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As always, a very detailed and interesting post from Ketara, but you forgot to mention another fact about London: the amount of money laundering and corruption that flows through there.

There's a lot of dodgy money swirling around.

On another note, did anybody catch any part of Corbyn's speech? I did and what a car crash it wash


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 Kilkrazy wrote:

 godardc wrote:
I was watching the news on my TV, and I saw, on France 2, that, in England, there are officialy sharia courts ?
No civil courts, but sharia courts, judging people by the sharia ?!
The example shown was a divorce. Three muslims erudites were judging the case of a woman asking divorce because her husband beat her.
They said that sharia courts has began since the 80's.

I have known for long that England isn't like France in relation to religions but, whoa, just whoa.

Any experience, thought about this ?

You've seen a misrepresentation or misunderstanding of the situation. There are sharia and jewish community based civil tribunals, whose judgements are not binding and do no see criminal cases.


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 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
So you have the situation where the UK is training skilled workers for other countries to get the economic benefits of.

And whats wrong with that? They've paid for their tuition haven't they?

Because it really dumb to train skilled workers so other countries can then employ them without having to fund their studies? There is a limited amount of space on courses and you want to maximise the economic benefit of that course so you want the most people graduating from that course to then work in the UK and contribute to our economy.

But that's exactly what we do. The NHS basically is kept going by imported foreign workers whose medical training was paid for by their country of birth.

That is the weird situation we have got into. There are hundreds of vacancies for GPs. We cannot find enough British people to train to become GPs, partly because the acceptance rate is very low due to the high standards. We import large numbers of foreign GPs to fill the gap. We pay a lot of them very high agency staff rates.

Brexit wont stop foreign doctors and nurses arriving here, and the British public certainly won't be against doctors coming into the country.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:


Brexit wont stop foreign doctors and nurses arriving here, and the British public certainly won't be against doctors coming into the country.

I wouldn't be too sure about that last bit.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:


Brexit wont stop foreign doctors and nurses arriving here, and the British public certainly won't be against doctors coming into the country.

I wouldn't be too sure about that last bit.

I've been from the top of Scotland all the way down to Cornwall, from Manchester to Essex, to the Welsh valleys. I like to think I know the British people pretty well.

Horrible, aren't we :-D

The purpose of Brexit is to allow the UK to impose the same kind of restrictions on European doctors as are imposed on other foreign doctors. It is difficult to see how this would result in no change in the supply of European doctors into the UK.

.slipped his mind, obviously.

So what, if anything do people make about the recent Israeli attempts to ..influence..... people's positions in UK politics ?

oh yes , with regards to the strikes :

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/11/rail-franchise-boss-peter-wilkinson-gave-southern-contract-client-consultancy

note the last few paragraphs.

 reds8n wrote:

Spoiler:

.slipped his mind, obviously.

So what, if anything do people make about the recent Israeli attempts to ..influence..... people's positions in UK politics ?

oh yes , with regards to the strikes :

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/11/rail-franchise-boss-peter-wilkinson-gave-southern-contract-client-consultancy

note the last few paragraphs.

Craig Murray has done a very good blog post on British politics, Israel, and the links between surprise surprise, Liam Fox, Adam Werrity, Conservative friends of Israel et al

Murray is a former ambassador and worked for the FCO for years, so he always provides good insights into this sort of thing. In the interests of fairness, I'll mention he is pro-Palestinian, and not a great fan of the Israeli government, so he can be biased at times, but it's still a good read IMO.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/01/israeli-spy-shai-masot-not-expelled/

 reds8n wrote:

oh yes , with regards to the strikes :

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/11/rail-franchise-boss-peter-wilkinson-gave-southern-contract-client-consultancy

note the last few paragraphs.

Makes you question which side are actually being militant doesn't it. I think the Unions should bandy that quote around anytime someone questions their motives.

The thing that beggared belief today from a UK politics perspective was May's apparent lack of willingness to accept that there is an issue with parts of the NHS at the moment.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/pmqs-theresa-may-jeremy-corbyn-nhs_uk_58762bdde4b033e31dab3e78?ir=UK+Politics&utm_hp_ref=uk-politics

I would invite her to come down to the Leicester Royal Infirmary A&E at the moment to see just what a small number of incidents means to a lot of people.

