"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
The whole process doesn't work unless there is some financial benefit to the banks of treating customers proportionately that is of a similar scale to these fines being imposed.
Perhaps the fines could be shared out amongst the banks who have got the balance best (although no idea how that would be calculated).
There needs to be an independent arbitrator, and a right of appeal.
Oh, and whoever at Coutts briefed the press about the financial details of a customer, needs to be struck off.
Breach of GDPR, isn’t it?
Anyone wanted anything on a customer of the bank - I would send them to Legal and/or Compliance. And that’s just internally.
Even stating that X has an account with you sounds like revealing personal information.
Yes but wouldn't be an excellent and amusing irony if Farage resorted to making a complaint that utilises GDPR? That said, though I hate the man, you do have a point, but then they might be OK because he went public, trying to turn his case into a publicity stunt (plus ca change), and they would claim their response was proportionate and justified.
If he wanted to get his own back he could make a "subject access request" under GDPR which would be a bit annoying for them.
I don't think that public spats are a justification for releasing GDPR privileged information - legally, that is.
There are other privacy rules that come into play. Coutts has definitely fucked up here, I think.
Surely a private bank says “we say nothing about anything” as a public statement? If there’s one reason you have a “private bank”, it’s that.
How many other Coutts customers now know that they’ll sh!t on you, if you sh!t on them in public?
@patrickkmaguire Labour lead at 25 points in latest YouGov poll for The Times
CON 22 (-2) LAB 47 (+1) LIB DEM 9 (-1) REF UK 9 (+1) GREEN 7 (=)
Fieldwork 5-6 July
Big 9% for Reform there for Sunak to squeeze by reducing the boats across the Channel in particular.
Indeed Reform now tied with the LDs for 3rd party on voteshare and ahead of the Greens
If you assume all of Ref, the LDs and Greens break Tory it'll be a very tight election.
I think/guess it will be a lot tighter than people assume at the moment.
I am less confident of my 1992 redux prediction, although I'll stick with it. I am less sure of the poster today who suggested that subject to the successful implementation of Rwanda (removal number limits apply) we are back in 2019 winning territory for the Tories.
The next election will be 2024, not anything redux. Do we need to share that xkcd post every election?
The Tories could successfully implement the Rwanda policy by removing number limits and getting over the legal issues, but I don't think it would remotely change the next election result. People are fed up of the Tories and "its time for a change" is going to beat "better the devil you know".
And if the Tories want to pin their next election's hopes on Rwanda then not only will they still lose the next election, they'll deserve to lose it too.
@patrickkmaguire Labour lead at 25 points in latest YouGov poll for The Times
CON 22 (-2) LAB 47 (+1) LIB DEM 9 (-1) REF UK 9 (+1) GREEN 7 (=)
Fieldwork 5-6 July
Big 9% for Reform there for Sunak to squeeze by reducing the boats across the Channel in particular.
Indeed Reform now tied with the LDs for 3rd party on voteshare and ahead of the Greens
If you assume all of Ref, the LDs and Greens break Tory it'll be a very tight election.
I think/guess it will be a lot tighter than people assume at the moment.
I am less confident of my 1992 redux prediction, although I'll stick with it. I am less sure of the poster today who suggested that subject to the successful implementation of Rwanda (removal number limits apply) we are back in 2019 winning territory for the Tories.
I don't think they will win, and I am not sure it is in the best interests of the Conservative Party or the country for them to do so. I am also convinced that a Labour majority, particularly a big one, is not in the country's best interests either. I think the best outcome for the country will be a very small Labour maj or even minority/coalition with the Tories electing Mordaunt leader.
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
The whole process doesn't work unless there is some financial benefit to the banks of treating customers proportionately that is of a similar scale to these fines being imposed.
Perhaps the fines could be shared out amongst the banks who have got the balance best (although no idea how that would be calculated).
There needs to be an independent arbitrator, and a right of appeal.
Oh, and whoever at Coutts briefed the press about the financial details of a customer, needs to be struck off.
Breach of GDPR, isn’t it?
Anyone wanted anything on a customer of the bank - I would send them to Legal and/or Compliance. And that’s just internally.
Even stating that X has an account with you sounds like revealing personal information.
Yes but wouldn't be an excellent and amusing irony if Farage resorted to making a complaint that utilises GDPR? That said, though I hate the man, you do have a point, but then they might be OK because he went public, trying to turn his case into a publicity stunt (plus ca change), and they would claim their response was proportionate and justified.
If he wanted to get his own back he could make a "subject access request" under GDPR which would be a bit annoying for them.
I don't think that public spats are a justification for releasing GDPR privileged information - legally, that is.
There are other privacy rules that come into play. Coutts has definitely fucked up here, I think.
They absolutely have, yes.
Its still funny though.
The fact they fucked up over his fuck to a probable fuck up on their part from a probable fuck up on his part is where it gets funny.
Shades of that silly "back to Vietnam" film where the explosives expert sets up a set of bobbytraps, so that the enemy triggers one, jumps straight onto the next one, goes the other way, straight into the the next and so on...
@patrickkmaguire Labour lead at 25 points in latest YouGov poll for The Times
CON 22 (-2) LAB 47 (+1) LIB DEM 9 (-1) REF UK 9 (+1) GREEN 7 (=)
Fieldwork 5-6 July
Big 9% for Reform there for Sunak to squeeze by reducing the boats across the Channel in particular.
Indeed Reform now tied with the LDs for 3rd party on voteshare and ahead of the Greens
If you assume all of Ref, the LDs and Greens break Tory it'll be a very tight election.
I think/guess it will be a lot tighter than people assume at the moment.
I am less confident of my 1992 redux prediction, although I'll stick with it. I am less sure of the poster today who suggested that subject to the successful implementation of Rwanda (removal number limits apply) we are back in 2019 winning territory for the Tories.
The next election will be 2024, not anything redux. Do we need to share that xkcd post every election?
The Tories could successfully implement the Rwanda policy by removing number limits and getting over the legal issues, but I don't think it would remotely change the next election result. People are fed up of the Tories and "its time for a change" is going to beat "better the devil you know".
And if the Tories want to pin their next election's hopes on Rwanda then not only will they still lose the next election, they'll deserve to lose it too.
I think the Rwanda policy will lose more votes than it will gain, but that might be my own confirmation bias
@patrickkmaguire Labour lead at 25 points in latest YouGov poll for The Times
CON 22 (-2) LAB 47 (+1) LIB DEM 9 (-1) REF UK 9 (+1) GREEN 7 (=)
Fieldwork 5-6 July
Big 9% for Reform there for Sunak to squeeze by reducing the boats across the Channel in particular.
Indeed Reform now tied with the LDs for 3rd party on voteshare and ahead of the Greens
If you assume all of Ref, the LDs and Greens break Tory it'll be a very tight election.
I think/guess it will be a lot tighter than people assume at the moment.
I am less confident of my 1992 redux prediction, although I'll stick with it. I am less sure of the poster today who suggested that subject to the successful implementation of Rwanda (removal number limits apply) we are back in 2019 winning territory for the Tories.
The next election will be 2024, not anything redux. Do we need to share that xkcd post every election?
The Tories could successfully implement the Rwanda policy by removing number limits and getting over the legal issues, but I don't think it would remotely change the next election result. People are fed up of the Tories and "its time for a change" is going to beat "better the devil you know".
And if the Tories want to pin their next election's hopes on Rwanda then not only will they still lose the next election, they'll deserve to lose it too.
I think the Rwanda policy will lose more votes than it will gain, but that might be my own confirmation bias
I doubt it will affect many votes either way by the time of the election.
The election will like most elections come down to a couple of simple premises. Its the economy, stupid along with are you better off now than you were four five years ago?
Rwanda is a sideshow that generates a lot of smoke and fury, but the amount of people willing to vote on racial/migration issues alone in a General Election is thankfully very miniscule.
I've noticed that tweets are back again without having signed on to twitter (or even being a member in my case). Presumably the protests reached even Musk, particularly with the advent of a potential competitor in nuclear war and the end of the world as we know it or Threads for short.
I think direct links work but you cannot just browse?
I'm sure it's been talked about before, but surely one unalloyed good of the Threads thing is the awareness being raised of the BBC TV film, Threads.
Still the most terrifying film I've ever seen. Genuinely brilliant.
yes it is strange that the "other" Threads didn't pop up during the brainstorming at Meta of what to call the damn thing.
I had not heard of this film until I think last year. It was a UK not a global thing (made by BBC). Cleggy is my ageish, 57 or so, so perhaps he as the UK consultant had also not heard of it.
Threads is also a very powerful software concept, e.g. multithreading. That'll be where it comes from: and orders of magnitude more people will know of it in that context rather than from an obscure BBC film from decades ago.
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
The whole process doesn't work unless there is some financial benefit to the banks of treating customers proportionately that is of a similar scale to these fines being imposed.
Perhaps the fines could be shared out amongst the banks who have got the balance best (although no idea how that would be calculated).
There needs to be an independent arbitrator, and a right of appeal.
Oh, and whoever at Coutts briefed the press about the financial details of a customer, needs to be struck off.
Breach of GDPR, isn’t it?
Anyone wanted anything on a customer of the bank - I would send them to Legal and/or Compliance. And that’s just internally.
Even stating that X has an account with you sounds like revealing personal information.
Yes but wouldn't be an excellent and amusing irony if Farage resorted to making a complaint that utilises GDPR? That said, though I hate the man, you do have a point, but then they might be OK because he went public, trying to turn his case into a publicity stunt (plus ca change), and they would claim their response was proportionate and justified.
If he wanted to get his own back he could make a "subject access request" under GDPR which would be a bit annoying for them.
I don't think that public spats are a justification for releasing GDPR privileged information - legally, that is.
There are other privacy rules that come into play. Coutts has definitely fucked up here, I think.
Surely a private bank says “we say nothing about anything” as a public statement? If there’s one reason you have a “private bank”, it’s that.
How many other Coutts customers now know that they’ll sh!t on you, if you sh!t on them in public?
They are paying, apparently, 1200 notes a year for what you get better for free everywhere else, and now that cheques are obsolete the one perk you get for that is history. Card readers can't tell Coutts from monzo. So they are probably all desperate to be outed in the press as Coutts customers, or at least former ones.
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
The whole process doesn't work unless there is some financial benefit to the banks of treating customers proportionately that is of a similar scale to these fines being imposed.
Perhaps the fines could be shared out amongst the banks who have got the balance best (although no idea how that would be calculated).
There needs to be an independent arbitrator, and a right of appeal.
Oh, and whoever at Coutts briefed the press about the financial details of a customer, needs to be struck off.
Breach of GDPR, isn’t it?
Anyone wanted anything on a customer of the bank - I would send them to Legal and/or Compliance. And that’s just internally.
Even stating that X has an account with you sounds like revealing personal information.
Yes but wouldn't be an excellent and amusing irony if Farage resorted to making a complaint that utilises GDPR? That said, though I hate the man, you do have a point, but then they might be OK because he went public, trying to turn his case into a publicity stunt (plus ca change), and they would claim their response was proportionate and justified.
If he wanted to get his own back he could make a "subject access request" under GDPR which would be a bit annoying for them.
I don't think that public spats are a justification for releasing GDPR privileged information - legally, that is.
There are other privacy rules that come into play. Coutts has definitely fucked up here, I think.
I am not so sure. They have a defence that he made a public accusation that was misleading and would be deleterious to their reputation and business. If he was not eligible to have an account and yet he was claiming that he was denied it for political reasons (usual Farage bullshit) then I think it reasonable that they give a public reason for his account to be closed. I suspect they thought "fuck him, let him sue"
I've noticed that tweets are back again without having signed on to twitter (or even being a member in my case). Presumably the protests reached even Musk, particularly with the advent of a potential competitor in nuclear war and the end of the world as we know it or Threads for short.
I think direct links work but you cannot just browse?
I'm sure it's been talked about before, but surely one unalloyed good of the Threads thing is the awareness being raised of the BBC TV film, Threads.
Still the most terrifying film I've ever seen. Genuinely brilliant.
yes it is strange that the "other" Threads didn't pop up during the brainstorming at Meta of what to call the damn thing.
I had not heard of this film until I think last year. It was a UK not a global thing (made by BBC). Cleggy is my ageish, 57 or so, so perhaps he as the UK consultant had also not heard of it.
Threads is also a very powerful software concept, e.g. multithreading. That'll be where it comes from: and orders of magnitude more people will know of it in that context rather than from an obscure BBC film from decades ago.
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
The whole process doesn't work unless there is some financial benefit to the banks of treating customers proportionately that is of a similar scale to these fines being imposed.
Perhaps the fines could be shared out amongst the banks who have got the balance best (although no idea how that would be calculated).
There needs to be an independent arbitrator, and a right of appeal.
Oh, and whoever at Coutts briefed the press about the financial details of a customer, needs to be struck off.
Breach of GDPR, isn’t it?
Anyone wanted anything on a customer of the bank - I would send them to Legal and/or Compliance. And that’s just internally.
Even stating that X has an account with you sounds like revealing personal information.
Yes but wouldn't be an excellent and amusing irony if Farage resorted to making a complaint that utilises GDPR? That said, though I hate the man, you do have a point, but then they might be OK because he went public, trying to turn his case into a publicity stunt (plus ca change), and they would claim their response was proportionate and justified.
If he wanted to get his own back he could make a "subject access request" under GDPR which would be a bit annoying for them.
I don't think that public spats are a justification for releasing GDPR privileged information - legally, that is.
There are other privacy rules that come into play. Coutts has definitely fucked up here, I think.
Surely a private bank says “we say nothing about anything” as a public statement? If there’s one reason you have a “private bank”, it’s that.
How many other Coutts customers now know that they’ll sh!t on you, if you sh!t on them in public?
They are paying, apparently, 1200 notes a year for what you get better for free everywhere else, and now that cheques are obsolete the one perk you get for that is history. Card readers can't tell Coutts from monzo. So they are probably all desperate to be outed in the press as Coutts customers, or at least former ones.
Coutts is basically golf club bore bragging rights for people too gammony for Handelsbanken.
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
The whole process doesn't work unless there is some financial benefit to the banks of treating customers proportionately that is of a similar scale to these fines being imposed.
Perhaps the fines could be shared out amongst the banks who have got the balance best (although no idea how that would be calculated).
There needs to be an independent arbitrator, and a right of appeal.
Oh, and whoever at Coutts briefed the press about the financial details of a customer, needs to be struck off.
Breach of GDPR, isn’t it?
Anyone wanted anything on a customer of the bank - I would send them to Legal and/or Compliance. And that’s just internally.
Even stating that X has an account with you sounds like revealing personal information.
Yes but wouldn't be an excellent and amusing irony if Farage resorted to making a complaint that utilises GDPR? That said, though I hate the man, you do have a point, but then they might be OK because he went public, trying to turn his case into a publicity stunt (plus ca change), and they would claim their response was proportionate and justified.
If he wanted to get his own back he could make a "subject access request" under GDPR which would be a bit annoying for them.
I don't think that public spats are a justification for releasing GDPR privileged information - legally, that is.
There are other privacy rules that come into play. Coutts has definitely fucked up here, I think.
I am not so sure. They have a defence that he made a public accusation that was misleading and would be deleterious to their reputation and business. If he was not eligible to have an account and yet he was claiming that he was denied it for political reasons (usual Farage bullshit) then I think it reasonable that they give a public reason for his account to be closed. I suspect they thought "fuck him, let him sue"
Are you in finance?
If so, be careful - "I think it reasonable" is the kind of thinking that can get you a free trip to American Club Fed. The all inclusive holiday that just never ends....
He'd be a fool not to delay it as much as possible, which is probably a lot, especially with his BFF judge Cannon presiding.
Zero chance it happens before election, and if he wins, it will somehow get pulled.
If he wins its DOJ policy you don't charge sitting presidents apparently.
But yes, the law is a slow beast, and in this case too slow. Its still not even decided if he will be charged in Georgia.
I think the NY case, which is weaker, is due for early next year, so itcl seems pretty easy for lawyers to get all of them pushed back 10 months or so.
But is it DOJ policy to drop cases that are currently in court if someone is elected President? He’s already been charged.
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
The whole process doesn't work unless there is some financial benefit to the banks of treating customers proportionately that is of a similar scale to these fines being imposed.
Perhaps the fines could be shared out amongst the banks who have got the balance best (although no idea how that would be calculated).
There needs to be an independent arbitrator, and a right of appeal.
Oh, and whoever at Coutts briefed the press about the financial details of a customer, needs to be struck off.
Breach of GDPR, isn’t it?
Anyone wanted anything on a customer of the bank - I would send them to Legal and/or Compliance. And that’s just internally.
Even stating that X has an account with you sounds like revealing personal information.
Yes but wouldn't be an excellent and amusing irony if Farage resorted to making a complaint that utilises GDPR? That said, though I hate the man, you do have a point, but then they might be OK because he went public, trying to turn his case into a publicity stunt (plus ca change), and they would claim their response was proportionate and justified.
If he wanted to get his own back he could make a "subject access request" under GDPR which would be a bit annoying for them.
I don't think that public spats are a justification for releasing GDPR privileged information - legally, that is.
There are other privacy rules that come into play. Coutts has definitely fucked up here, I think.
Surely a private bank says “we say nothing about anything” as a public statement? If there’s one reason you have a “private bank”, it’s that.
How many other Coutts customers now know that they’ll sh!t on you, if you sh!t on them in public?
