This pedantic legalism ignores the fact that not all constitutions deserve American-style veneration. The Spanish one was forced upon a cowed, ballot-naive populace by Francoists, with the threat of a military coup if they didn't behave. Mr Walshe mentions 1714 without explaining why he's so outraged at this being called an 'occupation' - but the Siege of Barcelona was hardly as peaceful as the Act of Union. And the argument that Spanish is the language of Catalonia because it's Spanish territory...this is circular to the point of childishness, like pretending that Chinese is the native language of Tibet. Spreading disinfectant on a public square - shocking! Dragging women by the hair and throwing them down flights of stairs - consitutional! Bestial is what Torra called it, and rightly so. Tempting though it is to imagine a jailed Sturgeon, we should thank God for British common-sense and decency. Any Conservatives who still hanker after the 'slap of firm government' offered by generalissimos in sunglasses should be reminded that the Cold War is over.
Has anyone pointed out that the Social Mobility Report is utter rubbish? They admit that “Birth cohort studies … are too small to allow them to be broken down reliably at a local level.” But that doesn’t stop them – they just look at what happens to children and adults in the same area, then assume that no-one ever moves! Which would make sense if this was the thirteenth century.
So, if someone from Peckham becomes rich and moves to Chelsea, they assume he was born in Chelsea with a silver spoon in his mouth. And if someone from Chelsea loses his money and moves to Peckham, they assume he was born in Peckham. And places like Peckham which are being gradually gentrified may appear ‘socially mobile’ even as poorer residents are forced out. Perhaps that's why London comes out so well. All in all, this report is about as well-researched and credible as a 4am tweet from Donald Trump.
Please could we stop referring to Russia as a bear? Is this supposed to make Putin scarier or cuddlier? A poison dwarf he may be, a member of the family Ursidae he is not!
Unfortunately, Farage's posturing really does mean that everyone who doesn't want to put himself beyond the pale will soon have to pretend that free NHS treatment for all the world is a Good Thing - despite the obvious truth that treating middle-class Africans with expensive healthcare requirements is, even for those like myself who would quite like to help as many Africans as possible, neither equitable nor good value for money. We've already seen an alarming rise in support for the EU, probably from people who think that any policy not supported by nasty people is a good policy. That's how most people decide on their politics, after all.
'Absolute' poverty as 60% of the median in a particular year? That's just another kind of relative poverty! By replacing talk of genuine poverty with a thinly-disguised measure of inequality, we've already acquiesced in the Left's Orwellian use of language. 'Absolute' poverty would be the inability to feed, clothe and house oneself, and it's time we forced left-wingers to acknowledge this and re-opened the debate about why there's so much less of it around these days.
So, it would 'counter-intuitive' to expect the Government to rack up more debt, would it? And just exactly who, please tell us, is going to repay the investors in this 'new wave of infrastructure' - the pixies? PFIs were popular with Gordon Brown because they allowed the gov't to hide borrowing off-balance-sheet. The problem was that it cost vastly more to fund capital projects through a 'special purpose vehicle' set up by the construction firm than it would have done if the gov't had simply borrowed the money at the market rate. Nor was there any better guarantee of delivery on time and to budget than there would have been with ordinary turn-key contracts. It's alarming that the present Chancellor is so keen on this very expensive way of borrowing to spend.
There's a big difference between occupying Iraq and defending Kurdistan. The Iraqis detest us, the Kurds (I say this from experience as I was in Erbil a month ago) have been loyal allies for a long time and are staunchly pro-British. They are religiously moderate, prepared to fight to defend Christians, and their democracy is imperfect but no more so than that of Italy or Japan. Now they are being attacked with American armoured cars and heavy weaponry, gifted to ISIS as part of a policy of 'non-intervention'. It seems we are allowed to sell arms to Putin but not to the Kurds.
I remember many Conservative friends of mine being reluctant to intervene in 'Yugoslavia', even when it no longer existed, and going so far as to persuade themselves the Srebrenica massacre had not happened. To allow a genocide of Christians and the invasion of an ally, just to maintain the fiction of a unified Iraqi state, would be equally perverse, more especially because we had a part in inventing this chimaeric 'nation'.
What was Baroness Warsi's position on Syrian intervention? Or were there too few Jews involved to make it a resignation issue? I'd rather see the next election lost, if winning it requires the party of Disraeli to pander to Muslim bigotry. What next - perhaps a few pro-FGM Conservatives to help broaden our appeal to minorities?
Interesting paper linked to here, on the increase in crime from those who started to use cannabis after it became 'less criminal'... but it does point out that the increase in criminality comes from "individuals who already had a relatively high propensity to engage in criminal activities and come from generally less favourable backgrounds". Is there nothing that could be done for these people which would be better value for money than employing large numbers of policemen to stop them from using cannabis? Because the reduction in crime caused by a more sensible employment of police manpower might, as the authors themselves admit, balance out the increase from new cannabis users. The authors also note a concomitant, and sharp, fall in cocaine use, which might also reduce crime levels just as cannabis use increases crime.
"Who is most deserving of the security of tenure?" Surely the smaller family, the ones who prudently decided not to have more children than they could afford to bring up.
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Opus