The current problems with the NHS are the result of various causes coming together. In order of the chain of reasons:

Things get worse in the winter because of seasonal diseases and accidents.
With the ageing population, more people are getting ill, needing more treatment and longer hospital stays.
Due to problems with the General Practice service, such as closure of primary treatment units, more people are going to A&E instead of to their local GP.
(It doesn't help that modern people have been conditioned to go to the doctor instead of "tough it out" for lots of pretty minor ailments.)
Modern PPI hospitals have been built for a lower number of beds per head of population than used to be the case, under the theory that keyhole surgery would result in shorter stays.
Local Authorities do not have the money to take recovered patients out of hospital into social care. This is blocking beds.

Money or the lack of it is one aspect of the overall problem, but simply throwing more money at it will not have an immediate effect, because you can't simply find 3,000 GPs or 6,000 care workers or build 9,000 beds overnight, and it will be inefficient because some of the problems are due to system design rather than lack of money.

This is a pretty long term problem which has been building up for five years and will take several years to resolve.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The current problems with the NHS are the result of various causes coming together. In order of the chain of reasons:

Things get worse in the winter because of seasonal diseases and accidents.
With the ageing population, more people are getting ill, needing more treatment and longer hospital stays.
Due to problems with the General Practice service, such as closure of primary treatment units, more people are going to A&E instead of to their local GP.
(It doesn't help that modern people have been conditioned to go to the doctor instead of "tough it out" for lots of pretty minor ailments.)
Modern PPI hospitals have been built for a lower number of beds per head of population than used to be the case, under the theory that keyhole surgery would result in shorter stays.
Local Authorities do not have the money to take recovered patients out of hospital into social care. This is blocking beds.

Money or the lack of it is one aspect of the overall problem, but simply throwing more money at it will not have an immediate effect, because you can't simply find 3,000 GPs or 6,000 care workers or build 9,000 beds overnight, and it will be inefficient because some of the problems are due to system design rather than lack of money.

This is a pretty long term problem which has been building up for five years and will take several years to resolve.

I don't disagree with this, but either being in denial that there is an issue or denying there is one whilst there obviously is, is either delusional thinking or not respecting the public. What worried me most is the head of the NHS pretty much said we hadn't seen anything yet and expected it to be much worse in 2018. And we haven't even had bad weather - can you imagine if we actually had a harsh winters like we had around 2012ish or even worse a repeat of the 1962-1963 winter?

The government can hardly admit there is a problem considering they are responsible for it, by sins of omission or commission, i.e. scamping on solutions and budgets over the past six years.

Presumably they are hoping there won't be a hard winter, and things will get better, giving them time possibly to address the problems.

My other half works in the NHS while I work as a researcher in a genetics lab / securing a PhD.

Both of us have been utterly shafted by both Brexit and the Tory economic policies.

Both of us are looking at leaving the UK in medium-term. England in particular has no interest in skilled scientific and biomedical workers. As Gove clearly pointed out, Britain is tired of experts.

https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/819678751554473984

Sandhill (Sunderland) result:
LDEM: 45.0% (+41.5)
LAB: 25.0% (-29.9)
UKIP: 18.7% (-7.2)
CON: 10.0% (-5.7)
GRN: 1.3% (+1.3)

The Liberal Democrats won 0 seats in Sunderland for eight years and now have won 2 seats in Sunderland in eight months.

Taken 1 from Labour and 1 from the Con.

Look where the LIB-DEM votes came from.

Looks like they came from everybody.

Except the Greens.

Another Blairite bites the dust:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/13/tristram-hunt-to-quit-as-mp-to-become-va-director

The last thing that Corbyn needs right now is another by-election.

I wonder if Labour will parachute another candidate in?

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
Another Blairite bites the dust:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/13/tristram-hunt-to-quit-as-mp-to-become-va-director

The last thing that Corbyn needs right now is another by-election.

I wonder if Labour will parachute another candidate in?

The seat will be lost in the upcoming boundary resuffles, can't see anyone important being put to the front.

 Mr. Burning wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
Another Blairite bites the dust:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/13/tristram-hunt-to-quit-as-mp-to-become-va-director

The last thing that Corbyn needs right now is another by-election.

I wonder if Labour will parachute another candidate in?

The seat will be lost in the upcoming boundary resuffles, can't see anyone important being put to the front.

I didn't know that the seat was up for the chop, but even so, I can imagine the panic this by-election will be causing at Corbyn HQ.