They are paying, apparently, 1200 notes a year for what you get better for free everywhere else, and now that cheques are obsolete the one perk you get for that is history. Card readers can't tell Coutts from monzo. So they are probably all desperate to be outed in the press as Coutts customers, or at least former ones.
When they have to go and collect their money, they'll do it in a Fortnum and Mason bag?
More seriously, I think Tom Cruise could be the last A-list actor capable, willing and able (i mean as much production company risk tolerance when you have CGI / AI) to do this stuff.
@patrickkmaguire Labour lead at 25 points in latest YouGov poll for The Times
CON 22 (-2) LAB 47 (+1) LIB DEM 9 (-1) REF UK 9 (+1) GREEN 7 (=)
Fieldwork 5-6 July
Big 9% for Reform there for Sunak to squeeze by reducing the boats across the Channel in particular.
Indeed Reform now tied with the LDs for 3rd party on voteshare and ahead of the Greens
If you assume all of Ref, the LDs and Greens break Tory it'll be a very tight election.
I think/guess it will be a lot tighter than people assume at the moment.
I am less confident of my 1992 redux prediction, although I'll stick with it. I am less sure of the poster today who suggested that subject to the successful implementation of Rwanda (removal number limits apply) we are back in 2019 winning territory for the Tories.
The next election will be 2024, not anything redux. Do we need to share that xkcd post every election?
The Tories could successfully implement the Rwanda policy by removing number limits and getting over the legal issues, but I don't think it would remotely change the next election result. People are fed up of the Tories and "its time for a change" is going to beat "better the devil you know".
And if the Tories want to pin their next election's hopes on Rwanda then not only will they still lose the next election, they'll deserve to lose it too.
Rwanda is rather cynical and Jenrick painting over the cartoons at the children's reception centre plain evil.
I don't believe there are many left in the country who don't agree practical application of immigration policy, particularly asylum policy is a disaster, but sending a couple of hundred Afghans to Rwanda at £169,000 per head isn't the answer.
Filtering applicants on the European mainland, and allowing in genuine cases is the only way forward. Failed applicants who keep coming back, then maybe Rwanda is part of a suite of responses.
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
The whole process doesn't work unless there is some financial benefit to the banks of treating customers proportionately that is of a similar scale to these fines being imposed.
Perhaps the fines could be shared out amongst the banks who have got the balance best (although no idea how that would be calculated).
There needs to be an independent arbitrator, and a right of appeal.
Oh, and whoever at Coutts briefed the press about the financial details of a customer, needs to be struck off.
Breach of GDPR, isn’t it?
Anyone wanted anything on a customer of the bank - I would send them to Legal and/or Compliance. And that’s just internally.
Even stating that X has an account with you sounds like revealing personal information.
Yes but wouldn't be an excellent and amusing irony if Farage resorted to making a complaint that utilises GDPR? That said, though I hate the man, you do have a point, but then they might be OK because he went public, trying to turn his case into a publicity stunt (plus ca change), and they would claim their response was proportionate and justified.
If he wanted to get his own back he could make a "subject access request" under GDPR which would be a bit annoying for them.
I don't think that public spats are a justification for releasing GDPR privileged information - legally, that is.
There are other privacy rules that come into play. Coutts has definitely fucked up here, I think.
I am not so sure. They have a defence that he made a public accusation that was misleading and would be deleterious to their reputation and business. If he was not eligible to have an account and yet he was claiming that he was denied it for political reasons (usual Farage bullshit) then I think it reasonable that they give a public reason for his account to be closed. I suspect they thought "fuck him, let him sue"
Are you in finance?
If so, be careful - "I think it reasonable" is the kind of thinking that can get you a free trip to American Club Fed. The all inclusive holiday that just never ends....
No, not in finance in a formal way. Not a lawyer either so I am probably talking bollox and my opinion is highly influenced by my loathing of Farage. But when did anyone have to be an expert to give an opinion on here? After all, in this post-truth world, we have had enough of experts have we not?
@patrickkmaguire Labour lead at 25 points in latest YouGov poll for The Times
CON 22 (-2) LAB 47 (+1) LIB DEM 9 (-1) REF UK 9 (+1) GREEN 7 (=)
Fieldwork 5-6 July
Getting a bit Trussy.
With bad news to come, including by-election thrashings, the political narrative may become a death spiral.
The Tory problem now has become Sunak. He has been weighed and measured by the electorate, and found to be completely immature and lightweight Primeminister.
The good news for the Tories from this yougov poll is there’s no Dutch Salute, Lab up to 47 lid Dem down to 9, the opposite of the salute. As HY will correctly say, If that happens on election night it’s a great night for Sunak as he will have more MPs than Major and Hague.
Remember the MoonRabbit polling maxim: It’s not just the size of your LLG (63%) it’s what you do with it.
Though the Dutch Salute isn't just about the totals, it's about their distribution. If the map resolves clearly into red, yellow and the odd bit of green, each constituency going for a single anti-Conservative challenger, the Conservative goose is really cooked. If the votes stay mixed in a single orangey sludge, that's good news for Rishi. (Tactical voting bores bang on about this every election; my hunch is that the extent to which voters are in the mood to spontaneously do it is what drives election results).
Call it the vinaigrette theory of politics. In 2019, the oil of Labour and the vinegar of the Lib Dems were mixed up in a way that was tasty for the Conservatives. Now, they've separated out again, and Sunak is looking a rather limp salad.
I love your attempt at psephological metaphor. The LLG vinaigrette. But the metaphor don’t work, it’s not meant to improve a Sunak Salad, just eat it.
Yes it’s about tactical voting. LLG of 60 acting like cats is 195 Tory MPs, LLG razor like precision on getting Tory’s out and it’s about 120 Tory MPs. And what a strange bunch of New Conservatives they would be, with the likes of Penny gone.
But we are not seeing much Dutch Salute in polls is the truth. Lib Dem’s 9 Labour 47. If national polls move toward the last local election night, LD19 L39 PV at the GE, that’s a lot of tactical fireworks.
Have to say that SKS was presumably grateful for the interruption of his speech by protesters yesterday as it broke the tedium and made it vaguely newsworthy. He didn’t have that advantage on R4 in the morning and boy that was grim. Platitudes and generalities piled high with not a detail in sight. He’s going to be poor in the election campaign, possibly even worse than Sunak if you can imagine such a thing.
Though when he broke from the script to engage with the protestors he came over well. That bodes well for the unpredictability of a campaign.
I am no Starmer fan, and he is still rather an enigma to me. What does he actually want to do as PM? He seems to be both over-prepared and over timid.
On the other hand, he is wise not to interrupt a government bent on self destruction.
What does Sir K want to do? I think something like this: 1) Win the election from the social democrat centre left 2) Under promise both before and after the election 3) Blame the Tories (not hard) 4) See what can be done about the EU in a Swiss sort of way 5) Try to be a government with some integrity, honesty and competence, no quick fixes 6) See if a 10-15 year programme can engender a bit of hope and a sense of direction 7) Use the current mood to further regulate water, banks, rail etc 8) Stop some rich people's loopholes and rebalance the tax system.
He can't spend any money much because there isn't any. The above 8 items is enough when all your money is going on debt interest, pensions and NHS.
(5) seems wildly aspirational to me. When did we last have a government like that?
I think May tried to be a government with some integrity, honesty and competence, no quick fixes. At least as far as that's possible.
She failed fairly dismally- partly by not really being up to the job, partly because of the people in the tent pissing in, partly because the country rather likes quick fixes
The big question for Starmer is whether the UK is ready to accept that quick fixes aren't on the menu. I hope we are, but I'm not sure.
Looking back, May's position was impossible from the beginning, and then her own 2017 election campaign made it worse.
As a remainer PM after Brexit it was politically impossible to do a sane Brexit (a Swiss or Norway approach) because her own party would not let her, and Labour was too self interested to help. So she had to try to find a middle way, pleasing no-one. It is notable that the faction that made life impossible for her has nothing worthwhile to offer now.
May would be OK in OK times; Brexit made it impossible.
May had a majority in spring 2017, but what she wanted was a big enough majority in h
Have to say that SKS was presumably grateful for the interruption of his speech by protesters yesterday as it broke the tedium and made it vaguely newsworthy. He didn’t have that advantage on R4 in the morning and boy that was grim. Platitudes and generalities piled high with not a detail in sight. He’s going to be poor in the election campaign, possibly even worse than Sunak if you can imagine such a thing.
Though when he broke from the script to engage with the protestors he came over well. That bodes well for the unpredictability of a campaign.
I am no Starmer fan, and he is still rather an enigma to me. What does he actually want to do as PM? He seems to be both over-prepared and over timid.
On the other hand, he is wise not to interrupt a government bent on self destruction.
Starmer can think on his feet better than Sunak, which isn't surprising given his CV and how poor Sunak is at thinking on his feet. But unlike Blair in 1997 and for that matter even Trump in 2016 he's got practically no element of a new dawn in his offering, and practically no charisma. He doesn't even measure up to Kinnock.
All the Tories need to do is introduce a bit of new and tough in conflict into their presentation. That may well mean binning Sunak, and there may be a bit of a trouble there with him hanging onto the doorframe because he's rich - so get yer popcorn ready - but they seem to have managed OK in removing the last three prime ministers when they wanted to. And it doesn't even necessarily mean getting rid of Sunak. He is young, he is not bright but he's better than his three predecessors at listening to advice, and he can be repackaged. The Tories' biggest card is Rwanda, and they will play it when they think the time is right, which isn't yet. Labour haven't really got a card to play in response, other than to say be nice and hey this is a distraction, oh please please, listen to us. Too many pundits keep comparing with 1992 and 1997, but 2024 will probably be more like 2019.
I really don't think "Rwanda" is going to pull the Tories nuts out of the fire. All it does is remind voters of another failed soundbite policy of the government that didn't work.
If there isn’t an actual daily flight to Rwanda, full of boat arrivals, by the time of the election, then the policy is going to be seen as a failure by the electorate.
Nailed on then, as the policy is limited to 120. Not even half a plane full.
There is nothing preventing that 120 being lifted.
Its far from unprecedented when starting a new system to trial with a small number, then once the kinks are out to lift that number or even remove the cap altogether.
All you have to do is massively increase the capacity of the Rwandan legal system to process a planeful of asylum cases a day. Because the UK is going to process those cases properly, isn't it?
Oh, and you have to do it as a temporary surge. You will need all those assylum lawyers for a few weeks, but then the flow of boat people is going to fall to a trickle and they won't be needed any more.
The whole thing is a blag, and as Sandpit has pointed out, a number of right wing voters are going to be awfully unhappy when the blaginess of the scheme becomes clear.
Saying it's a policy drawn in crayon is an insult to toddlers who draw in crayon. They usually manage to get the number of arms and legs right. Sometimes the nose is even in roughly the right place.
Why would you need Rwanda to process them in a day? The UK doesn't process them in a day.
All you need is Rwanda to agree to house them and process them eventually, which is what the UK does already. No need for them to be processed within 24 hours of arrival.
That's a completely different matter. And as you say, then the flow will fall to a trickle and the planes won't be needed anymore.
Think of the asylum system as a pipeline. At the moment, people are entering that pipe at the rate of about 100 a day. Unless the flow through the narrowest part of the pipeline is about 100 a day, a backlog will build up and keep building. It's one of the reasons that the UK asylum system is in a mess and frantically looking for places to dump people; were not managing to get as many decisions made every day as we need to.
Now, in theory, we could just fly people to Rwanda, a jetload a day or a week, and try to forget about them. If it takes ages for their claims to be processed, and they spill out from those lovely flats the Home Secretary went to visit, it's not our problem.
But that's not the story we are telling ourselves- is it?
But that's exactly what's happened in the UK. At the moment people are entering the pipeline faster that they can be processed so a backlog has built up and keeps building.
Yes, you're right, we could fly a jetload a day or a week to Rwanda and wait for them to be processed there. So long as Rwanda is OK with that (read: so long as we write them a big enough cheque), then that is entirely possible.
Yes a backlog will build up, but that's no different to having a backlog in this country that already exists today.
And as you said, the flow of boats across the Channel would stop if they knew they absolutely definitely would be sent to Rwanda, no ifs, no buts, no equivocation.
The policy works on its merits so long as its actually implemented. Not so long as the throughput is met, since the throughput already isn't met today so that's not new.
What you are describing is not the policy. The policy is not that absolutely definitely everyone is sent to Rwanda. The policy is that a small number of people are sent to Rwanda.
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
The whole process doesn't work unless there is some financial benefit to the banks of treating customers proportionately that is of a similar scale to these fines being imposed.
Perhaps the fines could be shared out amongst the banks who have got the balance best (although no idea how that would be calculated).
There needs to be an independent arbitrator, and a right of appeal.
Oh, and whoever at Coutts briefed the press about the financial details of a customer, needs to be struck off.
Breach of GDPR, isn’t it?
Anyone wanted anything on a customer of the bank - I would send them to Legal and/or Compliance. And that’s just internally.
Even stating that X has an account with you sounds like revealing personal information.
Yes but wouldn't be an excellent and amusing irony if Farage resorted to making a complaint that utilises GDPR? That said, though I hate the man, you do have a point, but then they might be OK because he went public, trying to turn his case into a publicity stunt (plus ca change), and they would claim their response was proportionate and justified.
If he wanted to get his own back he could make a "subject access request" under GDPR which would be a bit annoying for them.
I don't think that public spats are a justification for releasing GDPR privileged information - legally, that is.
There are other privacy rules that come into play. Coutts has definitely fucked up here, I think.
Surely a private bank says “we say nothing about anything” as a public statement? If there’s one reason you have a “private bank”, it’s that.
How many other Coutts customers now know that they’ll sh!t on you, if you sh!t on them in public?
They are paying, apparently, 1200 notes a year for what you get better for free everywhere else, and now that cheques are obsolete the one perk you get for that is history. Card readers can't tell Coutts from monzo. So they are probably all desperate to be outed in the press as Coutts customers, or at least former ones.
When they have to go and collect their money, they'll do it in a Fortnum and Mason bag?
Seems the FED are concerned for US inflation and the markets reacted badly yesterday at the prospect of ever higher interest rates in the US, EU, and UK which could see our base rate head towards 7%
This is any government's worst nightmare and certainly will see the conservatives lose to labour but what then ?
The conservative may tear themselves apart, indeed will if they go down the ERG right wing path, but the next 5 years are going to be more than challenging and especially for a labour government who for once faces the absolute of 'there is no money left'
It was interesting that labour have again said they may not be able to agree the teachers pay review body recommendations and it looks as if the public sector are not going to find it any easier to advance pay with labour
What a mess, and yes Johnson's toxic behaviour and Truss's debacle are centre to the political fray, but ultimately Brexit, covid and the war in Ukraine have combined to deliver a devastating blow to the UK economy and with the war in Ukraine and talk of threats to grain supplies, this could continue for a long time yet
Never mind - we have the cricket to look forward to - or do we ?
It isn't the 'ERG Right Wing Path' that the Tories might go down, its absolutely necessary that they do. Statist Blairism doesn't work - that it what we have at the moment. We need radical approaches to reducing the costs of the nation.
Cutting the state (and then taxes) is absolutely imperative. This will cause lots of whinging from comfortably off do-gooders who want their pet projects protected (much like Brexit did). But it has to happen.
It will either be forced as part of an IMF bailout, or voluntary under a proper Conservative Govt.
A nightmare on Downing Street!
Your idealogical panacea of no state intervention means the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. That ultimately results in totalitarian of one form or another, either by revolution or by counter-revolution.
Why can't we just try to make the mixed economy work for all of us?
No state intervention? What are you talking about. Cutting the state and allowing the private sector to grow is the solution.
The state is bigger than ever, the countryis broke with creditors demanding ever high premiums on loans, and we're likely heading for recession. How is that mixed economy working out for you?!
Privatisation you say. Thames Water says hello.
There you go again!
I didn't say privatisation. Letting the private sector grow. Getting rid of useless regulations. Reducing taxes. Reducing the civil service numbers (they've crept up to Brownite levels and beyond, I believe.
In order to present the case that a regulation poor private sector is broken, I have three words for you. West Bromwich Albion!
Adam Smith sussed it in 1776. Conspiracies of merchants to defraud the public.
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
Just because they handled £264M of cash from a dodgy jewellers in Oldham doesn't mean they need to be randomly closing other accounts. The regulator/courts need to start making it clear to banks that just because they have AML responsibilities doesn't mean they can start closing accounts willy nilly.
I believe some of them outsourced their auditing so there was an incentive to close a percentage of accounts just to show how much risk they'd saved the bank from being exposed to.
Have to say that SKS was presumably grateful for the interruption of his speech by protesters yesterday as it broke the tedium and made it vaguely newsworthy. He didn’t have that advantage on R4 in the morning and boy that was grim. Platitudes and generalities piled high with not a detail in sight. He’s going to be poor in the election campaign, possibly even worse than Sunak if you can imagine such a thing.
Though when he broke from the script to engage with the protestors he came over well. That bodes well for the unpredictability of a campaign.
I am no Starmer fan, and he is still rather an enigma to me. What does he actually want to do as PM? He seems to be both over-prepared and over timid.
On the other hand, he is wise not to interrupt a government bent on self destruction.
