This is all just so depressing. There is nothing to make me vote for either of the big parties, since Labour binned their environmental pledges. It's just Green or don't bother voting for me.

I probably won't bother voting for you - we've already got the NF in power now anyway.

The Greens are not seriously in contention outside of Brighton (though they have won a council seat in Hampstead & Highgate), being a niche middle-class ginger-group. The question is what happens to the Tories after the upcoming defeat, with numerous Tory MPs announcing they won't stand again, and also what happens to Labour after a victory which is really only to do with resentment of the government and not with anything Labour has to offer (which frankly isn't much).

This problem here is that you don't have any experience of following the bill through the Scottish Parliament. It was confirmed during this time, in parliament, that yes a family conversation around the dinner table could be covered.

Also, the major issue that you seem to be missing when quoting what a 'reasonable person considers...' is that it is very much open to the interpretation initially of the police. There is no general confidence that this statement actually means anything.

The bolded is very much the issue and all signs are that the police are already getting things badly wrong. There's been numerous arcticles and discussion around this in the past couple of weeks. The Scottish Police Federation are very concerned about this legislation as are the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents and The Scottish Police Authority. That's very concerning.
The main concern is that even where people don't cross the criminal threshold, the investigation, possible confiscation or laptops, phones, etc and the time this could all take will have a chilling effect on free speech. There is also issues around recording non hate crime incidents.

Just to show where we are right now, and this is before the new legislation comes in, a Conservative MSP is threatening to take the police to court as he just discovered that Police Scotland recorded his name for a non criminal hate incident



And this is the 'hate incident' that was the issue




And here's a report from yesterday about one of the various ways the police are acting disingeniously here. There is no confidence in how this will be policed.

I'm thinking of reporting everyone in scotland for hating the english

Funnily enough I was reading an article by Kathleen Stock today that touched upon that point

"Growing up in Scotland as the offspring of sassenachs, I have certainly been made aware of the presence of spikes of hatred at various times in my life; but strangely enough, animus against the English does not figure heavily in defences of the policies. Instead, the focus is upon more fashionable victims. You may not understand what a non-binary person actually is, let alone be able to summon up enough negative emotion to persecute one, but according to the Scottish government such people are sufficiently threatened as to justify their specific inclusion in the Bill. Also included under the characteristic of transgender identity are people who “cross-dress”: good news for the many Scotswomen who wear trousers, as otherwise females don’t get much of a look-in, with sex not mentioned as a protected characteristic at all."

Doesn anyone have a comparable table here for the UK government? Would be interesting to compare the figures for how few folk think each government is doing.

Jeffrey Donaldson has resigned as DUP leader after being charged with "allegations of a historical nature".

What an awful man.

Just when it looked like NI politics was becoming a bit less of a shitshow.

Deviant Ulster Perv.

83% dissatisfied overall with the UK government, per Ipsos.

https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/uk-opinion-polls

Though note that 55% are dissatisfied with Keir Starmer, though this is better than the 73% dissatisfied with Rishi Sunak.

(Interestingly, 52% now think Brexit has had a negative impact and only 22% think it's positive, with another 22% arguing no difference.)

The Westminster Tory government may have the same problem as the SNP in Scotland -- been in power too long and everybody's sick of them -- but the Tories have not done anything as mad as the SNP's Hate Crime Bill. Whether the inevitably incoming Labour government will do anything that mad, I wouldn't care to predict, but it's possible. You'd think the recent Irish referendum disaster might have warned politicians that, as they should have known already, the public tend to be socially conservative -- but politicians like to force things and act 'new' and show off their power, so maybe they haven't got it.

My friend Lisa was refused a job at Waitrose in Glasgow a few years ago because, she was told, 'Our customers don't like English accents.' I wonder if that would be covered by the Hate Crime Bill? I'm guessing probably not, somehow, even though you couldn't come across a clearer example of irrational hate-based discrimination which we all know is as common as rainwater in Scotland.

i dont think i will see a prominent politician maintain a >50% approval rating for a sustained period again in my lifetime

The main political leaders (and a certain ex leader) up here are all in negative territoty. Sarwar the most popular and he's at -7

Politicians of all colours have facked things up in the UK so badly for so long it's a pretty rational response.

