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Post by orvillethird on Oct 15, 2016 21:57:32 GMT
Well, to my surprise, Nicola Sturgeon is pushing for an IndyRef2 by releasing a draft bill. Oddly, support for independence appears to have declined.
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Post by orvillethird on Oct 29, 2016 4:13:48 GMT
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Post by orvillethird on Jan 11, 2017 18:56:52 GMT
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Post by eDGT on Jan 16, 2017 16:11:08 GMT
So the Northern Irish Executive has collapsed, just in case any of you were wondering.
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Post by Krall on Jan 16, 2017 20:58:10 GMT
So the Northern Irish Executive has collapsed, just in case any of you were wondering. Ah yes, I've been trying to keep up with the news regarding that. I'm actually weirdly happy with how much press it's getting, considering how Northern Ireland is usually ignored by the news media and Britain in general. To summarise the situation for those unaware of what's going on there: A renewable energy scheme set up by the First Minister (Arlene Foster - Democratic Unionist Party) has gone way overbudget, and the Deputy First Minister (Martin McGuinness - Sinn Fein) resigned in order to force an election.
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Post by eDGT on Jan 16, 2017 21:15:24 GMT
Ah yes, I've been trying to keep up with the news regarding that. I'm actually weirdly happy with how much press it's getting, considering how Northern Ireland is usually ignored by the news media and Britain in general. To summarise the situation for those unaware of what's going on there: A renewable energy scheme set up by the First Minister (Arlene Foster - Democratic Unionist Party) has gone way overbudget, and the Deputy First Minister (Martin McGuinness - Sinn Fein) resigned in order to force an election. Pretty much yes. Though to give it a bit more detail. The RHI scheme has essentially been accused of making massive profits for those involved. It's based off of a similar scheme in England and Wales, that people using wood pellet burners to heat barns and the like would be paid £1.60 for every £1 they spent. The thing was that unlike in England we didn't have a limit to it. So now we've the case where some farmers in Arlene's constituency have had eight fuel tanks in a tiny barn which was heating nothing. One fella even caused a fire because of it. Arlene's refusing to admit that any mistake was made, much less admit to corruption. The Executive is owing a cool £490 million to people because of this scheme, and we've no even sorted out our budget, so now we're quite possibly going to go bankrupt. Never mind that our NHS is facing massive problems which needed to be addressed. Arlene meanwhile is accusing every one of everything else. She called a Minister who spoke out against her "a bully", she's claiming that her critics are misogynistic, that Sinn Fein are being sectarian against her because she's a Unionist. Every trick. Martin McGuinness is standing down. Officially it's because the DUP culture minister cut a £50,000 fund for the Irish language in schools with the excuse that he was trying to help sort out this RHI overspend, whilst increasing the fund for community halls to £300,000. It's looking incredibly likely all the community halls which received money were used by Marching bands, which if you're unfamiliar with Northern Ireland usually means that they're Protestants and guaranteed to vote DUP. Though as it also turns out McGuinness is incredibly sick and no one thinks he's going to last more than a few more years. Sinn Fein have not proposed a new Deputy First Minister, partially because they claim that Arlene had zero respect for Martin considering he was officially her equal in government and the senior partner by a long shot. So because of this Stormont has collapsed. Elections will be on the 2nd of March.
