HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: albion@bnr.ca (Alan Buchanan)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british,uk.politics
Subject: Re: elect'n 92: TORY WIN MAKES TERRORISM
Date: 15 Apr 92 13:29:26 GMT
Reply-To: alanbu@bnr.ca
Organization: Bell-Northern Research Ltd, Ottawa
Originator: albion@bcrks63


In article <1992Apr14.161451.22005@newcastle.ac.uk>, w.p.coyne@newcastle.ac.uk writes:

> But let's say (for the sake of discussion) the conservative party will win
> the next 2 elections with similar share of the vote and with an overall 
> majority of the seats.  Do the media seriously think members of fringe
> extreme left-wing groups and the Scotish and Welsh extreme groups (SNLA and
> Sons of Glendower) will sit back and do nothing? 
> 
> There might be a real danger of terrorism.


While I am in favour of constitutional change, I would choose to ignore
this specific line of thought. There is always the possibility of
people using violence. The circumstances you describe would never justify
it and I would think that most people who seriously wanted change would do
their best to prevent such foolish and counter-productive action.

It would be for those people considering protests to organise themselves 
to minimise the risk of violent or uncontrolled action. 


                              Alan

--
Alan Buchanan       Bell-Northern Research, Ltd       Ph.: (613) 763-2750
Silicon Design      P.O. Box 3511, Station C          Fax: (613) 763-3970
  Methods           Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1Y 4H7  

alanbu@bnr.ca        

        Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
                         - William Butler Yeats
Xref: sparky soc.culture.british:5899 soc.culture.usa:2822
From: hm@fwi.uva.nl (Hans Mulder)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british,soc.culture.usa
Subject: Re: Why should Libya hand over the PanAm bombers?
Date: 8 Apr 92 14:36:08 GMT
Organization: FWI, University of Amsterdam

In <1992Apr7.180919.8260@unixg.ubc.ca> buckland@ucs.ubc.ca (Tony Buckland) writes:

>In article <1992Apr7.124654.133@pony.Ingres.COM> mkrey@Ingres.COM (MICHAEL KREY) writes:
>>In article <1992Apr6.232851.29460@unixg.ubc.ca>, buckland@ucs.ubc.ca (Tony  writes...
>>> How about, because the UN Security Council has told them to?
>>HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!  Why not say, because the Guam foreign minister 
>>said so, or because Nancy Reagan said so??????  Same bloody thing.... 

> I hope this won't come as too much of a shock, but last year there
> was a substantial, if short, war fought in the Persian Gulf.  It
> established a new principle in world affairs, that the SC can issue
> enforceable resolutions, particularly if it seems likely to be able
> successfully to call on the US to carry the brunt of the effort of
> enforcing.

It's hardly a new principle that the side with the strongest army gets
its way.

It used to be that the USA just ignored rulings from the International
Court in the Hague.  This time, they can't be bothered to wait until
the Court comes up with a ruling.  Hardly an improvement.

I _will_ be highly surprised if the United Nations ever manages to round
up an army to stop the United States from violating international law.

--
Hans Mulder			hm@fwi.uva.nl
From: jes@tcom.stc.co.uk (JES)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Questions on the election
Date: 13 Apr 92 16:32:27 GMT
Reply-To: jes@tcom.stc.co.uk (JES)
Organization: NT Europe Limited, London N11 1HB.

In article <1992Apr10.115106.19941@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> migod@turing.toronto.edu (Mike Godfrey) writes:

>-- What kind of seat did Glenda Jackson win (was it traditionally a 
>   marginal/strong Labour/LibDem/Tory seat)?

Glenda Jackson won the Highgate and Hampstead seat from the conservatives.
The H&H seat is in NW London, covering a well to do but very trendy part of
town.  I think being Glenda Jackson helped!

>-- Who defeated Gerry Adams and from what party?  What was Adams' plurality
>   last time around?  Any ideas on what this represents?

The SDLP candidate, whose name I have forgotten.  (Quick recap, the
Social Democratic and Labour Party are traditionally the moderate
representatives of the Catholic minority in the North.  They normally
take the labour whip in the House of Commons.  I understand some
protestants also voted SDLP).  He and his family have been threatened
with retribution by the IRA for beating Adams!!

>-- What was the "conservative newspaper" that endorsed Labour this time
>   around?  The local news didn't identify it.

???  I must have missed that, the Mail, Express, Sun and Star had whole
front page leader comments for the last three days before the election
warning people that they would be taxed to buggary, mortgaged to buggary -
and generally buggared if they voted labour - and so they didn't.

