Best Of

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The question is whether Jenrick is “racist” is not illuminating. Yet, whether something or someone is “racist” consumes a massive amount of media attention and focus in 2025.

No, what is relevant is that Jenrick’s comments - taken out of context or not - were offensive.

God only knows how I’d feel if I was a brown migrant or perhaps even just brown, in the UK today. I would not be feeling very welcome, and I would also be feeling that the next Tory leader is stoking racial enmity for partisan advantage.

Jenrick should apologize, but he hasn’t and he won’t.
He’s beyond the pale.

There is a trend on the right to stop apologising - see also Truss's refusal to disassociate herself from Tommy Robinson. Liz Truss isn't a supporter of Tommy Robinson, but she refused to give any ground on it because she did not want to continue what she sees as the left being given the right to pronounce on what is right and decent, and what, as you say, is 'beyond the pale'.

If someone wants the right to pronounce on what is 'right and decent', I might suggest they start by not associating herself with criminal neo-Nazi thugs.

Truss is not setting herself up as the pronouncer of what is right and decent - she is refusing to submit to what is effectively a left-wing derived rulebook of modern manners.

Don't be a nitwit. You don't need to be left-wing to criticise Tommy Robinson.

She is making the same mistake as Enoch Powell who refused to give any ground to his critics even when the criticism was justified. The latest episode of The Rest is History is very good on this and how his utter refusal to show or express any empathy for those harmed by his words, even in the face of clear evidence of such harm, damned him even more. He didn't simply make criticisms. He deliberately used inflammatory language and then tried to claim the consequences of his choice of words had nothing to do with him.

This is irresponsible dangerous politics. It is as bad as those marchers shouting Arab slogans from the 8th century about killing Jews and then pretending this has nothing to do with creating a climate of fear.

Tory politicians should not be behaving like this.

Just read Starmer is making it so indian employees on assignment from outsourcing firms don’t have to pay national insurance anymore

Great news for rishi sunaks family but bad news for uk jobs

Let’s unpick this a little as it’s a few months since the first outbreak of commentary on the agreement, and because it’s a good example of the way the media creates and social media propagates bizarre narratives.

As part of last year’s Indian trade deal, there is an agreement to mitigate double social security contributions for assigned workers going in both directions.

Absent reciprocal social security agreements, an assigned worker pays the equivalent of NI in both their home country and the destination country, with no double tax relief. Ie they are taxed twice despite having no access to the pension system of the destination.

DSSAs are set up to avoid this by allowing people to keep paying in their home country only, so long as the assignment is formalised and of a limited duration. We have such agreements with all EU countries, most OECD countries and a wide range of developing countries, and have done for years. We didn’t have one with India. Now we do. It will help my organisation as we post a number of relatively highly paid UK employees over to India every year, and get a similar number of Indian assignees back.

The absolute numbers of posted workers are governed by visa rules. The DSSA simply ensures no unfairness in treatment. Those railing against it are essentially arguing for double taxation.

Kemi Badenoch’s future in doubt as shadow ministers consider coup

The Tory leader tried to rebuff Robert Jenrick’s simmering challenge at conference — but some think she is heading for a poor performance in the May elections

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/kemi-badenoch-future-shadow-cabinet-robert-jenrick-k7xwh5tdg?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_page=Politics&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1759867683

I predict that Badenoch is a gonner in 7 months or less.

And that you'll have resigned your membership within 12 months with no-cartoons-for-kids, fifty-shades-of-white as the Tory leader.

You have to give Jenrick credit. He is testing the maxim that "there's no such thing as bad publicity" to the limit.

Nailed on next Tory leader. The Tory membership lap up this stuff.

Jenrick has done well today, and he has done himself and his party a power of good.

The getting rid of lefty ("foreigner" loving) lawyers will be popular and the "there are too many "foreigners" in Birmingham and a city near you" is what everyone wants to hear, unless they are a lefty to be scorned or a "foreigner".

It isn't the sort of country I want to live in, but neither was Brexit Britain and PBers loved it, so what do I know?

The media are lapping this up. The first time since the election that a politician who isn't Nigel Farage has captured the hearts of the nation's journalists.

