British Politics
Been on holiday for a few weeks, surprised to find no general discussion of British politics so though I'd kick one off.
Tory leadership contest is quickly turning into farce. Trump has backed Boris, which should be reason enough for anyone with half a brain to exclude him.
Of the other candidates Rory Stewart looks the best of the outsiders. Surprised to see Cleverly and Javid not further up the betting, but not sure the Tory membership are ready for a brown PM.
https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/bri...
Regarding the LD leadership contest, Jo Swinson is miles ahead of any other candidate (and indeed any of the Tory lot). Should be a shoe in.
Finally, it's Groundhog Day in Labour - the more serious the anti-Semitism claims get, the more Corbyn's cronies write their own obituary by blaming it on outlandish conspiracy theories - this week, it's apparently the Jewish Embassy's fault...
Politicians of all colours have facked things up in the UK so badly for so long it's a pretty rational response.
Try explaining to someone why Norway have a sovereign wealth fund set up from their oil and gas revenues but the UK spent most of theirs on unemployment benefit.
Not setting up a sovereign wealth fund was definitely a mistake. I can see why it wasn't done but I disagree with it. Not sure what the 80's would've looked like though without the expenditure from that oil money.
Looking at politics now I don't think any politician will do anything that involves taking a long term outlook at the expense of the short or medium term, they are all concerned about the election cycle and what they can do within that.
The SNP have been going on about the lack of a sovereign wealth fund for years and yet they themselves have pretty much done the same thing as the Conservatives. They spoke about creating a wealth fund from the Scotwind project (the selling of seabed leases for offshore wind farms), however they've now admitted that it's being spent in the general revenue budget instead. If money is available, politicians will spend it. It's the same reason our national debt isn't likely to decrease at any point in the future.
You're correct they won't be concerned about the ling term or naything much. Unless the votes are.
Why should they be?
That's a bit of fantasy based on the idea that Norway has a similarly small population and imagining that all the oil and gas revenues could have come to Scotland. But Scotland has bigger problems than Norway and Scotgov has shown no competence at any point. It is of course true that UK North Sea revenues were squandered due to Thatcher's frankly strange determination to 'sell off the family silver', as Edwardian gent Harold Macmillan put it, giving the red-braces City boys a temporary payday while surrendering important revenue rights and then blowing almost unimaginable sums to pay people to do nothing.
You're correct they won't be concerned about the ling term or naything much. Unless the votes are.
Why should they be?
In order to setup a sovereign fund you basically have to be willing to bet your collective livelihood on the idea the other party won't raid the fund for political short term gains. You need 1) a super-high-trust society and 2) very minimal actual differences between the two main parties.
OR, you need single-party dominance like in Singapore, you can setup a fund if you know you will be the guys benefiting politically from it 20+ years down the line.
Can't blame either main party in the UK for not trusting the other party enough, it was rational for both of them not to do so.
I wasn't particualrly commenting on the sovereign fund. Just banging my drum that if we keep voting for politicians we dont want then we will most definitely keep getting politicians we dont want.
There's only one way democracies invariably have policitians with staggering low popularity ratings. Trumen was wrong - in a democracy the buck stops with us.
skirt wearing porridge-gobblers,
from now on, bad posting WILL result in me sending the police round
The poor old polis don't know which way to turn. They're likely to be snowed under with vexatious score-settling complaints and apparently they've only had two hours' online video training for this. Meanwhile on X, JK Rowling keeps daring the polis to arrest her for 'misgendering' India Willoughby, which would set the cat among the pigeons all right. (Sex, a category that wokers somehow don't approve of, is specifically excluded as a protected characteristic under Holyrood Law, even though sex-based hate crimes are the commonest of all.)
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/onlin...
Over in Ireland, where a similarly ill-thought-out bill has been looming for some time, Fianna Fail Senator Sharon Keogan has tweeted 'I heart JK' and former Fine Gael justice minister Charlie Flanagan says the Irish bill should be binned soonest.
https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2024...
We don't yet know if the presumed incoming Labour government at Westminster (though Labour may have crocked their chances in Muslim and Red Wall constituencies somewhat) will try and force something similarly stupid on England & Wales. Their proposed bill to ban 'conversion practices', which aren't really a thing, with only about a dozen cases ever reported, is likely in effect to target religious communities, in particular minority religious communities ('private prayer' has been mentioned as something that would be outlawed as wrongthink), and the blowback in human-rights terms and electoral terms could be considerable. You'd think Labour would have learnt by now not to let policy be dictated by crank activists or the mythical 'Islington dinner party', but apparently they haven't.
