The Dis-United Kingdom Thread - (Indyref 2, United Ireland poll, Welsh independence)

[DCI Harry Batt]

it's in the first paragraph

"has been urged" doesn't tell us much, really, does it?

Anyway, they sound like pretty thin plans which have no relevance for Scotland, at least. Labour, all of it, has no idea about Scotland.

[Duncan Gardner]

Lang Spoon simplifying that tweet from Belfast journo Suzanne Breen- NI politics may break down as Unionists show their frustration in 2 conflicting ways- either defecting to Alliance or conversely rallying to Squeaky Jim Allister for a last stand at the (Lough) Gaulish village...

[Patrick Thistle]

it's in the first paragraph

Yes, but as I said* the article mentions limiting the powers of the monarchy but not whether there would be limitations on Westminster. That's where the issue lies.

Fundamentally, freedom that is granted by fiat is not freedom because permission can always be revoked.

*in my edit after you posted. I didn't see your post while editing.

[Bizarre Löw Triangle]

https://twitter.com/anthonybarnett/status/1356021042909765633?s=21

policy

I think if Labour had come up with this sort of thing in 2015 it could have made things interesting.

But now it's too late - I can't imagine English voters accepting this after five years of stirring up nationalist sentiment there and it seems unlikely that Scottish voters are going to be in favour of it either given the extent to which the promises of 2014 were not delivered on. It's not to say independence is inevitable - i just can't really imagine ideas less suitable to the current climate.

[Belhaven]

What's TUV and what are the political implications of shift from DUP to TUV? From bad to even worse? (I couldn't open the link properly)

[Lang Spoon]

Much much worse- Ultra Bigot Unionist Party

[Bizarre Löw Triangle]

What's TUV and what are the political implications of shift from DUP to TUV? From bad to even worse? (I couldn't open the link properly)

Yes, pretty much. Jim Allister split from the DUP when they went into government with Sinn Fein and opposes power-sharing. He's a religious fundamentalist, wants homosexuality criminalised and believes in creation.

[Lang Spoon]

Patrick Thistle this sums up how I feel whenever Bobby G speaks his brains on politics.

https://twitter.com/gordonguthrie/status/1356183925106814976

[Diable Rouge]

Yes, pretty much. Jim Allister split from the DUP when they went into government with Sinn Fein and opposes power-sharing. He's a religious fundamentalist, wants homosexuality criminalised and supports creationism.

Ironically, the primary consequence of unionism effectively eating itself would be a significantly increased likelihood of a Sinn Fein First Minister (even if both positions are technically equal). Even if Alliance were to come second, they couldn't claim the Deputy FM position, as the "others" bloc would still be third behind unionism and nationalism.

[Duncan Gardner]

BLT describes Jim A well. He's pretty much a one man band though- his mates struggle to get elected to Council (like me in that respect at least )

Diable Rouge and I disagree on the detail of political Unionism in NI. Basically they are all as hidebound and socially conservative as each other since Paisley Senior retired, so I'd expect the DUP to lose more support to AP as above. Naomi Long as FM isn't that far fetched

[Patrick Thistle]

I found this interesting

https://twitter.com/UKandEU/status/1356214648761176066?s=19

[Snake Plissken]

Craig Murray is a fan, which says it all.

Pretty sure that I've said this before I used to be a very active member of Campbells website forum* back when he was doing interesting things with MAME, retro and obscure gaming titles. While he was always spiky and an amazing writer, I really wonder how/why he totally went off the rails.

*Which collapsed for the same reasons his writing career did, in that he was pissing off the people who were trying to stop him self-immolating over something fairly trivial.

[Snake Plissken]

Anyway, reason I was in this thread - Westminster has noticed the opportunity to sow a bit of dissent with the Joanna Cherry sacking and sent in Kuenssberg.

[Lang Spoon]

Yeah when he was exposing the shitty nature of Britain's collusion in Central Asia he seemed a decent sort. Now at best he's running a music festival from his castle's grounds that's notorious for eh "late payment" of artists, at worst there's everything he's tweeted and blogged in the last 5 years.

[Lang Spoon]

Oh what's Laura K up to now?

[Diable Rouge]

https://twitter.com/bbclaurak/status/1356552696745099264

[Patrick Thistle]

... then they fight you...

https://twitter.com/ionewells/status/1356525717538955265?s=19

[Diable Rouge]

Interesting article (they read the Torygraph so we don't have to) on how the Tory stance on devolution risks marginalisation, but alas, the polls disagree.

[Nefertiti2]

Vernon Bogdanor -once considered a constitutional expert wants a hard border

https://twitter.com/brigidlaffan/status/1358123454566977542?s=21

but then he thought david Cameron the brightest student he ever taught.

[Lang Spoon]

These leading scholars of Modern Democracy are just as hidebound and full of John Bullshit as fuckin Bagehot. The veneration for the PPE degree from two fucking sandstone and chinless punting lads unis is up there with Sea shanties as terrible overrated things on a very shit Public School vermin infested island.

[Nefertiti2]

How to appease the DUP and Kate Hoey

https://twitter.com/cjayanetti/status/1359784948211802112?s=21

[Antepli Ejderha]

https://twitter.com/TDaviesLewis/status/1361078223807918082?s=19

[Bizarre Löw Triangle]

That's a very strange article cos it's quite reasonable and informed about Irish history, gives a more contentious Scottish history then goes on to fart out a couple of paragraphs about Welsh that are basically unrelated to the question at hand and would have been cut from a Clarkson column.

It really reads like he initially wrote that paragraph about the Irish language and then cut it (presumably at the behest of whichever Irish person proofread that section) and rewrote it to be about Welsh, cos it's truer to a greater extent about Irish (with its greater number of speakers, and significantly fewer daily users and an orthography that's very different to English) yet doesn't really make sense with Welsh at all where the number of daily speakers is one of its strengths as a minority language (a majority of people who claim to speak welsh claim to use it daily)

[Lang Spoon]

Good Christ, even for Hitler Hastings that was terrible. He identifies Scots resentment to "the English" as driven by chinless aristos huntin and shootin and then goes on about how much he loves his Highland Playground. And I doubt the deerstalkers of Knoydart exercise the passions of many voters in the Central Belt anyways. The same bollocks that what is driving the mood for independence is a hatred of the English. I'd wager anti-English bigotry was way more prevalent in the days before Devolution. Utter pish.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The important thing to remember about that article is that he's trying to not do the thing, but he just can't help himself. It would seem that living in ireland has taught him largely how to avoid doing the thing with us, likely the hard way, though that "Belongs to the EU" That bit about the welsh language is so weird. I don't know how learning welsh in school is supposed to make you less suited for operating in the anglophone world, of all linguistic worlds. Literally no-one has ever made that argument against Gaelscoileana, or indeed about the irish language since the mid nineteenth century