Best Of

@viewcode

I got your message on the previous thread and will respond as requested.

I note this comment from you, which is a view share by some other posters -

"I hold the Widdecombe position on trans: namely, those who have gone all the way surgically/hormonally and can reasonably function as the opposite sex should be allowed to be legally considered as the opposite sex."

I realise that people cannot be expected to follow the ins and outs of complicated areas of law. But the ECHR ruled in 2017 in the case of Garçon & Nicot v France (followed in a case against Italy in 2018 and Romania in 2021 saying the same) that countries could NOT insist on surgery (with a high risk of sterility) as a condition for recognising a change in gender in law. The ECHR has ruled that a change gender identity must in certain circumstances be recognised in law, regardless of a persons physical body. This therefore means means that you cannot link gender recognition to surgery/hormone treatment and must give it to, for instance, a man who has made no changes to his body whatsoever or to a woman trying to get pregnant, if they claim to have changed their gender (re this last, see the recent ruling by Mr Justice Hayden in the "W" case - in October 2025).

Ms Widdecombe, as a former MP and Minister in the Home Office, should have done her research before opining on this or putting this forward as some sort of solution or compromise. It isn't. It is unlawful. This debate is persistently hampered by politicians and commentators putting forward "solutions" which are unlawful. It is unfair and unkind to all concerned to offer false solutions and to mislead about what the law says and has said for some time, whatever side of the debate anyone is on.

This debate is also persistently hampered by a confusion and mingling of two separate thing, sex and gender. The law should be concerned with the former, the latter being merely what an individual chooses to think of themself as.

I think we should wait for viewcode to post the header (which has clearly taken considerable preparation) before debating bits of it here.

Don't worry. When VC eventually does produce The Mangina Monologues there will be no shortage of obsessives willing to discuss "loos" for days on end. I hope we get some advance notice of its publication so I can sell my computer on Facebook Marketplace the day before.

The thing about this bet is that it's almost entirely about Reform, and not the Tories or Lib Dems.

If Reform at least double their vote share at the next GE then the Tories will lose dozens more seats. But the Lib Dems are not so vulnerable to a Reform surge. So the Lib Dems would expect to win more seats than the Tories without winning any extra seats themselves.

It's therefore worth comparing the odds for this bet with odds on Reform most seats, or first place in vote share, as they're likely to be related contingencies.

Reform most seats at 11/10 looks like a better bet than the Lib Dems to win more seats than the Tories at 8/11, and similarly Labour most seats at 27/10 is more attractive than the Tories to win more seats than the Lib Dems at 1/1.

Also, I think Lib Dem voters are in general more averse to Reform than average, probably the most averse overall. It's just a gut feel, it would be interesting to see if polling evidence supported that.

The point being, if I am right the stronger Reform are the more likely LDs are to gain seats. Our North Dorset seat last time was Con 37%, LD 34%, Reform 16%. Yesterday's projection had N Dorset going to Reform, and it may well do but it's not likely to be the LD voters switching imo.

More Con voters would tactically vote Reform than LD but more LD voters would tactically vote Con to beat Reform than would tactically vote Reform

No, I really don't think so. Not round here anyway.

I could be wrong though (and I know you never are 😉) so as I said it would be good to see some polling. Is there something around 2024 vote switchers that would show this?

I suspect you may be right in North Dorset, and HYUFD in Essex.

This is a map (credit J Swarbrick originally, I believe) of local by-election winners since May..those Vikings who settled here would appear to have a lot to answer for...

Have we done the slow moving disaster zone that is company director ID verification? It's not blown up in the government's face yet, but it has the potential.

The gov has decided that the era of just taking names and addresses of people who are running a company is over. They want to "verify" everyone's identity. Therefore every company director has to get their ID verified, at which point Companies House doles out a magic 11 digit string of random letters and numbers. You can't become a company director without entering this magic string of letters into Companies House's website, nor can you file a company annual confirmation statement without having doing this for all existing directors.

The system went live in November, with the intention of getting every single director verified by November next year as confirmation statements fall due.

If you have a biometric passport, and a modernish smartphone, it's a doddle. 15 mins of you life wasted, and boom there's a code. Save it somewhere, and you're done for life.

If you've no photo driving licence or passport, it's virtually impossible - you just end up in an endless cycle of "system says no" and calling helplines full of sympathetic people with no actual solutions. There is no published guidance on what to do without these two documents, other than ring the helpline, where they suck their teeth and say "that's tricky, isn't it".

I've the misfortune to be Finance director and secretary of a charity that's structured as a limited company - and worse still our confirmation statement is due in two weeks, so I'm effectively one of the guinea pigs for this stupid process. I'm going round in circles because one of our elected directors/trustees (who is 79) has no photo ID. At the current rate of progress we're going to end up fined for not filling.

Repeat the saga literally millions of times over the next year - there are about 5.5 million companies with about 8 million directors to go through this process - and it's going to be carnage. Small charities, flats where the freehold is held in a jointly owned and managed company by the leaseholders, sports clubs etc are all gong to be banging their heads against brick walls trying to make it work.

MPs will probably have a pile of caseworke off it. Hundreds of thousands of companies are going to end up filing late, and thousands will probably end up with substantial fines or struck off.

As I say, it's not yet publicly exploded in the government's face - but it's quite likely to at some point in the next 12 months.

I'm stuck on this myself and need to call the helpless line in the morning. On an unrelated note I see Betfred has just been fined for not having procedures to check FOBT players are not money laundering. No-one is money laundering at £2 a spin. When it was £100 a spin, yes. Likewise I'm on the list because I own a flat. I'm not importing, exporting or laundering. The government lacks any sense of scale and proportion.

