Best Of

Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.

Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.

The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.

When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.

The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.

I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.

Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.

That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!

The guy in the Human League song is a creepy, misogynistic stalker.

Just saying.

Next you'll be saying Every Breath You Take is kind of creepy and not romantic!

That song, of course, is meant to be creepy and Sting was disturbed by how many people interpreted it as romantic, even playing it at weddings. He wrote "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" in response.

On the subject of inappropriate songs...went to a wedding in Italy where they brought in a London gospel choir. Despite it being "the best thing we do", they were finally convinced a wedding was not the place for "I still haven't found what I'm looking for"...

Is there anything to stop Farage's girlfriend selling the property and walking away with the money ?

If not then this story is going nowhere.

This is the bit I don’t understand about this story. If she owns all of the home, whether that money is gifted or not, isn’t that the end of it for tax purposes? (Waiting for someone very clever to correct me, and as always I am not a tax expert yadda yadda).

Optically, I can see it looks like an unusual arrangement and unusual arrangements always invite questions, though.

If she was gifted the money, wouldn't she be taxed on it as income? (Apologies for using 'she', I Don know the lady's name.)

Ms Ferrari apparently.

Is there anything to stop Farage's girlfriend selling the property and walking away with the money ?

If not then this story is going nowhere.

This is the bit I don’t understand about this story. If she owns all of the home, whether that money is gifted or not, isn’t that the end of it for tax purposes? (Waiting for someone very clever to correct me, and as always I am not a tax expert yadda yadda).

Optically, I can see it looks like an unusual arrangement and unusual arrangements always invite questions, though.

The 'allegation' seems to be that Farage has given the girlfriend the money to buy the house to avoid stamp duty.

Even if true that would mean the wealth change is:

Farage -£885k
Girlfriend +£885k

So Farage would be risking a £885k financial loss in order to avoid paying £44k in tax.

Which would be more financial reckless than a Reform manifesto.

Farage has explicitly said he did not give his girlfriend the money.

(Of course, he had said he'd bought the house and that turned out not to be true...)

So how can Farage have avoided tax when he's not been involved in the financial transaction ?

This is the difference between Rayner and Farage - Rayner owns the Hove flat whereas Farage doesn't own the Clacton house.

As I understand it...

If Farage gave his girlfriend money to buy a house (which he says he didn't), that is legal and attracts no tax (unless he dies soon and it comes under inheritance tax).

If Farage gave his girlfriend money to buy a house specifically as a way to avoid paying more stamp duty, that doesn't change anything in terms of tax rules, but it might be seen to be cynical.

If Farage came to an arrangement with his girlfriend whereby he pretended to give her money, but they secretly agreed it was still his money, then that would be tax avoidance. (Again, Farage denies doing this.)

Meanwhile, it has been noted that Farage, at the time, said he had bought the house. This turns out to have been not true. It is not illegal to say something that isn't true, but it's not a good look for a politician.

Not quite.
He claims not to have gifted the money but if he had he would have had to declare no interest in the property. He lives there.

One for @Leon, if the maggots haven't done for him...


(((Dan Hodges)))
@DPJHodges

Slightly long post. But there's a lot of concern on the moderate Left today about the Robinson event. Fine. But if you actually want to do something about it you have to understand four things:

2) The Blue Sky experiment has failed.

Musk took what was a monopoly and fractured it. While Bluesky isn’t the success others think it should be it’s a far nicer platform to spend time on and 1 I trust because I understand the algorithm that is generating the feed displayed to me.

The fact people on here don’t understand the power of those algorithms is frankly worrying for the world as a whole (because if we don’t understand that power even after it’s been explained x hundred times there is zero chance the general public will understand how they are being quietly manipulated

Picture of the day: I'm always fascinated by abrupt changes of land use. Here is the point where the encroaching flattification of Manchester reaches the bit we might term 'what inner Manchester used to be like'.

Remarkable that there are still places remaining that are “what inner Manchester used to be like”. I remember from childhood visits the bizarre (in hindsight) sight of the centre of a huge city filled with empty old warehouses, car parks and weedy waste ground.

There are still unaccountable pockets of London like that too, mostly along the Thames estuary.

Thirty years ago, there were two covered canal wharfs that I loved the look and atmosphere of: the sort of warehouse that has an awning over the canal so barges can be offloaded in the dry. One was on the Regents Canal at Mile End, and it has now gone. Another was on the Grand Union near the A4 in Brentford, and I fear for that one as well. Deeply atmospheric places, but whose original purpose has long gone.

Is there anything to stop Farage's girlfriend selling the property and walking away with the money ?

If not then this story is going nowhere.

This is the bit I don’t understand about this story. If she owns all of the home, whether that money is gifted or not, isn’t that the end of it for tax purposes? (Waiting for someone very clever to correct me, and as always I am not a tax expert yadda yadda).

Optically, I can see it looks like an unusual arrangement and unusual arrangements always invite questions, though.

The 'allegation' seems to be that Farage has given the girlfriend the money to buy the house to avoid stamp duty.

Even if true that would mean the wealth change is:

Farage -£885k
Girlfriend +£885k

So Farage would be risking a £885k financial loss in order to avoid paying £44k in tax.

Which would be more financial reckless than a Reform manifesto.

Farage has explicitly said he did not give his girlfriend the money.

(Of course, he had said he'd bought the house and that turned out not to be true...)

So how can Farage have avoided tax when he's not been involved in the financial transaction ?

This is the difference between Rayner and Farage - Rayner owns the Hove flat whereas Farage doesn't own the Clacton house.

Its likely (from those sniffing around the story) an 'original source of the funds' question

One for @Leon, if the maggots haven't done for him...


(((Dan Hodges)))
@DPJHodges

Slightly long post. But there's a lot of concern on the moderate Left today about the Robinson event. Fine. But if you actually want to do something about it you have to understand four things:

1) To deal with the underlaying causes requires hard policy proscriptions on areas like immigration. And you will have to endorse positions that make you instinctively uncomfortable. But they are unavoidable.

2) The Blue Sky experiment has failed. You may hate Musk. But this is the most influential platform on the globe. If you abandon it to Robinson and his allies you have already lost.

https://x.com/DPJHodges/status/1967502268833403136

The last point is very true. Abandoning X en masse is huge mistake for the Left. There's many non-politically aligned people around the world, for whom it just represents their daily reality, and are posting on other issues.

If you abandon the political dimension of that global meeting-space entirely to the hatd right, that just becomes many politically unaligned people's sense of objective reality, and also majority opinion.

Musk has so twised the algorithms to repeat what he wants them to that I don't think the absence of some people on the left makes any difference.