Best Of

I had a really nice chat today with a lovely lady on my route

We've had a few brief chats before, but since I last saw her a couple of months ago I noticed on one of her letters that she has a CBE

I looked her up and found she was awarded it for services to health care. She had a long career in the NHS, and after retirement (which she told me today was forced on her by a reorganisation) she had a few other positions including working with the Red Cross in Moscow

She's big into wine; I delivered her a bottle from Hard To Find Wines last week (a NZ pinot noir from a vineyard called, I think, Remarkables, that she and her husband visited 30 years ago when it had first opened)

AND she's big into walking. She's going away on a walking holiday for a week in a fortnight. And the reason she bought the house in Ogbourne is because she walked past it on a Ridgeway walk many years ago

She's a soul mate from a different generation

Talking of ICE, masked up agents pulling a legally-in-USA PhD student off the streets. She wrote a piece in the student newspaper criticising Israel. It's getting nastier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGDVKBdq3Gw&t=179s

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and PhD student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, was arrested outside her off-campus apartment. Then renditioned in violation of a Court Order.
...
Khanbabai said Ozturk had valid F-1 visa status as a PhD student. She has filed a habeas petition in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts for Ozturk’s release from detention.
...
“Unless otherwise ordered by the Court, petitioner shall not be moved outside the District of Massachusetts without first providing advance notice of the intended move,” wrote federal judge Indira Talwani in a three-page order to ICE on Tuesday night.
...
But shortly after the judge made that order, federal authorities transferred Ozturk to Louisiana, according to her attorney.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2025-03-26/tufts-international-graduate-student-taken-into-ice-custody

The op ed she wrote:
https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2024/03/4ftk27sm6jkj

Land of free speech my arse.

It couldn't happen here, Oh wait:

https://bsky.app/profile/georgemonbiot.bsky.social/post/3llit6dd7es2u

You think the arbitrary arrest of political dissenters cannot happen in the UK? It already does. www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-eve...

Is there any more reporting on that ?
Your link provides very little detail.

https://www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-events/news/quakers-condemn-police-raid-on-westminster-meeting-house

It was a meeting of the group "Youth Demand" who rented a room at the Meeting House. They are protesting for a boycott of Israel and for climate action.

https://youthdemand.org/

They are the ones who are “planning to shut down London… for a month straight”, right?

In direct violation of the “just stop oil” legislation?

Sounds like they were arrested while planning a crime rather than exercising their free speech.

And they weren’t Quakers about their worship, they had just rented a meeting room.

Yes, planning a protest is now a crime. Unless of course you are a farmer worried about tax.

Planning a protest in concert with the local authorities and police to meet established guidelines for organised protest in one thing

Planning to obstruct or damage infrastructure is another.

I speak as one who helped plan protests (of the former type) when at university. Generally for causes I opposed.

*I think it was Wellington who said that any damn fool could get 10,000 people into Hyde Park. But it would take a general to get them out, again.

Only protests that the police and government approve of.

What sort of right to protest is that?

If protesters commit crimes of criminal damage then arrest them. Not for thought crime.

So if you are aware that your neighbour is
planning to murder his wife you shouldn’t
intervene because it’s “thought crime”?

That's a bit Minority Report isn't it? Unless he's shared his plans.

Let’s say you accidentally get his Amazon parcel with some black tarpaulin, duct tape, a shovel and a pair of ninja swords…

Or you get invited to his Signal chat with his mistress and a contract killer.

WTAF???

@NOELreports

🇺🇸 Fox News host Jesse Watters: “We don’t need friends. If we have to burn some bridges with Denmark to take Greenland, so be it. We’re big boys. We dropped bombs on Japan, and now they’re our ally. America isn’t handcuffed by history.”

https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1905927108712386791

Time to batten down the hatches. If our principal ally has gone rogue we neen a new one. China or the EU. I'd prefer either to Trump's America

You can't despise Trump more than I do, but to suggest what America under Trump is doing is as bad as what China is doing to the Uighers and Tibetans, or indeed the people of Hong Kong, is simply nonsensical. Cosying up to China to distance ourselves from America would be like trying to bargain with a rattlesnake to take on an enormous blundering elephant.

We can't disengage from either, obviously, and will continue to deal with both.
It's rather that our relationship with the US is being rapidly redefined, and the end state is unclear.

I support your thoughts about gaining more autonomy from the US (of course), which is an essential project, though clearly a long term one. However, it's also very clear to me that yours is a temporary political aversion based on Trump and the MAGA right, and that as soon as another plausible Democrat or even a Neocon Republican gets in the door, your desire for British autonomy will evaporate till the next time.