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 reds8n wrote:
https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/819678751554473984

Sandhill (Sunderland) result:
LDEM: 45.0% (+41.5)
LAB: 25.0% (-29.9)
UKIP: 18.7% (-7.2)
CON: 10.0% (-5.7)
GRN: 1.3% (+1.3)

The Liberal Democrats won 0 seats in Sunderland for eight years and now have won 2 seats in Sunderland in eight months.

Taken 1 from Labour and 1 from the Con.

I wouldn't read too much into the Lib Dems winning a council election on a 20% turnout in the middle of January.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:


I wouldn't read too much into the Lib Dems winning a council election on a 20% turnout in the middle of January.

It depends on what you are comparing to. If the turnout at the last elections for these areas were roughly the same then you can read something into them. If the the percentage turnout was significantly different then there is admittedly less.

However what we can note is that despite Mays protection of the Nissan people are abandoning the Tories. Labour whose supporters generally make up about 70% pro-EU people are really abandoning them. UKIP has lost support since they lost Farage. I think there is a big batch of Council elections in May this year. If the same pattern happens then we might be able to infer that pro-EU, that might be truly p*d off about what happened from Tory and Labour, are moving to LD simply because they are the only party that they can make their frustration known with. It will be interesting to see which way the Tories swing if this happens. They could try and soften Brexit as the pro-EU people in the Tory party get a louder voice or we could see an even harder Brexit as those Tories desperate to leave push on as fast and hard as possible hoping to get it over before the next GE.

As for Corbyn, I fully expect tomorrow to reverse his decision on whether more of his party will leave (maybe to all of them... )

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jeremy-corbyn-im-not-expecting-any-more-labour-mps-to-resign_uk_5878f708e4b04a8bfe6a7544?ir=UK+Politics&utm_hp_ref=uk-politics

It's a shame really, as given the appalling handling of the NHS crisis Labour should have an easy win but instead they continue to implode.

I also see that for some Tories annoying other countries just before you start negotiations is still considered a good idea. I can imagine the "Tiny little island" might cause us big trouble in the future if they take the comments to heart!

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tory-mp-dismisses-malta-as-a-tiny-little-island_uk_5878bbc0e4b074eb45cd6ca5?ir=UK+Politics&utm_hp_ref=uk-politics

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-latest-news-northern-ireland-crisis-stormont-assembly-delay-theresa-may-illegal-article-50-a7526126.html
Interesting. Unlikely though but I'm wondering what the solution will be to the crisis.
Power-sharing with the DUP has failed. That much is clear.

 Da krimson barun wrote:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-latest-news-northern-ireland-crisis-stormont-assembly-delay-theresa-may-illegal-article-50-a7526126.html
Interesting. Unlikely though but I'm wondering what the solution will be to the crisis.
Power-sharing with the DUP has failed. That much is clear.

I'm not sure it has failed. Given that NI has had relative terrorist free peace now for a decade or so it is working to some extent. It is however going to take many decades and possibly generations to really clear the air. Until new politicians start coming through the system that have lived in peace for all their lives there is always going to be tension. A lot of people spent many decades hating the other side and that's not something that is going to disappear overnight.

It is an interesting quandary with regards Brexit though. With no parliament to represent them it is difficult to say how May could say she is acting in their best interests (and may be seen as going back to old colonialism ways). It's also going to be interesting how people might vote if one party is supporting leave and another remain which can cut across both parties.

Surely the Brexit decision (Article 50) is foreign affairs and lies within the purview of the Westminster Parliament. The NI Assembly only handles certain domestic affairs. The people of NI have full representation at Westminster through their MPs.

I acknowledge if NI like Scotland voted clearly for Remain, there is a political problem, but surely this does not constitute a legal problem. Else Oxfordshire, London and other areas of the UK that clearly voted Remain ought to have their views considered separately.

Looking at the NI problems, though, as far as I can see they result from this balls-up over the wood-burning stove subsidies, and Gerry Adams is using the opportunity to force his own angle. He was on TV saying that clearly there cannot be a return to the current power-sharing situation after an election. I should think that depends on the result of the election. If Sinn Fein win a lot of votes, they will have a bigger voice. If not, then they won't.

Avoidance of the tyranny of the majority cannot be allowed to result in a tyranny of the minority.

