Der Standard, Austria, December 14, 2019.POLITICO.com, U.S., December 12, 2019.Caglecartoons.com, The Netherlands, December 9, 2019.The Khaleej Times, UAE, December 9, 2019Politicalcartoons.com, Ukraine, December 9, 2019
The American media published reports about the bizarre British habit of taking their dogs with them to vote. Could it be that the Brits are actually stranger than we thought they were?
I like the clown. It was big news in the States when Macron and Trudeau laughed at Trump during the NATO conference.
In the NATO cafeteria, the cool kids chased off Romania, but Trumpy still had to sit at the loser’s table with Latvia. Angela (who still has a crush on Barack) always tries hard to be cool, but isn’t. Melania’s “Be Best” is her anti-bullying organization.
LOL…….Might just be an English thing. The Queen is big on doggies. 😉
Don’t know about the video link. It embedded as usual and works for me. In the past, SNL has worked OK on MNR I think. Might work directly from the YouTube website by typing the title in the search box. Title is “NATO Cafeteria Cold Open – SNL”
I see the first wheel has come off their bus. Raab, the de facto deputy prime monster has admitted that the USA will be able to put up the price of drugs.
Oh yea Tris! We’ll be more than happy to supply NHS with the most expensive drugs in the world ! Only the best for the UK……none of those cheap third world drugs for you! 😉
When I was but a youth of 67 or under, it was not atypical to see folk appear at the polling station with a dug, tie it to the always available railing – it was always sunny and surprisingly nippy – do their business, both the voter and sometimes the dug, and go on about the rest of their day, relieved in both a civic duty sense and the issues of the bladder.
To the best of my recollection dogs were not dressed up, o0ff topic perhaps, I never, ever, managed to hand out an SNP leaflet to a dug.
Paul Kavanagh (aka the Wee Ginger Dug) has raised dugs to iconic status. He alone has turned us into a nation of happy mongrels. And I am delighted that he has done so.
I kinda hope there’s going to be a real standoff between the First Minister and the Prime Minister over the §30 order business, because if it’s not brought to a head it will fester. However, I haven’t seen anyone mention as a serious possibility anything other than Boris refusing to grant one (the majority view), or granting the First Minister’s request (the minority). The only other outcome I have seen mentioned, very much a minority opinion, I think, is that Boris may simply dump Scotland (and Norniron) because we’re getting in the way of his bloody Brexit.
There is, however, a possible fourth outcome: Boris may pull a Theresa May and basically ignore the request, and not respond properly at all. Doubts have been cast on whether the courts can help in this at all, and some say Nay (Andrew Tickell) while others, including Paul Kavanagh (and me!), are not so sure.
A large part of the problem is, I think, that we are far too liable to unconsciously accept Westminster’s own jumped-up ideas about its powers and prerogatives – as was pointed out by Lorna Campbell, among others, in the comments on that article by Andrew Tickell in the National today (http://archive.is/nlL1G, entitled “Without Section 30, the law won’t help Scottish independence”). Another very sensible comment was that perhaps we should leave it up to Joanna Cherry QC…
I think that Joanna would be a pretty sensible choice as spokesman on independence in the British parliament.
It may be that we will need to prove, yet again that we have a mandate.
Possibly we could run an unofficial referendum (I’m not sure whether it would be legal to do that) and then hit them with the result of that. We don’t want to have to wait till 2021 for an election mandate.
we can – it’s not illegal but the problem is Nicola Sturgeon has previously said she wants a legally BINDING referendum which both sides agree on. There is zero stopping us holding advisory referendum (after all Brexit was an advisory ref) but obviously Westminster legally, if not politically and morally, could ignore it.
Anyhoo according to Michael Grey in Glasgow twitter, 48k people have indicated on facebook that they are attending to AUOB march in Glasgow on 11 January. And when you think of the number of folk not on FB, that’s a lot. Also the indyref pledge is now just over 14k away from 500k – or roughly 10% of the population (not of the electorate which is obviously smaller)!
On the legally binding referendum, I have heard NS, when speaking about independence, drop the referendum word out. Instead spoke of independence being won as the outcome of a legal process.
