Best Of

Per Telegraph:
"Benefit claimants could receive free television licences under sweeping BBC reforms being considered by Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary."
So the actual license payer will not just be stumping up for Trump's amour propre

Why not just give everyone a free TV licence?

That's the 'fund from general taxation' option. Then like schools, hospitals etc it's free at the point of delivery.

The BBC themselves want a digital tax. On ISPs.

Because that way the tax will be hidden from the public. Whose bills for internet connections will go up, of course.

Then all the BBC has to do is ask for more free money every year.

As someone who uses zero BBC services I would object vehemently to such a tax unless it was strictly to fund a limited set of core BBC services; news reporting, public service program making, etc. If the beeb want to continue making soap operas and game shows they should sell subscriptions or advertising to fund them.

@PippaCrerar

EXCL: An agreement to rejoin Erasmus – the EU’s student exchange programme – set to be announced on Wednesday as part of UK government’s drive towards closer relations with Brussels.

https://x.com/PippaCrerar/status/2000992877443231788?s=20

Is this where we give the EU what they want and they fuck us up the ass.

SKS would pay full price for a Dominos pizza

Brexit was just a spiteful destruction of opportunity voted for by people who'd had their time and had no plan for the aftermath.
It's been left to the people who voted against it to make the best of the mess left behind, turns out that means trying to recover the benefits at greater cost as was said at the time.
Suck it up.

Standard drivel.

Brexit opened doors. Doors can allow you to leave the house, have fun, get a job, or meet the love of your life. Or you can stand at the threshold in the stiff breeze rooted to the spot, reminiscing about how great it was when the door was closed.

I thought it was like having a baby? Certainly it seems to lend itself to fanciful analogy in lieu of any mundane workaday benefits.

Fanciful or otherwise, you do seem to have had difficulty understanding it. Let me be more prosaic. With some obvious 'workaday', exceptions like the absence of membership fees (not exactly chump change when Reeves' hasn't got two pennies to bless herself with), Brexit restored a fairly large arsenal of competencies to the UK Government. Competencies only become benefits if one decides to use them. And deciding not to use them at all was not an outcome that anyone, from the most ardent Brexit supporter to the most passionate remainer, predicted.

Ah I see. So we're just waiting for the right government to come along and it's lift off. Right you are. That's good. It has the benefit of being repeatable forever more.

Brexit is like Communism. It only appears to have failed because it has never been tried properly.

Back to his lawyerly brilliance:

“Every time I go to pull a lever, there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arms-length bodies that mean the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be"

https://x.com/politlcsuk/status/2000594550599864781

If only he was the PM with a large majority, who might be in a position to actually do something about the regulatory and bureaucratic overload?

Having a large majority doesn't free you from public law obligations around due process, consultation, taking full account of objections and so on.

Now, you could loosen some of those constraints - but that in itself is a project that detracts from your main agenda. Further, rather like the filibuster in the US, a sensible politician realises majorities come and go, and reducing friction for yourself today does so for your opponent tomorrow.

It does. Parliament has unlimited power. Starmer could have legislated away those constraints on day 1 if he was prepared and wanted to.

@PippaCrerar

EXCL: An agreement to rejoin Erasmus – the EU’s student exchange programme – set to be announced on Wednesday as part of UK government’s drive towards closer relations with Brussels.

https://x.com/PippaCrerar/status/2000992877443231788?s=20

Is this where we give the EU what they want and they fuck us up the ass.

SKS would pay full price for a Dominos pizza

Brexit was just a spiteful destruction of opportunity voted for by people who'd had their time and had no plan for the aftermath.
It's been left to the people who voted against it to make the best of the mess left behind, turns out that means trying to recover the benefits at greater cost as was said at the time.
Suck it up.

So the BBC is going to fight - fight like hell - and I'll be there with them. They should crowdfund the cost of the case. Allow people to contribute if they are so inclined. Put me down for £500. I'll give up nuts for a year. It's a no brainer.

There was some stuff from Newsmax on the BBC this morning saying both that the BBC couldn't afford to fight the case (£50m plus) versus settling (maybe £10-15m) .. and that they would be embarrassed by the discovery process.

I'm with you in saying bollocks to that.
The BBC's own right to discovery is likely to be very interesting in what it might turn up. And I'm happy to help pay to defend such a transparently nonsense lawsuit.

It's important, I think. People talk a lot about "British values" and if not giving in to extortion by malevolent foreigners isn't one of them it jolly well should be. I also like the calculus of it. IMO the potential damage to Donald Trump of having this litigated in open court in the US is greater than that to the BBC.

