Off topic completely, but I saw this study doing the rounds that (to me as a 30 something still experiencing Long Covid) seems pretty scary. The general idea is that those who suffered Covid are more likely to have more deterioration in their DNA and that their biological age becomes wildly out of sync with their actual age - and that this is more prominent the younger you are:
This could mean a general shortening of life expectancy, as well as more illnesses associated with aging in younger people; with Long Covid essentially being part of that as your body goes from having the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old. I am not a medic, so any doctors or scientists here who know better than me I would be extremely grateful if you can tell me if this all sounds like bullcrap - but if it isn't will we not have to change a lot of policy priors (such as people being capable of working well into their 60s and 70s) after generation Covid?
I don't think you can infer shortening of life expectancy from this. Notable they think effect reversible in some people. I'm sure we will learn more over time.
I couldn't actually find the table in the paper, sorry if I'm being dumb.
There is no Table 1 in that paper. So where does the table come from???
Off topic completely, but I saw this study doing the rounds that (to me as a 30 something still experiencing Long Covid) seems pretty scary. The general idea is that those who suffered Covid are more likely to have more deterioration in their DNA and that their biological age becomes wildly out of sync with their actual age - and that this is more prominent the younger you are:
This could mean a general shortening of life expectancy, as well as more illnesses associated with aging in younger people; with Long Covid essentially being part of that as your body goes from having the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old. I am not a medic, so any doctors or scientists here who know better than me I would be extremely grateful if you can tell me if this all sounds like bullcrap - but if it isn't will we not have to change a lot of policy priors (such as people being capable of working well into their 60s and 70s) after generation Covid?
"the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old."
I am not aware of a metric called the DNA strength - that's probably the bull crap part of this. I am sorry to hear of your long covid - are you willing to share your symptoms? One thing to note - long term response to infection is not a new thing, and not unique to Covid. I think there is an issue with some people who have been affected by infection with covid (and this paper is interesting - I will read in full later) but there area also people suffering in other ways that may not be related to a physical process. Some reports of people with long covid (and by no means all) sound very similar to FND (functional neuronal disorders - see https://www.amazon.co.uk/Its-All-Your-Head-Psychosomatic/dp/0099597853/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1F11M757UHFI1&keywords=fnd+suzanne+o'sullivan&qid=1707737980&sprefix=fnd+suzanneo'sullivan,aps,291&sr=8-1).
I used the term strength because I am not a biologist nor a doctor, and therefore picked a layman term that seems to replicate the effect of what was described in the abstract of the paper. I am more than happy to defer to someone else for a better term for it.
My long covid has been significant fatigue: I used to do pretty long walks of 2-4 hours regularly no problem, and in spring and summer would regularly do a 5 mile walk home from the office 2-3 times a week, but since getting covid I get tired, hot and sweaty, and out of breath after about 15-20 minutes of proper walking. I have definitely had increased brain fog; finding it hard to concentrate and forgetting stuff more often. It was recently suggested I might have PoTS (Postural Tachycardia Syndrome) which, whilst some symptoms fit things from my life prior to covid, if at least not a new thing is more acutely effecting me. It made my depression worse to begin with - although that is also a long term thing I suffer with, so that could be incidental. And just generally many more aches and pains in muscles and joints (it was suggested this might be because covid does something to the way we store vitamin D, but even supplements don't seem to help much).
So generally feeling like shit, but not in a massively obvious "this is an issue" way, but more in a "I have never got back to normal and that feels really weird" way.
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
I though it was interesting how DJT was almost deferential toward her on Truth. He knows, even if some of his more mental outriders don't, that MAGAWorld vs The Swifties only ends one way.
He doesn't want to get on the wrong side of that Travis Kelce either, does he?
Guy looks like a total 'This Is What Real American Manhood Is All About' package.
In the brief snippet of the Superbowl I caught he seemed to be in a right old tizzy and body slamming his own coach. I fear he may have anger issues.
isn't there a conspiracy theory that Travis Kelce is just a beard, ie a pretend boyfriend, with a celeb angle, to hide the fact Taylor Swift is actually a lesbian?
I like this theory mainly because it gives me a chance to imagine Taylor Swift being a lesbian, and doing lesbiany things, perhaps with a young Scarlet Johansson
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce have in common is a 100% focus on their public image. Swift that she's a hometown girl who just happens to travel everywhere by private jet. Kelce that he's always looking out for other people and generous with his time and money. Carefully curated public images that likely have a basis in fact.
Here's Taylor Swift introducing one of her dearest old friends to her boyfriend's dad. No-one feels left out.
The Labour front bench are saying that he 'fell for an online conspiracy theory'. I thought this was red-on-red infighting, but it appears to be the Labour line for his defence. Hardly a ringing defence, is it?
Labour (sadly) are committing an egregious error. At moment one, within an hour, they should have said "Whatever it says on the ballot Labour have no candidate in Rochdale, he is suspended from the party. Sorry. Sotto voce: vote LD".
The good post-Brexit economic news just keeps coming:
’ The U.K. economy is now 5% worse off than it would have been had it never left the European Union due to a slump in trade and investment since the Brexit referendum in June 2016, according to a new study by Goldman Sachs.
This slowdown has seen the U.K.’s GDP per capita stagnate since COVID-19, having increased just 4% since the 2016 referendum, compared to an 8% increase in the eurozone and a 15% increase in the U.S., said a team at Goldman led by chief European economist Sven Jari Stehn.
At the same time, the U.K. has experienced much higher inflation than in rival advanced economies, with the country’s consumer prices up by 31% since 2016, versus rises of 27% in the U.S. and 24% in the eurozone.
Goldman Sachs’ study compared the U.K.’s post-Brexit economy to a hypothetical model of one that never left the E.U., with that underperformance blamed on the trade drop, lowered investment and labor market impacts of the decision to leave the E.U.
U.K. trade volumes –- total imports and exports –- are roughly 15% lower than in comparable countries, due to higher trade barriers with the E.U. and the resulting shift in supply chains.
Britain’s exports of goods to both the E.U. and the rest of the world have fallen sharply since Brexit, even as its services exports, which account for 40% of the country’s total exports, have remained roughly on course, the report said.
Investment in the U.K. has also stalled since Brexit, as a result of uncertainty in the years immediately following the referendum alongside a pullback by hard hit companies. Overall investment is 5% lower than if Britain had never left the E.U.
The situation has been worsened by a drop in E.U. migration that has reduced elasticity in the U.K.’s labor market, despite an uptick in overall migration driven by people moving from countries outside the E.U., said Stehn and the team…
‘New trade deals with countries outside the E.U. could help mitigate some of the long-term costs of Brexit, the reports adds. However, any benefits are unlikely to outweigh the reduction in trade to the European bloc.
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
I though it was interesting how DJT was almost deferential toward her on Truth. He knows, even if some of his more mental outriders don't, that MAGAWorld vs The Swifties only ends one way.
He doesn't want to get on the wrong side of that Travis Kelce either, does he?
Guy looks like a total 'This Is What Real American Manhood Is All About' package.
In the brief snippet of the Superbowl I caught he seemed to be in a right old tizzy and body slamming his own coach. I fear he may have anger issues.
isn't there a conspiracy theory that Travis Kelce is just a beard, ie a pretend boyfriend, with a celeb angle, to hide the fact Taylor Swift is actually a lesbian?
I like this theory mainly because it gives me a chance to imagine Taylor Swift being a lesbian, and doing lesbiany things, perhaps with a young Scarlet Johansson
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce have in common is a 100% focus on their public image. Swift that she's a hometown girl who just happens to travel everywhere by private jet. Kelce that he's always looking out for other people and generous with his time and money. Carefully curated public images that likely have a basis in fact.
Here's Taylor Swift introducing one of her dearest old friends to her boyfriend's dad. No-one feels left out.
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Alternatively, AI is the last best chance to salvage something from the smoking ruins.
Local papers, local radio, they seem to need a monopoly for the finances to stack up. If you're the only place the local car dealership has to go to get an advert out to everyone, that brings in enough money to fund the journalism. Once that market atomised, the money wasn't there any more.
Back in the 80's a town like Gosport (population 80,000) could support a daily edition of the Portsmouth News, with 3 or 4 dedicated hacks based in a High Street office. Sales fell, so the product got worse, so sales fell even more and it's all gone now.
Overall, we probably don't want to go back to that world, but some important things have been lost.
We make a similar point about local journalism, however, i don't understand your last argument. It was a better news environment when local news was covered properly by dedicated people (being paid). Why shouldn't we want that world to return?
How we do that, is a different question. But properly reported local news is a good thing, no?
Yup, proper local journalism is a good thing, and that's part of what we've lost.
But the price of supporting that was having much less media choice as consumers, and I don't think we are ready to go back to that as a society.
Another example. Before multichannel was a thing, the audience for something like News at Ten was huge- eight digits not seven. And the advertising income from the ITV network funded pretty lavish journalism and meant that a large part of the country were seeing a good attempt at tying to provide honest coverage of what is happening. They may only have watched because there was not much else on, but they watched.
Once you fragment the audience, the model falls apart. Which is in part why the national conversation is often so dumb.
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Alternatively, AI is the last best chance to salvage something from the smoking ruins.
Local papers, local radio, they seem to need a monopoly for the finances to stack up. If you're the only place the local car dealership has to go to get an advert out to everyone, that brings in enough money to fund the journalism. Once that market atomised, the money wasn't there any more.
Back in the 80's a town like Gosport (population 80,000) could support a daily edition of the Portsmouth News, with 3 or 4 dedicated hacks based in a High Street office. Sales fell, so the product got worse, so sales fell even more and it's all gone now.
Overall, we probably don't want to go back to that world, but some important things have been lost.
We make a similar point about local journalism, however, i don't understand your last argument. It was a better news environment when local news was covered properly by dedicated people (being paid). Why shouldn't we want that world to return?
How we do that, is a different question. But properly reported local news is a good thing, no?
Well, I think we would want that world to return. But it seems not to the extent of actually paying for it. We'd rather get lower quality news for free.
A generation ago, a newspaper wasn't just a way to get your news, it was a time filler in the way that a phone is now. People would buy a newspaper in order to get their news, their clickbait, their idle ten minute games, their weather forecasts; a newspaper would be browsed on the morning commute, repeatedly put down and picked up again throughout the day; half-read during a conversation with their spouse, and would fill time in exactly the way a phone does now. Arguably the £1 a day or whatever it cost was pretty good value. But people now get all that for free on their phones and much of the purpose of a paid-for newspaper has been lost.
Alastair Campbell: Spoke recently to a soldier friend who said “you’ve no idea how hard it is being in the military when you’re ashamed of your own government.”
No it died when Donald Trump accused Nikki Haley of being a loser pretending she'd won.
Off topic completely, but I saw this study doing the rounds that (to me as a 30 something still experiencing Long Covid) seems pretty scary. The general idea is that those who suffered Covid are more likely to have more deterioration in their DNA and that their biological age becomes wildly out of sync with their actual age - and that this is more prominent the younger you are:
This could mean a general shortening of life expectancy, as well as more illnesses associated with aging in younger people; with Long Covid essentially being part of that as your body goes from having the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old. I am not a medic, so any doctors or scientists here who know better than me I would be extremely grateful if you can tell me if this all sounds like bullcrap - but if it isn't will we not have to change a lot of policy priors (such as people being capable of working well into their 60s and 70s) after generation Covid?
"the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old."
I am not aware of a metric called the DNA strength - that's probably the bull crap part of this. I am sorry to hear of your long covid - are you willing to share your symptoms? One thing to note - long term response to infection is not a new thing, and not unique to Covid. I think there is an issue with some people who have been affected by infection with covid (and this paper is interesting - I will read in full later) but there area also people suffering in other ways that may not be related to a physical process. Some reports of people with long covid (and by no means all) sound very similar to FND (functional neuronal disorders - see https://www.amazon.co.uk/Its-All-Your-Head-Psychosomatic/dp/0099597853/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1F11M757UHFI1&keywords=fnd+suzanne+o'sullivan&qid=1707737980&sprefix=fnd+suzanneo'sullivan,aps,291&sr=8-1).
I used the term strength because I am not a biologist nor a doctor, and therefore picked a layman term that seems to replicate the effect of what was described in the abstract of the paper. I am more than happy to defer to someone else for a better term for it.
My long covid has been significant fatigue: I used to do pretty long walks of 2-4 hours regularly no problem, and in spring and summer would regularly do a 5 mile walk home from the office 2-3 times a week, but since getting covid I get tired, hot and sweaty, and out of breath after about 15-20 minutes of proper walking. I have definitely had increased brain fog; finding it hard to concentrate and forgetting stuff more often. It was recently suggested I might have PoTS (Postural Tachycardia Syndrome) which, whilst some symptoms fit things from my life prior to covid, if at least not a new thing is more acutely effecting me. It made my depression worse to begin with - although that is also a long term thing I suffer with, so that could be incidental. And just generally many more aches and pains in muscles and joints (it was suggested this might be because covid does something to the way we store vitamin D, but even supplements don't seem to help much).
So generally feeling like shit, but not in a massively obvious "this is an issue" way, but more in a "I have never got back to normal and that feels really weird" way.
Sorry to hear that. I'd argue the abstract does not tie in well with DNA strength. We know that age is a factor in risk from covid (however the profile matches that for other respiratory viruses - e,g, influenza). Yes epigenetic age (the amount of accumultated methylation events on the DNA will correlate to age, that's not a surprise. They are claiming that covid can accelerate the epigenetic age of a patient and then making the leap that that means there risk is now enhance as if they had aged. The last bit is definitely not proven.
As for your experience - have you sought help? Maybe not just medical, but also potentially counselling?
Grant Shapps has ordered an inquiry to find out which party has run the MoD since 2010.
I know a bit about this, as it's adjacent to some of the things I do for work.
Obviously, I can't give specific details... but if you were to think about some of the checks you might run on someone before granting them a security clearance, one of them might be something like a credit check.
Nice and simple in the UK - sign contracts with the credit reference agencies, hire a team of software developers, and in a few months you'll have an automated system that will get you the required information in less than a second.
Not so simple for an overseas recruit, especially if they're somewhere like Nepal where there might not even be a credit reference agency to talk to.
So you're going to have to check the applicant's financial history manually, and then you'll want to verify that information with his bank or community in Nepal. Rather than a few seconds, this might take many months.
Meanwhile, you've got this applicant who wants to start his job. But he can't because you're hanging on waiting for a Nepalese money-lender to confirm that they did indeed repay that 1000 Rupee loan they had five years ago.
In that case, you might well decide to let the applicant start at risk, making sure he doesn't go beyond basic training without the full clearance coming through.
Not woke, just a very simple operational decision that allows the pipeline of overseas recruits to be unclogged.
In fact, this story is such a load of nonsense that it's almost making me wonder if other "woke" stories have also been cynically invented to distract from real, actual government failings.
