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25 April 2017 at 23:32 #56727
Wheat is hand-pollinated if you want to incorporate new genetic traits; I understand it’s a right pain. Managing several acres in a single morning would certainly have someone bouncing for joy.
So it could be a writing mistake, it could be that the only Great Big Field they could rent was wheat, or it could be that they quite reasonably thought that farmers on a brand new planet would need to do some work on the plants’ genetics so that they’d flourish in their new environment.
18 April 2017 at 22:59 #56463@Morpho
I agree that the Gallifreyans in the 50th talk about TARDISes, but they’re also talking in English. 😀One of the minor items on my Who wish list is a line or two of dialogue in Gallifreyan. In the meantime, I think we have to assume that the English word TARDIS translates whatever the Galifreyan terminology is for that type of ship. Even though ‘The TARDIS’ is technically the name of the Doctor’s ship, only.
Same sort of thing as the British name for vacuum cleaner being ‘Hoover’ or a ballpoint pen being a ‘Biro’.
17 April 2017 at 23:40 #56389Is it just me or did the actress who played Heather remind you of Clara?
Yes, very much so. I noticed two echoes of Clara besides the musical motif. Firstly the actress who plays Heather has a bit of a look of Clara. Secondly the close up photo of Bill’s biological Mum was so similar to Jenna Coleman’s features it made me wonder if they’d photoshopped a mix of the model’s face and hers.
The other thing I found interesting was the way they cut to Susan’s photo when Bill asked ‘why me’. Moffat seems to be hinting that the young female Companions are often ‘foster granddaughters’.
17 April 2017 at 20:57 #56379Possibly because the TARDIS translates the Gallifreyan word as ‘TARDIS’?
17 April 2017 at 18:01 #56368I’m thinking that the tech used can derive energy from biologicals (i.e. food). David Weber has a similar problem for his human personality imprinted android in the Safehold series – it can use food to scavenge needed materials, so it poops out the stuff it doesn’t need.
Is this the first time it’s been definitely confirmed on the main programme that the TARDIS has a loo? I know it’s been mentioned in the webisodes, but I think this might be a first for a TV episode of Doctor Who.
17 April 2017 at 16:51 #56366I think they’re hoping that Matt Lucas’ Nardole will turn into something like Catherine Tate’s Donna – a one-off casting for a very comic part that can be extended as a longer term companion. Because the comedian is also an actor.
I’ve seen Matt Lucas on stage, so I’d say he’s perfectly capable of playing a comic companion who might prove to be a lot more than the comic relief. Like Matt Smith and Catherine Tate, he’s a National Youth Theatre alumnus.
17 April 2017 at 15:13 #56357TARDIS Interiors generally turn out to be a lot of corridors. 😉 We saw early shots of the interior of the TARDIS in the 1964 story Edge of Destruction – spaceship style cabins and not much belief in doors. I recall a shot of a cabin in the Davison Doctor’s era, but that was also basically ‘ship’s cabin’ style.
Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS in S7 (Smith Doctor) showed the most we’ve seen of the interior, with extensive use of the TARDIS library, the Doctor’s workshop, the engine room and … corridors. 😀
17 April 2017 at 14:34 #56355Re:TARDIS
In the 50th Anniversary season, we saw the Doctor and Susan escaping into a TARDIS on Gallifrey. So, it is a question, isn’t it? Why an acronym name that only works in English for a Gallifreyan time machine?Possibilities:
- Susan was human, kidnapped by the Time Lords for some nefarious reason. She named TARDIS in English because it was her native language.
- Both Susan and the Doctor are Gallifreyan, but have some kind of (possibly genetic) connection with Earth and humans. Both Susan and the Doctor have married humans, both Susan and the Doctor have insisted on spending time on Earth. She named the TARDIS in English as a symbol of her (and the Doctor’s) dual heritage.
- Susan was Gallifreyan, became fascinated with Earth when she and her grandfather were in exile, and was playing around with English acronyms. She simply thought TARDIS sounded cool, just as she thought human pop music was fun to listen to. .