>Thanks.

>Mike Godfrey

Dave Kennard
Xref: sparky soc.culture.british:6137 alt.politics.british:3
From: anw@maths.nott.ac.uk (Dr A. N. Walker)
Newsgroups: uk.politics,soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Simple message
Date: 8 Apr 92 17:53:18 GMT
Reply-To: anw@maths.nott.ac.uk (Dr A. N. Walker)
Organization: Maths Dept., Nott'm Univ., UK.

In article <NICKH.92Apr7104655@VOILA.VENARI.CS.CMU.EDU> nickh@CS.CMU.EDU
(Nick Haines) writes:

>   >Person B will probably be spending the extra money on a mortgage, something
>   >which has no VAT levied on it.
>
>	   He or she may well be spending a lot more on a mortgage, but only
>   the interest on 30K is tax-free, so the chances are that person B is
>   paying more than 10 times as much tax on this spending.  [You're right
>   in that it isn't actually VAT, of course.]
>
>Erm, no. Mortgages have no VAT levied on them. The fact that one can
>reclaim income tax on the interest for the first #30k means that
>`rich' people (ie those with houses) are paying even _less_ tax, but
>is independent of the fact that that money is not liable to VAT, and
>that therefore people with big mortgages are spending a smaller
>fraction of income as VAT.

	OK, I explained myself badly.  Michael's person B was hypothetically
on 10 times person A's income.  Person A pays no tax on the income out of
which he pays his mortgage;  person B does.  Therefore, person B pays
[on this slice of his income] proportionately more tax than A.  Nothing
to do with VAT, unless you think that B spends so much on his mortgage
that he is proportionately less able than A to spend money on VAT-rated
items.  [Michael seemed to be claiming that B probably spends more than
90% of his disposable income on his mortgage, which doesn't seem very
likely to me.  I would expect, rather, that people with mortgages spend
a broadly similar percentage on them right across the income range, in
which case the effect is that seriously rich people can't afford to buy
houses in proportion to their income.  I pass no comment on whether or
not this is desirable.]

-- 
Andy Walker, Maths Dept., Nott'm Univ., UK.
anw@maths.nott.ac.uk
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
From: livesey@solntze.esd.sgi.com (Jon Livesey)
Subject: Re: What happened to Peter Haines??
Organization: sgi
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 92 22:03:31 GMT

In article <1992Apr15.140048.7641@ssd.kodak.com>, dj@ssd.kodak.com (Dave Jones) writes:
|> 
|> You must have missed the discussion of about a month ago.  Peter Hain
|> has been an MP for some time now.  He recently alleged that someone in
|> the security services had stolen important information on floppy disk
|> from his House of Commons office.

That news report caused a good deal of merriment over here.   People
commented that if it took MI5 to break into a PC, or lift a disk off
someone's desk, then the British must be very computer naive indeed.

jon.
Newsgroups: uk.politics,soc.culture.british
From: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Why should Libya hand over the PanAm bombers?
Date: 13 Apr 92 15:07:04 GMT
Organization: Software Engineering Institute

In article <1992Apr8.084501.12512@canon.co.uk> smith@canon.co.uk (Mark Smith) writes:

>Given that this "new principle in world affairs" leaves the US 
>free to do as it damn well pleases, ignoring resolutions unless 
>it happens to agree with the SC, how exactly does it differ from 
>the old principle in world affairs?

"The strong do what they will; the weak endure what they must"

- Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War

(In fact, the entire Melian Dialogue would repay very close study,
especially by the policy makers in the USA, and not least because
the authors of the above quotation, the Athenians, in the end not
only failed to impose their version of the New World Order, but
were utterly defeated.)
From: fledgist@weber.ucsd.edu (Fragano Ledgister)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Any minority candidates?
Date: 9 Apr 92 11:50:12 GMT
Organization: University of California, San Diego
NNTP-Posting-Host: weber.ucsd.edu

In article <1992Apr8.121616.5355@vax.oxford.ac.uk> wilcox@vax.oxford.ac.uk writes:
>As well as Keith Vaz, Bernie Grant and [help! I've forgotten her name] who

Sharon Atkins. By the way, you've left out Paul Boateng MP.

