Here’s a little guessing game. It’s part of a photograph I took earlier this year. It was taken as an abstract so even the whole picture only includes a small part of the object but from that picture I think it’s pretty obvious what it is. Here’s a tight crop which I think is still pretty obvious but hey, I’ve seen it. Can you guess what it is?
The Telegraph reports that the Reform Scotland think tank recommends that Scotland should have its own Treasury and Chancellor and that the Barnett formula should be scrapped.
This will result in Scotland raising its own taxes but it is unclear at this stage how much money raised in England will be allocated for spending north of the border.
Reform Scotland also mention an English Parliament.
The report also argues that the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of the current devolution set-up is the lack of any body to represent specifically English matters, an omission that it claims is unusual.
But wait. Before you get too excited they conclude that:
…the workings of Westminster can be altered without setting up a new English parliament.
So, that would leave Scotland with its own parliament, its own executive, its own Chancellor, its own treasury and its own claim of right.
England, on the other hand, will have to languish in its own unusual position as a phantasm of a country.
Staying with youtube, here’s an excellent short version of Selling England by the Pound:
When I was a boy I was fanatical about what, in those days, we called Citadel miniatures. These days there referred to generally as Warhammer miniatures which are produced by the creative folks over at Games Workshop. My main joy was in the painting of the figures and the creation of dioramas. Hours and hours were spent with a small file (the miniatures were all metal in those days), glue, paint and other bits and bobs usually resulting in a final creation depicting unimaginable fantasy violence of one kind or another.
I still have every miniature I ever painted bar one which I gave away to a nephew. A Minotaur if I remember correctly. Wish I still had it.
This all brings me to the following video which I only ever saw the once on satellite TV. It’s for the Halo xbox 360 game franchise and it struck a real chord with me. I suppose the fact it struck a chord is down to a combination of my involvement with the creation of dioramas, my genuine affection for the Halo franchise, a love of good music and a healthy respect for the creativity and bravery of the people who took the commercial from conception to final production.
The following video is about one and a half minutes long. I think the one I saw on TV was less than half that.
The music, which took some tracking down, is called Raindrop and you can hear Vladimir Horowitz playing it here.
I agree with Tommy.
That list. That list of names. A list full of vile villainy and hatred. I wish I’d never laid eyes on it.
Handwriting is extremely difficult for The England Project boy. The difficulty comes as a result of the dyspraxia and it’s something that is not likely to get very much easier. That’s why we took the decision, in discussion with his school, to get him a laptop to use in the classroom and at home. Next year is a big one for him as it’s the start of what you might traditionally know as senior school and we wanted to get him practiced at using a laptop in comfortable surroundings before the big change.
The decision of which machine to get him turned out to be relatively straight forward. We chose the ASUS Eee PC. Small, long battery, well priced and reasonable performance.
The model we went for is the 1000 H running windows.
Here are a few of the photographs I took of the machine:
He’s being using it in class for a week or so now and so far so good. The interesting thing is how much more creative he has become in English. Previously his main goal was to reduce the amount of pain and difficulty he had to go through by choosing the shortest sentence he could to fulfill his assignment. Now he’s really beginning to think creatively, often rambling on about how his zombie army destroyed this or that opponent and how much of the Universe will ultimately fall under his jackbooted control.
Nice. Don’t know who he gets it from.
There are many things I have an intense fondness for in this country. Really high up on my list are the beers, my long term favorite being Old Peculier. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it on pump (that’s the price of living where I do) but my local supermarket usually has a few bottles in. I love the way Theakston describe it:
See: Deep dark ruby
Smell: Fruity, mellow, warming
Taste: Rich, full-bodied, malty
Mmmmmm, exactly.
Another thing I love is the attention people pay to naming beers. Old Peculier is a case in point but there are many, many others. Alfie names a few.
The spectacle of the Scottish Parliament debating ID cards, a policy that is reserved to Westminster, will have New Labour spitting teeth. With the backing of the Tories, Lib Dems and Greens the SNP are expected to win overwhelming support for their motion which condemns ID cards as an expensive invasion of civil liberties. A New Labour Officer remarked that the SNP should be bringing forward more important issues to debate.