Actually I do not think that this is a crisis simply created by the wrong political brand in the White House. Trump´s aggression to America´s closest allies and his conciliation to Putin has shown that the assumption that the US would always come out on the side of freedom and democracy was fundamentally false. Neither is this merely theoretical: Vance, Musk et al are torching due process and the rule of law with every lie they tell and every executive order they impose, and the Congress and the Supreme Court are, so far, fine with that. At this point the separation of powers has not prevented a slew of illegal actions being undertaken by the regime- including threats to world peace.

So, even if you believe that this crooked and incompetent regime will eventually fall (but there is no longer a 100% guarantee of that) the damage is already done. NATO allies are already considering the military threat of the US as a potential adversary and there is no going back from that. For our own security the UK is reducing its intelligence sharing operations, as difficult as that is, not least because Houthigate shows how spectacularly insecure the US system has become. The idea that no one else was listening in is laughable, Russian and Chinese of course, but also British, French and now even Canadians are listening very closely. Big Balls, inadvertently or not, published the entire roster of the CIA, around 1000 names, so at this point the US no longer has a functioning confidential intelligence service.

So the impact of unforgivable incompetence coupled with direct threats to allies on economic, political, and even military fronts against allies has massively and permanently compromised the US as a trusted partner.

Amidst the chaos, the UK is seen as a credible and serious partner, in significant ways we are a peer power to China and drastically more powerful than Putin´s Russia-not merely a nuclear weapon state but the sixth largest economy in the world and a global centre for finance, trade, innovation and in soft power like culture and sport. Collaboration with France, the EU and CANZUK creates a counterweight to the chaos in Washington, and very clearly that is what we must do.

It is not yet a given that we utterly break with the US, but the fundamental assumptions of our 84 year alliance are broken and it is now critical that we accept this and plan for our own security without reference to the US.

Russia think they have won. For the sake of global freedom and our own security, that must not be the case.

Morning all

We have Canada voting on April 28th and Australia voting on May 3rd so the new CANZUK alliance might look very different by early May (or it might not as you could easily imagine Carney keeping the Liberals in power and Albanese getting back with Independent help in Canberra).

Some betting opportunities to consider perhaps next month?

On topic, almost all elections are "pocket book" elections inasmuch as how people "feel" economically is a big factor around how they vote. The decisive rejections of Government aren't usually because of a belief the Opposition would do much better but more a perception they couldn't do any worse.

As we now find in many instances they can and do, the option is either to "get the other lot back in" (which is your only option in a rigid 2-party system) or to look elsewhere at the coterie of snake oil salespeople on both and neither extreme (a bit cynical perhaps).

I've raised this many times on here but there still seems to be no practical solution to the issues of stagnant growth and ambient inflation (I seem to recall the UK economy was particularly prone to stubborn inflation). Getting energy prices and council tax rises back to somewhere in the neighbourhood of actual CPI or RPI inflation would be a good start. The notion our energy prices go up so the customers in the countries which own our energy suppliers can see theirs go down (or not rise as much) is a huge bone of contention.

As for local Government finance, notwithstanding the unnecessary costs of pointless re-organisations, the issues of social care, SEN and temporary accommodation costs all remain unresolved - Newham's 8.9% rise in 2025/26 may be part down to overarching incompetence and part down to the same costs as every other councils but the fact remains most people's incomes haven't risen by 8.9% so it's another cost.

I've no statistical evidence but my assertion is we have stagnated since 2008 in terms of living standards. Yes, our assets (primarily but not exclusively property) have appreciated strongly but unless you can release some of that asset (by downsizing) it's not much help. Yet there's plenty of people with plenty of money - I wonder what the take up in ISAs will be in April 2025?

A slow down in Council Tax rises won't happen. They have had 15 years decades of being shredded, which has fed through to quality of localities and services.

Funding is down hugely - perhaps 30% in real terms since 2010.

Agreed and one million local Government jobs lost since 2012 suggests, contrary to what the supply siders would have you believe, there was plenty of austerity going
on especially in the Coalition years.

why has council tax soared if they got rid of a million duffers. The clowns could not run a bath.

Mainly social care, but also SEN

Both obligations committed to by central government and then handed off to their local colleagues without new funding streams

That's the thing with council tax. A bug chunk of it gets spent on a minority of residents. Leaving a majority thinking that they get charged a fortune but see little in return.