I have a feeling this migrant didn’t get off a dinghy with all the other engineers and scientists so probably isn’t raising a lot of concern for most. Conflating “immigration is too high” with “anyone who thinks immigration is too high is a racist who thinks they are all freeloaders” doesn’t work anymore, no amount of media propaganda will change that.
And yet those kids from state schools then come out with more firsts than those from independent schools, showing they were not “dumber” at all - they were smarter.
Really, oxford and cambridge as well as other top universities can have a simple algorithm. They should bias against those from private schools in terms of admissions criteria until the point at which outcomes (as measured by graduating degree scores) are equal. This wouldn’t happen though because then private schools would drop to 5% of enrolments and there’d be no advantage gained from paying for a private school education. Unthinkable!
Your anecdote doesn’t contradict the story - the University of Edinburgh doesn’t appear in the top 20 so apparently their “rankings” don’t think highly of the University of Edinburgh either.
(Also Edinburgh isn’t a redbrick, it was founded in 1583)
Fortunately in Britain we have moved far from the values of former labour MP and noted Europhile Sir Oswald Mosley. I would see reform as a fairly traditional conservative party, though I appreciate that there are many that are keen to shift the overton window so far that they can be described as somehow “far right”.
There are quite a few things there (e.g. that he wanted laws against marrying someone of another race, that he saw himself as left wing, etc.) that I did not know, although id did know of his involvement in the Union Movement.
He was also a Conservative MP (later joining Labour)
That was not Reform. It was Tommy Robinson, someone so politically toxic that Reform turned down a huge amount of money (a £80m donation) from Elon Musk because it came with the condition that they allowed him to join the party.
The turnout was boosted by the murder of Charlie Kirk (yet another example of British people getting more involved in American causes than their own), and by some other things too I think, and although very big for a far right protest, it is far smaller than many causes have managed to organise over the years (anti-Iraq war, opposing to the fox hunting ban, both pro and anti Brexit, climate change...).
I'd love to switch to helix from emacs - I really like the editing model when I have tried it. However I write a lot of clojure and the lack of a REPL in helix and reliance on using LSP for everything (which just isn't as good as repl integration) is a bit of a blocker. I hope their plugin system and embracing scheme for it means that some kind of REPL capability will be implemented and supported well. I hope that plugin branch is merged soon.
You might want to have a look at Matt Paras’s config. He’s been developping the plugin system using steel, his own scheme interpreter in rust.
To send things to the repl, it uses eval-buffer from the helix-ext.scm file.
The integration and customizability is for sure not that of Emacs yet, but with the plugin system soon to be merged, we can hope to have a proper REPL and Parinfer implementation!
It isn't free but it is less expensive. In fact in Scotland the annual water bill averages to £490 compared to £603 in England. This is despite a lower population density (which means more infra required per person comparatively).
So despite the best efforts of critics, they can't really show that Scottish water is any worse in terms of sewage outflows etc - if anything it is marginally better on that metric, and significantly cheaper to run. And the actual water quality is good, although that has a lot to do with incidental geography. Why would I want it privatised?
I fully agree. Moreover, it’s clear that Scottish Water actually has (if slowly) moved towards improving infrastructure and sewerage monitoring since that 2021 post I replied to, unlike a number of English water companies.
I think a national speed limit is a sensible system. In many countries, every random stretch of road has a different speed limit, as though driving speeds have been centrally planned - usually poorly.
Expecting the driver to be an educated and safe driver who is capable of judging the appropriate speed for the road is far superior. This also inculcates a better attitude in the driver - the speed limit is not a target.
I absolutely understand that, but it seems concerned with the same things (preserving a minority language) and there are lots of initiatives in this area all over the U.K. Literally, right next door.
Really the article - despite the headline - spends a long time on the literary history of gaelic in scotland, with a short paragraph at the end on the current status. I doubt the author had time to expand to a review of minority language measures globally, and it didn’t seem to be the main point of it anyway.
And, the situation and standing of gaelic in Ireland and Scotland are quite different. In Ireland, gaelic is strongly associated with the primary, and successful ethnonationalist movement. In Scotland, at the end of the day gaelic is a remnant of a foreign invasion, and is also historically associated with catholicism, so is often seen as the “other”. This makes it more difficult to whip up enthusiasm to learn it, even among die hard Scottish nationalists. This whole situation is quite unlike Ireland and even Wales, it would be at best a distraction in the article.
Gaelic arrived in Scotland within 100 years of English arriving in England. They are both attested to arrive in around the 4th - 5th AD century IIRC. Before that Scotland spoke Pictish (which is not known in the modern era and may/maynot have been a Brythonic language) and a language related to Welsh in the Lowlands. Gaelic is a very interesting language and should absolutely get championed and preserved, but it is not the ancient language of Scotland, and hasn't really been spoken there much longer than the English language was in the UK.
“The British” did not genetically engineer the potato blight.
Further, in the 19th century state capacity was small and massive modern style relief programmes were not possible. Despite this, Britain managed to spend a large degree of GDP on relief. Proportionately more than it did on covid response recently, for example.
The reason people deny british culpability for “genocide” is that there was no “genocide” and britain did what it was able to do, to an unprecedented degree in fact. If anything, we should be proud of britain’s response, especially knowing that it would never get aby kind of gratitude for it.
>If anything, we should be proud of britain’s response, especially knowing that it would never get aby kind of gratitude for it.
Some examples of Britain's response:
* Establishing soup kitchens for the starving, where, to acquire food one must renounce your religion, anglicise your name, and abandon your native tongue.
* Provide maize for the starving and destitute but not for free for fear it would generate a sense of self-importance amongst the millions who are dying of hunger
* Maintaining the exportation vast amounts of food to Britain throughout the Great Hunger
* Requiring the starving who couldn't afford to buy food from the British to build pointless walls in order to earn that food
* Forcibly evicting the starving and dying from their homes because they couldn't pay their rent for some reason
* Denying aid to anyone who owned more than a quarter-acre of land, forcing starving farmers to give up their land and become destitute in order to qualify for relief
So, on behalf of all those before me in Ireland; go raibh maith agat.
The entire reason there was a famine was due to absentee landlords who demanded absolutely everything but the bare minimum from farmers for the "right" to work on "their" land.