Since she left, the Doctor’s fascination with Earth and insistence on calling his ship ‘TARDIS’ has been his way of remembering his granddaughter. He protects the planet she lived on; his ship is called by the name she gave
17 April 2017 at 14:00 #56353The time to panic with the bookies is when they close down the betting – that’s when they think the part has been cast and people-in-the-know are betting on a dead cert. 😉
Remember when Capaldi was cast? There was a massive surge in betting for Rory Kinnear – and it turned out to be rubbish.
17 April 2017 at 00:52 #56319Martha had a sister, a brother and a baby nephew, plus a dead cousin who looked just like her. 😉 I don’t think Bill is related; I can’t see the extensive Jones family leaving a relative in foster care.
At the moment I’d say Bill’s backstory simply explains why she’d be willing to leap in the TARDIS. Like Rose, she’s bright but didn’t do well in school. Like Clara, she isn’t going to let life get in the way of her dreams. If she can’t go to university one way, she’ll find another.
The photos on the desk do show that the Doctor’s moving on emotionally. The Smith Doctor was the man who tried to forget; the Capaldi Doctor has become the man who remembers his family. Maybe being forced to forget Clara made him finally realise how precious those memories are?
10 April 2017 at 02:36 #56054@Thane15 and @pedant
There was some four-course rotation in the Midlands in the late Middle Ages. Townshend’s great innovation was to popularise the Flemish use of clover, which fixes nitrogen in the soil and provides feed for animals turned into the field for grazing – previous four-course rotation had relied on one field simply being left fallow. Oh, and to popularise the Flemish use of turnips, which meant more animals could be kept alive over winter.
The clover was a win-win; it replenished the nitrogen, fed the animals and the animals fertilised the field as well. But the poor guy is remembered for the turnips. 🙂
The big confusion with ‘crop rotation’ is that the agricultural revolution moved us from a Roman system of leaving one field fallow to the modern system where every field is in use.
10 April 2017 at 00:47 #56049@jimthefish and @blenkinsopthebrave
Thank you so much for reminding me of Time and The Rani. I’ve been trying to forget that ever since I first watched it. In fact, I think I was trying to forget it while I first watched it.
Okay, Missy and the Master – that’s been on my personal wish list for a bit, but I don’t think I thought it would happen. I agree with @tardigrade, though – the Simm Master was being driven deeper into his insanity, and you often got the impression he didn’t like it. Mind you, this may have been because John Simm didn’t particularly like the script making the Master so OTT, and decided to incorporate it into the character.
Missy, on the other hand, seems perfectly happy being as mad as a box of frogs. Which may be why she’s less ‘villain’ and more ‘anti-hero’. What’s also possible is that the Master blamed the Doctor for whatever happened to him; finding out that it was really Rassillon behind it all meant s/he no longer hated the Doctor.
Ooh, I wonder ‘when’ the Simm Master is going to be from? Mr Saxon? Hoodie Master? Or just after he blasted Rassillon into his next regeneration?
16 January 2017 at 21:13 #55147It was a gag in the 50th Anniversary episode. He brings Queen Elizabeth and her horse into the TARDIS, thinking Queen Liz is the Zygon spy. It’s the horse. 🙂
11 October 2016 at 09:24 #54188Thanks for that. I’ve managed to time my holiday to coincide with the first episodes of Class, so minimal information on the forum title sounds great.
I’ll have to play catch-up when I get back.
8 August 2016 at 23:06 #53620The Doctor certainly seems to believe that – but he always does seem to have believed that. The Time Lords (as distinct from the Gallifreyans) seem to be the type of atheists that make Richard Dawkins look like a devout Anglican. If anything, Dark Water seems to indicate that he’s becoming a little less certain, a bit more agnostic. The Nethersphere? Well, it’s defined as not so much an afterlife, rather a bit more life than you were expecting. The ultimate question of what happens next isn’t so much answered as postponed.
