Toque

Bob Neill, Shadow Local Government & Planning Minister, has announced that the Conservatives will stop gardens up and down "the country" being concreted over:

The practice of “garden grabbing”, where developers build homes or blocks of flats on back gardens, is dramatically changing the character of many suburban areas throughout the UK, leading to high levels of unsustainable development and increasing housing densities in areas previously characterised as leafy suburbs. Some figures suggest that over 180,000 buildings have been put on back gardens in the last five years.

Bob implies that the 180,000 figure relates to the UK. However, the figures actually come from councils' responses to a Government survey of 42 local authorities, covering a seventh of England's population.

Findings of the survey, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, show that between 2003 and 2008, the councils granted planning permission for 26,688 new homes on land which was previously occupied by houses and their front and back gardens.

The amount is a net total – for instance, if one large Edwardian house is replaced with a block of ten flats, it would count as nine new homes in the figures.

The survey totals equate to a figure of 186,000 new homes in England as a whole – 102 a day – or 210,000 for the UK.

So although he mentions the UK and doesn't mention England, Bob's article on Garden Grabbing is about England. And any Tory change to the legislation will affect England (and may also apply to Wales).

Credit where credit is due though. Where Bob fails, at least Caroline Spelman gets it correct:

The only people who are not losing out from the rush to develop back gardens are the developers and land speculators. For them, England is literally becoming a treasure island. Right now, land agents may be putting this Bill and my speech on their website in a bid to convince people speculatively to buy plots of land in the expectation of being granted planning permission.

Yesterday I speculated as to whether Gordon Brown would utter the word 'England' in his speech on health and social care in England.

I'm rather taken aback to report that he did, just the once:

And for too long in England we have tolerated a care system which sees tens of thousands of people who would prefer to be cared for in their own homes go needlessly into residential care, with all the cost and losses that entails.

He managed to slip the word 'Britain' into his speech seven times. But none of this is relevant to Scotland where the Scottish Government takes its own decisions on health and social care.

In a speech to the King's Fund on Monday, Gordon Brown is expected to pledge free one-on-one home care by specialist nurses for every cancer patient in England, if Labour wins the election.

Let's see if he mentions England at all, shall we?

Gordon Brown has already reneged on his 2008 pledge to give free prescriptions to all people in England with cancer and other long- term conditions.

In today's Number 10 podcast (Podcast - what a twat!), Gordon Brown stated that he came from 'Middle Britain' and stands for 'Middle Britain':

He reiterated his plans for a reform of England's social care (his native Scotland already has free personal care):

It’s not fair that so many people already struggling with the loss of independence - who have worked hard all their lives and saved for their retirement - are faced with the prospect of running down their savings or selling their homes to fund their care.

Or that those seeing their parents and grandparents suffering from conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia not only have to watch as their dignity fades, but have the heartbreak made worse by the costs of getting support.

So I am proud that we are about to bring forward a new system of social care that will directly benefit many families of middle Britain."

I'm sorry to use such language, but this man is a total cunt.

David Cameron speaking in February 2009.

The Conservative party wants nothing less than radical decentralisation, to reach every corner of the country [England]. The policies we launch today are a decisive step towards that goal. They fall into three broad groups. There are plans to give people a much greater say over the issues that affect their daily lives; plans to give local councils much more responsibility and power; and plans to actually reshape the way political power is structured in this country.

February 2010.

Local authorities in England could lose many of their planning powers regarding schools if the Conservatives win the general election.

A draft of the party's planning policy, seen by BBC One's The Politics Show, says their schools secretary would take decisions on building new schools.

Toque has learned that Edinburgh Castle, which looks down over Scotland's capital city, is being flogged off by the Government in a desperate bid to raise some cash after the failure of Scotland's banks.

The leading bidder is the Wal-Mart, which also owns Asda.

Industry sources say Edinburgh Castle could fetch up to £500 million with retail rights.

UPDATE

My mistake, it's the Port of Dover in England that Gordon Brown is thinking of selling - to the French - along with the Student Loans Book (English), the Dartford Crossing (English), English Hospitals, English libraries, channel rail link, cemeteries, public housing estates, school playing fields and Urenco, headquartered in England.

Silly of me to believe that Brown would sell off anything Scottish. Must check my sources in future.

See CEP: Brown's £16bn fire sale of England's assets

This is Cuckmere Haven today, from up high.

Mrs Toque and Crumpet.

Zooming in on a flooded field.

