First Minister Salmond, Scotland's prime minister, said yesterday, "Our first 100 days' commitment ...includes the publishing of a white paper on independence, which will serve as the basis for a national conversation with the people of Scotland about their constitutional future,".
The White Paper on the form of the independence referendum will be published within the next 14 days. Of course, referendums in the United Kingdom are advisory, not binding; they cannot abrogate laws, or initiate, or set up popular-driven legislation.
Nevertheless, the political force of the Scottish referendum on their withdrawal from the United Kingdom will be immense; the case for a similar referendum being held in England on the break-up of the United Kingdom is powerful but has never been proposed at Westminster. But then England has no parliament and our First Minister, prime minister Brown, sits for a Scottish constituency.
Brown will get a vote on Scotland's secession; the English will not.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
19 comments:
Is it not true that all three major parties have been led by Scots for quite some time? I have theorised before now that our system of government changed its flavour when James VI/I rode South to claim the throne. Celtic aristocracy and kingship was far more high-handed and contemptuous. No wonder it was farewell, Charles I and "Seamus a caca" and welcome the Glorious Revolution.
God on earth absolutism, S, till the axe came down. But axes only deal with one person, it's the hearts and minds of the elites, and even the masses that have to be secured (as the Leader and his Labour party knows).
The Conservative leader has the good manners to sit for an English constituency and speak like a human being. He does not pick his nose in public (nor in private, I expect). He is properly educated, and disarmingly reticent about his intellectual gifts, which seem to be considerable, unlike the non neuro-typical Brown in his obsessing mentality and peculiar notion that being clever is a quality associated with being worthy of esteem.
If the Scottish people are to have a referendum on the breaking up of the United Kingdom, then so must the English, Welsh, and northern Irish be given a similar means to express a view. Most particularly the English who are even without a parliament.
This has been the problem of the last thirty years really hasn`t it HG. Scotland has been drifting away for a long time and ending its connection with the pattern of British POlitics is just part of it.It is a Europe wide phenomena at least and it has mean the Labouir Party has been able to fight in England with foreign votes in effect
E-K sits at back of class sucking his thumb. No comment. Why ? He's one of the victims of 40 years of lousy comprehensive education and an (almost) total ignorance of why this should matter.
Keep the alcopops flowing, house prices 'booming'...
The English should have been on the streets long ago.
E-K...Yup, in 1918.
There were awfully few by 1918, S.
It's not that there is an educated understanding of what is happening and why it matters, for me E-K, it's an emotion, a gut reaction so strong I keep writing things down.
Just thoughts from what I read every day, sometimes in the way of work, sometimes in the garden or before falling asleep. I'm starting Dawkins on God, you've probably reached the end by now, so if you hear echoes, you'll know where it's coming from.
Scotland should do as it chooses N, but England shouldn't be stuck with a fake unionist Scottish representative as prime minister. It' hard to make comments specifically on Conservative policies, because it's other people's party, so I rather take my line from you and other Conservatives. You're firmly unionist aren't you, party-wise?
You're firmly unionist aren't you, party-wise?
Well no Cameron has called for English votes so thats going down the road of seperation. I think there is a recognition that the Union is finished in the Conservative Party which has no serious commitment North of the Border. Thats what I meant about part of Scotlands seperation being the end of UK style Politics as it has been.
Heffer wrote months ago that those Conservatives that talk about the Union are like the old buffers in the 60s that still went on about the Empire.
I think serious Policy would just recognise the new position with English votes .Brown will not countenance that but if he tries to rule England with Scottish votes there will be a crisis . There will be no moral mandate and no electoral mandate .
I disapprove of this flighty attitude you have to party Politics HG it seems to me you should be a Conservative.
Typical woman
If it's alright to make a few comments on the Conservative party's policies then two seem to be demanding adoption:-
those paying for their children's education in the non-state sector should not have to meet the cost out of taxed income;
inheritance tax and inter-vivos gift taxes should be abolished.
Nothing would break the stranglehold of the Labour regime more quickly and completely than those two measures.
People on middling earned incomes who cannot arrange their tax affairs out of the Labour reach would benefit enormously. Lots of their own earnings would be spent as they chose and the appalling state education system would be left to those who admire it.
The same sectors of working people have most of their capital in their houses and their parents and other family's houses; why ever has anyone else any claim to this?
The arguments against these measures are essentially redistributive and coercive, raw 19th and early 20th century state socialism of the crudest kind, and very difficult to present in the 21st century, particularly by a regime that has encouraged and induced a greater growth of wealth inequality in this country over the last 10 years than in the preceding 100.
those paying for their children's education in the non-state sector should not have to meet the cost out of taxed income;
That wouild change everything for us , but this will never happen. The Loss of tax revenue when everyone has chosen to go private ( and almost everyone would ), ..would be monumental .
Its an interesting idea though , I think vouchers are more on the cards but actually offseting education cost dirtecly from tax has too many problmes .
Too extreme .
On the other ie HG the pressurre on brown to drop academies is already growing and inthe Speccie they report that quietly it is being dropped.
I just hope people wake up to what brown is before its too late .
If almost everyone chose to pay directly for their children's education then why supply an unwanted good in the form of the state education system? Unless the purpose of that system is the transmission of a determined culture and the control over the time of students so that it cannot be used for what interests them . Effectively state schools transmit a low quality degraded version of western culture, a degraded notion of other cultures, waste years of school students' lives, and force the family to squeeze a proper education into increasingly small amounts of time.
If such an inferior good were offered freely in the market it would sink without trace.
Vouchers are a sop to the wholly unproven contention that if children are not offered a state education their parents will not offer them an education at all.
All parents who earn enough send their children into schools of their choice. More parents would have those choices if there was no compulsory purchase of a state-provided education.
