I'm not even sure the SNP would continue to exist post-independence (at least not in the same form) there do seem to be some fairly serious policy differences amongst the group held together by the overarching goal of independence.

I think you would see a shakeup in the parties following independence and it would probably be the best thing to ever happen to Labour. Part of the issue seems to be that the opposition parties are either so moribund (or in the case of the Tories having to cater to the nutjob element) that there really isn't much political talent and brain matter outside the SNP (and you could say the same about some in the SNP too!)

As long as any line is drawn North of Hartlepool I'm OK with it really

As a Scot I vote for Stonehenge.

Aaah yes, so Northumberland can be ignored from Holyrood instead of being ignored from Westminster...

Some days I think it might be a good idea for us, as a county, to ask Denmark if we can join them.

I'd rather be ignored by a left of centre national government that Bojo's mob to be honest.

The problem with that is that all the OTHER people who caused the problems would come with you. The clever move would be to move to Denmark, but unfortunately the idiots who would never want to do such a thing took that right away from us.

The UK needs to be laser-focused on recovery from the pandemic and not Scottish independence discussions, Michael Gove says

Former Conservative Secretary of State for Scotland, David Mundell, has been talking to Radio 4's The World This Weekend.

He says people want to see the governments within the UK working together and they don't want conflict.

Asked if the election results mean Scotland does not want to be governed by Boris Johnson, he says he does not accept that premise because people voted to stay in the union in a referendum in 2014.

He says it is not within the gift of the Scottish government to try to hold another independence referendum.

The SNP's Jeane Freeman, who serves as the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Health, has been talking to Radio 4.

She denies her party's failure to get a majority in the elections to the Scottish Parliament takes the shine off its victory.

Freeman says the electoral system is different in Scotland, so "the idea you can get a majority in a system designed not to do that is a big ask".

She says the SNP has a "moral authority based on those results" for the Scottish Parliament to decide if and when it wants to hold an independence referendum.

I'm not sure exactly what that might consist of. Presumably nothing derived from the indigenous cuisines, herbs, and spices of the various British controlled territories over the past few centuries.

What does that leave? Overcooked roasts and veggies? Eel pies? Kippered herring?

Whatever it is it is bound to be boring.

Which, I suppose, is fitting. Somehow.

I'm not sure if tea can actually be considered British, since it was brought to Europe by Dutch traders and had never been seen in England before the middle of the 17th century.

Link

That's not a wall, that's a trench!

Chicken tikka masala.

There has been a video on twitter of two Hartlepool voters explaining why they voted Conservative. They blamed Labour for the closure of a local police station and the loss of local hospital services to another larger hospital outside the constituency.

I get their unhappiness at the apparent failure of the local MP to save local services, but it is rather odd they have switched to voting for the party that closed those services.

It may help Labour to try and educate more people about how politics works.

*Found the video

https://twitter.com/resophonick/stat...88617449005058

potato? New World surely?

It used to be a wall.

Talk Radio had one giving one of his reasons for voting Tory as under a Labor govt they only had one Food Bank and now they have Seven.

Oh FFS!

I used to work into the Teesside acute hospitals in my job before I moved up here and that thing about moving services from Hartlepool General to James Cook in Middlesbrough has been going on since around the turn of the century.

HGH is a ******* pig's ear of a site and always has been. Ditto North Tees in Stockton and Middlesbrough General. James Cook is the only one on a site which allows for service expansion and modernisation without demolishing the existing buildings. Services at all sites expanded and improved under the last Labour governents and have been hacked since 2010: which is, of course, all Labour's fault, as they clearly control the DoH and the commissioners (the knowledge that most folk have about commissioning of health services is pretty much non-existent).

If we’re going that far back then presumably Italian cookery is not allowed tomato.

And the hospitals are so full! Not like under Labour!

Despair is fine at this point.

