Britannia Radio

Changing the forum   Thursday 19 April 2012 Sharp-eyed readers will notice a subtle change in the forum – the URL is different. With as little disruption as humanly possibly, North Jr has migrated it to here on the EUReferendum domain. The apparently simple act of migration has, in fact, been enormously complex but it is a necessary part of our rationalisation process, preparatory to simplifying the way the blog works and, with a bit of luck, getting on top of the spam problem. We have lost a few forum posts in the transition, but most of them survived the process. There may be some small glitches, but so far the new forum looks stable and is working roughly as intended, although it is a bit slow to load at the moment. We think that is at the server end. We will keep the old forum going for a little while as an insurance, but all the new links will point to the EURef version. We would be grateful if you would use the new forum from now on. In time, we think it might be possible to have a redirect on all the older posts, whence we can retire the "umbrellog" domain and concentrate all our resources on a single site. COMMENT THREAD  Richard North 19/04/2012

The last to notice   Thursday 19 April 2012 Illustrating how completely the Failygraph is trapped in its bubble is its leader writer Robert Colvile, who is getting excited about the idea of the graduated vote. Needless to say, the idea is very far from new. We touched on it in May last year, having briefly mentioned it in March 2009. Then, in the context of Referism, we had a good look at the idea on 4 June 2011. There, after noting the vibrant discussion on the forum and observing that the idea had caused a lot of grief, we were all informed that the idea went back to the Prussian three-class franchise. Furthermore, Nevil Shute suggested the idea in his book In the wet. He saw it as a necessary reform of democracy and, in his scheme, a person could have up to seven votes. Everyone got a basic vote. Other votes could be earned for education (including a commission in the armed forces), earning one's living overseas for two years, raising two children to the age of 14 without divorcing, being an official of a Christian church, or having a high earned income. The seventh vote was only given at the Queen's discretion by Royal Charter. Playing around with this idea, I was at the time thinking in terms of potentially ten votes per person, and discussed my ideas in the June piece, setting them out in some detail. That is not to say that anyone so clever and grand as Mr Colvile should stoop so low as to read EUReferendum, where he would be in grave risk of learning something. That might cause irreparable damage to his fragile brain. All we can do is simply observe once again that media writers are totally introspective, self-referentialto a tee, rarely looking outside their own bubble. When they do, it is only to pick up things like this - which Colvile wrongly labels the "blogosphere". For many months, though, there has been a vibrant debate on constitutional issues in a corner of the real blogosphere. This has been totally ignored by the likes of Colvile, his type only noticing things when they penetrate the bubble, and can be then "owned" by their discoverers. Until then, of course, nothing exists. That is why no-one in the MSM saw George Galloway coming, even though keeping any eye on such matters is a full time, paid job for gifted political hacks. And its impoverished, trivialisation of the debate will keep the MSM in the ignorance that it richly deserves. Meanwhile, the real debate goes on, outwith the MSM. It is from outside the bubble that change will come. Hacks like Colvile will be the last to notice.