Torchwood certainly does try to suggest that there’s nothing on the other side by having someone briefly revived and remembering (literally) nothing: it’s another example of RTD’s tone-deafness about religion that he doesn’t know that this would be entirely compatible with Christian theology, possibly Buddhism as well. I think the worst tone-deaf point was when he had someone lose their faith due to aliens. Really not sure how he’s managed to avoid noticing the number of SF writers who are also practising members of a religion, or that the Vatican has a policy on alien contact. 😉
There are several other points in RTD scripts where I’d go ‘well, you got that bit about religion wrong’- but I don’t think I’ve ever been able to say that in a Moffat script, even though he’s probably just as agnostic as RTD.
perhaps the Twelfth Doctor’s “big” arc will finally reveal there is a real promised land and give him something to work towards/look forward to?
Well, there were quite a few times in Series 8 when I was joking that Moffat must have been on an Alpha course, but I think any arc along those lines would only go as far as admitting that the Time Lords might be claiming certainty where there is no certainty.
7 August 2016 at 17:32 #53596My experience with people complaining that actors mumble is that they frequently seem to be over fifty and have attended rather a lot of rock concerts. 🙂
But if it’s only some actresses (and not the ones with the higher voices), then the explanation might be their regional accents anyway. Accents are often gendered – the rising tone inflection near the end of the famous ‘Valley Girl’ accent is called Valley Girl for a reason.
I do have a bit of a problem with what’s called phonological awareness, though, and I often find that I have to concentrate to understand someone who has an accent new to me.
6 August 2016 at 23:59 #53585If you’re going slightly deaf, it’s the higher frequencies that go first. If you also have a problem with distinguishing children’s words as well as some of the women actors – possibly time to get your hearing checked out. 😕
5 August 2016 at 19:09 #53580Who does dust the Tardis?? Maybe it dusts itself
I really hope so – can you imagine having to dust an infinite number of corridors? 🙁
4 August 2016 at 13:07 #53567What I’ve done – because it’s very difficult to discuss this without spoilers – is set up a blog. Rather than make it specifically about HP, I’ve widened it up to a more general blog on the nature of canon, using Harry Potter and the Cursed Child as an example.
So I will reply to you there. All are welcome (if you’re okay about Harry Potter spoilers), because there’s always plenty to discuss about canon in Doctor Who.
The first and most important point being: is there any canon in Doctor Who?
3 August 2016 at 00:35 #53539@puroandson
Yes, there’s more HP – it’s a West End play. Now the reviews have been good, they’re in talks about taking it around the world.
My guess from reading the script is that the playwright (Jack Thorne, who has quite a few BAFTAs to his credit) came up with the idea and the main theme of the play, then JK Rowling worked with him and the director to make sure that the play was true to the books, the established characters and to the Potterverse.
The script (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) is on sale, but it is a playscript. See above for comments. 🙂
2 August 2016 at 23:31 #53537It’s a playscript. Even the Telegraph article is basically saying ‘Who are these idiots who don’t realise that a playscript isn’t like a novel?’ You can’t read a script like a book – you have to think of a playscript as the skeleton of the story, with the set, effects and performances as the flesh and blood. If you’re reading it for fun, that means you have to do an awful lot of work, imagining the finished play in your head.
And no, you can’t judge a play by its plot summary: try summarising Hamlet if you don’t believe me.
Yes, I’ve read the script of HP and the Cursed Child; getting a ticket is now very firmly on my list of Things To Do. As stories go, it’s effectively a short story rather than a novel and deals with two very simple but very powerful themes – but the power is going to come from the actors’ performances and the visual effects.
Visually, I’m really looking forward to discovering how they’re going to manage some of those scenes on stage; I’d say this is going to be one heck of a theatrical experience. From an acting point of view, the main characters have a lot of subtext to deliver – the script seems to presume that the actors playing adults will be working from the books as well as the script, so will know what book subtext informs which lines. I think you could see the play without knowing the books, but I will say that you’ll probably get a lot more out of it if you treat it as Harry Potter Part 8.
2 August 2016 at 19:43 #53532@puroandson
interesting angle
Well, the only alternative angle I could think of was ‘OMG, what is that teacher doing??!! Has she gone mad??’ 🙂
But it does sometimes happen that schools need to discuss triple X rated stuff, usually when something triple X has been discovered in the wild, so to speak.