Various “woke” ideas have been latched onto by the incompetent, to explain away organisational paralysis.
Just as “‘Elf and Safety” was used by bullshit merchants to deny progress on anything. Actual H&S was usually ignored by these morons.
So now you have legions of clowns using racism, sexism, ableism etc as their excuse.
Aside from the organisation not doing anything, the actual racism, sexism etc goes unchecked. And Dave from accounting still can’t get his wheelchair through the door. Because it is too fucking narrow.
In this case, the context seems to be an ongoing fight between the brass and Shapps over the current army recruitment crisis.
Absurd statements from both sides... Brass - "we might need conscription!", Shapps - "woke!". What it likely actually needs is more money, an acceptance of reduced capacity, or a willingness to think about meeting requirements in other ways.
I'm actually quite disappointed in Shapps for leaning into the woke nonsense, I had genuinely thought he was better than that. The situation he's trying to distract from must be truly desperate.
Get rid of Crapita, and the recruitment issues sort themselves.
Off topic completely, but I saw this study doing the rounds that (to me as a 30 something still experiencing Long Covid) seems pretty scary. The general idea is that those who suffered Covid are more likely to have more deterioration in their DNA and that their biological age becomes wildly out of sync with their actual age - and that this is more prominent the younger you are:
This could mean a general shortening of life expectancy, as well as more illnesses associated with aging in younger people; with Long Covid essentially being part of that as your body goes from having the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old. I am not a medic, so any doctors or scientists here who know better than me I would be extremely grateful if you can tell me if this all sounds like bullcrap - but if it isn't will we not have to change a lot of policy priors (such as people being capable of working well into their 60s and 70s) after generation Covid?
I don't think you can infer shortening of life expectancy from this. Notable they think effect reversible in some people. I'm sure we will learn more over time.
I couldn't actually find the table in the paper, sorry if I'm being dumb.
There is no Table 1 in that paper. So where does the table come from???
Yes I'm suspicious it is fake news wrapped onto a genuine science article.
Eyeballing the different dna ageing models, some find a difference from covid infection, some do not. None of them seem to suggest a 20 year+ difference to me.
Judging by the snail's pace at which battles over modest towns, suburbs and villages- Adviika (In progress), Bakhmut for the Russians, Krinky, Staromaiorske for Ukraine seem to have gone after the initial attack by Russia and counter by Ukraine there's going to be fighting in the Donbas for the next hundred years.
What would have been said about the Western Front in WW1 right up to March 1918?
Ukraine's going to need substantially more equipment to achieve such a result.
Unfortunately, both Russia and Ukraine seem to be in "one more heave" mode, when it's obvious that the front is deadlocked. A ceasefire on current lines seems to be the sensible option avoiding thousands of deaths - military and "collateral". Maybe it would lead to a negotiated settlement, or maybe just a cold war with sanctions in place for years, but either would be better than the current pointless slaughter over a few hundred yards of devastated territory in villages along the front.
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Alternatively, AI is the last best chance to salvage something from the smoking ruins.
Local papers, local radio, they seem to need a monopoly for the finances to stack up. If you're the only place the local car dealership has to go to get an advert out to everyone, that brings in enough money to fund the journalism. Once that market atomised, the money wasn't there any more.
Back in the 80's a town like Gosport (population 80,000) could support a daily edition of the Portsmouth News, with 3 or 4 dedicated hacks based in a High Street office. Sales fell, so the product got worse, so sales fell even more and it's all gone now.
Overall, we probably don't want to go back to that world, but some important things have been lost.
We make a similar point about local journalism, however, i don't understand your last argument. It was a better news environment when local news was covered properly by dedicated people (being paid). Why shouldn't we want that world to return?
How we do that, is a different question. But properly reported local news is a good thing, no?
Yup, proper local journalism is a good thing, and that's part of what we've lost.
But the price of supporting that was having much less media choice as consumers, and I don't think we are ready to go back to that as a society.
Another example. Before multichannel was a thing, the audience for something like News at Ten was huge- eight digits not seven. And the advertising income from the ITV network funded pretty lavish journalism and meant that a large part of the country were seeing a good attempt at tying to provide honest coverage of what is happening. They may only have watched because there was not much else on, but they watched.
Once you fragment the audience, the model falls apart. Which is in part why the national conversation is often so dumb.
Proper local journalism has long since gone. My main local paper, online, is predominantly clickbait and/or stories trawled from social media. Reddit, Mumsnet, Twitter and the like.
There is very little local news now.
We are never going back,,the genie is out of the bottle.
Off topic completely, but I saw this study doing the rounds that (to me as a 30 something still experiencing Long Covid) seems pretty scary. The general idea is that those who suffered Covid are more likely to have more deterioration in their DNA and that their biological age becomes wildly out of sync with their actual age - and that this is more prominent the younger you are:
This could mean a general shortening of life expectancy, as well as more illnesses associated with aging in younger people; with Long Covid essentially being part of that as your body goes from having the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old. I am not a medic, so any doctors or scientists here who know better than me I would be extremely grateful if you can tell me if this all sounds like bullcrap - but if it isn't will we not have to change a lot of policy priors (such as people being capable of working well into their 60s and 70s) after generation Covid?
"the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old."
I am not aware of a metric called the DNA strength - that's probably the bull crap part of this. I am sorry to hear of your long covid - are you willing to share your symptoms? One thing to note - long term response to infection is not a new thing, and not unique to Covid. I think there is an issue with some people who have been affected by infection with covid (and this paper is interesting - I will read in full later) but there area also people suffering in other ways that may not be related to a physical process. Some reports of people with long covid (and by no means all) sound very similar to FND (functional neuronal disorders - see https://www.amazon.co.uk/Its-All-Your-Head-Psychosomatic/dp/0099597853/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1F11M757UHFI1&keywords=fnd+suzanne+o'sullivan&qid=1707737980&sprefix=fnd+suzanneo'sullivan,aps,291&sr=8-1).
I used the term strength because I am not a biologist nor a doctor, and therefore picked a layman term that seems to replicate the effect of what was described in the abstract of the paper. I am more than happy to defer to someone else for a better term for it.
My long covid has been significant fatigue: I used to do pretty long walks of 2-4 hours regularly no problem, and in spring and summer would regularly do a 5 mile walk home from the office 2-3 times a week, but since getting covid I get tired, hot and sweaty, and out of breath after about 15-20 minutes of proper walking. I have definitely had increased brain fog; finding it hard to concentrate and forgetting stuff more often. It was recently suggested I might have PoTS (Postural Tachycardia Syndrome) which, whilst some symptoms fit things from my life prior to covid, if at least not a new thing is more acutely effecting me. It made my depression worse to begin with - although that is also a long term thing I suffer with, so that could be incidental. And just generally many more aches and pains in muscles and joints (it was suggested this might be because covid does something to the way we store vitamin D, but even supplements don't seem to help much).
So generally feeling like shit, but not in a massively obvious "this is an issue" way, but more in a "I have never got back to normal and that feels really weird" way.
Sorry to hear that. I'd argue the abstract does not tie in well with DNA strength. We know that age is a factor in risk from covid (however the profile matches that for other respiratory viruses - e,g, influenza). Yes epigenetic age (the amount of accumultated methylation events on the DNA will correlate to age, that's not a surprise. They are claiming that covid can accelerate the epigenetic age of a patient and then making the leap that that means there risk is now enhance as if they had aged. The last bit is definitely not proven.
As for your experience - have you sought help? Maybe not just medical, but also potentially counselling?
Yes - am waiting for an exercise assessment, have been told I'm still "breathing from the chest too much" and given breathing exercises and have been doing therapy generally anyway for a while.
The good post-Brexit economic news just keeps coming:
’ The U.K. economy is now 5% worse off than it would have been had it never left the European Union due to a slump in trade and investment since the Brexit referendum in June 2016, according to a new study by Goldman Sachs.
This slowdown has seen the U.K.’s GDP per capita stagnate since COVID-19, having increased just 4% since the 2016 referendum, compared to an 8% increase in the eurozone and a 15% increase in the U.S., said a team at Goldman led by chief European economist Sven Jari Stehn.
At the same time, the U.K. has experienced much higher inflation than in rival advanced economies, with the country’s consumer prices up by 31% since 2016, versus rises of 27% in the U.S. and 24% in the eurozone.
Goldman Sachs’ study compared the U.K.’s post-Brexit economy to a hypothetical model of one that never left the E.U., with that underperformance blamed on the trade drop, lowered investment and labor market impacts of the decision to leave the E.U.
U.K. trade volumes –- total imports and exports –- are roughly 15% lower than in comparable countries, due to higher trade barriers with the E.U. and the resulting shift in supply chains.
Britain’s exports of goods to both the E.U. and the rest of the world have fallen sharply since Brexit, even as its services exports, which account for 40% of the country’s total exports, have remained roughly on course, the report said.
Investment in the U.K. has also stalled since Brexit, as a result of uncertainty in the years immediately following the referendum alongside a pullback by hard hit companies. Overall investment is 5% lower than if Britain had never left the E.U.
The situation has been worsened by a drop in E.U. migration that has reduced elasticity in the U.K.’s labor market, despite an uptick in overall migration driven by people moving from countries outside the E.U., said Stehn and the team…
‘New trade deals with countries outside the E.U. could help mitigate some of the long-term costs of Brexit, the reports adds. However, any benefits are unlikely to outweigh the reduction in trade to the European bloc.
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Alternatively, AI is the last best chance to salvage something from the smoking ruins.
Local papers, local radio, they seem to need a monopoly for the finances to stack up. If you're the only place the local car dealership has to go to get an advert out to everyone, that brings in enough money to fund the journalism. Once that market atomised, the money wasn't there any more.
Back in the 80's a town like Gosport (population 80,000) could support a daily edition of the Portsmouth News, with 3 or 4 dedicated hacks based in a High Street office. Sales fell, so the product got worse, so sales fell even more and it's all gone now.
Overall, we probably don't want to go back to that world, but some important things have been lost.
We make a similar point about local journalism, however, i don't understand your last argument. It was a better news environment when local news was covered properly by dedicated people (being paid). Why shouldn't we want that world to return?
How we do that, is a different question. But properly reported local news is a good thing, no?
Well, I think we would want that world to return. But it seems not to the extent of actually paying for it. We'd rather get lower quality news for free.
A generation ago, a newspaper wasn't just a way to get your news, it was a time filler in the way that a phone is now. People would buy a newspaper in order to get their news, their clickbait, their idle ten minute games, their weather forecasts; a newspaper would be browsed on the morning commute, repeatedly put down and picked up again throughout the day; half-read during a conversation with their spouse, and would fill time in exactly the way a phone does now. Arguably the £1 a day or whatever it cost was pretty good value. But people now get all that for free on their phones and much of the purpose of a paid-for newspaper has been lost.
Well phrased
It's notable that the NYT has suddenly started prospering (unlike 95% of US newspapers) by massively boosting their cookery pages and puzzles and building a community of commenters around that. And people are willing to pay for this sense of community plus the specialist info, via subs
This is surely the future. Papers will become an online brand where people will go to meet others and get specialist info
PB at its best is something I would pay for (and I have donated several times in the past). Not so much the headers - tho they are always appreciated, and sometimes excellent - as the community beneath
Perhaps PB should add cooking pages, and we can all discuss the recipes and denounce each other for being anti-carrot or secretly pro-Tabasco, or maybe a bot paid for by Big Broccoli
Off topic completely, but I saw this study doing the rounds that (to me as a 30 something still experiencing Long Covid) seems pretty scary. The general idea is that those who suffered Covid are more likely to have more deterioration in their DNA and that their biological age becomes wildly out of sync with their actual age - and that this is more prominent the younger you are:
This could mean a general shortening of life expectancy, as well as more illnesses associated with aging in younger people; with Long Covid essentially being part of that as your body goes from having the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old. I am not a medic, so any doctors or scientists here who know better than me I would be extremely grateful if you can tell me if this all sounds like bullcrap - but if it isn't will we not have to change a lot of policy priors (such as people being capable of working well into their 60s and 70s) after generation Covid?
I don't think you can infer shortening of life expectancy from this. Notable they think effect reversible in some people. I'm sure we will learn more over time.
I couldn't actually find the table in the paper, sorry if I'm being dumb.
I also couldn't find that table in the paper looking back - so maybe it's from a different paper - I was reading a long piece about this and I assumed that it was the same reference for the table as this article, but maybe I got that wrong.
Off topic completely, but I saw this study doing the rounds that (to me as a 30 something still experiencing Long Covid) seems pretty scary. The general idea is that those who suffered Covid are more likely to have more deterioration in their DNA and that their biological age becomes wildly out of sync with their actual age - and that this is more prominent the younger you are:
This could mean a general shortening of life expectancy, as well as more illnesses associated with aging in younger people; with Long Covid essentially being part of that as your body goes from having the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old. I am not a medic, so any doctors or scientists here who know better than me I would be extremely grateful if you can tell me if this all sounds like bullcrap - but if it isn't will we not have to change a lot of policy priors (such as people being capable of working well into their 60s and 70s) after generation Covid?
"the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old."
I am not aware of a metric called the DNA strength - that's probably the bull crap part of this. I am sorry to hear of your long covid - are you willing to share your symptoms? One thing to note - long term response to infection is not a new thing, and not unique to Covid. I think there is an issue with some people who have been affected by infection with covid (and this paper is interesting - I will read in full later) but there area also people suffering in other ways that may not be related to a physical process. Some reports of people with long covid (and by no means all) sound very similar to FND (functional neuronal disorders - see https://www.amazon.co.uk/Its-All-Your-Head-Psychosomatic/dp/0099597853/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1F11M757UHFI1&keywords=fnd+suzanne+o'sullivan&qid=1707737980&sprefix=fnd+suzanneo'sullivan,aps,291&sr=8-1).
I used the term strength because I am not a biologist nor a doctor, and therefore picked a layman term that seems to replicate the effect of what was described in the abstract of the paper. I am more than happy to defer to someone else for a better term for it.
My long covid has been significant fatigue: I used to do pretty long walks of 2-4 hours regularly no problem, and in spring and summer would regularly do a 5 mile walk home from the office 2-3 times a week, but since getting covid I get tired, hot and sweaty, and out of breath after about 15-20 minutes of proper walking. I have definitely had increased brain fog; finding it hard to concentrate and forgetting stuff more often. It was recently suggested I might have PoTS (Postural Tachycardia Syndrome) which, whilst some symptoms fit things from my life prior to covid, if at least not a new thing is more acutely effecting me. It made my depression worse to begin with - although that is also a long term thing I suffer with, so that could be incidental. And just generally many more aches and pains in muscles and joints (it was suggested this might be because covid does something to the way we store vitamin D, but even supplements don't seem to help much).
So generally feeling like shit, but not in a massively obvious "this is an issue" way, but more in a "I have never got back to normal and that feels really weird" way.
