Utopia, you are standing in it!

Richard I (September 8, 1157 – April 6, 1199) was King of England from 1189 until his death. He was the second king of the House of Plantagenet. He also ruled as Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Cyprus, Count of Poitiers, Anjou, Maine, and Nantes, and was overlord of Brittany at various times during the same period. He was the third of five sons of King Henry II of England and Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine and seemed unlikely to become king, but all of his brothers except the youngest, John, predeceased their father. Richard is known as Richard Cœur de Lion or Richard the Lionheart because of his reputation as a great military leader and warrior.

Richard was born on September 8, 1157, probably at Beaumont Palace, in Oxford, England, son of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was a younger brother of…

Empress Matilda (c. February 7, 1102 – September 10, 1167), also known as the Empress Maude, was one of the claimants to the English throne during the civil war known as the Anarchy. Empress Matilda was the daughter of King Henry I of England by first wife Matilda of Scotland, daughter of Malcolm III, King of Scots.

Henry I’s two eldest surviving children were William Ætheling and Matilda. William Ætheling (1103 – 1120), commonly called Adelin, sometimes Adelinus, or Adelingus or other Latinised Norman-French variants of Ætheling. William was married to Matilda of Anjou the eldest daughter of Count Fulk V of Anjou. The couple were married when William Ætheling was 16 and Matilda of Anjou was only 8. Needless to say, that when William drowned in the English channel in 1120, a year after their marriage, when his ship, The White Ship, sank, there were no children from the…

The Scottish Government’s Case for a Second Independence Referendum

On 19 December 2019 – a week after the Westminster General Election at which the SNP, again, won an overwhelming majority of Scottish seats – the Scottish Government published its long-awaited case for a second independence referendum: Scotland’s Right to Choose: Putting Scotland’s Future in Scotland’s Hands. 

The document does three main things, aimed at four distinct audiences. First, the bulk of the discussion is devoted to setting out the democratic case for holding a second referendum by the end of 2020. This is based on three claims: that the people of Scotland, as members of a multi-national Union based on consent, have the sovereign right to determine their own constitutional future; that there has been a material change in circumstances since the 2014 referendum; and that the Scottish Government has a mandate to hold a referendum. The material change…

Alex Salmond has been a controversial figure (to say the least) in Scottish politics for quite some time. Recently, he sparked further controversy when he introduced his newly founded Alba Party alongside a strategy to secure a supermajority for Scottish independence in the upcoming 2021 Scottish Parliament election. While it is not clear what exactly makes a supermajority in Salmond’s understanding, how he aims to achieve it is.

The Scottish election system is different from that of Westminster. Instead of a pure first past the post system(FPTP) Scotland uses the Additional Member System(AMS). Scots elect a Member of the Scottish Parliament(MSP) in their constituency just as they do for Westminster elections, but additionally they vote within their electoral region to send seven further MSPs to Holyrood. While the MSPs in constituencies are chosen according to FPTP, MSPs within the region are not. This is what Alex Salmond and his AlbaParty…