1 August 2016 at 14:44 #53518@puroandson
What do you think? Should I march to the school and have a word in this teacher’s ear?
My palms are itchy. I think I want to slap her. But a ‘word’ might be better (also, more legal).The best thing to do would be to ask the head why the teacher is giving them this material – is it part of a school wide discussion on domestic abuse, sexual abuse and/or pornography? Because the availability of porn on the internet and the ability to pass it around on mobile phones between kids means that, yes, schools can find themselves urgently needing to give lessons about some of these topics to 14 year olds – and also feel that they need to explain that the practices seen in pornography may not be normal, or realistic, or much fun for the woman. This can involve some explicit explanations.
Saying that, the selection of this case does sound worrying, which is why I’d go to the head rather than the teacher. Inexperienced teachers have ruined their careers by diving in where angels fear to tread: you might want to enquire whether she’s checked with her line manager/department head that the proposed trial was suitable material for the class.
31 July 2016 at 08:59 #53494@puroandson – like a few others, I’ve been lurking and reading a lot but haven’t had anything to add – so I haven’t been posting.
A happy belated birthday to you!
@ichabod – when it comes to tumours, no news is definitely good news. Glad to hear you’re getting better and that you didn’t need too many pain meds.
13 July 2016 at 13:44 #53230In the UK, it can snow in June. Rare, admittedly, but it has happened. 🙂
7 July 2016 at 01:26 #53135And with the pound plummeting, stocks in freefall and the prospect of future capital flight that makes anything that happened in the past 20-odd years look like a walk in the park, it’s going to take a lot more than that for Britain to be anything other than an economic basket-case.
I’ve been saying throughout this Referendum – never make long-term decisions on the basis of short term effects. It was so bloody obvious that the economy was going to tank in the immediate aftermath of Brexit that I heard Leavers quietly admitting that the next few years would be rough if they succeeded. But, as I keep saying – economies don’t matter to people in a revolution. They just want to bring the government (whichever government) down.
As for the markets they, more than anything, loathe uncertainty. However, once the dust has settled, they won’t care whether we’re in the EU or not – as long as we have a stable government, a population that isn’t on the brink of rebellion and the ability to export something to somebody.
Unfortunately, as I keep joking, Plan A involved the Prime Minister not resigning and Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition not trying to re-enact the assassination scene from Julius Caesar. 🙂
I will here pause to salute Mark Carney for seemingly being the only person in the entire British Establishment to Have A Post-Brexit Plan. This is undoubtedly because he’s a Canadian who never went to a British public school. 😈
Many thanks, Canada.
4 July 2016 at 13:04 #53087@puroandson
Basically, I’d say: ‘This is what a revolution looks like’. 🙂 I’m sure there were people in the English Civil War muttering that going to war over a Ship tax was silly, and who the heck was affected by the Star Chamber anyway?
The long term causes had short term trigger points. I’d say it’s very similar for this Brexit: in future years historians are going to be able to dig out the real long term causes. My guess at the moment is that it’s going to come down to ‘The UK just didn’t fit into the EU and the EU tried to integrate too quickly’.
That is, we are almost the only country in Europe where our Constitutional Revolution happened nearly 400 years ago, haven’t been successfully invaded (except by our constituent countries) in over 900 years and where, as a result, the constitution has grown organically. Add to that that the English and Welsh legal system is based on precedent and common law rather than the Roman law basis of most of the other EU countries, that economic integration is pretty spotty (we kept the pound because of that) and you get …
… that the changes required to fit into the EU were, in the end, too much for the UK to cope with. The EU tried to introduce them too quickly; even with various opt-outs, a very large section of the UK population didn’t follow. Add a referendum, and you get Brexit.
I don’t think most people reasoned that out; they just knew they felt unhappy. Too many little decisions being made that weren’t the ones they would have made. Not enough understanding of how the general public could change the directives. Not enough understanding of why they’d been made in the first place, when the previous system was working. An attitude from the EU that they governed FOR the good of the people, and that took precedence over popular votes. But the UK conception of government is that you govern BY the consent of the people (hopefully for everyone’s good).
