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From Guardian reporting:

Yesterday Lord Justice William Davis, chairman of the Sentencing Council for England and Wales, issued a statement defending the new guidelines criticised by Robert Jenrick and Shabana Mahmood. He said:

One of the purposes of the revised Imposition of community and custodial sentences guideline is to make sure that the courts have the most comprehensive information available so that they can impose a sentence that is the most appropriate for the offender and the offence and so more likely to be effective. The guideline emphasises the crucial role played by pre-sentence reports (PSRs) in this process and identifies particular cohorts for whom evidence suggests PSRs might be of particular value to the court. The reasons for including groups vary but include evidence of disparities in sentencing outcomes, disadvantages faced within the criminal justice system and complexities in circumstances of individual offenders that can only be understood through an assessment.

PSRs provide the court with information about the offender; they are not an indication of sentence. Sentences are decided by the independent judiciary, following sentencing guidelines and taking into account all the circumstances of the individual offence and the individual offender.

Nothing in there refutes what Mahmood and Jenrick are saying though? He's actually saying we will be moving to two tier justice in many more words than necessary. Hopefully Labour abolish this body and shit can this idea because it's wrong. Crime is crime whether it's been perpetrated by a rich white woman or a poor black man, it's still crime.

How is any of this consistent with the Equality Act 2010, and why doesn't someone judicially review it (or someone convicted and sentenced on these guidelines appeal on grounds of discrimination)?

Get building that European reusable launch system.

Eutelsat is in talks with the EU to supply additional internet access to Ukraine, it said on Tuesday, amid a two-day surge in its shares on the prospect that OneWeb satellites could replace Elon Musk's Starlink there, - Reuters

🇫🇷🇬🇧 Shares of the Franco-British satellite group have more than tripled in value over the past two days, adding over 1 billion euros ($1.05 billion) to their market capitalisation.
https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1896979968636207543

I still have no idea whether the UK government bailing out OneWeb was prescience or brexit-spasm, but it's looking pretty good in retrospect.

I was very much opposed to the bail out, and have been proved conclusively wrong.

Afternoon folks

thinking about things over night to do with US withdrawing intelligence support. Should matters deteriorate even further between the UK/Europe and the US then one obvious way in which we could seriously inconvenience the US would be by withdrawing US access to data from Fylingdales.

Along with Thule in Greenland and Clear in Alaska this makes up one third of the US Ballistic Missile Early Warning system. It seems to me that if Trump is going to make threats about not helping in the defence of Europe then we should no longer be helping to defend the US.

After all, if Russia is their new best buddy then what do they need the early warning system for anyway?

Other people will know better than me but isn't Fylingdales essentially a US facility?

No wonder Starmer has to act carefully. We're full of US intelligence and military facilities.
De Gaulle wins again.

Indeed. Post-war we bet big on the US remaining an essentially benign hegemon, resisting the alternative European security solutions on offer. That bet looks increasingly like a disastrous error.

I disagree. Nato did the job it was designed to, as did most other UK-US relationships for many decades. The idea that a bet in the 1940s would last forever is ludicrous; those decisions were taken in the context of their time and the lifespan of arrangements.

To the extent that the *current* UK reliance on the US puts it in an awful position, that's a result of failing to reconsider the arrangements despite the increasingly divergent paths the UK and more particularly US have taken since 2010 or so; repeating mantras of the past without confronting the realities of the present. It's still happening now, more for comfort-blanket purposes than as any useful policy.

We have had at least a decade's warning that the US is not a reliable partner. Trump I should have been sufficient by itself but both Obama and Biden gave their own warnings, at much lower and more subtle levels. We knew a Trump return was highly possible well over a year ago - realistically, four years ago when he was let off his second impeachment. Both Starmer and Sunak before him should have set plans in place to prepare for this eventuality.

But to return to the earlier point, US bases in the UK are a card Britain can play. We should not be afraid to note that it's in our hand, if pushed sufficiently.

What's worrying for me with the "age of the US" coming to an end is that it will be China that inherits the mantle. Whatever one thinks of Trump and MAGA the US is founder upon principles of freedom and that, until recently, has been what they exported to the world. In a world where China is exporting it's values unchallenged the world will become a colder, more paranoid place and feel much less friendly outside of our core allies.

Who are our core allies? The US clearly isn't one.

Australia, Canada, France and Poland in that order I'd say then a bunch of second order allies in Europe.

I would put the Nordics and the Netherlands ahead of Australia and Canada, both of which have much higher priorities than the UK in their own neck of the woods.

