It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
I appreciate that revisionism is fun, but I do have to giggle.
Selling England by the pound. Once again the government opens the door for British assets to flow abroad.
If we don't make/create and things the world wants, all that is left is selling the silver.
We are selling not just the silver but also future revenue streams abroad. And that is without the absurdities of subsidies following or the rundown of services such as water. It is not just infrastructure but football clubs, supermarkets and tech firms.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
Lockdown 1 was justified. We didn’t know what it was. Lockdowns 2 and 3 were insane, we should shielded the old and cracked on with living
Instead we have severely damaged a generation of kids - indeed maybe everyone - and racked up crippling national debt. Not good
Just thinking about Mr Dancer's comparison to the twentieth century, what would people in 1925 have picked as the most important moment so far? Probably either one aspect of the outbreak of WW1 or the Armistice.
But in the longer term, that accolade would surely have to go to the development of powered aircraft, which began either in 1903 with the Wright brothers or with either Brazilian or German pioneers (depending on what you call a 'powered aircraft' and which account you believe). That changed the whole planet in innumerable dramatic ways, including its weather systems.
I wonder if we're also overlooking something because the pandemic, 9/11 and financial crises are all blocking our view. Answer - very probably, but we won't know what it is (and I do hope that's not triggered a certain Multiple ID poster).
The annoying thing is that he'd almost certainly be right.
It's a possibility, although it would be a dramatic break with tradition from him.
But from what I have heard, I would actually suggest the most likely left-field candidate is the vaccines developed for Covid - which appear to be promising in many other fields of medicine to the extent they may be genuinely revolutionary.
Good morning comrades and colleagues!
There are very few* 'revolutionary' events which are stand-alone. The Covid experience facilitated the development and especially the use of the likes of Zoom and Teams. Quite a lot of elderly people of my acquaintance, who would once have relied on their own physical social circles now routinely meet up with like minded people across the globe. And, going back a century, would airplanes have developed in the way they did but for WWI.
*Edited for sense, due to finger failure.
Yes, but it would have been slower.
Just as atomic energy and weapons would have been developed, but it would have taken more time.
Or indeed, in medical terms again, penicillin.
War injects massive capital resources into things that expedites what would otherwise be slow development hampered by lack of cash.
Of course, it can go the other way. The Nuffield aero engine, which offered a power-weight ratio far in excess of any other internal combustion engine, was abandoned due to the Air Ministry's obsession with secrecy which annoyed Lord Nuffield so much he cancelled the programme. Equally, that made jet engines a more attractive option than they would otherwise have been.
Following your lead of penicillin, the 21st Century developments of Crispr and mRNA revolutionising vaccine development and personalised medicine.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
That figure's too low. More like 1% or more in the UK IIRC. [Edit: overall, for all, but that includes children, though.]
That's the overall rate, not the rate in healthy adults which was under 0.1%, it was the unhealthy for which COVID ended up being deadly and once we realised that (which was pretty early on) our measures should have focussed on that aspect, not locking up healthy people for months on end and having them need to pretend to go to the shops to get out of the house.
Definitely a blue-on-blue. The shootdown was by the USS Gettysburg, a Tico class DDG.
I hope the Captain enjoys his next draft as Officer, IC Latrines in American Samoa.
You reckon he’s gonna be lucky enough to be Latrines Officer in American Samoa?
Dunno. It depends how the BoI plays out. If the Hornet driver was in the wrong place, didn't respond on GUARD or the IFF was inop then there may have been mitigating circumstances. He can certainly forget about getting another command or flag rank no matter what.
That's 2019, 2 elections ago and X Prime Ministers ago.
It wasn't in the 2024 Manifesto.
(And no - that's not support for Rayner.)
No it wasn’t but it still did not stop many many labour candidates, now MPs enjoying photo ops with and pledging undying support for these entitled boomers. All looking foolish now.
Including the prime minister. Even if the Waspi women campaign leaders are overreaching, it has been ruled that notification was inadequate.
The danger for Labour comes if they are seen to have followed the LibDem path of promising (even if only implied) one thing but reversing once in power.
The danger for government generally is that it is added to the list along with contaminated blood and subpostmasters of things that deserve compensation but we'll drag our feet until they're all dead and forgotten.
Post Office Horizon and the contaminated blood scandal both involve relatively limited numbers of genuine victims. Compensation for them is expensive but the money can be found. The WASPI case is different. The Government is correct to say that the scale of payouts required, given the numbers of women involved, is too great to be afforded and a bad use of public funds. I also question the victim narrative in this case: what's really happened here, as with the stopping of WFP for better off pensioners, is that Boomers have been done out of an entitlement and they're screaming accordingly.
The pension age had to be equalised at some point, and this cohort had the misfortune to be the ones affected, but that doesn't mean they deserve big handouts.
The issue here is that they expected to be allowed to claim a pension whilst men of the same age continued to have to work, and threw a wobbly when they were told no. Demanding gender equality so long as it works in your favour and then throwing a strop when it doesn't engender much sympathy.
Yes, protesting the increase in pension age and demanding the full amount is what I described as overreach.
However, it is true that notification was inadequate, and it is not absurd to suggest that compensation for that and that alone might be in order, or that the normal pension requirements (other than age) can be waived in these cases. The ombudsman has already ruled this is so.
But the merits are irrelevant to the point, which was Labour's apparent volte face on reaching Downing Street. This is compared to the LibDem handling of tuition fees, again without debating the merits of that decision.
From the PHSO report. No legal duty to inform anyone of the changes. Why should they be compensated for ‘administration’ when there was no legal requirement. PHSO just caved to a vocal lobby. This change was passed into law in 1995 and we are talking about 28 months delay a decade or so later.
“68. We are aware of the Court judgments relating to recent judicial review proceedings4. DWP told us that the Courts have already ruled that:
there was no legal duty to communicate the changes in State Pension age, and the Courts found as a matter of fact that the steps DWP took to communicate the changes were adequate.
69. We agree that the Courts have ruled there was no legal (that is, statutory or common law) duty to communicate the changes. However, as noted earlier, this does not mean that there was no requirement for DWP to adequately communicate the changes as a matter of good administration.”
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
There is a simple, stark truth about the transition to electric vehicles: China has already won. There is a little resistance to the transition - whipped up by the alt-right and clickbait media types. As people realise EVs are easier to drive, cheaper to run and don’t need all that expensive pointless maintenance, the transition will only accelerate.
Europe needs to play catch up. Invest bigly to get ahead of the curve as China did a decade ago, and then play to the strengths of existing brands. But no, said brands think they can keep ripping people off with daft paid extras and dafter servicing - BMW want to sell you a service plan for EVs which covers engine oil changes.
Getting Chinese marques to build here could be done - if we’re targeted with threatened tariffs and generous with the state aid. But we’d need to do that *and* invest to get head of the curve.
Does Starmer have the strategic vision? And the balls?
Just thinking about Mr Dancer's comparison to the twentieth century, what would people in 1925 have picked as the most important moment so far? Probably either one aspect of the outbreak of WW1 or the Armistice.
But in the longer term, that accolade would surely have to go to the development of powered aircraft, which began either in 1903 with the Wright brothers or with either Brazilian or German pioneers (depending on what you call a 'powered aircraft' and which account you believe). That changed the whole planet in innumerable dramatic ways, including its weather systems.
I wonder if we're also overlooking something because the pandemic, 9/11 and financial crises are all blocking our view. Answer - very probably, but we won't know what it is (and I do hope that's not triggered a certain Multiple ID poster).