What does Sir K want to do? I think something like this: 1) Win the election from the social democrat centre left 2) Under promise both before and after the election 3) Blame the Tories (not hard) 4) See what can be done about the EU in a Swiss sort of way 5) Try to be a government with some integrity, honesty and competence, no quick fixes 6) See if a 10-15 year programme can engender a bit of hope and a sense of direction 7) Use the current mood to further regulate water, banks, rail etc 8) Stop some rich people's loopholes and rebalance the tax system.
He can't spend any money much because there isn't any. The above 8 items is enough when all your money is going on debt interest, pensions and NHS.
(5) seems wildly aspirational to me. When did we last have a government like that?
I think May tried to be a government with some integrity, honesty and competence, no quick fixes. At least as far as that's possible.
She failed fairly dismally- partly by not really being up to the job, partly because of the people in the tent pissing in, partly because the country rather likes quick fixes
The big question for Starmer is whether the UK is ready to accept that quick fixes aren't on the menu. I hope we are, but I'm not sure.
Looking back, May's position was impossible from the beginning, and then her own 2017 election campaign made it worse.
As a remainer PM after Brexit it was politically impossible to do a sane Brexit (a Swiss or Norway approach) because her own party would not let her, and Labour was too self interested to help. So she had to try to find a middle way, pleasing no-one. It is notable that the faction that made life impossible for her has nothing worthwhile to offer now.
May would be OK in OK times; Brexit made it impossible.
May had a majority in spring 2017, but what she wanted was a big enough majority in h
Have to say that SKS was presumably grateful for the interruption of his speech by protesters yesterday as it broke the tedium and made it vaguely newsworthy. He didn’t have that advantage on R4 in the morning and boy that was grim. Platitudes and generalities piled high with not a detail in sight. He’s going to be poor in the election campaign, possibly even worse than Sunak if you can imagine such a thing.
Though when he broke from the script to engage with the protestors he came over well. That bodes well for the unpredictability of a campaign.
I am no Starmer fan, and he is still rather an enigma to me. What does he actually want to do as PM? He seems to be both over-prepared and over timid.
On the other hand, he is wise not to interrupt a government bent on self destruction.
Starmer can think on his feet better than Sunak, which isn't surprising given his CV and how poor Sunak is at thinking on his feet. But unlike Blair in 1997 and for that matter even Trump in 2016 he's got practically no element of a new dawn in his offering, and practically no charisma. He doesn't even measure up to Kinnock.
All the Tories need to do is introduce a bit of new and tough in conflict into their presentation. That may well mean binning Sunak, and there may be a bit of a trouble there with him hanging onto the doorframe because he's rich - so get yer popcorn ready - but they seem to have managed OK in removing the last three prime ministers when they wanted to. And it doesn't even necessarily mean getting rid of Sunak. He is young, he is not bright but he's better than his three predecessors at listening to advice, and he can be repackaged. The Tories' biggest card is Rwanda, and they will play it when they think the time is right, which isn't yet. Labour haven't really got a card to play in response, other than to say be nice and hey this is a distraction, oh please please, listen to us. Too many pundits keep comparing with 1992 and 1997, but 2024 will probably be more like 2019.
I really don't think "Rwanda" is going to pull the Tories nuts out of the fire. All it does is remind voters of another failed soundbite policy of the government that didn't work.
If there isn’t an actual daily flight to Rwanda, full of boat arrivals, by the time of the election, then the policy is going to be seen as a failure by the electorate.
Nailed on then, as the policy is limited to 120. Not even half a plane full.
There is nothing preventing that 120 being lifted.
Its far from unprecedented when starting a new system to trial with a small number, then once the kinks are out to lift that number or even remove the cap altogether.
All you have to do is massively increase the capacity of the Rwandan legal system to process a planeful of asylum cases a day. Because the UK is going to process those cases properly, isn't it?
Oh, and you have to do it as a temporary surge. You will need all those assylum lawyers for a few weeks, but then the flow of boat people is going to fall to a trickle and they won't be needed any more.
The whole thing is a blag, and as Sandpit has pointed out, a number of right wing voters are going to be awfully unhappy when the blaginess of the scheme becomes clear.
Saying it's a policy drawn in crayon is an insult to toddlers who draw in crayon. They usually manage to get the number of arms and legs right. Sometimes the nose is even in roughly the right place.
Why would you need Rwanda to process them in a day? The UK doesn't process them in a day.
All you need is Rwanda to agree to house them and process them eventually, which is what the UK does already. No need for them to be processed within 24 hours of arrival.
That's a completely different matter. And as you say, then the flow will fall to a trickle and the planes won't be needed anymore.
Think of the asylum system as a pipeline. At the moment, people are entering that pipe at the rate of about 100 a day. Unless the flow through the narrowest part of the pipeline is about 100 a day, a backlog will build up and keep building. It's one of the reasons that the UK asylum system is in a mess and frantically looking for places to dump people; were not managing to get as many decisions made every day as we need to.
Now, in theory, we could just fly people to Rwanda, a jetload a day or a week, and try to forget about them. If it takes ages for their claims to be processed, and they spill out from those lovely flats the Home Secretary went to visit, it's not our problem.
But that's not the story we are telling ourselves- is it?
But that's exactly what's happened in the UK. At the moment people are entering the pipeline faster that they can be processed so a backlog has built up and keeps building.
Yes, you're right, we could fly a jetload a day or a week to Rwanda and wait for them to be processed there. So long as Rwanda is OK with that (read: so long as we write them a big enough cheque), then that is entirely possible.
Yes a backlog will build up, but that's no different to having a backlog in this country that already exists today.
And as you said, the flow of boats across the Channel would stop if they knew they absolutely definitely would be sent to Rwanda, no ifs, no buts, no equivocation.
The policy works on its merits so long as its actually implemented. Not so long as the throughput is met, since the throughput already isn't met today so that's not new.
What you are describing is not the policy. The policy is not that absolutely definitely everyone is sent to Rwanda. The policy is that a small number of people are sent to Rwanda.
The public understanding of the policy, is that everyone arriving by boat is sent to Rwanda.
That’s the measure, on which the government will be marked at the election.
(Yes, it’s going to be 1997 levels of Conservatives sitting on their hands).
Seems the FED are concerned for US inflation and the markets reacted badly yesterday at the prospect of ever higher interest rates in the US, EU, and UK which could see our base rate head towards 7%
This is any government's worst nightmare and certainly will see the conservatives lose to labour but what then ?
The conservative may tear themselves apart, indeed will if they go down the ERG right wing path, but the next 5 years are going to be more than challenging and especially for a labour government who for once faces the absolute of 'there is no money left'
It was interesting that labour have again said they may not be able to agree the teachers pay review body recommendations and it looks as if the public sector are not going to find it any easier to advance pay with labour
What a mess, and yes Johnson's toxic behaviour and Truss's debacle are centre to the political fray, but ultimately Brexit, covid and the war in Ukraine have combined to deliver a devastating blow to the UK economy and with the war in Ukraine and talk of threats to grain supplies, this could continue for a long time yet
Never mind - we have the cricket to look forward to - or do we ?
It isn't the 'ERG Right Wing Path' that the Tories might go down, its absolutely necessary that they do. Statist Blairism doesn't work - that it what we have at the moment. We need radical approaches to reducing the costs of the nation.
Cutting the state (and then taxes) is absolutely imperative. This will cause lots of whinging from comfortably off do-gooders who want their pet projects protected (much like Brexit did). But it has to happen.
It will either be forced as part of an IMF bailout, or voluntary under a proper Conservative Govt.
A nightmare on Downing Street!
Your idealogical panacea of no state intervention means the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. That ultimately results in totalitarian of one form or another, either by revolution or by counter-revolution.
Why can't we just try to make the mixed economy work for all of us?
No state intervention? What are you talking about. Cutting the state and allowing the private sector to grow is the solution.
The state is bigger than ever, the countryis broke with creditors demanding ever high premiums on loans, and we're likely heading for recession. How is that mixed economy working out for you?!
Privatisation you say. Thames Water says hello.
There you go again!
I didn't say privatisation. Letting the private sector grow. Getting rid of useless regulations. Reducing taxes. Reducing the civil service numbers (they've crept up to Brownite levels and beyond, I believe.
In order to present the case that a regulation poor private sector is broken, I have three words for you. West Bromwich Albion!
Adam Smith sussed it in 1776. Conspiracies of merchants to defraud the public.
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”
Have to say that SKS was presumably grateful for the interruption of his speech by protesters yesterday as it broke the tedium and made it vaguely newsworthy. He didn’t have that advantage on R4 in the morning and boy that was grim. Platitudes and generalities piled high with not a detail in sight. He’s going to be poor in the election campaign, possibly even worse than Sunak if you can imagine such a thing.
Though when he broke from the script to engage with the protestors he came over well. That bodes well for the unpredictability of a campaign.
I am no Starmer fan, and he is still rather an enigma to me. What does he actually want to do as PM? He seems to be both over-prepared and over timid.
On the other hand, he is wise not to interrupt a government bent on self destruction.
What does Sir K want to do? I think something like this: 1) Win the election from the social democrat centre left 2) Under promise both before and after the election 3) Blame the Tories (not hard) 4) See what can be done about the EU in a Swiss sort of way 5) Try to be a government with some integrity, honesty and competence, no quick fixes 6) See if a 10-15 year programme can engender a bit of hope and a sense of direction 7) Use the current mood to further regulate water, banks, rail etc 8) Stop some rich people's loopholes and rebalance the tax system.
He can't spend any money much because there isn't any. The above 8 items is enough when all your money is going on debt interest, pensions and NHS.
(5) seems wildly aspirational to me. When did we last have a government like that?
I think May tried to be a government with some integrity, honesty and competence, no quick fixes. At least as far as that's possible.
She failed fairly dismally- partly by not really being up to the job, partly because of the people in the tent pissing in, partly because the country rather likes quick fixes
The big question for Starmer is whether the UK is ready to accept that quick fixes aren't on the menu. I hope we are, but I'm not sure.
Looking back, May's position was impossible from the beginning, and then her own 2017 election campaign made it worse.
As a remainer PM after Brexit it was politically impossible to do a sane Brexit (a Swiss or Norway approach) because her own party would not let her, and Labour was too self interested to help. So she had to try to find a middle way, pleasing no-one. It is notable that the faction that made life impossible for her has nothing worthwhile to offer now.
May would be OK in OK times; Brexit made it impossible.
May had a majority in spring 2017, but what she wanted was a big enough majority in h
Have to say that SKS was presumably grateful for the interruption of his speech by protesters yesterday as it broke the tedium and made it vaguely newsworthy. He didn’t have that advantage on R4 in the morning and boy that was grim. Platitudes and generalities piled high with not a detail in sight. He’s going to be poor in the election campaign, possibly even worse than Sunak if you can imagine such a thing.
Though when he broke from the script to engage with the protestors he came over well. That bodes well for the unpredictability of a campaign.
I am no Starmer fan, and he is still rather an enigma to me. What does he actually want to do as PM? He seems to be both over-prepared and over timid.
On the other hand, he is wise not to interrupt a government bent on self destruction.
Starmer can think on his feet better than Sunak, which isn't surprising given his CV and how poor Sunak is at thinking on his feet. But unlike Blair in 1997 and for that matter even Trump in 2016 he's got practically no element of a new dawn in his offering, and practically no charisma. He doesn't even measure up to Kinnock.
All the Tories need to do is introduce a bit of new and tough in conflict into their presentation. That may well mean binning Sunak, and there may be a bit of a trouble there with him hanging onto the doorframe because he's rich - so get yer popcorn ready - but they seem to have managed OK in removing the last three prime ministers when they wanted to. And it doesn't even necessarily mean getting rid of Sunak. He is young, he is not bright but he's better than his three predecessors at listening to advice, and he can be repackaged. The Tories' biggest card is Rwanda, and they will play it when they think the time is right, which isn't yet. Labour haven't really got a card to play in response, other than to say be nice and hey this is a distraction, oh please please, listen to us. Too many pundits keep comparing with 1992 and 1997, but 2024 will probably be more like 2019.
I really don't think "Rwanda" is going to pull the Tories nuts out of the fire. All it does is remind voters of another failed soundbite policy of the government that didn't work.
If there isn’t an actual daily flight to Rwanda, full of boat arrivals, by the time of the election, then the policy is going to be seen as a failure by the electorate.
Nailed on then, as the policy is limited to 120. Not even half a plane full.
There is nothing preventing that 120 being lifted.
Its far from unprecedented when starting a new system to trial with a small number, then once the kinks are out to lift that number or even remove the cap altogether.
All you have to do is massively increase the capacity of the Rwandan legal system to process a planeful of asylum cases a day. Because the UK is going to process those cases properly, isn't it?
Oh, and you have to do it as a temporary surge. You will need all those assylum lawyers for a few weeks, but then the flow of boat people is going to fall to a trickle and they won't be needed any more.
The whole thing is a blag, and as Sandpit has pointed out, a number of right wing voters are going to be awfully unhappy when the blaginess of the scheme becomes clear.
Saying it's a policy drawn in crayon is an insult to toddlers who draw in crayon. They usually manage to get the number of arms and legs right. Sometimes the nose is even in roughly the right place.
Why would you need Rwanda to process them in a day? The UK doesn't process them in a day.
All you need is Rwanda to agree to house them and process them eventually, which is what the UK does already. No need for them to be processed within 24 hours of arrival.
That's a completely different matter. And as you say, then the flow will fall to a trickle and the planes won't be needed anymore.
Think of the asylum system as a pipeline. At the moment, people are entering that pipe at the rate of about 100 a day. Unless the flow through the narrowest part of the pipeline is about 100 a day, a backlog will build up and keep building. It's one of the reasons that the UK asylum system is in a mess and frantically looking for places to dump people; were not managing to get as many decisions made every day as we need to.
Now, in theory, we could just fly people to Rwanda, a jetload a day or a week, and try to forget about them. If it takes ages for their claims to be processed, and they spill out from those lovely flats the Home Secretary went to visit, it's not our problem.
But that's not the story we are telling ourselves- is it?
But that's exactly what's happened in the UK. At the moment people are entering the pipeline faster that they can be processed so a backlog has built up and keeps building.
Yes, you're right, we could fly a jetload a day or a week to Rwanda and wait for them to be processed there. So long as Rwanda is OK with that (read: so long as we write them a big enough cheque), then that is entirely possible.
Yes a backlog will build up, but that's no different to having a backlog in this country that already exists today.
And as you said, the flow of boats across the Channel would stop if they knew they absolutely definitely would be sent to Rwanda, no ifs, no buts, no equivocation.
The policy works on its merits so long as its actually implemented. Not so long as the throughput is met, since the throughput already isn't met today so that's not new.
What you are describing is not the policy. The policy is not that absolutely definitely everyone is sent to Rwanda. The policy is that a small number of people are sent to Rwanda.
Which brings us back full circle to what I said at the start.
It is perfectly normal when starting a new policy to start a trial with a small number of people.
If that trial and its legal issues can be navigated successfully, then the trial can be changed eventually to have that policy applied to everyone. Which would require of course a new budget attached to it that is different to the original trial budget.
The Rwanda policy can work if it it applies to everyone, and it can be applied to everyone if the legal issues are resolved and Rwanda agrees to it (read: is given a big enough cheque).
Whether its humane, a good idea, or the right thing to do is a completely different question. Many policies which can be done, should not be done. As Jeff Goldblum famously put it in that nature documentary from 1993, people "were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
The whole process doesn't work unless there is some financial benefit to the banks of treating customers proportionately that is of a similar scale to these fines being imposed.
Perhaps the fines could be shared out amongst the banks who have got the balance best (although no idea how that would be calculated).
There needs to be an independent arbitrator, and a right of appeal.
Oh, and whoever at Coutts briefed the press about the financial details of a customer, needs to be struck off.
Breach of GDPR, isn’t it?
Anyone wanted anything on a customer of the bank - I would send them to Legal and/or Compliance. And that’s just internally.
Even stating that X has an account with you sounds like revealing personal information.
Yes but wouldn't be an excellent and amusing irony if Farage resorted to making a complaint that utilises GDPR? That said, though I hate the man, you do have a point, but then they might be OK because he went public, trying to turn his case into a publicity stunt (plus ca change), and they would claim their response was proportionate and justified.
If he wanted to get his own back he could make a "subject access request" under GDPR which would be a bit annoying for them.
I don't think that public spats are a justification for releasing GDPR privileged information - legally, that is.
There are other privacy rules that come into play. Coutts has definitely fucked up here, I think.
Surely a private bank says “we say nothing about anything” as a public statement? If there’s one reason you have a “private bank”, it’s that.
How many other Coutts customers now know that they’ll sh!t on you, if you sh!t on them in public?
They are paying, apparently, 1200 notes a year for what you get better for free everywhere else, and now that cheques are obsolete the one perk you get for that is history. Card readers can't tell Coutts from monzo. So they are probably all desperate to be outed in the press as Coutts customers, or at least former ones.
Coutts is basically golf club bore bragging rights for people too gammony for Handelsbanken.
Danske Bank is better than Handelsbanken, though less exclusive, because they print their own bank notes:
Seems the FED are concerned for US inflation and the markets reacted badly yesterday at the prospect of ever higher interest rates in the US, EU, and UK which could see our base rate head towards 7%
This is any government's worst nightmare and certainly will see the conservatives lose to labour but what then ?