Sorry to hear that. I'd argue the abstract does not tie in well with DNA strength. We know that age is a factor in risk from covid (however the profile matches that for other respiratory viruses - e,g, influenza). Yes epigenetic age (the amount of accumultated methylation events on the DNA will correlate to age, that's not a surprise. They are claiming that covid can accelerate the epigenetic age of a patient and then making the leap that that means there risk is now enhance as if they had aged. The last bit is definitely not proven.
As for your experience - have you sought help? Maybe not just medical, but also potentially counselling?
Yes - am waiting for an exercise assessment, have been told I'm still "breathing from the chest too much" and given breathing exercises and have been doing therapy generally anyway for a while.
Good stuff - hope you can get back to where you want to be.
Off topic completely, but I saw this study doing the rounds that (to me as a 30 something still experiencing Long Covid) seems pretty scary. The general idea is that those who suffered Covid are more likely to have more deterioration in their DNA and that their biological age becomes wildly out of sync with their actual age - and that this is more prominent the younger you are:
This could mean a general shortening of life expectancy, as well as more illnesses associated with aging in younger people; with Long Covid essentially being part of that as your body goes from having the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old. I am not a medic, so any doctors or scientists here who know better than me I would be extremely grateful if you can tell me if this all sounds like bullcrap - but if it isn't will we not have to change a lot of policy priors (such as people being capable of working well into their 60s and 70s) after generation Covid?
"the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old."
I am not aware of a metric called the DNA strength - that's probably the bull crap part of this. I am sorry to hear of your long covid - are you willing to share your symptoms? One thing to note - long term response to infection is not a new thing, and not unique to Covid. I think there is an issue with some people who have been affected by infection with covid (and this paper is interesting - I will read in full later) but there area also people suffering in other ways that may not be related to a physical process. Some reports of people with long covid (and by no means all) sound very similar to FND (functional neuronal disorders - see https://www.amazon.co.uk/Its-All-Your-Head-Psychosomatic/dp/0099597853/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1F11M757UHFI1&keywords=fnd+suzanne+o'sullivan&qid=1707737980&sprefix=fnd+suzanneo'sullivan,aps,291&sr=8-1).
I used the term strength because I am not a biologist nor a doctor, and therefore picked a layman term that seems to replicate the effect of what was described in the abstract of the paper. I am more than happy to defer to someone else for a better term for it.
My long covid has been significant fatigue: I used to do pretty long walks of 2-4 hours regularly no problem, and in spring and summer would regularly do a 5 mile walk home from the office 2-3 times a week, but since getting covid I get tired, hot and sweaty, and out of breath after about 15-20 minutes of proper walking. I have definitely had increased brain fog; finding it hard to concentrate and forgetting stuff more often. It was recently suggested I might have PoTS (Postural Tachycardia Syndrome) which, whilst some symptoms fit things from my life prior to covid, if at least not a new thing is more acutely effecting me. It made my depression worse to begin with - although that is also a long term thing I suffer with, so that could be incidental. And just generally many more aches and pains in muscles and joints (it was suggested this might be because covid does something to the way we store vitamin D, but even supplements don't seem to help much).
So generally feeling like shit, but not in a massively obvious "this is an issue" way, but more in a "I have never got back to normal and that feels really weird" way.
Sympathies, that doesn't sound fun
If it's any consolation, there is absolutely no evidence of brain fog in your comments on here. You write lucidly, and articulately, and often knowledgeably. I disagree with you 97% of the time, but you write well
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Alternatively, AI is the last best chance to salvage something from the smoking ruins.
Local papers, local radio, they seem to need a monopoly for the finances to stack up. If you're the only place the local car dealership has to go to get an advert out to everyone, that brings in enough money to fund the journalism. Once that market atomised, the money wasn't there any more.
Back in the 80's a town like Gosport (population 80,000) could support a daily edition of the Portsmouth News, with 3 or 4 dedicated hacks based in a High Street office. Sales fell, so the product got worse, so sales fell even more and it's all gone now.
Overall, we probably don't want to go back to that world, but some important things have been lost.
Second most read story on the guardian, rapidly losing money job cuts incoming, website is this gem. An intern has just cut n pasted tweets from Eric Idle. I was following it yesterday oddly enough. News is more and more disagreements on social media.
AI can do this. Given how these businesses are more and more cash strapped it is the future.
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Alternatively, AI is the last best chance to salvage something from the smoking ruins.
Local papers, local radio, they seem to need a monopoly for the finances to stack up. If you're the only place the local car dealership has to go to get an advert out to everyone, that brings in enough money to fund the journalism. Once that market atomised, the money wasn't there any more.
Back in the 80's a town like Gosport (population 80,000) could support a daily edition of the Portsmouth News, with 3 or 4 dedicated hacks based in a High Street office. Sales fell, so the product got worse, so sales fell even more and it's all gone now.
Overall, we probably don't want to go back to that world, but some important things have been lost.
We make a similar point about local journalism, however, i don't understand your last argument. It was a better news environment when local news was covered properly by dedicated people (being paid). Why shouldn't we want that world to return?
How we do that, is a different question. But properly reported local news is a good thing, no?
Well, I think we would want that world to return. But it seems not to the extent of actually paying for it. We'd rather get lower quality news for free.
A generation ago, a newspaper wasn't just a way to get your news, it was a time filler in the way that a phone is now. People would buy a newspaper in order to get their news, their clickbait, their idle ten minute games, their weather forecasts; a newspaper would be browsed on the morning commute, repeatedly put down and picked up again throughout the day; half-read during a conversation with their spouse, and would fill time in exactly the way a phone does now. Arguably the £1 a day or whatever it cost was pretty good value. But people now get all that for free on their phones and much of the purpose of a paid-for newspaper has been lost.
There is also the question of cost for the print format. The Daily Telegraph annual print sub is just under £1000. In the 1960s to buy it in the old way every day cost well under £20 a year.
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
I wouldn't put a number on it - but I mean the ability to pay bills, have a roof over your head, pay for food and other necessities, and support a family sounds like me a minimum for "modest living". Food banks, for example, should not exist.
Food banks shouldn't exist? So in your anarchist utopia there would be no mechanism to redistribute surplus food to those in need?
I mean, there are a lot of assumptions in that starting with the idea of surplus food - this food isn't surplus, it would have been bought if the people could just afford it. As I've said many times before; my axiom for resource distribution would be each according to their need.
Food banks should not exist because it shows, under the current system we have, that wages and government assistance are not enough for working people to afford food staples. Most people who use food banks are the working poor. That private charity needs to be organised to help huge numbers of working people eat is a clear failure of the system we live in.
Not a failure of the people to buy food before anything else. Everyone on UC got a free £300 last Friday. Why not just spend that on food?
Because shit is expensive and people have limited time resources and so it's easier to buy somewhat cheap (although relatively expensive for the cost of the ingredients) but quick food rather than time intensive cheaper ingredients that can be made into cheap and healthy meals. Again, the vast majority of people who use food banks are in work - these are people in precarity, working long hours for little pay, and then also have to eat. That they work long hours for little pay is already a failure, but it is an additional failure that the state then fails them by not a) increasing the minimum wage and enforcing workers' rights and strong labour unions and b) by not at least topping up their pay to a sustainable level (until they can force their employers to do so via their wages).
Interesting one for me is housing benefit.
If housing benefit was reduced to zero tommorow, what would actually happen. The rental returns at the bottom end would drop, so there'd be a crash at the bottom end of the market I guess - which would mean the returns from the new, lower rents paid by the bottom of the market would then become once again viable. As the bottom of the market is taken out so my guess is the middle drops, and probably the top a bit (Though that has different dynamics with more unoccupied property for investment and so forth). Overall since the same number of people and the same housing stock should still exist the net result would be purely positive to the treasury...
Of course it's the "in the meantime" (And associated property price drop) that would be the headache for the Gov't.
The good post-Brexit economic news just keeps coming:
’ The U.K. economy is now 5% worse off than it would have been had it never left the European Union due to a slump in trade and investment since the Brexit referendum in June 2016, according to a new study by Goldman Sachs.
This slowdown has seen the U.K.’s GDP per capita stagnate since COVID-19, having increased just 4% since the 2016 referendum, compared to an 8% increase in the eurozone and a 15% increase in the U.S., said a team at Goldman led by chief European economist Sven Jari Stehn.
At the same time, the U.K. has experienced much higher inflation than in rival advanced economies, with the country’s consumer prices up by 31% since 2016, versus rises of 27% in the U.S. and 24% in the eurozone.
Goldman Sachs’ study compared the U.K.’s post-Brexit economy to a hypothetical model of one that never left the E.U., with that underperformance blamed on the trade drop, lowered investment and labor market impacts of the decision to leave the E.U.
U.K. trade volumes –- total imports and exports –- are roughly 15% lower than in comparable countries, due to higher trade barriers with the E.U. and the resulting shift in supply chains.
Britain’s exports of goods to both the E.U. and the rest of the world have fallen sharply since Brexit, even as its services exports, which account for 40% of the country’s total exports, have remained roughly on course, the report said.
Investment in the U.K. has also stalled since Brexit, as a result of uncertainty in the years immediately following the referendum alongside a pullback by hard hit companies. Overall investment is 5% lower than if Britain had never left the E.U.
The situation has been worsened by a drop in E.U. migration that has reduced elasticity in the U.K.’s labor market, despite an uptick in overall migration driven by people moving from countries outside the E.U., said Stehn and the team…
‘New trade deals with countries outside the E.U. could help mitigate some of the long-term costs of Brexit, the reports adds. However, any benefits are unlikely to outweigh the reduction in trade to the European bloc.
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Alternatively, AI is the last best chance to salvage something from the smoking ruins.
Local papers, local radio, they seem to need a monopoly for the finances to stack up. If you're the only place the local car dealership has to go to get an advert out to everyone, that brings in enough money to fund the journalism. Once that market atomised, the money wasn't there any more.
Back in the 80's a town like Gosport (population 80,000) could support a daily edition of the Portsmouth News, with 3 or 4 dedicated hacks based in a High Street office. Sales fell, so the product got worse, so sales fell even more and it's all gone now.
Overall, we probably don't want to go back to that world, but some important things have been lost.
Second most read story on the guardian, rapidly losing money job cuts incoming, website is this gem. An intern has just cut n pasted tweets from Eric Idle. I was following it yesterday oddly enough. News is more and more disagreements on social media.
AI can do this. Given how these businesses are more and more cash strapped it is the future.
Grant Shapps has ordered an inquiry to find out which party has run the MoD since 2010.
I know a bit about this, as it's adjacent to some of the things I do for work.
Obviously, I can't give specific details... but if you were to think about some of the checks you might run on someone before granting them a security clearance, one of them might be something like a credit check.
Nice and simple in the UK - sign contracts with the credit reference agencies, hire a team of software developers, and in a few months you'll have an automated system that will get you the required information in less than a second.
Not so simple for an overseas recruit, especially if they're somewhere like Nepal where there might not even be a credit reference agency to talk to.
So you're going to have to check the applicant's financial history manually, and then you'll want to verify that information with his bank or community in Nepal. Rather than a few seconds, this might take many months.
Meanwhile, you've got this applicant who wants to start his job. But he can't because you're hanging on waiting for a Nepalese money-lender to confirm that they did indeed repay that 1000 Rupee loan they had five years ago.
In that case, you might well decide to let the applicant start at risk, making sure he doesn't go beyond basic training without the full clearance coming through.
Not woke, just a very simple operational decision that allows the pipeline of overseas recruits to be unclogged.
In fact, this story is such a load of nonsense that it's almost making me wonder if other "woke" stories have also been cynically invented to distract from real, actual government failings.
Various “woke” ideas have been latched onto by the incompetent, to explain away organisational paralysis.
Just as “‘Elf and Safety” was used by bullshit merchants to deny progress on anything. Actual H&S was usually ignored by these morons.
So now you have legions of clowns using racism, sexism, ableism etc as their excuse.
Aside from the organisation not doing anything, the actual racism, sexism etc goes unchecked. And Dave from accounting still can’t get his wheelchair through the door. Because it is too fucking narrow.
In this case, the context seems to be an ongoing fight between the brass and Shapps over the current army recruitment crisis.
Absurd statements from both sides... Brass - "we might need conscription!", Shapps - "woke!". What it likely actually needs is more money, an acceptance of reduced capacity, or a willingness to think about meeting requirements in other ways.
I'm actually quite disappointed in Shapps for leaning into the woke nonsense, I had genuinely thought he was better than that. The situation he's trying to distract from must be truly desperate.
Get rid of Crapita, and the recruitment issues sort themselves.
The whole point of getting Capita was to release 1,000 service personnel involved in recruitment and selection back to units. If Capita got binned there is no way to reconstitute the recruitment function without serious disruption because it mainly requires SNCOs which are in very short supply.
Off topic completely, but I saw this study doing the rounds that (to me as a 30 something still experiencing Long Covid) seems pretty scary. The general idea is that those who suffered Covid are more likely to have more deterioration in their DNA and that their biological age becomes wildly out of sync with their actual age - and that this is more prominent the younger you are:
This could mean a general shortening of life expectancy, as well as more illnesses associated with aging in younger people; with Long Covid essentially being part of that as your body goes from having the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old. I am not a medic, so any doctors or scientists here who know better than me I would be extremely grateful if you can tell me if this all sounds like bullcrap - but if it isn't will we not have to change a lot of policy priors (such as people being capable of working well into their 60s and 70s) after generation Covid?
I don't think you can infer shortening of life expectancy from this. Notable they think effect reversible in some people. I'm sure we will learn more over time.
I couldn't actually find the table in the paper, sorry if I'm being dumb.
I also couldn't find that table in the paper looking back - so maybe it's from a different paper - I was reading a long piece about this and I assumed that it was the same reference for the table as this article, but maybe I got that wrong.
Hope you feel better soon. Paul Garner from Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine might be worth looking at, he's a health researcher who got long covid. He has made something of a recovery but his approach may not work for everyone.
Judging by the snail's pace at which battles over modest towns, suburbs and villages- Adviika (In progress), Bakhmut for the Russians, Krinky, Staromaiorske for Ukraine seem to have gone after the initial attack by Russia and counter by Ukraine there's going to be fighting in the Donbas for the next hundred years.
What would have been said about the Western Front in WW1 right up to March 1918?
Ukraine's going to need substantially more equipment to achieve such a result.
Unfortunately, both Russia and Ukraine seem to be in "one more heave" mode, when it's obvious that the front is deadlocked. A ceasefire on current lines seems to be the sensible option avoiding thousands of deaths - military and "collateral". Maybe it would lead to a negotiated settlement, or maybe just a cold war with sanctions in place for years, but either would be better than the current pointless slaughter over a few hundred yards of devastated territory in villages along the front.
I don't think Ukraine are in one more heave mode. It's obvious that they didn't make the advanced they were hoping for in 2023, and so they now seem to be looking for a change in strategy to find better success in 2024. But I don't see a country that thinks that simply more of the same will succeed where it failed in 2023.