What the officer doesn’t realise is that the story doesn’t end with the IDification of the UK. The SNP are squeezing extra value out of the debate by, effectively, flexing their political mandate across the bounds of their responsibilities. It’s all meaningless in terms of actually doing anything legislatively about the ID menace but in terms of pushing the boundaries that Westminster has imposed upon Scottish governance, it’s a great opportunity. It’s also exactly the kind of behaviour from the SNP that New Labour were dreading and expecting.
Via Gareth comes this appraisal by Robert Hazell in a speech to the Constitution Unit:
The fundamental difficulty is the sheer size of England by comparison with the rest of the UK . England with four fifths of the population would be hugely dominant. On most domestic matters the English parliament would be more important than the Westminster parliament. No federation has operated successfully where one of the units is so dominant. In the post-war German federal constitution of 1949, Prussia was deliberately broken up into five or six different states to prevent it being disproportionately large and dominating the new Germany . Although all federations have some units much larger than others, as a general rule no federal unit is greater than around one third of the whole, to avoid it dominating the rest. If this logic were accepted, England would need to be broken up into smaller units for a federal solution to work – something which is anathema to the Campaign for an English Parliament.
The argument is simple I suppose. There are too many people in England. A parliament of their own would result in decisions being made that are mandated by the majority of the UK population (excluding, of course, decisions that have been devolved to each nation). It’s like watching advocates of democracy suddenly realising that they have no real taste for democracy after all.
Read it here:
There is no hope for Britian. Civilisations dont die, they commit suicide. And before they commit suicide, they read and believe the Guardian.
Ouch. I mean really ouch.
I’ve been sitting here in bed, back perched up against some rather comfy pillows, contemplating this posting by Gareth in which he highlights a rather interesting concern of one of our elected representatives.
Robert Key MP, a Tory, is a man who is absolutely clear in his convictions. None of this skirting around the subject, no obfuscation, no slight of hand. He is the kind of man that shoots straight from the hip.
One thing that is absolutely clear is that we should make every possible attempt to ensure that this House remains the Parliament of England. I do not wish to see any other Parliament established anywhere calling itself an English Parliament. That would be appalling and would go against 1,000 years of our history.
Now we can, I think, take Robert’s concern in one of two ways. The first is that he thinks the current UK parliament is in fact an English parliament in its entirety or, which is more likely in my opinion, he thinks the UK parliament should be the only one allowed to represent England.
His “argument”, that a parliament of England would be appalling, is an impenetrable one. One might be tempted to ask questions like ”why?” and ”why is devolution not appalling for other UK nations?” I mean, national self determination is nothing new. In democratic circles it has historically been all the rage. Quite popular. Some have been known to see it as the right thing to do.
The convictions of our representatives in recent years tend to add substance to the very idea that national parliaments or assemblies are best placed to serve their populations. We see them drive national devolution forward in both Scotland and Wales but never on the national level for England. It’s always, always, always fundamentally down to the same reason. England, they believe, is too big and too populated to function correctly with a single parliament. England will either overshadow the other UK nations or the parliament will fail, due to the size of England, to deliver what it is tasked to deliver.
Many hundreds of years of history have indicated that, though not perfect, a single parliament for all UK nations hasn’t tended towards catastrophe so it is extremely difficult to believe that, as an argument, a single English parliament should be discounted because of the size of the country that it will be tasked with running.
No matter which way I have come at this it always seems to come down to fear. Fear that national representation for England as a nation will be damaging for the rest of the UK.
The real question that needs answering is does that fear bestow with it the right to deny the people of England the opportunity to decide for themselves?
I’m in bed. Have been since Thursday afternoon. This bed based adventure began soon after surgery to mend a hernia. It’s no fun I tell you. No fun at all.
Having said that, the pain killers really are an interesting experience. Strong. One minute I’m wide awake, the next I’m
I was all excited I really was. I just got an email from 10 Downing Street saying that the PM’s office had responded to this petition in which a number of signatories asked the Prime Minister to:
…stop saying ‘Our country’ or ‘This country’ when he is talking in relation to devolved issues such as health, education and housing. If Mr Brown is talking about English matters then he should say ‘England’, even if it is politically inconvenient for him to do so.
I mean, it’s not as if he doesn’t say Wales when talking about Wales or Scotland when talking about Scotland.
