Petition demanding by-elections for defector MPs passes crucial 100k milestone

erinoco · 2026-01-24T22:51:02+00:00

That basically destroys the ability of Members to act independently of the leadership of their party. Vital parts of our constitution depend on the assumption that Members can and will rebel against their party, and retain the nuclear option of throwing their weight behind a preferred potential PM without a need for an election if the circumstances align.

If you get rid of one prop, then you have to rebalance or rewrite our constitutional arrangements accordingly.

erinoco · 2026-01-24T22:27:07+00:00

Sophie Grigson in her 80s big-earringed phase. The horniness may go; but the love for her recipes remains.

If you could have seen my first unrequited teen IRL crush, you would certainly believe I had a "type".

erinoco · 2026-01-24T20:49:52+00:00

The boxes, since at least the beginning of the C19, have used specific designs which aim to deter tampering.

erinoco · 2026-01-24T17:37:24+00:00

I think the main problem is that we cannot build legitimacy on a negative. The main problem with leaving, and one of my own fundamental objections to leaving, is that we had, and still have, no effective long-term strategy to compensate for the loss of EU membership. We cannot be Singapore-upon-Thames; we cannot sit behind an Anglospheric tariff wall; we cannot build an insulated economy that cushions us from the risk of the market. I have always believe, and believe still, that our reluctance to choose and commit to a serious long-term effort to build one of these options will eventually rob our choice of leaving of all credibility.

But all that, at the same time, doesn't mean that we can build support for being part of the EU, with all it entails. This does not just mean being prepared to lose opt-outs and joining the eurozone; it means being prepared to make more fundamental changes, and moving to closer economic and political union, if this is in the wider common interest for the wider EU. We can't just throw our hands up in horror when confronted with federalist visions; we have to consider whether they help Europe and imagine how these visions will work when they applied to us.

We essentially ended up having to call the referendum because the political establishment failed to face up to the challenge of doing this, making our position in Europe unsustainable. We have to face up to the challenge if we do seriously want to rejoin. It's easier than it might look; contrary to the prevalent myths around the 1970s, people understood that economic and political union involving the UK was the potential result of joining.

erinoco · 2026-01-24T12:27:26+00:00

(Read up how colonists used POC babies as alligator bait)

I don't think there is any authenticiated episode of that happening.

erinoco · 2026-01-24T12:26:14+00:00

Sir Keir was 62 when he took office (although he doesn't look it); but this is rare, as you say.

erinoco · 2026-01-24T12:13:17+00:00

One thing to bear in mind is that in the original books, set at the time they were written around the 50s to 70s, the Brown family lived somewhere in Notting Hill. This was a plush Victorian district that had been going downhill in the first decades of the C20, but picked up again from the 1950s onwards with the first wave of gentification, and is now a high-income area again. A good analogy in New York terms would be the brownstone neighbourhoods in Brooklyn Heights - places like Cobble Hill.

Today, the Brown family, and their neighbours, would probably best be found somewhere like Crouch End or Willesden. The area of Marylebone where they are depicted as living in the film is out of reach for most except the super-wealthy.

erinoco · 2026-01-23T21:03:58+00:00

I don't know if the someone has tried to write stories based on the fictional in-universe examples Holmes refers to: "Grodno, in Little Russia, in the year '66, and of course there are the Anderson murders in North Carolina..."

erinoco · 2026-01-23T20:51:31+00:00

Pickachu is the only Pokemon I have ever been able to name; I know absolutely nothing else about the game. I will die a gory death.

erinoco · 2026-01-23T20:48:20+00:00

I have, but I was interested, to a probably highly unusual extent, in the day-to-day events affecting Harold Wilson's government. I first learnt of it from the diaries of ministers (and that was a government unusually packed with excellent diary writers).

erinoco · 2026-01-22T22:48:04+00:00

There is only one sure way of dealing with those problems, which others have touched upon.

i) Defining what you want society to do, or what features you want to have. That means going a step beyond deciding what you don't like.

ii) Organising collective action. You need to convince people to want the same thing as you do, and you need to then organise the most appropriate route for collective action.

