Reform UK came second, pushing Labour into a distant third place. Plaid won 43 seats, Reform 34, Labour nine, the Conservatives seven, Greens two and Liberal Democrats one.
49 needed for a majority. PC plus L or C? How else can one be cobbled together?
PC plus R? R plus L plus C?
Doubt it. C could probably work with R, but none of the others could countenance it. It’ll probably be P + L and they’ll fight regularly with R trying to stop the complete nuttiness.
I don’t think there’s any equivalence between Reform and the AfD but our political class are going to pretend there is and try to build a firewall to keep Reform out. I think that will be a big mistake and will come back to bite them at the next elections.
That said, it might be in Reform’s interest not to get in to a coalition that will be difficult to manage and they will be seen as part of the failure.
BinND, I think you’re correct. If Reform play it cool and act as the main opposition to the nationalist loons, they will start to be seen as a ‘proper’ party, not just insurgents. Further they will come to be seen as the viable alternative to the nationalists in future elections.
Indeed this is how Reform fought their Welsh campaign. And PC fought theirs on the basis of stopping the “Trumpian” politics of Reform plus clearing out Labour – they put indy on the back burner, it was the other parties who kept bringing up that independence is literally in the PC constitution. The idea that either Reform or PC would even countenance a coalition for a microsecond is ridiculous.
Do PC actually advocate for Welsh independence (or “independence” within the EU)? Are they basically just another variation of Labour?
The fun thing with UK politics is that Reform are the only clear standout party. They’re the caff serving full English breakfast in a street full of places serving organic coffee and sourdough pastries to MILFs. The caff is the one making a profit because anyone that wants a hearty breakfast goes there.
If you look at the Greens, Labour, Lib Dems, PC and SNP, there’s tons of overlap. The PC manifesto prioritises: pissing more money on the NHS, pissing more money on childcare, “job creation”, more school spending, tackling “child poverty”, more choo choos, more eco, everyone is horrible to asylum seekers, Other than a bit of daffodil shagging, it’s what Labour wants.
The SNP are the same load of stuff, except for a bit of haggis shagging. The LDs are the same stuff, only with that veneer of being the sort of people that visit National Trust places on a weekend. The Greens are the same sort of stuff, but like they’re on ecstacy and tripping balls.
If you’re going to split from the UK and just do the same shit Labour does, why even bother? Why bother being LDs instead of just joining Labour?
Because if you join Labour you’re just part of the background. LD has their own bureaucracy, and some would rather be a large frog in a small pond.
The Buffoon certainly fits that image. Definitely a bullfrog, though I just got a vague image of Jabba the Hutt too writing this…
I agree Reform stick out distinctively, and this is reflected in polling showing them as highly divisive – voters tend to either love or hate them. The mainstream parties aim more for the floating or median voter, whereas Reform’s current strategy is more insurgent. The fact more voters hate Reform than love them doesn’t necessarily prevent Reform winning a GE, but that relies on the opposition vote being split by voters refusing to vote tactically. So ironically if all the other parties really are pretty much the same (at least in the eyes of the people who vote for them) then it would be bad news for Reform.
But putting Reform aside, parties that want the UK to break up are not really equivalent to unionist parties. Parties that want to rejoin the EU (or at least the Common Market) are not equivalent to those that prefer (maybe not deep in their hearts but at least so as not to repulse certain voters) to stick with Brexit or even go further and activately want to leave the jurisdiction of the ECtHR. You don’t need to pull out a microscope to see difference in social policies or tax policies either.
I won’t deny there’s too much group think but I reckon at most points in British history it’s possible to see similarities between parties based on them all following what they saw as “the spirit of our times”. A lot of big changes in the past had surprisingly bipartisan support (and Brexit is an even weirder case where the electorate opted for something that produced bipartisan horror). And at the same time there were people on the back benches or minor parties who were decrying the consensus.
I reckon it’s easier to see our era as unusually consensus-bound if you’re one of the people who disagrees with the current consensus, and especially if you look back on Thatcher-vs-Foot levels of partisan disagreement as “normal” (which ignores that Thatcher had her wets to deal with and Foot had the Labour right). But within the last 20 years we’ve definitely had periods where the “uniparty” effect was far stronger than it is right now. I know Farage catalysed a lot of the changes that led up to this, but put him to one side for a moment and think about Badenoch and Polanski, their personalities and politics. The fact either of these people are party leaders who have a route (viable even if unlikely) to 10 Downing Street would be a system shock to someone who just woke up from a coma.
