Categories
It’s one of those mornings where one story dominates the front pages – politicalbetting.com
It’s one of those mornings where one story dominates the front pages – politicalbetting.com
Summary of Monday's front pages (10/07/2023) #TomorrowsPapersToday #FrontPages #MondaysPapers #Headlines pic.twitter.com/6peZaFROEl
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Of course they would find this one irresistible.
MoD claims ethical investing to blame for vital defence contractors being unable to access finance
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/07/09/banks-investigated-for-closing-defence-companies-accounts/ (£££)
Of course, as punters many of us face the same problems with having betting accounts closed for similar reasons, amid demands for pay slips, bank statements and passports.
Jeremy Hunt denied bank account by Monzo
Chancellor is among multiple politicians to have accounts denied and cards cancelled because of 'disproportionate' money laundering rules
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/07/08/jeremy-hunt-denied-bank-account-american-express-monzo/ (£££)
ETA a quick glance at the Telegraph and Times home pages finds two other anti-BBC stories, unrelated to this one. Where is the BBC's equivalent?
1. Play a few bars and let the crowd do the rest - see Welsh football fans or Scottish rugby fans.
2. Ask an American actor/Elvis impersonator to do a novelty version.....
Discuss
My guess is that so far neither the Sun nor the BBC has been able to trace the sordid pictures back to when the child was under 18, or possibly establish a direct link between the star's payments and the child's photographs. Obviously this may change after forensic examination of phones and messages.
It is possible an MP might use Parliamentary privilege to name the star today or later this week.
I could understand them doing it if it was still being covered up, but the police are now involved so there is no good reason why an MP should. I guess we also don't know if it will lead to identification of the child, in the same way as everybody knows the name of the young man involved with Schofield. From the bits in the Sun story, it sounds like they are really quite troubled e.g. heavy serious drug use.
That said, the Beeb was right on board when Hugh Grant was trying to limit the power of the press. The BBC are keen to hit back when they can. The Beeb are very much of the view that life would be better if they were the only arbiter of the news agenda.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13525021
Both of whom have had multiple bans already and will be back.
It’s time we found an alternative way to fund the BBC removing the license fee and funding the means of transmission via taxation.
Richard Sharp, yesterday, was saying the ‘well off’ should pay more for the BBC than poorer households. No. The BBC is losing listeners and viewers. The license fee in its current form is untenable. You cannot demand people pay more for a service they use less and less.
Over the weekend I celebrated my dad's birthday. I'm lucky that both my parents are still alive, and are healthy (and wealthy) enough to enjoy holidays to the seaside. They have been brilliant parents.
On his birthday, I came across a post about Henderika Oudgenoeg, a girl born in Delfzijl, Netherlands on exactly the same day as my dad. The photo shows a girl staring into the camera, clutching a doll and her elder brother's hand.
She was just like my dad, except for two accidents: she was born in the Netherlands, not the UK, and she was Jewish, not Christian.
She and her brother were deported to Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber when she was six.
https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum/status/1677762000410013696
That little girl and my dad had no connection, aside from the accident of birthdate. Yet I cannot help of that connection as being strong: what would Henderika Oudgenoeg have become without the evil of anti-Semitism? Would she have had three happy children, as my dad did? would she have become a doctor and helped people?
So much potential, utterly wasted: times six million.
Which is rubbish. I love the BBC. I personally have zero problem with paying the licence fee, and believe I get value for it from BBC 4 alone.
But I'm not everyone, and the world has become a much more exciting place, media-wise. People can get their entertainment and news from so many more sources, and the licence fee increasingly looks like an anachronism of little relevance to large sectors of the population.
I don't know what the answer is, but people who proclaim to love the BBC should be asking whether insisting on keeping the licence fee is actually going to kill the thing they love.
Except 6m is the number of Jews. I believe there were about 5m assorted other “undesirables” - gays, trade unionists, gypsies etc.
So it should be “so much potential, utterly wasted: times eleven million”
I think though the Auschwitz Museum twitter with its individual stories gets it right, and I find their tales very moving.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/10/if-you-want-cartwheels-im-not-your-person-rachel-reeves-on-charisma-u-turns-and-rescuing-the-economy
BBC should focus on actually informing us about things.
I have a lesser connection, as you might expect from someone born nearly thirty years after it ended. I've got my dad's stories; my paternal granddad's few tales of his time as DEMS on ships; or my maternal grandmother's working at the Western Approaches in Liverpool.