This is Cuckmere Haven in Summer.

This dithering retard, Jim Devine, Member of Parliament for Livingston, won by a healthy 9% majority at the last General Election. Why? Because, as Subrosa says, some Scots will vote for anything in a red rosette. It's dithering retards like these that are voting on English legislation that does not concern their constituents (Scottish Labour MPs are 46% more likely to support Gordon Brown than English Labour MPs), and this particular piece of Labour filth supported a Team GB football team for the 2012 Olympics.

These three Labour scumbags - of which Retard Devine is one - are falling back on parliamentary privilege to keep them from gaol.

Did they stick up for parliamentary privilege when Damian Green was arrested inside the Houses of Parliament for doing his job?

Did they fuck.

For MPs to fall back on parliamentary privilege to keep them from gaol when MPs (and Parliament) have divested themselves (and itself) of responsibility for expenses, handing it over to a body outhwith Parliament, because MPs and the public felt that MPs could not be trusted, is a disgrace?

These men deserve nothing but our contempt, whether or not they are convicted. Attempting to use parliamentary privilege to protect themselves from the law makes me more angry than the fraud, and it would appear that our political class fears that very reaction.

On Meridian Tonight David Cameron was asked what, if he were Fabio Capello, he would do about John Terry. His response was as stupid as it was evasive.

"If I was Fabio Capello I would rather hope that the leader of the Conservative Party wouldn't tell me how to do my job. I think he's a great manager, and I think he's doing a great job for Britain."

Capello may be foreign, but at least he knows the name of the country he manages.

It becomes a hard to break habit, this saying Britain when you are talking about England.

This is a pretty good distillation of the English Question by the BBC.

A campaign for an English parliament has grown and is backed by some opposition Conservative MPs, but has not yet entered the political mainstream. The Labour government maintains that an English parliament would overshadow the rest of the United Kingdom. Cornwall, an English county with a separate Celtic identity, has seen a campaign for its own assembly, backed by all five of the county's Liberal Democrat MPs.

According to the most recent census data, about 95% of the population of Scotland and Wales identify as White British, rising to 99% in Northern Ireland. The comparable figure for England is just under 85%. Therefore most of the British debate about ethnic diversity, immigration and national identity in fact applies to England.

This sensitive political question is further complicated by two factors.

First, British and English institutions and national identifiers such as flag, language, anthem and popular culture largely overlap. As a result, markers of specific English identity, such as the flag of St George, tend to be unofficial, while similar signs of Scottish and Welsh nationhood are sanctioned by the separate institutions of those countries.

Second, Scottish and Welsh nationalist movements have long been part of the political mainstream, and are seen as champions of legitimate historical national identities. English nationalism, on the other hand, is more often portrayed as a reaction to non-white immigration and the exclusive province of the neo-fascist right.

This makes public discussion of English identity politics difficult, as politicians on the left and right have discovered, as accusations of racism and appeasement of minorities are exchanged.

The one area where English identity is able to develop without political controversy is the realm of culture, and sporting teams are often the most comfortable focus for national loyalty.

The BBC is getting better at differentiating between English and British, as this landmark article shows, but it still unfortunately apes the UK Government in its discrimination against England. The BBC as much as our political classes are to blame for the 'political controversy' surrounding English identity. There is no BBC England, no English channel (see iPlayer), and the BBC would never commission a season of programmes celebrating English history, culture and nationhood, as it does for Scotland. The best we English can hope for is a costume drama or two, or a non-commital speculative look at Englishness like Made-in-England.

You can enjoy a Scottish, Welsh and British history portal on the BBC, but there's nothing for England.

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/history/
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/history/
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/england/history/

And if you're looking forward to the Proms, then this is how the BBC advertises that multi-national celebration of Britishness.

Still, I suppose it's for the best. The BBC would want to be accused of being racist.

In a letter to Roger Williams MP, Liam Byrne - Chief Secretary to the Treasury - has reiterated that the Government has no plans to change the Barnett Formula.

Wales is well funded. Identifiable public spending per head in Wales is 14% above England and in the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review, the Welsh Assembly Government received an annual average real terms increase of 2.4% compared to the UK average of 2.1%... The Government has no plans to change the Barnett formula.

And not only that. The Government also has no time to debate it and has cancelled the Lords debate on the Barnett Formula.

A Lords debate on the Barnett formula, the controversial Government funding mechanism for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, was unexpectedly cancelled due to a shortage of parliamentary time.

How convenient.