The conservative may tear themselves apart, indeed will if they go down the ERG right wing path, but the next 5 years are going to be more than challenging and especially for a labour government who for once faces the absolute of 'there is no money left'
It was interesting that labour have again said they may not be able to agree the teachers pay review body recommendations and it looks as if the public sector are not going to find it any easier to advance pay with labour
What a mess, and yes Johnson's toxic behaviour and Truss's debacle are centre to the political fray, but ultimately Brexit, covid and the war in Ukraine have combined to deliver a devastating blow to the UK economy and with the war in Ukraine and talk of threats to grain supplies, this could continue for a long time yet
Never mind - we have the cricket to look forward to - or do we ?
It isn't the 'ERG Right Wing Path' that the Tories might go down, its absolutely necessary that they do. Statist Blairism doesn't work - that it what we have at the moment. We need radical approaches to reducing the costs of the nation.
Cutting the state (and then taxes) is absolutely imperative. This will cause lots of whinging from comfortably off do-gooders who want their pet projects protected (much like Brexit did). But it has to happen.
It will either be forced as part of an IMF bailout, or voluntary under a proper Conservative Govt.
A nightmare on Downing Street!
Your idealogical panacea of no state intervention means the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. That ultimately results in totalitarian of one form or another, either by revolution or by counter-revolution.
Why can't we just try to make the mixed economy work for all of us?
No state intervention? What are you talking about. Cutting the state and allowing the private sector to grow is the solution.
The state is bigger than ever, the countryis broke with creditors demanding ever high premiums on loans, and we're likely heading for recession. How is that mixed economy working out for you?!
Privatisation you say. Thames Water says hello.
There you go again!
I didn't say privatisation. Letting the private sector grow. Getting rid of useless regulations. Reducing taxes. Reducing the civil service numbers (they've crept up to Brownite levels and beyond, I believe.
In order to present the case that a regulation poor private sector is broken, I have three words for you. West Bromwich Albion!
Adam Smith sussed it in 1776. Conspiracies of merchants to defraud the public.
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”
‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices’
Seems the FED are concerned for US inflation and the markets reacted badly yesterday at the prospect of ever higher interest rates in the US, EU, and UK which could see our base rate head towards 7%
This is any government's worst nightmare and certainly will see the conservatives lose to labour but what then ?
The conservative may tear themselves apart, indeed will if they go down the ERG right wing path, but the next 5 years are going to be more than challenging and especially for a labour government who for once faces the absolute of 'there is no money left'
It was interesting that labour have again said they may not be able to agree the teachers pay review body recommendations and it looks as if the public sector are not going to find it any easier to advance pay with labour
What a mess, and yes Johnson's toxic behaviour and Truss's debacle are centre to the political fray, but ultimately Brexit, covid and the war in Ukraine have combined to deliver a devastating blow to the UK economy and with the war in Ukraine and talk of threats to grain supplies, this could continue for a long time yet
Never mind - we have the cricket to look forward to - or do we ?
It isn't the 'ERG Right Wing Path' that the Tories might go down, its absolutely necessary that they do. Statist Blairism doesn't work - that it what we have at the moment. We need radical approaches to reducing the costs of the nation.
Cutting the state (and then taxes) is absolutely imperative. This will cause lots of whinging from comfortably off do-gooders who want their pet projects protected (much like Brexit did). But it has to happen.
It will either be forced as part of an IMF bailout, or voluntary under a proper Conservative Govt.
A nightmare on Downing Street!
Your idealogical panacea of no state intervention means the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. That ultimately results in totalitarian of one form or another, either by revolution or by counter-revolution.
Why can't we just try to make the mixed economy work for all of us?
No state intervention? What are you talking about. Cutting the state and allowing the private sector to grow is the solution.
The state is bigger than ever, the countryis broke with creditors demanding ever high premiums on loans, and we're likely heading for recession. How is that mixed economy working out for you?!
Privatisation you say. Thames Water says hello.
There you go again!
I didn't say privatisation. Letting the private sector grow. Getting rid of useless regulations. Reducing taxes. Reducing the civil service numbers (they've crept up to Brownite levels and beyond, I believe.
In order to present the case that a regulation poor private sector is broken, I have three words for you. West Bromwich Albion!
Adam Smith sussed it in 1776. Conspiracies of merchants to defraud the public.
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”
‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices’
@patrickkmaguire Labour lead at 25 points in latest YouGov poll for The Times
CON 22 (-2) LAB 47 (+1) LIB DEM 9 (-1) REF UK 9 (+1) GREEN 7 (=)
Fieldwork 5-6 July
Big 9% for Reform there for Sunak to squeeze by reducing the boats across the Channel in particular.
Indeed Reform now tied with the LDs for 3rd party on voteshare and ahead of the Greens
If you assume all of Ref, the LDs and Greens break Tory it'll be a very tight election.
I assume the Ref's may break to Con but the LDs and Greens will stick. There is a nasty part of my head that insists that Ref are the racist element of Con that can't cope with Sunak's skin colour and so will not necessarily return to Con Daddy at election, but I don't know if I'm right.
I was just trying to cheer HY up. Adding some spice to his assumption that ALL Refuk swing back to Con. and I fear you may have a point.
...Stating the obvious though it may be, and with caveats around who the hosts associate with, the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast has a good episode on diagnoses. Their focus is gender but they make the good point that if you go to see an Asperger's specialist it might easily turn out that you have Asperger's; if you go and see an Autism/ADHD/ADD/etc specialist it will turn out that you have those conditions...
@Topping, I missed this when I first read it. They are running into selection bias (right word?). People who see a specialist for X are not generated at random, they are people with a prior belief that they have X. Probabilistic statistics from this are therefore dubious.
To put it simply, people who go to a clinic for gunshot wounds are highly likely to be diagnosed with a gunshot wound. This is not nefarious overdiagnosis, it's a result of the fact that people without gunshot wounds don't go there in the first place.
I've noticed that tweets are back again without having signed on to twitter (or even being a member in my case). Presumably the protests reached even Musk, particularly with the advent of a potential competitor in nuclear war and the end of the world as we know it or Threads for short.
I think direct links work but you cannot just browse?
I'm sure it's been talked about before, but surely one unalloyed good of the Threads thing is the awareness being raised of the BBC TV film, Threads.
Still the most terrifying film I've ever seen. Genuinely brilliant.
yes it is strange that the "other" Threads didn't pop up during the brainstorming at Meta of what to call the damn thing.
I had not heard of this film until I think last year. It was a UK not a global thing (made by BBC). Cleggy is my ageish, 57 or so, so perhaps he as the UK consultant had also not heard of it.
Threads is also a very powerful software concept, e.g. multithreading. That'll be where it comes from: and orders of magnitude more people will know of it in that context rather than from an obscure BBC film from decades ago.
It’s also funny that they couldn’t buy the domain threads.com, and have to make do with threads.net.
I'm suprised they haven't registered a 'meta' or 'metaverse' TLD and used that for all sites. Maybe even Zuck is not daft enough for that.
Yes, absolutely.
I’ve actually been working with a customer this week who’s looking to purchase domains, and it’s now a total sh!t-show of TLD rent-seekers looking for $1k or $2k annual fees. It’s probably okay if you’ll be using the domain to run your business, but not for anyone looking to keep a personal domain safe from competitors.
Its actually quite a rubbish attempt by state of the art standards and the fact there is massive training dataset available for Martin Lewis, given he is never off the bloody telly.
Seems the FED are concerned for US inflation and the markets reacted badly yesterday at the prospect of ever higher interest rates in the US, EU, and UK which could see our base rate head towards 7%
This is any government's worst nightmare and certainly will see the conservatives lose to labour but what then ?
The conservative may tear themselves apart, indeed will if they go down the ERG right wing path, but the next 5 years are going to be more than challenging and especially for a labour government who for once faces the absolute of 'there is no money left'
It was interesting that labour have again said they may not be able to agree the teachers pay review body recommendations and it looks as if the public sector are not going to find it any easier to advance pay with labour
What a mess, and yes Johnson's toxic behaviour and Truss's debacle are centre to the political fray, but ultimately Brexit, covid and the war in Ukraine have combined to deliver a devastating blow to the UK economy and with the war in Ukraine and talk of threats to grain supplies, this could continue for a long time yet
Never mind - we have the cricket to look forward to - or do we ?
It isn't the 'ERG Right Wing Path' that the Tories might go down, its absolutely necessary that they do. Statist Blairism doesn't work - that it what we have at the moment. We need radical approaches to reducing the costs of the nation.
Cutting the state (and then taxes) is absolutely imperative. This will cause lots of whinging from comfortably off do-gooders who want their pet projects protected (much like Brexit did). But it has to happen.
It will either be forced as part of an IMF bailout, or voluntary under a proper Conservative Govt.
A nightmare on Downing Street!
Your idealogical panacea of no state intervention means the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. That ultimately results in totalitarian of one form or another, either by revolution or by counter-revolution.
Why can't we just try to make the mixed economy work for all of us?
No state intervention? What are you talking about. Cutting the state and allowing the private sector to grow is the solution.
The state is bigger than ever, the countryis broke with creditors demanding ever high premiums on loans, and we're likely heading for recession. How is that mixed economy working out for you?!
Privatisation you say. Thames Water says hello.
There you go again!
I didn't say privatisation. Letting the private sector grow. Getting rid of useless regulations. Reducing taxes. Reducing the civil service numbers (they've crept up to Brownite levels and beyond, I believe.
In order to present the case that a regulation poor private sector is broken, I have three words for you. West Bromwich Albion!
Adam Smith sussed it in 1776. Conspiracies of merchants to defraud the public.
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”
‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices’
… as you were saying
Actually there seem to be two opinions about that quote,
...Stating the obvious though it may be, and with caveats around who the hosts associate with, the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast has a good episode on diagnoses. Their focus is gender but they make the good point that if you go to see an Asperger's specialist it might easily turn out that you have Asperger's; if you go and see an Autism/ADHD/ADD/etc specialist it will turn out that you have those conditions...
The symptomless coma is a growing problem, as highlighted in this documentary:
Another Spanish poll shows the PP lead grow slightly with some signs that Box may be being squeezed. Still unlikely that any one party will reach the magic 176 but equally the left parties remain behind the right parties!
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
The whole process doesn't work unless there is some financial benefit to the banks of treating customers proportionately that is of a similar scale to these fines being imposed.
Perhaps the fines could be shared out amongst the banks who have got the balance best (although no idea how that would be calculated).
There needs to be an independent arbitrator, and a right of appeal.
Oh, and whoever at Coutts briefed the press about the financial details of a customer, needs to be struck off.
Breach of GDPR, isn’t it?
Anyone wanted anything on a customer of the bank - I would send them to Legal and/or Compliance. And that’s just internally.
Even stating that X has an account with you sounds like revealing personal information.
Yes but wouldn't be an excellent and amusing irony if Farage resorted to making a complaint that utilises GDPR? That said, though I hate the man, you do have a point, but then they might be OK because he went public, trying to turn his case into a publicity stunt (plus ca change), and they would claim their response was proportionate and justified.
If he wanted to get his own back he could make a "subject access request" under GDPR which would be a bit annoying for them.
I don't think that public spats are a justification for releasing GDPR privileged information - legally, that is.
There are other privacy rules that come into play. Coutts has definitely fucked up here, I think.
I am not so sure. They have a defence that he made a public accusation that was misleading and would be deleterious to their reputation and business. If he was not eligible to have an account and yet he was claiming that he was denied it for political reasons (usual Farage bullshit) then I think it reasonable that they give a public reason for his account to be closed. I suspect they thought "fuck him, let him sue"
Are you in finance?
If so, be careful - "I think it reasonable" is a justification th
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
Just because they handled £264M of cash from a dodgy jewellers in Oldham doesn't mean they need to be randomly closing other accounts. The regulator/courts need to start making it clear to banks that just because they have AML responsibilities doesn't mean they can start closing accounts willy nilly.
I believe some of them outsourced their auditing so there was an incentive to close a percentage of accounts just to show how much risk they'd saved the bank from being exposed to.
In one, semi-startup, that I worked at, they instituted a Data Security department.
It became clear, rather rapidly, that Data Security would stop the operation of the company - because doing anything has a *risk* of leaking data. So from their point of view, stop everything was the best solution.
Their mandate and leadership were rapidly amended.
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
The whole process doesn't work unless there is some financial benefit to the banks of treating customers proportionately that is of a similar scale to these fines being imposed.
Perhaps the fines could be shared out amongst the banks who have got the balance best (although no idea how that would be calculated).
There needs to be an independent arbitrator, and a right of appeal.
Oh, and whoever at Coutts briefed the press about the financial details of a customer, needs to be struck off.
Breach of GDPR, isn’t it?
Anyone wanted anything on a customer of the bank - I would send them to Legal and/or Compliance. And that’s just internally.
Even stating that X has an account with you sounds like revealing personal information.
Yes but wouldn't be an excellent and amusing irony if Farage resorted to making a complaint that utilises GDPR? That said, though I hate the man, you do have a point, but then they might be OK because he went public, trying to turn his case into a publicity stunt (plus ca change), and they would claim their response was proportionate and justified.
If he wanted to get his own back he could make a "subject access request" under GDPR which would be a bit annoying for them.
I don't think that public spats are a justification for releasing GDPR privileged information - legally, that is.
There are other privacy rules that come into play. Coutts has definitely fucked up here, I think.
Surely a private bank says “we say nothing about anything” as a public statement? If there’s one reason you have a “private bank”, it’s that.
How many other Coutts customers now know that they’ll sh!t on you, if you sh!t on them in public?
They are paying, apparently, 1200 notes a year for what you get better for free everywhere else, and now that cheques are obsolete the one perk you get for that is history. Card readers can't tell Coutts from monzo. So they are probably all desperate to be outed in the press as Coutts customers, or at least former ones.
Says it is free if you have £0.5m with them and are UK domiciled. They are closing people down for having less than £3m so doubt many UK peeps paying the quartely fees.
...Stating the obvious though it may be, and with caveats around who the hosts associate with, the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast has a good episode on diagnoses. Their focus is gender but they make the good point that if you go to see an Asperger's specialist it might easily turn out that you have Asperger's; if you go and see an Autism/ADHD/ADD/etc specialist it will turn out that you have those conditions...
The symptomless coma is a growing problem, as highlighted in this documentary:
Its actually quite a rubbish attempt by state of the art standards and the fact there is massive training dataset available for Martin Lewis, given he is never off the bloody telly.
Boris should have gone for the party videos were all deepfakes by the dodgy pizza restaurant angle. Trump probably will.
@patrickkmaguire Labour lead at 25 points in latest YouGov poll for The Times
CON 22 (-2) LAB 47 (+1) LIB DEM 9 (-1) REF UK 9 (+1) GREEN 7 (=)
Fieldwork 5-6 July
Getting a bit Trussy.
With bad news to come, including by-election thrashings, the political narrative may become a death spiral.
The Tory problem now has become Sunak. He has been weighed and measured by the electorate, and found to be completely immature and lightweight Primeminister.
The good news for the Tories from this yougov poll is there’s no Dutch Salute, Lab up to 47 lid Dem down to 9, the opposite of the salute. As HY will correctly say, If that happens on election night it’s a great night for Sunak as he will have more MPs than Major and Hague.
Remember the MoonRabbit polling maxim: It’s not just the size of your LLG (63%) it’s what you do with it.
Quite a few double entendre and innuendo laden posts of late, ooh Mrs! Are you the ghost of Frankie Howard?
If you want double entendres, I’m happy to give you one.
@patrickkmaguire Labour lead at 25 points in latest YouGov poll for The Times
CON 22 (-2) LAB 47 (+1) LIB DEM 9 (-1) REF UK 9 (+1) GREEN 7 (=)
Fieldwork 5-6 July
Getting a bit Trussy.
With bad news to come, including by-election thrashings, the political narrative may become a death spiral.
The Tory problem now has become Sunak. He has been weighed and measured by the electorate, and found to be completely immature and lightweight Primeminister.
The good news for the Tories from this yougov poll is there’s no Dutch Salute, Lab up to 47 lid Dem down to 9, the opposite of the salute. As HY will correctly say, If that happens on election night it’s a great night for Sunak as he will have more MPs than Major and Hague.
Remember the MoonRabbit polling maxim: It’s not just the size of your LLG (63%) it’s what you do with it.
Quite a few double entendre and innuendo laden posts of late, ooh Mrs! Are you the ghost of Frankie Howard?
If you want double entendres, I’m happy to give you one.
Another Spanish poll shows the PP lead grow slightly with some signs that Box may be being squeezed. Still unlikely that any one party will reach the magic 176 but equally the left parties remain behind the right parties!
Box or Vox? My son's father-in-law explained that b and v are indistinguishable in pronunciation - baca/vaca . . . bienes/vienes etc
Have to say that SKS was presumably grateful for the interruption of his speech by protesters yesterday as it broke the tedium and made it vaguely newsworthy. He didn’t have that advantage on R4 in the morning and boy that was grim. Platitudes and generalities piled high with not a detail in sight. He’s going to be poor in the election campaign, possibly even worse than Sunak if you can imagine such a thing.
Though when he broke from the script to engage with the protestors he came over well. That bodes well for the unpredictability of a campaign.
I am no Starmer fan, and he is still rather an enigma to me. What does he actually want to do as PM? He seems to be both over-prepared and over timid.
On the other hand, he is wise not to interrupt a government bent on self destruction.