Grant Shapps has ordered an inquiry to find out which party has run the MoD since 2010.
I know a bit about this, as it's adjacent to some of the things I do for work.
Obviously, I can't give specific details... but if you were to think about some of the checks you might run on someone before granting them a security clearance, one of them might be something like a credit check.
Nice and simple in the UK - sign contracts with the credit reference agencies, hire a team of software developers, and in a few months you'll have an automated system that will get you the required information in less than a second.
Not so simple for an overseas recruit, especially if they're somewhere like Nepal where there might not even be a credit reference agency to talk to.
So you're going to have to check the applicant's financial history manually, and then you'll want to verify that information with his bank or community in Nepal. Rather than a few seconds, this might take many months.
Meanwhile, you've got this applicant who wants to start his job. But he can't because you're hanging on waiting for a Nepalese money-lender to confirm that they did indeed repay that 1000 Rupee loan they had five years ago.
In that case, you might well decide to let the applicant start at risk, making sure he doesn't go beyond basic training without the full clearance coming through.
Not woke, just a very simple operational decision that allows the pipeline of overseas recruits to be unclogged.
In fact, this story is such a load of nonsense that it's almost making me wonder if other "woke" stories have also been cynically invented to distract from real, actual government failings.
Various “woke” ideas have been latched onto by the incompetent, to explain away organisational paralysis.
Just as “‘Elf and Safety” was used by bullshit merchants to deny progress on anything. Actual H&S was usually ignored by these morons.
So now you have legions of clowns using racism, sexism, ableism etc as their excuse.
Aside from the organisation not doing anything, the actual racism, sexism etc goes unchecked. And Dave from accounting still can’t get his wheelchair through the door. Because it is too fucking narrow.
In this case, the context seems to be an ongoing fight between the brass and Shapps over the current army recruitment crisis.
Absurd statements from both sides... Brass - "we might need conscription!", Shapps - "woke!". What it likely actually needs is more money, an acceptance of reduced capacity, or a willingness to think about meeting requirements in other ways.
I'm actually quite disappointed in Shapps for leaning into the woke nonsense, I had genuinely thought he was better than that. The situation he's trying to distract from must be truly desperate.
Get rid of Crapita, and the recruitment issues sort themselves.
The whole point of getting Capita was to release 1,000 service personnel involved in recruitment and selection back to units. If Capita got binned there is no way to reconstitute the recruitment function without serious disruption because it mainly requires SNCOs which are in very short supply.
It is worth emphasizing this. Once something is outsourced it is virtually impossible to bring it back in house as the required skill set and staff will no longer exist internally.
A lot of the work the next Labour Government is going to have to do is to replace knowledge that has been lost due to historic decisions and then implement things to ensure that such mistakes aren’t made in the future.
Army recruitment is 1 example, how to electrify a railway/ build one is another skill that needs to be relearnt but there will literally be 1000s of examples where outsourcing and a start/ stop philosophy has destroy institutional knowledge resulting in solved problems needing to be relearnt again and again
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Alternatively, AI is the last best chance to salvage something from the smoking ruins.
Local papers, local radio, they seem to need a monopoly for the finances to stack up. If you're the only place the local car dealership has to go to get an advert out to everyone, that brings in enough money to fund the journalism. Once that market atomised, the money wasn't there any more.
Back in the 80's a town like Gosport (population 80,000) could support a daily edition of the Portsmouth News, with 3 or 4 dedicated hacks based in a High Street office. Sales fell, so the product got worse, so sales fell even more and it's all gone now.
Overall, we probably don't want to go back to that world, but some important things have been lost.
We make a similar point about local journalism, however, i don't understand your last argument. It was a better news environment when local news was covered properly by dedicated people (being paid). Why shouldn't we want that world to return?
How we do that, is a different question. But properly reported local news is a good thing, no?
Well, I think we would want that world to return. But it seems not to the extent of actually paying for it. We'd rather get lower quality news for free.
A generation ago, a newspaper wasn't just a way to get your news, it was a time filler in the way that a phone is now. People would buy a newspaper in order to get their news, their clickbait, their idle ten minute games, their weather forecasts; a newspaper would be browsed on the morning commute, repeatedly put down and picked up again throughout the day; half-read during a conversation with their spouse, and would fill time in exactly the way a phone does now. Arguably the £1 a day or whatever it cost was pretty good value. But people now get all that for free on their phones and much of the purpose of a paid-for newspaper has been lost.
Yes and it's hard to return to that. I wanted to. It was a New Year resolution of mine to get the Guardian a couple of times a week and read it mid-morning with my egg and soldiers, settled at the kitchen table by the window. But I just haven't done it. Did it once and that was it. It felt odd.
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
I wouldn't put a number on it - but I mean the ability to pay bills, have a roof over your head, pay for food and other necessities, and support a family sounds like me a minimum for "modest living". Food banks, for example, should not exist.
Food banks shouldn't exist? So in your anarchist utopia there would be no mechanism to redistribute surplus food to those in need?
I mean, there are a lot of assumptions in that starting with the idea of surplus food - this food isn't surplus, it would have been bought if the people could just afford it. As I've said many times before; my axiom for resource distribution would be each according to their need.
Food banks should not exist because it shows, under the current system we have, that wages and government assistance are not enough for working people to afford food staples. Most people who use food banks are the working poor. That private charity needs to be organised to help huge numbers of working people eat is a clear failure of the system we live in.
Not a failure of the people to buy food before anything else. Everyone on UC got a free £300 last Friday. Why not just spend that on food?
Because shit is expensive and people have limited time resources and so it's easier to buy somewhat cheap (although relatively expensive for the cost of the ingredients) but quick food rather than time intensive cheaper ingredients that can be made into cheap and healthy meals. Again, the vast majority of people who use food banks are in work - these are people in precarity, working long hours for little pay, and then also have to eat. That they work long hours for little pay is already a failure, but it is an additional failure that the state then fails them by not a) increasing the minimum wage and enforcing workers' rights and strong labour unions and b) by not at least topping up their pay to a sustainable level (until they can force their employers to do so via their wages).
Interesting one for me is housing benefit.
If housing benefit was reduced to zero tommorow, what would actually happen. The rental returns at the bottom end would drop, so there'd be a crash at the bottom end of the market I guess - which would mean the returns from the new, lower rents paid by the bottom of the market would then become once again viable. As the bottom of the market is taken out so my guess is the middle drops, and probably the top a bit (Though that has different dynamics with more unoccupied property for investment and so forth). Overall since the same number of people and the same housing stock should still exist the net result would be purely positive to the treasury...
Of course it's the "in the meantime" (And associated property price drop) that would be the headache for the Gov't.
I mean that is one thing that could happen. But also, because we have a weird housing situation in this country, it could just lead to a load of landlords refusing to rent stuff out cheaper and therefore a load of people become homeless.
The good post-Brexit economic news just keeps coming:
’ The U.K. economy is now 5% worse off than it would have been had it never left the European Union due to a slump in trade and investment since the Brexit referendum in June 2016, according to a new study by Goldman Sachs.
This slowdown has seen the U.K.’s GDP per capita stagnate since COVID-19, having increased just 4% since the 2016 referendum, compared to an 8% increase in the eurozone and a 15% increase in the U.S., said a team at Goldman led by chief European economist Sven Jari Stehn.
At the same time, the U.K. has experienced much higher inflation than in rival advanced economies, with the country’s consumer prices up by 31% since 2016, versus rises of 27% in the U.S. and 24% in the eurozone.
Goldman Sachs’ study compared the U.K.’s post-Brexit economy to a hypothetical model of one that never left the E.U., with that underperformance blamed on the trade drop, lowered investment and labor market impacts of the decision to leave the E.U.
U.K. trade volumes –- total imports and exports –- are roughly 15% lower than in comparable countries, due to higher trade barriers with the E.U. and the resulting shift in supply chains.
Britain’s exports of goods to both the E.U. and the rest of the world have fallen sharply since Brexit, even as its services exports, which account for 40% of the country’s total exports, have remained roughly on course, the report said.
Investment in the U.K. has also stalled since Brexit, as a result of uncertainty in the years immediately following the referendum alongside a pullback by hard hit companies. Overall investment is 5% lower than if Britain had never left the E.U.
The situation has been worsened by a drop in E.U. migration that has reduced elasticity in the U.K.’s labor market, despite an uptick in overall migration driven by people moving from countries outside the E.U., said Stehn and the team…
‘New trade deals with countries outside the E.U. could help mitigate some of the long-term costs of Brexit, the reports adds. However, any benefits are unlikely to outweigh the reduction in trade to the European bloc.
Umm I don't think the chart you are presumably referring to supports the case that Brexit has had no effect on business investment.
I assume also that these are current prices and given high inflation in recent years that business investment is quite a bit lower in real terms compared with 2016.
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
I wouldn't put a number on it - but I mean the ability to pay bills, have a roof over your head, pay for food and other necessities, and support a family sounds like me a minimum for "modest living". Food banks, for example, should not exist.
Food banks shouldn't exist? So in your anarchist utopia there would be no mechanism to redistribute surplus food to those in need?
I mean, there are a lot of assumptions in that starting with the idea of surplus food - this food isn't surplus, it would have been bought if the people could just afford it. As I've said many times before; my axiom for resource distribution would be each according to their need.
Food banks should not exist because it shows, under the current system we have, that wages and government assistance are not enough for working people to afford food staples. Most people who use food banks are the working poor. That private charity needs to be organised to help huge numbers of working people eat is a clear failure of the system we live in.
Not a failure of the people to buy food before anything else. Everyone on UC got a free £300 last Friday. Why not just spend that on food?
Because shit is expensive and people have limited time resources and so it's easier to buy somewhat cheap (although relatively expensive for the cost of the ingredients) but quick food rather than time intensive cheaper ingredients that can be made into cheap and healthy meals. Again, the vast majority of people who use food banks are in work - these are people in precarity, working long hours for little pay, and then also have to eat. That they work long hours for little pay is already a failure, but it is an additional failure that the state then fails them by not a) increasing the minimum wage and enforcing workers' rights and strong labour unions and b) by not at least topping up their pay to a sustainable level (until they can force their employers to do so via their wages).
Interesting one for me is housing benefit.
If housing benefit was reduced to zero tommorow, what would actually happen. The rental returns at the bottom end would drop, so there'd be a crash at the bottom end of the market I guess - which would mean the returns from the new, lower rents paid by the bottom of the market would then become once again viable. As the bottom of the market is taken out so my guess is the middle drops, and probably the top a bit (Though that has different dynamics with more unoccupied property for investment and so forth). Overall since the same number of people and the same housing stock should still exist the net result would be purely positive to the treasury...
Of course it's the "in the meantime" (And associated property price drop) that would be the headache for the Gov't.
That's not how it would work in practice. The transition would be messy. A lot of landlords would take time to accept that they couldn't charge the same rent, and so they'd evict tenants who couldn't pay and leave their properties empty for a while as they tried to find those who could. Then maybe they'd try to sell, if the new market level of rents wouldn't cover their mortgage.
After a couple of years it's possible we'd have a much more healthy market, but while you waited for things to shake out you'd have lots of people suddenly homeless.
Off topic completely, but I saw this study doing the rounds that (to me as a 30 something still experiencing Long Covid) seems pretty scary. The general idea is that those who suffered Covid are more likely to have more deterioration in their DNA and that their biological age becomes wildly out of sync with their actual age - and that this is more prominent the younger you are:
This could mean a general shortening of life expectancy, as well as more illnesses associated with aging in younger people; with Long Covid essentially being part of that as your body goes from having the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old. I am not a medic, so any doctors or scientists here who know better than me I would be extremely grateful if you can tell me if this all sounds like bullcrap - but if it isn't will we not have to change a lot of policy priors (such as people being capable of working well into their 60s and 70s) after generation Covid?
I don't think you can infer shortening of life expectancy from this. Notable they think effect reversible in some people. I'm sure we will learn more over time.
I couldn't actually find the table in the paper, sorry if I'm being dumb.
I also couldn't find that table in the paper looking back - so maybe it's from a different paper - I was reading a long piece about this and I assumed that it was the same reference for the table as this article, but maybe I got that wrong.
Hope you feel better soon. Paul Garner from Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine might be worth looking at, he's a health researcher who got long covid. He has made something of a recovery but his approach may not work for everyone.
That's a brilliant link. I'm sure some have long covid due to the physical effects, but I am also sure that many are similar to this chap. There should be no shame or stigma associated with such a diagnosis, and the symptoms will be real to those suffering and in need of appropriate treatment. The warning sign for me is when I see someone say "I know that if I do too much one day, I will suffer the next". I think this becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
Excl: Investigation by @thetimes into the scale of abuse of Christian conversion in the asylum system has found: - Murderers, rapists, drug dealers & burglars avoided deportation by claiming they're Christian converts - Outlandish claims lodged included a "Christian" who spent a month going to a synagogue by mistake 1/8 With @GeorgeGreenwood & @inspirellie_: thetimes.co.uk/article/509b22…
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
Yes, I recall seeing the Pythons ranked by wealth a decade or two back, and Eric Idle was far, far richer than any of the others - on the back of, inter alia, Spamalot. Writing hit musicals is pretty lucrative.
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Alternatively, AI is the last best chance to salvage something from the smoking ruins.
Local papers, local radio, they seem to need a monopoly for the finances to stack up. If you're the only place the local car dealership has to go to get an advert out to everyone, that brings in enough money to fund the journalism. Once that market atomised, the money wasn't there any more.
Back in the 80's a town like Gosport (population 80,000) could support a daily edition of the Portsmouth News, with 3 or 4 dedicated hacks based in a High Street office. Sales fell, so the product got worse, so sales fell even more and it's all gone now.
Overall, we probably don't want to go back to that world, but some important things have been lost.
We make a similar point about local journalism, however, i don't understand your last argument. It was a better news environment when local news was covered properly by dedicated people (being paid). Why shouldn't we want that world to return?
How we do that, is a different question. But properly reported local news is a good thing, no?
Well, I think we would want that world to return. But it seems not to the extent of actually paying for it. We'd rather get lower quality news for free.
A generation ago, a newspaper wasn't just a way to get your news, it was a time filler in the way that a phone is now. People would buy a newspaper in order to get their news, their clickbait, their idle ten minute games, their weather forecasts; a newspaper would be browsed on the morning commute, repeatedly put down and picked up again throughout the day; half-read during a conversation with their spouse, and would fill time in exactly the way a phone does now. Arguably the £1 a day or whatever it cost was pretty good value. But people now get all that for free on their phones and much of the purpose of a paid-for newspaper has been lost.
Yes and it's hard to return to that. I wanted to. It was a New Year resolution of mine to get the Guardian a couple of times a week and read it mid-morning with my egg and soldiers, settled at the kitchen table by the window. But I just haven't done it. Did it once and that was it. It felt odd.
