Best Of

"Home Office limits ‘one in, one out’ migrant deal with France

Officials fear the border scheme to effectively trade small boat arrivals for asylum seekers brings in ‘young men more likely to engage in criminal activity’"

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/france-home-office-border-policy-8ktl9lf0j

I was in Farnham last night for a meal with my wife.

I don't want to profile and at the same time two noisy motorbikes turned up suddenly on the high street outside our restaurant with two middle-eastern looking men on each of them, wearing bandanas covering their faces, and they had dark hair. They looked angry.

They did an about turn in the middle of the high-street, made a massive noise with their engines, and then revved off again. All my red flags were going off and I was ready to whip my wife out the restaurant on the high street, and head off out and away from there.

In the event nothing (that I could see) happened but it was all very weird and discomforting. Whole thing was about 8 seconds long and a flash in a pan. But where had they come from suddenly? Why were they there? What were they doing?

Maybe they just wanted a ride.

A free ride ?

That’s our strength and what makes Britain what it is. They’re the people who built this country

It's telling that I've been hesitant to report it to the police, and "hoping" other had instead.

They would ask me to describe the individuals involved, and give me own details, and there's too much risk of me being labelled a racist.

What would you be reporting to the police? Two guys revved their engines loudly? Is that a crime?

I thought your post was a parody initially, it’s so ridiculous.

Cut welfare and spend the money on defence instead. No need for tax rises

So let's look into where the so-called peace dividend went. What did governments spend more on after the 1990s as they spent less on defence? Because we will have to spend less on these things if we want to increase spending on defence without raising taxes.

Turns out the big increases are health then pensioner welfare and non pensioner welfare.

So when Badenoch and others glibly talk about funding defence through welfare cuts do they actually want to reduce people's access to healthcare and do a triple unlock to reduce pensions?




https://bsky.app/profile/ruthcurtice.bsky.social/post/3mo3ziif3g22r

That debt interest is absolutely catastrophic. A gross act of fiscal vandalism to have incurred all that debt during COVID without coming up with a way to pay for it. I'm afraid national crises like pandemic and war need eye-watering taxes on high earners (like me) and we'll be paying the price for decaes to come because we ignored that reality.

My headache is also catastrophic.

Sorry about the headache. Hope it improves fast.

On the debt, surely it has ever been thus.

We didn't pay off our WW2 debt until 2006
We didn't pay off our WW1 debt until even later. 2015.

Strange to think that by winning the war we ended up in a far worse place economically than Germany who lost. They had all their debt written off at the London Conference in 1950.

There were good reasons for some of the spending during Covid. The restrictions we imposed (rightly or wrongly) threatened the very existence of our economy and the hospitality industry in particular. But the waste was mind blowing and slow to be corrected. The cumulo effect was like a medium sized war and the blithe assumptions we could simply carry on without consequences was delusional. Taxes should have gone up as soon as the crisis was at an end.

It's the point of that Macmillan 'family silver' speech, that we've spent decades ignoring.

The conservative thing to do is to grow the endowment, leave a better inheritance for the next generation. By all means enjoy the revenue it throws off, but don't eat into the capital unless a real emergency comes up.

Since at least the Lawson years, our governments have done the opposite, and we have demanded it as voters. And the consequences of that are now queuing up.

There's one other MacMillan soundbite that everyone knows. But the end of the paragraph is also important;

Let us be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms, and you'll see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime- nor indeed ever in the history of this country. What is beginning to worry some of us is 'Is it too good to be true?' or perhaps I should say 'Is it too good to last?'

At least some of the Thatcher-Major-Blair era was too good to be true. And it didn't, couldn't last. And the resulting grumpiness is a large part of why we are where we are.

Agreed, that was the Faustian Pact; Give us low taxes and universal services and we’ll vote for you! Thatcher sold off assets accumulated by previous generations and revenue from the North Sea, Brown used Taxes from the Banks and borrowing from future generations.

But if you don’t store grain in the seven good years!

We have nothing left to sell and we’ve reached out credit limit and must live within our means with tightened belts.

The public response?

Having rode the Gravy Train till it broke down they moan about how the railway is run!

Peter.

BBC going big on the shadow tanker and ar brave lads.

Frank Gardner: ‘the English Channel, or La Manche as the French call it’

That’s why he gets the big bucks I suppose.

Is this it now then? War with Russia. Has it come before we're ready?

