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Johnson suffers first defeat on Brexit bill in Lords as peers vote to give EU nationals physical proof of right to stay
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CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Debate!
GE2019 (and aftermath) prediction thread
(116 posts)-
Posted 4 years ago #
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Ian Murray has recently warned other Labour MPs and Deputy contenders to comment on Scottish politics with care.
Last week he ticked off Clive Lewis's (positive) comments on case for IndyRef2, comparing this being akin to an Edinburgh politician commenting on the pedestrianisation of Norwich High St.
This week he has been slightly critical but also supportive of Lisa Nandy's enthusiasm for Spain's approach to Catalan self determination.
With only one MP it's inevitable that all other Labour MPs commenting will not live 'up here'.Posted 4 years ago # -
Aftermath - more analysis/recriminations/disfunction -
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jan/21/crushed-by-brexit-how-labour-lost-the-election
Posted 4 years ago # -
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“Andrew Gilligan rang me to ask me my top five transport priorities and asked me for my views on HS2 but he gave no view either way.”
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Posted 4 years ago # -
From The National - 'small'(!) donations but interesting as Alister Jack was unknown to me before GE.
"ARSENAL chairman Sir Chips Keswick donated £5000 to help fund the re-election of Secretary of State for Scotland Alister Jack.
The merchant banker’s wife, Lady Sarah Keswick and his brother Sir Henry Keswick, also topped up the Tory minister’s campaign coffers by £5,000 a piece, according to the Parliament’s latest register of interests.
Sir Henry also gave money to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s local party, and Jack’s predecessor in the Scotland Office, David Mundell.
According to the House of Commons website, the main purpose of the register of interests “is to provide information about any financial interest which a Member has, or any benefit which he or she receives, which others might reasonably consider to influence his or her actions or words as a Member of Parliament”.
Jack’s other donors include former Scottish Tory treasurer James Stewart, who donated £2500 to his
campaign.He also donated to Mundell’s campaign, giving him £7500 in the run up to December’s General Election. That was Stewart’s third donation to Mundell in less than a year, with all three totalling £17,500.
Meanwhile, LibDem MP Alistair Carmichael has registered a £10,000 donation from arms dealer Sudhir Choudhrie.
Known as Bunny to his friends, Sudhir Choudhrie, who is in his 70s, moved to London from India in 2002 and has been a supporter of the LibDems for years, donating around £1.6 million.
The family business, run by his son Bhanu, has interests in aviation, care homes and luxury hotels, including the Nira Caledonia in Edinburgh.
Both Chaudries were arrested in February 2014 and questioned as part of a wide-ranging investigation into the activities of Rolls-Royce by the Serious Fraud Office.
Neither man was charged and a few months after the arrests, the two men had their bail conditions lifted.
According to the BBC’s Panorama, Rolls-Royce made secret payments of around £10m to an unregistered Indian agent. The company then won a major contract for engines on Hawk aircraft being built in India.
Choudhrie is on an Indian government blacklist of people suspected of “corrupt or irregular practice”.
Choudhrie’s lawyers told the BBC he “has never paid bribes to government officials or acted as an illegal middleman in defence deals”. They said he has “no knowledge of the contents” of the list."
National 05/02/20
Posted 4 years ago # -
[quote]According to the House of Commons website, the main purpose of the register of interests “is to provide information about any financial interest which a Member has, or any benefit which he or she receives, which others might reasonably consider to influence his or her actions or words as a Member of Parliament”.
Why is this not called out for what it is : corruption.
It's as if declaring it automatically sanitises it. But it doesn't. Absolutely stinks.
Edit: struggling with the quote function :(
Posted 4 years ago # -
The rules on political donations are broken (and it seems, un- or poorly-policed anyway). (This is also why the existence of billionaires is such an obscene and damaging thing: it's not because they have unimaginable amounts of money, it's because their wealth allows them as individuals vast, corrupting influence on political systems. As though by virtue of wealth they are somehow more qualified to direct our lives.)
Posted 4 years ago # -
Whoever woulda thunk it?
Posted 4 years ago # -
"Witness this obscenity. The new daily allowance for simply turning up at the House of Lords is £323; compared to a roughly similar sum as the monthly allowance for a single person over 25 on Universal Credit.