The uniparty was never that strong. We can see this in the 2010 results, where the voters got the message that Cameron was going to be more Blair and a lot of them shifted to UKIP. I don’t even think UKIP was people desperate to leave the EU, but just that well, if the EU is one of 5 things you care about and the Conservatives are promising to do 0 of them, might as well vote UKIP.
Cameron was the main catalyst, destroying the broad church of the Conservatives that allowed for posh shire Tories, metrosexual Londoners and industrial liberals in the provinces. I like Farage, but UKIP were not going places until Cameron came along and basically told right-wingers that they were going to be Blairites now and to fuck off. The Conservatives have now lost the industrial liberals to Reform. They might be able to hold somewhere in the Cotswolds, but places like Swindon, Wellingborough, Worcester, they can’t win now. You lose 15-20% of your vote, you’re done for.
Yeah and I also agreed with your other post about two-party FPTP starting to break up once the parties centralised more and stopped choosing candidates that better suited local people, even if it meant having MPs in their fringes who didn’t sit well with what the leadership were trying to convey. The ironic thing is that both Labour and Conservatives did this in an effort to “detoxify” their brands. Now probably the Trotskyists deserved to be dumped and there were Tory old duffers who said politically unwise things about ethnic minorities and gays, but both parties have gone so far down this road that they’ve rendered areas of the country unwinnable that they used to do well in.
Nutty MPs saying daft things are an easy target of ridicule or attack ads but having diversity of thought made it easier for someone to look at a party, even one they didn’t like on the whole, and find some voices they agreed with on a host of issues. Voters are much more likely to think “they’re all the same!” now. The more bland and uniform you make the party, the more the toxicity of the leadership (which comes inevitably if you ever make it into power and start making decisions which tick people off, or simply outstay your “moment” like Corbyn did) starts to rub off on the rest of them.
“Nutty MPs saying daft things are an easy target of ridicule or attack ads but having diversity of thought made it easier for someone to look at a party, even one they didn’t like on the whole, and find some voices they agreed with on a host of issues.”
The important thing about diversity of thought is that you get policies and leaders balanced towards the whole country. What do people in Devizes, Swindon, Hull, London and Canterbury care about? Coastal, rural, modern and older places have a different perspective. You want MPs who understand those places and can bring their power to select leaders and policies that reflect the whole country. And the best way to do that is to have local constituency offices selecting them.
If you have MPs all cut from the same central party cloth, maybe they all come from thinking trains are great. Which might reflect London, but doesn’t reflect Devizes and Swindon.
There’s a lot of Conservative policies like this. Lots of gays and Muslims in London, so, have to look after those votes. Well, OK, but out in Devizes, not so much.
And it’s where Reform have found fertile ground. It’s speaking the language of Wiltshire or non-metro Warwickshire or Gateshead. Cancel trains, make driving better. it’s also why they’re almost nowhere in large cities.
And there’s the whole Presidentialisation of the political process. Nobody said they were voting for Foot or Thatcher, they were voting Labour or Conservative. But started voting For Blair, and by the time people were voting For Corbyn or For Boris it complete. In last week’s local election I was getting leaflets leading on STOP FARAGE!!!! In a ***** LOCAL ELECTION!!!!
I’d say the Greens stand out too. Not for their founding “eco nut” credentials but for their ultra left wing economic and social policies that would syphon all the money from their hated Boomers then expect to go back for more once they had pissed it away on futile ventures due to their complete lack of numeracy and failure to grasp that the laws of physics are for all practical purposes immutable.
In my Council ward, a Green retard (he was SEND) was elected.
This ward used to be ‘rock solid’ Suffolk market town Tory; but…the demographics are changing – more coloureds, more renters, more ‘refugees’ from high Cambridge rents/house prices, more younger people, and more oldies dying off…
“advocate for”? If every bugger is going to start speaking American English we might as well give up and apply to be the 51st state. Not that they’d have us, of course.
The upside is you would get your guns back.
That shows what’s wrong with the country today. Of course we shouldn’t apply to be the 51st state: we should take back control of the rebellious colonies that declared independence in 1776.