It's because it is intrinsically odd
When you have all the world's info and news at your fingertips, via the net, and your phone, tablet, laptop, why on earth would you spend an hour reading ONLY the news/sports/gossip that some spotty twit in N1C decides is suitable for you to read, written by the people they approve of in N1C? in one go, over breakfast?
That world is gone, and it is never coming back, and it is quite bizarre, in retrospect
I used to do it as a lad, picked it up from my Dad, who ALWAYS read THE PAPER front-to-end in the morning. I generally lost the habit in my 30s, and I haven't bought and read a dead tree paper in about 15 years
Excl: Investigation by @thetimes into the scale of abuse of Christian conversion in the asylum system has found: - Murderers, rapists, drug dealers & burglars avoided deportation by claiming they're Christian converts - Outlandish claims lodged included a "Christian" who spent a month going to a synagogue by mistake 1/8 With @GeorgeGreenwood & @inspirellie_: thetimes.co.uk/article/509b22…
The good post-Brexit economic news just keeps coming:
’ The U.K. economy is now 5% worse off than it would have been had it never left the European Union due to a slump in trade and investment since the Brexit referendum in June 2016, according to a new study by Goldman Sachs.
This slowdown has seen the U.K.’s GDP per capita stagnate since COVID-19, having increased just 4% since the 2016 referendum, compared to an 8% increase in the eurozone and a 15% increase in the U.S., said a team at Goldman led by chief European economist Sven Jari Stehn.
At the same time, the U.K. has experienced much higher inflation than in rival advanced economies, with the country’s consumer prices up by 31% since 2016, versus rises of 27% in the U.S. and 24% in the eurozone.
Goldman Sachs’ study compared the U.K.’s post-Brexit economy to a hypothetical model of one that never left the E.U., with that underperformance blamed on the trade drop, lowered investment and labor market impacts of the decision to leave the E.U.
U.K. trade volumes –- total imports and exports –- are roughly 15% lower than in comparable countries, due to higher trade barriers with the E.U. and the resulting shift in supply chains.
Britain’s exports of goods to both the E.U. and the rest of the world have fallen sharply since Brexit, even as its services exports, which account for 40% of the country’s total exports, have remained roughly on course, the report said.
Investment in the U.K. has also stalled since Brexit, as a result of uncertainty in the years immediately following the referendum alongside a pullback by hard hit companies. Overall investment is 5% lower than if Britain had never left the E.U.
The situation has been worsened by a drop in E.U. migration that has reduced elasticity in the U.K.’s labor market, despite an uptick in overall migration driven by people moving from countries outside the E.U., said Stehn and the team…
‘New trade deals with countries outside the E.U. could help mitigate some of the long-term costs of Brexit, the reports adds. However, any benefits are unlikely to outweigh the reduction in trade to the European bloc.
Umm I don't think the chart you are presumably referring to supports the case that Brexit has had no effect on business investment.
I assume also that these are current prices and given high inflation in recent years that business investment is quite a bit lower in real terms compared with 2016.
The investment numbers are volume, not value. Saying it has had no effect is different from saying it has stagnated since.
Excl: Investigation by @thetimes into the scale of abuse of Christian conversion in the asylum system has found: - Murderers, rapists, drug dealers & burglars avoided deportation by claiming they're Christian converts - Outlandish claims lodged included a "Christian" who spent a month going to a synagogue by mistake 1/8 With @GeorgeGreenwood & @inspirellie_: thetimes.co.uk/article/509b22…
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
Excl: Investigation by @thetimes into the scale of abuse of Christian conversion in the asylum system has found: - Murderers, rapists, drug dealers & burglars avoided deportation by claiming they're Christian converts - Outlandish claims lodged included a "Christian" who spent a month going to a synagogue by mistake 1/8 With @GeorgeGreenwood & @inspirellie_: thetimes.co.uk/article/509b22…
I mean this is going to be an interesting "no true scotsman" conversation. I would argue going to synagogue is just a slow way of converting to Christianity - you've got to learn the basics. Even Paul started as Jewish.
Grant Shapps has ordered an inquiry to find out which party has run the MoD since 2010.
I know a bit about this, as it's adjacent to some of the things I do for work.
Obviously, I can't give specific details... but if you were to think about some of the checks you might run on someone before granting them a security clearance, one of them might be something like a credit check.
Nice and simple in the UK - sign contracts with the credit reference agencies, hire a team of software developers, and in a few months you'll have an automated system that will get you the required information in less than a second.
Not so simple for an overseas recruit, especially if they're somewhere like Nepal where there might not even be a credit reference agency to talk to.
So you're going to have to check the applicant's financial history manually, and then you'll want to verify that information with his bank or community in Nepal. Rather than a few seconds, this might take many months.
Meanwhile, you've got this applicant who wants to start his job. But he can't because you're hanging on waiting for a Nepalese money-lender to confirm that they did indeed repay that 1000 Rupee loan they had five years ago.
In that case, you might well decide to let the applicant start at risk, making sure he doesn't go beyond basic training without the full clearance coming through.
Not woke, just a very simple operational decision that allows the pipeline of overseas recruits to be unclogged.
In fact, this story is such a load of nonsense that it's almost making me wonder if other "woke" stories have also been cynically invented to distract from real, actual government failings.
Various “woke” ideas have been latched onto by the incompetent, to explain away organisational paralysis.
Just as “‘Elf and Safety” was used by bullshit merchants to deny progress on anything. Actual H&S was usually ignored by these morons.
So now you have legions of clowns using racism, sexism, ableism etc as their excuse.
Aside from the organisation not doing anything, the actual racism, sexism etc goes unchecked. And Dave from accounting still can’t get his wheelchair through the door. Because it is too fucking narrow.
In this case, the context seems to be an ongoing fight between the brass and Shapps over the current army recruitment crisis.
Absurd statements from both sides... Brass - "we might need conscription!", Shapps - "woke!". What it likely actually needs is more money, an acceptance of reduced capacity, or a willingness to think about meeting requirements in other ways.
I'm actually quite disappointed in Shapps for leaning into the woke nonsense, I had genuinely thought he was better than that. The situation he's trying to distract from must be truly desperate.
Get rid of Crapita, and the recruitment issues sort themselves.
The whole point of getting Capita was to release 1,000 service personnel involved in recruitment and selection back to units. If Capita got binned there is no way to reconstitute the recruitment function without serious disruption because it mainly requires SNCOs which are in very short supply.
Capita are nevertheless, useless at doing the job they are meant to be doing.
Excl: Investigation by @thetimes into the scale of abuse of Christian conversion in the asylum system has found: - Murderers, rapists, drug dealers & burglars avoided deportation by claiming they're Christian converts - Outlandish claims lodged included a "Christian" who spent a month going to a synagogue by mistake 1/8 With @GeorgeGreenwood & @inspirellie_: thetimes.co.uk/article/509b22…
So what's actually going on here? Is there any evidence that churches are on the take? Is baptising people with freezing water really the best way to test the sincerity of someone's belief? Have we considered using ducking stools instead?
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
Yes, I recall seeing the Pythons ranked by wealth a decade or two back, and Eric Idle was far, far richer than any of the others - on the back of, inter alia, Spamalot. Writing hit musicals is pretty lucrative.
He was saying he last made money 20 or so years ago. Hasn’t seen Cleese in 7 years. Gilliams daughter manages the Python stuff.
My sympathy is pretty non existent given the disputes over the Rutles with Neil Innes.
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
What would generate the royalties nowadays though? I suppose Idle would get a cut from every DVD sold, but is there much of that?
Streaming, for a start
A quick google tells me you can watch Life of Brian for $4 on Apple TV
Given how mega famous it is, it's not hard to inagine it being streamed, say, 500,000 times a year, around the world, with a global population of 8 billion
That is two million bucks right there, for just one movie in the Python backlist
Plus royalties from the TV, musicals, songs (Bright Side of Life)
Idle mentions shit lawyers in his tirade, seems to be they must have had REALLY shit lawyers. And where did the money go when they WERE minting it? Did they all spaff it on hookers and blow?
Isn't it a bit of a myth that Democrats coalesced on Biden last time because they thought he was the best (or only) person to defeat Trump? As I remember, everyone else gave up and endorsed Biden because they didn't want Sanders to win the nomination. Sanders was also too old and, like Biden, shouldn't have been running in 2020. We're in a mess because of the egos of people in their seventies who should have made way for younger people (with less name recognition of course), and the weakness of political parties in the USA.
What happened was that there were a load of moderate candidates none of whom got an overwhelming lead in Iowa and NH, and then they got to the first state with black people and they overwhelmingly went for Biden. You can't win a Democratic primary with just white moderates because there aren't enough of them, so all the other moderates dropped out and backed Biden. Bernie Sanders never had a strategy to reach more than 1/3 of the primary electorate so that was that.
Part of his appeal with the primary voters was probably that they thought he'd be good at attracting the elderly white people they needed to beat Trump, but the party could have coalesced around any other of the moderate candidates if they'd managed to get clearly out in front of the pack.
The other candidates dropped out before Super Tuesday because Sanders was leading the polls in most Super Tuesday states. Biden was chosen as the "stop Sanders" candidate rather than the stop Trump candidate.
A younger candidate would have been better as a stop Trump candidate. A candidate who offered a clearcut contrast to Trump's nepotism would have made a better stop Trump candidate.
I don’t think anyone at the time expected a losing Trump to attempt an insurrection, and then to dominate the Republican field 4 years later. The question of who would be the best person to beat Trump in 2024 didn’t arise. No-one thought Trump would stand in 2024.
Whenever wages or the cost of living get mentioned, the right get all huffy. We're no longer in the age of hair shirts - unless you are in the bottom decide (and we'll come back to them in a minute).
For so many people in so many decently paid and well respected jobs, it doesn't matter how hard they work. Money remains a concern. For most of the people in the jobs we claim are vital for society (lets take TAs as one example), wages and conditions are genuinely insulting.
We then conflate multiple issues together. Wages are low and the cost of living high, so we need women to go back to work after having a child. But childcare costs too much. After much complaining the government announces free childcare, but refuses to pay for it.
Thats the majority of people in the middle. At the bottom, that 10% is truly screwed. They pay a poverty tax - everything costs more (rent, electricity) with a very steep marginal tax rate to get through if they are able to try and work they way out of that decile.
Back in my day ( 1970s). We had kids at school who were living in council houses with one working parent who were genuinely poor.
By the 2000s aspirational Thatcher children had their decent hospital, decent school, a mortgage, their second hand Range Rover, and a sleeve of tattoos to show off on a modest TUI holiday. These people I suspect voted Brexit, Boris and detested the Labour Party as the high taxation party of envy. This is the cohort that has been screwed hardest by austerity. The working poor is again "a thing".
The reason (replying to @RochdalePioneers not you but on an iPhone and can’t be arsed to find his post) is the redefinition of the term “poor” from absolute to relative poverty.
Both have value as measures but the use of relative poverty in headlines and reporting means that *no matter how good a job the government does* the poor are always with us.
That creates a recipe for endless government intervention rather than solving a problem.
Good Queen Bess said she wouldn't try to make windows into people's souls.
PB Tories used to say Britain should concentrate on helping Christian refugees, rather than Muslim ones.
Now, instead of accepting a conversion at face value, and asking their co-religionist to help out at the Church Fete by carrying the tea urn, PB Tories are willing to run the risk of sending genuine Christians back to a martyr's death, because of their obsession they everyone else is abusing the system.
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
What would generate the royalties nowadays though? I suppose Idle would get a cut from every DVD sold, but is there much of that?
Streaming, for a start
A quick google tells me you can watch Life of Brian for $4 on Apple TV
Given how mega famous it is, it's not hard to inagine it being streamed, say, 500,000 times a year, around the world, with a global population of 8 billion
That is two million bucks right there, for just one movie in the Python backlist
Plus royalties from the TV, musicals, songs (Bright Side of Life)
Idle mentions shit lawyers in his tirade, seems to be they must have had REALLY shit lawyers. And where did the money go when they WERE minting it? Did they all spaff it on hookers and blow?
Wasn't there an expensive court case over the Spamalot musical? I think because it was based on a film, so they ended up having to pay lots in royalties...
Excl: Investigation by @thetimes into the scale of abuse of Christian conversion in the asylum system has found: - Murderers, rapists, drug dealers & burglars avoided deportation by claiming they're Christian converts - Outlandish claims lodged included a "Christian" who spent a month going to a synagogue by mistake 1/8 With @GeorgeGreenwood & @inspirellie_: thetimes.co.uk/article/509b22…
An unbelievable thread, and yet, all too believable
I despise the state that allows this shit, loyal British taxpayers are being brutally mocked by those who purport to govern us
Look, apparently everyone can have a personal relationship with Jesus, and who are we to doubt conversion? What truly makes a Christian? Only the Lord can know, I have been told.
The Labour front bench are saying that he 'fell for an online conspiracy theory'. I thought this was red-on-red infighting, but it appears to be the Labour line for his defence. Hardly a ringing defence, is it?
Labour (sadly) are committing an egregious error. At moment one, within an hour, they should have said "Whatever it says on the ballot Labour have no candidate in Rochdale, he is suspended from the party. Sorry. Sotto voce: vote LD".
If they’d done that, he’d still probably have won.
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
Good Queen Bess said she wouldn't try to make windows into people's souls.
PB Tories used to say Britain should concentrate on helping Christian refugees, rather than Muslim ones.
Now, instead of accepting a conversion at face value, and asking their co-religionist to help out at the Church Fete by carrying the tea urn, PB Tories are willing to run the risk of sending genuine Christians back to a martyr's death, because of their obsession they everyone else is abusing the system.
Well it’s one of those situations where any policy will be problematic. Like benefits fraud. You either have a policy that lets ne’er do wells in on false pretences, or a policy that sends devout Christians to be persecuted abroad.
The good post-Brexit economic news just keeps coming:
’ The U.K. economy is now 5% worse off than it would have been had it never left the European Union due to a slump in trade and investment since the Brexit referendum in June 2016, according to a new study by Goldman Sachs.
This slowdown has seen the U.K.’s GDP per capita stagnate since COVID-19, having increased just 4% since the 2016 referendum, compared to an 8% increase in the eurozone and a 15% increase in the U.S., said a team at Goldman led by chief European economist Sven Jari Stehn.
At the same time, the U.K. has experienced much higher inflation than in rival advanced economies, with the country’s consumer prices up by 31% since 2016, versus rises of 27% in the U.S. and 24% in the eurozone.
Goldman Sachs’ study compared the U.K.’s post-Brexit economy to a hypothetical model of one that never left the E.U., with that underperformance blamed on the trade drop, lowered investment and labor market impacts of the decision to leave the E.U.
U.K. trade volumes –- total imports and exports –- are roughly 15% lower than in comparable countries, due to higher trade barriers with the E.U. and the resulting shift in supply chains.