What connection does my son have? The events were seventy years before he was born, and he can only hear my granddad's stories now - and he was a child at the time, and does not like to talk about them much. My mum was born during the war, and has no memories of it. The connection for him is less visceral. And on the other hand, there are loads of Wehraboos on t'Internet glorying in the non-political Wehrmacht and its wonderful tanks - a gateway into neo-Nazism.
For people with little or no direct connection with WW2 or the horrors of the camps and fascism, perhaps such trips can be important. As long as you learn something from it, that is...
There’s a simple fact underlying this: the BBC is airtime that the media barons could be extracting more income from. That is it, and all. There is never enough pie.
As to the prurient speculation: it is potentially very damaging to a lot of the regular names I’ve seen being chucked around - and being used pretty shamelessly by the press in their thumbnail imagery on links.
I long since abandoned BBC4 as it stopped, or reduced, it’s classic TV reruns and stopped making new drama.
At the moment she is coming across as a road block that is making it very difficult for Starmer to commit to anything. Labour gain "credibility" but lose the ability to inspire hope. I am not sure it is a great trade off.
The BBC is a state funded organisation and it bears all the hallmarks of a bloated behemoth.
I don't pay a licence fee and I never will. If people don't take a stance, nothing will change.
No more clunky than Sunak hanging around on a Southampton street where his mother's pharmacy used to be though.
Brexit tariffs threaten Vauxhall’s mega factory in Luton
Crippling taxes weaken competitiveness of Britain’s nascent electric vehicle industry
New Brexit tariffs on electric car parts threaten the future of Vauxhall’s huge factory in Luton, the plant’s director has warned.
Mark Noble, who runs the Bedfordshire site, warned that crippling taxes applied to vehicles exported into mainland Europe pose a risk to the factory’s competitiveness.
Under new “rules of origin” laws that come into force from January, 45pc of the value of an electric car must originate from either the UK or the EU. This is due to rise to 65pc in 2027.
But car makers have urged the Government to roll out a moratorium on the new laws to allow them to catch up with the changes.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/07/09/brexit-tarrifs-threaten-vauxhall-mega-factory-luton/
Everyone should go once to Yad Vashem and fall silent in the Children's Memorial there.
The country needs more from Labour than bland managerialism.
I notice that the government is getting increasingly nervous about financing it at the new interest rates.
Half of people questioned by pollsters believe that Humza Yousaf has done a bad job in his first 100 days as first minister.
Fewer than a quarter of voters (23 per cent) endorsed his tenure, which has been fraught with internal party issues and U-turns on the deposit return scheme and highly protected marine areas.
A poll in April had suggested that 19 per cent of people thought Yousaf was doing well, and 44 per cent believed the opposite, although his administration was just weeks old when it was conducted.
He [Yousaf] had a slightly better rating than Rishi Sunak, with 22 per cent of Scots saying he was doing a good job leading the UK government, compared to 59 per cent who said he was doing a bad job.
On favourability, 28 per cent had a favourable view of Yousaf, and 51 per cent had an unfavourable view.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/humza-yousaf-s-doing-a-bad-job-poll-suggests-5pm2bp0hx
Today's offerings on BBC are not worth to me 14 quid a year never mind 14 quid a month....
YouGov
Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes 37% (-2)
No 46% (+1)
Changes with the last YouGov poll in April.
Repercentaged without DKs/WNVs
Yes 45%
No 55%
Australia is little better. The ABC there survives very much on buying scraps from the BBC.
People all over the world access the BBC via VPNs. Almost no one does that for American broadcast news or Australian TV.
So again,, no. Show me a private sector doing it better and I'll listen.
Since when has that ever been a winning formula?
Labour have to show economic competence and trustworthiness, not cutting-edge radicalism.
It may be depressing but when the other party are imploding, you just need to be there and sound sensible.
My boys did appreciate CBBC when young, and nice to have advertising free content for them. I haven't watched it since, but glad it still exists.
I think the problem is more one of "the talent" being indulged to think that the rules do not apply to them. It is a problem in TV, other media, social media influencers, politics, business, pretty much anywhere there is a household name.
I don't know who this person is, but it isn't the BBC that is sick, but rather our whole celebrity obsessed culture.
Am trying to respond to your comment @MartinVegas about news in both OZ and the US.