The annoying thing is that he'd almost certainly be right.
It's a possibility, although it would be a dramatic break with tradition from him.
But from what I have heard, I would actually suggest the most likely left-field candidate is the vaccines developed for Covid - which appear to be promising in many other fields of medicine to the extent they may be genuinely revolutionary.
Good morning comrades and colleagues!
There are very few* 'revolutionary' events which are stand-alone. The Covid experience facilitated the development and especially the use of the likes of Zoom and Teams. Quite a lot of elderly people of my acquaintance, who would once have relied on their own physical social circles now routinely meet up with like minded people across the globe. And, going back a century, would airplanes have developed in the way they did but for WWI.
*Edited for sense, due to finger failure.
Yes, but it would have been slower.
Just as atomic energy and weapons would have been developed, but it would have taken more time.
Or indeed, in medical terms again, penicillin.
War injects massive capital resources into things that expedites what would otherwise be slow development hampered by lack of cash.
Of course, it can go the other way. The Nuffield aero engine, which offered a power-weight ratio far in excess of any other internal combustion engine, was abandoned due to the Air Ministry's obsession with secrecy which annoyed Lord Nuffield so much he cancelled the programme. Equally, that made jet engines a more attractive option than they would otherwise have been.
On the government picking winners and killing them off, we can add maglev trains, vtol aircraft and of course public key encryption which today underlies all of ecommerce.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
Lockdown 1 was justified. We didn’t know what it was. Lockdowns 2 and 3 were insane, we should shielded the old and cracked on with living
Instead we have severely damaged a generation of kids - indeed maybe everyone - and racked up crippling national debt. Not good
Yes, this was my issue at the time too. With lockdown 1 we were flying pretty blind, it probably went on for a month too long but otherwise sure it wasn't anyone fault really. At the end of lockdown 1 we should have ended all of the financial assistance measures and got everyone back to normal life and from then the only lockdowns should have been optional for the unhealthy and I also think, in retrospect, we shouldn't have mandated vaccines even though I supported it at that time I now realise it was wrong to do so.
People should always have the choice to take it or not, especially one with such a short phase 3 trial and no phase 4 data which ended up showing a lot of issues that would have resulted in the AZ vaccine being withdrawn and both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines being withdrawn for men under 50.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
There is a simple, stark truth about the transition to electric vehicles: China has already won. There is a little resistance to the transition - whipped up by the alt-right and clickbait media types. As people realise EVs are easier to drive, cheaper to run and don’t need all that expensive pointless maintenance, the transition will only accelerate.
Europe needs to play catch up. Invest bigly to get ahead of the curve as China did a decade ago, and then play to the strengths of existing brands. But no, said brands think they can keep ripping people off with daft paid extras and dafter servicing - BMW want to sell you a service plan for EVs which covers engine oil changes.
Getting Chinese marques to build here could be done - if we’re targeted with threatened tariffs and generous with the state aid. But we’d need to do that *and* invest to get head of the curve.
Does Starmer have the strategic vision? And the balls?
You're responding seriously to someone who thinks Labour receiving a £200m donation from the CCP is firstly a positive and secondly a possibility. You might want to rethink the effort you put into your responses.
That's 2019, 2 elections ago and X Prime Ministers ago.
It wasn't in the 2024 Manifesto.
(And no - that's not support for Rayner.)
No it wasn’t but it still did not stop many many labour candidates, now MPs enjoying photo ops with and pledging undying support for these entitled boomers. All looking foolish now.
Including the prime minister. Even if the Waspi women campaign leaders are overreaching, it has been ruled that notification was inadequate.
The danger for Labour comes if they are seen to have followed the LibDem path of promising (even if only implied) one thing but reversing once in power.
The danger for government generally is that it is added to the list along with contaminated blood and subpostmasters of things that deserve compensation but we'll drag our feet until they're all dead and forgotten.
Post Office Horizon and the contaminated blood scandal both involve relatively limited numbers of genuine victims. Compensation for them is expensive but the money can be found. The WASPI case is different. The Government is correct to say that the scale of payouts required, given the numbers of women involved, is too great to be afforded and a bad use of public funds. I also question the victim narrative in this case: what's really happened here, as with the stopping of WFP for better off pensioners, is that Boomers have been done out of an entitlement and they're screaming accordingly.
The pension age had to be equalised at some point, and this cohort had the misfortune to be the ones affected, but that doesn't mean they deserve big handouts.
The issue here is that they expected to be allowed to claim a pension whilst men of the same age continued to have to work, and threw a wobbly when they were told no. Demanding gender equality so long as it works in your favour and then throwing a strop when it doesn't engender much sympathy.
Yes, protesting the increase in pension age and demanding the full amount is what I described as overreach.
However, it is true that notification was inadequate, and it is not absurd to suggest that compensation for that and that alone might be in order, or that the normal pension requirements (other than age) can be waived in these cases. The ombudsman has already ruled this is so.
But the merits are irrelevant to the point, which was Labour's apparent volte face on reaching Downing Street. This is compared to the LibDem handling of tuition fees, again without debating the merits of that decision.
From the PHSO report. No legal duty to inform anyone of the changes. Why should they be compensated for ‘administration’ when there was no legal requirement. PHSO just caved to a vocal lobby. This change was passed into law in 1995 and we are talking about 28 months delay a decade or so later.
“68. We are aware of the Court judgments relating to recent judicial review proceedings4. DWP told us that the Courts have already ruled that:
there was no legal duty to communicate the changes in State Pension age, and the Courts found as a matter of fact that the steps DWP took to communicate the changes were adequate.
69. We agree that the Courts have ruled there was no legal (that is, statutory or common law) duty to communicate the changes. However, as noted earlier, this does not mean that there was no requirement for DWP to adequately communicate the changes as a matter of good administration.”
So there was maladministration.
But again, the merits of the case are separate from the politics. Labour said (or appeared to say) one thing in opposition and another in government. That is the point.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
There is a simple, stark truth about the transition to electric vehicles: China has already won. There is a little resistance to the transition - whipped up by the alt-right and clickbait media types. As people realise EVs are easier to drive, cheaper to run and don’t need all that expensive pointless maintenance, the transition will only accelerate.
Europe needs to play catch up. Invest bigly to get ahead of the curve as China did a decade ago, and then play to the strengths of existing brands. But no, said brands think they can keep ripping people off with daft paid extras and dafter servicing - BMW want to sell you a service plan for EVs which covers engine oil changes.
Getting Chinese marques to build here could be done - if we’re targeted with threatened tariffs and generous with the state aid. But we’d need to do that *and* invest to get head of the curve.
Does Starmer have the strategic vision? And the balls?
He’s shown no sign of any strategic vision so far and his business team don’t have any real business or background. Working prior to Parliament mainly for lobbyists, charities or NGO’s.
Definitely a blue-on-blue. The shootdown was by the USS Gettysburg, a Tico class DDG.
I hope the Captain enjoys his next draft as Officer, IC Latrines in American Samoa.
You reckon he’s gonna be lucky enough to be Latrines Officer in American Samoa?
Dunno. It depends how the BoI plays out. If the Hornet driver was in the wrong place, didn't respond on GUARD or the IFF was inop then there may have been mitigating circumstances. He can certainly forget about getting another command or flag rank no matter what.
A single-crewed aircraft having a bad day might plausibly be able to end up in the wrong place, not respond on guard despite an inop IFF, and not dodge the incoming - but a double-crewed aircraft?
