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

the jury is in

The SNP govt wanted, during the present state of emergency, to abolish juries. No attempt to do that has happened in Englandandwales, where jury trials are simply postponed for the duration. Mercifully, within a day they were stopped by all the Unionist parties: and okay, as the Unionists are not in a majority, also by the opposition of law professionals from their own ranks.

Human rights here have just passed through a breathtaking moment of emergency, and who from? From the reputed progressives who have told us for years they want to give us a nice more progressive state of our own, and campaigned against Brexit's likely rollback of ECHR-associated human rights safeguards. The independence movement's entire claim that Scottish governments and state would be innately more progressive and fairer, now stands smashed by this. This will always be there as a fact of history in the debate.

Notice it follows within days the MeToo extreme feminists' oopenly disliking that a woman-majority jury found Alex Salmond innocent. This has rightly split the nats into a bad fight on Facebook and in the National, where both the loyalists who saw politicality in the whole trial, and the scrupulous over the vital human right to presumption of innocence, have seen through the evil raving believe-what-we-want injustice of the radical feminists and their witch-hunt of men.

The Crossgate Centre on Mar 24 displayed on Facebook a reply to that character of radical feminists, that they well deserved, and deserve everyone to contemplate:

《 This tweet from Rhiannon Spear, the SNP National Women's Convener, in response to the Alex Salmond verdict yesterday is absolutely appalling, and has drawn a well-deserved backlash from SNP members and the wider Yes movement on Twitter. Her contempt for the principle of presumption of innocence, juducial due process, and not least the jury, 9 of whom, the majority, were women - makes her unfit for office.

Never mind respecting entitlement to presumption of innocence, clowns like you can't even respect a verdict from a female-majority jury if it goes in the accused's favour. You epitomise the entryism piggy-backing on & destroying an SNP where it is because of indy supporters. The tweet itself, Mar 23, and its reactions, are here.

It was natural for society to wind down gradually

I have been interested to observe this. Every frequently meeting group known to me has been psychologically reluctant to stop. It was always been irresistible to go on and achieve their next meet so long as folks generally seem well. There is that mismatch, then, between a thinking group's natural instincts and the advice. Folks have stayed active until last weekend before the move to major shutdown from Mar 16, feeling they owed to each other to try not to drop activities, and there was always a next meet that would still be good to get done if folks were still well. Precautions like separately wrapped food started, and Anglican churches stopping their handshakes and shared communion wine from a shared cup; but knowing there were not yet many cases, folks all seemed to need the week of build-up of threat awareness, before the govt announcements of Mar 16, to get mentally ready to stop their social activities.

That felt right. It's particularly reasonable for support activities for vulnerable groups. It points against the kneejerk armchair opinion there was on Facebook for a sudden instant "lockdown" on the shockingly authoritarian model seen in some countries like Italy. As a report by Robert Peston raised, heavy handed lockdowns put the elderly at risk of unseen neglect inside their homes, which counters the argument that the authoritarian lockdown makes them safer from the virus. I agreed with the government keeping the country active as long as we were still mostly healthy, and being driven by events re when we had to tip over into shutdown. Because it all matched folks' irresistible common sense day-to-day behaviour in my experience, mine included. That has been the real practicality of folks' social and political lives, during the descent into this health emergency.