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Post by Krall on Jan 16, 2017 22:56:32 GMT
Pretty much yes. Though to give it a bit more detail. The RHI scheme has essentially been accused of making massive profits for those involved. It's based off of a similar scheme in England and Wales, that people using wood pellet burners to heat barns and the like would be paid £1.60 for every £1 they spent. The thing was that unlike in England we didn't have a limit to it. So now we've the case where some farmers in Arlene's constituency have had eight fuel tanks in a tiny barn which was heating nothing. One fella even caused a fire because of it. Arlene's refusing to admit that any mistake was made, much less admit to corruption. The Executive is owing a cool £490 million to people because of this scheme, and we've no even sorted out our budget, so now we're quite possibly going to go bankrupt. Never mind that our NHS is facing massive problems which needed to be addressed. Arlene meanwhile is accusing every one of everything else. She called a Minister who spoke out against her "a bully", she's claiming that her critics are misogynistic, that Sinn Fein are being sectarian against her because she's a Unionist. Every trick. Martin McGuinness is standing down. Officially it's because the DUP culture minister cut a £50,000 fund for the Irish language in schools with the excuse that he was trying to help sort out this RHI overspend, whilst increasing the fund for community halls to £300,000. It's looking incredibly likely all the community halls which received money were used by Marching bands, which if you're unfamiliar with Northern Ireland usually means that they're Protestants and guaranteed to vote DUP. Though as it also turns out McGuinness is incredibly sick and no one thinks he's going to last more than a few more years. Sinn Fein have not proposed a new Deputy First Minister, partially because they claim that Arlene had zero respect for Martin considering he was officially her equal in government and the senior partner by a long shot. So because of this Stormont has collapsed. Elections will be on the 2nd of March. Thanks for giving more information on this - I'd heard the £490 million figure before and accusations of corruption, but nothing I'd read actually supplied any details.
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Post by orvillethird on Jan 20, 2017 5:37:58 GMT
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Post by eDGT on Jan 29, 2017 19:32:42 GMT
An NI specific update: Michelle O'Neill is the new Sinn Fein leader. The Daily Mail did an article about her "shocking" IRA family ties, which pretty much everyone knew about anyway. Seriously you're hard pressed to find anyone in Northern Ireland who doesn't have any links to paramilitaries through family or friends. So that's not really a problem.
What is a problem is that she was formerly the Agriculture Minister, which means she's also connected to the RHI scandal as it was specifically linked to farmers, so her department had the job of selling it to them. She can of course claim that it wasn't her job to look for problems, just to sell it, but plenty of people have called for her to resign anyway. These are the same sorts of people who think Arlene Foster has done nothing wrong btw.
It raises the bigger question of how much Sinn Fein knew about the problems with RHI in the past. Apparently whistle blowers had contacted the office of Martin McGuinness at the same time as they tried to contact the First Minister. Certainly SF have some responsibility to accept for not being more scrutinizing of the plan, or for letting it go through in the first place, but the case still remains that RHI is shaping up to look very much like the DUP accommodating massive corruption under their time in office. Shinners can be told off for incompetence, but the DUP have actively robbed the people, and Arlene issuing an insincere apology does not make that better.
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Post by orvillethird on Feb 1, 2017 1:09:15 GMT
There's a major petition to deny Trump entry into the UK. May, on the other hand, is trying to be close to Trump. The odds of PM Corbyn are getting greater...
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Post by eDGT on Feb 1, 2017 1:11:42 GMT
There's a major petition to deny Trump entry into the UK. May, on the other hand, is trying to be close to Trump. The odds of PM Corbyn are getting greater... When a petition is debated in parliament they can literally just say "This petition had enough votes but it's probably not within our power to deal with it, note it. Next!"
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Post by Krall on Feb 1, 2017 4:10:17 GMT
When a petition is debated in parliament they can literally just say "This petition had enough votes but it's probably not within our power to deal with it, note it. Next!" That doesn't sound quite right to me, since Parliament is sovereign. The petitions committee can just choose to not schedule a debate on a petition though - that's what they did for a recent petition calling for the repeal of the Investigatory Powers Act.
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Post by eDGT on Feb 1, 2017 13:14:04 GMT
That doesn't sound quite right to me, since Parliament is sovereign. The petitions committee can just choose to not schedule a debate on a petition though - that's what they did for a recent petition calling for the repeal of the Investigatory Powers Act. I'm unfamiliar with the precise workings, but something similar happened when it came to a petition about the whole RHI thing. Westminster could have found an excuse to intervene, there's plenty of them, but instead they said "That's a devolved issue" and moved on. So yes they could stop a Trump visit, but May won't let it come to that, so she could probably say that it's up to her Maj to tell her to call it off.
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Post by eDGT on Mar 4, 2017 14:18:56 GMT
NI Assembly 2017 Election results are in.
Democratic Unionist Party (DUP): Down from 38 seats to 28.
Sinn Fein (SF): Down from 28 to 27.
Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP): 12 seats, no change.
Ulster Unionist Party (UUP): Down from 16 to 10 seats.