Anybody else notice this?
Could it be pressure being applied to Westminster on behalf of Scotland from the EU and internationally that is hoped/being worked for and if so, at what cost to Scotland?
An idle thought. Probably too many mince pies, already had two Christmas dinner invites out already.
The “Law” is whatever BoJo and his cronies say it is and also under the unconstitutionalised UK parliament,what is “law” today and be made not “law” tomorrow by the government of the day.
Westminster can reserve to itself anything it likes at any time but they may have to enforce it against
a hostile population.
That is a political decision.
It is breaking the Treaty of the Union of Parliaments. Scotlands people can tell the Scottish Government to repeal the Treaty, we can run a referendum on repealing the Treaty without the English Parliaments permission. Westminster is the ENGLISH Parliament as it was not dissolved and a new Parliament elected on the signing of the treaty as was written into the Treaty. Westminster Parliament has never been legal so Treaty has never been legal.
To be fair to Andrew he tells it as he sees it. Y’know, legally. Having read the guy for years I think his heart is in the right place but his intellect – which he has in abundance – would be far better exercised as a defence lawyer for us rather than as a defence lawyer for them. It is a tad ironic that Andrew appears to be the legal touchstone for ‘no independence now! ‘ whereas Joanna Cherry QC, is the exact opposite.
Yes, as I said, Douglas, but I’ll put it another way: not even the best of us is immune from unconsciously or lazily taking Westminster’s jumped-up conception and conceit of itself at face value. Neither the Westminster Parliament nor the Westminster regime necessarily has the power it claims – they only think they do, or believe they do, or act as if they do, or know fine well that they don’t but do it anyway. We have an out-of-control regime hell bent on ignoring a parliament which is itself puffed up with an arrogant notion of its own top-down and unlimited sovereignty. That being the case, the Scottish people and Scotland’s legal rights can be safely and routinely ignored. They think.
Whether my hypothesis about the Westminster Parliament and regime is entirely or even partially correct I leave others to judge, but you have to admit it has a certain explanatory power!
Whatever the Westminster Parliament and the Westminster regime are, they are not a government and legislature of the people acting in the best interests of that people; they are not properly founded in democracy, and we should stop trying to kid ourselves that they are, or that the UK is. This will come as no surprise to Munguinites, of course. Even if the regime keeps up a pretence of democracy, it’s a façade, it’s a sham, and the UK State is a Potemkin village of a thing. And now the Tories have a working majority in the legislature and the remaining Tory Remainers have been expelled from the Party, the Westminster Parliament is now effectively in Brexiteer hands – a majority further compounded by all those lily-livered Labour MPs in formerly safe Labour seats who are quaking in their electoral boots, and the ones who hated Europe in the first place anyway.
Now more than ever there is no purpose in hell being served by our SNP MPs putting in an appearance at Westminster. I think they should just stop going and see how long it takes before anyone notices. They’ll be glad of the extra room, I suppose, so maybe it wouldn’t actually take them all that long, but I can’t see Them lamenting our absence very much at all, and even if they do, they’ll be crocodile tears.
Paul Kavanagh said something earlier, something which I put somewhere else in Tris’s blog already but already can’t remember where, which rather effectively demonstrates how far the Tory Party have fallen from their already despicable low:
“Even Margaret Thatcher recognised that the current stance of the Conservative party was profoundly undemocratic and unsustainable. In her memoirs The Downing Street Years, she wrote, ‘As a nation, [the Scots] have an undoubted right to national self-determination; thus far they have exercised that right by joining and remaining in the Union. Should they determine on independence, no English party or politician would stand in their way, however much we might regret their departure. What the Scots (or indeed the English) cannot do, however, is to insist upon their own terms for remaining in the Union, regardless of the views of the others.’”
England has polling stations (and dogs it seems); Scotland has polling places. Not that it really matters, but does anyone know how/why the difference arose?
Thanks John, this blog is brilliant. I had to look that up, the polling question.
The polling place is the building, the polling station is the room/area within the building where you cast your vote.
Although near me the polling building is a caravan. Is the space within its aluminium skin the station?
