Best Of

I am running in 2026 but with a delayed start to campaigning to get my head into a better place. 2025 has been horrible, hoping for more fun and less grief in 2026.

Anyway, Movember update! I'm up to £707 raised still with 40% or so of the month left. That's a real positive!

Tache is already bristly, and I have more to grow. Might need beard oil or something to try and condition it as this is getting silly already.

Whats next? I am giving myself 2 full weeks fully off over Christmas. Grow a beard maybe...

Good morning

I am so sorry you have had a horrible 2025 and with a couple of members of our family suffered mental health issues I know it is important you do not overcommit and have lots of 'me' time

Hopefully you can enjoy your Christmas holiday and look forward to a much better 2026

Good morning everyone.

Our Tesla correspondent's report rant about the 3p per mile tax for EVs.

Nice objective report on the Telegraph. Essentially "This is from the Telegraph, so half of it may be bollocks."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-Fv39zGyAc

No no, it was a rant. And a bit clickbaity. Successfully so.

Provoked the desired response from the kind of people who are reading the Telegraph/Mail and watching GBeebies/TalkTory and are OUTRAGED that Tesco have banned Christmas trees.

I am depressed at the moment. But having good fun calling out performative wazzockry.

Also check out Emergency Podcast where we tore into "British Culture" and I unveiled my war against wazzocks
https://youtu.be/VkvpriRHc8s

Sorry to hear you're feeling shitty - my commiserations.

Trump says that tariff checks will 'probably come in the middle of next year'
The president has doubled down on his promise that the revenue raised from his sweeping tariffs will result in $2,000 checks for American families. “We’re going to be issuing dividends later on, some somewhere prior to probably in the middle of next year,” he said. “We have a lot of money from tariffs. If we didn’t have tariffs, this nation would be in serious trouble.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/nov/17/donald-trump-jeffrey-epstein-files-republicans-democrats-world-cup-us-politics-live-news-updates

Surely he ought to delay the bribe until after the mid-terms: "Vote Republican to get your $2,000 Tariff Check"?

Ah yes, $2,000 cheques from the government on the eve of an election. Real subtle.

This year, the US fiscal deficit will be 5.9% of GDP, down very slightly from 6.1% last year. (It is worth noting, of course, that the absolute deficit is going to be higher, it just looks slightly less as a percentage of GDP because of the inflation caused by tariffs...)

A roughly 6% budget deficit, in peacetime, when not saddled with a financial crisis or a pandemic, is not a great place to be. It is also somewhat worse than the budget deficit the UK government is currently having kittens over.

Handing out $2,000 cheques to people as some kind of tariff 'bonus' when you can't even balance the books is the kind of thing that would have driven Republicans to apoplexy... when they weren't in government.

Wow. Feel this might need to be tomorrow's header:

S Mahmood: “Well, firstly, Nigel Farage can keep his opinions to himself. He can frankly sod off . I'm not interested in anything that he has to say. And let me just say to people of all political persuasions who are watching, I'm not making a political calculation here. I'm not making an election calculation here. It is my responsibility as the home secretary of this country who can see a broken system, to work out how to fix that broken system and to work out what is the right thing to do and then to go out there and make the argument for why these changes are the right thing to do for the right reasons. Because they will fix the problems that people genuinely see and genuinely are occurring, and in doing so, to retain support for having an asylum system at all. Everything else, that's politics, that’s downstream of all of the main choices that I'm making. My responsibility is to deliver a system that the whole of the country can have faith in.”

https://x.com/Peston/status/1990543713852907660


Finally. Someone in Labour is coming out of the traps and fighting for the future.*


* doesn't matter if you agree with her or not but this endless wishwashy, hand wringing, Reeves and Starmer marching up hills and then back down again is over.

I struggle to understand why we devote so much PB time to the trans issue. I'd guess that 99% of the UK public don't give it much thought at all.

Immigration; the economy; spending/taxation/deficit; the threat to European order from Russia; our dependence on China; the perils facing US democracy; climate change; the mental health crisis...

All these are far more significant than 'trans' imo.

This impacted it though see it as important. A good friend of mine almost lost her job for retweeting a post by j k Rowling, went through a safeguarding investigation and told not to come to work. The complaint was manufactured by an lgbt youth activist charity.

Sure, it's important to those impacted by it. I've known two people who have transitioned, and had to overcome tremendous stigma and prejudice in so doing. It's important to them, of course.

But should we devote numerous threads to something that is very important only to a small proportion of the population? We might as well discuss the challenges of being a paraplegic*, but that again would be a very minority interest.

(*Substitute with your preferred "topic very important to those impacted but of f*ck-all interest to the vast majority".)

The only reason trans comes up again and again imo is because some want to manufacture a 'culture war'.

Are trans activists prosecuting a culture war?

Are trans activists continually raising 'trans' on PB?

I like trains.

I find PB train posts (relatively) much more interesting than PB trans posts.

It amused* me that as the Huntingdon train stabbing news broke PBers were discussing what train/route it was on and led to a discussion about the East Coast Mainline and the fact LNER aren't as good as they used to be.

*Might not be the right adjective.

Forgive the foray into toilet use which I know gets rather too much attention sometimes but what does 'implementing the law' look like at, say, John Lewis? They have three types, signed Men, Women, Disabled. There is no additional wording relating to transgender and no policing on the door of what people's birth sex (or disability) is as they enter whichever one they decide is right for them. What (if anything) do JL need to change as a consequence of the Supreme Court clarifying what 'sex' in the Equality Act means? Do we know?

The disabled ones are sex neutral. Those who do not identify as their sex can use them.

Problem solved. Not rocket science.

This is the worst "solution" to come out of the Trans debate. We have disabled toilets for a reason and I don't think disabled folk should be the ones who end up worst out of this.