I agree that the GFC is too low, and the rise of China - whilst not an "event" - is hugely significant.
I'd definitely put 9/11 ahead of Covid. The former was horrifying terror that forever changed how we do things.
Spanish flu killed more people than World War I, but it’s notable that histories of the twentieth century devote, what?, a hundred times more space to WWI... A thousand times? So I’m not surprised that people put 9/11 ahead of COVID. I don’t think they should. COVID should’ve forever changed how we do things. Another pandemic poses far more threat than terrorist attacks to us.
If anybody wants to see where the nanny state leads, this video contains a fascinating if horrifying clip of a petty Chinese official trying to bully a single man into having children. From 9:24 for about three minutes.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Foreign cash buying our political parties is okay if it’s the party you support 👍
I doubt the MSM hate labour any more than the Tories. It’s all about controversy and whatever will drive traffic and engagement.
Selling England by the pound. Once again the government opens the door for British assets to flow abroad.
Selling off the family silver* as McMillan put it. One of the less welcome legacies of Thatcher.
*To foreign asset strippers.
Rubbish. Making the UK more attractive to foreign investment was one of the best legacies of even Margaret Thatcher's golden rule. It was directly beneficial, because foreign-owned businesses are significantly better managed and more successful than domestic ones (this isn't a UK point - it's true internationally as well). So welcoming foreign investment improved huge parts of our industrial base, whatever economically and xenophobic garbage fools like Macmillan spouted, providing welcome employment and tax revenues.
It was also indirectly beneficial because the supply-side reforms necessary to encourage that investment, such as lower taxes and deregulation, boosted the UK economy hugely, and contributed to its greater dynamism, at least until the governments since 1997 ruined it.
That's 2019, 2 elections ago and X Prime Ministers ago.
It wasn't in the 2024 Manifesto.
(And no - that's not support for Rayner.)
No it wasn’t but it still did not stop many many labour candidates, now MPs enjoying photo ops with and pledging undying support for these entitled boomers. All looking foolish now.
Including the prime minister. Even if the Waspi women campaign leaders are overreaching, it has been ruled that notification was inadequate.
The danger for Labour comes if they are seen to have followed the LibDem path of promising (even if only implied) one thing but reversing once in power.
The danger for government generally is that it is added to the list along with contaminated blood and subpostmasters of things that deserve compensation but we'll drag our feet until they're all dead and forgotten.
Post Office Horizon and the contaminated blood scandal both involve relatively limited numbers of genuine victims. Compensation for them is expensive but the money can be found. The WASPI case is different. The Government is correct to say that the scale of payouts required, given the numbers of women involved, is too great to be afforded and a bad use of public funds. I also question the victim narrative in this case: what's really happened here, as with the stopping of WFP for better off pensioners, is that Boomers have been done out of an entitlement and they're screaming accordingly.
The pension age had to be equalised at some point, and this cohort had the misfortune to be the ones affected, but that doesn't mean they deserve big handouts.
The issue here is that they expected to be allowed to claim a pension whilst men of the same age continued to have to work, and threw a wobbly when they were told no. Demanding gender equality so long as it works in your favour and then throwing a strop when it doesn't engender much sympathy.
Yes, protesting the increase in pension age and demanding the full amount is what I described as overreach.
However, it is true that notification was inadequate, and it is not absurd to suggest that compensation for that and that alone might be in order, or that the normal pension requirements (other than age) can be waived in these cases. The ombudsman has already ruled this is so.
But the merits are irrelevant to the point, which was Labour's apparent volte face on reaching Downing Street. This is compared to the LibDem handling of tuition fees, again without debating the merits of that decision.
From the PHSO report. No legal duty to inform anyone of the changes. Why should they be compensated for ‘administration’ when there was no legal requirement. PHSO just caved to a vocal lobby. This change was passed into law in 1995 and we are talking about 28 months delay a decade or so later.
“68. We are aware of the Court judgments relating to recent judicial review proceedings4. DWP told us that the Courts have already ruled that:
there was no legal duty to communicate the changes in State Pension age, and the Courts found as a matter of fact that the steps DWP took to communicate the changes were adequate.
69. We agree that the Courts have ruled there was no legal (that is, statutory or common law) duty to communicate the changes. However, as noted earlier, this does not mean that there was no requirement for DWP to adequately communicate the changes as a matter of good administration.”
So there was maladministration.
But again, the merits of the case are separate from the politics. Labour said (or appeared to say) one thing in opposition and another in government. That is the point.
There are no merits, they have exhausted pretty much all the legal avenues. Your point about labour is one I have also made.
That is what the ombudsman found. Maladministration in delaying sending a batch of letters.
However it does not mean they deserve compensation for it especially when there was no legal requirement to let people now.
China joining the WTO in December 2001 was the most important event of the 21st century. It accelerated the loss of Western manufacturing jobs, leading to the rise of Trump and Brexit. It led to goods price deflation, encouraging central banks to keep interest rates too low, inflating housing markets and driving reach for yield in financial markets, leading to the global financial crisis. It enabled the rise of China as an economic power, challenging US hegemony and allowing China to bankroll Russian imperialism. It lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. It accelerated the climate crisis. And it's not even on the list!
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
Lockdown 1 was justified. We didn’t know what it was. Lockdowns 2 and 3 were insane, we should shielded the old and cracked on with living
Instead we have severely damaged a generation of kids - indeed maybe everyone - and racked up crippling national debt. Not good
The vaccination program justified lockdown 3 on a 'keep inside for a few more weeks' basis but it did go on too long.
The avoidable one was lockdown 2, which was caused by covid pouring back into the country with every returning holiday flight. All the effort of lockdown 1 was wasted because the government pandered to people who wanted their week in Benidorm.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Foreign cash buying our political parties is okay if it’s the party you support 👍
I doubt the MSM hate labour any more than the Tories. It’s all about controversy and whatever will drive traffic and engagement.
Chinese cash to Labour = Good American cash to Reform = Bad
I think the one thing that 99% of us here can agree on, is that foreigners funding UK political parties is a bad idea.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
There is a simple, stark truth about the transition to electric vehicles: China has already won. There is a little resistance to the transition - whipped up by the alt-right and clickbait media types. As people realise EVs are easier to drive, cheaper to run and don’t need all that expensive pointless maintenance, the transition will only accelerate.
Europe needs to play catch up. Invest bigly to get ahead of the curve as China did a decade ago, and then play to the strengths of existing brands. But no, said brands think they can keep ripping people off with daft paid extras and dafter servicing - BMW want to sell you a service plan for EVs which covers engine oil changes.
Getting Chinese marques to build here could be done - if we’re targeted with threatened tariffs and generous with the state aid. But we’d need to do that *and* invest to get head of the curve.
Does Starmer have the strategic vision? And the balls?
You're responding seriously to someone who thinks Labour receiving a £200m donation from the CCP is firstly a positive and secondly a possibility. You might want to rethink the effort you put into your responses.
True, but his reply was interesting and worth reading, unlike the post he replies to.
Just thinking about Mr Dancer's comparison to the twentieth century, what would people in 1925 have picked as the most important moment so far? Probably either one aspect of the outbreak of WW1 or the Armistice.
But in the longer term, that accolade would surely have to go to the development of powered aircraft, which began either in 1903 with the Wright brothers or with either Brazilian or German pioneers (depending on what you call a 'powered aircraft' and which account you believe). That changed the whole planet in innumerable dramatic ways, including its weather systems.