The trigger points were stupid little things like EU regulations on rivers, popularised and mythologised; no ’emergency brake’ when freedom of movement resulted in mass migration, and a slogan like ‘Take Back Control’.
The big thing that all Westminster, every party, missed was that a revolution was brewing. People don’t care about economics in a revolution – they WILL bring the entire country down if it’ll only get rid of the system of government. So far, we’re fortunate that the ‘revolution’ feeling has been expressed via the ballot box; hopefully that’ll earth the lightning strike.
4 July 2016 at 01:07 #53066Yes, I’ve certainly heard that argument: I’m not qualified to know whether there’s any basis in fact. The EU itself has flatly denied it and stated that the cause of recent serious floods is the record rainfall. It certainly seems reasonable that record rainfall might cause floods.
However, the local argument is that they’ve had flood plans in place for generations which have worked – but the EU directives take effect and suddenly they’re wading in water. You can see why they’d connect the two.
4 July 2016 at 00:54 #53064And it turns out that not only did the Remain party have no contingency plan in the event of a vote against them, neither was there any consensus or coherent plan among the Leavers
And that, to me, is the scariest thing about this whole Referendum. Because I could work out, halfway through the campaign, that there was a possibility of Brexit. Add the poll-of-polls constantly reverting to 50/50 to the equally consistent ‘Leavers are more likely to vote’, and you’ve got a Brexit.
Now for the Indyref, every party down to the Greens had a Scexit plan. They might not have been very good ones, but they all had plans. But it seems everyone in Westminster is either so out of touch, so delusional – or both – that they never even considered the possibility.
This is probably the biggest failure of government of our times. Not the Referendum itself; that was possibly ill-considered, but certainly manageable. The failure was that nobody, nobody at all, ever considered that a united front of Labour, mainstream Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, even the SNP –
– might lose.
3 July 2016 at 14:06 #53057@puroandson
And there are some righties that swing more leftie with age. 😀
3 July 2016 at 13:58 #53056@puroandson
what’s the Rotterdam effect. Or anyone?
‘The Rotterdam effect’ is the name given to the idea that some EU exports may not actually be exports to the EU. 😉
The Port of Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe, and it’s very common for EU exports to non-EU countries to first be shipped TO Rotterdam, for sea delivery to non-EU countries. Or, to be sold to exporters in Rotterdam, for export elsewhere.
However, in the export statistics, they will be listed under the first place they’re shipped to. Rotterdam. That’s the ‘Rotterdam Effect’ – non EU exports may be classified as EU exports. If you want a government explanation, it’s here.
So there’s an indeterminate number of the UK’s non-EU exports which may be being classified as the UK’s EU exports. Nobody quite knows how much – upper limit, 8%, but probably about 4%.
2 July 2016 at 16:07 #53046I think there’s been an absolute as well as a percentage fall in UK exports to the EU since 2011.
Any government, at whatever geographical level, which loses the support of 52% of a population no longer has a democratic mandate anyway. Consent of the governed, and all that.
As far as the UK in the EU is concerned, we’re just discussing the details of the funeral.
30 June 2016 at 21:37 #53022what does the Paul McGann movie classify as BG or AG
It classifies as The Movie We Do Not Mention. 😀
Not Paul’s fault, of course. He gave a good performance in a rather dire script, and has since done great Eighth Doctor work for the Big Finish Audio series. But the Gap is 1989 to 2005, and I’d personally classify Paul McGann’s Doctor as the last of the BG Doctors. Certainly the Night of the Doctor minisode has a very ‘BG’ feel about it, stylistically.
29 June 2016 at 21:30 #52991Pretty much. The real reason for the global mass migration is that wealth is almost entirely dependent on where you were born. Move countries, and your children are very likely to be much better off than you were.
The long term solution is a less unequal world.