But my dear chap that is exactly what Keir Starmer is trying to do.
Cute. But our guns aren’t Kentucky rifles anymore.
Plus, we have a real military for backup.
The rest of the world speak American English and we get the benefit of being able to speak our native tong “almost” anywhere in the world and be understood. Having to accept a few odd phrases and pronunciations (except bouy) is a small price to pay and much easier than learning Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish and French.
Meet with, arrive to, whom, please within my remaining lifetime let them declare independence and call it Americanish.
Independence “within Europe” is right there in the party’s constitution. https://www.partyof.wales/constitution
However they view it as a second-term project so it’s a plan for 2030+. Presumably to avoid scaring off voters. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9958227r38o
When these bastard politicians actually learn some basic truths, they might just become electable.
Those truths?
That the vast majority of white British people want to be left alone to get on with whatever they do. Whatever their so-called “class”, most want a job, low taxation, a small state, financial stability, efficient working services (emergency, transport, military etc) and wholly manageable LEGAL immigration.
I’m not holding my breath.
Small government doesn’t seem to be what the people of Taffrica want, half of them, or at least those who have jobs, work in the public sector.
But can “positions” in the tax-payer funded public sector be viewed as real jobs…?
For their recipients, the salaries and gold-plated pensions can be viewed as real, reliable income, no matter what they do, burnished with the righteous halo of “working for the public.” Lanyards signify moral purity, don’tcha know.
But can “positions” in the public sector be viewed as real jobs…?
I hadn’t realised that “positions” in the public sector could be viewed as real jobs…
I hadn’t realised that positions in the public sector could be viewed as real jobs…
I hadn’t realised that positions in the public sector could be viewed as real jobs.
Are employed in the public sector. It’s a mystery how much actual work is done!
More a mystery that ANY work is done.
As I write (10pm Saturday) counting is still ongoing in Lewisham. Highlands & Islands got their results over a day ago, and I suspect their logistics are a bit more challenging than in outer London. I can only assume those counting the votes are all WFH.
Hm. If the counters are all WFH then the votes are not being counted where they were cast and we know what that means …
“Whatever their so-called “class”, most want … a small state”
Not in my lifetime they haven’t, not as far as I can see. As for low tax, they tend to want low tax for themselves and high tax for everyone else.
As I often say “Robbing Peter to pay Paul” tends to be very popular with the Pauls of the world. Not so much for the Peters. What most of the Pauls fail to grasp is that they are actually Peters.
If you look at the breakeven point of how much tax you need to be paying and what public services you need to not be using, I reckon it can work the other way round too. You do need to be quite a high earner these days, and even that could be wiped out from kids in school/nursery or getting anything expensive done on the NHS. Plenty of people feel like they’ve paid all their taxes and NI and are therefore net contributors, but are really net recipients. If they see the nation’s finances don’t add up, their gut reaction is that’s because “the rich aren’t paying their taxes like I do” rather than “the government is spending a lot”.
But this isn’t all a zero-sum game of robbers and receivers. Almost everybody in society would be a lot better off if governments focused as seriously on removing barriers to economic growth as they claim to do.
Yup, sadly.
Even “the vast majority … want to be left alone to get on with whatever they do” probably isn’t correct. Most people want the State to stop interfering in whatever they like to do, but to come down like a ton of bricks on whatever dastardly things their neighbours are getting up to.
One of the persistent lies that I have seen, is that Labour held Manchester and its hinterland thanks to the popularity of Burnham.
Labour were massacred in Manchester. Only half the seats were up and Labour lost 4 out of 5 they contested, most to the Greens.
Reform is hoovering up both in Greater Manchester and in West Yorks.
In the rest of Lancashire a large corpus of ‘independent’ councillors have taken root. I leave that to the reader to speculate what sort they are.
R should have nothing to do with coalitions anywhere, except perhaps with C. Best to keep clean hands before the GE.
There’s always the possibility, now PC isn’t competing with Labour over which can be more socialist, some pragmatism might seep in. PC’s ambition will be to preserve & improve its lead. For that it needs to show results.
The terminally damaged Conservative and Labour parties have just haemorrhaged nearly 2,000 council seats in England.