What does Sir K want to do? I think something like this: 1) Win the election from the social democrat centre left 2) Under promise both before and after the election 3) Blame the Tories (not hard) 4) See what can be done about the EU in a Swiss sort of way 5) Try to be a government with some integrity, honesty and competence, no quick fixes 6) See if a 10-15 year programme can engender a bit of hope and a sense of direction 7) Use the current mood to further regulate water, banks, rail etc 8) Stop some rich people's loopholes and rebalance the tax system.
He can't spend any money much because there isn't any. The above 8 items is enough when all your money is going on debt interest, pensions and NHS.
(5) seems wildly aspirational to me. When did we last have a government like that?
I think May tried to be a government with some integrity, honesty and competence, no quick fixes. At least as far as that's possible.
She failed fairly dismally- partly by not really being up to the job, partly because of the people in the tent pissing in, partly because the country rather likes quick fixes
The big question for Starmer is whether the UK is ready to accept that quick fixes aren't on the menu. I hope we are, but I'm not sure.
Looking back, May's position was impossible from the beginning, and then her own 2017 election campaign made it worse.
As a remainer PM after Brexit it was politically impossible to do a sane Brexit (a Swiss or Norway approach) because her own party would not let her, and Labour was too self interested to help. So she had to try to find a middle way, pleasing no-one. It is notable that the faction that made life impossible for her has nothing worthwhile to offer now.
May would be OK in OK times; Brexit made it impossible.
May had a majority in spring 2017, but what she wanted was a big enough majority in h
Have to say that SKS was presumably grateful for the interruption of his speech by protesters yesterday as it broke the tedium and made it vaguely newsworthy. He didn’t have that advantage on R4 in the morning and boy that was grim. Platitudes and generalities piled high with not a detail in sight. He’s going to be poor in the election campaign, possibly even worse than Sunak if you can imagine such a thing.
Though when he broke from the script to engage with the protestors he came over well. That bodes well for the unpredictability of a campaign.
I am no Starmer fan, and he is still rather an enigma to me. What does he actually want to do as PM? He seems to be both over-prepared and over timid.
On the other hand, he is wise not to interrupt a government bent on self destruction.
Starmer can think on his feet better than Sunak, which isn't surprising given his CV and how poor Sunak is at thinking on his feet. But unlike Blair in 1997 and for that matter even Trump in 2016 he's got practically no element of a new dawn in his offering, and practically no charisma. He doesn't even measure up to Kinnock.
All the Tories need to do is introduce a bit of new and tough in conflict into their presentation. That may well mean binning Sunak, and there may be a bit of a trouble there with him hanging onto the doorframe because he's rich - so get yer popcorn ready - but they seem to have managed OK in removing the last three prime ministers when they wanted to. And it doesn't even necessarily mean getting rid of Sunak. He is young, he is not bright but he's better than his three predecessors at listening to advice, and he can be repackaged. The Tories' biggest card is Rwanda, and they will play it when they think the time is right, which isn't yet. Labour haven't really got a card to play in response, other than to say be nice and hey this is a distraction, oh please please, listen to us. Too many pundits keep comparing with 1992 and 1997, but 2024 will probably be more like 2019.
I really don't think "Rwanda" is going to pull the Tories nuts out of the fire. All it does is remind voters of another failed soundbite policy of the government that didn't work.
If there isn’t an actual daily flight to Rwanda, full of boat arrivals, by the time of the election, then the policy is going to be seen as a failure by the electorate.
Nailed on then, as the policy is limited to 120. Not even half a plane full.
There is nothing preventing that 120 being lifted.
Its far from unprecedented when starting a new system to trial with a small number, then once the kinks are out to lift that number or even remove the cap altogether.
All you have to do is massively increase the capacity of the Rwandan legal system to process a planeful of asylum cases a day. Because the UK is going to process those cases properly, isn't it?
Oh, and you have to do it as a temporary surge. You will need all those assylum lawyers for a few weeks, but then the flow of boat people is going to fall to a trickle and they won't be needed any more.
The whole thing is a blag, and as Sandpit has pointed out, a number of right wing voters are going to be awfully unhappy when the blaginess of the scheme becomes clear.
Saying it's a policy drawn in crayon is an insult to toddlers who draw in crayon. They usually manage to get the number of arms and legs right. Sometimes the nose is even in roughly the right place.
Why would you need Rwanda to process them in a day? The UK doesn't process them in a day.
All you need is Rwanda to agree to house them and process them eventually, which is what the UK does already. No need for them to be processed within 24 hours of arrival.
That's a completely different matter. And as you say, then the flow will fall to a trickle and the planes won't be needed anymore.
Think of the asylum system as a pipeline. At the moment, people are entering that pipe at the rate of about 100 a day. Unless the flow through the narrowest part of the pipeline is about 100 a day, a backlog will build up and keep building. It's one of the reasons that the UK asylum system is in a mess and frantically looking for places to dump people; were not managing to get as many decisions made every day as we need to.
Now, in theory, we could just fly people to Rwanda, a jetload a day or a week, and try to forget about them. If it takes ages for their claims to be processed, and they spill out from those lovely flats the Home Secretary went to visit, it's not our problem.
But that's not the story we are telling ourselves- is it?
But that's exactly what's happened in the UK. At the moment people are entering the pipeline faster that they can be processed so a backlog has built up and keeps building.
Yes, you're right, we could fly a jetload a day or a week to Rwanda and wait for them to be processed there. So long as Rwanda is OK with that (read: so long as we write them a big enough cheque), then that is entirely possible.
Yes a backlog will build up, but that's no different to having a backlog in this country that already exists today.
And as you said, the flow of boats across the Channel would stop if they knew they absolutely definitely would be sent to Rwanda, no ifs, no buts, no equivocation.
The policy works on its merits so long as its actually implemented. Not so long as the throughput is met, since the throughput already isn't met today so that's not new.
What you are describing is not the policy. The policy is not that absolutely definitely everyone is sent to Rwanda. The policy is that a small number of people are sent to Rwanda.
Which brings us back full circle to what I said at the start.
It is perfectly normal when starting a new policy to start a trial with a small number of people.
If that trial and its legal issues can be navigated successfully, then the trial can be changed eventually to have that policy applied to everyone. Which would require of course a new budget attached to it that is different to the original trial budget.
The Rwanda policy can work if it it applies to everyone, and it can be applied to everyone if the legal issues are resolved and Rwanda agrees to it (read: is given a big enough cheque).
Whether its humane, a good idea, or the right thing to do is a completely different question. Many policies which can be done, should not be done. As Jeff Goldblum famously put it in that nature documentary from 1993, people "were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
It is perfectly normal when starting a new policy to start a trial with a small number of people. In such a case, you say this is a trial with a small number of people, but the plan is to apply it to X people if the trial is successful. The Government has not, as far as I understand it, said this. It’s policy is that “some” people will be sent to Rwanda.
Have to say that SKS was presumably grateful for the interruption of his speech by protesters yesterday as it broke the tedium and made it vaguely newsworthy. He didn’t have that advantage on R4 in the morning and boy that was grim. Platitudes and generalities piled high with not a detail in sight. He’s going to be poor in the election campaign, possibly even worse than Sunak if you can imagine such a thing.
Though when he broke from the script to engage with the protestors he came over well. That bodes well for the unpredictability of a campaign.
I am no Starmer fan, and he is still rather an enigma to me. What does he actually want to do as PM? He seems to be both over-prepared and over timid.
On the other hand, he is wise not to interrupt a government bent on self destruction.
What does Sir K want to do? I think something like this: 1) Win the election from the social democrat centre left 2) Under promise both before and after the election 3) Blame the Tories (not hard) 4) See what can be done about the EU in a Swiss sort of way 5) Try to be a government with some integrity, honesty and competence, no quick fixes 6) See if a 10-15 year programme can engender a bit of hope and a sense of direction 7) Use the current mood to further regulate water, banks, rail etc 8) Stop some rich people's loopholes and rebalance the tax system.
He can't spend any money much because there isn't any. The above 8 items is enough when all your money is going on debt interest, pensions and NHS.
(5) seems wildly aspirational to me. When did we last have a government like that?
I think May tried to be a government with some integrity, honesty and competence, no quick fixes. At least as far as that's possible.
She failed fairly dismally- partly by not really being up to the job, partly because of the people in the tent pissing in, partly because the country rather likes quick fixes
The big question for Starmer is whether the UK is ready to accept that quick fixes aren't on the menu. I hope we are, but I'm not sure.
Looking back, May's position was impossible from the beginning, and then her own 2017 election campaign made it worse.
As a remainer PM after Brexit it was politically impossible to do a sane Brexit (a Swiss or Norway approach) because her own party would not let her, and Labour was too self interested to help. So she had to try to find a middle way, pleasing no-one. It is notable that the faction that made life impossible for her has nothing worthwhile to offer now.
May would be OK in OK times; Brexit made it impossible.
May had a majority in spring 2017, but what she wanted was a big enough majority in h
Have to say that SKS was presumably grateful for the interruption of his speech by protesters yesterday as it broke the tedium and made it vaguely newsworthy. He didn’t have that advantage on R4 in the morning and boy that was grim. Platitudes and generalities piled high with not a detail in sight. He’s going to be poor in the election campaign, possibly even worse than Sunak if you can imagine such a thing.
Though when he broke from the script to engage with the protestors he came over well. That bodes well for the unpredictability of a campaign.
I am no Starmer fan, and he is still rather an enigma to me. What does he actually want to do as PM? He seems to be both over-prepared and over timid.
On the other hand, he is wise not to interrupt a government bent on self destruction.
Starmer can think on his feet better than Sunak, which isn't surprising given his CV and how poor Sunak is at thinking on his feet. But unlike Blair in 1997 and for that matter even Trump in 2016 he's got practically no element of a new dawn in his offering, and practically no charisma. He doesn't even measure up to Kinnock.
All the Tories need to do is introduce a bit of new and tough in conflict into their presentation. That may well mean binning Sunak, and there may be a bit of a trouble there with him hanging onto the doorframe because he's rich - so get yer popcorn ready - but they seem to have managed OK in removing the last three prime ministers when they wanted to. And it doesn't even necessarily mean getting rid of Sunak. He is young, he is not bright but he's better than his three predecessors at listening to advice, and he can be repackaged. The Tories' biggest card is Rwanda, and they will play it when they think the time is right, which isn't yet. Labour haven't really got a card to play in response, other than to say be nice and hey this is a distraction, oh please please, listen to us. Too many pundits keep comparing with 1992 and 1997, but 2024 will probably be more like 2019.
I really don't think "Rwanda" is going to pull the Tories nuts out of the fire. All it does is remind voters of another failed soundbite policy of the government that didn't work.
If there isn’t an actual daily flight to Rwanda, full of boat arrivals, by the time of the election, then the policy is going to be seen as a failure by the electorate.
Nailed on then, as the policy is limited to 120. Not even half a plane full.
There is nothing preventing that 120 being lifted.
Its far from unprecedented when starting a new system to trial with a small number, then once the kinks are out to lift that number or even remove the cap altogether.
All you have to do is massively increase the capacity of the Rwandan legal system to process a planeful of asylum cases a day. Because the UK is going to process those cases properly, isn't it?
Oh, and you have to do it as a temporary surge. You will need all those assylum lawyers for a few weeks, but then the flow of boat people is going to fall to a trickle and they won't be needed any more.
The whole thing is a blag, and as Sandpit has pointed out, a number of right wing voters are going to be awfully unhappy when the blaginess of the scheme becomes clear.
Saying it's a policy drawn in crayon is an insult to toddlers who draw in crayon. They usually manage to get the number of arms and legs right. Sometimes the nose is even in roughly the right place.
Why would you need Rwanda to process them in a day? The UK doesn't process them in a day.
All you need is Rwanda to agree to house them and process them eventually, which is what the UK does already. No need for them to be processed within 24 hours of arrival.
That's a completely different matter. And as you say, then the flow will fall to a trickle and the planes won't be needed anymore.
Think of the asylum system as a pipeline. At the moment, people are entering that pipe at the rate of about 100 a day. Unless the flow through the narrowest part of the pipeline is about 100 a day, a backlog will build up and keep building. It's one of the reasons that the UK asylum system is in a mess and frantically looking for places to dump people; were not managing to get as many decisions made every day as we need to.
Now, in theory, we could just fly people to Rwanda, a jetload a day or a week, and try to forget about them. If it takes ages for their claims to be processed, and they spill out from those lovely flats the Home Secretary went to visit, it's not our problem.
But that's not the story we are telling ourselves- is it?
But that's exactly what's happened in the UK. At the moment people are entering the pipeline faster that they can be processed so a backlog has built up and keeps building.
Yes, you're right, we could fly a jetload a day or a week to Rwanda and wait for them to be processed there. So long as Rwanda is OK with that (read: so long as we write them a big enough cheque), then that is entirely possible.
Yes a backlog will build up, but that's no different to having a backlog in this country that already exists today.
And as you said, the flow of boats across the Channel would stop if they knew they absolutely definitely would be sent to Rwanda, no ifs, no buts, no equivocation.
The policy works on its merits so long as its actually implemented. Not so long as the throughput is met, since the throughput already isn't met today so that's not new.
What you are describing is not the policy. The policy is not that absolutely definitely everyone is sent to Rwanda. The policy is that a small number of people are sent to Rwanda.
Which brings us back full circle to what I said at the start.
It is perfectly normal when starting a new policy to start a trial with a small number of people.
If that trial and its legal issues can be navigated successfully, then the trial can be changed eventually to have that policy applied to everyone. Which would require of course a new budget attached to it that is different to the original trial budget.
The Rwanda policy can work if it it applies to everyone, and it can be applied to everyone if the legal issues are resolved and Rwanda agrees to it (read: is given a big enough cheque).
Whether its humane, a good idea, or the right thing to do is a completely different question. Many policies which can be done, should not be done. As Jeff Goldblum famously put it in that nature documentary from 1993, people "were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
It is perfectly normal when starting a new policy to start a trial with a small number of people. In such a case, you say this is a trial with a small number of people, but the plan is to apply it to X people if the trial is successful. The Government has not, as far as I understand it, said this. It’s policy is that “some” people will be sent to Rwanda.
Until people are being sent and the legal issues have been resolved, what's the point in saying any more yet? The cap has not become an issue yet.
When Australia implemented the same policy, they underwent the same path. It was initially a policy for some, the legal issues were resolved, then once the policy was running it was changed to say "this applies to everyone now" (with commensurate payment to the recipient nation) at which point the boats stopped.
There's no reason the UK can't follow the same path. Whether it should is another matter, but claiming the policy can't work is just nonsense. It can work, whether it should is another matter.
PS there's a good reason not to say it would apply to all yet, which is that would require Rwanda's consent, which would require making a bigger payment to them. If you want to implement the policy and the legal issues have been resolved then making that payment is a matter that can work with policy, but there's no reason to trigger that prematurely.
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
The whole process doesn't work unless there is some financial benefit to the banks of treating customers proportionately that is of a similar scale to these fines being imposed.
Perhaps the fines could be shared out amongst the banks who have got the balance best (although no idea how that would be calculated).
There needs to be an independent arbitrator, and a right of appeal.
Oh, and whoever at Coutts briefed the press about the financial details of a customer, needs to be struck off.
Breach of GDPR, isn’t it?
Anyone wanted anything on a customer of the bank - I would send them to Legal and/or Compliance. And that’s just internally.
Even stating that X has an account with you sounds like revealing personal information.
Yes but wouldn't be an excellent and amusing irony if Farage resorted to making a complaint that utilises GDPR? That said, though I hate the man, you do have a point, but then they might be OK because he went public, trying to turn his case into a publicity stunt (plus ca change), and they would claim their response was proportionate and justified.
If he wanted to get his own back he could make a "subject access request" under GDPR which would be a bit annoying for them.
I don't think that public spats are a justification for releasing GDPR privileged information - legally, that is.
There are other privacy rules that come into play. Coutts has definitely fucked up here, I think.
I am not so sure. They have a defence that he made a public accusation that was misleading and would be deleterious to their reputation and business. If he was not eligible to have an account and yet he was claiming that he was denied it for political reasons (usual Farage bullshit) then I think it reasonable that they give a public reason for his account to be closed. I suspect they thought "fuck him, let him sue"
The legitimate interests justification might stretch far enough. Would be an interesting point of law, imho. Did Coutts specifically state that Farage did not meet their wealth criteria, or were they a bit more vague?
ETA: Googling shows a random twitterer (claims to be barrister and director at ICDR) thinks similar: https://twitter.com/SamFowles/status/1676829553149263877 saying Re. Farage/Coutts and “confidentiality”/gdpr: 1. It’s not clear that Coutts shared anything other than its policy - which is public information. 2. If it did, it was arguably entitled to do so per 6(1)(f) UKGDPR because it had a legitimate interest in rebutting (potentially defamatory) misinformation spread by Farage. 3. 6(1)(f) requires balancing the rights of the subject (Farage) against those of the controller (Coutts). 4. Farage didn’t put Coutts’ name in the public domain but it was *in the public domain as a result of Farage’s actions.* 5. There is a reasonable expectation that, if you spread misinformation about a brand using your own personal data, it may be corrected. 6. The legal principle of ex turpi causa non oritur actio likely applies - Farage is not entitled to benefit in law from his own wrong act. In other words - you can’t sue someone if you brought it on yourself. 7. Saying “I defamed Coutts because they wouldn’t give me special treatment and I want to sue them because they corrected me” is a case unlikely to pass the laugh test.
