The Brexit debate – flailing around in a pool of shit

@JonWorth’s pungent week on Twitter.
(tags: eu brexit ukpolitics twitter )

What It’s Like Teaching ‘1984’ After Trump’s Election

Chilling.
(tags: Uspolitics )

The Best Star Trek Episodes From Every Series

A useful if contested list.
(tags: sf )

The Real Risk Behind Trump’s Taiwan Call

He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
(tags: China uspolitics )

Current
Tolstoy, by Henri Troyat

Last books finished
Short Trips: The History of Christmas, ed. Simon Guerrier
Kings of the North, by Cecelia Holland
AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers, ed. Nnedi Okorafor

Next books
Angels & Visitations: A Miscellany, by Neil Gaiman
Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past, by Paul Cartledge
Bullet Time, by David A. McIntee

Books acquired in last week
Electoral Laws and their Political Consequences, eds Bernard Grosman and Arend Lijphart
Comparing Electoral Systems, by David M. Farrell
A Short History of Electoral Systems in Western Europe, by Andrew McLaren Carstairs

EU citizens in Britain post Brexit vote: ‘I feel betrayed, not at home, sad’ | UK news | The Guardian

Brexiters – pleased with your achievement?
(tags: ukpolitics brexit race eu )

Brutalist architecture in Skopje: why you should have visited Skopje before yesterday

Harsh but fair.
(tags: macedonia architecture )

The Duke of Richmond’s bill for universal suffrage, annual parliaments and equal electoral districts

from 1780.
(tags: ukpolitics elections )

Harvard research suggests that an entire global generation has lost faith in democracy

Worrying reading.
(tags: Uspolitics eu democracy )

I came across an interesting map the other day, showing the local government electoral divisions of north-eastern Ireland in the mid-20th century, showing dispensary districts (never heard of them before!) and electoral divisions (presumably these are the wards used for local council elections after the abolition of proportional representation in 1932):

My eye was caught by an anomaly around Belfast:

Down at the southern edge of the city, the Dunmurry dispensary district west of the Lagan includes the Malone, Derryaghy and Lissue electoral wards of Lisburn Rural Council, and the Ballylesson dispensary district east of the Lagan includes the Breda and Drumbo wards of Hillsborough Rural Council – and also a small corner marked "part of Malone", nestling in an angle of the southern perimeter of the Belfast municipal boundaries.

I found this fascinating. In general Irish political geography has avoided institutionalising small enclaves (as opposed to much bigger ones); this seems on the face of it to be a tiny sliver of Lisburn Rural Council, in County Antrim, detached from the rest and sandwiched between the County Borough of Belfast and County Down.

The location of this enclave appears to be roughly at 54.559 N, 5.932 W, the location of Moreland's Meadow, an 18 acre/7 hectare extension of the Lagan Meadows separated from them by the two straight lines of the old canal on the west, with Belvoir Forest across the river to the east (and the Newtownbreda sewage works visible to the northeast):

(Incidentally I always referred to it as Belvoir Forest Park, pronounced "Beaver", but it seems the official name is Belvoir Park Forest.)

A plausible explanation might be that the old municipal boundary of Belfast followed the canal line, and the old county boundary between Antrim and Down followed the river, leaving Moreland's Meadow stuck between.

This was surprisingly difficult to verify with online sources. The Ordnance Survey used to have a very nifty historical maps website, but it seems to be offline. Then I found a Google Books copy of Belfast: Approach to Crisis: A Study of Belfast Politics 1613–1970, published in 1973, a bit behind the curve, by Ian Budge and the late great Cornelius O'Leary (my father is referenced in a footnote on page 65). This has a map on page xxii showing the 1853 and 1896 boundaries, conveniently set off by shading to indicate the ambition of Belfast Corporation to annex neighbouring territory in 1947. Moreland's Meadow is roughly under the "E" in "RIVER LAGAN".

It's clear enough that the sharper angle of the canal, rather than the kink in the river, is that followed by the Belfast boundary. But it is if anything implied that the Antrim/Down boundary followed that of the city vs the countryside.

However. At last I located what appears to be a 1915 map of Belfast at the Charles Close collection, and this makes it clear that my initial suspicions were correct.