Sorry, I should have said too that “If they stationed the caravan polling place in a station car park, that would make the station car park the caravan polling place station polling place caravan park”, though that might make people expect there to be some greenery. Not that anyone sane would bother engaging in such semantic idiocy in the first place. Nor would they bother referring to the polling stations within the caravan polling pla[That’s quite enough of that. Have you taken your pills? -Ed.]
Nope, I was there right up to and beyond “semantic idiocy”. I was back in the mental territory of Kandinsky’s point and plane.
There be space cadets there.
Especially now that the Orange One has actually inaugurate the fourth branch of the American armed forces, the Space Force, for which there will have to be cadets.
After the milkshake lobb(y)ing, when MacDonald stopped selling milkshakes, Burger King put out the advert announcing, “we still sell milkshakes”
Yip, they can have my custom.
Alan, I never did sell milkshakes! When my surname is misspelt (often) my usual response is: “It’s M-A-C – I am not a hamburger.” That said, an immigration officer in Kuwait was wide-eyed in admiration when he looked at my passport. “You’re here to check if we make your hamburgers properly? We do. I like them.” And he stamped the passport with a big smile, adding “Proud to meet you. My family won’t believe me when I tell them.”
I didn’t want to disillusion him and he’s still probably dining out on burgers and telling the staff that he once stamped their big boss’s passport.
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
The American media published reports about the bizarre British habit of taking their dogs with them to vote. Could it be that the Brits are actually stranger than we thought they were?
https://www.vox.com/world/2019/12/12/21012561/uk-elections-2019-dogs-at-polling-stations
I like the clown. It was big news in the States when Macron and Trudeau laughed at Trump during the NATO conference.
In the NATO cafeteria, the cool kids chased off Romania, but Trumpy still had to sit at the loser’s table with Latvia. Angela (who still has a crush on Barack) always tries hard to be cool, but isn’t. Melania’s “Be Best” is her anti-bullying organization.
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I’ve never seen a dog outside a polling station. Perhaps it’s an English thing?
Judging by the way they voted, it might be a better idea to tie the humans up and let the dogs to the voting.
Can’t get that second one , Danny
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LOL…….Might just be an English thing. The Queen is big on doggies. 😉
Don’t know about the video link. It embedded as usual and works for me. In the past, SNL has worked OK on MNR I think. Might work directly from the YouTube website by typing the title in the search box. Title is “NATO Cafeteria Cold Open – SNL”
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Thanks, Danny.
I see the first wheel has come off their bus. Raab, the de facto deputy prime monster has admitted that the USA will be able to put up the price of drugs.
Well, I never!
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Oh yea Tris! We’ll be more than happy to supply NHS with the most expensive drugs in the world ! Only the best for the UK……none of those cheap third world drugs for you! 😉
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Although, Danny, we are third world in many ways.
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So are we. Compared with France, we have fine 19th century railroads….LOL.
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Oh, the joy of being on a French train… or a Spanish one, or a German one, or an Italian one, a Chinese one… well, pretty much every one.
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Amazing things! 🙂
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Indeed, Danny. Indeed.
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I agree, as long as they are not Labourador voters.
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Ho ho ho! Marcia
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When I was but a youth of 67 or under, it was not atypical to see folk appear at the polling station with a dug, tie it to the always available railing – it was always sunny and surprisingly nippy – do their business, both the voter and sometimes the dug, and go on about the rest of their day, relieved in both a civic duty sense and the issues of the bladder.
To the best of my recollection dogs were not dressed up, o0ff topic perhaps, I never, ever, managed to hand out an SNP leaflet to a dug.
Paul Kavanagh (aka the Wee Ginger Dug) has raised dugs to iconic status. He alone has turned us into a nation of happy mongrels. And I am delighted that he has done so.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I kinda hope there’s going to be a real standoff between the First Minister and the Prime Minister over the §30 order business, because if it’s not brought to a head it will fester. However, I haven’t seen anyone mention as a serious possibility anything other than Boris refusing to grant one (the majority view), or granting the First Minister’s request (the minority). The only other outcome I have seen mentioned, very much a minority opinion, I think, is that Boris may simply dump Scotland (and Norniron) because we’re getting in the way of his bloody Brexit.