>stood and won for Labour in 1987, and are standing again, Labour have four or
>five other ethnic minority candidates in winnable seats, as well as some
>losers. I don't know about the Libdems, but the Tories have a couple of Asian
>candidates in constituiencies with large Asian populations. And, as Francis
>suggested, they are popular amongst the self-made restaurant/corner-shop owning
>small-business people. They also have, famously, a black barrister in white
>middle-class little England Cheltenham. When he was selected last year, there
>was a great hoo-hah in the local party, with several openly racist members
>resigning. He is likely to lose, a result of the Libdem gain in the region and
>of the racist vote against him. While this is a shame, because we desperately
>need more ethnic minority MPs, it also means we are one seat closer to toppling
>the iniquitously divisive Tories.
>

I agree with this completely. It would be a pleasure to see a few
more non-white faces in the Commons (not to mention more members in
African robes at the opening of Parliament), on both sides of the
aisle.

I wonder (since, being on the wrong side of the Atlantic, it isn't
easy for me to find out for myself) if there are any ethnic minority
candidates standing in Scotland or Wales? I'd expect that one might
in Wales.


FSJL



-- 
____________________________________________________________________
Dawn over the dark sea brings on the sun;                      
She leans across the hilltop: see, the light!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
From: cc@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Chris Cooke)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Why wait 5 years?
Date: 16 Apr 92 16:33:20 GMT
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
In-reply-to: martin.baines@uk.sun.com's message of 16 Apr 92 11:33:42 GMT

In article <sjommINN5c0@grapevine.EBay.Sun.COM> martin.baines@uk.sun.com (Martin Baines - Sun UK - SE Manager Cambridge/Gatwick) writes:

   the Scotish election results seem to me to indicate a sufficient
   diversity of views in Scotland, that trying to coble together a
   working government from the factions north of the border would
   be a very interesting* exercise.

I wouldn't have thought so - Labour, the SNP and the Liberal Democrats have
broadly similar "social democratic" policies on most things.  Labour and the
Liberal Democrats have already been working in coalition to design a new
constitutional arrangement for Scotland for several years, and have
successfully compromised on lots of issues.  Their main disagreement with the
SNP is on independence; apart from that they're fairly close on most issues I
would have thought.
--
	-- Chris. 	cc@dcs.ed.ac.uk   (on Janet, cc@uk.ac.ed.dcs)
From: mmh@cs.qmw.ac.uk (Matthew Huntbach)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: What happened to Peter Haines??
Date: 15 Apr 92 16:02:31 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept, QMW, University of London, UK.

From: nikkhah@skyfox.usask.ca
>Peter Haines who used to be leader of the Young Liberals, later on
>as far as I know joined the Labour Party. He was active against racism
>and once was accused of bank robbery. Eventually he was acquitted.
>
>I want to know whether he was standing for parliament and if he was
>did he get elected. please post any information that you might have.

Yes, he joined the Labour Party and has become an active member
of it; he is now quite hostile to the Liberals. After standing
for Labour in Putney and losing in the 1987 election, he got
into Parliament for Labour in a safe Labour seat in South Wales
(can't remember which seat). He was re-elected to this seat in
this general election.

Matthew Huntbach
From: smee@bristol.ac.uk (Paul Smee)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: MAJOR WINS MAJORITY!!!
Date: 14 Apr 92 13:24:36 GMT
Reply-To: P.Smee@bristol.ac.uk (Paul Smee)
Organization: University of Bristol

In article <jh56qek@zola.esd.sgi.com> livesey@solntze.esd.sgi.com (Jon Livesey) writes:
>In article <1992Apr13.095502.8241@bristol.ac.uk>, smee@bristol.ac.uk (Paul Smee) writes:
>|> Thirteen years ago, the UK was near the top of most comparative EEC
>|> tables; now it's near the bottom.
>
>Would you care to post some data to support the first of those
>claims?

Well, it's not my field, which means I don't keep refs lying around,
but I'll see what I can find.  (If anyone here actually DOES have the
data right at hand, sure wouldn't hurt my feelings if you put it in
before I find it.)

-- 
Paul Smee, Computing Service, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UD, UK
 P.Smee@bristol.ac.uk - ..!uunet!uknet!bsmail!p.smee - Tel +44 272 303132
From: bob@castle.ed.ac.uk (Bob Gray)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: MAJOR WINS MAJORITY!!!
Date: 16 Apr 92 14:43:46 GMT
Organization: Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre

smee@bristol.ac.uk (Paul Smee) writes:
>course, according to Maggie 'society' doesn't exist, so it's hard to
>argue my beliefs here against hard-line Thatcherites.)

I don't see why. It is exactly the same bunch of people who
want more and more controls on what people do and say and
watch and read, all to preserve society's moral standards.

If it doesn't exist, why do they want so many new laws to
protest it?

