Best Of

"But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man."

They are one and the same.

It is a lie to say that a man who identifies as a woman somehow automatically becomes less of a threat. Male pattern criminality is the same for him as for other men. There is some evidence - though more research is needed - that the proportion of sex offenders among trans-identified males in British prisons is higher than it is for other males.

But as I say much more research is needed. Worth noting that when a (female) professor of criminology suggested just this sort of research she was horribly abused and forced out of her job.

But ask yourself this: if a man refuses to accept a woman's boundaries, refuses to take No for an answer, insists on forcing himself into a space and making a woman uncomfortable, why wouldn't a woman perceive him as a potential threat?

The other lie which is perpetrated is that no trans identified man has ever attacked a woman in a loo or a changing room. Again, untrue - as a moment's research would show. See, for instance, Katie Dolatowski - a 6 foot man who sexually assaulted a 10 year old girl in a public bathroom.

No woman, no girl should have to take the risk of assault or indecent exposure or voyeurism by any sort of man in a place where they are vulnerable and entitled to privacy, dignity and security. And, frankly, men and women who don't get this are enabling predatory behaviour. They should be ashamed of themselves not go round attacking those women pointing out this obvious and, until recently, uncontroversial truth.

It is for men to be kind and inclusive and to sort out ie stop the violence they inflict on their fellow transgender men. Not expect women to put themselves at risk.

This is ridiculous - you can find the official gov.uk guidance on higher rate stamp duty for second home purchases in two clicks from googling 'stamp duty rules' where it says

If any of you will own, or part own more than one residential property worth £40,000 or more, you will have to pay the higher rates on your new purchase (unless there is another reason why the higher rates do not apply).

Include any residential property that:

is owned on behalf of children under the age of 18 (parents are treated as the owners even if the property is held through a trust and they are not the trustees)
you have an interest in as the beneficiary of a trust
Include your current home, if you still own it at the end of the day you buy your new home.

'Expert opinion, complicated tax blah blah blah'

She can fuck right off

Based on what you know, is it clear to you it was a second home? What other home did she own?

The trust thing that was set up, that she thought she had completely withdrawn from and no longer counted for her (or that’s what she’s claiming she understood it based on advice.) is it still a crime if it happened based on someone else’s guidance from whom you sought how to do such things right, and whose answers you trusted? If the bad advice was from the trust who already had all the details of her particular position so she couldn’t have misled them in anyway.

But reading her body language, it tells me I completely agree with you - she knew she was on the make, and that she has to resign from government when the fast track investigation concludes. Do we have eta for the commissioners report?

But after resigning from Government, perhaps for the first time, what standard should she then be held to? Will you call for her to resign as an MP as well over this? when others have made strong political comebacks after very similar things, after time on back benches. Because if she doesn’t stand down as MP, and survives the election in May 2029, we know she will be back on the front bench because it’s what always happens. Ultimately can those who set themselves up as White Knights really be held to sterner punishments than everybody else? 🤷‍♀️

I think losing Rayner would be a major blow to a Starmer government that is already dead in the water. For all her faults she is one of the most dynamic and charismatic of Labour's front benches, very much her own person and not cut from the identi-cut PPE/SPAD/MP cloth. She may well have to go, and has certainly blotted her copy book very badly.

A couple of thoughts though:

Of our 650 MPs a great number have 2 or more homes, including Farage, Sunak, Jenrick etc etc, and even more notably the King and other members of the Royal family.. There may well be further casualties to this sort of scrutiny over property affairs. Rayner's came to light because of her visibility as a politician and role in charge of housing, but I bet there are a number of others looking anxiously over their property assets and tax affairs. There are some professions and domestic situations that multiple properties are a requirement rather than an extravagance.

Secondly, this entire mess has arisen from the differential treatment of second properties, and the anomalies arising from that. Stamp Duty used to be a transaction tax, but now is being used to punish second home owners, landlords etc as a way of distorting the market in favour of a perceived policy goal. Council tax replaced the Poll Tax (and that in turn replaced the Rates) and was originally designed to fund local services. At one time Council Tax had a discount for second homes (I think on the grounds that as part time residents, owners were light users of local services) but now are charged 2 or more times the rate as a way of punishing owners. If properties were merely taxed on the capital value rather than as a way of punishing second home owners then none of these issues would have arisen.

A small wrinkle on the Raynor affair that I just noticed: the trust set up for her child is almost certainly a trust for a vulnerable person. Unlike the trusts people like TSE setup for their children, the tax treatment of these is different. Trusts like TSE‘s treats all income, CGT etc as accruing to the parent / trustees for tax purposes. For Trusts for vulnerable people the tax treatment calculates the taxes owed as if they had been earned by the vulnerable person instead of the trustees even though (IIRC) they are actually paid by the trustees - the trustees can then claim the difference in taxes owed back from HMRC if necessary.

All this will have been explained to Raynor at some length by her lawyers. It’s therefore not entirely surprising that she might have thought that, having transferred property to the vulnerable persons trust, the same exemptions would apply to stamp duty calculations. Unfortunately for her these exemptions for vulnerable trust-related taxes do not include the question of whether the parent is deemed to own a property owned by the trust for the purposes of calculating stamp duty.

