article, and why should they - they're only PB headers. Instead the ideas are introduced as self-evident truth. This is fine, it's a style.
Until we hit something I'm actually relatively familiar with, such as Margaret Thatcher's philosophy on nationhood in any way being the basis for the wet Eurofederalism of Howe and later Blair. Then it comes to a crunching halt.
The wets' ideas (if they can be called that) were very well established long before Thatcher came to power - before even Heath came to power. There is also no sense in which Thatcher's philosophy on nationhood legitimised their push for European statehood with the British public - the wet policy on European statehood has always been furious denial that such a thing exists, whilst working toward Britain's participation in it behind the scenes. It still is.
Look out for a water company or train franchise that is making a big profit, seems well run….
If that process goes into reverse, one would expect our century-old experiment with democracy to gradually come to an end.
If you take the initial crimes as a sunk cost, or don't care about them because they were committed abroad, money laundering is an economically beneficial activity.
Both want the boons of the state (even gangsters need their used fifty pound notes to have value) without paying the costs of it.
The big question is how we resolve that, when human nature is fundamentally cakeist?
Some things are eternal, however. I came across this again this morning: https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=e571dd1d0d2dc4465ac2115e989fde995bc776e1b0c106d6617167575b1b2f2bJmltdHM9MTc0MzI5MjgwMA&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=4&fclid=286f17fc-1c60-6c5a-0eb0-02b31dff6dac&u=a1L3ZpZGVvcy9zZWFyY2g_cT10aGUrcHJlc2lkZW50K3NhbmcrYW1hemluZytncmFjZStieStKb2FuK0JhZXomcXB2dD10aGUrcHJlc2lkZW50K3NhbmcrYW1hemluZytncmFjZStieStqb2FuK2JhZXomRk9STT1WRFJF&ntb=1
Such things can hold a nation together and create a sense of community.
"...This enabled her to privatise nationalized industries and move them to the free market, disconnecting the economy from nationality and from the land. But this opened Pandora’s box and that disconnect went on to enable the pro-Europeanism of Howe, the liberal interventionism of Blair, and ultimately the European Union’s supranationalism and even Euronationalism.."
Viewcode actually makes a very good case here. Obviously Mrs T didn't create those things, but it's far from daft to say that her internationalisation of the economy helped enable them.
Them Kurds sure get about. Thank Allah that he never chose them or promised them a land, think of all the trouble that would cause.
1) We must do something
2) This means filing out huge number of forms in unintelligent, rote fashion
3) Therefore we must do this.
We are in a decentralised, denationalised world already in many ways.
She wrote the Manual on how to be a good Mum.
It is little comfort, but my personal belief is that she is still there, and that you can wish her a Happy Mothers Day.
Blair wanted an end to the Westphalian Settlement. What he was actually pushing for - though I don't accuse him of knowingly doing this - was an end to functional democracy.
For example, the determination by the US (and possibly Europe) that reindustrialisation is an economic imperative...
The obvious nationalism and territorial aggression variously displayed by China, Russia, and now Israel, gives rise to a nationalist response in their neighbours...
Are such things likely to reverse your trend, or merely slow it ?
As I see it, they are committed to the theoretical basis of Trumpism (the word is used), and regard themselves as enemies of Neocons (internationalist / interventionist / "peace through strength"), and Libertarians and traditional conservatives as curate's eggs.
They have a heavy commitment to religion integrated with nationalism, and disdain for anything outside the USA - so are happy denying basic rights or constitutional rights or legal rights to non-citizens. This also kills "The American Dream" myth stone dead.
I interpret that to be a manifestion of the "religion based state" (1) tradition, which has always run alongside the "neutral state" (2) idea in US history, and a ideological interpretation of "manifest destiny".
I think a useful lens to understand aspects of current developments in the USA is as a political and cultural battle between (1) and (2).
‘With great difficulty!’
He actually slaps a pleasant cologne onto the shorn areas, so quite nice is the real answer.
The Chinese conglomerate CK Hutchison has announced that it’s withdrawing from signing a deal next week to sell its two strategic ports at the Panama Canal to an American-led group.
It’s now unclear whether the deal will go through at all..
https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1906005945785733532
I would say, firstly, that it is an economic unit that supports those within its community that are in need. Being British, for example, entitles you to a range of benefits from welfare, the NHS, cleanish water, disposal of sewerage, some sort of an education and the great British tradition of a right to moan about it all.