>Interestingly, Major looks like he might be lightening up.  Virginia

Yes, but remember that Mrs T started out this way too. Some
of her earliest changes were quite sensible. The more stupid
policies only started appearing once the "libertarian" nuts
had managed to maneuver themselves into position as her only
advisors.
	Bob.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
From: livesey@solntze.esd.sgi.com (Jon Livesey)
Subject: Re: Great Britain as a malfunctioning democracy
Organization: sgi
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 92 01:42:42 GMT

In article <12APR199219114424@zeus.tamu.edu>, pac9897@zeus.tamu.edu (THEY SENTENCED ME TO 5 MORE YEARS) writes:
>
> It is clear that the present system favors the status quo and crushes 
> parties like the Liberal Democrats who have sensible, popular ideas 
> from even getting a)the fair share of seats they should get off the 20% 
> of the vote they garner now or b)a degree of credibility that would 
> allow the much larger group who "would vote for them if they though 
> they had a chance of winning" to go ahead and vote for who they want, 
> not who will keep the Tories/Labour out in their area.

The trouble with this argument is that it assumes that you can
label the ideas of one party "sensible, popular" independent of
the votes they get.

There is no ANSI standard for political ideas, and democracy
isn't supposed to be a system for producing sensible ideas, but
rather one for letting people chose the ideas they want, no
matter how daft.   If only twenty percent voted Liberal Democrat
then their ideas may be sensible as you like, but popular they 
ain't.

As for the voting system, there really is no requirement that
every time someone comes up with a party that can get twenty
percent of the votes, we have to find a way to let them run
the country twenty percent of the time, or have twenty percent
of the influence.   Do we have to let the National Front run
the country one percent of the time?

Countries that do try to apportion power by global vote often
use proportional representation to do it, and generally speaking 
it causes a lot of problems.

You are perfectly correct when you say that third parties get 
short-changed under the present system, but that does not lead to
the conclusion that we ought to change the system just because
a third party has popped up.

Let Mr Ashdown take over the moderate wing of Labour so that the
Liberals (or whatever) become the second largest party instead
of the third, and I suspect you'll find that he suddenly decides
that first-past-the-post leads to stable government, and PR would
just give too much influence to the radicals in the Michael Foot
Memorial Rump.

jon.
From: streater@unixhub.SLAC.Stanford.EDU (Tim Streater)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Marmite in S.F. Bay Area?
Date: 14 Apr 92 03:39:54 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

Draeger's in Menlo Park has it too.

Tim.
From: gray@rz-berlin.mpg.de
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Northern Ireland and alledged British propaganda
Date: 6 Apr 92 12:21:19 +0100
Organization: Rechenzentrum MPG Berlin

In article <1992Mar31.113443@mark.enet.dec.com>,
  holohan@mark.enet.dec.com (Mark Holohan) writes:

> In article <1992Mar27.160310.7545@rz-berlin.mpg.de>, gray@rz-berlin.mpg.de
> writes:
> 
> |>  Hear hear, well said (if a little impolite).  How, Jonathan, can you
> |>expect to understand the situation in NI if you refuse to listen to the
> |>people you disagree with.  OK so the man distorts facts, but they should
> |>be worrying enough without distortion.

> If you feel facts are being distorted, then point them out.  I am not
> distorting anything.  Lord Lloyd George, is just a good example of how 
> the British deal with those who tell the truth.

  I'm afraid that Mark's original post has been deleted at this site, if
he really wants a point-by-point assessment he should send me a copy.

  So in general terms here are my pet hates:

  -The use of the word "all" instead of "many"
  -The use of the word "many" instead of "few" or "one"
  -The use of silly labels which only serve to insult the person you are
   talking to, viz "Paddies" or "Goons".

  An example from Mark's post (culled from memory) is the description of
house searches as "harassment".  True harassment certainly occurs, but if
someone set off a large bomb near your house wouldn't you want the police
to look for the person who did it?  Complain about the misuse of the search
power when it occurs, complain about the dodgy attitude of the british courts
to anyone with an irish accent, complain about the daft political system that
allows NI to elect MPs who have no effective power at Westminster, complain
about all these things and rightly too, but this newsgroup deserves better
reasoning than the tabloid headlining contained in Mark's post.

  My point was only that the whole NI debate has degenerated to the level
of name-calling and the application of over-worked labels, and that because
the British Government and the IRA generally accept this because it prevents
discussion of the real issues, the people of NI get seriously screwed.

> |>OK so he uses highly emotive
> |>language, but so do you.  Which came first, the bigot or the bigot?