Anyhow, I went to read the response. One of the best so far:
We are sorry. The page you are looking for cannot be found. It might have been removed, had its name changed, or may be temporarily unavailable.
Deflated? Me?
Let’s hope that it appears. This is the link. I’m expecting all sorts of things about how English matters cannot be separated from the UK and that English policy is a matter of concern to all. Sure, why not…..
UPDATE: Well, the number 10 reply has appeared:
The Prime Minister has been elected by the people of Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath to represent them in the UK Parliament. As Prime Minister he heads the UK Government. It is in this capacity that he speaks when articulating his vision for the future of the country.
It’s like a matron talking down to a toddler. A toddler who wishes he had enough fridge magnets to spell out the word “disingenuous”.
I find myself enjoying a moment of satisfaction when I read about politicians who think that that people are far too cynical about politics and politicians these days. I particularly enjoy it when they point their fingers at the political blogosphere. On the one hand I understand why they might feel that way, on the other hand I see exactly why they themselves turn out to be their own worst enemies when it comes to apportioning blame for the causes of the cynicism.
Jacqui Smith, in a moment of calculated madness, says that she regularly has people coming up to her and saying that they simply can’t wait as long as she would like to get their own ID cards. I suppose that, if anything, illustrates the divide between the world that she lives in and the world that us cynical types live in. I mean, I’ve pounded the streets, spent weeks in pubs and generally lived my life going from one networking meeting to another and not once has anyone mentioned that they can’t wait for ID cards.
What they have mentioned, as normal and well adjusted people do in everyday conversation, are the things that actually concern them. The recession, the price of fuel and food, family, work and the fact that they feel so cynical about politics and politicians these days.
Apparently, and alarmingly, an English Parliament has been playing the roll of benefactor during these turbulent times:
THE REAL problem of the banking crisis is not that all our savings in Iceland’s Christmas club have gone all Ashley Cole; it’s that the capitulation of the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS, the twin pillars of the Scottish economy, have had to be bailed out by the English parliament.
Our work is done.
Patrick Ward’s photo series titled “Essentially English” is work a look.
I wonder how long it can go on for. We started a million miles away from where we are today and for much of that time we were branded as a fringe special interest group battling against self created phantasms. All made up. All ridiculous. All crazy nationalists. We were, to all intents and purposes, coming over all unnecessary.
The tactics used by our professional political opponents, the same ones who have been all to eager to offer to the other British nations what we want for ourselves, have ranged from utter contempt through to unfounded and hurtful accusations of racism.
Nevertheless, up the beach we came. Up the beach only to face a vicious and sustained barrage directed at us by the media. Uneducated, reactionary and incendiary ordnance landed all around in a way that can only be directed at the people of England … too busy, too disorganised, too fragmented at the start to do much more than gape in utter astonishment at the sheer volume of nonsense that we were expected to take …. in silence.
But the silence never quite came. Onward we went, picking up momentum and support along the way. Suddenly we were being treated to media on media incidents and politician on politician skirmishes. Of course the media showed more guts and were willing to stick to their guns far longer than the cowardly classes were.
And now we find ourselves on the actual battlefield. And if we look hard enough … there in the distance … we can see their bunker.
Tom Devine reflects upon the Union:
Why is there no English parliament? Why do Scottish MPs vote on English issues? Why should Gordon Brown, a Scot from a Scottish constituency, be allowed to rule Britain as Prime Minister?
You got me there.
Graham writes with the following regarding Andy Murray’s reported anti-English sentiments:
I noticed that your blog has been propagating the myth of Andy Murray’s anti-English sentiments. Would you therefore be so kind as to listen to this recent interview with Tim Henman which I hope will put the record straight.
You can listen to the short interview via youtube.com:
It’s suggested that the whole thing started off with a single light hearted interview where the reporters were cheekily baiting Andy regarding the performance of Scotland’s footballers, with Andy’s comments coming in response to the banter.
If this is the case, and I have no reason to believe at present that it is not, then an apology is required and given.
Search above vault entries only:
From the Front Rank,
To the Solent.
From the Solent,
To the Samizdat.
From the Samizdat,
To the Edge.
Then Across the Atlantic,
To Lileks.
And back again,
For the England Project.