Britain’s exports of goods to both the E.U. and the rest of the world have fallen sharply since Brexit, even as its services exports, which account for 40% of the country’s total exports, have remained roughly on course, the report said.
Investment in the U.K. has also stalled since Brexit, as a result of uncertainty in the years immediately following the referendum alongside a pullback by hard hit companies. Overall investment is 5% lower than if Britain had never left the E.U.
The situation has been worsened by a drop in E.U. migration that has reduced elasticity in the U.K.’s labor market, despite an uptick in overall migration driven by people moving from countries outside the E.U., said Stehn and the team…
‘New trade deals with countries outside the E.U. could help mitigate some of the long-term costs of Brexit, the reports adds. However, any benefits are unlikely to outweigh the reduction in trade to the European bloc.
Just imagine how much extra there would have been for public services. If Leavers want to big up the sovereignty aspect that’s an argument that has some merits but really on the economy it’s polishing a txrd !
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
Good Queen Bess said she wouldn't try to make windows into people's souls.
PB Tories used to say Britain should concentrate on helping Christian refugees, rather than Muslim ones.
Now, instead of accepting a conversion at face value, and asking their co-religionist to help out at the Church Fete by carrying the tea urn, PB Tories are willing to run the risk of sending genuine Christians back to a martyr's death, because of their obsession they everyone else is abusing the system.
Well it’s one of those situations where any policy will be problematic. Like benefits fraud. You either have a policy that lets ne’er do wells in on false pretences, or a policy that sends devout Christians to be persecuted abroad.
Given that Christianity, as a religion, is founded on the ideal of martyrdom, I guess you're really doing them a favour by returning them to a hideous death. They will be rewarded in the next life, after all.
Judging by the snail's pace at which battles over modest towns, suburbs and villages- Adviika (In progress), Bakhmut for the Russians, Krinky, Staromaiorske for Ukraine seem to have gone after the initial attack by Russia and counter by Ukraine there's going to be fighting in the Donbas for the next hundred years.
What would have been said about the Western Front in WW1 right up to March 1918?
Ukraine's going to need substantially more equipment to achieve such a result.
Unfortunately, both Russia and Ukraine seem to be in "one more heave" mode, when it's obvious that the front is deadlocked. A ceasefire on current lines seems to be the sensible option avoiding thousands of deaths - military and "collateral". Maybe it would lead to a negotiated settlement, or maybe just a cold war with sanctions in place for years, but either would be better than the current pointless slaughter over a few hundred yards of devastated territory in villages along the front.
The issue is that a ceasefire on the current lines favours Russia. Western attention will move on, Russia can rearm and choose their timing better next time. And there will be a next time.
In the meantime you exposure millions of Ukrainians to the genocide and terror that those in Bucha and other places faced. No Ukrainian leader could live with that.
So they continue to fight even if it seems hopeless. The hour is darkest before dawn and all that.
Good Queen Bess said she wouldn't try to make windows into people's souls.
PB Tories used to say Britain should concentrate on helping Christian refugees, rather than Muslim ones.
Now, instead of accepting a conversion at face value, and asking their co-religionist to help out at the Church Fete by carrying the tea urn, PB Tories are willing to run the risk of sending genuine Christians back to a martyr's death, because of their obsession they everyone else is abusing the system.
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Alternatively, AI is the last best chance to salvage something from the smoking ruins.
Local papers, local radio, they seem to need a monopoly for the finances to stack up. If you're the only place the local car dealership has to go to get an advert out to everyone, that brings in enough money to fund the journalism. Once that market atomised, the money wasn't there any more.
Back in the 80's a town like Gosport (population 80,000) could support a daily edition of the Portsmouth News, with 3 or 4 dedicated hacks based in a High Street office. Sales fell, so the product got worse, so sales fell even more and it's all gone now.
Overall, we probably don't want to go back to that world, but some important things have been lost.
We make a similar point about local journalism, however, i don't understand your last argument. It was a better news environment when local news was covered properly by dedicated people (being paid). Why shouldn't we want that world to return?
How we do that, is a different question. But properly reported local news is a good thing, no?
Well, I think we would want that world to return. But it seems not to the extent of actually paying for it. We'd rather get lower quality news for free.
A generation ago, a newspaper wasn't just a way to get your news, it was a time filler in the way that a phone is now. People would buy a newspaper in order to get their news, their clickbait, their idle ten minute games, their weather forecasts; a newspaper would be browsed on the morning commute, repeatedly put down and picked up again throughout the day; half-read during a conversation with their spouse, and would fill time in exactly the way a phone does now. Arguably the £1 a day or whatever it cost was pretty good value. But people now get all that for free on their phones and much of the purpose of a paid-for newspaper has been lost.
Yes and it's hard to return to that. I wanted to. It was a New Year resolution of mine to get the Guardian a couple of times a week and read it mid-morning with my egg and soldiers, settled at the kitchen table by the window. But I just haven't done it. Did it once and that was it. It felt odd.
It's because it is intrinsically odd
When you have all the world's info and news at your fingertips, via the net, and your phone, tablet, laptop, why on earth would you spend an hour reading ONLY the news/sports/gossip that some spotty twit in N1C decides is suitable for you to read, written by the people they approve of in N1C? in one go, over breakfast?
That world is gone, and it is never coming back, and it is quite bizarre, in retrospect
I used to do it as a lad, picked it up from my Dad, who ALWAYS read THE PAPER front-to-end in the morning. I generally lost the habit in my 30s, and I haven't bought and read a dead tree paper in about 15 years
Yes I suppose so. It was a nice idea of mine though. Bit disappointed in myself.
This Azhar Ali story does nothing to help the feeling many on the left have that anti-Semitism was just a stick to beat Corbyn with - especially considering that part of his apology was all about how much the "Labour party has changed under the leadership of Keir Starmer". Like, I wouldn't call what he said anti-Semitic as much as conspiratorial and stupid (and as far as I'm aware the facts are true; Egypt and the US did warn Israeli intelligence, it's just that they cared more about the West Bank than Gaza). But this is what happens when the serious issue of anti-Semitism becomes tokenised - a sort of team sport where if you're pro Israel you can't possibly be an anti-Semite, even if you share literal Holocaust denial on the platform you own (*coughElonMuskcough*), but you are considered anti-Semitic if you're anti Zionist (and just happen to also be Jewish).
Isn't it a bit of a myth that Democrats coalesced on Biden last time because they thought he was the best (or only) person to defeat Trump? As I remember, everyone else gave up and endorsed Biden because they didn't want Sanders to win the nomination. Sanders was also too old and, like Biden, shouldn't have been running in 2020. We're in a mess because of the egos of people in their seventies who should have made way for younger people (with less name recognition of course), and the weakness of political parties in the USA.
What happened was that there were a load of moderate candidates none of whom got an overwhelming lead in Iowa and NH, and then they got to the first state with black people and they overwhelmingly went for Biden. You can't win a Democratic primary with just white moderates because there aren't enough of them, so all the other moderates dropped out and backed Biden. Bernie Sanders never had a strategy to reach more than 1/3 of the primary electorate so that was that.
Part of his appeal with the primary voters was probably that they thought he'd be good at attracting the elderly white people they needed to beat Trump, but the party could have coalesced around any other of the moderate candidates if they'd managed to get clearly out in front of the pack.
The other candidates dropped out before Super Tuesday because Sanders was leading the polls in most Super Tuesday states. Biden was chosen as the "stop Sanders" candidate rather than the stop Trump candidate.
A younger candidate would have been better as a stop Trump candidate. A candidate who offered a clearcut contrast to Trump's nepotism would have made a better stop Trump candidate.
I don’t think anyone at the time expected a losing Trump to attempt an insurrection, and then to dominate the Republican field 4 years later. The question of who would be the best person to beat Trump in 2024 didn’t arise. No-one thought Trump would stand in 2024.
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
Francis Ford Coppola has been bankrupt three times. How the fuck did he manage that?
Without googling, I'm going to say: divorce
I know that is why Cleese is relatively skint. Multiple divorces
And I am wrong. Google says FFCoppola has never been divorced
Then it is a mystery. Drugs? Gambling? Secret payoffs to REDACTED?
I think Cleese made a lot of money from a very successful series of instructional management films not long after he became famous through Python. He may of course have spent it all on divorces (or just wasted it.)
Palin of course has the travel work. (I understand it pays well, and the expenses are generous.)
Chapman of course died young, and Jones lived fairly modestly, I believe, in The Vale of Health, Hampstead.
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
Francis Ford Coppola has been bankrupt three times. How the fuck did he manage that?
Maybe it’s the old David Copperfield thing? “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
The good post-Brexit economic news just keeps coming:
’ The U.K. economy is now 5% worse off than it would have been had it never left the European Union due to a slump in trade and investment since the Brexit referendum in June 2016, according to a new study by Goldman Sachs.
This slowdown has seen the U.K.’s GDP per capita stagnate since COVID-19, having increased just 4% since the 2016 referendum, compared to an 8% increase in the eurozone and a 15% increase in the U.S., said a team at Goldman led by chief European economist Sven Jari Stehn.
At the same time, the U.K. has experienced much higher inflation than in rival advanced economies, with the country’s consumer prices up by 31% since 2016, versus rises of 27% in the U.S. and 24% in the eurozone.
Goldman Sachs’ study compared the U.K.’s post-Brexit economy to a hypothetical model of one that never left the E.U., with that underperformance blamed on the trade drop, lowered investment and labor market impacts of the decision to leave the E.U.
U.K. trade volumes –- total imports and exports –- are roughly 15% lower than in comparable countries, due to higher trade barriers with the E.U. and the resulting shift in supply chains.
Britain’s exports of goods to both the E.U. and the rest of the world have fallen sharply since Brexit, even as its services exports, which account for 40% of the country’s total exports, have remained roughly on course, the report said.
Investment in the U.K. has also stalled since Brexit, as a result of uncertainty in the years immediately following the referendum alongside a pullback by hard hit companies. Overall investment is 5% lower than if Britain had never left the E.U.
The situation has been worsened by a drop in E.U. migration that has reduced elasticity in the U.K.’s labor market, despite an uptick in overall migration driven by people moving from countries outside the E.U., said Stehn and the team…
‘New trade deals with countries outside the E.U. could help mitigate some of the long-term costs of Brexit, the reports adds. However, any benefits are unlikely to outweigh the reduction in trade to the European bloc.
Umm I don't think the chart you are presumably referring to supports the case that Brexit has had no effect on business investment.
I assume also that these are current prices and given high inflation in recent years that business investment is quite a bit lower in real terms compared with 2016.
The investment numbers are volume, not value. Saying it has had no effect is different from saying it has stagnated since.
It appears both to have stagnated and have had a Brexit effect. I accept it's volume - I didn't read the chart label properly. Note the investment number is barely any higher than at (3) when the referendum took place.
Whenever wages or the cost of living get mentioned, the right get all huffy. We're no longer in the age of hair shirts - unless you are in the bottom decide (and we'll come back to them in a minute).
For so many people in so many decently paid and well respected jobs, it doesn't matter how hard they work. Money remains a concern. For most of the people in the jobs we claim are vital for society (lets take TAs as one example), wages and conditions are genuinely insulting.
We then conflate multiple issues together. Wages are low and the cost of living high, so we need women to go back to work after having a child. But childcare costs too much. After much complaining the government announces free childcare, but refuses to pay for it.
Thats the majority of people in the middle. At the bottom, that 10% is truly screwed. They pay a poverty tax - everything costs more (rent, electricity) with a very steep marginal tax rate to get through if they are able to try and work they way out of that decile.
Back in my day ( 1970s). We had kids at school who were living in council houses with one working parent who were genuinely poor.
By the 2000s aspirational Thatcher children had their decent hospital, decent school, a mortgage, their second hand Range Rover, and a sleeve of tattoos to show off on a modest TUI holiday. These people I suspect voted Brexit, Boris and detested the Labour Party as the high taxation party of envy. This is the cohort that has been screwed hardest by austerity. The working poor is again "a thing".
The reason (replying to @RochdalePioneers not you but on an iPhone and can’t be arsed to find his post) is the redefinition of the term “poor” from absolute to relative poverty.
Both have value as measures but the use of relative poverty in headlines and reporting means that *no matter how good a job the government does* the poor are always with us.
That creates a recipe for endless government intervention rather than solving a problem.
It’s not the case that no matter how good a job the government does, the relative poor are always with us. It is the case that some changes in overall wealth don’t impact on the relative figures, but it is possible to reduce the relative figures. You just need to do something different, namely reduce economic inequality at the lower end.
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
The Rochdale Labour candidate should be gone. No question. And I don't know how they can hold their current line on this.
I know the suspension of left wingers was often for refusal to apologise for less overt comments, but no apology suffices for accusing a nation's government of deliberately allowing a large terrorist attack against its own people without the most damning of evidence, and even then don't pre-empt your leadership.
I hold no love for Netanyahu, and his government failed badly on the attack, but the candidate's comments were beyond the pale.
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Alternatively, AI is the last best chance to salvage something from the smoking ruins.
Local papers, local radio, they seem to need a monopoly for the finances to stack up. If you're the only place the local car dealership has to go to get an advert out to everyone, that brings in enough money to fund the journalism. Once that market atomised, the money wasn't there any more.
Back in the 80's a town like Gosport (population 80,000) could support a daily edition of the Portsmouth News, with 3 or 4 dedicated hacks based in a High Street office. Sales fell, so the product got worse, so sales fell even more and it's all gone now.
Overall, we probably don't want to go back to that world, but some important things have been lost.
We make a similar point about local journalism, however, i don't understand your last argument. It was a better news environment when local news was covered properly by dedicated people (being paid). Why shouldn't we want that world to return?
How we do that, is a different question. But properly reported local news is a good thing, no?
Well, I think we would want that world to return. But it seems not to the extent of actually paying for it. We'd rather get lower quality news for free.
A generation ago, a newspaper wasn't just a way to get your news, it was a time filler in the way that a phone is now. People would buy a newspaper in order to get their news, their clickbait, their idle ten minute games, their weather forecasts; a newspaper would be browsed on the morning commute, repeatedly put down and picked up again throughout the day; half-read during a conversation with their spouse, and would fill time in exactly the way a phone does now. Arguably the £1 a day or whatever it cost was pretty good value. But people now get all that for free on their phones and much of the purpose of a paid-for newspaper has been lost.
Yes and it's hard to return to that. I wanted to. It was a New Year resolution of mine to get the Guardian a couple of times a week and read it mid-morning with my egg and soldiers, settled at the kitchen table by the window. But I just haven't done it. Did it once and that was it. It felt odd.
It's because it is intrinsically odd
When you have all the world's info and news at your fingertips, via the net, and your phone, tablet, laptop, why on earth would you spend an hour reading ONLY the news/sports/gossip that some spotty twit in N1C decides is suitable for you to read, written by the people they approve of in N1C? in one go, over breakfast?