28 June 2016 at 14:15 #52964So: still on ‘music to Brexit by’
27 June 2016 at 22:51 #52959I think we’re rapidly approaching the ‘Everybody Hurts’ stage. 😕
27 June 2016 at 12:19 #52956The area with most immigrants nearly all voted Remain.
That’s an over-simplistic analysis. London – which has a centuries old tradition of high migration – certainly voted Remain: other areas with recent high immigration voted Leave. Birmingham, for example, very multi-cultural and hardly an area of low immigration, went Leave. Boston, Lincs, with 10% of its population recent immigrants, went Leave. Peterborough, Cambs (9% of population recent migrants), went Leave.
Those areas with hardly any immigrants are very often living near areas of high immigration, as well. Attitudes get worse when you can see the effects, but don’t get the mitigating factor of chatting to or working with any recent migrants.
I could go on. I was arguing this for weeks before this damn vote: mass migration has a flattening effect on the wages of the native-born low-paid. Even with a minimum wage, wages often decrease because available hours decrease. The effect has been observed in the UK, by the Home Office and by the Oxford Migration Laboratory. It’s been observed by studies in Norway. But mass migration is good for the middle and upper classes and for the nation as a whole.
If you leave this to ‘sort itself out’ because the effect is ‘temporary’ and ‘small-scale’ – and ignore the fact that ‘temporary’ mass migration is now in its second decade – you get rising inequality and some very pissed off people at the lower end of the scale. Add to this a Labour Party that thinks migration is always good (despite the above statistical evidence that it increases inequality in the short term) and that anyone who even hints at possible problems is a racist xenophobe who is too thick to understand that the real problem is Blairism, or Thatcherism, or possibly captialism – and you get what we’ve got.
Which is a (currently democratic) explosion from people sick of nothing being done about their problems. Telling them they’re racist xenophobes and giving them diversity education only helps if there are no real problems.
Don’t get me wrong: I think the problems from mass migration can be solved by far better means than ‘stop all migration’ and ‘send them all back’. Mass migration is a net good for the receiving country. And its basic cause of huge income disparity between countries isn’t going to go away overnight.
But we can’t pretend that the problems are all in people’s racist and xenophobic heads. Suddenly importing an extra 10% population into a smallish, previously rather insular area requires more schools, more hospitals, more low cost housing, an eye being kept on wages and employment. Otherwise people will start looking for scapegoats – and the big, obvious scapegoat staring them in the face is that extra 10%.
27 June 2016 at 11:08 #52951Ah, well. We are living in interesting times. 😕
27 June 2016 at 10:41 #52949Do you think there’s a chance of back-pedaling from this insanity?
That would be the worst thing we could do: was it Emma Goldman who said ‘If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.’?
Well, we’ve just had a vote that has changed things. We are now running around like headless chickens – but, actually, I think that telling people ‘No, voting can’t be allowed to change things’ would ultimately lead to a civil war. Not over Brexit, specifically. But over something else, some thing that attracts a noisy populist …
… who will then be able to point to the overturning of the Brexit vote as evidence that there is simply no point working through the ballot box.
But if we grit our teeth, invoke Article 50, take the hit – then, we have evidence for all our people that the ballot box is very serious indeed and can change our country in huge ways. The last evidence of this was 1945, when the election brought in the Welfare State. Interesting that one of the biggest voting blocs for ‘change’ were the people who remembered the last time things changed so very drastically.
The real big problem is the one I was writing about up-thread; nobody in Westminster dreamed Brexit might actually WIN – so the planning is having to be done after-the-event instead of before. They thought it was going to be another Indyref; close, but ultimately the status quo will win.
Right now, I reckon a lot of people on the Remain side are in the Bargaining stage of grief. They’re hysterical, quite frankly. All they can think of is to try and bargain a way to put the genie back in the bottle, and pretend this never happened. You’re seeing all kind of ‘it was only a small majority’, or ‘it’s not legal until parliament approves and most of our MPs don’t approve, so they’ll stop it’, or ‘well, I have a Brexiter here who’s changed their mind, so that proves the majority vote wasn’t really valid’ stuff.
17.4 million British citizens voted to change the status quo. When that happens, after weeks of being told ‘changing the status quo will bring disaster’, something is badly wrong. The most likely explanation is the simple one: people feel that the current status quo has already brought disaster to them.