Got to love JK
Yes, and no. I fundamentally agree with her position on trans issues. Maybe someone of her stature who is uncancellable does need to draw a line in the sand by using provocative language to make a point, but in most cases I would not call a transwoman a man.
As a rule you go with politeness and live-and-let-live, but JKR was discussing characters, some of them criminals, who 'push it' in a manner hostile to women's rights, making their actual sex the issue. Police Scotland have blinked first and said they definitely won't be charging JKR. Although it's not a judicial precedent, it should mean that 'misgendering' cannot in itself be criminalised, even if you don't have JKR's profile and resources. She's performed a public service by establishing that straight off.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-6...
The law is still a bad, stupid and unnecessary one (there is no such 'rising tide of hatred' as the Scottish First Minister claims -- the wee laddie's far too young to remember the 1970s, a more difficult time in all sorts of ways), and the police don't welcome it and don't want the pointless workload.
As a rule you go with politeness and live-and-let-live, but JKR was discussing characters, some of them criminals, who 'push it' in a manner hostile to women's rights, making their actual sex the issue. Police Scotland have blinked first and said they definitely won't be charging JKR. Although it's not a judicial precedent, it should mean that 'misgendering' cannot in itself be criminalised, even if you don't have JKR's profile and resources. She's performed a public service by establishing that
This made me lol 😆
Police Scotland said a large proportion of the complaints it had received concerned a speech made by Mr Yousaf in 2020 when, as justice secretary, he highlighted the number of white people holding prominent positions in Scotland.
As a rule you go with politeness and live-and-let-live, but JKR was discussing characters, some of them criminals, who 'push it' in a manner hostile to women's rights, making their actual sex the issue. Police Scotland have blinked first and said they definitely won't be charging JKR. Although it's not a judicial precedent, it should mean that 'misgendering' cannot in itself be criminalised, even if you don't have JKR's profile and resources. She's performed a public service by establishing that
Indeed. Rarely in the history of law making has so much nonsense talked by so many been debunked so quickly
Hate speech laws in general should have no place at all, no exceptions, in western societies, because giving judges (or even worse, "government agencies") the power to censor content on the basis of their own particular reading of some content, is always infinitely worse than the worst.effects of hate speech can ever be.
This is a line that should never be crossed
Police Scotland said a large proportion of the complaints it had received concerned a speech made by Mr Yousaf in 2020 when, as justice secretary, he highlighted the number of white people holding prominent positions in Scotland.
lol'd.
As a rule you go with politeness and live-and-let-live, but JKR was discussing characters, some of them criminals, who 'push it' in a manner hostile to women's rights, making their actual sex the issue. Police Scotland have blinked first and said they definitely won't be charging JKR. Although it's not a judicial precedent, it should mean that 'misgendering' cannot in itself be criminalised, even if you don't have JKR's profile and resources. She's performed a public service by establishing that
Almost 4,000 complaints received in the first 2 days.
We have some numbers in for the new Hate Crime legislation.
Police Scotland had previously said they would investigate every single hate crime report. This was a mere 2 weeks after they said they would no longer be investigating some lower level crimes such as theft.
I gather 'hate crime' reports now outnumber reports of all other crimes put together in Scotland. The First Minister claims that this proves the law is needed. It actually proves something quite different and the police, even though they're dismissing almost all reports, clearly can't be expected to handle this and also do their essential job.
The hate crime reports are known to be the result of a campaign by people to report alleged anti-white offences in protest at the law which they feel restricts their right to racially abuse people.
Lets see once the trolling and pent up demand has played out.
I don't know if the full dataset is available but there are numerous reports in the media such as
Police Scotland has said only a small number of the thousands of reports lodged so far under Scotland’s controversial hate crime act were authentic.
The force released data showing 3.8% of the 7,152 complaints it received in the first week the hate crime act was in force were judged to be legitimate. Two hundred and forty complaints were logged as hate crimes and 30 as non-hate incidents.
The figures follow a bitter dispute over the justification for the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act. It seeks to criminalise hatred towards minority and vulnerable groups, but has been dogged by mis-statements from ministers and misrepresentation by some of its critics.
Spare a thought for poor Elrazor and diebitter's keyboards.
Police Scotland said the vast majority of reports received during this period were anonymous and submitted online. “These were assessed against the new legislation and no further action is being taken,” it added.
The figures appear to substantiate warnings the police would be inundated with spurious complaints because of campaigns to undermine the act’s credibility.
Spare a thought for Elrazor and diebitter's keyboards.