That world is gone, and it is never coming back, and it is quite bizarre, in retrospect
I used to do it as a lad, picked it up from my Dad, who ALWAYS read THE PAPER front-to-end in the morning. I generally lost the habit in my 30s, and I haven't bought and read a dead tree paper in about 15 years
Yes I suppose so. It was a nice idea of mine though. Bit disappointed in myself.
Maybe try a little more longform biweekly & weekly stuff. Private eye, LRB, New Statesmen, New Yorker etc. More contemplative journalism. I'd avoid Neil's rag though, can't abide state owned media.
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
Good Queen Bess said she wouldn't try to make windows into people's souls.
PB Tories used to say Britain should concentrate on helping Christian refugees, rather than Muslim ones.
Now, instead of accepting a conversion at face value, and asking their co-religionist to help out at the Church Fete by carrying the tea urn, PB Tories are willing to run the risk of sending genuine Christians back to a martyr's death, because of their obsession they everyone else is abusing the system.
Well it’s one of those situations where any policy will be problematic. Like benefits fraud. You either have a policy that lets ne’er do wells in on false pretences, or a policy that sends devout Christians to be persecuted abroad.
The approach needed on benefits fraud is simple. Recognise that total benefits fraud is small compared to tax evasion and other white collar fraud (see PPE contracts), so stop worrying about it and target where the big losses are.
The Labour front bench are saying that he 'fell for an online conspiracy theory'. I thought this was red-on-red infighting, but it appears to be the Labour line for his defence. Hardly a ringing defence, is it?
Labour (sadly) are committing an egregious error. At moment one, within an hour, they should have said "Whatever it says on the ballot Labour have no candidate in Rochdale, he is suspended from the party. Sorry. Sotto voce: vote LD".
If they’d done that, he’d still probably have won.
Looking at the list of Rochdale Labour councillors there are quite a few with what appear to be ‘Muslim’ names. I suspect some of them might sympathise with the candidate. Secondly, when the terrible event happened there were quite a few rumours floating about who or what lay behind it.
This Azhar Ali story does nothing to help the feeling many on the left have that anti-Semitism was just a stick to beat Corbyn with - especially considering that part of his apology was all about how much the "Labour party has changed under the leadership of Keir Starmer". Like, I wouldn't call what he said anti-Semitic as much as conspiratorial and stupid (and as far as I'm aware the facts are true; Egypt and the US did warn Israeli intelligence, it's just that they cared more about the West Bank than Gaza). But this is what happens when the serious issue of anti-Semitism becomes tokenised - a sort of team sport where if you're pro Israel you can't possibly be an anti-Semite, even if you share literal Holocaust denial on the platform you own (*coughElonMuskcough*), but you are considered anti-Semitic if you're anti Zionist (and just happen to also be Jewish).
The problem with what Ali said is not that he talked of Israel neglecting warnings from Egypt and the US, it’s that he suggested Israel knew an attack was coming and deliberately let it happen. Those “facts” aren’t true.
There was far too much anti-Semitism among the Corbynite left, and still is. It would be better for the left to recognise that than to constantly complain that it was just a stick to beat Corbyn with.
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
Francis Ford Coppola has been bankrupt three times. How the fuck did he manage that?
Without googling, I'm going to say: divorce
I know that is why Cleese is relatively skint. Multiple divorces
Lionel Bart always gets me: ended up totally skint but would have been £100 million richer if he hadn't flogged the rights to 'Oliver!'.
Bart was fond of giving money away to people less well off than himself. He found plenty of takers.
Parties for up to 600 people at a time, 27 room Chelsea mansion. Free cocaine and cash for guests. Imagine how much that would all cost in today's money !
Good Queen Bess said she wouldn't try to make windows into people's souls.
PB Tories used to say Britain should concentrate on helping Christian refugees, rather than Muslim ones.
Now, instead of accepting a conversion at face value, and asking their co-religionist to help out at the Church Fete by carrying the tea urn, PB Tories are willing to run the risk of sending genuine Christians back to a martyr's death, because of their obsession they everyone else is abusing the system.
No, I would send them ALL back
Enough. Zero net migration, no more asylum
Why? The immiseration of thousands of people, most of whom are normal people living normal lives, will not in any way improve the lives of the worst off in the country - that requires a functioning economy for working people and adequate social services, something we do not currently have and would not magically appear by chucking everyone out of the country you believe shouldn't be here. And where do you stop? Are those born here by immigrant families okay? Third generation? And, the cry of the right whenever anything else is suggested, what about cost and civil liberties? How expensive would a mass deportation effort be, and how would people wrongly caught in that net contest it? If these kind of things are expedited, what happens if the full force of the government's fist wrongly decided you are an immigrant and shouldn't be here any longer? Border fascism is not the answer - it just puts up a wall that encloses the next scapegoat.
But hey, it's great to see people who love to discuss the anti-Semitism of others decry the system of asylum that was specifically built after a load of Western countries refused to take Jewish refugees and instead left them to the horrors of the Holocaust.
This Biden tweet is great. Best way to deal with conspiracy theorists is to meet them head on (eg campaign against 15 minute cities because your local is a 5 minute walk away) .
This Azhar Ali story does nothing to help the feeling many on the left have that anti-Semitism was just a stick to beat Corbyn with - especially considering that part of his apology was all about how much the "Labour party has changed under the leadership of Keir Starmer". Like, I wouldn't call what he said anti-Semitic as much as conspiratorial and stupid (and as far as I'm aware the facts are true; Egypt and the US did warn Israeli intelligence, it's just that they cared more about the West Bank than Gaza). But this is what happens when the serious issue of anti-Semitism becomes tokenised - a sort of team sport where if you're pro Israel you can't possibly be an anti-Semite, even if you share literal Holocaust denial on the platform you own (*coughElonMuskcough*), but you are considered anti-Semitic if you're anti Zionist (and just happen to also be Jewish).
He essentially said that Israel was behind the attack. Whether or not that meets anyone's definition of anti-Semitism, it seems a pretty rum thing to be saying.
Alastair Campbell: Spoke recently to a soldier friend who said “you’ve no idea how hard it is being in the military when you’re ashamed of your own government.”
No it died when Donald Trump accused Nikki Haley of being a loser pretending she'd won.
Funeral was the next day. I went.
The House Republicans exhumed the corpse and gave it a good going over.
Whenever wages or the cost of living get mentioned, the right get all huffy. We're no longer in the age of hair shirts - unless you are in the bottom decide (and we'll come back to them in a minute).
For so many people in so many decently paid and well respected jobs, it doesn't matter how hard they work. Money remains a concern. For most of the people in the jobs we claim are vital for society (lets take TAs as one example), wages and conditions are genuinely insulting.
We then conflate multiple issues together. Wages are low and the cost of living high, so we need women to go back to work after having a child. But childcare costs too much. After much complaining the government announces free childcare, but refuses to pay for it.
Thats the majority of people in the middle. At the bottom, that 10% is truly screwed. They pay a poverty tax - everything costs more (rent, electricity) with a very steep marginal tax rate to get through if they are able to try and work they way out of that decile.
Back in my day ( 1970s). We had kids at school who were living in council houses with one working parent who were genuinely poor.
By the 2000s aspirational Thatcher children had their decent hospital, decent school, a mortgage, their second hand Range Rover, and a sleeve of tattoos to show off on a modest TUI holiday. These people I suspect voted Brexit, Boris and detested the Labour Party as the high taxation party of envy. This is the cohort that has been screwed hardest by austerity. The working poor is again "a thing".
The reason (replying to @RochdalePioneers not you but on an iPhone and can’t be arsed to find his post) is the redefinition of the term “poor” from absolute to relative poverty.
Both have value as measures but the use of relative poverty in headlines and reporting means that *no matter how good a job the government does* the poor are always with us.
That creates a recipe for endless government intervention rather than solving a problem.
It’s not the case that no matter how good a job the government does, the relative poor are always with us. It is the case that some changes in overall wealth don’t impact on the relative figures, but it is possible to reduce the relative figures. You just need to do something different, namely reduce economic inequality at the lower end.
If relative poverty is 60% of median household income, then it could indeed be eliminated, in one of two ways:
Reduce income inequality in general, boosting lowest incomes, so that even the poorest are at >60% of median
Completely shaft more than the bottom 50%, so that the bottom >50% have income reduced to be no more than 5/3 times the income of the poorest
1984-esque societies and maybe some of the communist models would manage the second, probably.
The Labour front bench are saying that he 'fell for an online conspiracy theory'. I thought this was red-on-red infighting, but it appears to be the Labour line for his defence. Hardly a ringing defence, is it?
Labour (sadly) are committing an egregious error. At moment one, within an hour, they should have said "Whatever it says on the ballot Labour have no candidate in Rochdale, he is suspended from the party. Sorry. Sotto voce: vote LD".
If they’d done that, he’d still probably have won.
Looking at the list of Rochdale Labour councillors there are quite a few with what appear to be ‘Muslim’ names. I suspect some of them might sympathise with the candidate. Secondly, when the terrible event happened there were quite a few rumours floating about who or what lay behind it.
It was almost certainly not true, but as conspiracy theories go it was towards the more plausible end of the spectrum. That may not be saying much, but I suspect that in itself this won't be terminal to Labour's chances in Rochdale.
Excl: Investigation by @thetimes into the scale of abuse of Christian conversion in the asylum system has found: - Murderers, rapists, drug dealers & burglars avoided deportation by claiming they're Christian converts - Outlandish claims lodged included a "Christian" who spent a month going to a synagogue by mistake 1/8 With @GeorgeGreenwood & @inspirellie_: thetimes.co.uk/article/509b22…
Just distinguish between asylum seekers who are Christian on arrival in the UK and fleeing persecution, who should still be granted asylum and those who are not Christian on arrival but convert while here for convenience to stay who shouldn't
The Labour front bench are saying that he 'fell for an online conspiracy theory'. I thought this was red-on-red infighting, but it appears to be the Labour line for his defence. Hardly a ringing defence, is it?
Labour (sadly) are committing an egregious error. At moment one, within an hour, they should have said "Whatever it says on the ballot Labour have no candidate in Rochdale, he is suspended from the party. Sorry. Sotto voce: vote LD".
If they’d done that, he’d still probably have won.
Looking at the list of Rochdale Labour councillors there are quite a few with what appear to be ‘Muslim’ names. I suspect some of them might sympathise with the candidate. Secondly, when the terrible event happened there were quite a few rumours floating about who or what lay behind it.
It was almost certainly not true, but as conspiracy theories go it was towards the more plausible end of the spectrum. That may not be saying much, but I suspect that in itself this won't be terminal to Labour's chances in Rochdale.
Most “scandals” have minimal effect, no-one resigns or gets sacked. Most of the time, the betting tip is to bet against the latest headline having any effect. Of course, sometimes it does matter!
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
Francis Ford Coppola has been bankrupt three times. How the fuck did he manage that?
Maybe it’s the old David Copperfield thing? “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
I suspect that it is more the roller coaster thing. If you invest a fair percentage of your wealth in something as ephemeral as a film you will have the odd disaster as well as the odd spectacular success. I do not pretend to be an expert but it also appears that the US bankruptcy schemes are as focused on trying to control cash flows and restricting diligence on assets as any absolute bankruptcy as we understand it. Hence so many companies seek bankruptcy protection from time to time.
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
This Azhar Ali story does nothing to help the feeling many on the left have that anti-Semitism was just a stick to beat Corbyn with - especially considering that part of his apology was all about how much the "Labour party has changed under the leadership of Keir Starmer". Like, I wouldn't call what he said anti-Semitic as much as conspiratorial and stupid (and as far as I'm aware the facts are true; Egypt and the US did warn Israeli intelligence, it's just that they cared more about the West Bank than Gaza). But this is what happens when the serious issue of anti-Semitism becomes tokenised - a sort of team sport where if you're pro Israel you can't possibly be an anti-Semite, even if you share literal Holocaust denial on the platform you own (*coughElonMuskcough*), but you are considered anti-Semitic if you're anti Zionist (and just happen to also be Jewish).
The problem with what Ali said is not that he talked of Israel neglecting warnings from Egypt and the US, it’s that he suggested Israel knew an attack was coming and deliberately let it happen. Those “facts” aren’t true.
There was far too much anti-Semitism among the Corbynite left, and still is. It would be better for the left to recognise that than to constantly complain that it was just a stick to beat Corbyn with.
Israeli intelligence was made aware by other states of the potential of an attack - similarly to how prior to 9/11 the US intelligence apparatus did have information warning them about that. I accept that doesn't therefore mean it was "allowed" to happen - big state apparatuses prioritise things differently and are prone to ignoring things they are predisposed to think are unlikely. I think this is what happened re Oct 7th - Israeli intelligence was probably warned and thought "we know Hamas, this is overblown, they can't possibly breach the fence and, anyway, we want to focus on the West Bank".
And it isn't just Corbyn, though. Bernie Sanders was also called an anti-Semite for not being Zionist enough. Germany is arresting and charging Jewish people right now for protesting against the war in Palestine, claiming they are abetting anti-Semitism. I've talked here before about the lefts anti-Semitism, it is a problem. Whereas Johnson was never scrutinised for the book he wrote that played in Jewish tropes, and no one took seriously the concern that the Jewish leader of the Labour party was constantly mocked for his weirdness, being unable to eat a bacon sandwich and the clear troping of his father.
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
Excl: Investigation by @thetimes into the scale of abuse of Christian conversion in the asylum system has found: - Murderers, rapists, drug dealers & burglars avoided deportation by claiming they're Christian converts - Outlandish claims lodged included a "Christian" who spent a month going to a synagogue by mistake 1/8 With @GeorgeGreenwood & @inspirellie_: thetimes.co.uk/article/509b22…
I mean this is going to be an interesting "no true scotsman" conversation. I would argue going to synagogue is just a slow way of converting to Christianity - you've got to learn the basics. Even Paul started as Jewish.
So did a bloke called Jesus who was quite important in Christianity.
Ridiculous amount of faux outrage by some Tories .
Louise Ellman MP supports the Labour decision to support Ali .
Simple fact is, it’s doing Labour more political and reputational damage standing by him, than cutting him loose. After such a distasteful comment he deserves to be cut loose. He said something far more disgusting than what got Long-Bailey the sack, so the lack of consistency is going off like a flipping Klaxon.
The Labour Party - all political party’s - need to make it loud and clear, British democracy isn’t about being a great representative of your community by believing in the same offensive crackpot conspiracy theories of the constituents, but that no one can be an MP and legislator if they believe in offensive crackpot conspiracy theories.
Excl: Investigation by @thetimes into the scale of abuse of Christian conversion in the asylum system has found: - Murderers, rapists, drug dealers & burglars avoided deportation by claiming they're Christian converts - Outlandish claims lodged included a "Christian" who spent a month going to a synagogue by mistake 1/8 With @GeorgeGreenwood & @inspirellie_: thetimes.co.uk/article/509b22…
Just distinguish between asylum seekers who are Christian on arrival in the UK and fleeing persecution, who should still be granted asylum and those who are not Christian on arrival but convert while here for convenience to stay who shouldn't
Do you have a direct line to God to give you the correct shibboleth? I mean, I could answer all the questions listed in the thread and I'm not a believer - how would anyone ever know?
