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This massive.

Paramount to show most Champions League games in UK from 2027-31

US network made largest bid at this week’s auction

Amazon Prime will have first pick of Tuesday matches

The US media and entertainment giant Paramount Skydance has won the auction for the rights to broadcast most Champions League matches in the UK from 2027 to 2031 in a major shake-up of the domestic rights market.

The Guardian has learned that Paramount, whose subsidiary company Paramount+ owns the rights for Champions League games in the US, made the largest bid in this week’s auction and an announcement is due. Amazon Prime is poised to land the first pick of Tuesday matches in major European markets in the new streaming deal sold by Uefa.

Sources with knowledge of the tender process say Paramount’s bid was considerably higher than the £1bn currently paid by TNT in what will be regarded as a successful auction for the Uefa-owned joint venture UC3, which runs the Champions League, and its new commercial rights distributor, Relevent Football Partners.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/nov/20/paramount-champions-league-games-uk-amazon-prime-tuesday

Interesting and how does that affect TNT

It's pretty explosive for them.

I'll wait to read the detail from covid but have to say I'm going to take a hell of a lot of convincing that locking down a week or two earlier would have reduced the overall deaths by 10ks they are claiming. Surely the deaths are simply postponed at that stage as there was no vaccine?

How we forget all those discussions on here about R !

I don't need an inquiry to tell me Johnson is "toxic and chaotic", but a good three word summary of the man nevertheless.

On the actual conclusions, I now cut Johnson more slack than I did at the time. Clearly a lot of decision making could have been better, but no-one got this completely right. In the end the UK was middle ranking amongst peers. Some countries did better but some did worse.

Well the important things are

1) having tried to source lots of disposable PPE in the middle of a world wide shortage, non-disposable has been rejected. We Don’t Do That Here
2) for disposable PPE a stockpile large enough to be useful would be huge and mean destroying vast amounts every year, unused. So we don’t do that either
3) Yes, kids. We are back to depending on PPE from Chinese factories, with about two weeks in the pipeline
4) if the next disease is really airborne, this stuff won’t protect anyone.
5) as much of the knowledge from test and trace etc has been got rid of, as possible
6) vaccine production on the Uk won’t happen
7) the dashboard team was disbanded for fear that easily accessible information would upset departmental control of policy.
{insert more here}

So all good for the future.

I'll wait to read the detail from covid but have to say I'm going to take a hell of a lot of convincing that locking down a week or two earlier would have reduced the overall deaths by 10ks they are claiming. Surely the deaths are simply postponed at that stage as there was no vaccine?

There's going to be a lot of noise and very little light from the reporting on this, which was utterly predictable.

At the time nobody thought the vaccine would be available so soon, so the only choice was in how fast people caught it.

The 20k or so saved by an earlier lockdown would have been caught by a later wave (which would have been bigger as a consequence).


Of course the last thing anyone is going to point at in all the noise is the massive debt pile - which will cause its own excess deaths for many years to come.

It was a no-win situation. Does anyone think the current government would have done any better?

I’m in the (minority, or silent majority?) view that thinks the government probably got it about right overall, in the grander scheme of things. If we ignore the lockdown parties.

The problems in our approach were largely in a few details:

- probably being a little slow early on in April 2020, but to me that’s perfectly understandable
- Allowing some jobsworths in the constabulary to get the idea that fun spreads COVID and do frankly silly things during lockdowns, like apprehending people sitting alone on beaches or going for walks on the moors
- Getting overly complicated with tiering in autumn 2020, but again I can understand why they tried it
- Flunking and then panic-buying PPE

Closing schools was, in hindsight, probably the most damaging mistake. One that most developed countries made. But the fear at the time was so great, it’s not remotely surprising the decision was made. I’d hope if we have another pandemic that largely affects adults that we’ll not do the same thing again.

I think the phasing of the lifting of restrictions towards the end was pretty well judged. The vaccine rollout was good. Furlough was expensive, but what’s really done in our finances is the (unexpected back in 2020) one-two of Covid spending followed by Ukraine war energy price subsidies.

“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”

Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.

The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?

Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.

Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.

That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).

The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.

Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?

They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.

Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.

I have written a header on this. https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2025/11/01/a-halloween-nightmare/ and the one earlier this week.

Or you can see these two articles by Legal Feminist - one by me: https://www.legalfeminist.org.uk/2025/10/31/cracking-the-code/ and https://www.legalfeminist.org.uk/2025/11/14/three-questions/

At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.

Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.

Men don’t care who goes in their toilets.

Cat Man was talking about trans men, people who were born female but now look male, going into women’s toilets.

And… Speak for yourself. I would be unnerved if a woman or someone presenting as a woman came into the men’s.

About that.

Trans people could be banned from single-sex spaces based on how they look
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/trans-women-only-space-guidance-tmrm9f3m5

..The Times has been passed a copy of the final guidance, which aims to preserve the dignity and safety of women, by Whitehall figures who are concerned that Labour is deliberately delaying publication to avoid a potential political backlash...

..(the guidance) also states that transgender people could be barred from single-sex services even when their biological sex matches, such if a trans man, who is biologically female but is “perceived” as a man, attempted to use a women’s changing room. It says that they can be barred because they are likely to be seen by others as the opposite sex..

That's literally what the Supreme Court said, yes.

Fortunately sex-neutral alternatives exist for the few individuals who can't use either main facility.

...unfortunately, the final guidance (recently leaked) states that sex-neutral alternatives need not be provided if the cost is prohibitive. So a woman who has had a sex-change and now looks like a man

I) cannot legally use the male toilet, because their birth sex is female
Ii) cannot legally use the female toilet, because their appearance is male
Iii) cannot legally use the sex-neutral or disabled toilet, because there isn't one

Without overtaxing my swiss-cheese memory overmuch, I can think of a Caffe Nero and another coffee shop in my town that is covered by this.

Same for disabled people though. That Cafe Nero should get its act together.

My gender-neutral hope is that, as a result of all this, national and local government will realise that toilet provision for disabled people is far from adequate.