Welsh border post ?

At school in the eighties I drew a cartoon of a Welsh border post. Today its Prime Minister, Mark Drakeford, Labour not nat, announced travel bans into Wales from other parts of Britain by reason of the Covid emergency's second wave. For the first time since the Middle Ages, + in any modern sense the first time ever, border controls into Wales!

Okay, consider these details:

• Saltney is a Garden Village in Wales running into English city Chester. The border runs from a crossroads along a Boundary Lane, a housing street that is a different country each side. On the English side are several culdesacs with a railway behind them.
• East Maelor is a finger of Wales that juts into England, just because of a historic court district, + cuts across the Oswestry to Whitchurch road.A495 in Shropshire.
• Llanymynech is a village half in each country, its High Street is the border.
• Pentreheyling and Brompton are a pair of villages in England in a loop of the border that crosses every road into them. By farmland + country paths they are joined to the rest of England, but by road you have to go through Wales.
• Knighton is a town in Wales with a rail station in England, because railway + town are on each side of the River Teme which is the border.

Police those! It seems we are now watching the experiment of trying to operate a real hard border on a line of this nature!

Its nature derives from it being Henry VIII's line, from when he settled the feudal-style local court districts after he annexed + abolished Wales in 1536. Wales's last period of independence was 1393-1410 the Owain Glyndwr rebellion. So it's a line that was never designed to be a frontier. Nats imagining a hard border separation have a big problem from this, when it is combined with how geopolitics after WW2 has adopted an ethic of taking borders as they are and never redrawing them, to try to prevent nationalist pushes for border changes from being a cause of wars. It sits awkwardly with the later post-colonial principle that all entities recognised as nations or countries have self-determination, that Wales has.

#Wales #coovid19 #borders #Saltney #Chester #EastMaelor #Shropshire #Llanymynech #Pentreheyling #Knighton

opinion polls conducted like this are garbage

What does this experience of an Ipsos Mori politics phone poll say for the credence of all their politics polls? Polls whose demographic is only the folks whò will passively take pushing around by the caller including arrogant ignorement of being short of time, are obviously not a true demographic of society. This caller ended the call and called me hostile just because I said “okay OKAY” to stop him giving a long winded repetitive spiel about the poll instead of keeping to the questions, ignoring that I had said at start I was relatively short of time.

Ipsos Mori’s Scottish politics poll called me at 17:50 on Oct 7, and by fluke, caught me in shortly before going out for the evening, and shortly before becoming older than the 16 to 54 age range they were polling. I have complained to Ipsos Mori that I was treated completely illogically + penalised for its caller’s own miscommunication, which does not make an honest poll, it makes a corrupt wrong poll.

First he seemed to say that the call was recorded, though later he said he could not listen to any recording. If there is a recording, I waive any confidentiality needed to allow investigators to listen to it, to hear how he conducted it.

As written to Ipsos Mori – When he asked me the most important issue in Scottish politics, he was stuck to categorise my answer, put it under “other” then said, how would I express it? Yet I had already given an answer, so what was he asking for now? You want me to think of a precis of my answer? No, he was asking me for the same answer again, for no reason ever explained, + when I tried to refer him back to the answer already given, that was when he said he had no recording. So I gave the answer again, then seemingly as a thanks for it he went straight off into a very long-winded spiel about the poll’s purpose. But this is after, at start I had said I did not have much time, soon to go out, + he had promised the call would only take 10 minutes! But now he was going round in circles, insistently reciting at least 3 different angles of spiel on the same thing, instead of continuing the questions.

So perfectly logically, to try to stop him + express time urgency, at a pause for response moment I said “okay OKAY!” Instantly he accused me of being hostile to him, + suggested that he should end the call. I said I was simply trying to prevent wasted time, + he ignored this, + in more long-winded recital he stuck to the charge of hostility, while “I’ve been perfectly courteous to you”, + asserted that he was ending the call.

To instantly start calling you hostile as soon as you have any collision at all, is a notorious unfair device used in modern corporate bullying, in business + by officials. It is a discrimination against standing up for yourself, an approach that only takes submission as amicable. No opinion poll conducted with that practice is fit. To suffer a termination of call so intemperately + not-listeningly of course creates hostility from that experience: in that way it is self-fulilling. It is also corporate bullying to declare yourself courteous when you have plainly not been. It is discourteous, very rude, to ignore the person’s statement of being relatively short of time, + despite it, insistently keep speaking to them in long-winded recitals of repetitive spiels about the poll instead of get on with the questions. Then it is discourteous to take as hostility a resulting “okay OKAY!” prod to return to the questions, and discourteous not to listen or budge to getting told that the called person wanted to save time. it is unfair polling as well as discourteous, to actually end a call for these things.

Polls confined to folks who passively accept unnecessary long-windedness even when they have limited time, + ignorement of them saying so, are not of a real demographic. All your polls stand invalid unless you say how handling calls like that is prevented + not allowed to happen.