Try explaining to someone why Norway have a sovereign wealth fund set up from their oil and gas revenues but the UK spent most of theirs on unemployment benefit.

Norways pm has a lower (just) popularity rating that sunak

https://pro.morningconsult.com/track...eader-approval

Not to justify government welfare in general, but the size of the benefit of fossil fuels for the UK was far smaller than for Norway.

Less total revenue for like 11x the people

Not setting up a sovereign wealth fund was definitely a mistake. I can see why it wasn't done but I disagree with it. Not sure what the 80's would've looked like though without the expenditure from that oil money.

Looking at politics now I don't think any politician will do anything that involves taking a long term outlook at the expense of the short or medium term, they are all concerned about the election cycle and what they can do within that.
The SNP have been going on about the lack of a sovereign wealth fund for years and yet they themselves have pretty much done the same thing as the Conservatives. They spoke about creating a wealth fund from the Scotwind project (the selling of seabed leases for offshore wind farms), however they've now admitted that it's being spent in the general revenue budget instead. If money is available, politicians will spend it. It's the same reason our national debt isn't likely to decrease at any point in the future.

You're correct they won't be concerned about the ling term or naything much. Unless the votes are.

Why should they be?

That's a bit of fantasy based on the idea that Norway has a similarly small population and imagining that all the oil and gas revenues could have come to Scotland. But Scotland has bigger problems than Norway and Scotgov has shown no competence at any point. It is of course true that UK North Sea revenues were squandered due to Thatcher's frankly strange determination to 'sell off the family silver', as Edwardian gent Harold Macmillan put it, giving the red-braces City boys a temporary payday while surrendering important revenue rights and then blowing almost unimaginable sums to pay people to do nothing.

https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/2...norway-uk-oil/

In order to setup a sovereign fund you basically have to be willing to bet your collective livelihood on the idea the other party won't raid the fund for political short term gains. You need 1) a super-high-trust society and 2) very minimal actual differences between the two main parties.

OR, you need single-party dominance like in Singapore, you can setup a fund if you know you will be the guys benefiting politically from it 20+ years down the line.

Can't blame either main party in the UK for not trusting the other party enough, it was rational for both of them not to do so.

I wasn't particualrly commenting on the sovereign fund. Just banging my drum that if we keep voting for politicians we dont want then we will most definitely keep getting politicians we dont want.

There's only one way democracies invariably have policitians with staggering low popularity ratings. Trumen was wrong - in a democracy the buck stops with us.

skirt wearing porridge-gobblers,

from now on, bad posting WILL result in me sending the police round

The poor old polis don't know which way to turn. They're likely to be snowed under with vexatious score-settling complaints and apparently they've only had two hours' online video training for this. Meanwhile on X, JK Rowling keeps daring the polis to arrest her for 'misgendering' India Willoughby, which would set the cat among the pigeons all right. (Sex, a category that wokers somehow don't approve of, is specifically excluded as a protected characteristic under Holyrood Law, even though sex-based hate crimes are the commonest of all.)

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/o...-act-7gsf5t3k3

Over in Ireland, where a similarly ill-thought-out bill has been looming for some time, Fianna Fail Senator Sharon Keogan has tweeted 'I heart JK' and former Fine Gael justice minister Charlie Flanagan says the Irish bill should be binned soonest.

https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/...r-for-justice/

We don't yet know if the presumed incoming Labour government at Westminster (though Labour may have crocked their chances in Muslim and Red Wall constituencies somewhat) will try and force something similarly stupid on England & Wales. Their proposed bill to ban 'conversion practices', which aren't really a thing, with only about a dozen cases ever reported, is likely in effect to target religious communities, in particular minority religious communities ('private prayer' has been mentioned as something that would be outlawed as wrongthink), and the blowback in human-rights terms and electoral terms could be considerable. You'd think Labour would have learnt by now not to let policy be dictated by crank activists or the mythical 'Islington dinner party', but apparently they haven't.