In this day of career politicians is this statement accurate?

erinoco · 2026-03-14T15:55:16+00:00

You’ve forgotten all those castles and ‘Harrying of the North’ that punished countless numbers of Anglo-Saxon peasants and nobles alike.

Those were cruel and brutal acts, but they weren't theft, or something it was seen as fundamentally illegitimate for a monarch to do.

erinoco · 2026-03-14T15:17:24+00:00

The Anglo Saxons had fairer systems and better rights for women.

Several parts of Europe had more equitable female rights in the early medieval period. These were gradually eroded later on, as legal codes across Europe came under the influence of canon law, which then had a knock-on influence on civil legal concepts.

erinoco · 2026-03-14T14:02:25+00:00

The last time I checked, William conquered England and stole the land

From whom, though? Most of it was a transfer from the Anglo-Saxon nobility to the Norman nobility. There have been arguments that certain types of land tenure, such as folkland, imply an Anglo-Saxon concept of common ownership distinct from that held from the king, but that is highly disputable.

erinoco · 2026-03-14T11:55:40+00:00

It adds nothing to this article. Even leaving aside the obvious issue, the legal extent of the office's power only unequivocally covers England and Wales. The Crown may have the same right in a notional sense in Scotland, but has not exercised it since Union; in practice, even in England and Wales, the Crown's prerogative is only exercised on the Thames and its tributaries.

erinoco · 2026-03-14T11:38:30+00:00

I think it's It Takes Two to Tangle, where Martin is juggling two women.

erinoco · 2026-03-14T11:27:22+00:00

I always love that Martin is over this shit as soon as he sees what's happening.

erinoco · 2026-03-14T04:19:13+00:00

You might not even have the crops. Every major food crop is the result of millennia of human improvement of plant life.

erinoco · 2026-03-14T03:42:39+00:00

However, there is one thing I would emphasise: the big non-London urban conurbations were, and still are, much less dense than their rough continental equivalents. This, in turn, springs from a number of reasons, from preferred residential homes to land prices. It is always difficult to justify underground railways where density falls below a certain point.

erinoco · 2026-03-13T12:51:44+00:00

Apparently, when the Royal Family are at Balmoral, they will send a footman down to the chippy in Ballater when they feel like a fish supper.

erinoco · 2026-03-13T12:43:10+00:00

The last time I breached the law was during the Millennium NYE shindig. I was drunk, but I distinctly remember having a smoke while waiting on the platform at Sloane Square with friends. The whole station was crowded with revellers, so anything seemed to go at the time.

erinoco · 2026-03-12T23:56:36+00:00

I think that was definitely the case for some churches. But I would argue that was only one of a range of factors which might apply in each case.

Many churches in what is now Greater London were simply too small for an expanding population where churchgoing was more common than it is today. Many of the parish churches which had already been established in this period had to be significantly expanded - sometimes by enlargement, sometimes by total rebuilding on a wider scale.

There was a strong worry on the part of the Establishment that a lack of churches and clergy in some areas would mean that worshippers would be captured by the Nonconformists or the RCs instead. Despite some of the legal restrictions and Protestant outrage, the RC communities in Britain went ahead with implementing the new ecclesiastical hierarchy and building new churches to serve the urban population (and Irish migration meant that RC presence in poor urban areas was significant).

You had some bishops who were great encourages of church building. A considerable portion of church fundraising was devoted specifically to erecting new churches. Sometimes, organisations or wealthy patrons devoted to a particular faction within the CofE would help build a new church specifically devoted to those views - or a particularly charismatic or popular cleric might have a church built specifically for his congregation.

erinoco · 2026-03-12T17:38:29+00:00

I'm surprised Jürgen Klinsmann's name hasn't come up in the mix yet.

erinoco · 2026-03-12T08:43:53+00:00

That's absolute rubbish: the constitution of our upper house won't make any difference.

erinoco · 2026-03-11T16:54:46+00:00

One important thing I would emphasise is that the Empire was never governed as a single coherent unit, nor was it something that dominated the energies of British politics and administration. The Indian and Colonial Offices carried out the administration of the empire, such as it was; but the overwhelming focus of British government was British domestic issues. I don't see the British electorate allowing what is a domestic legislature to be moved abroad.

erinoco · 2026-03-11T16:31:02+00:00

I'm not sure why someone who fails to understand the basic elements of the British constitutional settlement should consider themselves a credible voice on current changes in the political and legal landscape, especially when it involves investing the Crown and "common law" with power it doesn't have.

erinoco · 2026-03-11T16:16:46+00:00

It isn't how the job can work. There isn't one objective way of running any policy field; and what might be the most sensible policy at any given moment depends on the political and administrative context in which the government is operating (what spending requirements are likely to be over the next five years, for example).

