the queen who says goodbye and never leaves.

london 7.33pm 20C sunny wednesday 2019

the high temperatures we have been getting are now thankfully over and we are back to normal. so things are very pleasant here in london, weather wise. 

the big surprise today to me anyway was seeing the news that the queen have been asked to prorogued parliament. that means it will not sit from 9sept to about middle of oct, 14th. when she will give the queen’s speech, which will tell what the govt intentions on the budget will be.

i have never heard of this prorogued procedure before, but it seems it has been done before, in april , May… usually, and it is so ordinary, that no one  tells us about it. it is only now when it is used so that parliament cannot scupper the brexit on 31st oct, that so much uproar is evoked .

ah well, in our gay world, we poke fun at  the queen who says goodbye and never leaves. as well as the other stereotype, a butch guy who leaves without saying goodbye. haha . i hope the uk is not going to be the queen who says goodbye and never leaves.

 these past few days with all the talk of duck rice, makes me want to eat meat, and the only meat i got is pork and chicken, so i decided to take out the frozen chicken thighs and make soya sauce chicken. it will satisfy my craving for some meat, and soya sauce chicken is real easy to make and is very delicious. just like how the restaurants would make it. and it reminds me that there is no need to buy these things from all these eating places and paying so much for them. when it is so easy to cook it myself at a fraction of the cost. 

 

 

 

spanish politics

london 7.16am 15.6C cloudy saturday 2018

spain has a new president and a different party in govt. and the new president is not even a member of parliament at all… so it means that power is invested in a president, not a primeminister who has to win an election… it is a strange system . all from a vote of no confidence. what i dont understand is why that has not triggered an election. normally when the govt in power loses a vote of confidence, parliament is dissolved and the whole country gets an election to vote in the next govt. but this did not happen in spain.

perhaps this case is different because of the corruption of the leading party that formed the govt,  and its conviction by the courts. it seems corruption is quite wholesale within that party, and many of its members have been jailed. this article tries to explain why. but after reading it i am still not clear why parliament is not dissolved and the whole country goes into an election.

from the look of it, the corruption has been known for quite some time, and even then, the party had been re elected many times. so it would seem the public is not interested in the corruption and it has not influenced their choice of which party gets to form the govt.

i personally think that they should have an election and see if the public agrees with this different party forming the govt… maybe spain follows the american system, with a president , instead of prime minister as its head of state. combining both offices, head of state and head of govt. hang on, that cannot be right. because they have a head of state, who is the king of spain. so it seems being called president is the same as being called prime minister, except by having a president, the person need not be a member of parliament. confusing or what.

Digital StillCamera

 

council elections result

london 11.42am 14C cloudy friday 2017

council elections for the rest of uk , not london, was yesterday and the results are coming in. quite a bloodbath for UKIP, who lost all their seats; and for labour in wales and england. as of now the scotland results are not in. i would be most interested in the scottish result. 

added. 7.37pm. from what i gather, there are all hung councils now in scotland; meaning no overall control. previously there were 6 with either snp or labour controlled, now they have all become hung councils. the scotland graph do not show the conservative seats won, which accounts for all the councils being hung councils. the torys have taken seats that have been previously labour. that is why it has stopped the snp from controlling glasgow, which they had hoped to do; glasgow was a labour stronghold.

pity they have not summarised  how many former snp or labour seats  have been taken by the conservatives. though u can get a inkling it is quite a lot when u look at the map of scotland with conservative gains. quite a sea of blue. 

sat 6may added. 6.27am 10C sunny . scotland result 

Con – 276, a rise of 164
Lab – 262, down 112
LD – 67, up 1
SNP – 431, up 31
Green – 19, up 7
Independents – 172, down 86

 

council elections usually dont attract much notice by the national press, nor of most people in the uk in general. but coming as it does just before the general election, people will interpret it in their own way as to what it portends about the general election.

in london we did not have to go to the voting booth yesterday to vote for our local council, because we did it on the same day when we voted for the EU referendum. that was in june last year. gosh, was it almost a year now since that referendum… time certainly has flown. and we are going to have another historic vote in june this year when we vote in the general election.

i dont suppose people outside the uk will be interested in our elections  , or would they? but you would be surprised at how much interest the rest of the world seem to have for what the british do. i would have thought no one apart from the british would be interested that the prince philip is to retire from public duties. and yet it seems to have swept the world. though maybe because it was reported falsely that he had died. 

i voted just now.

london 8am, 2015 thursday

i was struck by this thought as i waited my turn to be noted down. no one asked me for identification. all i need is the poll card sent to me. i asked what is there to stop someone else from taking my card and pretending to be me?  the person in charge there said because i have the poll card sent to my address.

i can see a way of someone jiggering the system, dont you? ah well, lets hope not, because in the marginal seats that might swing the vote.

i am in westminster and the city of london (it just goes to show how few people live in city of london and westminster to allow it to merge with westminster and only take one MP to represent us) and it is solidly conservative.

or rather, there are so few of us eligible to vote. the vast majority who live here are visitors, or rich people who buy as investments, or if they are do live here because they are rich they dont have the right to vote. or if they are british their second home is in london, their main voting residence is elsewhere in uk.

We didn’t stop the Iraq war. But we transformed British politics | Andrew Murray | Comment is free | The Guardian… Not

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via We didn’t stop the Iraq war. But we transformed British politics | Andrew Murray | Comment is free | The Guardian.

aopinionatedman is doing a project O , garnering the opinions of bloggers because he believes that opinions are important and influential and hopes project O will confirm it or bring it about.

i would like to hope he is right, but i fear he is wrong. in fact, it was while i was filling up his questionaire that i realised he is wrong. my answers showed how useless our opinions are in influencing the govt. it only allows us to vent and blow off steam and that makes us feel good. that is all it does. really.

and this article shows why. the author says it was influential in changing our views on intervention in foreign conflicts, but i think it shows the opposite.

at least 1million people came to london to protest against going into war with Iran, and Bush was actually here in london at that time, but did it make a blind bit of difference? no, uk went ahead with the war in Iran.

and what is more, blair , who single handedly fooled everyone with his threat of imminent danger to the uk from ‘Iran’s weapons of mass destruction’ , which we now know is a fiction, got re elected at the next election.

it may be that bush misheard iraq for iran, and that iraq has weapons of mass destruction, in which case compounded to the wrong in going into iran, is the fact that iraq is saved from invasion.

so that demonstration was useless.

we are now  wary of jumping into another war intervention because iran showed us not to jump in too quick. it costs a lot of money, a lot of lives, both civilian and military;  and nothing gained from it with a fully functioning country left in ruins; and also now the uk dont have so much money anymore to waste on overseas wars and acting like the world’s police.

and the politicians realise they have been fooled before and the voters lost all faith in them.. and there is that old saying…fool us once, shame on you, fool us twice, shame on us.  like any ordinary person, the MPs dont like to be taken for fools.

it is a clear indication to me that opinion by ordinary people is not much use, when those who hold the power are determined to get their way. only opinion that matters is opinion held by these people in power.