I wonder if we're also overlooking something because the pandemic, 9/11 and financial crises are all blocking our view. Answer - very probably, but we won't know what it is (and I do hope that's not triggered a certain Multiple ID poster).
The annoying thing is that he'd almost certainly be right.
It's a possibility, although it would be a dramatic break with tradition from him.
But from what I have heard, I would actually suggest the most likely left-field candidate is the vaccines developed for Covid - which appear to be promising in many other fields of medicine to the extent they may be genuinely revolutionary.
Good morning comrades and colleagues!
There are very few* 'revolutionary' events which are stand-alone. The Covid experience facilitated the development and especially the use of the likes of Zoom and Teams. Quite a lot of elderly people of my acquaintance, who would once have relied on their own physical social circles now routinely meet up with like minded people across the globe. And, going back a century, would airplanes have developed in the way they did but for WWI.
*Edited for sense, due to finger failure.
Yes, but it would have been slower.
Just as atomic energy and weapons would have been developed, but it would have taken more time.
Or indeed, in medical terms again, penicillin.
War injects massive capital resources into things that expedites what would otherwise be slow development hampered by lack of cash.
Of course, it can go the other way. The Nuffield aero engine, which offered a power-weight ratio far in excess of any other internal combustion engine, was abandoned due to the Air Ministry's obsession with secrecy which annoyed Lord Nuffield so much he cancelled the programme. Equally, that made jet engines a more attractive option than they would otherwise have been.
On the government picking winners and killing them off, we can add maglev trains, vtol aircraft and of course public key encryption which today underlies all of ecommerce.
IIRC Nuffield dropped out of aero engine production because the Air Ministry wanted insane amounts of paperwork on military contracts - and with WWII approaching, it was going to be 100% military.
It was a variation on the Cost Plus comedy - as used in the US - where everything is accounted for at insane cost.
So Nuffield sold the research and designs, and made stuff for the Army. Who didn’t require the paperwork.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
Lockdown 1 was justified. We didn’t know what it was. Lockdowns 2 and 3 were insane, we should shielded the old and cracked on with living
Instead we have severely damaged a generation of kids - indeed maybe everyone - and racked up crippling national debt. Not good
The vaccination program justified lockdown 3 on a 'keep inside for a few more weeks' basis but it did go on too long.
The avoidable one was lockdown 2, which was caused by covid pouring back into the country with every returning holiday flight. All the effort of lockdown 1 was wasted because the government pandered to people who wanted their week in Benidorm.
The single biggest mistake of the whole pandemic in the UK, was allowing holiday flights abroad in 2020.
Apart from anything else, it shovelled a fair amount of the support cash overseas!
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
I wonder if memories of covid are affected by what people's work situation was at the time.
For those who continued to go to their place of work and had minimal or zero time on furlough it wasn't too different - there was just fewer things to do outside of work and some had restrictions.
Whereas for those who had long periods on furlough or who worked from home the effects were greater and often longer lasting.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Selling England by the pound. Once again the government opens the door for British assets to flow abroad.
So what? Its a private firm, no more special than Amazon or Yodel or any other of the plethora of delivery firms that exist.
Assets will go abroad for as long as we run a trade deficit.
You have cause and effect the wrong way round, and also have misunderstood the relevance of its being a private firm, which is only that it can be sold.
Running a trade deficit weakens the pound, which makes British assets cheaper for foreign capital to buy, which leads to asset sales.
What have I got wrong?
Yes exports need to rise and imports need to fall, otherwise the only way the books balance is with capital injections from overseas.
Perhaps building a million new student housing units and boarding school places reserved for overseas students is the way to go.
Only if we can fill them. We have an ongoing crisis at Dundee University which has seen the departure of our Principal "with immediate effect". There are a variety of reasons for this, and Dundee is very far from alone, but gearing up on student accommodation into a headwind of falling international numbers is a major factor.
Well if they can’t fill the places, it usually means the price is too high and/or their marketing isn’t good enough.
I’ll take a guess that they put all of their eggs in the Chinese and Russian baskets, only for those countries to go horribly tits-up.
No-one in the UK is looking to Russia for overseas students much, but, yes, China has been very significant. Universities are aware of this and trying to diversify by marketing more to places like Indonesia, India, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria.
In 2022/3, there were 758,855 international students in the UK. That’s about a quarter of all students. International students make up a majority of full-time taught postgrad students. China has been the largest source since 2018/9, but was overtaken by India in 2022/3. The top six were:
India China Nigeria Pakistan US Bangladesh
Also up there are Malaysia, UAE, Saudi Arabia, France and Ireland.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
I’d rather that no one was dictating to us.
But, a totalitarian, genocidal, regime like China calling the shots would be far worse than Trump or Musk.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
Lockdown 1 was justified. We didn’t know what it was. Lockdowns 2 and 3 were insane, we should shielded the old and cracked on with living
Instead we have severely damaged a generation of kids - indeed maybe everyone - and racked up crippling national debt. Not good
You are so right. Although I think that the children who were about 2 when it kicked off and just starting to socialise were the main ones that have suffered long term damage.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Foreign cash buying our political parties is okay if it’s the party you support 👍
I doubt the MSM hate labour any more than the Tories. It’s all about controversy and whatever will drive traffic and engagement.
Chinese cash to Labour = Good American cash to Reform = Bad
I think the one thing that 99% of us here can agree on, is that foreigners funding UK political parties is a bad idea.
I agree Foreign funding is a bad idea.
If there are levels of bad though Musk is a far greater risk to our Country than China.
China would not impose communist rule
Musk will impose a form of White Supremisist Fascism
That came up 2 or 3 days back - not criticising you, not at all, just that it arose in passing and could be easily missed. Main nub of it was that 'private' option is being disabled so the mods can easily check previous posts (but our emails are still concealed); and, more generally, some of us have to behave ourselves more when making accusations about identifiable persons.
Maybe we ned a header when the mods and OGH have had a chance to consider it all.
Ah, I saw the discussion about private profiles but missed what prompted it. Thanks.
That link indicated there was an onerous amount of admin and management for those runnjng/moderating online forums. Risk assessments, trained moderators etc.
The Internet is proving very hard to manage/contain /police - there's such a lot of good stuff but attempts to control the downsides, eg scams, fake news, illegal/immoral content, etc inevitably impact on all the good stuff.
It's a worry that smaller websites might be targeted by law enforcement in order to show that the new laws are working, while the big companies that can afford legal assistance are left largely unfettered, and potentially meantime the dark underworld parts of the ineternet just carry on as normal.
With the added kicker that the US is all-in on ‘freedom of speech’, so most sites not based out of the UK will be unaffected. Expect many of the more controversial UK sites (and their employees) to relocate themselves overseas as a result.
The US *was* all-in on freedom of speech, but now we’ve got Trump, who is suing Ann Selzer for a poll result he didn’t like, etc.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Foreign cash buying our political parties is okay if it’s the party you support 👍
I doubt the MSM hate labour any more than the Tories. It’s all about controversy and whatever will drive traffic and engagement.
Chinese cash to Labour = Good American cash to Reform = Bad
I think the one thing that 99% of us here can agree on, is that foreigners funding UK political parties is a bad idea.
Why hasn’t the U.K. got into the “buying other people’s governments”?
For a few billion, we could buy the US Presidency.
It’s the lack of thinking, in investment, that is doing this country down.