E2TA: I'd assume that Coutts took legal advice before making their statement. But 'legitimate' is one of those 'reasonable' type words. Open to a lot of interpretation.
I've noticed that tweets are back again without having signed on to twitter (or even being a member in my case). Presumably the protests reached even Musk, particularly with the advent of a potential competitor in nuclear war and the end of the world as we know it or Threads for short.
What are the reporting deadlines for this stuff? Is it possible that the SNP reporting is incomplete and/or late? Given their accounts situation, this seems possible.
Only donations over £500 are reported. So these stories miss out the thousands of 5 quid monthly direct debits the SNP are likely receiving.
"‘There’s nothing like face to face’: Darlington reacts to ticket office closures In Darlington, a town steeped in rail history, teenage and elderly rail passengers agree nothing beats talking to a human"
@patrickkmaguire Labour lead at 25 points in latest YouGov poll for The Times
CON 22 (-2) LAB 47 (+1) LIB DEM 9 (-1) REF UK 9 (+1) GREEN 7 (=)
Fieldwork 5-6 July
Getting a bit Trussy.
With bad news to come, including by-election thrashings, the political narrative may become a death spiral.
The Tory problem now has become Sunak. He has been weighed and measured by the electorate, and found to be completely immature and lightweight Primeminister.
The good news for the Tories from this yougov poll is there’s no Dutch Salute, Lab up to 47 lid Dem down to 9, the opposite of the salute. As HY will correctly say, If that happens on election night it’s a great night for Sunak as he will have more MPs than Major and Hague.
Remember the MoonRabbit polling maxim: It’s not just the size of your LLG (63%) it’s what you do with it.
Quite a few double entendre and innuendo laden posts of late, ooh Mrs! Are you the ghost of Frankie Howard?
If you want double entendres, I’m happy to give you one.
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
The whole process doesn't work unless there is some financial benefit to the banks of treating customers proportionately that is of a similar scale to these fines being imposed.
Perhaps the fines could be shared out amongst the banks who have got the balance best (although no idea how that would be calculated).
There needs to be an independent arbitrator, and a right of appeal.
Oh, and whoever at Coutts briefed the press about the financial details of a customer, needs to be struck off.
Breach of GDPR, isn’t it?
Anyone wanted anything on a customer of the bank - I would send them to Legal and/or Compliance. And that’s just internally.
Even stating that X has an account with you sounds like revealing personal information.
Yes but wouldn't be an excellent and amusing irony if Farage resorted to making a complaint that utilises GDPR? That said, though I hate the man, you do have a point, but then they might be OK because he went public, trying to turn his case into a publicity stunt (plus ca change), and they would claim their response was proportionate and justified.
If he wanted to get his own back he could make a "subject access request" under GDPR which would be a bit annoying for them.
I don't think that public spats are a justification for releasing GDPR privileged information - legally, that is.
There are other privacy rules that come into play. Coutts has definitely fucked up here, I think.
I am not so sure. They have a defence that he made a public accusation that was misleading and would be deleterious to their reputation and business. If he was not eligible to have an account and yet he was claiming that he was denied it for political reasons (usual Farage bullshit) then I think it reasonable that they give a public reason for his account to be closed. I suspect they thought "fuck him, let him sue"
The legitimate interests justification might stretch far enough. Would be an interesting point of law, imho. Did Coutts specifically state that Farage did not meet their wealth criteria, or were they a bit more vague?
On this matter, Will Dunn in the Staggers email today says:
"Why are the country's most senior politicians interested in which part of the NatWest Group gives Nigel Farage a bank account?
One answer is that MPs and peers hate the PEP regime. The UK, following retained EU law to combat money laundering and corruption, treats domestic and foreign PEPs equally. This means the finances of anyone who is “entrusted with prominent public functions” faces extra financial scrutiny, as do their families, “known close associates” and anyone with whom they have “close business relations”. MPs such as Charles Walker have fulminated for years against the “intrusive” financial oversight banks apply to MPs’ kids, colleagues and aged parents (not to mention potential party donors).
There plenty of people in Westminster, then, who would like to see the rules on domestic PEPs relaxed. Sources say it’s not unreasonable to suggest that this is why Farage’s downgrading to a NatWest Everyday Basic Scrimper has been deemed of such high importance."
and
"Can MPs change the PEP regime? Perhaps – but before banks change their procedures, they would want the government to indemnify them against the failure to uphold international regulations, and investors might take a dim view of a country deciding to weaken its own defences against corruption. This creates the potential for a very expensive mistake."
...Stating the obvious though it may be, and with caveats around who the hosts associate with, the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast has a good episode on diagnoses. Their focus is gender but they make the good point that if you go to see an Asperger's specialist it might easily turn out that you have Asperger's; if you go and see an Autism/ADHD/ADD/etc specialist it will turn out that you have those conditions...
@Topping, I missed this when I first read it. They are running into selection bias (right word?). People who see a specialist for X are not generated at random, they are people with a prior belief that they have X. Probabilistic statistics from this are therefore dubious.
To put it simply, people who go to a clinic for gunshot wounds are highly likely to be diagnosed with a gunshot wound. This is not nefarious overdiagnosis, it's a result of the fact that people without gunshot wounds don't go there in the first place.
Maybe. We have already had a few people on here self-diagnose. There are many flavours of mental health conditions out there and take someone who says "I'm pretty sure I have ADHD I'm going to go to an ADHD specialist".
What kind of a diagnosis are they likely to walk out of the session with.
I've noticed that tweets are back again without having signed on to twitter (or even being a member in my case). Presumably the protests reached even Musk, particularly with the advent of a potential competitor in nuclear war and the end of the world as we know it or Threads for short.
What are the reporting deadlines for this stuff? Is it possible that the SNP reporting is incomplete and/or late? Given their accounts situation, this seems possible.
Only donations over £500 are reported. So these stories miss out the thousands of 5 quid monthly direct debits the SNP are likely receiving.
Exactly. The SNP doesn't get so many donations from foreign businessmen and large corporations, either, even pro rata.
"Professor Lesley Sawers, the 64-year-old Equalities and Human Rights Commissioner for Scotland, has been with RBS for 32 years but two weeks ago, she and her husband Allan McKechnie were told it would be shut next month."
Suspect NatWest being hit by a quarter billion pound fine for poor anti money laundering procedures, reduced somewhat by being co-operative, may drive.some of these account closures.
The whole process doesn't work unless there is some financial benefit to the banks of treating customers proportionately that is of a similar scale to these fines being imposed.
Perhaps the fines could be shared out amongst the banks who have got the balance best (although no idea how that would be calculated).
There needs to be an independent arbitrator, and a right of appeal.
Oh, and whoever at Coutts briefed the press about the financial details of a customer, needs to be struck off.
Breach of GDPR, isn’t it?
Anyone wanted anything on a customer of the bank - I would send them to Legal and/or Compliance. And that’s just internally.
Even stating that X has an account with you sounds like revealing personal information.
Yes but wouldn't be an excellent and amusing irony if Farage resorted to making a complaint that utilises GDPR? That said, though I hate the man, you do have a point, but then they might be OK because he went public, trying to turn his case into a publicity stunt (plus ca change), and they would claim their response was proportionate and justified.
If he wanted to get his own back he could make a "subject access request" under GDPR which would be a bit annoying for them.
I don't think that public spats are a justification for releasing GDPR privileged information - legally, that is.
There are other privacy rules that come into play. Coutts has definitely fucked up here, I think.
I am not so sure. They have a defence that he made a public accusation that was misleading and would be deleterious to their reputation and business. If he was not eligible to have an account and yet he was claiming that he was denied it for political reasons (usual Farage bullshit) then I think it reasonable that they give a public reason for his account to be closed. I suspect they thought "fuck him, let him sue"
The legitimate interests justification might stretch far enough. Would be an interesting point of law, imho. Did Coutts specifically state that Farage did not meet their wealth criteria, or were they a bit more vague?
My reading of it is that it had nothing to do with wealth criteria but hinting at having fallen below the limit at some point is just a convenient way to discredit Farage and close down the story.
...Stating the obvious though it may be, and with caveats around who the hosts associate with, the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast has a good episode on diagnoses. Their focus is gender but they make the good point that if you go to see an Asperger's specialist it might easily turn out that you have Asperger's; if you go and see an Autism/ADHD/ADD/etc specialist it will turn out that you have those conditions...
@Topping, I missed this when I first read it. They are running into selection bias (right word?). People who see a specialist for X are not generated at random, they are people with a prior belief that they have X. Probabilistic statistics from this are therefore dubious.
To put it simply, people who go to a clinic for gunshot wounds are highly likely to be diagnosed with a gunshot wound. This is not nefarious overdiagnosis, it's a result of the fact that people without gunshot wounds don't go there in the first place.
Maybe. We have already had a few people on here self-diagnose. There are many flavours of mental health conditions out there and take someone who says "I'm pretty sure I have ADHD I'm going to go to an ADHD specialist".
What kind of a diagnosis are they likely to walk out of the session with.
I recently found some worrying dark spots - so off to the dermatological clinic (within days btw). Got all clear, one possible to watch. So negative, but a priori more likely to have melanoma before I went than now ...
Another Spanish poll shows the PP lead grow slightly with some signs that Box may be being squeezed. Still unlikely that any one party will reach the magic 176 but equally the left parties remain behind the right parties!
Nearly every opinion poll shows PP + Vox with an overall majority.
"‘There’s nothing like face to face’: Darlington reacts to ticket office closures In Darlington, a town steeped in rail history, teenage and elderly rail passengers agree nothing beats talking to a human"
Buying train tickets is so complicated these days that it is easier to queue for five minutes to speak to an actual human, at least until the AI ticket bots get going.
That shot was an example of insanity being doing the same thing twice in expectation of the same result.
Moeen Ali is a frustrating test cricketeer. He looked in no trouble, some classy shots, then soft dismissal with 15 mins to go to lunch. Just see it through.
"‘There’s nothing like face to face’: Darlington reacts to ticket office closures In Darlington, a town steeped in rail history, teenage and elderly rail passengers agree nothing beats talking to a human"
Buying train tickets is so complicated these days that it is easier to queue for five minutes to speak to an actual human, at least until the AI ticket bots get going.
And some people wonder why people prefer the freedom of getting into your own vehicle and just going wherever you want, whenever you want to.
"‘There’s nothing like face to face’: Darlington reacts to ticket office closures In Darlington, a town steeped in rail history, teenage and elderly rail passengers agree nothing beats talking to a human"
Buying train tickets is so complicated these days that it is easier to queue for five minutes to speak to an actual human, at least until the AI ticket bots get going.
I posted recently abour cases where the Trainline doesn't give accurate information on restrictions, and where it's impossible to buy the right kind of ticket at a station if one is disabled etc but the stuff won't be updated for three years (a Which.co.uk report). THese will multiply massively.
"‘There’s nothing like face to face’: Darlington reacts to ticket office closures In Darlington, a town steeped in rail history, teenage and elderly rail passengers agree nothing beats talking to a human"
Buying train tickets is so complicated these days that it is easier to queue for five minutes to speak to an actual human, at least until the AI ticket bots get going.
Yep.
Unless this is done very carefully, the Govt will get spanked by the Judicial Review.
For example, wheelchair users are entitled to a 50% discount on normal tickets, which is not available via the machines.
Have to say that SKS was presumably grateful for the interruption of his speech by protesters yesterday as it broke the tedium and made it vaguely newsworthy. He didn’t have that advantage on R4 in the morning and boy that was grim. Platitudes and generalities piled high with not a detail in sight. He’s going to be poor in the election campaign, possibly even worse than Sunak if you can imagine such a thing.
Though when he broke from the script to engage with the protestors he came over well. That bodes well for the unpredictability of a campaign.
I am no Starmer fan, and he is still rather an enigma to me. What does he actually want to do as PM? He seems to be both over-prepared and over timid.
On the other hand, he is wise not to interrupt a government bent on self destruction.
What does Sir K want to do? I think something like this: 1) Win the election from the social democrat centre left 2) Under promise both before and after the election 3) Blame the Tories (not hard) 4) See what can be done about the EU in a Swiss sort of way 5) Try to be a government with some integrity, honesty and competence, no quick fixes 6) See if a 10-15 year programme can engender a bit of hope and a sense of direction 7) Use the current mood to further regulate water, banks, rail etc 8) Stop some rich people's loopholes and rebalance the tax system.
He can't spend any money much because there isn't any. The above 8 items is enough when all your money is going on debt interest, pensions and NHS.
(5) seems wildly aspirational to me. When did we last have a government like that?
I think May tried to be a government with some integrity, honesty and competence, no quick fixes. At least as far as that's possible.
She failed fairly dismally- partly by not really being up to the job, partly because of the people in the tent pissing in, partly because the country rather likes quick fixes
The big question for Starmer is whether the UK is ready to accept that quick fixes aren't on the menu. I hope we are, but I'm not sure.
Looking back, May's position was impossible from the beginning, and then her own 2017 election campaign made it worse.
As a remainer PM after Brexit it was politically impossible to do a sane Brexit (a Swiss or Norway approach) because her own party would not let her, and Labour was too self interested to help. So she had to try to find a middle way, pleasing no-one. It is notable that the faction that made life impossible for her has nothing worthwhile to offer now.
May would be OK in OK times; Brexit made it impossible.
May had a majority in spring 2017, but what she wanted was a big enough majority in h
Have to say that SKS was presumably grateful for the interruption of his speech by protesters yesterday as it broke the tedium and made it vaguely newsworthy. He didn’t have that advantage on R4 in the morning and boy that was grim. Platitudes and generalities piled high with not a detail in sight. He’s going to be poor in the election campaign, possibly even worse than Sunak if you can imagine such a thing.
Though when he broke from the script to engage with the protestors he came over well. That bodes well for the unpredictability of a campaign.
I am no Starmer fan, and he is still rather an enigma to me. What does he actually want to do as PM? He seems to be both over-prepared and over timid.
On the other hand, he is wise not to interrupt a government bent on self destruction.
Starmer can think on his feet better than Sunak, which isn't surprising given his CV and how poor Sunak is at thinking on his feet. But unlike Blair in 1997 and for that matter even Trump in 2016 he's got practically no element of a new dawn in his offering, and practically no charisma. He doesn't even measure up to Kinnock.
All the Tories need to do is introduce a bit of new and tough in conflict into their presentation. That may well mean binning Sunak, and there may be a bit of a trouble there with him hanging onto the doorframe because he's rich - so get yer popcorn ready - but they seem to have managed OK in removing the last three prime ministers when they wanted to. And it doesn't even necessarily mean getting rid of Sunak. He is young, he is not bright but he's better than his three predecessors at listening to advice, and he can be repackaged. The Tories' biggest card is Rwanda, and they will play it when they think the time is right, which isn't yet. Labour haven't really got a card to play in response, other than to say be nice and hey this is a distraction, oh please please, listen to us. Too many pundits keep comparing with 1992 and 1997, but 2024 will probably be more like 2019.
I really don't think "Rwanda" is going to pull the Tories nuts out of the fire. All it does is remind voters of another failed soundbite policy of the government that didn't work.
If there isn’t an actual daily flight to Rwanda, full of boat arrivals, by the time of the election, then the policy is going to be seen as a failure by the electorate.
Nailed on then, as the policy is limited to 120. Not even half a plane full.
There is nothing preventing that 120 being lifted.
Its far from unprecedented when starting a new system to trial with a small number, then once the kinks are out to lift that number or even remove the cap altogether.
All you have to do is massively increase the capacity of the Rwandan legal system to process a planeful of asylum cases a day. Because the UK is going to process those cases properly, isn't it?
Oh, and you have to do it as a temporary surge. You will need all those assylum lawyers for a few weeks, but then the flow of boat people is going to fall to a trickle and they won't be needed any more.
The whole thing is a blag, and as Sandpit has pointed out, a number of right wing voters are going to be awfully unhappy when the blaginess of the scheme becomes clear.
Saying it's a policy drawn in crayon is an insult to toddlers who draw in crayon. They usually manage to get the number of arms and legs right. Sometimes the nose is even in roughly the right place.
Why would you need Rwanda to process them in a day? The UK doesn't process them in a day.
All you need is Rwanda to agree to house them and process them eventually, which is what the UK does already. No need for them to be processed within 24 hours of arrival.
That's a completely different matter. And as you say, then the flow will fall to a trickle and the planes won't be needed anymore.
Think of the asylum system as a pipeline. At the moment, people are entering that pipe at the rate of about 100 a day. Unless the flow through the narrowest part of the pipeline is about 100 a day, a backlog will build up and keep building. It's one of the reasons that the UK asylum system is in a mess and frantically looking for places to dump people; were not managing to get as many decisions made every day as we need to.
Now, in theory, we could just fly people to Rwanda, a jetload a day or a week, and try to forget about them. If it takes ages for their claims to be processed, and they spill out from those lovely flats the Home Secretary went to visit, it's not our problem.
But that's not the story we are telling ourselves- is it?
But that's exactly what's happened in the UK. At the moment people are entering the pipeline faster that they can be processed so a backlog has built up and keeps building.
Yes, you're right, we could fly a jetload a day or a week to Rwanda and wait for them to be processed there. So long as Rwanda is OK with that (read: so long as we write them a big enough cheque), then that is entirely possible.
Yes a backlog will build up, but that's no different to having a backlog in this country that already exists today.
And as you said, the flow of boats across the Channel would stop if they knew they absolutely definitely would be sent to Rwanda, no ifs, no buts, no equivocation.