Has anyone in NI been making more than noise? Is there any actual talk of resurrecting conflict there? I only ask because you mentioned that Gerry Adams is using it to push his agenda.

 Breotan wrote:
Has anyone in NI been making more than noise? Is there any actual talk of resurrecting conflict there? I only ask because you mentioned that Gerry Adams is using it to push his agenda.

http://m.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/psni-only-force-in-belfast-says-police-chief-after-punishment-attack-on-couple-35364404.html

This seemed to happen yesterday. No idea what caused it but there seems to still be some active paramilitary.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Surely the Brexit decision (Article 50) is foreign affairs and lies within the purview of the Westminster Parliament. The NI Assembly only handles certain domestic affairs. The people of NI have full representation at Westminster through their MPs.

I acknowledge if NI like Scotland voted clearly for Remain, there is a political problem, but surely this does not constitute a legal problem. Else Oxfordshire, London and other areas of the UK that clearly voted Remain ought to have their views considered separately.....

I think the NI situation is vastly more complicated than that, especially as they have a physical land border with an EU state. It's not really comparable to the London or Oxfordshire situation, or even Sotland for that matter. The ties with the Free State are very complex, political, familial and economic.
Of all the constituent parts of the UK that could do with a "special" deal with the EU, Northern Ireland probably has the strongest and most compelling case to be given some sort of special status, and maybe Gibraltar too.
But seeing as we haven't even started negotiating and have no idea what we're negotiating, we'll just have to wait and see what that might look like.

BTW, just wondering if it's possible that Spain might bring out the old thumbscrews over Gibraltar. They could certainly use this time to really put pressure on the UK. It's a pretty big bargaining chip, and Spain do hold a veto.

 r_squared wrote:

BTW, just wondering if it's possible that Spain might bring out the old thumbscrews over Gibraltar. They could certainly use this time to really put pressure on the UK. It's a pretty big bargaining chip, and Spain do hold a veto.

Gibraltar is a drum Spain like to bang. especially when things are not going okay internally. It distracts from an economy and employment that is tanking. It is also dangerous to have a special case like Gib, with Catalonians and other regions watching. (reform your constitution already!)

As well political pressure will come from other EU members to form a united front for negotiations. Gibraltar is a non issue for the remaining member states. It won't exist as far as the 'Union' is concerned.

To be sure it is a complicated situation but it is a political situation, not constitutional/legal. If the constitutional/legal rights of citizens are the primary concern, it doesn't matter whether you live in NI or south Oxfordshire. That's why the current Supreme Court case about May wanting to trigger Article 50 by Royal Prerogative.

What I mean is, it seems to me that the argument that A50 has to wait for an election in NI is wrong according to the legal position. If it is right according to the political position, the same applies to the country as a whole.

I have previously made the argument that leaving the EU should be confirmed by a new Parliament at Westminster following a General Election. And thus, of course, would be liable to a reversal of the Referendum.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Surely the Brexit decision (Article 50) is foreign affairs and lies within the purview of the Westminster Parliament. The NI Assembly only handles certain domestic affairs. The people of NI have full representation at Westminster through their MPs.

I'm not sure it is as simple as that because triggering A50 impacts so many different areas some of which do fall under the control of NI, Welsh and Scottish Parliaments. Fishing and Agriculture for example which have been devolved. Westminster doesn't have the authority to affect these and needs to be implemented by the individual countries. Actually issuing A50 is within Westminster's authority but a lot of the impacts aren't and hence why the A50 case included elements of should the respective national governments have their say as well.

From a political perspective it is risky because if they plough on ahead anyway before there is National Assembly in place then that could become the dominant election point (Westminster aren't listening, DUP are just England lackeys etc) rather than more local issues which it should be about. The more sensible option would not be to invoke A50 until an Assembly is in place to avoid this so there can be a proper consultation.

It's different with London and English Councils because they do not have the same level of powers devolved (yet?)

The conflict will not resume. The arsenal of the PIRA was destroyed.
The so-called "Republican paramilitaries" remaining have little capability to do anything more then then kneecap people. Since last march the only successful op they pulled off(between drug smuggling) against crown forces, was the death of one prison officer.
Power-sharing HAS failed. The DUP cannot be dealt with. Every party in the assembly wanted Arlene removed to investigate cash for ash. She did not. Personally I believe a sullen acceptance of the status-quo will have to happen, unless Unionists stop voting in thieves like Arlene and pick another party.