Interesting debate on Trevor Phillips on Sky this morning about how well the recent assisted dying bill was discussed, and the quality of the debate, as mps could speak as they wanted and not follow the party line
Ayesha Hazarika suggested that letting mps debate freely and honestly in the house more often would be a good way forward
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
Lockdown 1 was justified. We didn’t know what it was. Lockdowns 2 and 3 were insane, we should shielded the old and cracked on with living
Instead we have severely damaged a generation of kids - indeed maybe everyone - and racked up crippling national debt. Not good
The vaccination program justified lockdown 3 on a 'keep inside for a few more weeks' basis but it did go on too long.
The avoidable one was lockdown 2, which was caused by covid pouring back into the country with every returning holiday flight. All the effort of lockdown 1 was wasted because the government pandered to people who wanted their week in Benidorm.
The single biggest mistake of the whole pandemic in the UK, was allowing holiday flights abroad in 2020.
Apart from anything else, it shovelled a fair amount of the support cash overseas!
It was incredible how the media obsessed about Bournemouth beach but didn't care about the covid infected flights returning from Malaga and Alicante.
The mistake was repeated in the spring when the delta variant was imported from India by returning 'snowbirds' (as predicted by PB's Foxy) and Boris desperately trying to delay travel restrictions so that he could have his official trip to India.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
So the cure for the alt-right is actual Fascism?
HH eh?
The 88 I’d assumed was year of birth but the shecorns has spoken about seeing test cricket in the seventies. 🤷♂️
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Foreign cash buying our political parties is okay if it’s the party you support 👍
I doubt the MSM hate labour any more than the Tories. It’s all about controversy and whatever will drive traffic and engagement.
Chinese cash to Labour = Good American cash to Reform = Bad
I think the one thing that 99% of us here can agree on, is that foreigners funding UK political parties is a bad idea.
I agree Foreign funding is a bad idea.
If there are levels of bad though Musk is a far greater risk to our Country than China.
China would not impose communist rule
Musk will impose a form of White Supremisist Fascism
Musk is a would-be fascist. The Communist Party of China are actual fascists, like their ally Putin, with a horrendous record towards minorities.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Foreign cash buying our political parties is okay if it’s the party you support 👍
I doubt the MSM hate labour any more than the Tories. It’s all about controversy and whatever will drive traffic and engagement.
Chinese cash to Labour = Good American cash to Reform = Bad
I think the one thing that 99% of us here can agree on, is that foreigners funding UK political parties is a bad idea.
I agree Foreign funding is a bad idea.
If there are levels of bad though Musk is a far greater risk to our Country than China.
China would not impose communist rule
Musk will impose a form of White Supremisist Fascism
Err, nope. American capitalists are a significantly lesser risk than Chinese communists, although neither are particularly desirable as an influence in British politics.
The latest Chinese strategy is to lend your country money to build infrastructure that will never be able to be paid back, and your country will end up utterly beholden to Chinese values in the future.
US and UK values are much closer, and investors in both can accept that sometimes projects make a loss.
Interesting debate on Trevor Phillips on Sky this morning about how well the recent assisted dying bill was discussed, and the quality of the debate, as mps could speak as they wanted and not follow the party line
Ayesha Hazarika suggested that letting mps debate freely and honestly in the house more often would be a good way forward
It certainly has merits but doubt it is likely
Is part of the problem too much legislation, with too little time allocated to each matter?
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Anyone who follows knows the story, but it's good to see some more generally prominent coverage.
It's really a shame that some international organisations that are so noisy about certain countries' crimes appear utterly silent over Russia's.
UN and ICC are just shite, they have their pet obsessions yet never say much about the real wrong un's. Sockpuppet grifters.
There is an ongoing ICC investigation into Russia’s actions in Ukraine, so it’s wrong to say they “never say much”.
The UN is more hampered by Russia having a veto on the Security Council. The UN General Assembly has passed multiple resolutions against Russia, notably including ES-11/6 in 2023, 5 out of 6 of their resolutions in 2022, and 68/262 in 2014.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
So the cure for the alt-right is actual Fascism?
HH eh?
Column 88.
Can imagine a sectarian squabble occuring between them and Combat 18 over who was the true inheritor of the holy number 8.
BMW want to sell you a service plan for EVs which covers engine oil changes.
It's definitely not on the service plan for our iX. The tyres are comically expensive though.
I'll give them credit - they've updated the details of the package. Genuinely was talking about oil changes a few months back when I screenshotted it for a video.
EVs are a genuine threat to the likes of BMW though. They have a network of dealerships to maintain, who make mega money sitting you on a nice sofa drinking nice coffee whilst they charge you £howmuch to fettle the complicated expensive drivetrain that is the biggest value in the car.
EV? No complex drivetrain, no service needed, no dollah for the dealerships. Its a problem - and they don't even make the expensive bit of the car any more. They don't even own the IP.
Reading the Daily Mail this morning, I felt that they have rather lost their touch. The stories are really dull, although of course still tinged with their characteristic whinging. It is almost as if their heart really isn´t in it.
Its the journalistic equivalent of a badly run care home- infantile but smelling quite strongly of incontinence pants.
I can´t believe that even the very elderly are either buying the editorial line or -actually- interested in the stories.
So- perhaps a wager on how much the total readership of the Mail falls over the course of the coming year?
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
While I despise Trump with every fibre of my being, I have to agree with @Sean_F and @MaxPB that Xi is a whole lot worse. Trump is a violent and unstable criminal and a clear cut risk to our security, but hasn't the intellect or the patience to be controlling in the way Xi is or the intention of being a mass murderer. That's partly why I think Vance, De Santis and Ramaswamy are actually in many ways more dangerous than he is.
I am not so sure about Musk. I think he has all the attributes of Xi - the greed, ruthlessness, erratic embrace of conspiracy theories, utter narcissism, the hatred of minorities and above all the same control freakery - but fortunately for various reasons is never likely to get the same level of power, even though as it is he's got far too much.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
That came up 2 or 3 days back - not criticising you, not at all, just that it arose in passing and could be easily missed. Main nub of it was that 'private' option is being disabled so the mods can easily check previous posts (but our emails are still concealed); and, more generally, some of us have to behave ourselves more when making accusations about identifiable persons.
Maybe we ned a header when the mods and OGH have had a chance to consider it all.
Ah, I saw the discussion about private profiles but missed what prompted it. Thanks.
That link indicated there was an onerous amount of admin and management for those runnjng/moderating online forums. Risk assessments, trained moderators etc.
The Internet is proving very hard to manage/contain /police - there's such a lot of good stuff but attempts to control the downsides, eg scams, fake news, illegal/immoral content, etc inevitably impact on all the good stuff.
It's a worry that smaller websites might be targeted by law enforcement in order to show that the new laws are working, while the big companies that can afford legal assistance are left largely unfettered, and potentially meantime the dark underworld parts of the ineternet just carry on as normal.
With the added kicker that the US is all-in on ‘freedom of speech’, so most sites not based out of the UK will be unaffected. Expect many of the more controversial UK sites (and their employees) to relocate themselves overseas as a result.
The US *was* all-in on freedom of speech, but now we’ve got Trump, who is suing Ann Selzer for a poll result he didn’t like, etc.
Even if you don’t like him, Trump will be gone in four years’ time. There’s a two term limit, and he’s not going to amend the constitution in the next four years.
The Selzer Iowa poll was a 16-point miss, and had prominent Democrats pushing it hard in advance of publication. I suspect that, as with the ABC lawsuit, the respondents would prefer to settle than go through the discovery process.