Middlesbrough General has completely disappeared, the site was completely redeveloped as new housing years ago.
The ENT hospital has gone from Middlesbrough too. It is now an Aldi. It's main building frontage was supposed to be retained in any redevelopment but Aldi persuaded the council it should be completely flattened so their standard building could be put up. The main portico was rebuilt as a pedestrian entrance to the car park.

West Lane Mental Health Hospital was closed in 2019 when it was rated as inadequate but has just re-opened as the Acklam Road Hospital, for some reason has been taken over by the Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear Health trust.

Yeah, I was based at West Lane for a time (community base for some specialist CAMHS) until I left in 2003.

As to why (my old employer) CumbriaNTW took over some of those services...Well, there has been a tendency in North East MH services for Newcastle ('cos Newcastle is the core of that trust) to dominate services since I can't remember when and I trained in Newcastle in the '80s - it's the big medical school and has dominated nurse, psychology and OT training in the region for some time.

But this must all be Labour's fault...

Don't forget the Whelk War effect; the Jersey "government" deliberately stirs up trouble by imposing limits on catches (in direct contravention of the the terms of the fisheries protocol of the EU-UK Brexit of 24DEC2020). Suddenly there's pushback, BoJo get's his frog bashing opportunity (with a couple of boats that never left harbour or even attempted to interfere with the fishing boats) and the dumber, pro-Brexit, Brits lap it up.

It's the entire UKGov in miniature; ideologically driven and just as doomed to cause Britain more problems.

Britons will have to show photo ID to vote in future general elections, ministers are poised to confirm this week, as a means of tackling fraud which critics claim could deter poorer and ethnic minority voters from taking part in democracy.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics...ns-social-care

Last election only 1 out of 47 million voters convicted of voting fraud.

3.5 million British voters don't have any form of photo ID, most young or in poverty and a disproportionate number are ethnic minorities.

This will suppress the non-Tory vote.

More than 40,000 people from the Philippines have been recruited to front British companies as part of schemes costing the UK "hundreds of millions of pounds" in lost taxes.

BBC Radio 4's File on 4 discovered more than 48,000 of these companies have been created in the past five years.

Some staff at NHS Covid test centres run by G4S have been employed by subcontractors in this kind of scheme.

G4S said that, when this came to its attention, HMRC was notified.

The company said it was taking steps to ensure that all agency workers were employed directly and not via a subcontractor.

The companies are originally incorporated with a British director recruited via private groups on Facebook. They resign as directors after a short period of time and a Filipino director is appointed in their place.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57021128

I suppose that would buy depend on if the Italians concerned were making a big deal about foreign influences...

The pandemic really has given the Tories another bite at the apple, NHS England was on its knees, waiting times going up and up, targets never being reached, staffing shortages and so on. And this was a simple equation - you cut money in real terms and you can’t provide the same level of healthcare.

Now it will all be the fault of the pandemic so we need to man-up and accept our lowered quality of life and life expectancy - like they did in the war!

Once again, they're learning from the GOP TOP. :mad:

In 27 years in the police, I dealt with a teenager who for a joke put his vote up for sale on ebay (he was warned) and whilst at Polling Stations I had a complaint from someone who was told he could not vote, which was due to his failure to register and a bizarre incident, where a lady, fed up at how long her husband was taking to vote, grabbed his ballot, marked it and voted for him (she was warned as well)!

I presume the voter ID will not alter postal votes.

That certainly has the sound of traditional British cuisine.

:p

It's fairly widely accepted that that dish was ethnic South-Asian British in origin. (Although maybe you knew that)

Scotland already has different election laws to England (we let 16 year old vote in our elections) so I am hoping we can tell them to sod off when trying this lunacy with voter ID, a solution looking for a problem.

Au contraire, the restrictions on exercise of the franchise are intended to stop a problem; poor people voting for Labour.

One wonders if all those Tory MPs who were screaming about our freedoms being trampled by restrictions due to the pandemic will be up in arms about this….