I think you're joking but it's not always easy to tell. If on the off chance you're being serious I really can't see it. Those kind of bad smells follow politicians to their grave and even if we might be going through one of those 'moments' the direction of travel is inexorably in the opposite direction. This will more than likely finish him.

No I'm deadly serious. PB Tories may be squeamish but the blue collar voters I rub shoulders with have pricked up their ears. They are listening to Jenrick and they will listen to Jenrick Tories. It's all very Trumpian, but Jenrick is making Farage look very Centrist Dad. Although I haven't confirmed this with Tirana taxi drivers yet.

Remember Enoch! A nine day wonder. A few months later all anyone remembers is his Rivers of Blood and Hitler moustache. A shrivalled little man less well regarded than Mosely.

These racist fads come and go but all the time the young people are growing older and they don't want to see any of that crap. They don't even get it or recognise what it's all about.

The Tories are out of time. Jenrick wouldn't be welcome in Reform. They're a racist Party but they don't want to be seen attracting racists

Jenrick is more subtle than Peter Griffiths, Enoch Powell or Terry Dicks. His racism like Boris Johnson's (Picanninies with water melon smiles and women looking like letterboxes was of course simply satire) is deniable, for the moment at least.

I doubt Jenrick dislikes dark skinned people. I would imagine he's fairly agnostic about whether people of an olive complexion come or go. He thinks he's tapped into a rich seam and he will pick away as long as it remains helpful to him. It is cheap politics, but it is effective politics.

Don't forget he's a sly f*****. Not many would have survived the Dirty Desmond scandal, and make no mistake that was a proper scandal.

Didn’t Terry Dicks write a lot of the Dr Who Target novelisations?

Terrance Dicks certainly did. He was also script editor in the early seventies, wrote several TV stories and some radio stuff.

Not the same guy as the Tory politician. Obvs.

Mixing up two blokes with the same name proves we need digital ID cards tattooed on our foreheads.

Just seen the full clip of Bob Jenrick's final few seconds of his speech.

OMG.

He actually said "let's build this new order"!!

And everyone is freaking over "take our country back"???

I saw New Order live once.
The stage collapsed.

That’s them Thousand Year Reichs fer ye.

I always think a thousand years was a bit optimistic. Has there EVER been an empire that lasted that long? Arguably the Eastern Roman Empire lived into the medieval period but was that a thousand years?

The Holy Roman Empire lasted from 800 to 1806 although its debateable how Holy, how Roman and how much of an Empire it was.

It was though the First Reich.

Roman Empire also counts - Rome was founded in 753 BCE, conventionally, and fell conventionally in 476 CE if you want to go on geography.

If you insist on emperors in the modern sense, the principate began in 27 BCE so you've got 27 BCE to 1453 CE for the Empire under that definition. Though the empire in terms of domination of other states began 2-3 centuries earlier.

Japan and China too.

England's still got some way to go, at least outwith Britain, counting its Irish enclave c. 1250 as the beginning. Or should I say the Empire of Normandy?

Denmark might have a better case.

Athelstan (927) is commonly recognised as the first king of a united England. Whereas Denmark is probably Harald Bluetooth about 50 years later

Sure, but Athelstan didn't bvuild an empire outwith England AFAIK. Harald did for Scandinavia.

Depends what you mean by England. His kingdom stretched up the east coast as far as the Forth, while simultaneously the kingdom of Strathclyde stretched down the East Coast as far as the Mersey, broadly with the Pennines as the border. A territorial exchange starting in 975 with the Scots conquest of Lothian ultimately resulted in the modern divide a few centuries later. I’m not aware of irredentism on either side suggesting a readjustment along those lines, some occasional Scots complaints re Berwick notwithstanding.

Apparently vigilantes in SF are using Narcan to make the area hostile to the street high. Which feels like an interesting way of cleaning up an area.

https://abc7news.com/amp/post/san-francisco-standard-report-narcan-allegedly-being-used-harm-sf-homeless-arent-overdosing/17800588/

That will kill someone, sooner or later.

They’re vigilantes. Not sure they care that much. But it does feel a very coastal-American failure model.

Is the model, wanting everything and not willing to pay for it? They seem to have more of a Boomer issue than we have, but we're always 10 years behind.

It's easy to underestimate the scale of US drug deaths, 80% of which are opiates. Currently it is running at 130 deaths a day or so.