This map does indeed make it fairly clear where the Belfast boundaries and the Antrim/Down boundaries diverge. At the bottom left, the Belfast boundary comes in along the Upper Malone Road and the Malone Road and hits the river at Shaw's Bridge, while the county boundary continues along the river. And at the top right, again the county boundary continues along the river, while the Belfast boundary strikes east along the streets now known as Hampton Park and Galwally Park. And in the middle, the characteristic shape of Moorland's Meadow is reinforced by the Belfast boundary running along the canal to the west, and the county boundary running along the river to the east. It also fits rather neatly with the much rougher map that I started with. So my theory was right.

I do not know whether Moreland's Meadow was included in Belfast, Antrim or Down for the purposes of the electoral register. In practice, it is unlikely to have mattered – I suspect it has never had a permanently resident human population. In 1973 (possibly earlier, but I think not until then) it was incorporated into the new Belfast District Council, and the boundary between Belfast and Castlereagh Districts ran along the river (not the canal) until the local government reform of a couple of years ago, when Belfast expanded to the ring road east of the river and the entire area became part of the city.

It's been interesting to research this in the week that Belgium and the Netherlands swapped parcels of land and adjusted their border peacefully. That resolved a boundary that lasted from 1843 to 2016; the Moreland's Meadows enclave was considerably smaller, and lasted at most for 75 years.

Moreland's Meadow is grazed by cattle and features venerable oak and cedar trees. It sounds very pleasant. I must look in next time I am passing.

Belgian beer culture added to UNESCO world heritage

Hooray!
(tags: Belgium beer )

Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy

Excellent, long analysis.
(tags: uspolitics language )

DWP ignoring effects of benefit sanctions

UK gov’t war on the poor continues.
(tags: ukpolitics )

EU Commission: The Smart Money is on Clean Energy

But does its new mammoth package provide the right framework to unleash its potential? – @JulesInBxl
(tags: )

We went in search of the world’s hardest language

Tuyuca, rather than Ubykh or !Xóõ.
(tags: languages )

Pakistani Prime Minister Sherif calls Donald Trump; Trump talks.

Verbatim.
(tags: uspolitics )

Re-Animate Europe!

Through comics.
(tags: comics eu )

Everything mattered: lessons from 2016’s bizarre presidential election

Long and thoughtful.
(tags: uspolitics )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Your suite is on the first floor, sir,’ Major Wolff said. ‘It faces the sea.’

I read this when I was twelve, in 1979, a completely unsuitable age to read a novel about an American airman landing on occupied Jersey just before D-Day and causing mayhem. (A phrase from the one and only sex scene, "Her neat round buttocks bouncing", has lingered with me for almost four decades.)

Even aged twelve I knew a bit about the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands – I think the Observer, which we used to read religiously on Sundays,. must have done a feature on it in the late 1970s. Even so, it was interesting then, and it is still interesting now, to read Robinson's exploration of a quaint rural isolated society under occupation by an alien force, though it is noticeable that most of the Germans are depicted as fairly humane chaps, Major Wolff having been driven out of his mind by his experiences on the Eastern Front, and only the commanding officers (and the invisible operators of Operation Todt) being real bastards.

The point I missed when I was twelve is that actually Kramer's impatience with the islanders' apparent collaboration with the Germans, and his personal acts of sabotage, make him rather an anti-hero. As it turns out, the leading islanders have long realised that collaborating with the Germans to turn Jersey into a massive fortress is likely to be the best thing they can do for the Allies – the more Jersey is fortified, the less likely it is to figure in a future Western Front, and the greater the diversion of resources from where they are really needed in Normandy or Brittany. This point is also made by Erwin Rommel who makes a brief appearance in the final chapters. (And of course this was borne out in real life; the French mainland near the Channel Islands was liberated in August 1944 but the islands themselves not until after VE Day in May 1945.) Reading it as an adult, Kramer comes over as a crass and insensitive Yank; the Germans get most of the funniest lines. Knowing what I do now about the all-encompassing evil of the Third Reich, it feels somewhat sanitised.

It was a bit poignant to read a novel set in the Channel Islands. A schoolfriend of mine from Belfast ended up working in financial services in that part of the world, and made a real success of his career, eventually getting elected to Guernsey's Police Complaints Commission; but unfortunately died last year. So it's interesting, but also sad, to reconnect both with him and with my memories of that time of my life by reading this.

Donald Tusk rebuffs British MPs’ call for expats rights deal

Good for Tusk. UK must make first move.
(tags: ukpolitics eu brexit )

Startups be warned: Something weird happens to companies when they hit 150 people

Importance of structure.
(tags: work psychology )

How to manipulate Donald Trump.

@Saletan on top form.
(tags: uspolitics )

PIN number analysis

How common is yours?
(tags: mathematics )