If there was ever an opportunity for the rational compassionate adult (as they see themselves despite their gormless leader) Lib Dem’s to welcome in a sizeable proportion of those disillusioned voters and take a giant step forward this was it.
In reality they made a net gain of just 151 of those seats, less than 1/12th of what was available.
This along with the marked underperformance of the Islamogreens, who the media reckon will be fighting out future election with the evil fascist Reformers, has been my major takeaway from the results.
Yes, the media have kept very quiet about the failure of the Greens to live up to all the press hyperbole.
PC have spent many years aligned with L
Reform will keep it’s hands out of this mangle and concentrate on influencing genuine change in the area it controls
Wales is a basket case
Apparently a load of research money will be coming their way, I bet that can be usefully deployed
I understand that, like the SNP, PC will start a campaign for independence. Personally, I think this is a good thing, as long as every tax payer, and I mean every tax payer, in the UK is allowed to vote as well.
PC don’t mean it, any more than the Jocks do. More freebies and blame the English.
I don’t understand why people think the SNP aren’t serious about independence. If they had won the indyref then Scotland would be an ‘independent’ country by now (ie another EU vassal). And if they had won a majority in the Scottish Parliament this time then they would be pushing for another referendum ASAP while all three of Labour, Conservatives and Reform are such toxic brands in Scotland (outside the minority of voters that turn to them) that not just the current UK government but any likely replacement is deeply unpopular.
At the last Indyref it clearly helped the unionist cause that the Cameron and Osborne were seen as temporary phenomenon brought about by the financial crisis and it was widely assumed Labour would sweep back to power in Westminster soon – not that Labour were beloved in Scotland, but they were better tolerated than the Tories. Right now the same kind of anti-Tory vitriol is developing for Labour, and while Reform have won some seats their brand is is divisive and has more haters than lovers.
They’re not serious because they’re essentially Kevin The Teenager, whining “it’s not fair” whilst expecting continued support from mum & dad. This perfectly suits the SNP nomenklatura career structure.
None of our so-called “devolved nations” can possibly stand as independent for the simple reason that they are drastically underproductive, with political and social structures that encourage more of the same. Can you imagine any of these places becoming Luxembourg, San Marino, Andorra, Monaco?
Whether it’s a good idea or not is different to whether they’re serious about it. The Republic of Ireland was also poor, especially without the more industrial north. It took a lifetime for them to catch up with British living standards. Admittedly the Republican attitude was “independence or death” rather than “independence or subsidies”, but there had been plenty of Irish nationalists before then who wanted independence but – so long as that wasn’t happening – pressed for more British aid.
Most countries can’t become Luxembourg or Monaco. They might take being Finland or Estonia and they’d certainly take being Ireland or Denmark.
If the SNP had won the indyref then they’d have had to deal with businesses clearing off with the uncertainty, and would have taken a major hit to their popularity when it became clear the Brussels subsidies were not going to make up for the lack of Westminster so the cloth was going to need to be cut differently – public service cuts and so on. The whole political ecosystem would have been reconfigured as the SNP would likely have split between its left and right wings (they’re a surprisingly broad church) and other parties chose whether to accept the referendum result or campaign for rejoining the UK. Big choices would need to be made about euro adoption. No doubt some petty acts of fealty to Brussels would be required to get Spain (and any other country that wanted to show its separatists that independence is not an easy option) to accept Scotland as an EU member state.
It would be undoubtedly a hard few years with an uncertain future. But having won their referendum, the SNP would not have stuck their arms up halfway through the process and said “I’m sorry this is all too hard, we give up”. If the party leadership tried that on, the lower ranks would have lynched them, or at least replaced them and carried on. Yes the SNP look a lot like all the other gooey right-on groupthinkers, but on this one issue they are True Believers. That’s partly why they never seem to have thought through all the things that would have gone south, sometimes literally, upon independence and preferred to hope somehow something would turn up to save them (last time round their hopes seemed fastened to “more oil”, this time it might be wind or whisky*). Sometimes there are moody teenagers who run away from home and never come back, despite subjecting themselves to unnecessary deprivation in doing so.
