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J. K. Rowling challenges new Scottish hate speech legislation, openly challenging them to arrest her for calling trans criminals men who pretend to be women:
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1774747068944265615
#ArrestMe is, dare I say it, brave and powerful. At least she's putting skin in the game. It's also pretty well calculated in my opinion.
They can't really attack her for being a right wing extremist when her world famous books are a pretty clear allegory of Racism Bad. She even makes sure to target India Willoughby, who is apparently anti-black. Rowling has an enormous pot of money for expensive litigation and automatic worldwide attention on her. It's hard to righteously defend people such as
It's very practical politics to fish out the worst of the enemy milieu to preface one's normative statements. I think Rowling has a good shot at tactical victory - either the govt won't charge her or she'll win in court. On the other hand, only systemic change is going to change the progressive-leaning status quo. You need an Orban or some similar force to drag out the weed by the roots, rather than just pruning away when it grows particularly egregious. Rowling is no Orban, that's probably far too extreme for her.
The legislation is here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2021/14/contents
Crimes include 'stirring up hate' by 'behaving in a manner that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening, abusive or insulting' to select groups. Looks like it allows nigh-limitless opportunities for selective enforcement. And a huge drain on police resources, given they can't even investigate all crimes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-68703684
While Rowling's crusade is admirable, I think what's really needed is a Scottish DeSantis to immediately turn these dystopian laws on the left. The only thing that stops this train is leftists being jailed for hate speech.
By the way, what's up with Scotland? What about their culture has made them go so loony, first with Covid and now with this? They honestly are starting to seem like China with worse food and weather.
Britain's a deeply broken country IMO, drowning in decline. Scotland has effectively permanent SNP leftist-progressive govt. Traditional heavy industry left, north sea oil is depleted. There's not much growing of the pie, only taking someone else's share - SNP policies lean in that direction.
Real GDP per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=GB
You can see the trend line of growth has fallen off since 2007 - and British growth is concentrated heavily around London, I expect things in Scotland are much worse than the country as a whole.
Potemkin villages: https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/1761798659396518342
Warships being scrapped: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/britain-to-scrap-two-royal-navy-frigates-say-reports/
NHS spends twice as much on legal payouts due to their horrendous maternity service than maternity itself: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/maternity-payouts-twice-cost-of-care-times-health-commission-svdhsjhqk
If you've seen Clarkson's Farm you'll appreciate how hard it is for anyone to build anything, even if they're a global superstar. Everything is very expensive and takes forever, for no good reason. The UK border is totally out of control, despite being an island. Plus there were the Pakistani child rape gangs that operated for years because police were too scared of being racist and covered them up.
If I could buy puts for countries, I think puts on Britain would have the most alpha. Everyone thinks 'oh it's a P5 nuclear power, they invented industrial civilization, it'll be fine'. It's really not fine in the UK. I think it's systemically broken. Every single institution broken, incentives broken. I know Dominic Cummings is a contested figure here but he did work in the British govt for some time and I think he was driven a bit mad by the cosmic horror of it all, he wrote these essays about how everything was broken and the leaders were clowns:
https://dominiccummings.com/2014/06/16/gesture-without-motion-from-the-hollow-men-in-the-bubble-and-a-free-simple-idea-to-improve-things-a-lot-which-could-be-implemented-in-one-day-part-i/
https://dominiccummings.com/2014/10/30/the-hollow-men-ii-some-reflections-on-westminster-and-whitehall-dysfunction/
(for the juicy horror stories skip down to four stories in the second link)
Having lived in quite a few European countries and knowing British history in some detail, I would put it this way: the UK had a period of great comparative success across a huge range of fields (prior to about 1945) where European countries they didn't outperform economically (France, Germany) were outperformed militarily/diplomatically, and the UK developed a fairly "laissez faire" type of imperialism that had some definite advantages over Belgian rapaciousness, French assimilationism etc.
The UK had a period of relative decline in 1945-1979. This was only relative (this was a period of mostly solid growth) and with some exceptions (UK unemployment rates were low in this period, even compared to e.g. the US).
The UK had a concerted and successful effort to combat relative decline from about 1979-2007. This took different forms, e.g. Thatcher had great confidence in Victorian institutions, practices, and values; Blair had a huge love of America (especially Clintonian America) public service modernisation, and wanted the UK to lead the EU into a modernist, progressive, American-style supra-state; Major was somewhere in between, with a strange sort of quiet iconoclasm in favour of "ordinary people" that ranged from the clever (getting rid of stupid regulations on everything from employment agencies to service stations) to the absurd (the "Cones Hotline").
For various reasons, I mostly blame Brown and subsequent UK politicians, and of course the UK voters to whom they pander. For example, the UK has a great edge in financial and business services. UK business services are one area where the UK still does great, partly due to language, partly due to regulation, and partly due to agglomeration in London/South-East England. What do UK politicians and voters love? MANUFACTURING. Steel. SHIPBUILDING. It's like a tall, scrawny but fast kid wanting to play rugby and set weightlifting records rather than basketball and netball - admirable, but stupid. So the UK overregulates and taxes its financial sector (as well as the occasional kick to its oil sector) and then wonders why its economy underperforms.
Similarly, the UK voters hate paying taxes at the levels of European countries. So they have the opportunity to e.g. save more of their own money for retirement, taking advantage of the huge long-term gains that private investment can make relative to pay-as-you-go state pensions. But they also want state pensions at European levels (no Boomer left behind) so politicians have introduced an unsustainable pensions uprating scheme that has meant that, despite significant spending cuts in some areas (welfare, education etc.) and despite tax rises to about peacetime highs, the UK public finances are still shit. This is not how a serious country deals with an ageing population.
And there's the UK national religion, the NHS, a healthcare system designed to save the UK Labour party from the wrath of doctors in the 1950 election, which voters think (a) should be improved, (b) should not be changed, and (c) should not cost them personally any more in taxes or fees. I suppose there are some religions with more absurd origins and principles...
Scotland is the beak of the UK ostrich: deepest into the sand it has buried itself.
I have lived in Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, Italy, Greece, and other places. These countries all have their own chronic problems and a similar lack of ambition in dealing with them. For me, it just stands out more in the UK (and more recently in the US) because the Limeys used to have some leaders and an electorate who were serious about tough changes. For all her faults, Margaret Thatcher was about the closest the West has come to a Lee Kuan Yew figure: someone who really thought, "If a policy is too popular, then we are being too careful."
Just responding to the manufacturing point, I don't think British voters particularly fetishise heavy industry so much as they feel that the return of these jobs will allow these poorer regions in the midlands and north to thrive again. This probably isn't going to happen but until politicians can figure out a more realistic way to revitalise those areas they have to promise something to get people from these areas to vote for them.
These jobs are never coming back. The UK manufactures more today in real value terms that it ever did in the past, but automation means we need fewer and fewer jobs each year to support this manufacturing. This trend is not going to change and if anything is going to accelerate (see how Tata is closing down their old labour intensive steel furnace and replacing it with a more efficient highly automated furnace that's going to pump out a lot more steel with a lot fewer workers). These towns and regions are dead and will stay dead. People need to realise this and move on.
I thought the steel plant was profitable and produced very good (ie. difficult to replace) steel but was being shut down for burning coal and is being 'replaced' with an electric one that will use mindboggling amounts of a scarce resource while producing inferior steel to the existing plant?
Looking at it in more depth you seem to be right. Also the electric arc furnace seems to work by taking scrap steel as input instead of iron ore like the blast furnace does. This changes my view of the project significantly, I'm now much less in favour of the change. I wouldn't even call the new thing a steel producer, it's more a "steel recycler".
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