I'm on the side of freedom of speech here, and in that case that means I'm 100% behind the BBC in this case.

US law should be on their side here too - far more than if the case was going to be heard in the libel capital of the world, London...

They should not settle, Trump has an extraordinarily high bar to pass in the US court system. And any halfway competent attorney ought to be able to defend them quite honestly.

Newsmax guy agreed that it was a weak case, but seemed to think we'd just settle on pragmatic (ie monetary) grounds, since a successful defence might still cost £50m plus.
I guess someone working for Newmax places very little value on journalistic independence, so he might even have been commenting honestly.

BBC v Trump

Like Neil Hamilton v Al Fayed.

Can’t they both lose ?

However anything that undermines the license fee is all well and good.

Just for you.

https://x.com/EdwardJDavey/status/2000850649064546505
Keir Starmer needs to stand up for the BBC against Trump's outrageous $5bn lawsuit and protect licence fee payers from being hit in the pocket.

Trump wants to interfere in our democracy and undermine our national broadcaster. We cannot let him.

So Ed Davey has no comment to make on the actual merits of the case, he just reflexively says BBCGood and OrangeManBad.

What merits of the case could Trump possibly have? I mean Davey really doesn't have to go into analysis mode on this

He said to march to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically”, but the BBC said that he said march to the Capitol “and fight like Hell”.

Given that there was actually a disturbance at the Capitol after the event at which he spoke, a reputable journalist might want to make sure that his words were accurately reported.

Pity you never seem to be as exercised by the lies that pour out of Trump's mouth on a daily basis.

So the BBC is going to fight - fight like hell - and I'll be there with them. They should crowdfund the cost of the case. Allow people to contribute if they are so inclined. Put me down for £500. I'll give up nuts for a year. It's a no brainer.

There was some stuff from Newsmax on the BBC this morning saying both that the BBC couldn't afford to fight the case (£50m plus) versus settling (maybe £10-15m) .. and that they would be embarrassed by the discovery process.

I'm with you in saying bollocks to that.
The BBC's own right to discovery is likely to be very interesting in what it might turn up. And I'm happy to help pay to defend such a transparently nonsense lawsuit.

It's important, I think. People talk a lot about "British values" and if not giving in to extortion by malevolent foreigners isn't one of them it jolly well should be. I also like the calculus of it. IMO the potential damage to Donald Trump of having this litigated in open court in the US is greater than that to the BBC.

I'm on the side of freedom of speech here, and in that case that means I'm 100% behind the BBC in this case.

US law should be on their side here too - far more than if the case was going to be heard in the libel capital of the world, London...

They should not settle, Trump has an extraordinarily high bar to pass in the US court system. And any halfway competent attorney ought to be able to defend them quite honestly.

Newsmax guy agreed that it was a weak case, but seemed to think we'd just settle on pragmatic (ie monetary) grounds, since a successful defence might still cost £50m plus.
I guess someone working for Newmax places very little value on journalistic independence, so he might even have been commenting honestly.

BBC v Trump

Like Neil Hamilton v Al Fayed.

Can’t they both lose ?

However anything that undermines the license fee is all well and good.

Just for you.

https://x.com/EdwardJDavey/status/2000850649064546505
Keir Starmer needs to stand up for the BBC against Trump's outrageous $5bn lawsuit and protect licence fee payers from being hit in the pocket.

Trump wants to interfere in our democracy and undermine our national broadcaster. We cannot let him.

So Ed Davey has no comment to make on the actual merits of the case, he just reflexively says BBCGood and OrangeManBad.

The claim that the $5bn lawsuit is "outrageous" is implicitly a comment on the merits of the case. $5bn is, indeed, clearly outrageous. The largest defamation settlement by the media in US history is the $787.5 million paid by Fox News to Dominion Voting Systems in 2023, when Fox repeated Trump's false claims about the election. The BBC case is a one-off bad edit and wasn't broadcast in the US, it clearly doesn't remotely approach the scale of Fox News's comments about Dominion, but Trump is claiming over 6 times as much in damages.

Alex Jones has faced over $1bn in settlements for his lies over Sandy Hook, but that's across several different trials. Again, Jones' persistent campaign against the Sandy Hook victims is many orders of magnitude greater than one bad edit, and yet Trump thinks he deserves nearly 5 times as much.

You repeatedly dismiss comments as "OrangeManBad", but you don't ever explain how the Orange Man is not bad. How is Trump selling Ukraine down the river not bad? How were his comments about the murder of Rob Reiner remotely acceptable?