Best Of

She quite frequently sets the agenda. Her problem is that whenever she does, it is on topics that remind voters that the Tories also failed to resolve them

From header: Rob J this week unleashed his inner Boris with a tweet surely conceived for the side of a bus:-

Yesterday a young man was murdered in broad daylight for his watch.

And now Starmer is on the verge of giving killers a 70% reduction on the full sentence.

The Tory government were warned that they would run out of prison places by the end of the year unless they did something to fix the problem. All they did was make a speech. The reason Starmer is having to reduce sentences is because the Tories did nothing to fix the prisons problem.

Labour have been in office for over a year now. What have they actually done in that time to build more prison places?

You think its just housing, infrastructure, investment and development that our ridiculous planning system holds up? Interesting.

There was a bit on PM on Thursday, I think, which explained that the additional regulator brought in after Grenfell to check buildings more than 18m high was holding up all such developments UK wide for more than a year because the regulator was "under resourced". We are our own worse enemies so often.

I've just come back from ten days in Montenegro. Apart from being marred by various small frustrations like cheating taxi drivers and triple digit temperatures in Podogrica, it was an improbably fascinating trip - a country, like so many in Eastern Europe, apparently split down the middle between following its heart, towards its Slavic brethren Serbia and Russia, and its head, towards NATO and civilised Europe.

As some commenters seem to appreciate my occasional postcards from foreign parts, I thought I'd share some thoughts:

- they use the Euro, and this has clearly trapped them in an unsustainably strong currency. Things feel much more expensive than they should for a developing country at the back end of Europe, unemployment is obviously very high (14% officially, youth unemployment 26%, in reality probably significantly higher)
- Russian influence EVERYWHERE. The most common petrol stations were Lukoil, many Russian banks (Sberbank etc) have branches in the towns, lots of signs in tourist areas where in Russian and the usual quota of Russian men obviously drunk by noon on the beaches
- but every Montenegrin ministry in the capital flies an EU flag alongside the Montenegrin one, and some fly NATO flags as well. So it's an odd mix. Their national symbol is the double-headed eagle, simultaneously facing west and east, which seems somehow appropriate to the country.
- the language situation is just as confused. Montenegrin itself is sort of a dialect of Serbian but sort of its own language. It only formally separated from Serbian in the 1990s. Most of the signs use the Latin script but some are in modified Cyrillic and a few are in English.
- the people I talked to are also a mix - they look Mediterranean rather than Slavic, though their language and culture are obviously basically Serbian. They drive better than you'd expect for a country that's next to Albania, and actually stop at pedestrian crossings, which was unexpected
- the US embassy in Podgorica is staggeringly ugly and larger than the former embassy in London on Grosvenor Square. For an obscure country of 600k, not a world power of 70m. God knows what Uncle Sam is thinking.
- the food is good if uninspired - classic Balkan fare of grilled meat, potatoes, sauces, soups, etc.

Anyway it was a good trip, though unfortunately I had to cut it short because of work. They won't become another Belarus as they are too far - geographically and culturally - from Russia but I will be interested to see if they can maintain their precarious national balancing act over the next couple of decades or if they will embrace the free world with all its problems and disappointments wholeheartedly.

Hmmm. Raynor Winn reverse ferret beginning ...

https://news.sky.com/story/the-salt-path-author-raynor-winns-fourth-book-delayed-13395448

One missing piece of information in the story is what on earth the husband was doing for income? If the illness is fake, he should have been working. Keeping up the mortgage on a 250000 house shouldn't have been too hard even with two low incomes - and recoverable even with the alleged fraud.

Middle class people with low incomes are a fascinating breed.

I don't know - I had never heard of them, despite seven figures of sales since 2018.

The latest book has been delayed. The statement is very blurb:

On Winter Hill sees Winn undertake the Coast to Coast walk in northern England, this time alone. “Despite 45 years of walking together, setbacks in her husband, Moth’s, health have led him to see his decline as inevitable, which Raynor refuses to accept”, according to the publisher’s description. “Feeling trapped, she is drawn north, like a migratory bird, seeking the peace and hope that walking brings her”.

The Coast to Coast is a great walk, but it's only 70 miles. Was not @JosiasJessop planning to do it on a pushbike in one day?

Nah, and certainly not on a pushbike!

For some reason the C-to-c is one trail I've got little interest in doing. I've walked all the national trails, aside from the Southern Upland, the Yorkshire Wolds, and a couple of recentish extensions to other trails, but the coast-to-coast leaves me cold. I don't know why.

When I was walking past St Bees Head on my coastal walk, I met some people descending the cliffs. They said proudly they'd just walked from Robin Hood's Bay in a couple of weeks. I replied I'd just come from there in ?five? months, but had come around the long way...