* Or water. Lots of SNPers know that England has a shortage of fresh water and believes Scotland has a trump card there. They don’t understand it’s largely due to the English refusal to build reservoirs and many have mangled the fact Scotland has most of the UK’s fresh water due to the lochs with “Scotland supplies 90% of England’s fresh water”, lunacy because the water system is actually fairly local since pumping water long distance is prohibitively expensive. But on social media you’ll see that claim repeated incessantly. I think the SNP higher-ups are well aware that it’s rubbish but they seem happy to let their supporters spout the water claim nevertheless.
Our dumb politicians in westminster would not accept an out vote and carry on bribing the sweaties with English cash long after the fait accompli.
Getting water from Scotland to southern England shouldn’t be prohibitively expensive. The distance is about the same as the three acqueducts feeding Los Angeles. Plus there is a lot less topography to deal with.
Gotta get the fucker built first. There’s your problem.
Long-distance water transfers could be done within the UK and there’s been research into it. The official technical position is that regional solutions are significantly cheaper and that inter-regional solutions pose ecological problems. See the Environment Agency report from 2006: Do we need large-scale water transfers for South-East England? Which claims the answer is no. https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20090205171641/http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/static/documents/Research/grid_1464452.pdf
The practical position is that it’s a very sensitive issue politically, especially when London loses so much of its water due to leaks (which makes it harder to justify “stealing” resources from elsewhere). There is still anger in Wales about flooding the village of Capel Celyn in the 1960s to create a reservoir for Liverpool. But the idea of using Welsh or Scottish water does pop up again from time to time, eg https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-62659762 and https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-17078727
You’d trust an Environment Agency report?
I did say this was the “official technical position”, I wasn’t vouching for its accuracy 🙂
But big infrastructure projects are unpopular and anything that “steals” regional resources to give to somewhere else is going to magnify that. So even if it is more affordable than claimed, I don’t expect to see it happen. Too hot a potato.
Tbh I haven’t seen any serious private business proposal to build a “national grid for water” which you might think there would be if it was a profitable proposition. Everybody seems to agree SE England lacks enough reservoirs, even left-wing academics who think our wet island should be adopting Australian methods to reduce domestic water use, so on the list of cost-effective things to do about it I reckon that probably ought to come before starting some infrastructure megaproject that with current British efficiency will be finished in the 2060s. https://theconversation.com/englands-water-crisis-needs-more-than-just-new-reservoirs-heres-what-will-help-257922
And it’s all downhill.
Certainly looks like it on a map!
There is the minor point that water is already flowing from the Lake Distric to Manchester and Liverpool and … – and has been for well over sixty years; on the east side of the country the Lielder Reservoir in Northumberland is supplying water as far south as Teesside. A less minor point is that water from the Highlands (there’s much less spare water in southern Scotland) would have to be pumped down ro the Central Lowlands, then up over the souther upland and the Cheviot Hills before starting a 300 mile journey down England to London and the south-east.
A desalination plant might be cheaper ….
There’s no particular reason Jockistan or the Taffs couldn’t be successfully independent. The Baltic states are small & they haven’t done so bad. But their politics is poisoned by their relationship to England.
A walk through Dundee last year convinced me that Scotland’s urban population is now almost irredeemably emasculated, enervated and corrupt. It was like watching Trainspotting. You can’t make a viable country with a population in that state.
The Baltics have/had masculine men, energy, and vast economic opportunity having thrown off Communism.
GDP per capita is about 40% lower in Estonia and Lithuania than in the UK, worse for Latvia. The Balts are a lot richer than under communism and have a plenty of very handsome architecture but under the surface they are a long way from western European levels of development – even by Scottish standards. EU membership brought great opportunities but the right to free movement has caused massive depopulation. Latvia has lost about 30% of its population, Lithuania about 20%. For all their problems, Wales and Scotland haven’t been shedding inhabitants like that. But the Balts are still there, still viable, and still see their “independence” (such as it is) as a success: they prefer Brussels to Moscow. If their story is accepted as a qualified success, I doubt a breakaway Scotland and Wales would fare much worse. Even if I wouldn’t want to sign up to the ride myself…
It depends on who leaves. If the russian-speakers who provide Russia with a grievance and an excuse leave then the balts are better off. If it’s the native speakers going to the EU that’s bad.
Mostly the Russian speakers cleared off during the early stages of independence though there’s still enough of them to be a problem. The wave of migration to the EU cut more heavily into the ethnic Balts, unfortunately.