There is, however, a possible fourth outcome: Boris may pull a Theresa May and basically ignore the request, and not respond properly at all. Doubts have been cast on whether the courts can help in this at all, and some say Nay (Andrew Tickell) while others, including Paul Kavanagh (and me!), are not so sure.
A large part of the problem is, I think, that we are far too liable to unconsciously accept Westminster’s own jumped-up ideas about its powers and prerogatives – as was pointed out by Lorna Campbell, among others, in the comments on that article by Andrew Tickell in the National today (http://archive.is/nlL1G, entitled “Without Section 30, the law won’t help Scottish independence”). Another very sensible comment was that perhaps we should leave it up to Joanna Cherry QC…
LikeLiked by 3 people
P.S. They ignore us almost completely almost all of the time anyway, after all.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think that Joanna would be a pretty sensible choice as spokesman on independence in the British parliament.
It may be that we will need to prove, yet again that we have a mandate.
Possibly we could run an unofficial referendum (I’m not sure whether it would be legal to do that) and then hit them with the result of that. We don’t want to have to wait till 2021 for an election mandate.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Possibly we could run an unofficial referendum”
we can – it’s not illegal but the problem is Nicola Sturgeon has previously said she wants a legally BINDING referendum which both sides agree on. There is zero stopping us holding advisory referendum (after all Brexit was an advisory ref) but obviously Westminster legally, if not politically and morally, could ignore it.
Anyhoo according to Michael Grey in Glasgow twitter, 48k people have indicated on facebook that they are attending to AUOB march in Glasgow on 11 January. And when you think of the number of folk not on FB, that’s a lot. Also the indyref pledge is now just over 14k away from 500k – or roughly 10% of the population (not of the electorate which is obviously smaller)!
LikeLiked by 1 person
On the legally binding referendum, I have heard NS, when speaking about independence, drop the referendum word out. Instead spoke of independence being won as the outcome of a legal process.
Anybody else notice this?
Could it be pressure being applied to Westminster on behalf of Scotland from the EU and internationally that is hoped/being worked for and if so, at what cost to Scotland?
An idle thought. Probably too many mince pies, already had two Christmas dinner invites out already.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Who’s a. Popular guy then?
Search me, Alan!
The legal nicities are beyond me!
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My goodness! That’s going to be some day.
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The “Law” is whatever BoJo and his cronies say it is and also under the unconstitutionalised UK parliament,what is “law” today and be made not “law” tomorrow by the government of the day.
Westminster can reserve to itself anything it likes at any time but they may have to enforce it against
a hostile population.
That is a political decision.
LikeLiked by 5 people
And all the time they talk about bringing the population of their great nation together.
I say stuff that!
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It is breaking the Treaty of the Union of Parliaments. Scotlands people can tell the Scottish Government to repeal the Treaty, we can run a referendum on repealing the Treaty without the English Parliaments permission. Westminster is the ENGLISH Parliament as it was not dissolved and a new Parliament elected on the signing of the treaty as was written into the Treaty. Westminster Parliament has never been legal so Treaty has never been legal.
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Good point, William!
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To be fair to Andrew he tells it as he sees it. Y’know, legally. Having read the guy for years I think his heart is in the right place but his intellect – which he has in abundance – would be far better exercised as a defence lawyer for us rather than as a defence lawyer for them. It is a tad ironic that Andrew appears to be the legal touchstone for ‘no independence now! ‘ whereas Joanna Cherry QC, is the exact opposite.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Yes, as I said, Douglas, but I’ll put it another way: not even the best of us is immune from unconsciously or lazily taking Westminster’s jumped-up conception and conceit of itself at face value. Neither the Westminster Parliament nor the Westminster regime necessarily has the power it claims – they only think they do, or believe they do, or act as if they do, or know fine well that they don’t but do it anyway. We have an out-of-control regime hell bent on ignoring a parliament which is itself puffed up with an arrogant notion of its own top-down and unlimited sovereignty. That being the case, the Scottish people and Scotland’s legal rights can be safely and routinely ignored. They think.
Whether my hypothesis about the Westminster Parliament and regime is entirely or even partially correct I leave others to judge, but you have to admit it has a certain explanatory power!