What is not Conservative about that?
Schooling: "the wholly unproven contention that if children are not offered a state education their parents will not offer them an education at all" - you have an interesting experiment in mind? I know you strongly disapprove of schools being made to bear ever more social burdens, which is one thing; but something quite cataclysmic could happen down this route if you are wrong about the contention.
Inheritance tax: yes, well as you know, I reckon McBroon has that particular vote-winner on his list, so Cameron had better act right now if he's to pre-empt.
It has always been interesting that Bertrand Russell set up , of all things, a school, and was deeply involved in its curriculum and teaching.
Child care and the kind of acculturation offered by schools in the UK may be what is demanded, but N's comments suggest otherwise - that state schools would be abandoned en masse if middle earners could pay schoolfees out of untaxed income.
My contention is that the state school system isn't offering an education at all. And there is lots of evidence to support that view. An English state school attendance of up to 15 years is a monstrous waste of time in any measure chosen. If you feel that the removal of day care centres would threaten some young people you are probably right, I couldn't agree more. But if we don't even talk about what an education is, and leave people with enough of their earned income to buy it, we steal, ND.
We steal time and we steal an enjoyable, and enriched lifetime; not to mention stealing earning capacity and future lifestyle choices.
If providing social care for deprived children costs so much, we could stop ordering aircraft carriers we are incapable of building.
HG, taking up one of your secondary topics here:
I have been to many schools (father in Army) and (from time to time) taught in many, too. I think people don't understand what's going on/wrong in education.
It's top-down managed, an over-reaction to the infiltration by teachers in the 60s and 70s who were given their training by political subversives in teacher training colleges and university education departments. (I think some of these second-generation subversives got early retirement and came back as advisers and Ofsted inspectors. There's still a poacher's pocket in many a gamekeeper's jacket.)
I think many of the younger teachers are, in their didactic skills, actually better than those of years ago (better even than some of the teachers in the public and grammar schools I attended). And childrens' skills are taught more specifically, reviewed and analysed more.
The exam system is one-size-fits-all (very badly), but the curriculum isn't so much dumb as politicised. It's like saying The Sun is for the semi-literate: not so, if you do the linguistic analysis; it's the cultural and moral outlook that is deplorable. Children in schools are trained in hypocritical victim-speak, over-empowered and often unruly. But then, much of what goes on in schools is a reflection of absolutely terrible parenting, and the sewage that is poured on the young by TV and music. This is not being dufferish - watch the soaps and listen to 50 Cent and you'll slowly go melancholy-mad.
If I had children, I'd probably home-educate them to keep them away from the negativity. It's the psychlogical malaise that's the issue (I would have said spiritual, but you can't say so because you'll get labelled a God-botherer).
Private schools and their intake are, by and large, success-oriented, and I think that's why they worked in the past, not because of the wonderful teachers or interesting textbooks. Quite the opposite: I was (foolishly, I sometimes think) moved to go into teaching so I could give others a more interesting education than the paralysing boredom I endured at boarding school.
It came as a heck of a shock to discover that many young people didn't want to learn - but when I started, at least you had the authority to push them a bit.
The resources needed to home school or, what we did, remove the children to another world, in their case an Italian state school education which is as excellent as the state school education in France and Germany - (no doubt etc., for most other European countries but these are the ones I know), are not available to most middle-earning working people.
But the possibility of creating a reasonable cost education system for the children of most of us is there if we weren't being forced to buy this sham, this disgraceful waste of time, called a state education in England.
You mention the deliberate infection of the system during the 60s by militant socialists; I would underwrite that; the trades unions were targetted too. We have been paying ever since even to the third generation.
No-one wishes to deny help to young people who are being dragged up rather than brought up, but that is nothing to do with taxing working people into such poverty they cannot refuse an indoctrination for their children, rather than availing themselves of an education.
Learning is often painful, thus often goaded. But it does, too, have such attractions that by around 14, most people given half a chance to study what interests them, willingly work at it; except in our state 'education' standardized, degraded, disgrace.
If the Conservative party will not make a stand here, where?
PS And as for the derision of 'spiritual', these trotskyoid freaks would deny us all a soul, and the English church is doing nothing to stop them. Which is, after all, their job.
HG: impassioned and correct. The hungry sheep look up and are not fed.
"those paying for their children's education in the non-state sector should not have to meet the cost out of taxed income;"
Right, absolutely. But I like newmania's suggestion of using vouchers. People could always spend more on their children's education, but would have no interest in spending less than the vouchers entitle them to have.
"inheritance tax and inter-vivos gift taxes should be abolished."
much better to abolish inter-vivos gift taxes and keep inheritance tax. This and only this would give an incentive to the old to pass on their wealth to the young when the young most need it and are capable of enjoying it. Abolishing both would not give them any such incentive.
Vouchers would meet ND's query on whether some parents would offer an education at all to their children, so perhaps you and N are right.
But there remains the wider politics of having state provided education that vouchers won't touch, sequestering huge amounts of earned income and pursuing ideological and commercial goals with it while pretending to do good.
Look at the need for a school in Holborn and St Pancras. 30,000 families with no secondary school and the state refusing for decades to provide one because it is against state policy for there to be families and community life there; that bit of London is marked out for commercial, tourist, and university development and the tenacity of its population in continuing not to get out of the way of city developers, (starting with Seifert's disgraceful distruction of Brunswick Square and south Marchmont Street 40 years ago), is undermined by the denial of every aspect of community life being denied or removed to north of the Euston Road - their libraries have been closed down, their school never built, their children at the bottom of every admission list, their sports facilities degenerated, whole area of housing ceded to the university (they took over most of Cartwright Gardens 5 years ago).
State education provision is used to herd people about. As are other 'locally' and nationally provided state facilities.
Post a Comment