Alliance Party: 8 seats, no change.
Green Party: Up from 1 to 2 seats.
People Before Profit Alliance (PBP): Down from 2 to 1 seat.
Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV): 1 seat, no change.
Independent, Claire Sugden: Kept her seat.
Our assembly had its seats reduced from 108 to 90, taking one seat away from each constituency. As you can see the DUP are clearly the biggest losers here having been absolutely shredded by both seat reductions but also by incredibly high voter turn out. Turn out was up by 10% on average. The UUP's loses are worse in comparison though as they have been reduced from the third party to fourth, and their leader, Mike Nesbitt, has also resigned.
Now we have three weeks to form a government. The DUP reiterate that they'll go back into government with SF with no preconditions. The Shinners however are demanding that Arlene Foster, DUP leader, step down bending an inquiry into the RHI scandal. As things stand it's quite possible that Arlene may be pushed before she jumps. However I believe that the most likely outcome is a failure to produce a stable government and a return to Direct Rule by the NI Secretary at Westminster.
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Post by Krall on Mar 4, 2017 17:36:35 GMT
NI Assembly 2017 Election results are in. Democratic Unionist Party (DUP): Down from 38 seats to 28. Sinn Fein (SF): Down from 28 to 27. Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP): 12 seats, no change. Ulster Unionist Party (UUP): Down from 16 to 10 seats. Alliance Party: 8 seats, no change. Green Party: Up from 1 to 2 seats. People Before Profit Alliance (PBP): Down from 2 to 1 seat. Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV): 1 seat, no change. Independent, Claire Sugden: Kept her seat. Our assembly had its seats reduced from 108 to 90, taking one seat away from each constituency. As you can see the DUP are clearly the biggest losers here having been absolutely shredded by both seat reductions but also by incredibly high voter turn out. Turn out was up by 10% on average. The UUP's loses are worse in comparison though as they have been reduced from the third party to fourth, and their leader, Mike Nesbitt, has also resigned. Now we have three weeks to form a government. The DUP reiterate that they'll go back into government with SF with no preconditions. The Shinners however are demanding that Arlene Foster, DUP leader, step down bending an inquiry into the RHI scandal. As things stand it's quite possible that Arlene may be pushed before she jumps. However I believe that the most likely outcome is a failure to produce a stable government and a return to Direct Rule by the NI Secretary at Westminster. So more of a loss for unionists rather than a major win for SF. Still, looks like SF are going to get what they want.
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Post by eDGT on Mar 4, 2017 17:57:04 GMT
So more of a loss for unionists rather than a major win for SF. Still, looks like SF are going to get what they want. Well with the seat reductions people were expecting the losses to be fairly even across the board, the fact that every Unionist party has experienced a reduction will (to Sinn Fein at least) be a clear indicator that when the majority actually get up and vote they're really not fond of the way things currently are. I'd be in agreement too. During Brexit our Leave-Remain map aligned mostly with the Unionist-Nationalist constituencies. Like with my home constituency we've a small Nationalist majority and so we were on the low end of Remain. Our Remain vote won handily, thanks in part to increased voter turn out. We had a similar turnout at this election and non-Unionists are well ahead in this Assembly. Not a direct Sinn Fein win of course, but they'll see it as very close to one. It's legitimized their decision to collapse the Assembly.
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Post by MinnesotaNationalist on Mar 4, 2017 19:25:20 GMT
So why were 18 seats removed from the assembly?
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Post by eDGT on Mar 5, 2017 2:33:00 GMT
So why were 18 seats removed from the assembly? As far as I know it was due to the cost, we just did not need that many people. Whilst the loss of seats did worse for Unionists we had a recent controversy where people were taken off of the voting register, many of them being from traditionally Nationalist districts. Most of them were made aware of this before hand but some of them seem to have just ignored it.
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Post by MinnesotaNationalist on Jun 9, 2017 2:08:08 GMT
Looks like Britain is heading to Conservative-led Hung Parliament. Thoughts from resident Brit and Northern Irelander?
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Post by lordroel on Jun 9, 2017 8:53:18 GMT
No toughed but it confirms it, polls should be outlawed and never to be used again, we have seen it in the past year they are not telling the truth.
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