Scotland and Catalonia differences ( 2 )

If Catalonia holds a referendum on independence, it will likely look to Scotland as a guide. Scotland’s existence as an independent state ended in 1707, when the Scottish parliament entered into the Treaty of Union with England.The Treaty dissolved the Scottish parliament and transferred ultimate political authority to London. One Scottish parliamentarian of the time lamented that the day on which the Treaty was put to a vote in the Scottish parliament was “the last day Scotland was Scotland.”

But Scotland “entered the United Kingdom with a distinct institutional trajectory of its own,” and following the union it retained a robust civil society, including its own legal and educational systems, social welfare programs, and established the Presbyterian church. Scots also made significant contributions to the British Empire, which “did not dilute the sense of Scottish identity but strengthened it by powerfully reinforcing the sense of national esteem and demonstrating that the Scots were equal partners in the great imperial mission.”

Although Scottish culture and identity flourished in the United Kingdom and the Empire, Scottish nationalism as a political force largely lay dormant until the 1960s, when the SNP surprised the British establishment by winning a parliamentary by-election. The discovery of oil in the North Sea in 1970 led many nationalists to argue for greater Scottish control over its own resources and revenues and to claim that Scotland could survive economically as an independent state. Diverting the flow of North Sea oil revenues from London to Edinburgh remains a central plank in the SNP’s economic platform.

During the 1970s, in an effort to co-opt Scottish national sentiment and maintain its position as the dominant political party in Scotland, the Labour Party announced plans for the devolution of political authority to Scottish institutions, but its proposal failed to obtain a sufficient number of votes in a 1979 referendum. The issue of devolution was shelved during the 1980s and early 1990s, when the Conservative Party governed the United Kingdom. The Conservatives followed an unabashedly pro-Union line, which alienated many Scottish institutions accustomed to being afforded a wide berth by London and in turn increased Scottish support for autonomy.

When the Labour Party returned to power under Tony Blair in 1997, it promised devolution of powers throughout the United Kingdom, in part to“‘lance the boil’ of independence.” In 1998, the Labour government introduced the Scotland Act, which provided for the creation of a local Scottish parliament. In contrast to the failed devolution referendum of 1979, Scottish voters enthusiastically backed the Scotland Act, and in 1999 the first Scottish Parliament since 1707 met in Edinburgh. Ultimately, the Scotland Act formed part of a broader pattern of devolution that also resulted in the establishment of a Welsh Assembly and, under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, a power-sharing government composed of unionists and nationalists in Northern Ireland.

Although the Labour Party initially controlled the devolved Scottish Parliament, in the 2007 elections the SNP cut deeply into Labour’s majority, and the SNP’s leader, Alex Salmond, became First Minister in an SNP-led minority government. The SNP’s decisive May 2011 victory pushed independence to the forefront of Scotland’s political agenda. On January 25, 2012, the birthday of the Scottish national poet Robert Burns, Salmond announced plans to hold a referendum on Scottish independence in the autumn of 2014, which would coincide with the 700th anniversary of the victory of Scottish forces over English invaders at the Battle of Bannockburn. The government of Prime Minister David Cameron came out forcefully in opposition to Scottish independence. Nonetheless, in the Edinburgh Agreement reached on October 15, 2012, the British government granted the Scottish Parliament authority to hold a referendum, and the two governments agreed to the ground rules for the referendum process.

London floods by Josselyn Sarango

LONDON NEWS

Last week London appeared in the news a lot. It's because, it has been raining a lot there. By these heavy rains, the Thames has been overflowed. Many people have lost their belogings. There are 14 alerts or floods in all the country. Even the great park of  Windsor was flooding.

Floods in London by Xavierr Andrés

 
London had the most rainy January in history. The rain caused the river rise up, so the citizens piled  sandbags to protect themselves from the flood, but the river Thames was overpassed and destroyed their barricades on 10 of February.  

Floods affected  the South West of England. The Environment Agency announced that between 800 and 900 houses were flooded last weekend. Thousands more are threatened.

St Jude storm in the UK

St Jude is the name of the apostle of the lost causes, therefore the weather forecast people decided to name the terrible storm coming to the south of Britain.

How will we remember the St Jude’s Day Storm? It will be forever associated with tragedy: a falling tree killed a 17-year-old girl in her home in Kent, a man died in Watford when his car was crushed, and a man and woman were killed after a house exploded in Hounslow when a falling tree hit a gas pipe. At Heathrow, dozens of planes were grounded and there was a succession of reports from around the south of England.

The storm was certainly dramatic. Yet at times yesterday, watching the news channels, you might have imagined the Apocalypse was upon us. In truth, winds like these affect many parts of the country every year; unusually, this storm was tracking across the South and into the Home Counties just in time for the rush hour. Was that really good reason to shut down the entire rail system serving Europe’s biggest city, hours before the storm had even arrived?

What is particularly striking is the way the language of the Atlantic hurricane season. We talk of “hurricane-force winds” simply because some gusts are over 72mph, which is Category 12 – the highest – on the Beaufort scale. But in a hurricane, such wind speeds are sustained, often for hours on end, with the gusts reaching 160mph. At its peak, Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, had maximum sustained winds of 175mph and gusts of 215mph.

The hurricane analogy was pushed further when the storm was given a name. A bright spark with an ecclesiastical calendar noted that yesterday was the feast day of St Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of lost causes. English people have become far too ready to adopt the language of cataclysm and disaster for events that in other parts of the world would hardly merit comment. England is not on a fault line, so have no earthquakes or volcanoes; yet we are obsessed with the weather, even though nothing much happens of great consequence.

But very occasionally it does. In January 1607, in the worst recorded natural disaster to hit Britain, an estimated 2,000 people were drowned along the Bristol Channel and the Severn Estuary by a surge of water that swept away villages and inundated vast areas of farmland. It had long been assumed that a storm surge was to blame, but recent research suggests that it may have been a tsunami caused by an earthquake or a rockfall off the coast of Ireland.

More recently, a torrential rainstorm on Exmoor in August 1952 caused a wall of water to pour into the North Devon village of Lynmouth, killing 34 people. The following January, a vicious northerly storm combined with high tides brought devastation to the east coast. The sea rose by 18 feet above its mean level, overwhelming coastal defences and causing extensive flooding. More than 300 people were killed – though the toll was higher still across the North Sea in Holland, where 1,800 people drowned.

The great storm of October 1987, which toppled an estimated 15 million trees and left a trail of devastation, made yesterday’s gales look like a mere zephyr by comparison. So, too, did the Burns Day storm on Jan 25, 1990, one of the strongest on record in the UK, with sustained winds across parts of Scotland exceeding 70mph – not far off a Category One hurricane. Then there were the unusual events in Lewes in Sussex in 1836: a three-day blizzard caused a huge build-up of snow on the cliffs above the town, and the resulting avalanche demolished dozens of cottages below, killing eight people. A nearby pub bears the name The Snowdrop Inn, which would probably be considered tasteless today.

The development of 24-hour news has tended to create a sense of foreboding through repetition. TV stations deployed their teams in advance – so were not about to admit it when the storm turned out to be not that terrible after all. The BBC was broadcasting live from Brighton beach, which was bathed in bright sunshine as a moderate wind whipped up the white horses in the background.

Yesterday’s storm was forecast to be a monster even when it was a mere eddy over the Atlantic, with supercomputers projecting the track and possible strength of a storm that still had 2,000 miles to travel. But in the future we could tell our grandchildren about the great St Jude’s Day Storm.