Best Of

Based on this polling I wouldn’t be surprised the Tories ahead of Reform at some point in quarter one of 2026, if present trends hold, not consistently but on an outlier basis.

Word missing there?

On the substantive point, am I right in thinking as well that Farage is at the same time the oldest and the least experienced of the four major party leaders? He's not likely to be improving now as he ages and he's never been in cabinet.

No, Starmer is about 18 months older than Farage.

Blair and Cameron had never been in government before they became PM.

Fair enough on the first point.

Cameron and Blair had both been Leaders of the Opposition. Farage hasn't even done that.

Indeed he quite often skives off Parliament. I think he finds it boring because its not all about him.

This has recently set me wondering if Nigel Farage might bail soon. He is rarely in the Commons or in Clacton, and does not even seem to have much to say about Streeting or Lammy advocating customs unions with the EU, an issue you'd think would be mother's milk to him. Is he still interested in politics? (That said, maybe he is just under the weather as there are some nasty bugs doing the rounds.)

I wonder if the 'I can't really remember what happened 50 years ago but I definitely did not say those racist and antisemitic things' row has put his gas at a peep. The one time I saw Farage address the issue directly he seemed uncharacteristically shifty and evasive.

28 witnesses, including Jewish students, and written communications amongst teachers, is quite a lot to dismiss as "lies, all lies". Tice is that crass imo; Farage is not.

It's also quite awkward with respect to Farage's position on Israel, and the portrayal of Muslims as The Mortal Enemy of Western Civilisation.

Witnesses at the time (as in recording in diaries, letters etc) or witnesses ‘recalling’ events of 50 years ago. Very big difference, as all good historians know.

28 witnesses seems pretty corroborative to me.
The man’s a bully, and a spiv, and has been so since his earliest years.

I haven’t cared enough to look at what he did at school in detail, but isn’t prancing around with your arm in the air attention seeking rather than bullying?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/25/three-more-ex-pupils-at-school-with-nigel-farage-reject-banter-claims

Still don’t care enough to click that link.

Farage is deeply unpleasant man who is probably a racist. Spending 5 minutes reading a guardian article to confirm those views isn’t a good use of my time

So why did you venture in with your first comment about it being attention seeking not bullying then?

Because it was an interesting discussion.

Not all of the conversations on here are entirely fact based and it’s a better board for it

Ok but hang on.

Post 1: You counter the 'bully' allegations with "wasn't it just attention seeking?"

Post2: You say you don't care enough to read the details to see if it was indeed just attention seeking.

Post3: Whilst still not caring to check if it was just attention seeking you say it's nevertheless interesting.

Really rather odd. But, look, you're not in the dock, and it is Christmas, so that's probably enough on the matter. I note your overall 'deeply unpleasant and probably a racist' assessment of the bloke we're talking about. Big tick for that.

Not at all. Very easy to reconcile.

I’m aware he behaved badly at school but haven’t checked into details. The only thing that has stuck in my mind is him walking around making nazi salutes. Which to my mind is more childishly trying to shock people/seek attention. But it may be he did other stuff which was more targeted at specific individuals (which for me is the threshold of bullying).

But whether he’s a spiv and a bully or a spiv and an attention seeker won’t materially change how I view him in the round, so would rather do more uplifting things with my time

Ok, so just a snippet to give you a flavour.

He would torment a particular Jewish pupil by continually leaning in close and saying, "should have gassed you all".

With gas enunciated as "gassssssss" to mimic the sound of it hissing into the chambers at the death camps.

A pedant notes that the most common Nazi gas chambers used Prussia acid crystals that produce cyanide when moist, so no gas would have been hissing into the chamber. I don’t expect Farage would have known that. But then I’m probably being disingenuous.

No that's good knowledge. No dark inference taken from your supplying it.

Had I fallen victim to the Holocaust, I’d far rather have died in the mass shooting phase, than the gassing phase. Death by gas is prolonged and agonising.

No good options. Not sure off being made to strip off, then lie down on a pile of corpses in a ditch waiting for your bullet is better or worse.

The more I read, the more horrifying it is, especially now I have a toddler. The accounts of the deaths of children is particularly harrowing. And so many of the killers believed they were doing a tough but necessary job. That’s brainwashing and hatred for you.

Can we talk about reform in the same bracket?

Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.

Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...

