{"id":1158,"date":"2006-03-10T11:18:00","date_gmt":"2006-03-10T11:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2006\/03\/10\/how-is-it-possible-to-hold-so-many-contradictory-ideas-at-one-time\/"},"modified":"2007-01-20T21:56:55","modified_gmt":"2007-01-20T21:56:55","slug":"how-is-it-possible-to-hold-so-many-contradictory-ideas-at-one-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2006\/03\/how-is-it-possible-to-hold-so-many-contradictory-ideas-at-one-time\/","title":{"rendered":"How is it possible to hold so many contradictory ideas at one time?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tony’s flatmate Charlie “the Lord” Falconer must be either a genius or a moron<\/a> – and I know which I’m putting my money on…<\/p>\n

So to have an English Parliament would threaten the breakup of the United Kingdom, but having a Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly does not?<\/p>\n

Falconer also acknowledges that “The argument for devolution was that the Scots and the Welsh felt policies could be imposed upon them for which there was little or no support in Scotland or Wales” – precisely the same arguments the proponents of an English Parliament use now, only with “England” in place of those two Celtic nations. Indeed, Scots votes have swung it for the government on a number of occasions now.<\/p>\n

For the record, my preferred solution to the West Lothian Question has long been that now adopted by the Tories – an honour system, where Scottish MPs don’t vote on issues that will not affect Scotland. Sadly, however, under this government the concept of “honour” seems to have been utterly lost under obfuscation, lies and spin. Ho-hum…<\/p>\n

Still, at least Tony and Charlie are being consistent in their claims that they can’t introduce two tiers of MPs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Although that rather fails to answer the question “what are MSPs and Welsh AMs if not second-class MPs, exactly?”<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b> Apparently that wasn’t Falconer’s only bit of doublethink this morning<\/a>. This is what I get for no longer being able to pick up Radio 4 on my alarm clock. Then again, missing The Today Programme is probably doing my heart a world of good – waking up every day to the levels of anger ministerial idiots provoke can’t have been healthy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tony’s flatmate Charlie “the Lord” Falconer must be either a genius or a moron – and I know which I’m putting my money on… So to have an English Parliament would threaten the breakup of the United Kingdom, but having … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}