And to get that Universal Credit means waiting up to six weeks. By that time, the potential Lords pay-out is £323, times five days a week, for six weeks and comes to almost £10,000 – tax free.
Little wonder Tories are queuing up to stick their noses in this trough. Remember too, that many of these snouts belong to those who have flopped in their positions.
In the UK, it is entirely possible to fail upwards."https://www.thenational.scot/news/18238391.uks-last-constitution-makes-democracy-easier-crush/
Posted 4 years ago # -
A lot of them are asleep. I have seen the photos.
Posted 4 years ago # -
It is a bit peak National to blame House Of Lords troughing soley on Tories - they have 245 peers while there are 180 Labour, 90 LibDems and 184 cross benchers.
SNP however are the only ones to have nothing to do with the whole thing and have no representatives there.:
Posted 4 years ago # -
I was shocked to learn that the English and Welsh Greens nominate barons and baronesses. I understand taking a peerage sees you expelled from the Scottish Greens.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Goodbye to an independent judiciary and BBC it seems?
Posted 4 years ago # -
I don't understand why some political parties object to the existence of a senate. Yes, the House of Lords as it is certainly needs further reform, but the existence of a second house as a senate (which is what it should evolve to become), to act as a balance to the first house, seems to me to be a good thing?
Posted 4 years ago # -
"It is not possible to build democratic socialism by using the institutions of the Ancient British state... in the way that it is not possible to induce a vulture to give milk."
Neal Ascherson, 1988
Posted 4 years ago # -
@IWRATS I think the US has proven that using the institutions of the Early Roman Republic is equally impossible.
Posted 4 years ago # -
@steveo
Are the citizens of that country interested in democratic socialism? It's not somewhere I know anything much about.
Posted 4 years ago # -
I'm sure if they stopped seeing commie plots at every mention of state support they might.
Point I was making (badly) is that by having two elected houses there is no guarantee that the people are any better represented or that anything will ever get done.
I'd either say an unelected upper house (with much less padding from ex MP's) or a strong mix from Proportional representation but that is not working well in Scotland.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Ah, I see. I think a fairly elected lower chamber and an upper chamber selected from among the citizens by sortition might work. Certainly motivates the country to produce uniformly well-educated citizens in case they get selected for
juryparliament duty.Which bits of the Scottish system do you think aren't working?
Posted 4 years ago # -
I'm starting to think 5 years National Service (in parliament) is the only fair way of representing the people)
There are not enough (electable)
partiesgroups in Scotland for a good mix of views in the Govt. We can see how the small voice of the Green party has some influence but if 3 or more parties even of fairly narrow interest groups actually had to form a working government then it may (may) fairly represent the country.As it is the UK's three main parties and a special interest party form the primary basis for selection. Thus you have the policies from the UK parties overly influencing the parties and voters and the SNP who have had to go find extra policies beside their primary one of Independence from the UK.
Posted 4 years ago # -
There's only one 'UK' party and that's the Conservative one. Nobody else stands candidates in all four of the UK's constituent parts. I guess Labour pretty much accept that Northern Ireland is a de facto occupied territory through their alliance with the SDLP?
Pretty tough gig being a Holyrood party leader now that the London regime has made clear that it will overturn any Holyrood law it doesn't like. Jackson Carlaw campaigned against the existence of the parliament he sits in. Most are constrained by answering to a line manager in London. Seems like a complete mess to me.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Posted 4 years ago #
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Dresden Neustadt, thats where me and the missus planned to settle for a month or so this year, but we could have settled for Berlin Pankow or Hamburg Altona, all three being familiar haunts
The idea was to max out our euro-time before the end of the european health card deal, cos after this no customs union end of year, due to underlying conditions, we could potentially lose the house through unexpected medical charges if we have to rely on dodgy third party world travel insurance
Surely what with this viral apocalypse the INGSOC BREXIT nonsense could just be cancelled forever NOW
PLAY LOUD
Posted 4 years ago # -
This seems like the appropriate thread.
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Twenty-nine asylum seekers have died in Home Office accommodation so far this year – five times as many as those who have lost their lives on perilous Channel small boat crossings over the same period.
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Posted 3 years ago #
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