Bits and Pieces Tuesday 11th January 2022

 

 

 

So staff were invited to bring their own booze to the Number 10 Garden Party – ITV have uncovered emails showing that Number 10 staff were invited to bring their own booze to the garden party held during lock down and that Boris Johnson and his wife also attended. Labour have accused Johnson of breaking the rules, well blow me down with a ruler. Labour are a joke, they should be calling for him to go, they should be trying to get a vote of no confidence in parliament, they should be demanding that everyone else persecuted for breaking the rules have their convictions quashed and any fines paid back but no they accuse him of breaking the rules. Labour are a total joke of a party and if anyone thinks they can win an election needs to seriously think again.

ISP This Week in Scotland – Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America has proved what some suspected, that Twitter algorithms promote right-wing views over left-wing ones, using a “ranked timeline” (as opposed to a “chronological timeline”). Studying Westminster MP Twitter accounts, they found Conservative views amplified by 176% compared to Labour and the SNP, which were amplified around 112%. Of other developed countries studied, only Germany amplifies left-wing voices more than right-wing, and then to a lower degree. Whether a right-wing government was in power or not, the results were the same.

First things first if you don’t check out Julia Pennell’s weekly update you should, it is excellent and I am not surprised by the findings that the Tories are favoured on social media as they are certainly in the print media. The media in the UK is only a media in name, we have got to have the most bias and useless media in the world, yeah they occasionally break a story but I am convinced that is just to try and look impartial when in reality they don’t know the meaning of the word.

Tom McTague has a very long, but interesting in some ways article in the Atlantic that is worth a read. Tom starts by saying that The grim reality for Britain as it faces up to 2022 is that no other major power on Earth stands quite as close to its own dissolution. This is a view that is shared by a few people now across the chattering classes, even many within the wider YES community, but it is just not something that I share to be honest, yes we are closer to the break up of the United Kingdom than we have ever been, but we are not as close as we think.

Tom travelled the length of the UK to come up with his article and makes some points that we already know like “the root of Britain’s existential crisis today is Brexit—an apparent spasm of English nationalism that has broken the social contract holding Britain’s union of nations together” while I would agree with this comment that it was Brexit which has helped cause this, it has always been this way it is just out in the open now in a way that wasn’t clear before to some, although it was to many of us. English voters exerted their Englishness in some ways during Brexit, it allowed them to escape their British straight jacket that has confined them for so long and allow their true feelings and nature out of the bag. Tom goes on to hit the nail on the head when he says of Brexit that is was “revealing the country’s true nature as an unequal union, of the English, by the English, for the English”. 

The article is very long, worth a read if it is a very middle class take on where the UK is right now. I suspect that the UK is not as close to death as many think, too many from the very top to the very middle have too much to lose if the UK was to break up and those at the very bottom have too little they feel they can afford to lose to vote for change. No one wants the break up of the UK more than myself but we are just not as close to it as we should be.

No bottle and comfy slippers are the problem – This tweet is spot on. SNP MPs should be doing more to bring about the end of the union but they are not, and while I do not agree with Philippa Whitford SNP MP when she says that SNP MPs cannot be abstentionists because they were not elected on that mandate, they were elected to bring about independence for Scotland and they are doing nothing about that either so I am sorry Philippa you are wrong and therefor are part of the larger problem, the other part of that problem is as Professor 5K says, there are potentially 59 x £84 reasons why we have a real problem with the settled in SNP Westminster MPs, they are doing nothing to bring about the end of the union because the union gives them a very comfy life indeed, just not the rest of us lower down the scale.