I recall the Ministry of Defence did the same thing once (probably more than once). That's pretty incompetent given the ease of proper redaction now.

@mjsdc.bsky.social‬

NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25a443_ba7d.pdf

It is interesting that some of Trump nominees are actually less servile and slavishly 'loyal' than the likes of the laughably corrupt Thomas.

On the redactions - “export to PDF”, kids.

That seems to be the problem. They redacted the documents using Adobe Acrobat apparently

Government by technobros.

We need a squillion dollars for AI and space and shit. Also we don't know how Adobe Acrobat works...

I saw the other day that there is a world championships of Excell spreadheeting (is that a word?). The geeks shall inherit the earth.

Excel

That’s how I was knocked out in the first round, could’nt even spell the name of the competition I was entering.

I sometimes wonder if the fact I have zero chance of inheriting any assets affects my ability to get very worked up about the principle of inheritance taxation.

I think it is more a "feels" thing. I'll probably inherit a significant amount (to a normal person (and myself...), perhaps crumbs to some of the pb elite)), and think it weird that it would be taxed less strictly than me working hard.

Maybe if it was from a family business rather than well paid professional jobs I might think differently as that would create more attachment between the money, bequestors and the future so I can see where the farmers are coming from, but ultimately we are skint, and someone has to be taxed more and very few of the candidates for that will like it either.

I think that many of our freehold family farms only came into existence due to death duties on large aristocratic estates, with land sold to tenant farmers to pay the tax. At the end of enclosures there were a lot of tenant farmers, a lot of very large landholdings and a relatively small number of small freeholders.

The history of landholding in this country is not one of freehold family farms, it is mostly of turning peasants with traditional rights into a landless working class, and consolidating land ownership amongst the aristocracy. It was only Death Duties (and more recently IHT) that had reversed things..

Conversely, I would say that life as a peasant was (for the majority), always pretty rough, and when people got the opportunity to obtain better-paid work in cities, and the new industrial towns, they availed themselves of it.

A typical village had a Big Man, and several better off peasants, but the large majority were always dependent on the former, whether or not they owned their small holdings.

I am not particularly agitating for reparations from the landholders in compensation for the loss of traditional lands in the Highland Clearances and the equivalent English Enclosures, but it would be nice if they acknowledged how they came by their lands. It was theft, albeit historic theft.

There is something massively appealing to the very idea of running a farm, supporting a family from your own produce, and turning a profit from it.

But, I don’t think that was ever available to more than 20-25% of the village population (the hoplite class in classical Greece, the yeomen of late medieval England). The rest depended on the wages they got as labourers and servants, to the better off peasants and the Big Man, in addition to produce from their small plots.

Frontier societies came closest to this ideal, but usually at the expense of defeated peoples, being pushed off the land.

The powerful were always trying to grab more land. It was fortunate that in late 18th century England, this coincided with the demand for labour in new industries. For the rural poor, leaving the land was a blessing.

So similar to the slaves exported from Guinea to Virginia, it was worth it for the long term benefit?

And should be grateful to those Liverpool ship owners?

No. Being a chattel slave rarely represented an improvement in one’s life. Working in new industries often did.

Interesting that someone is trying to sell the “being a factory worker = slavery” thing.

Only the most extreme Southern Fireaters tried that pitch, back in the day.

No, its simply asking if the ends justifies the means.

Clearly African-Americans are better off now than Guineans, clearly I am better off than my Scottish crofting ancestors and English copyholder ancestors, but does that justify the monumental wrongs done?

The reason that we have so many rich landowners is that they are descended from thieves who pushed their kinfolk off the land with no posessions to rural or urban poverty wages or emigration to the colonies.

https://x.com/SecRubio/status/2003547575580815814

For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.

Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.

For far too long, ideologues in Washington have pursued coordinated efforts to obstruct renewable energy projects they oppose, using federal authority to suppress innovation, distort energy markets, and limit domestic energy supply. The European Union will no longer ignore these egregious acts of policy-driven obstructionism.

Today, EU institutions will take steps to formally challenge the United States’ prohibition of new wind projects, measures that raise prices for American consumers, weaken grid resilience, and increase U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources. These actions undermine climate commitments, economic competitiveness, and the foundations of transatlantic cooperation. We stand ready and willing to escalate our response should these restrictions not be reconsidered.