All that US propaganda we’ve been fed for 50 years about leadership of the free world, the shining light on the hill, the new world, the land of liberty etc chokes. I couldn’t give less of a toss about their founding fathers or , as it turns out, ineffective constitution.

Personally I would like to see us promote our own story and mythology. For example , the Scottish enlightenment needs to be celebrated, but few have heard of it.

Britain needs to rediscover the period in the eighteenth century when it was the intellectual centre of Europe, and finally shake off Victorian anti-intellectualism ; that"s what's allowed the less advanced, rather than more expansive, part of American mass culture to exert too much of an
influence on us.

.

Our distaste, bordering on contempt, for Donald Trump is a remarkably unifying factor across our political spectrum. Surely an organised two minute hate would be appropriate and bring together society's disparate factions?

I find it hard to understand why so many Trump supporters on the UK right - such as Jenrick - now criticise him when it was absolutely clear what he was going to do on Ukraine and tariffs well before November. Were they being opportunistic then or is it now?

We have friends in California who are (or were) Trump voters. He voted Trump because (a) concerns about illegal immigration / crime, and (b) because he thought Trump (as a businessman() would manage the economy better than Harris.

Said friend has a clothing business: he basically supplies big chains with own label clothing that bears a remarkable physical resemblance to that made by more expensive brands.

Before the election, he saw the way the wind was blowing and moved a lot of production out of China, and into Mexico. He's been absolutely poll-axed by the Mexican tariffs: he's genuinely worried he is going to lose his business because his contracts are in the US and his cost of importation just rose 25%, and his customers don't care.

He's still clinging on to the hope that this will all blow over, but he's in wide eyed shock right now that things have gone the way they've gone.

Please find me the smallest violin . Sorry if this sounds a bit flippant and you said they’re friends of yours but I have zero sympathy for anyone who voted for Trump and if they get screwed now I could care less.

I don't just disagree with that; I think it's a massively counterproductive response (not you personally, but in general).

If you don't welcome the conversion of political opponents, or ridicule the admission of mistakes (even the most egregious ones), then you do your own favoured policies a huge disservice.

Our distaste, bordering on contempt, for Donald Trump is a remarkably unifying factor across our political spectrum. Surely an organised two minute hate would be appropriate and bring together society's disparate factions?

I find it hard to understand why so many Trump supporters on the UK right - such as Jenrick - now criticise him when it was absolutely clear what he was going to do on Ukraine and tariffs well before November. Were they being opportunistic then or is it now?

We have friends in California who are (or were) Trump voters. He voted Trump because (a) concerns about illegal immigration / crime, and (b) because he thought Trump (as a businessman() would manage the economy better than Harris.

Said friend has a clothing business: he basically supplies big chains with own label clothing that bears a remarkable physical resemblance to that made by more expensive brands.

Before the election, he saw the way the wind was blowing and moved a lot of production out of China, and into Mexico. He's been absolutely poll-axed by the Mexican tariffs: he's genuinely worried he is going to lose his business because his contracts are in the US and his cost of importation just rose 25%, and his customers don't care.

He's still clinging on to the hope that this will all blow over, but he's in wide eyed shock right now that things have gone the way they've gone.

Nice to see the centrist Dads getting bent out of shape over Ukraine whilst the genocide in Gaza has been met with splendid indifference.

The centrist dads aren't happy with that, either.
The difference is the UK or Europe's ability to influence events. Which, in the case of whatever it is that Netanyahu and Trump are about to do in Gaza, is close to nil.

Note that Saudi Arabia's bid of $55bn to rebuild the place has just been rejected out of hand by Trump. And MBS probably now has more influence in the White House than we do.

I live a very sheltered life. What is a centrist dad? Am I one because I am both a centrist and a dad or is there a special meaning?

If you don't know then you are one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zltpK2KiaQ

Is a centrist dad worse than a centrist mum?

Isn't a 'centrist dad' an anti woke middle aged male with old fashioned conservative views?

Someone like Leon I suppose?

No - that's pretty much the opposite of what it means.

"Centrist dad" was originally a far left term of abuse for social democrat types within the Labour Party, the kind of party members who would turn up to a CLP meeting to vote down Corbynista attempts to replace the sitting MP with some Trot nutter. It has broadened out to encompass a broad swathe of liberal-left opinion, somewhat complacent, enamoured with the status quo, resistant to attempts from both left and right to smash the system. The centrist dad gets his news from Channel 4 News or Newsnight. He likes the Rest is Politics. He cycles to work. He shops at Sainsburys but probably gets an organic veg box in too. He still seethes over Brexit. He wonders what happened to the circa 2000 world that he understood and loved.