The two HMS warships used in the operation were HMS Sutherland (commissioned 4th July 1997) and HMS Ledbury (commissioned 11th June 1981).

They're a good example of how salami-slicing the defence budget has made it so inefficient. You cut the budget for new ships, and instead rely on extending the life of your existing ships. You spend loads of money on refits, and life-extension repairs for your existing ships, during which time they aren't available for use. You end up spending more money than you planned, to have a less capable ship, mostly not available for service.

And now it means you need to build ships twice as fast to catch up on the ship-building you deferred, but the shipyards are closed and the skilled staff were let go, so to recreate the ship-building capacity you will need to pay £££.

When you've had a period of sweating your existing assets to destruction it's always going to cost lots to make good the situation. You can't do that just by making the existing budget more "efficient". One of the reasons the budget became inefficient was that it wasn't big enough.

The Japanese model is the one to follow.

Japan has a massive commercial shipbuilding industry and so has the industrial capacity and skills. The ONLY ships that are built in the UK are incredibly expensive and massively delayed warships. So the Japan model isn't remotely feasible.

Building the hulls somewhere cheap and then adding all the high value systems like weapons and sensors in the UK would make a lot of sense and be a lot more effective. It'll never happen though as the UK now has three surface ship yards that are politically impossible to close down and so will have to be kept building incredibly expensive and massively delayed warships. We're basically trying to be a Tier 1 warship builder without any commercial shipbuilding to support it which is impossible.

That's another good point.

"Back in the day" we had uber-commercial shipbuilding to smooth the load. And it was normal for yards to do both military and civilian contracts.

It's not the civilian industry - though there's no good reason why we cannot have a civilian shipbuilding sector. Europe is dominant in cruise ships, and superyachts, energy services, perhaps ice protected ships, and other sectors. That's more a national attitude and culture here in the UK - perhaps a downside of being dominated by financial services, which needs feedstock.

Japan has a military shipbuilding heartbeat that is steady for decades, rather than feast and famine. Then if the size of the navy is adjusted, it is done by adjusting the service life rather than destroying the industry - sell it, scrap it, or put it in reserve. Here is the list of in service dates for ships - look at the consistency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Japan_Maritime_Self-Defense_Force_ships

Even if we were running one frigate / destroyer every 2-3 years at 2 yards, and one submarine every 2 years, it could follow the same principle.

Japan runs a significantly larger navy than we do.

Nevertheless, I agree - we should think far more industry-first. We don't get capital spending in this country and bugger about it with it all the time, which kills the supply chain.

All politicians do it. All nonsensically.

We have spent decades allowing or even encouraging the decline of our manufacturing sector (we're far from alone in that, of course).
Suddenly everyone is waking up to its fundamental importance, but the way ahead for the UK, with debt at 100% of GDP, and having separated itself from the largest market on its doorstep, isn't very clear.

I thin a better explanation than ignoring or encouraging is that we left it to the Markets. Thatcher started in though I don’t think she expected where it would fully lead, and Blair triangulating on to the Tories continued it.

Let Capital flow freely without the dead hand of the state. Get the highest return at lowest risk.

If you can make more buying and selling existing houses or renting them than building new ones that’s what you do.

If you can make a higher rate of return by buying and selling shares in a company than investing in it then you do.

If you can make more, more quickly breaking it up than building it that’s what you do.

If you can make a deal to sell an acorn to Apple or Google for more than you invested before you need to put in more, you do it.

If you make money doing deals you do as many big deals as you can and the debt involved afterwards is their problem.

If your share option is based on price you keep the dividend up rather than invest.

Then….. You get rich by accumulating wealth, not actually creating it.

As to the Country… who gives a…..

We used to make and sell goods, now we shuffle shares!

Peter.

FPT…

I hadn't noticed this detail.

few will appreciate how grimly funny it is that this judge both issued a gagging order so that the filton 4 could not explain their motivation to the jury, and then also sentenced them according to a specific intent provision requiring them to have had a specific motivation
https://x.com/ergo_praxis/status/2066049704811491467

I sympathise with the judge who has a problem. he has to act according to law, whatever his personal views. The defendants clearly don't think the law should apply to them.

There is a middle position: The government is wrong to extend terrorism to obviously non terrorist acts; and the defendants are wrong to try to get off a criminal charge by running a defence about motivation which in law isn't one.

