Best Of

I was eating at a hotel in Greece when, upon learning I was British, the nice Belgian lady next to me immediately asked if i had supported Brexit, despite us not exchanging words until that moment. I thought such things only happened in obviously made up twitter stories.

Maybe all those Albanian taxi driver 'testimonials' weren't bullsh*t after all?

I'm in Italy every few weeks and no one has ever asked me this.

Hence my complete surprise.

I tried to swerve the question but they seemed insistent so i took the coward's way out and just implied I'd been against ftom the start and chuckled appreciatively at a joke about angry Brits and passport lines.

I think that eventually no one would admit to voting for Brexit was a bit of a meme..

A hundred years from now, I doubt we'll be able to find person who would admit to being a Brexit voter.

Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".

Bidders are asked to:

‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’

Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.

Not only that:

At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.

The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.

This shitshow has cost £22million so far.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-britain-trying-to-make-our-nuclear-reactors-woke/

Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.

Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.

I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.

If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?

Red tape long predates 'woke'.
This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.

It’s the generation of ever more bullshit requirements by people who have no fucking clue.

A uni friend ended up working in California in the defence industry. His company made an interesting box of electronic tricks that was several orders of magnitude cheaper than the traditional approach.

US military saw it, loved it, spec’s it. Bought it.

A couple of blokes from upside down land turned up and looked at it. After drinking most of the beer in the local bars, they wrote a recommendation and an order followed,

Other US allies did similar.

The U.K. delegation was a huge collection of hangers on. They went away and sent back a vast document for all the changes they wanted. According to my friend, they ranged from the idiotic to the harmful. Many were obviously from people who had no clue about electronics or the function of the box of tricks.

After discussion with his bosses, they decided not to go forward with the suggested contract. Too much work, risk of overruns in cost, creating a bad product, a scandal and a failure.

Their contact in London was startled - couldn’t believe that people would turn their nose up at the money.

'far superior D'Hondt system'?!?

Fuck the fuck off. Right off. D'Hondt is possibly the worst electoral system ever devised.

It creates arbitrary cliff-edges and almost always relies on fixed lists that can make it impossible to elect a candidate you like without also electing one you don't like, and the vote for the one you like risks electing the one you don't like but not the one you like!

Awful, awful, horrible manky system! It completely devalues the individual candidate; sacrificed upon the altar of party machine and pisses and shits upon all that is good about politics.

(And it's not even particularly proportional - in the last UK Euro-elections, the LibDems got twice as many votes as the Tories but four times as many seats under D'Hondt.)

I like Milei a lot, but I'd like him even more if he spared the poor Argentinians the abject nonsense of this apology for an electoral system.

Rachel Reeves set to announce a Mansion Tax in the Budget and a charge of 1% on the value of all properties worth over £2 million
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15228277/Mervyn-King-Rachel-Reeves-incoherent-mansion-tax.html

The Government is also considering raising the top rate of income tax, with the additional rate possibly rising from 45p in the £ back to 50p as it was when Brown left office in 2010 or the threshold for the additional rate being reduced to £110k

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tax-budget-income-rachel-reeves-chancellor-b2847002.html

Funny how each paper (and it goes beyond these two) has ‘insiders’ telling them completely different things.

The general trend though is clear, Starmer and Reeves are going to hit the rich and their assets more, private sector professionals and their earnings more and the highest income tax payers more.

This is of course entirely to do with economics and nothing whatsoever to do with Starmer's candidate losing the Labour leadership yesterday and Plaid winning the Caerphilly by election and he needing to throw some red meat to the Labour membership to stop them shifting further to Burnham and to keep Labour's core vote from going further to the Greens and Plaid!

It's entirely to do with the government being skint and needing to raise some extra funds for all the things they want to spend money on.

Every political party prefers to cut taxes, and you can be as political with the taxes you choose to cut as with the taxes you choose to raise.

They are a pair of weapons who will destroy the country's finances. Neither could run a bath having never had a real job between them.

We need a new derogatory simile to decribe politicians.

They are not sharp enough to be weapons and not useful enough to be tools.

@atrupar.com‬

Gallego on what the next Democratic president should do about Trump's ballroom: "To really mess with him, just name it the Barack Obama Ballroom, and I think that will take care of half the problem."

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3m444lbq3ma2t

I was watching Rick Wilson, and he said on the afternoon of the 20th January (in whatever year the next Dem President is elected) both the Epstein Ballroom and the (Rose) beer garden must be smashed and the debris tipped into the sea to prevent the spoil becoming a Maga shrine. He has even offered to help out destroying the Rose Garden plinth with his jack hammer.

Bessent is on TV right now saying maybe the East Wing had to be destroyed because it had asbestos in it

The ballroom needs to be destroyed because it had Trump in it

It probably did, but the whole point about asbestos is it's more or less harmless as long as you leave it where it is.

It only becomes dangerous if you smash it up, which would only happen if some useless knob end decided on a whim to demolish the building it was...oh dear.

Good balanced header Foxy. Except of course for the ludicrous idea that the D'hondt method is anything other than the very worst form of electoral system. Anything based on proportionality between parties is just simply wrong from the very start.

I remember reading Dan Hannan’s critique of D’Hondt on the eve of one of the European elections, perhaps 2009.

The piece started something like “Next week I will be re-elected to the European Parliament”

He wasn’t joking either, he was #1 on the Tory list for a 12-member constituency, his party only needed to get 8% of the vote for him to be re-elected, and were polling in the high 30s.

I don't agree with Richard. The parties know their candidates well and it's reasonable that they should pick potential Cabinet Ministers etc. at the top of the list. If their choices are stupid they lose votes. Most other systems can be and are being gamed, sometimes to a ludicrous extent. d'Hondt produces a result in line with the population's general preferences, bearing in mind that a lot of voters couldn't even tell you who all the candidates are.

If you're going to emphasise candidates rather than parties, which I think is Richard's argument, then the current system is arguably as good as any - hence the profusion of kindependent MPs as party loyalty declines. But it produces results which don't closely represent what people really want. At present we have a Labour majority that is wildly in excess of the proportion of the population who actually support Labour. If a GE was held tomorrow, we'd probably get a result with Labour wildly underrepresented. Neither really makes sense in terms of reflecting what most people think.

To say it is only about D'hondt vs FPTP is rather misleading. Although in that isntance I would choose FPTP every time. We should be aiming to reduce the power of the parties not increase it. But an AV system would alow greater choice by the electorate over who represented them compared to FPTP whilst preventing further power being given to parties. D'hondt is pretty much the worst system we could have as it allows parties to decide who represents us rather than the voter.

STV, as used in Ireland, is, surely, better than either.