I don’t see it. The Baltics will have their people return as their economies improve, just as Poland did. Try to find a Polish plumber or builder now: they’ve all gone home. Plus, since the Poles first turned up here, Remitly has been invented.
What we still have, is Romanians. And Bulgarians. And Albanians.
Yeah, even a lot of Romanians have gone back – not that it’s a rich country yet by any means but the wage differentials have fallen sharply, especially if adjusted for the cost of living. So hopefully the Balts make a return. But I have to say it isn’t looking very rosy. Their populations aren’t showing great signs of recovery if you look at the figures.
Poland didn’t suffer anything like the same kind of population collapse as the Balts did, and it’s now been so many decades that the chances of families having settled down permanently in their new homes is getting stronger. Kids who grew up abroad aren’t so keen to move “back” to a place they never lived. Also that scale of emigration of working age people, especially younger ones with more relevant language skills (oldies got taught Russian which isn’t so useful in the EU, and anyway older people tend to be more settled and less mobile for work opportunities) has utterly screwed up their age pyramid, which has the obvious negative economic consequences. Which in turn makes it a less desirable place to return to.
There’s a surprising number of Poles with “family” in the UK.
Post WW2 a lot of the Free Polish Army decided UK was a better bet then Stalin.
You sometimes see clusters of names near old WW2 airfields.
There’s a Polish bit of the cemetery in Perth for example & they send a contingent over every year to do the honours.
Indeed, caused a ruffle in the post-WW2 Polish community when all the EU accession wave came over. The established community didn’t always see eye to eye with them on things (different social mores, opinion on the Polish Government in Exile and so on), and it had a big effect on things like the Polish cultural clubs and the Polish language newspapers in Britain (two used to be distributed in supermarkets near me, not sure how nationwide they were).
General Stanisław Sosabowski ended up working at the CAV Electrics factory in Acton with no military pension. He’d fought the Russians in WWI for Austria-Hungary, then joined the Polish Army during their war for independence from the Soviets, fought the Nazis in the Siege of Warsaw, escaped his PoW camp to reach Paris then London, had to calm his mutinous troops after they were told they couldn’t be sent to help the Warsaw Uprising (Stalin banned the use of Soviet airfields for the potential drop), got parachuted into Arnhem despite his reservations about Market Garden (Gene Hackman portrayed him in A Bridge Too Far). After that Stalin applied pressure to get him removed as commanding officer. Fortunately after the war he managed to snuggle his wife and son (who’d lost an eye fighting in the Warsaw Uprising) to London.
The other Polish generals who fought with the western Allies were also denied pensions after their service. Lt Gen Władysław Anders fought for the Russians in WWI, then against the Soviets for Polish independence, against the Nazis and then against the Soviets during their carve-up of Poland, captured by the NKVD, tortured at Lubyanka, allowed to form his own Polish army after Barbarossa, deported with his army via Iran to join the Western Allies, and ended up in the Italian campaign fighting at Monte Cassino and Bologna. Post-war, he stayed in London working for the government in exile. And Lt Gen Stanisław Maczek fought against Italy for Austria-Hungary, against the Ukrainians and the Soviets for Poland, then as a tank commander against the Nazis in Poland, having evacuated via Hungary fought them again in the Battle of France, and finally – having evacuated again via Vichy France, North Africa and Portugal to reach the UK – in Operation Overlord, fighting to close the Falaise pocket. After all that he ended up as a hotel barman in Scotland – dying aged 102 in Edinburgh in 1994.
All of them would have been executed by Stalin.
That’s largely because a lot of the Polish Air Force came over here and helped win the Battle of Britain.
For the air field memorials certainly. The Polish Navy also evacuated to the UK. But most of the Poles who came over were with the land forces.
Some of the Polish army escaped overland to France and formed “Sikorski’s Army”, much of which eventually reached the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Army_in_France_(1939%E2%80%931940)
Another large contingent was raised by Władysław Anders in the USSR after Barbarossa, but unlike the “Polish Army in the East” that stayed with the Red Army (and became the army of communist Poland) this formation was loyal to the government in exile and was allowed to evacuate via Iran and join up with the Western Allies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders%27_Army
John77 (and anyone else who hasn’t seen it) I heartily recommend the movie “Hurricane”, about RAF 303 Squadron, probably more recognised as the Polish pilots asking Barry Foster to “repeat please” in The Battle of Britain.