Personally, I think that the Europeans, including us, should be backing Denmark and that all of us should send the US ambassadors packing until the sovereignty of Greenland is acknowledged. We let this bunch of morons away with so much it is hardly surprising that they conclude they can walk all over us whenever they want.

I sometimes wonder if the fact I have zero chance of inheriting any assets affects my ability to get very worked up about the principle of inheritance taxation.

I think it is more a "feels" thing. I'll probably inherit a significant amount (to a normal person (and myself...), perhaps crumbs to some of the pb elite)), and think it weird that it would be taxed less strictly than me working hard.

Maybe if it was from a family business rather than well paid professional jobs I might think differently as that would create more attachment between the money, bequestors and the future so I can see where the farmers are coming from, but ultimately we are skint, and someone has to be taxed more and very few of the candidates for that will like it either.

I think that many of our freehold family farms only came into existence due to death duties on large aristocratic estates, with land sold to tenant farmers to pay the tax. At the end of enclosures there were a lot of tenant farmers, a lot of very large landholdings and a relatively small number of small freeholders.

The history of landholding in this country is not one of freehold family farms, it is mostly of turning peasants with traditional rights into a landless working class, and consolidating land ownership amongst the aristocracy. It was only Death Duties (and more recently IHT) that had reversed things..

Conversely, I would say that life as a peasant was (for the majority), always pretty rough, and when people got the opportunity to obtain better-paid work in cities, and the new industrial towns, they availed themselves of it.

A typical village had a Big Man, and several better off peasants, but the large majority were always dependent on the former, whether or not they owned their small holdings.

I am not particularly agitating for reparations from the landholders in compensation for the loss of traditional lands in the Highland Clearances and the equivalent English Enclosures, but it would be nice if they acknowledged how they came by their lands. It was theft, albeit historic theft.

There is something massively appealing to the very idea of running a farm, supporting a family from your own produce, and turning a profit from it.

But, I don’t think that was ever available to more than 20-25% of the village population (the hoplite class in classical Greece, the yeomen of late medieval England). The rest depended on the wages they got as labourers and servants, to the better off peasants and the Big Man, in addition to produce from their small plots.

Frontier societies came closest to this ideal, but usually at the expense of defeated peoples, being pushed off the land.

The powerful were always trying to grab more land. It was fortunate that in late 18th century England, this coincided with the demand for labour in new industries. For the rural poor, leaving the land was a blessing.

So similar to the slaves exported from Guinea to Virginia, it was worth it for the long term benefit?

And should be grateful to those Liverpool ship owners?

No. Being a chattel slave rarely represented an improvement in one’s life. Working in new industries often did.

Interesting that someone is trying to sell the “being a factory worker = slavery” thing.

Only the most extreme Southern Fireaters tried that pitch, back in the day.

11 new "corrections" to the Peggie judgment seeking to correct "clerical mistakes, errors or omissions". Snuck out just before Christmas. After a previous "correction". It is actually shocking. None of these "corrections", which include adding the word "trans" before "female" or replacing "male" with "female" make any difference to the judgment or the reasoning of course. No sirree.

I presume it still ignores those parts of FWS which say the exact opposite of what Kemp has sought to draw from it. Dear oh dear oh dear.

Speaking of which @DavidL, when may I expect a discussant contribution from you please? I have asked @turbotubbs to write one in case you can't, but he has also not produced anything. I'll rewrite the article on Xmas Day to have @kyf_100 on one side and @Cyclefree on the other, setting aside @Nigelb 's contribution until you or @turbotubbs submit something. If neither of you can I'll ask @fitalass to kick in: I'm pretty sure she'll get something to me.

For the avoidance of doubt this reply is not as sarky as it sounds and I genuinely do value your input in this matter. But the verdicts in GLP Vs EHRC and in Hampstead Ponds is due and I need the article to achieve some kind of shape soon: the next draft is the ninth and it's turning into "Answered Prayers"

I'm sorry @viewcode but the run up to Christmas has been absolutely full on and the time for a really considered reply to a detailed piece is just not there. Even when I have been on holiday I have been responding to various emails, meeting a complainer, preparing for a court hearing on the 30th and 2 commissions in early January. I simply have not had and will not have time to respond in detail to your piece. Apologies.

Not a problem sir. I appreciate the attempt regardless. Thank you for trying.