Best Of

Fair play to him.

Tory MP Takes Swipe At Kemi Badenoch For Attacking Starmer Over PMQs Absence

Mark Pritchard said: "I may get the party whip withdrawn for saying it, but so be it."

A senior Tory MP has taken an astonishing swipe at Kemi Badenoch after she accused Keir Starmer of dodging prime minister’s questions.

The opposition leader said Starmer had “evaded” PMQs for the last two weeks, when he has been attending the G7 and Nato summits abroad.

In response, a clearly-angry PM accused Badenoch of being “unserious” at a time of huge global instability.

He said: “There’s never been a more important time to work with our allies and to be absolutely serious in our response. That response was unserious. Unserious.

“To suggest at a time like this that the prime minister attending the G7 summit and the Nato summit is avoiding PMQs is unserious.”

Later during the same Commons debate, Mark Pritchard, the Conservative MP for The Wrekin, attacked his own leader over her comments.

He said: “Whilst we may disagree on the detail, can I agree with the prime minister that as far as possible in this place, it would be best to keep partisan politics out of national security issues.

“Who knows, I may get the party whip withdrawn for saying it, but so be it. There are things that go beyond party politics.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tory-mp-takes-swipe-at-kemi-badenoch-for-attacking-starmer-over-pmqs-absence_uk_685d30ece4b0c601d5a1eeb7

No wonder Dave (pbuh) thinks Jenrick will do a better job than Kemi.

Another day another university set for strike action with belligerent language from the UcU union head.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rpkj18xjjo

What a basket case our universities seems to be.

My understanding is that even some very highly ranked universities are under serious financial strain. There is also an issue with funding for PhD, which without those, you don't get post-docs, and the ultimately, you don't get the next generation of academic staff.

And the first departments to close are expensive laboratory-based sciences like chemistry. It was the same cost-based bean-counting in the 1950s that meant technical schools were never built alongside grammars and secondary moderns. All those workshops!

Our AI / tech / knowledge economy growth focused government recently cut the extra funding pot that was given to universities to run what are deemed high cost subjects e.g. Chemistry, Medicine, etc. Its crazy, we should be doing the opposite, more money into these subjects.

In addition to my bug bear about the unique super computer getting cut, another area not getting enough funding is GPU clusters. Universities will always struggle to compete with these mega tech companies and I don't think they can, but all STEM subjects now need access to GPUs, because ML is such a powerful approach to estimating complex functions from data. Its not just Computer Science with their LLMs, Maths / Physics / Chemistry / Biology / Engineering, they all want to leverage these ML approaches.

O/T today is a good example of the inherent physical differences between men and women when it comes to sport (no, not the Swiss women’s national football team being beaten by Lucerne’s under 15 boys 7-1).

Faith Kipyegon will today attempt to become the first woman to run a mile under 4 minutes. To do this she will be aided by specialist kit including an aerodynamic skin suit, specialist energy returning lightweight spikes and specialist pace runners arranged to disrupt the airflow for her. She will attempt this on a modern track which returns energy after a lifetime of the best scientific conditioning of fitness and nutrition.

71 years ago Roger Banister did it with none of the above assistance after starting the day at work as a medical student then catching the train up to Oxford mid morning and running at 6pm.