US political polling is a mess, as has been discussed at length on this forum, and there’s a need to better regulate it than is currently the case.
Reading the Daily Mail this morning, I felt that they have rather lost their touch. The stories are really dull, although of course still tinged with their characteristic whinging. It is almost as if their heart really isn´t in it.
Its the journalistic equivalent of a badly run care home- infantile but smelling quite strongly of incontinence pants.
I can´t believe that even the very elderly are either buying the editorial line or -actually- interested in the stories.
So- perhaps a wager on how much the total readership of the Mail falls over the course of the coming year?
That came up 2 or 3 days back - not criticising you, not at all, just that it arose in passing and could be easily missed. Main nub of it was that 'private' option is being disabled so the mods can easily check previous posts (but our emails are still concealed); and, more generally, some of us have to behave ourselves more when making accusations about identifiable persons.
Maybe we ned a header when the mods and OGH have had a chance to consider it all.
Ah, I saw the discussion about private profiles but missed what prompted it. Thanks.
That link indicated there was an onerous amount of admin and management for those runnjng/moderating online forums. Risk assessments, trained moderators etc.
The Internet is proving very hard to manage/contain /police - there's such a lot of good stuff but attempts to control the downsides, eg scams, fake news, illegal/immoral content, etc inevitably impact on all the good stuff.
It's a worry that smaller websites might be targeted by law enforcement in order to show that the new laws are working, while the big companies that can afford legal assistance are left largely unfettered, and potentially meantime the dark underworld parts of the ineternet just carry on as normal.
With the added kicker that the US is all-in on ‘freedom of speech’, so most sites not based out of the UK will be unaffected. Expect many of the more controversial UK sites (and their employees) to relocate themselves overseas as a result.
The US *was* all-in on freedom of speech, but now we’ve got Trump, who is suing Ann Selzer for a poll result he didn’t like, etc.
Even if you don’t like him, Trump will be gone in four years’ time. There’s a two term limit, and he’s not going to amend the constitution in the next four years.
The Selzer Iowa poll was a 16-point miss, and had prominent Democrats pushing it hard in advance of publication. I suspect that, as with the ABC lawsuit, the respondents would prefer to settle than go through the discovery process.
US political polling is a mess, as has been discussed at length on this forum, and there’s a need to better regulate it than is currently the case.
Trump was vindicated by winning.
Truman didn’t sue pollsters who put Dewey ahead, in 1948, but then, Truman was not a manchild.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
While I despise Trump with every fibre of my being, I have to agree with @Sean_F and @MaxPB that Xi is a whole lot worse. Trump is a violent and unstable criminal and a clear cut risk to our security, but hasn't the intellect or the patience to be controlling in the way Xi is or the intention of being a mass murderer. That's partly why I think Vance, De Santis and Ramaswamy are actually in many ways more dangerous than he is.
I am not so sure about Musk. I think he has all the attributes of Xi - the greed, ruthlessness, erratic embrace of conspiracy theories, utter narcissism, the hatred of minorities and above all the same control freakery - but fortunately for various reasons is never likely to get the same level of power, even though as it is he's got far too much.
Here is our strategic challenge - Xi is a brilliant capitalist. There is a whole load of things to dislike about China. A lot of a lot of things. And yet how many things in your house have they made? And are you prepared to pay a lot more to have them made elsewhere?
"The west" - however you want to define that - is pretty dependent on China. We could wean ourselves off, but our society now demands that we buy an expensive new phone every couple of years and the only way we can possibly afford them is to have them made somewhere cheap.
The way to defeat China economically is stop buying so much stuff from them.
Just thinking about Mr Dancer's comparison to the twentieth century, what would people in 1925 have picked as the most important moment so far? Probably either one aspect of the outbreak of WW1 or the Armistice.
But in the longer term, that accolade would surely have to go to the development of powered aircraft, which began either in 1903 with the Wright brothers or with either Brazilian or German pioneers (depending on what you call a 'powered aircraft' and which account you believe). That changed the whole planet in innumerable dramatic ways, including its weather systems.
I wonder if we're also overlooking something because the pandemic, 9/11 and financial crises are all blocking our view. Answer - very probably, but we won't know what it is (and I do hope that's not triggered a certain Multiple ID poster).
The annoying thing is that he'd almost certainly be right.
It's a possibility, although it would be a dramatic break with tradition from him.
But from what I have heard, I would actually suggest the most likely left-field candidate is the vaccines developed for Covid - which appear to be promising in many other fields of medicine to the extent they may be genuinely revolutionary.
Good morning comrades and colleagues!
There are very few* 'revolutionary' events which are stand-alone. The Covid experience facilitated the development and especially the use of the likes of Zoom and Teams. Quite a lot of elderly people of my acquaintance, who would once have relied on their own physical social circles now routinely meet up with like minded people across the globe. And, going back a century, would airplanes have developed in the way they did but for WWI.
*Edited for sense, due to finger failure.
Yes, but it would have been slower.
Just as atomic energy and weapons would have been developed, but it would have taken more time.
Or indeed, in medical terms again, penicillin.
War injects massive capital resources into things that expedites what would otherwise be slow development hampered by lack of cash.
Of course, it can go the other way. The Nuffield aero engine, which offered a power-weight ratio far in excess of any other internal combustion engine, was abandoned due to the Air Ministry's obsession with secrecy which annoyed Lord Nuffield so much he cancelled the programme. Equally, that made jet engines a more attractive option than they would otherwise have been.
On the government picking winners and killing them off, we can add maglev trains, vtol aircraft and of course public key encryption which today underlies all of ecommerce.
IIRC Nuffield dropped out of aero engine production because the Air Ministry wanted insane amounts of paperwork on military contracts - and with WWII approaching, it was going to be 100% military.
It was a variation on the Cost Plus comedy - as used in the US - where everything is accounted for at insane cost.
So Nuffield sold the research and designs, and made stuff for the Army. Who didn’t require the paperwork.
That's true; but it's also worth pointing out that having an engine fail in a tank or truck is generally an embuggerance, but not necessarily the end of the world. Having an engine fail in a plane can be - especially if it fails by catching fire. Which might explain why the Air Ministry had higher standards and more paperwork.
Which is also why Merlin parts that were not deemed good enough for flight were derated and made into the first Meteor tank/vehicle engines, which were massively successful. In fact, the first Meteor engines were developed from parts recovered from crashed aircraft.
Reading the Daily Mail this morning, I felt that they have rather lost their touch. The stories are really dull, although of course still tinged with their characteristic whinging. It is almost as if their heart really isn´t in it.
Its the journalistic equivalent of a badly run care home- infantile but smelling quite strongly of incontinence pants.
I can´t believe that even the very elderly are either buying the editorial line or -actually- interested in the stories.
So- perhaps a wager on how much the total readership of the Mail falls over the course of the coming year?
I am rather surprised you would be bothered reading the mail
It's circulation in Nov 24 was 667,299 down 7.8% on the year
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
While I despise Trump with every fibre of my being, I have to agree with @Sean_F and @MaxPB that Xi is a whole lot worse. Trump is a violent and unstable criminal and a clear cut risk to our security, but hasn't the intellect or the patience to be controlling in the way Xi is or the intention of being a mass murderer. That's partly why I think Vance, De Santis and Ramaswamy are actually in many ways more dangerous than he is.