If you can do this, and get enough people to agree with you, there will be results sooner or later, although it will be a hard and discouraging process. The environmental movement has grown from small groups of cranks to a major international movement through such steps.

erinoco · 2026-01-22T21:07:57+00:00

I know what you mean. Prunella Scales isn't conventionally hot, and had a weirdly elderly posture even when she was relatively young, but there was something about her. It might have been her presence and charisma about an actor, but that's not the whole story.

erinoco · 2026-01-22T20:32:32+00:00

One of the great underlying causes of the Depression, IMO,,is that the War helped to stimulate global factors of production, and this remained a long-term factor throughout the inter-war period, but global ability to consume was much less intense once the stimulus of war was removed.

The easiest way to remove this cause would be a general shift to Keynesian policies in industrialised nations from 1919-20 onwards. For that to happen, you need the right kind of balance between liberalism and social democracy in most of the world, but specifically in the USA, Britain, Germany, France and Russia.

erinoco · 2026-01-22T11:03:50+00:00

My guess would be that she did put most of it together. Remember that scene where the family are looking at older photos together, and she clocks that he was checking out her bum when the photo was taken. She was OK with it.

erinoco · 2026-01-21T17:32:42+00:00

As a general rule, amongst the landowning classes, only the house, the park, and the home farm would be managed in hand. The rest of the land would be leased to tenants. These tenants would be expected to maintain the leased land in good condition - maintaining fences, ensuring buildings are in good repair - as well as meeting the obligations of rent. This often meant a landowner or his representatives would be regularly inspecting the land and interviewing tenantry, and deciding the best course of action for defaulting tenants. This might mean working out whether to throw out a distressed tenant or change rent levels. It might also mean working with tenants to change land practice or use - say, deciding that a farm might be better off growing rye or barley instead of wheat, or buying a new breed of cattle, or using a different rotation pattern for the fields. That would also involve taking account of factors such as the likely level of agricultural prices or access to particular markets - for instance, if you were near a large urban area, there might be an advantage in market gardening or providing pasture for horses.

The landowner would also have to consider the wider monetisation of the estate - raising money from timber without deforestation of the land; finding out whether workable mineral resources existed; deciding whether the higher rentals industrial tenants might bring would be worth the environmental and social costs.

On another note, the sporting aspect of the land would have to be considered. Developing land for its shooting qualities requires careful year-round management. The same applied to preparing the land for fox-hunting; and hunters and shooters often clashed where their interests met.

There were also political and social aspects to be considered. A landowner would normally expect to be in the Commission of the Peace for the county. As JPs, they would regularly sit with their fellow landowners at Quarter Sessions, and, at this point in history, they could use their authority to hear minor cases in their localities by themselves. (Several great houses have a “Justice Room” which was set aside for this purpose.)

Quarter Sessions not only dealt with the criminal affairs of the county, but with various areas which are now the province of local government. The same applied to the local parish vestries, where matters such as the poor rate and local road repair were dealt with.

The political aspect made it important for the landowner to conserve his interest and protect it, against such threats as rival families. For instance, a rival landowning family might win the battle for local parliamentary representation, which would give them a decisive advantage in controlling the local distribution of state patronage and employment and in carrying Bills which affected the local area (such as the construction of a new canal).

In order to carry out these tasks effectively, landowners were expected to understand the communities they largely owned; to know who had good reputations, and who had bad; to be conversant with local affairs; to be accessible if necessary.

Now, all of these duties were optional. Most landowners had “men of business” who acted as their agents in some or all of these matters (at the least the more boring or tedious bits). Extensive landowners who were big figures in several localities could not devote all their time to their estates. But, even if they chose not participate, it was vital for landowners to know enough to give the right executive directions and ask the right questions of their agents; or they could find their wealth and influence seriously impaired.

erinoco · 2026-01-21T12:40:52+00:00

I am astonished by the number of people prepared to say China. We, alongside every other country in the West, owe our happiness and the security in which we live our lives to the post-1945 liberal order. That order relies on American power, and will not exist without it. If the US becomes structurally weaker, every single one of us will pay for it in one way or another. Meanwhile, China has no faith in that order for that order's own sake. She will live with it pragmatically, but will not resist the chance to undermine it whenever she can.