To put that in perspective it is more deaths than gun deaths and traffic deaths combined. Or perhaps best thought of as a mass shooting every hour or so.

There were 308 drug deaths in Scotland in the first quarter of 2025. PB.com has previously been amazed at how much higher the rate of drug deaths is in Scotland compared to England or Europe.

The population of Scotland is 5.5 million and there are 90 days in the first quarter, so it equates to about 0.62 drug deaths per day per million population.

The population of the US is 342 million, so there are about 0.38 drug deaths per day per million population in the US.

Scotland. What the hell?

It's worth digging into the Scottish data on this - from memory, the reason that we continue to have such a high numbers of deaths is drug users from the 80s/90s (when we had our insane heroin epidemic) find that their bodies fail in their 40s and 50s. My partner spends a good part of her week trying to find a solution to this in the less salubrious parts of Lothian/Fife. It shows up in the demographic data too.

So, the frightening thing about America is what will happen in 20 years time when the current drug using population also hit their 40s, where else in Scotland we should see the numbers fall over time as the drug using population literally dies out.

I can think of one heroin-using PBer who should count himself fortunate that he hasn't gone the same way. Some of the stories you hear are heartbreaking, and it's the same individuals causing a significant degree of the chaos and petty crime in Scotland. Hopefully we'll learn the lessons of that period because her we are, decades later, spending billions on the consequences.

Farage, the gift that keeps on giving.

EU steel tariff hike threatens 'biggest ever crisis' for UK industry
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy875px79po
The EU has announced plans to hike tariffs on imported steel in a move the UK's steel industry has said could be "perhaps the biggest crisis" it has ever faced.
The commission has set out plans to cut the amount of steel that can be imported into the bloc by half - beyond which the new 50% tariffs will apply.
The EU is the UK's most important export destination for steel, worth nearly £3bn and representing 78% of steel products made in the UK for overseas markets.
The commission has come under pressure from some member states and their steel industries, which have been struggling to compete with cheap imports from countries like China and Turkey.
The EU is proposing to reduce tariff-free quotas for imports to 18.3 million tonnes a year – a 47% reduction from 2024 levels...

The theory that tariffs affect the country imposing them rather than the country they are imposed upon seems to have gone missing on Remainer PB this evening.

Perhaps it was never quite that simple in the first place.

Tariffs damage both our country and the EU.

80% of our steel exports go there, or used to.

But Brexit put us in this bad place.

We do, however, buy more of their steel than they do ours.

Being out has tariff advantages too: not paying 25% tariffs on Chinese EVs like our EU cousins, for example.

I wonder what, if anything, we will tariff in response to these steel tariffs.

Yes, so a tariff war damages us from both sides.

Putting up trade barriers to our largest and closest market was supreme folly.

Indeed if we were still in the EU we may have been able to stop a tariff war with other producers too.

May be we could have a common trading area without all the politics stuff? Wouldn’t that be grand.

The problem is... you can't and you never could. Making economic decisions is political by definition. Heath knew that at the time and said so clearly. Those looking for apolitical economics are wishing for the Moon.

Of course these things are political. But that doesn’t mean you need a “ever closer union” monetary union, freedom of movement, etc etc

Well, 27 countries have agreed to precisely that. That's the deal, not some anaemic non Union which doesn't exist and which it appears no one else supports.

Which is why we left.

And why it’s so dull the jabs from people like @Foxy - they just state a true fact (a free trade area is better) without talking about the costs (the political baggage) and think it’s some kind of killer point.

It is if you're the UK steel industry, as you're about to get killed if we can't negotiate a deal.

That going to be difficult. 50% of our production - and about 80% of exports - goes to Europe. With 50% tariffs, above the small tariff free quota, we won't sell a tonne.
The numbers in the opposite direction are far, far smaller, so retaliation won't work.

Which is a neat illustration of the problem.

"Political baggage" is just a slogan. We're barely noticeably freer since we left, and around two thirds of the electorate agree with me that it was a mistake.

What you do is: something that hurts them

Refuse defense cooperation re Ukraine. Suspend British tourism to Spain and France. Block usage of British airspace and fishing in British seas

TOW BACK ALL THE BOATS