You always used to be able to walk into any bank and, say, change a £20 note into two tens, etc, but if you try doing it now, they won't, unless you stick your bank card into the machine and effectively do it through your bank account, so it has to be your bank, not just any bank.

And I assume the reason for this is something to do with money laundering. As if a money launderer would waste time walking into a bank with a few banknotes and change them into different denominations. Ridiculous.

All people care about now is following policy and process, not actually helping anyone.

AML rules cannot br ignored. The problem is not the bank clerks it is the rules.

These are an absolute nightmare. The hassle my 85 year old aunt went through proving "source of funds" when she gave £20 000 to her grandsons for a flat deposit was out of this world. She had cashed in some Premium Bonds that she had held for 2 decades and had to show where she got that money in the first place. Anyone working in conveyancing has similar stories every week.

Similarly, I am a Trustee for a couple of charities, and we have a number of accounts to manage our funds. We want to take advantage of better interest rates on our reserves, but opening any new account takes months (often the rate disappears in the meantime).

Abolishing or greatly reducing AML rules is the sort of deregulation needed in our economy. I cannot see anyone really engaged in money laundering doing it by either of these means.

AML rules date from 2014, I think.

Have we done the slow moving disaster zone that is company director ID verification? It's not blown up in the government's face yet, but it has the potential.

The gov has decided that the era of just taking names and addresses of people who are running a company is over. They want to "verify" everyone's identity. Therefore every company director has to get their ID verified, at which point Companies House doles out a magic 11 digit string of random letters and numbers. You can't become a company director without entering this magic string of letters into Companies House's website, nor can you file a company annual confirmation statement without having doing this for all existing directors.

The system went live in November, with the intention of getting every single director verified by November next year as confirmation statements fall due.

If you have a biometric passport, and a modernish smartphone, it's a doddle. 15 mins of you life wasted, and boom there's a code. Save it somewhere, and you're done for life.

If you've no photo driving licence or passport, it's virtually impossible - you just end up in an endless cycle of "system says no" and calling helplines full of sympathetic people with no actual solutions. There is no published guidance on what to do without these two documents, other than ring the helpline, where they suck their teeth and say "that's tricky, isn't it".

I've the misfortune to be Finance director and secretary of a charity that's structured as a limited company - and worse still our confirmation statement is due in two weeks, so I'm effectively one of the guinea pigs for this stupid process. I'm going round in circles because one of our elected directors/trustees (who is 79) has no photo ID. At the current rate of progress we're going to end up fined for not filling.

Repeat the saga literally millions of times over the next year - there are about 5.5 million companies with about 8 million directors to go through this process - and it's going to be carnage. Small charities, flats where the freehold is held in a jointly owned and managed company by the leaseholders, sports clubs etc are all gong to be banging their heads against brick walls trying to make it work.

MPs will probably have a pile of caseworke off it. Hundreds of thousands of companies are going to end up filing late, and thousands will probably end up with substantial fines or struck off.

As I say, it's not yet publicly exploded in the government's face - but it's quite likely to at some point in the next 12 months.

This is Farage outbursts against the BBC

https://news.sky.com/liveblog-webview/politics-latest-budget-taxes-reeves-starmer-labour-badenoch-farage-12593360

While Farage is expert at whataboutery, straw men, rephrasing, non apologies and so on, I just draw attention to what, it is alleged, comes from the actual time when he was at school, written in 1981 by a teacher to the head. It includes these words:


“Another colleague, who teaches the boy, described his publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views; and he cited a particular incident in which Farage was so offensive to a boy in his set, that he had to be removed from the lesson. This master stated his view that this behaviour was precisely why the boy should not be made a prefect. Yet another colleague described how, at a Combined Cadet Force (CCF) camp organised by the college, Farage and others had marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night shouting Hitler-youth songs.”


As contemporaneous evidence from decades before people knew he might be PM it is, if authentic (and Michael Crick says it is) it is of greater evidential value than all the (I have no doubt generally reliable) accounts from memories years later.

How important it is is a separate question. But I think Reform and Farage are troubled by this.

The point is Farage was about 14 or 15 at the time, while the BBC, run by fully grown adults, was showing the Black and White Minstrel Show during the same period.

It's not much of a point, though, is it.

Isn't it?

That's what I said, didn't I?

Yes and you’re wrong. It’s perfectly valid point to make.

Societal cultural norms change over time. What’s acceptable now won’t be in a decade. The further you go back the more the change.

I'm NF's age. It wasn't any sort of cultural norm in the 70s to taunt and bully Jewish people about Nazi atrocities. He's flapping around desperately and dishonestly.

Indeed. I'd go further. I'm older, and this notion that racist, or sexist, 'banter' was socially acceptable in the 70s and 80s just isn't true. Of course such banter existed, but both had been challenged since the mid-1960s by anti-racist and feminist groups and, though there remained much to do, such banter wasn't the norm any more, and its proponents were on the back foot, certainly by the mid-to-late 1970s.

I rather suspect one of Farage's problems is that he perceived the banter of the posh-heads at Dulwich College (and subsequently in the City) as the norm.

Well it was completely acceptable in my local comprehensive. No Hitler love, but great hilarity around the Ethiopia famine for example. Shocking looking back, but Pretending this stuff was not going on is revisionist bullshit.

I get it. Corbyn says/likes something anti-semitic and unwilling to apologise = unfit to be leader or MP,

Farage says "Gas 'em all" and refuses to apologise = glorious patriot standing up against multiculturism.