Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Irrelevant, The usual scaremongering/negative post from the extreme right.

stan - is that yes that scots should have a say in non-scottish debates, or yes that they should not?

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/03/exclusive-alex-salmond-says-snp-would-vote-down-tories-queen-s-speech

Will Alex Salmond ever shut up?
The man who lost the referendum on Scottish independence is swanning around like he owns the Union. How long will the English put up with him?

By Iain Martin9:42AM GMT 25 Mar 2015Comments47 Comments
It is becoming impossible to escape the defeated leader of the Yes campaign. Turn on a radio or the television and he is always there, burbling away about what is going to happen when he and the SNP are in charge of England. The man is so perpetually pleased with himself that he cannot get half way through a sentence without chuckling at his own amazing brilliance. In the excitement of the referendum campaign he seems somehow to have become convinced that he is absolutely hilarious.
I cannot account for whatever is going on inside that great big head of a gifted man who used to have a greater grasp of reality. Perhaps it is denial, or addiction to attention, or excitement about his return to the Commons (a place he loves).‎ Whatever it is, he is behaving as though Nicola Sturgeon is still his deputy and he didn't resign.


It looks from the outside as though he is getting rather carried away by the thought of wiping out Scottish Labour, when history suggests it is usually better to cut back on the cockiness until after the votes are cast and counted.
But as a Scot I worry about the impact of all this. It is is not just that Salmond and the most obsessive Nationalists are trashing the Scottish brand outside Scotland.‎ In the country itself, as Alex Massie has observed, the divisions of the referendum are also hardening into cold hatred. The so-called "zoomers" on the nationalist side will believe any crazy claim no matter how implausible. Polling even suggests that more than 50% of SNP voters think that the collapse in the oil price, which would punch a multi-billion pound hole in the finances of an independent or fiscally autonomous Scotland, is neither good nor bad for Scotland. That is mind-bendingly mad.

What worries me most as a Unionist is that in England more and more people I encounter just want the Scots, or the Scottish Nationalists who shout loudest, to stop whinging and whining. They ask: will Salmond ever shut up? Why, they ask, are so many Scots obsessed with talking about themselves in this grating manner? Indeed, Salmond's referendum has become a neverendum, in which the airwaves are dominated by smug Nationalists showing off their moral superiority complexes and boasting about how progressive they are. (That's the SNP, the party that savaged vocational education in Scotland's colleges to pay for the middle class perk of "free" tuition fees at Scottish universities.)
The tragedy in this for Scotland is that a great country that has long punched above its weight by being inventive and outward-looking is being steadily diminished by the boring chuntering of those who lost but want to keep going. Week by week, as they continue their destructive work, you can see Scotland shrinking.

Of course they should Alf, no reason why not.

I wish that horrible little jumped up Scotsman would just go away .

...Get Knitted JJ -):

of course you're right, at least for as long there is no vote in favour of scottish independence ... the SNP group is really no different from the welsh or irish boys

Assuredly -):

On a more serious note ,i wonder what brought that Plane down ? seems really strange .
That is three now with no explanation ..

Spooky isn't it.

the only reason there is "no explanation" is because the contents of the black boxes still awaits analysis

Alex Salmond's comments are for a domestic Scottish audience. He wants to assure that denying Labour seats in Scotland, it won't produce a minority Conservative government. Of course, if he did vote down the Queen's speech, it would come back to bite him. It would, almost certainly, trigger a new election. The public would rightly be annoyed as it would take SNP plus Labour to vote down the speech. A new election would be an opportunity for the public to vent its anger at SNP meddling by giving Cameron a victory with a clear majority.

Following a new election with a Conservative victory, there would be legislation passed very quickly to limit the powers of Scottish MPs. The Scots could also kiss goodbye to any further concessions.

Just speculating JJ, but maybe their is a new way of bringing down a plane using some new form of interference to a plane's electronics by terrorists?

The consistent 'glide down' seems to indicate a possible instant depressurisation, causing all the occupants, including the flight crew, to completely black out. This would also explain the lack of SOS messaging from the crew.

Now what might cause instant depressurisation?

An explosive device? And the bigger the device the faster the depressurisation.

What other explanations are there?

The tail of the aircraft clips the top of a mountain?

Nah. The plane would have already had to descend for that that to happen. If it had done this, then what caused it to descend to that low a height anyway?

Fuel failure?

Not really. There would have been messages from the flight crew.

Mid air collision?

With what? A missile? The ground controllers watched the plane descend all the way down, so this one is out too.

So the favourite reason surely has to be 'instant depressurisation'. But what caused it?

There have been a couple of instances of sudden loss of altitude for this model of plane. The pilots recovered and there is a workaround involving switching off the guidance system and taking control. In the other instances, there were no mountains at 6,000ft.

a pretty pointless exercise in this instance
much more relevant is that the plane didn't just "fall out of the sky" but came down relatively slowly - almost a controlled descent
hard to believe, but i know even less about aviation that i do about share investment, but it sounds to me like some sort of technical failure with which the pilot was unable to cope

Manuel,

Post 57870

Salmond has got his head screwed on!

He is grandstanding for the Scottish vote, but if elected as an MP to the London H.P. he has the right to vote for what he considers to be in the best interests of his supporters taking into consideration the needs of the UK as a whole.

For all their boasting and "organised" PR and false promises, the ideology of the present tory party is not acceptable to the majority of voters in Scotland, the North of England, Wales and other areas of UK.

My guess is that after the G.E., is that the tories will poll less votes and have less MPs than the other parties put together .

I cannot see the remaining Lib/dems would go into a coalition, or an alliance with Cameron as leader. (Their party members won’t tolerate it.)

If, the majority of MPs (representative of the majority of voters) turn down the formation of, or the possibility, of a minority tory government and vote against the introduction of their policies that will be “democracy” in action. It would otherwise suggest that a rejected previous incumbent group has an ongoing “right” to govern.

That seems to suggest that an “elitist minority” have a right to govern the majority of voters who have already rejected it.

Also, you can’t have the rights of a member of parliament of an UK parliament from part of the UK being different to one from another.

How they use those rights is their choice.
===-=-=-=-=-==

PS.

I don't see why London based MPS should vote on NE projects or policies for the West Midlands.

8-)