Whatever the Westminster Parliament and the Westminster regime are, they are not a government and legislature of the people acting in the best interests of that people; they are not properly founded in democracy, and we should stop trying to kid ourselves that they are, or that the UK is. This will come as no surprise to Munguinites, of course. Even if the regime keeps up a pretence of democracy, it’s a façade, it’s a sham, and the UK State is a Potemkin village of a thing. And now the Tories have a working majority in the legislature and the remaining Tory Remainers have been expelled from the Party, the Westminster Parliament is now effectively in Brexiteer hands – a majority further compounded by all those lily-livered Labour MPs in formerly safe Labour seats who are quaking in their electoral boots, and the ones who hated Europe in the first place anyway.
Now more than ever there is no purpose in hell being served by our SNP MPs putting in an appearance at Westminster. I think they should just stop going and see how long it takes before anyone notices. They’ll be glad of the extra room, I suppose, so maybe it wouldn’t actually take them all that long, but I can’t see Them lamenting our absence very much at all, and even if they do, they’ll be crocodile tears.
Paul Kavanagh said something earlier, something which I put somewhere else in Tris’s blog already but already can’t remember where, which rather effectively demonstrates how far the Tory Party have fallen from their already despicable low:
“Even Margaret Thatcher recognised that the current stance of the Conservative party was profoundly undemocratic and unsustainable. In her memoirs The Downing Street Years, she wrote, ‘As a nation, [the Scots] have an undoubted right to national self-determination; thus far they have exercised that right by joining and remaining in the Union. Should they determine on independence, no English party or politician would stand in their way, however much we might regret their departure. What the Scots (or indeed the English) cannot do, however, is to insist upon their own terms for remaining in the Union, regardless of the views of the others.’”
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Well I’m always with Joanne
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England has polling stations (and dogs it seems); Scotland has polling places. Not that it really matters, but does anyone know how/why the difference arose?
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Oh… I didn’t know that.
I’d be interested in finding out.
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Thanks John, this blog is brilliant. I had to look that up, the polling question.
The polling place is the building, the polling station is the room/area within the building where you cast your vote.
Although near me the polling building is a caravan. Is the space within its aluminium skin the station?
LikeLiked by 1 person
If they parked the polling caravan in a station car park, that would be quite Zen-like, really. It might also be a boon to commuters.
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Sorry, I should have said too that “If they stationed the caravan polling place in a station car park, that would make the station car park the caravan polling place station polling place caravan park”, though that might make people expect there to be some greenery. Not that anyone sane would bother engaging in such semantic idiocy in the first place. Nor would they bother referring to the polling stations within the caravan polling pla[That’s quite enough of that. Have you taken your pills? -Ed.]
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Nope, I was there right up to and beyond “semantic idiocy”. I was back in the mental territory of Kandinsky’s point and plane.
There be space cadets there.
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Especially now that the Orange One has actually inaugurate the fourth branch of the American armed forces, the Space Force, for which there will have to be cadets.
This one’s quite pretty – no, not a pretty space cadet, or even a pretty spacey space cadet: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/o2F8AR7hIpM/maxresdefault.jpg
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It is indeed pretty!
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LOL
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Would you have to vote Greens then?
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OmG!
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What a lot of clever people read this wee blogl
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I never eat burgers but I’m almost tempted to go to Burger King after that bus advert!
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🙂
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After the milkshake lobb(y)ing, when MacDonald stopped selling milkshakes, Burger King put out the advert announcing, “we still sell milkshakes”
Yip, they can have my custom.
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LOL!
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Alan, I never did sell milkshakes! When my surname is misspelt (often) my usual response is: “It’s M-A-C – I am not a hamburger.” That said, an immigration officer in Kuwait was wide-eyed in admiration when he looked at my passport. “You’re here to check if we make your hamburgers properly? We do. I like them.” And he stamped the passport with a big smile, adding “Proud to meet you. My family won’t believe me when I tell them.”
I didn’t want to disillusion him and he’s still probably dining out on burgers and telling the staff that he once stamped their big boss’s passport.
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Like that story ☺
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