Overturning people’s votes doesn’t make that go away. It just makes things worse.
26 June 2016 at 23:48 #5293826 June 2016 at 15:36 #52926But for me the best thing to come out of this mess is that it’s put a second independence referendum clearly back on the cards.
Yes, it has. Much as I hope Scotland will choose to stay in the UK once things have calmed down, the situation has changed so completely that I’d say it’s constitutionally impossible not to hold a second Indyref.
It’s also changed my mind completely on proportional representation. Wednesday, I’d have said the English/Welsh don’t want it (see previous referenda). But by yesterday I was thinking that if people feel so disenfranchised they need to press a Big Red Button to get Westminster to pay attention – maybe we do need a Holyrood style List system. So they can feel their vote counts and they will have representation in every election.
I suspect Scottish Independence is part of a wider revolt simply because it fits in all the ‘revolt against the established order’ movements. Occupy, Trumpism, Brexit, Scottish Independence – they’re all part of a growing feeling that the status quo is simply not working for most people.
26 June 2016 at 13:01 #52922Okay, I kept finding myself singing this all day yesterday, so:
Music to Brexit by. Anyone else got some good ‘end of the world’ music?
[Any political discussion should be at The Fox Inn – strictly music discussion here].
25 June 2016 at 16:31 #52915@puroandson
I’d go for ‘not doing their job’, personally. Living mainly in London rather than in their constituencies – which in a country as geographically tiny as the UK, is really difficult to justify. Yes, they have to be in London while Parliament is sitting, but there’s no reason for the ‘just drop in for surgeries’ attitude too many MPs have.
The BBC’s linked to an interesting article.
25 June 2016 at 14:21 #52912@puroandson
They do, yes. But how else do you make major constitutional changes? And if a referendum is so ‘anti-democracy’, why do so many democracies use them far more frequently than we do?
One of the things we’ve just found out is that we’re a very divided country. One of the other things we’ve just found out is that our system – which is one of electing locally based MPs – isn’t working. The whole point of the ‘local MP’ system is that such MPs are supposed to keep abreast of opinion in their area, and then bring that opinion back to Parliament, so that Parliament knows what’s going on.
Parliament should have known there was such a big desire for change; Parliament should have been able to head this off – for one thing, if David Cameron had realised he might genuinely lose this Referendum, he might have been able to persuade the EU negotiators of that. Alternatively, they might have been able to ease austerity in areas that were getting a lot of migration; places like Boston voted heavily for Out.
But the system of ‘know your constituency’ very obviously isn’t working, because there’s a massive difference of opinion between the major cities and the rest. It’s actually very similar result to the one in Scotland – except there, it was Glasgow and Dundee who were largely for Independence. And in a similar way to this Referendum, people were quite honestly and genuinely telling me that most of the people they knew were for Independence. Here, people were quite honestly and genuinely telling me that everyone was for Remain.
The problem for the Indyref, it turned out, was that they didn’t know many people outside Glasgow. 🙂 In this Referendum, I’d say that the problem was that they didn’t know many people outside London. Including the very people whose job it is to know people outside London – those locally elected MPs. There were stories of Labour front-benchers busily doorstopping – and being told by household after household ‘F**k off, I’m voting Out.’
Well, they damn well should have known that was the case before the vote. Why didn’t they?
25 June 2016 at 12:47 #52910@Puroandson
I think what we’ve just had in the UK is the biggest protest vote of the modern era – possibly the biggest protest vote ever in the UK, because the raw numbers and the percentage vote were both bigger than for the Clement Attlee Labour government that brought in our post-war NHS/education/social reforms.
I think most of the Leave voters were shocked to find themselves the majority. Yes, immigration was the ‘hot-button’ UK wide issue; but for many that ‘hot-button’ spoke to issues of finding themselves in a system that they don’t really understand or feel they have control over, and wanting to return to a system that they do understand and do have at least some control over.