The question is whether I need to do the English Coastal Path when it opens - I've walked the coast before, but that wouldn't have been the 'official' trail, so probably doesn't count...

As it hapoens, I am currently walking the Cumbrian part with a friend (who is doing the whole thing). It's 190 miles coast to coast. The Cumbrian section has a lot of climbing up onto high moorland passes and then often steep descents. Often it is just you and the Herdwicks. You can go slightly off piste and do a few Wainwrights if you want to. Stunning scenery. My friend gets to Shap tonight, I'll be on my way home.

Anyhow, here’s a tiny bit of WW2 history I came across yesterday, which I doubt anyone here knows; I certainly didn’t. A memorial to the 42 dead of Operation Seagull - SOE commandos and the crew of a Norwegian submarine - which had it succeeded, might by now have been depicted in film (at least one of the guys was a veteran from the well-known sabotage raid on the Norwegian heavy water plant).

Sadly the submarine set off on its mission - taking the commandos to destroy the power plant of a mining operation near the Swedish border - but simply disappeared. In 1985 they found it at the bottom of the ocean, the wreckage indicating that it had hit a German mine. The British had advised the Norwegians before the mission of the route, believed to be clear of mines, but this minefield had been very recently laid. Norway’s King unveiled the memorial, on the shore nearest the site of the wreckage, in 1987. D4S as usual.

I disagree that "he's not very bright". He seems genuinely very bright, not an educated "intellectual", but sharp, cunning, witty, adroit, yes, that's one reason why he entirely outfoxed the GOP the establishment and is still running rings around people. He's genuinely clever (and also wildly flawed)

Bankrupt 6 times, so he's not very bright

On the contrary, as each time Trump got to screw his suppliers and investors he's very bright.

Setting up a shell company to buy stuff, then transferring assets out and bankrupting it before you pay your suppliers is a well known business move in America.

Those who continue to supply him and invest in him, perhaps should revise their own criteria.

Think we need to install shutters on windows, like the French.

The biggest difference between Brits when it’s sunny, and all of our southern neighbours, remains that we rush to fling the windows open and they rush to close them, and draw the curtains.

The sensible amongst us do not do that .

I'm interested that the latest RExxxx *, which is apparently a Conservative Think Tank, are maundering on about air conditioning, as part of their performative "using less energy is not something we should be concerned about" shtick. They are still trying to out-Nigel, Nigel, without noticing that back in 2021 his party were saying they were serious about tackling Net Zero, and he will turn his coat like the flim-flam man he is when necessary - and the Tories do not have that skill.

https://x.com/ClaireCoutinho/status/1943660950118175110

* Britain Remade.

One of the benefits of getting a heat pump is it can be reversed to make an air conditioner. If we are going to transition away from burning gas for heating, we're going to need the extra electricity supply anyway. Why not make it more comfortable in the summer?

The type of heat pumps which receive subsidies in the UK can't be used for air conditioning.

No surprise there's no joined-up thinking on things like this.

Ed's on the case.

Air con for your home could become part of £7.5k heat-pump grant
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/air-con-for-your-home-could-become-part-of-7-5k-heat-pump-grant-3799614

However the grant is calculated, it will be specifically designed to prevent Fairliered claiming. See also ….. all other grants.

It's a stupid proposal by Leveson.

For the reasons set out here the last time something similar was suggested - https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/06/24/12-good-men/

Reading the report again, it's a discussion outwith the formal scope of the review.
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/review-of-efficiency-in-criminal-proceedings-20151.pdf

He's not recommending that juries be dispensed with; rather that the issue of judge led trials be revisited (though he's clearly quite keen on the idea).
I think he's reasonably fair in setting out the arguments on both sides, and would be interested if that is, or isn't how you see it.
(Edit ... if you have the time; it's quite a long read.)

What do you make of his formal recommendations on changes to the appeals procedure from magistrates courts ?

I don't have the time this evening.

Judges and politicians are always desperate to get rid of juries and they always try to find ways of justifying this. These attempts have been going on my entire professional life and I view them as yet another example of the rulers displaying their disregard for and contempt for ordinary people and the role they ought to play in a well ordered society. See the last paragraph of my header the other day.

The fundamental problem with our criminal justice system is its persistent under-funding over decades, an absolute failure by the state to take seriously one of its core duties.

Also while I have worked professionally with Leveson and he is a nice thoughtful man, he has a tendency to come up with complicated proposals which seem to me to cause at least as many problems as they solve. See his suggestions on newspapers. He is a bit too pro-establishment de haut en bas for my tastes, which is probably why he is the go-to judge for such matters.

Anyway will revert in more detail another time. Am a bit overwhelmed at the moment.