The judge was right to stop them trying to do so, and is bound by law in the sentencing process to take motive into account. Motivation goes to mitigation/aggravation of an offence, not guilt.

Extending our traditional freedoms to protest to mean including breaking the law in serious ways a is a dangerous step, with fascistic overtones.

Finally, if the judge has got it wrong they can appeal.

I’m not disagreeing with everything you say there, but I wish to dispute the notion that protest that involves breaking the law has fascistic overtones. This country has a long tradition of protest that involves breaking the law, as do other Anglophone nations like the US.

The Suffragettes get mentioned often, but better examples include the Tolpuddle martyrs, the early years of trade unionism, some of the civil rights marches in Northern Ireland, helping slaves to escape, etc.

Good Scotland result.

I wonder how much of the Kilted Army (if what I hear from Boston is correct) have rooms booked for the second stage of the competition.

Got to get there first… But can do no more than win. Morocco and Brazil are a tougher test.

That said I can see England losing to Croatia and I anticipate howls of joy from the frozen north…

There can be upsets in any football match but England is a class above Croatia.

11th in FIFA rankings is not too shabby , usual England complacency before heading home perhaps.

I don't think that Croatia is quite the team they were when Suker was playing up front and Modric was in his pomp but they are still a useful side. I have also yet to be persuaded that Tuchel has any idea how to get the best out of his talented squad. But in Kane they have probably the best forward in the world at the moment and I suspect that will be enough.

One of my pals sent me a social media image last night made up of flags wishing every country in the WC good luck. In the middle was the cross of St George and on that it said "not you". I really don't get that and will be cheering England on on Wednesday, just as I would support any other British team, unless they were playing Scotland, of course.

"Home Office limits ‘one in, one out’ migrant deal with France

Officials fear the border scheme to effectively trade small boat arrivals for asylum seekers brings in ‘young men more likely to engage in criminal activity’"

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/france-home-office-border-policy-8ktl9lf0j

I was in Farnham last night for a meal with my wife.

I don't want to profile and at the same time two noisy motorbikes turned up suddenly on the high street outside our restaurant with two middle-eastern looking men on each of them, wearing bandanas covering their faces, and they had dark hair. They looked angry.

They did an about turn in the middle of the high-street, made a massive noise with their engines, and then revved off again. All my red flags were going off and I was ready to whip my wife out the restaurant on the high street, and head off out and away from there.

In the event nothing (that I could see) happened but it was all very weird and discomforting. Whole thing was about 8 seconds long and a flash in a pan. But where had they come from suddenly? Why were they there? What were they doing?

Maybe they just wanted a ride.

A free ride ?

That’s our strength and what makes Britain what it is. They’re the people who built this country

It's telling that I've been hesitant to report it to the police, and "hoping" other had instead.

They would ask me to describe the individuals involved, and give me own details, and there's too much risk of me being labelled a racist.

What was their offence?
For a loud noise to be a Statutory Nuisance, it needs to be persistent and regular, rather than a one-off event.
Or was it them looking angry?
Or something else?

I'm impressed by the spidey sense that can discern middle-eastern-ness beneath helmets and face-coveriing bandanas.

I want to know what the bikes were.

I've sold my Bimota and might get a Z H2 for the lolz.

Golly, a supercharger!

What bike would a budding terrorist use? Not something noisy and attention seeking, perhaps a C90 with a basket in front for all their terrorist bits and pieces.

Probably a Surron. A C90 could lead to premature shaheed status.

I hadn't noticed this detail.

few will appreciate how grimly funny it is that this judge both issued a gagging order so that the filton 4 could not explain their motivation to the jury, and then also sentenced them according to a specific intent provision requiring them to have had a specific motivation
https://x.com/ergo_praxis/status/2066049704811491467

I sympathise with the judge who has a problem. he has to act according to law, whatever his personal views. The defendants clearly don't think the law should apply to them.

There is a middle position: The government is wrong to extend terrorism to obviously non terrorist acts; and the defendants are wrong to try to get off a criminal charge by running a defence about motivation which in law isn't one.

The judge was right to stop them trying to do so, and is bound by law in the sentencing process to take motive into account. Motivation goes to mitigation/aggravation of an offence, not guilt.

Extending our traditional freedoms to protest to mean including breaking the law in serious ways a is a dangerous step, with fascistic overtones.

Finally, if the judge has got it wrong they can appeal.