Best Of

Here's a bizarre story:

Boxes reportedly containing snails were uncovered by Westminster City Council officers in West End offices.

It believes it is an attempt to avoid the payment of business rates (NNDR) through claiming that a commercial property is a snail farm and therefore exempt from business as a “a fish farm / agricultural use” property.

While in reality organisers of the scam know that the Valuation Office (central government agency) will never grant an agricultural business rate exemption, the council is forced to go through the legal hoops of winding up the shell company which is occupying the office space. As the council must hold the occupier of a property as liable for business rates, the landlord does not have to pay any business rates and therefore can be considered as complicit in this arrangement.

Westminster City Council has so far wound up four snail companies for non payment of business rates.

Good use of shell company.

Can I just tell, after probably too many gripes about the public sector, a different story? My daughter was due to fly to Egypt for a holiday yesterday. When she got to the gates she was told that her passport would reach its final 6 months 3 days before she was due to return. She was told that Egypt would probably detain her in those circumstances. The woman from Easyjet seemed to know what she was talking about. She also advised that my daughter go to Glasgow and just drop in to the passport centre and get her passport renewed.

My daughter did this and was understandably distraught. She was now having to pay for an additional flight and £220 for the emergency renewal of her passport. The staff at the Passport Centre really could not have been nicer to her. They did everything they could to turn it around as fast as possible and before 3pm she had a new passport. My daughter is flying out this morning. Kind, polite, considerate, efficient. Not words that are always used for public services.

More than any other party, the mis-match between the Greens' members and their voters is vast. If/when the media start to analyse exactly what the Greens are proposing, their opinion polling numbers will start to fall.

However, as the media has shown no interest whatsoever in critiqueing RefUk, then I expect the Greens wil continue to have an easy rde - so I forecast them in second place before Christmas.

On the contrary, I think the Greens are doing so well in the polling because Polanski clearly communicates what he stands for.

He is an excellent communicator and willingly to go into bat to defend immigrants, Transfolk, and to speak out against rising inequality, genocide in Gaza and the Oligarchs. These may well be minority views on PB but go down well with the wider public. Our right wing press barons and twisted Social Media alogorithims are not representative.

Polanski is mining a substantial seam of support, helped by a strong anti-Starmer and anti-Farage feeling in much of the country.

Trump Org’s income in the first half of 2024 was $51 million.

In the first half of 2025 it rose to $864 million.

A massive percentage came from foreigners.

It should be the biggest scandal in the history of American politics.

But few even care.
https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1983234367162835298

America is no longer a serious country.

Nobody much seems to give a fuck their democracy has been taken from them by charlatans and chancers and a bunch of weird, absolute obsessive reactionary slave owner wanting nutjobs who have spent their lives in basements in underpants.

Still, there's always shits and hoots on Facebook of cute cats or liberals covered in shit to keep the mind from doing anything stupid like wonder why the american revolution happened.

It's because opponents of Trump have outrage fatigue. Everything he does, or that is done on his behalf, is worthy of outrage, but it's pretty tiring to be angry all the time.

And for Republicans they've been convinced that their biggest enemy is the Democrats, and so as long as Trump is, "annoying all the right people," then it's secondary that he's openly corrupt, selling himself to foreign states, and generally acting as a traitor who is trashing the Constitution. He's owning the libs, so none of that matters.

What's the point of "owning" the Libs if you end up destroying everything you and your party believed in?

eg. yesterday's row about Ronald Reagan.

The enemy are the libs who are going to turn your children transgender and flood the country with illegal immigrants (who are also voting in record numbers across the country).

All that matters is the fight against the libs, and if we need to burn down the rule of law and the separation of powers to do it, then so be it.

Not being funny, but until recently there was a contingency of "Libs" who didn't ask too many questions before referring dysmorphic kids to Tavistock and the country sort of is being flooded with illegal immigrants.

The trouble is there's a grain of truth in it, as there is in the centrist Dads who brush it all off - and thus help fuel it.

There's a difference between being wrong and being the enemy.

From my point of view, Tories are [mostly] wrong, Russia is the enemy.

Trump, and to a lesser extent Farage, are big on treating people in their country they disagree with as the enemy. It's the sort of thing that people have done for rhetorical purposes in the past, but not really meant it, but these days, with Trump really meaning it, we should be making a special effort to step away from it.

I saw Thatcher do the same - I didn't agree with it, btw - and I think there are plenty on the radical Left who do so as well, just look at the celebrations of the death of Charlie Kirk. I also don't think Farage is anything like Trump in that regard.

However, I agree: we shouldn't dehumanise our opponents. I like how John McCain handled it.

Trump Org’s income in the first half of 2024 was $51 million.

In the first half of 2025 it rose to $864 million.

A massive percentage came from foreigners.

It should be the biggest scandal in the history of American politics.

But few even care.
https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1983234367162835298

America is no longer a serious country.

Nobody much seems to give a fuck their democracy has been taken from them by charlatans and chancers and a bunch of weird, absolute obsessive reactionary slave owner wanting nutjobs who have spent their lives in basements in underpants.

Still, there's always shits and hoots on Facebook of cute cats or liberals covered in shit to keep the mind from doing anything stupid like wonder why the american revolution happened.

It's because opponents of Trump have outrage fatigue. Everything he does, or that is done on his behalf, is worthy of outrage, but it's pretty tiring to be angry all the time.

And for Republicans they've been convinced that their biggest enemy is the Democrats, and so as long as Trump is, "annoying all the right people," then it's secondary that he's openly corrupt, selling himself to foreign states, and generally acting as a traitor who is trashing the Constitution. He's owning the libs, so none of that matters.

What's the point of "owning" the Libs if you end up destroying everything you and your party believed in?

eg. yesterday's row about Ronald Reagan.

The enemy are the libs who are going to turn your children transgender and flood the country with illegal immigrants (who are also voting in record numbers across the country).

All that matters is the fight against the libs, and if we need to burn down the rule of law and the separation of powers to do it, then so be it.

Not being funny, but until recently there was a contingency of "Libs" who didn't ask too many questions before referring dysmorphic kids to Tavistock and the country sort of is being flooded with illegal immigrants.

The trouble is there's a grain of truth in it, as there is in the centrist Dads who brush it all off - and thus help fuel it.

Yes.

There are some very stupid things proposed by people.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, some equally stupid things were enacted, like a 98% tax on unearned income.

Really incredibly dumb things.

But fortunately, no matter how terrible for the British economy Wilson and Callaghan were, they also believed in democracy and the rule of law, and they were kicked out, and we got Mrs Thatcher.

Stupid things come. Stupid things go.

So long as democracy and the rule of law prevails, then things will correct.

Once you let that go, because there's some particular things you find irksome, then you are fucked.

Still trying to understand how the governing party can be on 17% with one of the best pollsters 15 months after winning a 170 seat majority.

Havde you got a sheet of foolscap.......but if you want the essentials

Labour supporters want their party to have a heart. If they showed they had one many of their problems would disappear. Specifically Mahmood seems like Farage in a frock and Starmer and Kemi are pretty indistinguishable.If he wants to ape someone he should be aping Zack.

"Having a heart" as you call it, presumably involves either wasting even more of other people's money, and there's none left, or importing yet more of the third world and dumping them in our inner cities, which would destroy what's left of our social cohesion. So both would be counter-productive politically even in the short term.

The truth is that the left-liberal path that both main parties have followed since 1997 has run out of road, We've dodged hard choices for a generation, and may be able to do so for the rest of this decade, but there's no room to make things actively worse without accelerating the reckoning.