I also think that the Indyref was an expression of exactly the same problems – except in this case, the ‘hot-button’ issue was that the majority party in Scotland often isn’t the majority party in the whole UK and the ‘distant government’ was in Westminster rather than in Brussels (and Strasbourg).
I’ve been following politics since I was a child and I would say that when things get to that point, there is no rational, sensible, economic argument that will work. People will vote for change and damn the economic hit. Scotland didn’t have a majority – but the UK did.
I don’t know the way forward. Possibly it’s for the UK to copy the PR style system for Holyrood elections, where there are both constituency MSPs and a party list, with further MSPs from the list being elected on a proportional representation basis. Because we’ve just had a huge number of normally very disengaged people voting in both the recent referendums. We have to find some way of giving them a voice; one that doesn’t involve handing them a Big Red Button each time.
24 June 2016 at 09:15 #52871@puroandson
Yes, Mr Cameron has announced that he’s resigned. He’ll stay on as caretaker PM with a caretaker Cabinet while the Conservative party runs a leadership election. Currently rumours are also flying of a vote against the Labour leader as well.
On the whole, ‘earthquake’ probably isn’t too big a word.
24 June 2016 at 01:43 #52863Yup, contentious. And I really was trying to stay calm. Oh, well. Apologies.
On the bright side, it’s a good turnout, with a lot of people who don’t normally vote getting engaged.
The other bright side is that a lot of the talking heads are saying ‘the message is that we haven’t been listening’. If they actually believe that, rather than just saying it, that’s a result. Whoever wins.
23 June 2016 at 22:00 #52861The one real-life marriage I know of between a Victorian servant and a ‘gent’ was the rather weird relationship between Hannah Cullwick and Arthur Munby. I seem to recall, when I was researching for the play, that there may have been a number of such marriages – but they were generally kept secret.
Rather like The Paternoster Gang, where Madame Vastra and Jenny have to pretend to be mistress and servant.
There are a couple of books on the real life Victorian governess; they did sometimes get marriage offers from people within the household. So, Jane Eyre isn’t entirely unrealistic on that.
Kathryn Hughes and Ruth Brandon have both turned their PhD thesis on the Victorian Governess into books.
23 June 2016 at 09:33 #52851But I haven’t seen a single voice on the Remain camp threaten rape or murder on those disagreeing with them.
No, not rape or murder. Suppression of voting rights, accusations of genocide, racist posts when a black writer announces she’s voting to Leave. I’ve seen those.
But can you tell me that some in the Remain camp haven’t excused or ignored the rape and murder of others? When the political cause was fashionable enough?
23 June 2016 at 09:03 #52850This council estate-raised son of a truck driver agrees with you wholeheartedly. I really really don’t need the manners and mores of the petit-bourgoise explained. I grew up dealing with it every day as a poor person in a wealthy town. So: your point?
And I live and work in an area that is by some measures one of the top five deprived areas in the country. I don’t commute into it for work, I live here – and have done for nearly twenty years. A hell of a lot of people here, probably the majority, are voting Leave. And I know them, and I am getting angry when middle class people with very comfortable lives tell lies about them. Seemingly because they are daring to have an opinion which differs from their ‘betters’.
because the native youth won’t do the work;
Please tell me whether you would? Not ‘the native youth’, not ‘the working class’. Would YOU?
Because personally, in my life, I’ve shovelled sh*t. I’ve worked until 2am in a city centre burger bar. I’ve done quite a few of the nasty jobs – and let me tell you, having done them I wouldn’t willingly do them again unless there was no other job on offer. Again, I live among ‘the native youth’ and one hell of a lot of them are working. They have jobs, or they’re training for jobs, and often it isn’t really the job they wanted or dreamt of – but they’re damn well doing it.
Are you willing to gather the crops? Not ‘the native youth’, YOU? Are you willing to start at seven and stay open until 1am? Again, not ‘the native youth’. YOU.
Because if you’re not, then don’t you dare call yourself a socialist – not when you disparage the working class of this country for wanting the exactly the same things that you want. A better job than the insecure, badly paid, back-breaking, wet, cold work that is, for example, picking our potatoes.
So, your point?
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