The Labour front bench are saying that he 'fell for an online conspiracy theory'. I thought this was red-on-red infighting, but it appears to be the Labour line for his defence. Hardly a ringing defence, is it?
Labour (sadly) are committing an egregious error. At moment one, within an hour, they should have said "Whatever it says on the ballot Labour have no candidate in Rochdale, he is suspended from the party. Sorry. Sotto voce: vote LD".
If they’d done that, he’d still probably have won.
Looking at the list of Rochdale Labour councillors there are quite a few with what appear to be ‘Muslim’ names. I suspect some of them might sympathise with the candidate. Secondly, when the terrible event happened there were quite a few rumours floating about who or what lay behind it.
It was almost certainly not true, but as conspiracy theories go it was towards the more plausible end of the spectrum. That may not be saying much, but I suspect that in itself this won't be terminal to Labour's chances in Rochdale.
Thing is, so what if the Israeli government let it happen? Sure, if I were an Israeli, I'd be livid at them, but unless the theory is extended to say it was a Mossad operation, then it was still perpetrated by Palestinians.
I don't quite understand the attraction to it as a theory. I'm not sure what they think it means. What it says to me is, the white people are seen as the grown ups who should make sure the brown people don't do bad things. As has been said many times on here, it's a thoroughly racist view of the world.
Excl: Investigation by @thetimes into the scale of abuse of Christian conversion in the asylum system has found: - Murderers, rapists, drug dealers & burglars avoided deportation by claiming they're Christian converts - Outlandish claims lodged included a "Christian" who spent a month going to a synagogue by mistake 1/8 With @GeorgeGreenwood & @inspirellie_: thetimes.co.uk/article/509b22…
I mean this is going to be an interesting "no true scotsman" conversation. I would argue going to synagogue is just a slow way of converting to Christianity - you've got to learn the basics. Even Paul started as Jewish.
So did a bloke called Jesus who was quite important in Christianity.
Well I'm not convinced of the historicity of Jesus, so I didn't use him as the example (and arguably even if he was a historical figure Paul still had more impact on the growth of Christianity then Jesus did).
Comments
My long covid has been significant fatigue: I used to do pretty long walks of 2-4 hours regularly no problem, and in spring and summer would regularly do a 5 mile walk home from the office 2-3 times a week, but since getting covid I get tired, hot and sweaty, and out of breath after about 15-20 minutes of proper walking. I have definitely had increased brain fog; finding it hard to concentrate and forgetting stuff more often. It was recently suggested I might have PoTS (Postural Tachycardia Syndrome) which, whilst some symptoms fit things from my life prior to covid, if at least not a new thing is more acutely effecting me. It made my depression worse to begin with - although that is also a long term thing I suffer with, so that could be incidental. And just generally many more aches and pains in muscles and joints (it was suggested this might be because covid does something to the way we store vitamin D, but even supplements don't seem to help much).
So generally feeling like shit, but not in a massively obvious "this is an issue" way, but more in a "I have never got back to normal and that feels really weird" way.
Here's Taylor Swift introducing one of her dearest old friends to her boyfriend's dad. No-one feels left out.
’ The U.K. economy is now 5% worse off than it would have been had it never left the European Union due to a slump in trade and investment since the Brexit referendum in June 2016, according to a new study by Goldman Sachs.
This slowdown has seen the U.K.’s GDP per capita stagnate since COVID-19, having increased just 4% since the 2016 referendum, compared to an 8% increase in the eurozone and a 15% increase in the U.S., said a team at Goldman led by chief European economist Sven Jari Stehn.
At the same time, the U.K. has experienced much higher inflation than in rival advanced economies, with the country’s consumer prices up by 31% since 2016, versus rises of 27% in the U.S. and 24% in the eurozone.
Goldman Sachs’ study compared the U.K.’s post-Brexit economy to a hypothetical model of one that never left the E.U., with that underperformance blamed on the trade drop, lowered investment and labor market impacts of the decision to leave the E.U.
U.K. trade volumes –- total imports and exports –- are roughly 15% lower than in comparable countries, due to higher trade barriers with the E.U. and the resulting shift in supply chains.
Britain’s exports of goods to both the E.U. and the rest of the world have fallen sharply since Brexit, even as its services exports, which account for 40% of the country’s total exports, have remained roughly on course, the report said.
Investment in the U.K. has also stalled since Brexit, as a result of uncertainty in the years immediately following the referendum alongside a pullback by hard hit companies. Overall investment is 5% lower than if Britain had never left the E.U.
The situation has been worsened by a drop in E.U. migration that has reduced elasticity in the U.K.’s labor market, despite an uptick in overall migration driven by people moving from countries outside the E.U., said Stehn and the team…
‘New trade deals with countries outside the E.U. could help mitigate some of the long-term costs of Brexit, the reports adds. However, any benefits are unlikely to outweigh the reduction in trade to the European bloc.
https://apple.news/A7cPRST7cRce3COfEGz428A
But the price of supporting that was having much less media choice as consumers, and I don't think we are ready to go back to that as a society.
Another example. Before multichannel was a thing, the audience for something like News at Ten was huge- eight digits not seven. And the advertising income from the ITV network funded pretty lavish journalism and meant that a large part of the country were seeing a good attempt at tying to provide honest coverage of what is happening. They may only have watched because there was not much else on, but they watched.
Once you fragment the audience, the model falls apart. Which is in part why the national conversation is often so dumb.
A generation ago, a newspaper wasn't just a way to get your news, it was a time filler in the way that a phone is now. People would buy a newspaper in order to get their news, their clickbait, their idle ten minute games, their weather forecasts; a newspaper would be browsed on the morning commute, repeatedly put down and picked up again throughout the day; half-read during a conversation with their spouse, and would fill time in exactly the way a phone does now. Arguably the £1 a day or whatever it cost was pretty good value. But people now get all that for free on their phones and much of the purpose of a paid-for newspaper has been lost.
Funeral was the next day. I went.
As for your experience - have you sought help? Maybe not just medical, but also potentially counselling?
Eyeballing the different dna ageing models, some find a difference from covid infection, some do not. None of them seem to suggest a 20 year+ difference to me.
There is very little local news now.
We are never going back,,the genie is out of the bottle.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/bulletins/businessinvestment/latest
It's notable that the NYT has suddenly started prospering (unlike 95% of US newspapers) by massively boosting their cookery pages and puzzles and building a community of commenters around that. And people are willing to pay for this sense of community plus the specialist info, via subs
This is surely the future. Papers will become an online brand where people will go to meet others and get specialist info
PB at its best is something I would pay for (and I have donated several times in the past). Not so much the headers - tho they are always appreciated, and sometimes excellent - as the community beneath
Perhaps PB should add cooking pages, and we can all discuss the recipes and denounce each other for being anti-carrot or secretly pro-Tabasco, or maybe a bot paid for by Big Broccoli
If it's any consolation, there is absolutely no evidence of brain fog in your comments on here. You write lucidly, and articulately, and often knowledgeably. I disagree with you 97% of the time, but you write well
AI can do this. Given how these businesses are more and more cash strapped it is the future.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/feb/12/monty-python-star-eric-idle-im-still-working-at-80-for-financial-reasons
If housing benefit was reduced to zero tommorow, what would actually happen. The rental returns at the bottom end would drop, so there'd be a crash at the bottom end of the market I guess - which would mean the returns from the new, lower rents paid by the bottom of the market would then become once again viable. As the bottom of the market is taken out so my guess is the middle drops, and probably the top a bit (Though that has different dynamics with more unoccupied property for investment and so forth). Overall since the same number of people and the same housing stock should still exist the net result would be purely positive to the treasury...
Of course it's the "in the meantime" (And associated property price drop) that would be the headache for the Gov't.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-trade-in-numbers/uk-trade-in-numbers-web-version
There is no name, no journalist
There is a serious chance that actually WAS written by AI
PA uses AI
https://bernardmarr.com/press-association-using-artificial-intelligence-and-nlg-to-automate-local-news/
Paul Garner from Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine might be worth looking at, he's a health researcher who got long covid. He has made something of a recovery but his approach may not work for everyone.
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/25/paul-garner-on-his-recovery-from-long-covid/
A lot of the work the next Labour Government is going to have to do is to replace knowledge that has been lost due to historic decisions and then implement things to ensure that such mistakes aren’t made in the future.
Army recruitment is 1 example, how to electrify a railway/ build one is another skill that needs to be relearnt but there will literally be 1000s of examples where outsourcing and a start/ stop philosophy has destroy institutional knowledge resulting in solved problems needing to be relearnt again and again
How can you not be lifelong rich from the all the money generated by Monty Python and its spinoffs? The movies, esp Life of Brian and Holy Grail, must surely generate significant royalties. Grail and Brian are regularly counted in the top 20 comedies of all time
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-lists/readers-poll-the-25-funniest-movies-of-all-time-14706/1-blazing-saddles-44961/
I assume also that these are current prices and given high inflation in recent years that business investment is quite a bit lower in real terms compared with 2016.
After a couple of years it's possible we'd have a much more healthy market, but while you waited for things to shake out you'd have lots of people suddenly homeless.
- Murderers, rapists, drug dealers & burglars avoided deportation by claiming they're Christian converts
- Outlandish claims lodged included a "Christian" who spent a month going to a synagogue by mistake
1/8
With @GeorgeGreenwood & @inspirellie_: thetimes.co.uk/article/509b22…
https://x.com/matt_dathan/status/1756986437650497959?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
When you have all the world's info and news at your fingertips, via the net, and your phone, tablet, laptop, why on earth would you spend an hour reading ONLY the news/sports/gossip that some spotty twit in N1C decides is suitable for you to read, written by the people they approve of in N1C? in one go, over breakfast?
That world is gone, and it is never coming back, and it is quite bizarre, in retrospect
I used to do it as a lad, picked it up from my Dad, who ALWAYS read THE PAPER front-to-end in the morning. I generally lost the habit in my 30s, and I haven't bought and read a dead tree paper in about 15 years
https://x.com/romfordrecorder/status/1757009307802185940?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
I despise the state that allows this shit, loyal British taxpayers are being brutally mocked by those who purport to govern us
My sympathy is pretty non existent given the disputes over the Rutles with Neil Innes.
A quick google tells me you can watch Life of Brian for $4 on Apple TV
Given how mega famous it is, it's not hard to inagine it being streamed, say, 500,000 times a year, around the world, with a global population of 8 billion
That is two million bucks right there, for just one movie in the Python backlist
Plus royalties from the TV, musicals, songs (Bright Side of Life)
Idle mentions shit lawyers in his tirade, seems to be they must have had REALLY shit lawyers. And where did the money go when they WERE minting it? Did they all spaff it on hookers and blow?
Both have value as measures but the use of relative poverty in headlines and reporting means that *no matter how good a job the government does* the poor are always with us.
That creates a recipe for endless government intervention rather than solving a problem.
PB Tories used to say Britain should concentrate on helping Christian refugees, rather than Muslim ones.
Now, instead of accepting a conversion at face value, and asking their co-religionist to help out at the Church Fete by carrying the tea urn, PB Tories are willing to run the risk of sending genuine Christians back to a martyr's death, because of their obsession they everyone else is abusing the system.
I know that is why Cleese is relatively skint. Multiple divorces
Then it is a mystery. Drugs? Gambling? Secret payoffs to REDACTED?
Just imagine how much extra there would have been for public services. If Leavers want to big up the sovereignty aspect that’s an argument that has some merits but really on the economy it’s polishing a txrd !
In the meantime you exposure millions of Ukrainians to the genocide and terror that those in Bucha and other places faced. No Ukrainian leader could live with that.
So they continue to fight even if it seems hopeless. The hour is darkest before dawn and all that.
Enough. Zero net migration, no more asylum
https://twitter.com/tracey_crouch/status/1757013901961543687
Palin of course has the travel work. (I understand it pays well, and the expenses are generous.)
Chapman of course died young, and Jones lived fairly modestly, I believe, in The Vale of Health, Hampstead.
Louise Ellman MP supports the Labour decision to support Ali .
I know the suspension of left wingers was often for refusal to apologise for less overt comments, but no apology suffices for accusing a nation's government of deliberately allowing a large terrorist attack against its own people without the most damning of evidence, and even then don't pre-empt your leadership.
I hold no love for Netanyahu, and his government failed badly on the attack, but the candidate's comments were beyond the pale.
There was far too much anti-Semitism among the Corbynite left, and still is. It would be better for the left to recognise that than to constantly complain that it was just a stick to beat Corbyn with.
But hey, it's great to see people who love to discuss the anti-Semitism of others decry the system of asylum that was specifically built after a load of Western countries refused to take Jewish refugees and instead left them to the horrors of the Holocaust.
(((Dan Hodges)))
@DPJHodges
·
6m
“We’re not anti-Semitic. We’re just mad conspiracy theorists. Vote Labour”
https://x.com/JoeBiden/status/1756888470599967000?s=20
A man who can't even be held responsible for mishandling classified information properly has absolutely no business occupying the Oval Office
https://twitter.com/HouseGOP/status/1756774606726123964
- Reduce income inequality in general, boosting lowest incomes, so that even the poorest are at >60% of median
- Completely shaft more than the bottom 50%, so that the bottom >50% have income reduced to be no more than 5/3 times the income of the poorest
1984-esque societies and maybe some of the communist models would manage the second, probably.Donald Trump, for example has filed for chapter XI bankruptcy no less than 6 times.
https://www.thoughtco.com/donald-trump-business-bankruptcies-4152019
And he is one of the most brilliant businessmen of all time. Apparently.
As he's currently doing with the $120m 'Megalopolis'.
And it isn't just Corbyn, though. Bernie Sanders was also called an anti-Semite for not being Zionist enough. Germany is arresting and charging Jewish people right now for protesting against the war in Palestine, claiming they are abetting anti-Semitism. I've talked here before about the lefts anti-Semitism, it is a problem. Whereas Johnson was never scrutinised for the book he wrote that played in Jewish tropes, and no one took seriously the concern that the Jewish leader of the Labour party was constantly mocked for his weirdness, being unable to eat a bacon sandwich and the clear troping of his father.
The Labour Party - all political party’s - need to make it loud and clear, British democracy isn’t about being a great representative of your community by believing in the same offensive crackpot conspiracy theories of the constituents, but that no one can be an MP and legislator if they believe in offensive crackpot conspiracy theories.
I don't quite understand the attraction to it as a theory. I'm not sure what they think it means. What it says to me is, the white people are seen as the grown ups who should make sure the brown people don't do bad things. As has been said many times on here, it's a thoroughly racist view of the world.