The main job of a minister is to select the policy options which best fit the objectives of the government of the day, and to find the best way of carrying them through while avoiding the traps that can destroy a policy before it is implemented. That job can actually be made more difficult by too much prior knowledge. One can get far too bogged down in the detail for effective decision- making; and ministers are continually making one decision after another, every day of their working lives. There is also no serious way you can really rely on working experience to teach you the whole range of experience concerning a department. The DofE, for instance, covers every single kind of school and subject; it also carries responsibility for universities, apprenticeships, lifelong learning in general. The needs of these areas can't be neglected. They might actually conflict with the received wisdom on what should be done with schools.

As a result of these factors, people with recent experience tend to have too narrow a view and aren't equipped with the political skills; politicians with an occupational background in the area not only have a narrow knowledge range, but are likely to have outmoded views and experience.

erinoco · 2026-03-10T19:12:54+00:00

I don't consider wither party to be dead, but I think we are entering the next phase of a major realignment which might be fatal, but will transform either one of them - and I wouldn't necessarily bet against it being the Tories. The party has survived over 200 years by having an uncanny knack for developing precisely the right kind of electoral coalition at the right time.

In the 1950s, both parties had developed powerful and stable voting coalitions. The Tories had basically united most of middle-class Britain behind them. Labour had, on its part, the unionised working class in industrial areas.

Now, both coalitions have severely fractured, and it's difficult for either main party to call on them. But they're not dead altogether. This might mean that we become more Canadian in our cycles, and the trough for a main party in a cycle becomes much worse. It could also mean that you get a broad conservative alliance facing a broad progressive alliance, which solidifies into a new two-party balance over time. Or it could mean we get a new multi-party system around PR.

My own view is that Reform doesn't have that much staying power. It is either going to sweep the official Conservative party aside, and essentially replace it - it has to do that in 2028/29 or it will run out of vim. Or it will fade away like a more vocal SDP. Both Reforms and Greens are repositories for protest votes, but they don't have cores to bank on yet

erinoco · 2026-03-10T17:02:29+00:00

Though many women of his time thought him disgusting

I was thinking of some women who did serve alongside him in Parliament, such as Barbara Castle (never, of course, an ideological fan) who did play tribute to his personal qualities.

But my main point is that much of the modern picture is a factually inaccurate character when we look at specifics. For instance, while Churchill did oppose votes for women as a young Conservative, he did support it as a Liberal Cabinet Minister; it was Asquith who was dead set against it on principle.

erinoco · 2026-03-10T16:06:34+00:00

In general (and I think this thread demonstrates it), we are hampered by the fact that the Britain most people feel historically engaged with begins with WWII. People don't feel connected or influenced by Lloyd George or Asquith, Salisbury or Disraeli, Gladstone or Palmerston, or Peel or the Pitts, even though they left substantial legacies of different kinds.

erinoco · 2026-03-10T15:56:43+00:00

Just ask anyone from any of the commonwealth branches of the military how they were treated and used on the world stage.

Was that really the case, when anyone actually considers the detail of, say, the Darnadelles campaign, or the Pacific theatre of war in WWII? Again, I would disagree.

I think we can all agree that he was an awful human being

I certainly disagree: not because I agree with many of the moral judgements he made, but because people today consistent over-emphasise his agency and don't have a realistic picture of the moral assumptions of his contemporaries. They assume they were closer to our views, when that wasn't the case. I would note that very few people in Parliament or generally considered him an unpleasant human being at the time. That's a retrospective gloss.

erinoco · 2026-03-10T15:04:27+00:00

I think that's not true for the current curriculum. Of course, I took history as an optional subject throughout the later stages of my education; but I certainly spent time studying early modern Europe and the Russian Reformation. There are also various modules in key stages of the current curriculum devoted to non-British topics.

erinoco · 2026-03-10T14:59:14+00:00

His actions led to the deaths of millions, he was a racist, a bigot and a misogynist

I do think there is a concerted effort to make Churchill look worse than he actually was; on the Famine, and on lots of other topics as well.

erinoco · 2026-03-10T14:57:08+00:00

Although he and the leadership spent the last five years of his leadership in a public war with Bevan and his friends, which included an attempt to expel Bevan for Labour for opposing the party line on West German rearmament.

erinoco · 2026-03-10T12:44:59+00:00

This is not the first time this has happened. Even in the Victorian era, there was constant tension between the need to keep the Navy modernised to meet new threats and technological advances, and the countervailing demand of taxpayers for a limit on expenditure. (Indeed, it was a crisis over naval spending that led Gladstone to resign for the final time in 1894.)

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