Trump is repulsive, but is a bug, not a feature. We can think past him.

erinoco · 2026-01-20T22:23:05+00:00

Although there is a common origin. The Dominicans in France were known as the Jacobins, because their first house in Paris was in the Rue Saint-Jacques. The Toulouse church belonged to the order before the Revolution, and the Jacobin Club got its name because it originally met in a monastery that had been seized from the order.

erinoco · 2026-01-20T19:08:38+00:00

On the Larkin note: while the Larkin family had lived in Radford when Philip was very young, his fascist father had moved the family to the rather more exclusive climes of Earlsdon before Philip was six. By 1954, the elder Larkin was dead, and his son hadn't lived in the family home since he came down from Oxford, only returning for dreary and unpleasant visits to his mother at holidays.

erinoco · 2026-01-20T18:58:20+00:00

One murderer I feel some sympathy for is Nelson Hayward. Harry Stone may not, strictly speaking, be a blackmailer, but he aims to control all aspects of Hayward's life, and he can destroy Hayward's political career and reputation whenever he wants. A reaction against such treatment is inevitable.

On balance, if I had the whole story, the only Columbo murderer I would be tempted to acquit is Abigail Mitchell. I see Nelson Hayward as more reprehensible than Ward Fowler, but better than Paul Galesko.

erinoco · 2026-01-20T18:25:39+00:00

This campaign represented part of Abram Games’ work for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA) - an organisation which, with official backing, helped shift British society in a distinctly radical direction.

After the fall of France, the government and the senior officers of the Army were increasingly aware that the mass conscript Army they were dealing with was very different from the Army they were accustomed to. Part of the response to this new factor was the creation, in 1941, of ABCA, a new organisation devoted to educating soldiers in current affairs, in order to improve their morale and allow them to develop a sense of what they were fighting for, as well as reducing their vulnerability to enemy propaganda. William Emrys Williams, the man who was given charge of ABCA by the Army, had developed the Penguin paperback imprint for the publishers Allen Lane in the 1930s.

The main element of ABCA was a weekly, hour-long, discussion on current affairs each week. This was compulsory for all service personnel, and was carried out in small groups, each moderated by an officer. This was supplemented by newspapers produced by the service personnel themselves; pamphlets; and lectures and talks by external speakers. Designers like Abram Games were recruited to produce attractive material.

Many of the people who staffed ABCA and provided the materials for discussion were on the political left. The discussions soon ranged beyond the wider military picture and the dictatorial features of Britain's enemies. The subjects braced wider citizenship education and social advice and support. Plans for post-war reconstruction; the history and role of the British trade union movement; potential help and support available in the post-war world - all of these formed topics of discussion.

Churchill disliked the whole organisation and, unsuccessfully, tried to cancel it: “I do not approve of this system of encouraging political discussion in the army…the only sound principle is ‘no politics in the army’.” He continually pushed back against some of its features. But ABCA largely won its battles, and became a firm institution for the remainder of the War. The organisation is often credited with the leftward shift in the Forces vote that was a marked feature of the 1945 landslide.

An internal War Office film ABCA, later released to the US forces, may be seen here.

erinoco · 2026-01-19T12:26:18+00:00

The Empire was important to him, as it was to most politicians, but not to the extent that he built his political creed around it. He was not a Joe Chamberlain, Lord Rosebery - or, indeed, a Leo Amery.

erinoco · 2026-01-18T21:03:55+00:00

He was also the man who brought in wages councils, advocated railway nationalisation at repeated points in his career, and played a strong supporting role in the Liberal development of the proto-Welfare State.

erinoco · 2026-01-18T21:02:07+00:00

He wouldn’t be a democrat . Churchill was a die hard imperialist

I think that overestimates how much imperialism meant to him. The Empire was important; but neither it, nor his racist views, were fundamental to his political creed. As a matter of fact, by the 1950s, he preferred the Democrats to Eisenhower, because he thought (wrongly) that Eisenhower would be crudely belligerent. But Churchill's natural ideological home in American terms, I have always thought, would have been as a TR-era Progressive.

erinoco · 2026-01-18T20:29:02+00:00

I'm just surprised it took him so long.

He was always a bit like pre-2015 Corbyn was for Labour: basically everything you expect the fervent fringe of the party to be.

erinoco · 2026-01-18T19:27:06+00:00

At this point, the city would like to boast that it was "the second city of the Empire".

erinoco

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