I am not so sure about Musk. I think he has all the attributes of Xi - the greed, ruthlessness, erratic embrace of conspiracy theories, utter narcissism, the hatred of minorities and above all the same control freakery - but fortunately for various reasons is never likely to get the same level of power, even though as it is he's got far too much.
Here is our strategic challenge - Xi is a brilliant capitalist. There is a whole load of things to dislike about China. A lot of a lot of things. And yet how many things in your house have they made? And are you prepared to pay a lot more to have them made elsewhere?
"The west" - however you want to define that - is pretty dependent on China. We could wean ourselves off, but our society now demands that we buy an expensive new phone every couple of years and the only way we can possibly afford them is to have them made somewhere cheap.
The way to defeat China economically is stop buying so much stuff from them.
A wise Government would work for them and with them to destroy Trump economically and in so doing destroy Musk.
Reading the Daily Mail this morning, I felt that they have rather lost their touch. The stories are really dull, although of course still tinged with their characteristic whinging. It is almost as if their heart really isn´t in it.
Its the journalistic equivalent of a badly run care home- infantile but smelling quite strongly of incontinence pants.
I can´t believe that even the very elderly are either buying the editorial line or -actually- interested in the stories.
So- perhaps a wager on how much the total readership of the Mail falls over the course of the coming year?
I am rather surprised you would be bothered reading the mail
It's circulation in Nov 24 was 667,299 down 7.8% on the year
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
Lockdown 1 was justified. We didn’t know what it was. Lockdowns 2 and 3 were insane, we should shielded the old and cracked on with living
Instead we have severely damaged a generation of kids - indeed maybe everyone - and racked up crippling national debt. Not good
The vaccination program justified lockdown 3 on a 'keep inside for a few more weeks' basis but it did go on too long.
The avoidable one was lockdown 2, which was caused by covid pouring back into the country with every returning holiday flight. All the effort of lockdown 1 was wasted because the government pandered to people who wanted their week in Benidorm.
The single biggest mistake of the whole pandemic in the UK, was allowing holiday flights abroad in 2020.
Apart from anything else, it shovelled a fair amount of the support cash overseas!
It was incredible how the media obsessed about Bournemouth beach but didn't care about the covid infected flights returning from Malaga and Alicante.
The mistake was repeated in the spring when the delta variant was imported from India by returning 'snowbirds' (as predicted by PB's Foxy) and Boris desperately trying to delay travel restrictions so that he could have his official trip to India.
Yes, no-one was getting sick from being on Bournemouth beach, but it was seen as symbolic that people shouldn’t be allowed to have a good time, even outside. The idea that you couldn’t go to Bournemouth but you could get on a plane to any one of dozens of countries didn’t help.
The big one was the Christmas lockdown, when many ‘influencers’ turned up in the sandpit for months and promoted themselves on social media as having a great time out here. That went down like a cup of cold sick back in the UK.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
While I despise Trump with every fibre of my being, I have to agree with @Sean_F and @MaxPB that Xi is a whole lot worse. Trump is a violent and unstable criminal and a clear cut risk to our security, but hasn't the intellect or the patience to be controlling in the way Xi is or the intention of being a mass murderer. That's partly why I think Vance, De Santis and Ramaswamy are actually in many ways more dangerous than he is.
I am not so sure about Musk. I think he has all the attributes of Xi - the greed, ruthlessness, erratic embrace of conspiracy theories, utter narcissism, the hatred of minorities and above all the same control freakery - but fortunately for various reasons is never likely to get the same level of power, even though as it is he's got far too much.
It is inevitable that China will replace the US as the global superpower in the next decade or two. Just compare economic size, growth rates and long term strategic intent.
A stable world is in China's interests in order to support its international trade and political expansion. So it will become the world's policeman. China is already reining in Putin. The last thing China wants is WWW3.
Fast forward twenty years and the UK may value its "special relationship" with China more than with the US.
That came up 2 or 3 days back - not criticising you, not at all, just that it arose in passing and could be easily missed. Main nub of it was that 'private' option is being disabled so the mods can easily check previous posts (but our emails are still concealed); and, more generally, some of us have to behave ourselves more when making accusations about identifiable persons.
Maybe we ned a header when the mods and OGH have had a chance to consider it all.
Ah, I saw the discussion about private profiles but missed what prompted it. Thanks.
That link indicated there was an onerous amount of admin and management for those runnjng/moderating online forums. Risk assessments, trained moderators etc.
The Internet is proving very hard to manage/contain /police - there's such a lot of good stuff but attempts to control the downsides, eg scams, fake news, illegal/immoral content, etc inevitably impact on all the good stuff.
It's a worry that smaller websites might be targeted by law enforcement in order to show that the new laws are working, while the big companies that can afford legal assistance are left largely unfettered, and potentially meantime the dark underworld parts of the ineternet just carry on as normal.
With the added kicker that the US is all-in on ‘freedom of speech’, so most sites not based out of the UK will be unaffected. Expect many of the more controversial UK sites (and their employees) to relocate themselves overseas as a result.
The US *was* all-in on freedom of speech, but now we’ve got Trump, who is suing Ann Selzer for a poll result he didn’t like, etc.
Even if you don’t like him, Trump will be gone in four years’ time. There’s a two term limit, and he’s not going to amend the constitution in the next four years.
The Selzer Iowa poll was a 16-point miss, and had prominent Democrats pushing it hard in advance of publication. I suspect that, as with the ABC lawsuit, the respondents would prefer to settle than go through the discovery process.
US political polling is a mess, as has been discussed at length on this forum, and there’s a need to better regulate it than is currently the case.
Trump was vindicated by winning.
Truman didn’t sue pollsters who put Dewey ahead, in 1948, but then, Truman was not a manchild.
Ironically it was things like the Iowa poll which made the pain of the actual result harder for Trump's enemies.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
So the cure for the alt-right is actual Fascism?
HH eh?
The 88 I’d assumed was year of birth but the shecorns has spoken about seeing test cricket in the seventies. 🤷♂️
Shecorns has also spoken of 88 representing their birth year. So I think we can only assume 1888.
That came up 2 or 3 days back - not criticising you, not at all, just that it arose in passing and could be easily missed. Main nub of it was that 'private' option is being disabled so the mods can easily check previous posts (but our emails are still concealed); and, more generally, some of us have to behave ourselves more when making accusations about identifiable persons.
Maybe we ned a header when the mods and OGH have had a chance to consider it all.
Ah, I saw the discussion about private profiles but missed what prompted it. Thanks.
That link indicated there was an onerous amount of admin and management for those runnjng/moderating online forums. Risk assessments, trained moderators etc.
The Internet is proving very hard to manage/contain /police - there's such a lot of good stuff but attempts to control the downsides, eg scams, fake news, illegal/immoral content, etc inevitably impact on all the good stuff.
It's a worry that smaller websites might be targeted by law enforcement in order to show that the new laws are working, while the big companies that can afford legal assistance are left largely unfettered, and potentially meantime the dark underworld parts of the ineternet just carry on as normal.
With the added kicker that the US is all-in on ‘freedom of speech’, so most sites not based out of the UK will be unaffected. Expect many of the more controversial UK sites (and their employees) to relocate themselves overseas as a result.
I don't agree there - if you look at the post from the owner of the closing site, the wording is broad enough to cover sites hosted abroad; it is along the lines of "linked to the UK", which would cover run from here or a userbase based here I think.
The guy closing the London Fixed Gear Single Speed site is a forum hosting hobbyist, and has 300 forums sites, all of which he is closing.