Well I am certain Brexit will have put paid to that sort of thing!

As does Wales - but it is still over 18 in a general election.

Dunno about trampling freedoms, but I don't see why exactly the same anti-discrimination objections being trotted out against vaccine ID, couldn't be used against this.

Hopefully I will be proved wrong but I suspect it will be

“Because….”

Chipping Norton fell to Labour. David Cameron’s old seat a safe Tory area turned off by Johnson’s nationalism switching to Labour.
Also Labour have gained two divisions in Witney. In fact in Oxfordshire as a whole the Tories are losing seats all over the place.

Why is no one talking about this?

Also look at Kent
Bastion of blue Tunbridge Wells now NOC (had a 55% remain vote), LibDems took Sevenoaks Town (55% leave) and nearby Tonbridge the Greens took both county council seats both Tory since the 70s. Of the 3 wards up for grabs in true-blue Tory Faversham, Kent, all three went Lib Dem

Perhaps partly because Cameron's reputation is shredded comprehensively. Perhaps also because councils aren't always the same as parliament constituencies. Noteworthy however

What's Gaelic for "When In The Course Of Human Events"......

Lemme see now...Might it be because those things don't fit with the "Tee, hee, Starmer's a joke, Labour are in freefall" narrative espoused by Johnson's meejah fan club?

I mean, Northumberland was being crowed over as a Tory gain, when the reality is that they only gained ONE seat and that was actually a dead heat with the Lib Dems decided on a coin toss/lot draw.

And, of course, it doesn't help when Kuenssberg, the Beeb's political editor, comes out with nonsense like this - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56624437.amp

"I know, let's re-define lying so that it is clear that senior Tories are not lying!"

And today the totally pro-civil liberties Tories introduce the idea of photo ID for voting. Of course, no senior Tory has ever, ever publicly opposed ID cards of any sort in any sort of hyperbolic terms, have they? Oh, except for when Johnson did in the Telegraph (paywalled, so I'm not linking, but you can have Marina Hyde from the Guardian instead - https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...d-fraud-tories ).

And I won't mention the report of the inquest into the Ballymena massacre of August 1971 coming out when the same scrupulously honest set of politicians want to try to stop historical prosecutions of military personnel - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...in-ballymurphy .

And this is benign?

I can easily believe that the highlighted is true. It does imply that he lies with strategic intent though. Which isn't better than lying on an adhoc basis.

^ Yup, on reading that piece (found it referred to by Edzard Ernst recently) I wondered how anyone could doubt that Kuenssberg has some class of bias towards the Tories.

I mean the main reason I might cry "Liar!" when I listen to or read Johnson is that the ****** tells such huge lies, all the time.

Why would you not tell lies when not only does being a liar not do you any harm but it actually HELPS you?

The English electorate seems beyond help at this moment in time.

I cannot in anyway disagree and have felt for a very long time that this is the case.

When you lot get independence I really do hope the berks in That There London **** up the geography and use Hadrian's Wall, despite my previous semi-cynical comment aboput being ignored from Holyrood (reflected a couple of conversations I had in Sutherland and Wester Ross as well as English experience).

Jacob Rees Mogg admits there isn't a problem when asked about Government Voter ID plan.
"you have to introduce things that keep the electoral system proper before the problem arises"

Matt Hancock says 6 cases of voter fraud is ‘6 too many’.

Conservative Education minister Gillian Keegan tells the BBC that people are already required to show photo ID to collect a parcel at the Post Office.
There is no such requirement.

I could just about get my head around the requirement if the government issued everyone over the age of 18 free of charge a Voter ID card, but people cannot be expected to pay for the right to vote.

I started a thread on it.

Today a lady wearing a diamond hat announced bills that introduce

Voter suppression
Reduction in judicial review of government actions
Oppressive policing

The last people to be fined for committing election fraud were Vote Leave.