> First came the British Imperialist, then came the revolutionary.

I rest my case.

   Struan
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
From: skenny@nano.engr.mun.ca (Shawn Kenny)
Subject: Natural Law
Organization: Memorial University of Newfoundland
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 16:01:27 GMT

I saw an article on the CBC National News about the "Natural Law Party"
with the company of the Maharishi, Doug Henning and George Harrison. I
was wondering whether this was on the ballot and if so how many votes
did it get from the populous? 
--
=================================
skenny@pico.engr.mun.ca
St. John's, NF, CANADA
"Have a touton or do without'n !"
From: prp@sei.cmu.edu (Patrick Place)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Marmite in S.F. Bay Area?
Date: 13 Apr 92 19:12:37 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Software Eng. Inst.;Carnegie-Mellon U.; Pittsburgh, PA 15213   _USA_


If you can't find Marmite locally in San Francisco, then try
a mail order place.  One such is "The British Teapot" in
Wexford, PA who regularly have Marmite and many other British
foodstuffs.  They do a mail order business which I have not
used as I am fortunate to live close enough to make personal
visits.  I can post an address, but don't have it to hand.

Good hunting.

Pat Place   prp@sei.cmu.edu
From: nickh@CS.CMU.EDU (Nick Haines)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Emmigration after the Tory win on April 9th
Date: 13 Apr 92 18:00:33 GMT
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Originator: nickh@VOILA.VENARI.CS.CMU.EDU

In article <1992Apr13.095359.18158@newcastle.ac.uk> J.W.Harley@newcastle.ac.uk (Jon Harley) writes:

   Remember the news story that Jim Davidson, Andrew Lloyd Weber et al
   were planning to leave the country if Labour won? Well, did they buy their
   tickets in advance? 

I didn't hear this. How kind of them to volunteer to leave, though.
Any other offensive gits on the list? :-)

Nick Haines nickh@cs.cmu.edu
From: jhill@coral.bucknell.edu (HILL, S JACKSON)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: The Archers and BBC-WS
Keywords: Archers
Date: 17 Apr 92 17:03:00 GMT
Distribution: world

Since there has been comment here about the Archers, I wondered if there have
been many people who have, as I have, over the years written many letters to
encourage the BBC World Service to carry The Archers.  I started writing about
fifteen years ago, first to the old "Letterbox" program at World Service,
saying that the two great British radio institutions were The Archers and
Choral Evensong and that the BBC-WS was missing out in not putting both on the
air world-wide.  The person who responded to my letter said that noone outside
the UK would understand the Archers (wrong!) and that they couldn't put Choral
Evensong on the air because they would have to pay the choir (so I guess they
don't have to pay someone else to fill up a half-hour of air time).  I tried
this tactic at least once a year for about fifteen years (ca. 1970-1865)
especially in behalf of The Archers, and finally gave up.  Is it perhaps time
for another concerted effort?  If we could get some 20,000 usenet users to ask,
they might give them an audience wider than just Radio 4!  Probably hopeless. 
Immovable object sort of thing.  Etc.  Etc.   
Organization: Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.4-b1  



Newsgroups: soc.culture.british,rec.arts.books
From: wojdylo@maths.uwa.oz.au (INFIDEL)
Subject: Re: ENGLISH AS SHE IS SPOKE
Organization: University of Western Australia
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1992 13:46:54 GMT

Douglas Harper harps on:

>In article <1992Apr5.154938.15375@uniwa.uwa.oz.au> amuzon@maths.uwa.oz.au (Polish news) writes:
>>wojdylo@maths.uwa.oz.au (INFIDEL) writes:

>More of the same.

>I know I'm not the only one dead sick of the insane ravings of this
>person.  If you feel as I do that he has seriously abused the net,
>especially in his attempts to stay out of KILL files, please sent a
>complaint to postmaster@maths.uwa.oz.au.  I have.


Unfortunately my system administrator's system collapsed on him today, so he
lost all his mail (and everyone else's) - including what he'd received as a 
result of Mr. Harper's post.  


So would all you dearest darlings who responded to that menstruating
vaginamouth's post please resend your complaint  - otherwise your cause has no
chance, whichever way it tilts.

 



>-- 
>Douglas Harper          harper@oracorp.com      (607) 277-6093 [ext 252]
>#
>Question for the net:  who said of the Holy Roman Empire that it was
>neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire?


jw
Maths Department
University Of Western Australia

Perth


home phone:  0011 61 9 459 2694
(Home on Easter Sunday, 11am local time - give us a buzz if you've got money
to burn.)