One could even argue that, given that the government chose to exempt the parents / trustees from tax liabilities arising from trusts for vulnerable people, the omission of property ownership for the purposes of calculating stamp duty was an oversight & that it should have been included alongside all the other taxes: The whole point appears to be to make sure that the trustees do not carry any extra tax liability as a consequence of carrying out their duties as trustees for a vulnerable person.

Nevertheless, the law is what it is & the gov.uk guidance is clear: Raynor should have known that & if she was advised otherwise then she was extremely badly advised. Can she prove that she was badly advised by the professionals she consulted? If not, then I think she’s probably toast.

See https://www.gov.uk/trusts-taxes/trusts-for-vulnerable-people for some details.

Incitement to violence in situations where the intent is possibly comedic rather than serious should perhaps be subject to the Tango test.

If people start going around punching feminine looking men in the balls, then it’s incitement to violence. If they don’t, it was a joke (or the poster doesn’t have the influence they think they have).

Take the bishop Brennan incident. Ted was told to kick him in the arse. He did so. That’s successful incitement. If he’d chickened out there’d have been no case to answer.

Surely not? Surely in the Bishop Brennan case the inciter bears no responsibility because noone reasonable would be expected to follow through? If I were to tell you, on here, to kick the Bishop of St. Edmundsbury (say) in the arse, and you did so, no legal process would go after Cookie off the internet because the suggestion is clearly ridiculous? Surely?

I'm impressed that you have very prudently covered yourself by selecting a See which currently has a Vacancy so nobody can follow your advice as there is presently no such Bishop!

Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.

But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.

With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.

There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.

The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.

This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.

Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?

I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.

I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.

In more concrete matters relating to Starmer's future we have just had our 11th consecutive month with manufacturing PMIs below 50, that is indicating a future contraction and the latest figure is one of the worst: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/uk-factories-stumble-as-new-orders-fall-back-pmi-shows/ar-AA1LD3ZA?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=68b69efe1dfd4e56a1a8495a30003596&ei=27

I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.

The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .

Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.

It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.

My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE

He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all

He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”

🫣

I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.

Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.

So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.

We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.

Even the guy running a company that provides school transport for SEND kids has gone on record complaining of the complete madness & waste in the current system.

PIP payments appear to have gone from “I need money for transport because otherwise I can’t get to work” to ”I have ADHD and find using the bus a bit tricky & would like my own car”,

The NHS maternity service is spending more on compensating mothers & children for damage done to them due to lack of adequate staffing than it is on actually delivering maternity services.

We trapped many of the “sick and poor” in unemployment because we let large corporations argue that even jobs that paid less than minimum wage counted as “shortage professions” that deserved unlimited work visas. How are they going to get work when made to compete in that environment?

The legal profession has turned the Equality Acts into a tool to undermine market forces in the labour market, leading inevitably to the chaos in Birmingham & the further casualisation of labour as employers flatly refuse to take on employees who have been turned into future legal liabilities for the sin of paying different jobs different amounts of money in order to attract workers.

We’ve made it completely impossible to build anything at all, anywhere. Latest stupidity on this front is that the cheap rate for non-degradable landfill that can be used to fill old quarries (cement, soil etc) at £4/tonne is being removed & the standard rate of £136 / tonne is being applied across the board, adding something like ~£25k to the price of the average house & vastly increasing the costs of larger projects. But that’s a pinprick next to the new Building Regulations, which appear to have cut house-building in half from already pitiful levels & the marauding Environment Agency that believes spiders matter more than housing children.

I could (very easily) go on, but there is so much in this country that doesn’t require money spending on it - it needs saner review & regulation. Successive governments have made this situation worse and worse because every regulation has had a proponent who cares very much about it being implemented but the costs have been spread across all of us, so pushback has been difficult to organise. We have ended up with a diffuse rule by lawfare, where everyone has a very important job to do but in the aggregate their job is to prevent anything happening at all.

You have hit the nail on the head.

We need a bonfire of regulations.

In a lot of cases, the regulations themselves aren’t the problem - it’s the interpretation of them via the legal system that has created the monster that now lies before us. We need to convince Parliament as an institution that following up on the interpretation of the law by the legal system is part & parcel of the job of lawmaking.

NB. To give an example of this - the last Parliament made a sensible change to the planning regulations that said that it would be permitted to add an extra floor to your property (with reasonable restrictions on which properties were allowed to do this), with only your neighbours being allowed object. The justification being that adding a floor to suburban houses in London would be a cheap way to add housing space without needing huge housing developments & with minimal impact.

A householder in London duly applied to extend their property upwards & the planning application was immediately opposed by people in neighbouring streets, horrified by the idea that “their” area might be defaced in this fashion. The case went to the courts, where a judge decided that the word “neighbouring” in the law in question didn’t mean “adjacent” as the lawmakers had intended - it meant anyone living within a mile or so.

Unsurprisingly, no one has bothered to make any planning applications of this kind since, as the inevitability of opposition by someone in a 1 mile radius circle makes it completely impossible to get through planning.

Parliament could have noticed this & issued a one line change to the law saying “no, when we said neighbouring we meant immediately adjacent”. But no one involved appears to have realised that this useful bit of planning reform that was carefully shepherded through the Parliamentary law-making maze was shot in the back by the judiciary the moment it became law.