There is ( or was ) such a large Polish population in Balham, south London.
There is a very pretty Catholic domed church by the station where they go. It became famous during Covid because Plod raided it during a service.
Wales would be in a worse position than Scotland due to the transport situation between north and south – so much of Wales is more connected to England than to other parts of Wales. If Wales becomes an EU member state (I don’t want to say that’s the same as true “independence”) and England isn’t part of the customs union then that’s not a great situation for Wales to be in. But it’s survivable. It took several generations before the Republic of Ireland became less dependent on the UK for trade (we’re only about 9% of their exports now) and the Balts do relatively little trade with Russia or Belarus.
PC do want to work on more north-south transport infrastructure and Brussels would likely pick up some of the tab if Wales joined the EU.
Trade? Ireland’s all about extremely low corp tax. Genius. Watch what happens if Cardiff or Edinburgh tries to compete.
Wales is really two countries. The bit along the M4/South Wales Main Line, and the rest of it.
That bit that takes in Newport, Swansea, Cardiff is really like England. Geographically, it’s in Wales, but it’s connected more to Bristol than to Harlech. People living in Newport commute to Bristol. I’ve been to Wales for concerts and to buy furniture and cars. You’ll rarely hear Welsh spoken, and no-one is hostile, and the excellent links means that those towns and cities are full of insurance businesses, call centres, technology companies.
That part is also relatively well off, could sustain itself, but also, knows where its interests lie. They trade a lot with the West of England.
The rest of it is farming, tourism, retired and unemployed people. And that can’t support itself. It’s still in a hangover from the era of mining. It’s full of morons that keep wanting Welsh language, and are happy to live on benefits. You’d need to massively depopulate these areas to make Wales add up.
In reply to all of the above, these are things the Jocks & Taffs would have to work out for themselves. That’s the point of being independent. Maybe they’d have to change the way they go on. Maybe they’d have to accept a lower standard of living. Independence comes at a price. If independence is important enough it has to be paid.
At the moment what they want is English subsidised independence. Which isn’t independence, is it?.
Precisely. They want to be able to buy dope with daddy’s credit card.
BIS,
What are they going to do better/different? What’s the plan?
There’s no common geographical, economical thing about Wales that means they need to be governed different to the rest of the UK. We aren’t oppressing them. It’s not like Ireland where we were absolutely trying to replace the Paddies and independence was understandable.
Well, the vote would sorta indicate otherwise.
Haven’t done the count for this one but in every other flippin election for the past 70 years, the unionist parties as a group get more votes than the Nasties.
I always take the whining about England subsidising Scotland with a pinch of salt as
a) Its the prosperous SE of England thst subsidises everywhere else.
b) When revenue was firehosing out of the N Sea for 40 years the principled objections to subsidies were remarkably well muffled.
If Wales, or Scotland, obtain independence, what are they going to do for money? As well as Scotland losing the Balfour agreement, they will both have to pay their share of the national debt using money that will no longer be underwritten by the Bank of England. I doubt that the EU would accept them as members under those circumstances. An interesting question.
There’s no way the EU could accept an independent Wales or Scotland as members under their own fiscal rules. But, as we’ve seen, those rules can be readily discarded if there’s a chance to have a pop at England.
An independent Scotland would be an economic basket case, but an independent Wales would make it look like S Korea.
The EU is currently enlarging into the Balkans and those states are poorer than Scotland and Wales. The Copenhagen Criteria to join the EU aren’t very limiting on the economic side. It comes down to having a “functional market economy” – you can be poor but you can’t have an Eastern Bloc command economy. It’s the criteria for joining the euro that are stricter re debt limits but you don’t need to meet those before joining the EU itself. https://enlargement.ec.europa.eu/enlargement-policy/conditions-membership_en
There’s also the Stability and Growth Pact (one of those clever bureaucratic things whose name tells you what it doesn’t achieve) which applies to all EU members and in principle requires them to take steps to get their deficit and debt into shape in the medium term, but if you’re not a euro member then it doesn’t really carry any weight – euro members can, in principle, be sanctioned for violations. https://economy-finance.ec.europa.eu/economic-governance-framework/stability-and-growth-pact_en
You summarise why its lunacy.