The policy works on its merits so long as its actually implemented. Not so long as the throughput is met, since the throughput already isn't met today so that's not new.
What you are describing is not the policy. The policy is not that absolutely definitely everyone is sent to Rwanda. The policy is that a small number of people are sent to Rwanda.
Which brings us back full circle to what I said at the start.
It is perfectly normal when starting a new policy to start a trial with a small number of people.
If that trial and its legal issues can be navigated successfully, then the trial can be changed eventually to have that policy applied to everyone. Which would require of course a new budget attached to it that is different to the original trial budget.
The Rwanda policy can work if it it applies to everyone, and it can be applied to everyone if the legal issues are resolved and Rwanda agrees to it (read: is given a big enough cheque).
Whether its humane, a good idea, or the right thing to do is a completely different question. Many policies which can be done, should not be done. As Jeff Goldblum famously put it in that nature documentary from 1993, people "were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
It is perfectly normal when starting a new policy to start a trial with a small number of people. In such a case, you say this is a trial with a small number of people, but the plan is to apply it to X people if the trial is successful. The Government has not, as far as I understand it, said this. It’s policy is that “some” people will be sent to Rwanda.
Until people are being sent and the legal issues have been resolved, what's the point in saying any more yet? The cap has not become an issue yet.
When Australia implemented the same policy, they underwent the same path. It was initially a policy for some, the legal issues were resolved, then once the policy was running it was changed to say "this applies to everyone now" (with commensurate payment to the recipient nation) at which point the boats stopped.
There's no reason the UK can't follow the same path. Whether it should is another matter, but claiming the policy can't work is just nonsense. It can work, whether it should is another matter.
There is a lot of point in saying more, in saying what your end goal is, now. It impresses the voters. It puts off more people trying to cross the Channel. This Government has not been shy of discussing end goals before the details have been worked out (viz. any of Sunak’s 5 pledges).
There are many reasons why the UK can’t follow the same path. First off, I’d note that the Conservative government has been talking about this for years and still hasn’t gotten anywhere! The policy is clearly beyond the abilities of the Home Secretaries the Conservatives keep picking.
It is not clear that Rwanda, for any size cheque, would take everyone. The numbers in question are twice those in the Australia case, and the power relationship between Australia and the other countries involved is different to that of the UK and Rwanda.
It is highly unlikely that the UK authorities could intercept all the boats at sea in the way Australia did because of the very different geography.
Mr. Topping, I recall from university reading that most people will go along with most symptom lists for psych conditions, partly because most of us feel X emotion or have Y quirk at some point.
To avoid this, I listed (without telling her what it was) the symptom list for psychopathology to my mother and asked how many applied to me. She said all but one and a half out of about 17.
Not to mention psychology's very bad habit of pathologising every quirk and behaviour it can.
Mr. Carnyx, online stuff is great but imperfect and when it's insufficient or just not working nothing beats a human being. Axing all the ticket offices seems like a crackers idea (though I'm very much an outsider, as I work from home).
Have to say that SKS was presumably grateful for the interruption of his speech by protesters yesterday as it broke the tedium and made it vaguely newsworthy. He didn’t have that advantage on R4 in the morning and boy that was grim. Platitudes and generalities piled high with not a detail in sight. He’s going to be poor in the election campaign, possibly even worse than Sunak if you can imagine such a thing.
Though when he broke from the script to engage with the protestors he came over well. That bodes well for the unpredictability of a campaign.
I am no Starmer fan, and he is still rather an enigma to me. What does he actually want to do as PM? He seems to be both over-prepared and over timid.
On the other hand, he is wise not to interrupt a government bent on self destruction.
What does Sir K want to do? I think something like this: 1) Win the election from the social democrat centre left 2) Under promise both before and after the election 3) Blame the Tories (not hard) 4) See what can be done about the EU in a Swiss sort of way 5) Try to be a government with some integrity, honesty and competence, no quick fixes 6) See if a 10-15 year programme can engender a bit of hope and a sense of direction 7) Use the current mood to further regulate water, banks, rail etc 8) Stop some rich people's loopholes and rebalance the tax system.
He can't spend any money much because there isn't any. The above 8 items is enough when all your money is going on debt interest, pensions and NHS.
(5) seems wildly aspirational to me. When did we last have a government like that?
I think May tried to be a government with some integrity, honesty and competence, no quick fixes. At least as far as that's possible.
She failed fairly dismally- partly by not really being up to the job, partly because of the people in the tent pissing in, partly because the country rather likes quick fixes
The big question for Starmer is whether the UK is ready to accept that quick fixes aren't on the menu. I hope we are, but I'm not sure.
Looking back, May's position was impossible from the beginning, and then her own 2017 election campaign made it worse.
As a remainer PM after Brexit it was politically impossible to do a sane Brexit (a Swiss or Norway approach) because her own party would not let her, and Labour was too self interested to help. So she had to try to find a middle way, pleasing no-one. It is notable that the faction that made life impossible for her has nothing worthwhile to offer now.
May would be OK in OK times; Brexit made it impossible.
May had a majority in spring 2017, but what she wanted was a big enough majority in h
Have to say that SKS was presumably grateful for the interruption of his speech by protesters yesterday as it broke the tedium and made it vaguely newsworthy. He didn’t have that advantage on R4 in the morning and boy that was grim. Platitudes and generalities piled high with not a detail in sight. He’s going to be poor in the election campaign, possibly even worse than Sunak if you can imagine such a thing.
Though when he broke from the script to engage with the protestors he came over well. That bodes well for the unpredictability of a campaign.
I am no Starmer fan, and he is still rather an enigma to me. What does he actually want to do as PM? He seems to be both over-prepared and over timid.
On the other hand, he is wise not to interrupt a government bent on self destruction.
Starmer can think on his feet better than Sunak, which isn't surprising given his CV and how poor Sunak is at thinking on his feet. But unlike Blair in 1997 and for that matter even Trump in 2016 he's got practically no element of a new dawn in his offering, and practically no charisma. He doesn't even measure up to Kinnock.
All the Tories need to do is introduce a bit of new and tough in conflict into their presentation. That may well mean binning Sunak, and there may be a bit of a trouble there with him hanging onto the doorframe because he's rich - so get yer popcorn ready - but they seem to have managed OK in removing the last three prime ministers when they wanted to. And it doesn't even necessarily mean getting rid of Sunak. He is young, he is not bright but he's better than his three predecessors at listening to advice, and he can be repackaged. The Tories' biggest card is Rwanda, and they will play it when they think the time is right, which isn't yet. Labour haven't really got a card to play in response, other than to say be nice and hey this is a distraction, oh please please, listen to us. Too many pundits keep comparing with 1992 and 1997, but 2024 will probably be more like 2019.
I really don't think "Rwanda" is going to pull the Tories nuts out of the fire. All it does is remind voters of another failed soundbite policy of the government that didn't work.
If there isn’t an actual daily flight to Rwanda, full of boat arrivals, by the time of the election, then the policy is going to be seen as a failure by the electorate.
Nailed on then, as the policy is limited to 120. Not even half a plane full.
There is nothing preventing that 120 being lifted.
Its far from unprecedented when starting a new system to trial with a small number, then once the kinks are out to lift that number or even remove the cap altogether.
All you have to do is massively increase the capacity of the Rwandan legal system to process a planeful of asylum cases a day. Because the UK is going to process those cases properly, isn't it?
Oh, and you have to do it as a temporary surge. You will need all those assylum lawyers for a few weeks, but then the flow of boat people is going to fall to a trickle and they won't be needed any more.
The whole thing is a blag, and as Sandpit has pointed out, a number of right wing voters are going to be awfully unhappy when the blaginess of the scheme becomes clear.
Saying it's a policy drawn in crayon is an insult to toddlers who draw in crayon. They usually manage to get the number of arms and legs right. Sometimes the nose is even in roughly the right place.
Why would you need Rwanda to process them in a day? The UK doesn't process them in a day.
All you need is Rwanda to agree to house them and process them eventually, which is what the UK does already. No need for them to be processed within 24 hours of arrival.
That's a completely different matter. And as you say, then the flow will fall to a trickle and the planes won't be needed anymore.
Think of the asylum system as a pipeline. At the moment, people are entering that pipe at the rate of about 100 a day. Unless the flow through the narrowest part of the pipeline is about 100 a day, a backlog will build up and keep building. It's one of the reasons that the UK asylum system is in a mess and frantically looking for places to dump people; were not managing to get as many decisions made every day as we need to.
Now, in theory, we could just fly people to Rwanda, a jetload a day or a week, and try to forget about them. If it takes ages for their claims to be processed, and they spill out from those lovely flats the Home Secretary went to visit, it's not our problem.
But that's not the story we are telling ourselves- is it?
But that's exactly what's happened in the UK. At the moment people are entering the pipeline faster that they can be processed so a backlog has built up and keeps building.
Yes, you're right, we could fly a jetload a day or a week to Rwanda and wait for them to be processed there. So long as Rwanda is OK with that (read: so long as we write them a big enough cheque), then that is entirely possible.
Yes a backlog will build up, but that's no different to having a backlog in this country that already exists today.
And as you said, the flow of boats across the Channel would stop if they knew they absolutely definitely would be sent to Rwanda, no ifs, no buts, no equivocation.
The policy works on its merits so long as its actually implemented. Not so long as the throughput is met, since the throughput already isn't met today so that's not new.
What you are describing is not the policy. The policy is not that absolutely definitely everyone is sent to Rwanda. The policy is that a small number of people are sent to Rwanda.
Which brings us back full circle to what I said at the start.
It is perfectly normal when starting a new policy to start a trial with a small number of people.
If that trial and its legal issues can be navigated successfully, then the trial can be changed eventually to have that policy applied to everyone. Which would require of course a new budget attached to it that is different to the original trial budget.
The Rwanda policy can work if it it applies to everyone, and it can be applied to everyone if the legal issues are resolved and Rwanda agrees to it (read: is given a big enough cheque).
Whether its humane, a good idea, or the right thing to do is a completely different question. Many policies which can be done, should not be done. As Jeff Goldblum famously put it in that nature documentary from 1993, people "were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
It is perfectly normal when starting a new policy to start a trial with a small number of people. In such a case, you say this is a trial with a small number of people, but the plan is to apply it to X people if the trial is successful. The Government has not, as far as I understand it, said this. It’s policy is that “some” people will be sent to Rwanda.
Until people are being sent and the legal issues have been resolved, what's the point in saying any more yet? The cap has not become an issue yet.
When Australia implemented the same policy, they underwent the same path. It was initially a policy for some, the legal issues were resolved, then once the policy was running it was changed to say "this applies to everyone now" (with commensurate payment to the recipient nation) at which point the boats stopped.
There's no reason the UK can't follow the same path. Whether it should is another matter, but claiming the policy can't work is just nonsense. It can work, whether it should is another matter.
There is a lot of point in saying more, in saying what your end goal is, now. It impresses the voters. It puts off more people trying to cross the Channel. This Government has not been shy of discussing end goals before the details have been worked out (viz. any of Sunak’s 5 pledges).
There are many reasons why the UK can’t follow the same path. First off, I’d note that the Conservative government has been talking about this for years and still hasn’t gotten anywhere! The policy is clearly beyond the abilities of the Home Secretaries the Conservatives keep picking.
It is not clear that Rwanda, for any size cheque, would take everyone. The numbers in question are twice those in the Australia case, and the power relationship between Australia and the other countries involved is different to that of the UK and Rwanda.
It is highly unlikely that the UK authorities could intercept all the boats at sea in the way Australia did because of the very different geography.
As I said in my edit if you want it to apply to more, you'd need Rwanda's consent for that, and there's no point paying for that consent today.
The voters he wants to appeal to already think its the intention to apply to people and its the lack of flights that is the issue, not that the flights are theoretically capped at 120.
It won't be clear that Rwanda would take everyone until a cheque big enough to convince them to do so is written, which is why there's no point saying that's the plan until you know that you need that capacity, and are so willing to write that cheque.
Australia didn't intercept many boats, the number of boats attempting the journey dropped by about 99% which meant interceptions were miniscule.
That shot was an example of insanity being doing the same thing twice in expectation of the same result.
Moeen Ali is a frustrating test cricketeer. He looked in no trouble, some classy shots, then soft dismissal with 15 mins to go to lunch. Just see it through.
He reminds me of Gower, in one of his patches of poor form.
As a regular complainer about long EU passport queues, it’s only right to report that Alicante airport has cracked it - with dedicated eGates and police to do the subsequent stamping. It’s so much quicker. I suspect it’s because they have so many UK travellers. And I hear it’s the same in Malaga and other holiday hotspots. Unfortunately, I doubt it is happening in Madrid or Barcelona as the UK visitor proportion is lower, so the investment is not worth it. I’m told Venice also has special UK entry and exit. Money talks!
Do people still buy train tickets from human beings (worse still at the kiosk on the day)?
Bonkers (you can take that to the diagnostician).
All the apps are great, Trainline even does split fares for you. Hadn't noticed about the restrictions although tbf I did spend quite some time once trying to work out what "off peak" actually meant. I doubt a human could have told me, that said.
As a regular complainer about long EU passport queues, it’s only right to report that Alicante airport has cracked it - with dedicated eGates and police to do the subsequent stamping. It’s so much quicker. I suspect it’s because they have so many UK travellers. And I hear it’s the same in Malaga and other holiday hotspots. Unfortunately, I doubt it is happening in Madrid or Barcelona as the UK visitor proportion is lower, so the investment is not worth it. I’m told Venice also has special UK entry and exit. Money talks!
My experience of visitng Portugal a few times over the past year, they have it down pat (i think for the same reasons that UK tourists are very valuable).
Full legalisation and education is far better than criminalisation or decriminalisation.
Stop wasting taxpayers money on court cases, Police action and prisons for drug offences, tax the drugs instead and use the taxes (and some of the money saved on criminal justice) for education instead.
Has the question been answered already? If not, Bing AI can't answer it but it can for Labour. "According to Wikipedia, the largest number of by-elections lost on a single day is three, when the Labour party lost Acton, Dudley and Meriden on 28 March 1968, all to the Conservatives."
Have to say that SKS was presumably grateful for the interruption of his speech by protesters yesterday as it broke the tedium and made it vaguely newsworthy. He didn’t have that advantage on R4 in the morning and boy that was grim. Platitudes and generalities piled high with not a detail in sight. He’s going to be poor in the election campaign, possibly even worse than Sunak if you can imagine such a thing.
Though when he broke from the script to engage with the protestors he came over well. That bodes well for the unpredictability of a campaign.
I am no Starmer fan, and he is still rather an enigma to me. What does he actually want to do as PM? He seems to be both over-prepared and over timid.
On the other hand, he is wise not to interrupt a government bent on self destruction.
What does Sir K want to do? I think something like this: 1) Win the election from the social democrat centre left 2) Under promise both before and after the election 3) Blame the Tories (not hard) 4) See what can be done about the EU in a Swiss sort of way 5) Try to be a government with some integrity, honesty and competence, no quick fixes 6) See if a 10-15 year programme can engender a bit of hope and a sense of direction 7) Use the current mood to further regulate water, banks, rail etc 8) Stop some rich people's loopholes and rebalance the tax system.
He can't spend any money much because there isn't any. The above 8 items is enough when all your money is going on debt interest, pensions and NHS.
(5) seems wildly aspirational to me. When did we last have a government like that?
I think May tried to be a government with some integrity, honesty and competence, no quick fixes. At least as far as that's possible.
She failed fairly dismally- partly by not really being up to the job, partly because of the people in the tent pissing in, partly because the country rather likes quick fixes
The big question for Starmer is whether the UK is ready to accept that quick fixes aren't on the menu. I hope we are, but I'm not sure.
Looking back, May's position was impossible from the beginning, and then her own 2017 election campaign made it worse.
As a remainer PM after Brexit it was politically impossible to do a sane Brexit (a Swiss or Norway approach) because her own party would not let her, and Labour was too self interested to help. So she had to try to find a middle way, pleasing no-one. It is notable that the faction that made life impossible for her has nothing worthwhile to offer now.
May would be OK in OK times; Brexit made it impossible.
May had a majority in spring 2017, but what she wanted was a big enough majority in h
Have to say that SKS was presumably grateful for the interruption of his speech by protesters yesterday as it broke the tedium and made it vaguely newsworthy. He didn’t have that advantage on R4 in the morning and boy that was grim. Platitudes and generalities piled high with not a detail in sight. He’s going to be poor in the election campaign, possibly even worse than Sunak if you can imagine such a thing.
Though when he broke from the script to engage with the protestors he came over well. That bodes well for the unpredictability of a campaign.
I am no Starmer fan, and he is still rather an enigma to me. What does he actually want to do as PM? He seems to be both over-prepared and over timid.
On the other hand, he is wise not to interrupt a government bent on self destruction.
Starmer can think on his feet better than Sunak, which isn't surprising given his CV and how poor Sunak is at thinking on his feet. But unlike Blair in 1997 and for that matter even Trump in 2016 he's got practically no element of a new dawn in his offering, and practically no charisma. He doesn't even measure up to Kinnock.