Well there's a common denominator to news in Oz and the US and it's in the form of a single odious individual.
But youngsters these days don't get news from traditional television. I don't own a tv and many GenZ's and millenials don't either.
Online is where news is to be found and I see no reason to plunder the BBC website for it when there are so many alternatives.
Also, every Vauxhall product since the Mk.1 GTE has been junk so who cares?
None of them ever really got into CBBC, for the same reason: on-demand viewing took away the one competitive advantage of a dedicated children's channel.
@Miklosvar
@dixiedean
So @Dixiedean stated that (paraphrasing so I hope I have this right) to appreciate the issue for a certain group you had to be a member of that certain group (not all groups, just that particular example). You disagreed and used an analogy to demonstrate that wasn’t true. It was an excellent analogy in that in the case you gave (a completely different group) it clearly wasn’t true which was the point you wanted to make.
Analogies are very useful. They can often bring sudden clarity to an issue and can often provide easy routes to solving difficult problems (not quite the same, but the issue of 3 different sized circles with tangents on each pair of circles all interesting in a straight line is hard to prove, but easy if you change it to 3 balls and intersecting planes).
The problem with analogies is it can appear you have one when you haven’t.
Whether you agree with @Dixiedean or not, and I am sure he was generalizing anyway, but it is not true that your analogy proves him wrong as each case depends on the context (the group involved). You have picked one example that is at one extreme. His was different.
You simply picked a case that was obviously true. There are plenty of examples where what you deduce is not obviously true.
Eg. I think it is reasonable to assume that as someone who doesn’t speak Chinese I have little understanding of Chinese grammar. For me that is certainly a fact and I assume true for others. So it is true that those best able to comment are generally Chinese speakers. As a left hander I am aware that most right handers are not aware of some of the niche issues eg playing cards. Left handers are clearly more qualified to comment. You picked an example that you don’t have to be a Jew to appreciate the holocaust was wrong (paraphrasing) is true but was both tasteless and invalid compared to @dixiedean’s point.
I don’t want to harp on about other issues but you brought these up again (not me). You have called me a liar directly yesterday and implied I lied a few weeks ago by posting laughter when I apologised that I had to leave temporarily to deal with the clearance of my deceased father’s house. Yesterday you accused me of being operatic in my reaction to your post about the death of my father. Really you think I overreacted and you haven’t gone beyond the pale by posting laughter? I mean really you do think that is ok? Didn't even attempt an apology.
I'll get some chav in a souped Corsa trying to race/overtake me and then I gently put my foot on the accelerator......
Australia is little better. The ABC there survives very much on buying scraps from the BBC.
People all over the world access the BBC via VPNs. Almost no one does that for American broadcast news or Australian TV.
So again, no. Show me a private sector doing it better and I'll listen.
I agree that there's significant value in having a public broadcaster. It ought though to be funded from general taxation.
A flaw in Revolut’s payment system in the US allowed criminals to steal more than $20mn of its funds over several months last year before the company could close the loophole, according to multiple people with knowledge of the episode.
The incident, which has not yet been disclosed publicly, is likely to add further pressure to the highly valued fintech, which has faced a string of senior departures and a qualified audit from BDO while it awaits a banking licence in the UK.
The problem stemmed from differences between European and US payment systems, which meant that when certain transactions were declined Revolut would erroneously refund accounts, handing them its own money, according to three people with knowledge of the situation.
Although Revolut recouped part of the roughly $23mn stolen by pursuing some of those who had taken funds, the net loss was about $20mn — equal to almost two-thirds of its annual net profit in 2021, those people added.
https://www.ft.com/content/0025347f-6e0c-4dbd-9762-e4eec0431050
More generally, Brexit has wrecked any prospects we might have had for a significant share of the EV industry.
This weekend I stayed in the little Suffolk village of Wangford. A book in the house had a collection of Suffolk stories, and one was of William Smith, a teacher at the village school in the run-up to WW1. He was an ordinary man, except his son lived in Germany for a period, and he went to visit him; and he had a couple of German girls visit.
When war broke out, this led to rumours of him being a German spy. The rumours got to the authorities, and he was ordered to leave the area. A few days later he committed suicide; his wife did the same a few months later.
"William died as a result of village gossip, of idle tittle-tattle nothing more."