I havent seen any coherent plan, but that’s because they’re not adults.
Amusingly, IF the Nasties got their way, the only way Scotland doesn’t become poorer than Albania is by being absolutely rabid about what the state can spend.
Doing a Milei on steroids & channeling Cowperthwaite is the only long term route to success, but most nasties would rather emulate Zimbabwe than admit free markets work.
I question whether you have ever been to Albania.
Nope, I can look up stats online though, lots of Albanias current disposable comes from the UK through murky channels I’m told.
As an aside, did you know that Scotalnd currently builds the smallest by M2 houses in Europe bar Albania.
Scottish elections are weird because of the constituency vs regional votes but you’re right that the unionist parties did better than the pro-indy parties again.
Constituency votes: SNP 38% + Scottish Greens 2% = 40% versus Lab 19% + Reform 16% + Con 12% + LD 11% =58%.
Regional votes: SNP 27% + Scottish Greens 14% = 41% versus Reform 17% + Lab 16% + Con 12% + LD 9% = 54%.
Lots of minor parties on sub-1% that I’ll let someone else crunch the numbers for but I think they very roughly split half indy and half unionist anyway.
In fact it’s a better result for unionists than 2021, which was very close and had pro-indy slightly ahead in the regional lists:
Constituency votes: SNP 48% + Scottish Greens 1% = 49% versus Lab 22% + Con 22% + LD 7% =50% (due to rounding).
Regional votes: SNP 40% + Scottish Greens 8% + Alba (Salmond) 2% = 50% versus Con 23% + Lab 18% + LD 5% + All For Unity (Galloway) 1% = 47%.
Yes, but the cost of the wall to keep the porridge eaters out.
Sir Keir Starmer has named Gordon Brown a trade adviser to Downing Street
As non sequiturs go, that’s one of the finest I’ve ever seen.
Well, Gordon, what shall we do with our gold reserves? And while we’re at it, can you think of a good way of taxing pension funds?
And FFS stop doing that!
No I didn’t mean wipe it on the armchair.
Oh God, you just ate it.
My thoughts exactly PiP CL, and I shouted at the telly this morning when Stephen Dixon on GBNews said he thought Brown had been a “good chancellor”.
These people have no idea what they are talking about do they?
In 30 Rock, part of Jack Donaghy’s strategy for NBC was “make it 1997 again through science or magic”. With apologies for the Americanism, that is basically Starmer’s strategy.
Unfortunately this isn’t true
No it isn’t – instead they will rush to con as may immigrants as they can into their boats at £2,000 each before 2029
John Swinney, SNP leader, has just said: We will exclude Reform from government…. want an inclusive government…
“Inclusive” = anti-white?
Yes, but the hilarious thing is that apart from a few urban areas Scotland is hideously white.
Its so hideously white there are a notable number of folks who’ve moved/retired from the more vibrant & diversified bits of England & Khans London.
Be funny if Scotland is seen as a refuge for the Bufton Tuftons when dhimmitude really gets going dahn sarf.
Oh yes…. This’ll be par for the course….
Any and every possible coalition, however insane, To Keep Reform Out.
Democracy™ in action….
Make Reform victims of perceived in justice. It didn’t work for the Afd or the RN, but real stupid tyranny hasn’t been tried.
In my borough the Greens failed by one place to get a majority.
I think the overarching lesson of this election is that almost the entire electorate, in its own ways, has rejected rule by Human Rights lawyers. The EU/Blairite project to legislate a new socialist Human Rights utopia into existence is comprehensively failing. Muslims want sharia; the far left wants its traditional, fun authoritarian mayhem; the bien pensant middle class wants to be “nice”; the rest of us want to be left alone with our country back.
No-one wants Starmerism.
Sadly we haven’t voted the Human Rights Lawyers out. They continue to rule us in many devious ways including what we are able to say and perhaps think.
If anything Starmers potential departure could lead to one more practicing in the field
Agree. I merely report what the electorate’s expressed preference appears to be.
REFORMER. You no say Daddy me Snow me, I’ll go blame
A licky boom-boom down.
Meanwhile, the race-grifting diversity hire who runs the South Bank Centre has compared the Reform win to the Holocaust.
Send them back.