All the Tories need to do is introduce a bit of new and tough in conflict into their presentation. That may well mean binning Sunak, and there may be a bit of a trouble there with him hanging onto the doorframe because he's rich - so get yer popcorn ready - but they seem to have managed OK in removing the last three prime ministers when they wanted to. And it doesn't even necessarily mean getting rid of Sunak. He is young, he is not bright but he's better than his three predecessors at listening to advice, and he can be repackaged. The Tories' biggest card is Rwanda, and they will play it when they think the time is right, which isn't yet. Labour haven't really got a card to play in response, other than to say be nice and hey this is a distraction, oh please please, listen to us. Too many pundits keep comparing with 1992 and 1997, but 2024 will probably be more like 2019.
I really don't think "Rwanda" is going to pull the Tories nuts out of the fire. All it does is remind voters of another failed soundbite policy of the government that didn't work.
If there isn’t an actual daily flight to Rwanda, full of boat arrivals, by the time of the election, then the policy is going to be seen as a failure by the electorate.
Nailed on then, as the policy is limited to 120. Not even half a plane full.
There is nothing preventing that 120 being lifted.
Its far from unprecedented when starting a new system to trial with a small number, then once the kinks are out to lift that number or even remove the cap altogether.
All you have to do is massively increase the capacity of the Rwandan legal system to process a planeful of asylum cases a day. Because the UK is going to process those cases properly, isn't it?
Oh, and you have to do it as a temporary surge. You will need all those assylum lawyers for a few weeks, but then the flow of boat people is going to fall to a trickle and they won't be needed any more.
The whole thing is a blag, and as Sandpit has pointed out, a number of right wing voters are going to be awfully unhappy when the blaginess of the scheme becomes clear.
Saying it's a policy drawn in crayon is an insult to toddlers who draw in crayon. They usually manage to get the number of arms and legs right. Sometimes the nose is even in roughly the right place.
Why would you need Rwanda to process them in a day? The UK doesn't process them in a day.
All you need is Rwanda to agree to house them and process them eventually, which is what the UK does already. No need for them to be processed within 24 hours of arrival.
That's a completely different matter. And as you say, then the flow will fall to a trickle and the planes won't be needed anymore.
Think of the asylum system as a pipeline. At the moment, people are entering that pipe at the rate of about 100 a day. Unless the flow through the narrowest part of the pipeline is about 100 a day, a backlog will build up and keep building. It's one of the reasons that the UK asylum system is in a mess and frantically looking for places to dump people; were not managing to get as many decisions made every day as we need to.
Now, in theory, we could just fly people to Rwanda, a jetload a day or a week, and try to forget about them. If it takes ages for their claims to be processed, and they spill out from those lovely flats the Home Secretary went to visit, it's not our problem.
But that's not the story we are telling ourselves- is it?
But that's exactly what's happened in the UK. At the moment people are entering the pipeline faster that they can be processed so a backlog has built up and keeps building.
Yes, you're right, we could fly a jetload a day or a week to Rwanda and wait for them to be processed there. So long as Rwanda is OK with that (read: so long as we write them a big enough cheque), then that is entirely possible.
Yes a backlog will build up, but that's no different to having a backlog in this country that already exists today.
And as you said, the flow of boats across the Channel would stop if they knew they absolutely definitely would be sent to Rwanda, no ifs, no buts, no equivocation.
The policy works on its merits so long as its actually implemented. Not so long as the throughput is met, since the throughput already isn't met today so that's not new.
What you are describing is not the policy. The policy is not that absolutely definitely everyone is sent to Rwanda. The policy is that a small number of people are sent to Rwanda.
Which brings us back full circle to what I said at the start.
It is perfectly normal when starting a new policy to start a trial with a small number of people.
If that trial and its legal issues can be navigated successfully, then the trial can be changed eventually to have that policy applied to everyone. Which would require of course a new budget attached to it that is different to the original trial budget.
The Rwanda policy can work if it it applies to everyone, and it can be applied to everyone if the legal issues are resolved and Rwanda agrees to it (read: is given a big enough cheque).
Whether its humane, a good idea, or the right thing to do is a completely different question. Many policies which can be done, should not be done. As Jeff Goldblum famously put it in that nature documentary from 1993, people "were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
It is perfectly normal when starting a new policy to start a trial with a small number of people. In such a case, you say this is a trial with a small number of people, but the plan is to apply it to X people if the trial is successful. The Government has not, as far as I understand it, said this. It’s policy is that “some” people will be sent to Rwanda.
Until people are being sent and the legal issues have been resolved, what's the point in saying any more yet? The cap has not become an issue yet.
When Australia implemented the same policy, they underwent the same path. It was initially a policy for some, the legal issues were resolved, then once the policy was running it was changed to say "this applies to everyone now" (with commensurate payment to the recipient nation) at which point the boats stopped.
There's no reason the UK can't follow the same path. Whether it should is another matter, but claiming the policy can't work is just nonsense. It can work, whether it should is another matter.
There is a lot of point in saying more, in saying what your end goal is, now. It impresses the voters. It puts off more people trying to cross the Channel. This Government has not been shy of discussing end goals before the details have been worked out (viz. any of Sunak’s 5 pledges).
There are many reasons why the UK can’t follow the same path. First off, I’d note that the Conservative government has been talking about this for years and still hasn’t gotten anywhere! The policy is clearly beyond the abilities of the Home Secretaries the Conservatives keep picking.
It is not clear that Rwanda, for any size cheque, would take everyone. The numbers in question are twice those in the Australia case, and the power relationship between Australia and the other countries involved is different to that of the UK and Rwanda.
It is highly unlikely that the UK authorities could intercept all the boats at sea in the way Australia did because of the very different geography.
As I said in my edit if you want it to apply to more, you'd need Rwanda's consent for that, and there's no point paying for that consent today.
The voters he wants to appeal to already think its the intention to apply to people and its the lack of flights that is the issue, not that the flights are theoretically capped at 120.
It won't be clear that Rwanda would take everyone until a cheque big enough to convince them to do so is written, which is why there's no point saying that's the plan until you know that you need that capacity, and are so willing to write that cheque.
Australia didn't intercept many boats, the number of boats attempting the journey dropped by about 99% which meant interceptions were miniscule.
Australia was intercepting all the boats, and then the number of boats coming dropped.
Your belief that Rwanda would take any number of people if the cheque is large enough is not founded in evidence. More to the point, if we know anything about the Conservative Government, it’s that they don’t like solutions where they have to pay. Successive Conservative Governments could have invested in more staff to tackle backlogs in the system and increase deportations under the current rules. They haven’t.
The UK could theoretically adopt a policy of sending everyone crossing the Channel in small boats to Rwanda, but that is not their stated policy, it is not Rwanda’s stated policy and the money for such a policy is not forthcoming. I suggest we judge policies on their intention and their actual achievement. It seems pointless to me to talk about some other approach that no-one is saying they will do and that it seems unlikely that they could do.
Absolutely heroin and cocaine should be a matter for taxes and education, not the Police and drug dealers.
I used to think that. I think having looked at Canada I've changed my mind. Probably. I think there's a case for state management of it rather than criminalisation. But out and out legality has too many negative consequences for my liking.
Comments
How many other Coutts customers now know that they’ll sh!t on you, if you sh!t on them in public?
The Tories could successfully implement the Rwanda policy by removing number limits and getting over the legal issues, but I don't think it would remotely change the next election result. People are fed up of the Tories and "its time for a change" is going to beat "better the devil you know".
And if the Tories want to pin their next election's hopes on Rwanda then not only will they still lose the next election, they'll deserve to lose it too.
Shades of that silly "back to Vietnam" film where the explosives expert sets up a set of bobbytraps, so that the enemy triggers one, jumps straight onto the next one, goes the other way, straight into the the next and so on...
Didn't realise Stuart Broad was now bowling for Australia, there's been a few of them this morning.
The election will like most elections come down to a couple of simple premises. Its the economy, stupid along with are you better off now than you were four five years ago?
Rwanda is a sideshow that generates a lot of smoke and fury, but the amount of people willing to vote on racial/migration issues alone in a General Election is thankfully very miniscule.
Perhaps Zuck can be made to listen to Reason.
If so, be careful - "I think it reasonable" is the kind of thinking that can get you a free trip to American Club Fed. The all inclusive holiday that just never ends....
Mission Impossible - Biggest stunt in cinema history
https://youtu.be/-lsFs2615gw
I will give it a miss thanks.
More seriously, I think Tom Cruise could be the last A-list actor capable, willing and able (i mean as much production company risk tolerance when you have CGI / AI) to do this stuff.
I don't believe there are many left in the country who don't agree practical application of immigration policy, particularly asylum policy is a disaster, but sending a couple of hundred Afghans to Rwanda at £169,000 per head isn't the answer.
Filtering applicants on the European mainland, and allowing in genuine cases is the only way forward. Failed applicants who keep coming back, then maybe Rwanda is part of a suite of responses.
Yes it’s about tactical voting. LLG of 60 acting like cats is 195 Tory MPs, LLG razor like precision on getting Tory’s out and it’s about 120 Tory MPs. And what a strange bunch of New Conservatives they would be, with the likes of Penny gone.
But we are not seeing much Dutch Salute in polls is the truth. Lib Dem’s 9 Labour 47. If national polls move toward the last local election night, LD19 L39 PV at the GE, that’s a lot of tactical fireworks.
That’s the measure, on which the government will be marked at the election.
(Yes, it’s going to be 1997 levels of Conservatives sitting on their hands).
It is perfectly normal when starting a new policy to start a trial with a small number of people.
If that trial and its legal issues can be navigated successfully, then the trial can be changed eventually to have that policy applied to everyone. Which would require of course a new budget attached to it that is different to the original trial budget.
The Rwanda policy can work if it it applies to everyone, and it can be applied to everyone if the legal issues are resolved and Rwanda agrees to it (read: is given a big enough cheque).
Whether its humane, a good idea, or the right thing to do is a completely different question. Many policies which can be done, should not be done. As Jeff Goldblum famously put it in that nature documentary from 1993, people "were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
https://danskebank.co.uk/about-us/bank-notes
AI Video deepfakes likely to be a factor in WH24?
To put it simply, people who go to a clinic for gunshot wounds are highly likely to be diagnosed with a gunshot wound. This is not nefarious overdiagnosis, it's a result of the fact that people without gunshot wounds don't go there in the first place.
I’ve actually been working with a customer this week who’s looking to purchase domains, and it’s now a total sh!t-show of TLD rent-seekers looking for $1k or $2k annual fees. It’s probably okay if you’ll be using the domain to run your business, but not for anyone looking to keep a personal domain safe from competitors.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23801883.2018.1530066
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKxM4ToLLR8
https://news.sky.com/story/martin-lewis-settles-lawsuit-against-facebook-over-scam-ads-11615288
One might imagine, that Facebook are now breaching that agreement.
Yes, deepfake ads are already a problem in WH24. DeSantis has been pinged already, for fake images of Trump embracing Fauci. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23753626/deepfake-political-attack-ad-ron-desantis-donald-trump-anthony-fauci
If so, be careful - "I think it reasonable" is a justification th In one, semi-startup, that I worked at, they instituted a Data Security department.
It became clear, rather rapidly, that Data Security would stop the operation of the company - because doing anything has a *risk* of leaking data. So from their point of view, stop everything was the best solution.
Their mandate and leadership were rapidly amended.
I'm assuming Broad is filling in where needed, but I haven't heard it's been officially announced.
My son's father-in-law explained that b and v are indistinguishable in pronunciation - baca/vaca . . . bienes/vienes etc
When Australia implemented the same policy, they underwent the same path. It was initially a policy for some, the legal issues were resolved, then once the policy was running it was changed to say "this applies to everyone now" (with commensurate payment to the recipient nation) at which point the boats stopped.
There's no reason the UK can't follow the same path. Whether it should is another matter, but claiming the policy can't work is just nonsense. It can work, whether it should is another matter.
PS there's a good reason not to say it would apply to all yet, which is that would require Rwanda's consent, which would require making a bigger payment to them. If you want to implement the policy and the legal issues have been resolved then making that payment is a matter that can work with policy, but there's no reason to trigger that prematurely.
ETA: Googling shows a random twitterer (claims to be barrister and director at ICDR) thinks similar: https://twitter.com/SamFowles/status/1676829553149263877 saying
Re. Farage/Coutts and “confidentiality”/gdpr:
1. It’s not clear that Coutts shared anything other than its policy - which is public information.
2. If it did, it was arguably entitled to do so per 6(1)(f) UKGDPR because it had a legitimate interest in rebutting (potentially defamatory) misinformation spread by Farage.
3. 6(1)(f) requires balancing the rights of the subject (Farage) against those of the controller (Coutts).
4. Farage didn’t put Coutts’ name in the public domain but it was *in the public domain as a result of Farage’s actions.*
5. There is a reasonable expectation that, if you spread misinformation about a brand using your own personal data, it may be corrected.
6. The legal principle of ex turpi causa non oritur actio likely applies - Farage is not entitled to benefit in law from his own wrong act. In other words - you can’t sue someone if you brought it on yourself.
7. Saying “I defamed Coutts because they wouldn’t give me special treatment and I want to sue them because they corrected me” is a case unlikely to pass the laugh test.
E2TA: I'd assume that Coutts took legal advice before making their statement. But 'legitimate' is one of those 'reasonable' type words. Open to a lot of interpretation.
In Darlington, a town steeped in rail history, teenage and elderly rail passengers agree nothing beats talking to a human"
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jul/07/nothing-like-face-to-face-darlington-station-railway-ticket-office-closures
"Why are the country's most senior politicians interested in which part of the NatWest Group gives Nigel Farage a bank account?
One answer is that MPs and peers hate the PEP regime. The UK, following retained EU law to combat money laundering and corruption, treats domestic and foreign PEPs equally. This means the finances of anyone who is “entrusted with prominent public functions” faces extra financial scrutiny, as do their families, “known close associates” and anyone with whom they have “close business relations”. MPs such as Charles Walker have fulminated for years against the “intrusive” financial oversight banks apply to MPs’ kids, colleagues and aged parents (not to mention potential party donors).
There plenty of people in Westminster, then, who would like to see the rules on domestic PEPs relaxed. Sources say it’s not unreasonable to suggest that this is why Farage’s downgrading to a NatWest Everyday Basic Scrimper has been deemed of such high importance."
and
"Can MPs change the PEP regime? Perhaps – but before banks change their procedures, they would want the government to indemnify them against the failure to uphold international regulations, and investors might take a dim view of a country deciding to weaken its own defences against corruption. This creates the potential for a very expensive mistake."
What kind of a diagnosis are they likely to walk out of the session with.
Unless this is done very carefully, the Govt will get spanked by the Judicial Review.
For example, wheelchair users are entitled to a 50% discount on normal tickets, which is not available via the machines.
Now six wickets down, still less than half of Australia's score achieved.
Very, very frustrating.
There are many reasons why the UK can’t follow the same path. First off, I’d note that the Conservative government has been talking about this for years and still hasn’t gotten anywhere! The policy is clearly beyond the abilities of the Home Secretaries the Conservatives keep picking.
It is not clear that Rwanda, for any size cheque, would take everyone. The numbers in question are twice those in the Australia case, and the power relationship between Australia and the other countries involved is different to that of the UK and Rwanda.
It is highly unlikely that the UK authorities could intercept all the boats at sea in the way Australia did because of the very different geography.
Mr. Topping, I recall from university reading that most people will go along with most symptom lists for psych conditions, partly because most of us feel X emotion or have Y quirk at some point.
To avoid this, I listed (without telling her what it was) the symptom list for psychopathology to my mother and asked how many applied to me. She said all but one and a half out of about 17.
Not to mention psychology's very bad habit of pathologising every quirk and behaviour it can.
The voters he wants to appeal to already think its the intention to apply to people and its the lack of flights that is the issue, not that the flights are theoretically capped at 120.
It won't be clear that Rwanda would take everyone until a cheque big enough to convince them to do so is written, which is why there's no point saying that's the plan until you know that you need that capacity, and are so willing to write that cheque.
Australia didn't intercept many boats, the number of boats attempting the journey dropped by about 99% which meant interceptions were miniscule.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66133549
https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1677063393901936642
Final Ford Fiesta rolls off production line in Cologne
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66130803
Bonkers (you can take that to the diagnostician).
All the apps are great, Trainline even does split fares for you. Hadn't noticed about the restrictions although tbf I did spend quite some time once trying to work out what "off peak" actually meant. I doubt a human could have told me, that said.
Full legalisation and education is far better than criminalisation or decriminalisation.
Stop wasting taxpayers money on court cases, Police action and prisons for drug offences, tax the drugs instead and use the taxes (and some of the money saved on criminal justice) for education instead.
If not, Bing AI can't answer it but it can for Labour.
"According to Wikipedia, the largest number of by-elections lost on a single day is three, when the Labour party lost Acton, Dudley and Meriden on 28 March 1968, all to the Conservatives."
Your belief that Rwanda would take any number of people if the cheque is large enough is not founded in evidence. More to the point, if we know anything about the Conservative Government, it’s that they don’t like solutions where they have to pay. Successive Conservative Governments could have invested in more staff to tackle backlogs in the system and increase deportations under the current rules. They haven’t.
The UK could theoretically adopt a policy of sending everyone crossing the Channel in small boats to Rwanda, but that is not their stated policy, it is not Rwanda’s stated policy and the money for such a policy is not forthcoming. I suggest we judge policies on their intention and their actual achievement. It seems pointless to me to talk about some other approach that no-one is saying they will do and that it seems unlikely that they could do.
I think there's a case for state management of it rather than criminalisation. But out and out legality has too many negative consequences for my liking.