Much of the argument is at the margins. Who has the right to join us? What are they entitled to when they do and at what stage? Are we content to have multiculturism or are we wanting a more homogeneous sense of unity with the restrictions that imposes?
Such a nation state serves a useful purpose for almost all of us at different stages of our lives and some pride as well as some angst in how our particular unit operates is a part of human nature. A world without it would be much harsher, no doubt more comfortable for the better off, better skilled and more mobile but nasty, brutish and short for the majority.
One question is how does everyone else deal with the small or large "tsunami" caused by the partial collapse of such a structure as the USA.
Another one is what remaining loyalty those embracing Trump have to the UK.
But will the land survive?
I’m not convinced. The global disconnect between capital and ‘natural capital’ leaves us totally exposed to climate catastrophe.
I guess that’s my life, and why I do what I do.
Nationality has never been the be all and end all, whether within Empire or in other international bodies like the UN or NATO.
It is just a front though, they support nationalist agendas only as far as it suits their own agendas. So Putin supports Hungarian and German nationalists, but denies that Ukranian national consciousness exists at all.
Similarly there is the issue with companies making fortunes out of the British consumer, but paying next to no tax here.
It's a bit like the aristocracy being tax exempt in pre-revolutionary France.
Kuenssberg asks the q do you forgive the abuser John Smythe, after a pause Welby answers yes.
He then goes on to say it’s not really for him to forgive but for the victims (which should be his only answer).
Guess which part the BBC news bulletin is leading with.
Yet the Patriotic Millionaires and Barrow Boy Gary Stevenson tell us the rich want to pay more tax !
@NOELreports
🇺🇸 Fox News host Jesse Watters: “We don’t need friends. If we have to burn some bridges with Denmark to take Greenland, so be it. We’re big boys. We dropped bombs on Japan, and now they’re our ally. America isn’t handcuffed by history.”
https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1905927108712386791
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
Of course, then they need henchmen to watch out for mutinies within their henchmen...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Storyland-Mythology-Britain-Amy-Jeffs/dp/1529407974
Although nothing will be Our Island Story
(And nice reference to the Doctor, @viewcode )
The Liberal Unionist strain within the Tory party valued international cooperation, free trade, fiscal discipline, social liberalism, freedom and a “one nation” mindset.
That does not have anything to do with the EU.
What you are mistaking is the mindset of Macmillian and his generation who were scarred by the first world war and saw the EU as a way to avoid that (and the second) reoccurring
It seems to me that England as a distinct "nation" is being airbrushed out of existence.
In the last census there was the usual question, "which nationality do you identify as?".
In Scotland and Wales, Scotland/Wales was put first as an answer, above British, but in England, British had been subtly moved to be first above English.
As an Englishman living in Scotland I am acutely aware of, and proud of , my English heritage.
"It's all the fault of the bloody English, no offence, Alan!"
https://x.com/JayinKyiv/status/1905911061498208579
Hope you are all having a pleasant Mothering Sunday.
Kind regards,
viewcode
This question is interesting:
Imagine there was a referendum in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland, and a majority in both places voted for Northern Ireland to unify with the Republic of Ireland. Please indicate what your reaction would be…
The percentage among NI protestants saying
"Almost impossible to accept" has fallen from 32% in 2022 to 20% in 2024, and is now outnumbered by the percentage of protestants saying
"Happily accept" (21% in 2022, 29% in 2024)
In the linked Unherd article the QC sample was reported by the lab shortly after the Letby samples were analysed as having a C-Peptide level that was much too low: 130 instead of the real value 873.5. That’s a factor of ~7 difference in C-peptide levels.
You (& the court) have placed great weight on the difference between C-peptide & insulin levels as being of primary importance in this case, yet it seems that this assay / lab can & has returned false results where the C-peptide / insulin ratio is completely wrong & wrong with the kind of ratios reported in the Letby case.
It’s possible that this was a one-off mis-handling of the QC sample of course. I would really like to see an explanation of how these wild mis-readings in both insulin & c-peptide can happen & why that would not apply to the babies in this case. Otherwise it seems that the reliability of this central evidence has been undermined - the jury should have been told that false readings of the levels they were being told about were entirely possible.
Of course if it's terrorism then I guess the insurance won't pay out...
https://x.com/YourAnonCentral/status/1906127583194018013