Thanks to the Internet the whole world is not a village, and we are seeing gossip and tittle-tattle everywhere we turn. It doesn't matter if we don't like the target of the gossip; it can still be just as hurtful and have real consequences to the innocent.
https://surname-society.org/false-rumours/
Yesterday morning I went down to the church to see if I could find his grave to pay my respects; I could not find it (I hadn't seen the link above then).
The problem for Sunak and Hunt is the same one that faces Starmer and Reeves. There isn't an answer to all of this that doesn't involve living standards falling. Not because of some elite conspiracy, but because our collective standard of living has risen beyond our ability to pay for it.
The two things Starmer has going for him are that, assuming he wins in 2024/5, he then has five years to grow and find some green shoots and an obvious scapegoat in the meantime.
Netflix maybe slightly better than YouTube, Facebook or TikTok, but only marginally. It soon starts feeding the cultural hegemony of (American) consumer capitalism and celebrity. The BBC often fails (who doesn't?) but at least it tries to educate more broadly.
A friend of mine tried to persuade me to sign up which I did for a short time before becoming concerned about it. Actually, it was crap for me in parts of Asia where it didn't offer transactions in several local currencies. And I didn't like certain draconian aspects and privacy invasions.
I've since deleted my Revolut account.
My friend? Revolut has 'lost' him $2000 during a transfer that neither he nor they can now find.
https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1678285032698400768
On the BBC; I read yesterday on the red button (which I do use usually once or twice a week) that Sharp reckons the BBC should in future be funded by a tax/fee on broadband.
I think they can sod off if that's their approach. I work online. I need an internet connection. I don't need the BBC. It's crackers, and unacceptable.
The TV licence fee is a weird anachronism which exists because it was made way back when, and it doesn't really make sense now. Instituting a new system that's complete insane is not something people will, or should, accept.
I still think the BBC is excellent value for money and for all its failings (which are broadly similar failings to those found in most large institutions and companies) is a huge net positive and a lynchpin of our cultural and creative industries (which the Tories obviously despise, even though it's one of the few areas where we are genuine world leaders).
There is a complete lack of interest in conserving our national institutions by modern "Conservatives".
Not so the BBC. They would have multiple reporters and crew representing branches: so for example, BBC One News, Six O' Clock, Ten O'Clock, Five Live, Radio One, BBC News, Website etc all with their 'own' reporting crew. It wasn't uncommon to see Radio Five and BBC One with separate vans parked outside the same courtroom.
They had ample opportunity to go private funded, for example if they had made iPlayer a globally-accessible subscription service which would have rivalled anything from Netflix or Sky.
This is what happens when you have a compulsory tax-funded unaccountable organisation.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/09/its-simple-and-cheap-the-volunteers-making-ukraine-trembita-bomb
...The Ukrainian version has a range of 140km (87 miles). It can carry 25kgs of explosives, and it runs on diesel or petrol that you can buy in the local garage.
Best of all for Ukraine’s armed forces, the Trembita is cheap. It costs about $3,000 (£2,300) to build the rocket and another $7,000 to equip it with a modern navigation system. ..
I had also cancelled Disney+ but turns out we missed some of the stuff on there, so it's back on the menu (boys).
Use for exchange etc - don’t keep serious sums there.
One possible exception is the Chase card, since that is backed by an actual bank.
The BBC is farcically bloated and lacking in financial nous, partly of course because its hands are tied by an anachronistic pernicious form of state funding. They scare Grannies into propping them up with really vicious nasty court order letters which are literally in red.
I know. I have a large pile of them. Which I have ignored for years and always will.
The Ukrainians are innocents in this; evil has been delivered upon them. People who try to blame the Ukrainians for this, or the west/EU/Nato, are not only excusing evil; they are actively calling for more evil to occur in the future.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/07/09/bt-high-alert-german-takeover/
Dystopian Black Mirror is here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_(newspaper)
Listening to the media coverage, it seems quite likely that Thames customers, rather than the 'investors' will get to pay for the excess debt loaded on to the company by Macquarie et al.
Because we have to maintain confidence in the UK as a destination for investment...
Unless you think the BBC is an essential utility for life (and there are some who do) then it's not quite the same thing.
He will be a sad loss to the Tory party if/when he loses Cheltenham. Should be Home Sec rather than Braverman.
But at least none of these send the heavies round to force you to buy their products.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/10/andrea-leadsom-held-shares-in-barclays-when-questioning-banks-ex-boss
The less obvious, but more important story on the front pages today.