I am on my way to Dublin and spending a day there before heading up to Belfast for three days. Any suggestions for Dublin solo-traveller-trips for someone who has been before, Bluesky? (Belfast evening suggestions also welcome!)
Local government is never likely to be at its best when facing the question of how to allocate a shared national/regional responsibility which more or less every locality prefers someone else to shoulder.
The problem is (unlike many areas where I actually would like to see a greater role for empowered local government) that without some mix of a) more central/regional compulsion and b) more scope for the market to decide, every council will decide the best new homes are those built elsewhere.
Yes, I think the breadth of opposition and flexibility as to rival candidates tells you that while Richard III may have done the only thing he could sooner or later, he had also stepped well outside the bounds of ‘acceptable’ ruthlessness. ‘Medieval England was not a meritocracy’ and all that.
‘Historical confidence is not and need not be criminal proof: an exemplar.’
And given the rapidity with which revolts broke out, including the confusion over who the candidate of the Buckingham Rebellion was at first, the answer was ‘I don’t have time for that.’
*Of course* you can’t usurp the Crown from a previously more or less universally accepted King and then let him and his brother live! The only thing even up for debate there is whether you’d rather leave it a few years and then trump up some treasonable conspiracy on the Henry VII and Warwick model.
(Honestly, guys. There is no plausible alternative murderer unless you’re into anachronistically baroque conspiracy theories, and the ‘you need people to know your rivals are gone’ stuff collapses once we realise the Princes are essentially regarded in the past tense by the end of 1483.)
I confess I always feel two male skeletons of the right age with velvet (and so very high-ranking and dead between the late 13th century and 1674) in the Tower and the Woodvilles’ willingness in summer 1483 to back Henry Tudor to marry Elizabeth of York mean this needn’t be such a big debate!
There is a risk of an indefinite catch-22 here: a smaller, implacably opposed group of people make it politically impossible to use a better route to reform, while a larger, contingently concerned group end up rejecting the results of a worse one.
I also think people who focus on the problems with a PMB as the vehicle should be asked how they’d react to a Government Bill (which would, I agree, be a much better approach). I strongly suspect a lot of the same people would see that as outrageous side-picking on a matter of conscience.
I always think much of this is down to how the British state won acceptance on quite different, often mutually incompatible, understandings of its nature. Part of our problem now is that different groups of Britons hear each other’s versions far more often and haven’t found ways to square them.
I suspect that is the highest impact-to-effort ratio I will ever manage, for better or worse …
I care about the world too much to leak all my secrets. I’m all heart. You know that.
I have since made a firm commitment never to post anything I think could conceivably not be properly public knowledge regarding China and Taiwan.
My most terrifying moment on Twitter was accidentally scooping the EU’s near-use of the Northern Ireland Protocol’s notionally last-ditch unilateral safeguard mechanism over vaccines. I assumed everyone of importance would be way ahead of me. In fact, my tweet kickstarted an international incident.
It was always coherent to be sceptical of lockdowns, but conclude the evidence showed there was no viable alternative to implementing them.
Hello! I'm working on the basis that 'long-standing mutual at the Other Place' counts as 'someone I know'.
I always thought this was a particularly unhelpful conflation during Covid. Any broadly liberal person should have been a lockdown sceptic in the strict sense. Unfortunately, 'lockdown sceptic' generally came to mean 'implacably anti-lockdown in any and all circumstances'.
I realise this is part of how British voters think about their democracy, for better or worse. But one reason I prefer a German-/Scottish-style system to STV for Westminster is that, while either is better than FPTP, competitive constituency service could really exacerbate that point.
I think this is partly (by no means entirely) down to over-prioritising our constituency tradition. We place so much weight on MPs' roles as quasi-social workers and local champions that we actively make it difficult for them to carry out their legislative role as fully as I'd like.
I think you could also argue FPTP (accepting the problem with labelling the EC this way) interacts in a particularly toxic way with an open primary system plus institutionalisation of the big two parties. You’ve effectively maximised electoral insulation *and* minimised party-based guardrails.
Yes, the current 52-48 lead for the Union is buttressed for now by the fact that plenty of the 48 don’t think independence is a priority right this minute. That is no protection when political circumstances make it one again. The constitutional, structural challenges still need to be addressed.
10 years ago, I was filled with dread about what voters in Scotland might choose. The immediate fear is less today, but as a half-Scottish, half-English British citizen, I worry my side of the national question is equating reduced salience with reduced support and failing to fix the foundations.
Without making any comment on the contents of a book I haven’t read, someone really does need to just sit graphic designers down and clarify what the UK is and is not. I feel confident in assuming that Robert and Kishan’s recommendations do not include restoring the Union of 1801 across all Ireland.
I suspect one of the most important safeguards in liberal democracies is that the median elected representative is usually more conscious of the dangers of wielding state power too freely than the median voter - which says more about the voters than the elected representatives, but still matters.
Second moderately optimistic take on UK-EU member state bilaterals: there’s a specific issue if the UK tries to bilateralise EU competencies, but it’s quite normal for member states to have distinctive relationships with important neighbours and it’s not a conspiracy when the UK fosters them. 2/2
Moderately optimistic take on matters EU-UK: it’s actually not such a bad thing that there are asks on both sides where the opposite numbers are less keen, because it means both sides have things they could get out of a negotiation, and fretting on this point is overblown. 1/
But you can’t cross a border freely, as opposed to having the ability to cross it, if others can’t! If you have to distinguish, you have to verify.