To me the wording looks broad enough to catch Twitter etc, though since they are published to the UK that would already apply for existing laws.
Bloggers all used the hosting abroad dodge back in the day after the "Boris Johnson Closedown by Fasthosts" event, but I think that is no longer enough.
Reading the Daily Mail this morning, I felt that they have rather lost their touch. The stories are really dull, although of course still tinged with their characteristic whinging. It is almost as if their heart really isn´t in it.
Its the journalistic equivalent of a badly run care home- infantile but smelling quite strongly of incontinence pants.
I can´t believe that even the very elderly are either buying the editorial line or -actually- interested in the stories.
So- perhaps a wager on how much the total readership of the Mail falls over the course of the coming year?
I'm sat opposite two boomers who have spent this entire train journey flicking through Facebook reels at full volume. A mix of Farage, e-bikes and cats as far as I can tell.
The mail can't compete with that level of inaninity.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
Lockdown 1 was justified. We didn’t know what it was. Lockdowns 2 and 3 were insane, we should shielded the old and cracked on with living
Instead we have severely damaged a generation of kids - indeed maybe everyone - and racked up crippling national debt. Not good
The vaccination program justified lockdown 3 on a 'keep inside for a few more weeks' basis but it did go on too long.
The avoidable one was lockdown 2, which was caused by covid pouring back into the country with every returning holiday flight. All the effort of lockdown 1 was wasted because the government pandered to people who wanted their week in Benidorm.
The single biggest mistake of the whole pandemic in the UK, was allowing holiday flights abroad in 2020.
Apart from anything else, it shovelled a fair amount of the support cash overseas!
It was incredible how the media obsessed about Bournemouth beach but didn't care about the covid infected flights returning from Malaga and Alicante.
The mistake was repeated in the spring when the delta variant was imported from India by returning 'snowbirds' (as predicted by PB's Foxy) and Boris desperately trying to delay travel restrictions so that he could have his official trip to India.
Yes, no-one was getting sick from being on Bournemouth beach, but it was seen as symbolic that people shouldn’t be allowed to have a good time, even outside. The idea that you couldn’t go to Bournemouth but you could get on a plane to any one of dozens of countries didn’t help.
Much helped by the then leader of Bournemouth council, who at least benefitted from her self publicity at the time by using it as a stepping stone to become an MP.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
So the cure for the alt-right is actual Fascism?
HH eh?
Hadolf Hitler? Hoseph Hoebbels? Hermann Hoering? Hudolf Hess?
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
I'd go for the GFC - I think Brexit, Trump, and the rise of right-wing populism can be tracked back to it. The idea the ordinary working man bailed out the bankers, none of whom were punished for helping cause the crisis, and has been worse off since has fuelled populism.
I don't think it's that simple, but it is typical of centrists who seek an economic explanation for everything- because that is how they see the world.
And what's wrong with that? says this unashamed centrist.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
While I despise Trump with every fibre of my being, I have to agree with @Sean_F and @MaxPB that Xi is a whole lot worse. Trump is a violent and unstable criminal and a clear cut risk to our security, but hasn't the intellect or the patience to be controlling in the way Xi is or the intention of being a mass murderer. That's partly why I think Vance, De Santis and Ramaswamy are actually in many ways more dangerous than he is.
I am not so sure about Musk. I think he has all the attributes of Xi - the greed, ruthlessness, erratic embrace of conspiracy theories, utter narcissism, the hatred of minorities and above all the same control freakery - but fortunately for various reasons is never likely to get the same level of power, even though as it is he's got far too much.
It is inevitable that China will replace the US as the global superpower in the next decade or two. Just compare economic size, growth rates and long term strategic intent.
A stable world is in China's interests in order to support its international trade and political expansion. So it will become the world's policeman. China is already reining in Putin. The last thing China wants is WWW3.
Fast forward twenty years and the UK may value its "special relationship" with China more than with the US.
Chinese growth has decelerated sharply and its population is falling. The USA’s population is rising, and is growing steadily.
China has purchased enough oil and gas from Putin to keep his war machine functioning.
China, at least under the Communist Party, will never be anything other than a brutal dictatorship, and is not our friend.
So important and so needed by all of us right now.
By defending his championship belt, Oleksandr @usykaa proves: we are Ukrainians and we will not give up what is ours! No matter how hard it gets—we will overcome everything. Whether it is in the ring, on the battlefield or in the diplomatic arena—we will fight and we will not give up what is ours!
Congratulations on your victory, Cossack! Congratulations on your victory, Ukraine! Glory to Ukraine!
58 is my birth year. 88 is the birth year of my twins I saw test cricket from the early 70s I learnt Latin at School... A very interesting little red book called The Latin Way R L Chambers. My first experience of watching Cricket was Scarborough Festival August 1972 Sunday League Yorkshire v Essex I am the biggest Anti Fascist you could imagine so it really is very funny to see myself linked to obscure groups like 18 and 88. No I don't have a spiderweb tattoo either. I fact I don't have a tattoo.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
While I despise Trump with every fibre of my being, I have to agree with @Sean_F and @MaxPB that Xi is a whole lot worse. Trump is a violent and unstable criminal and a clear cut risk to our security, but hasn't the intellect or the patience to be controlling in the way Xi is or the intention of being a mass murderer. That's partly why I think Vance, De Santis and Ramaswamy are actually in many ways more dangerous than he is.
I am not so sure about Musk. I think he has all the attributes of Xi - the greed, ruthlessness, erratic embrace of conspiracy theories, utter narcissism, the hatred of minorities and above all the same control freakery - but fortunately for various reasons is never likely to get the same level of power, even though as it is he's got far too much.
It is inevitable that China will replace the US as the global superpower in the next decade or two. Just compare economic size, growth rates and long term strategic intent.
A stable world is in China's interests in order to support its international trade and political expansion. So it will become the world's policeman. China is already reining in Putin. The last thing China wants is WWW3.
Fast forward twenty years and the UK may value its "special relationship" with China more than with the US.
The problem is what Xi's proteges will see as 'stability' and what we would see as 'stability' are two rather different things - and not in a good way from our point of view.
Interesting debate on Trevor Phillips on Sky this morning about how well the recent assisted dying bill was discussed, and the quality of the debate, as mps could speak as they wanted and not follow the party line
Ayesha Hazarika suggested that letting mps debate freely and honestly in the house more often would be a good way forward
It certainly has merits but doubt it is likely
Is part of the problem too much legislation, with too little time allocated to each matter?
I don't think so. In Parliament debate is dominated by people making lengthy speeches where they could have made their key points in 5 minutes. The result is that most MPs don't bother to attend debates and only come over for votes. A standard 5-minute limit would improve the quality no end and make debates genuinely interesting.
Reading the Daily Mail this morning, I felt that they have rather lost their touch. The stories are really dull, although of course still tinged with their characteristic whinging. It is almost as if their heart really isn´t in it.
Its the journalistic equivalent of a badly run care home- infantile but smelling quite strongly of incontinence pants.
I can´t believe that even the very elderly are either buying the editorial line or -actually- interested in the stories.
So- perhaps a wager on how much the total readership of the Mail falls over the course of the coming year?
I am rather surprised you would be bothered reading the mail
It's circulation in Nov 24 was 667,299 down 7.8% on the year
Jesus there are really 667,299 people with just 1 brain cell loose in the UK
My in-laws read it. Sister-in-law's father read it, his father had it, and when they married she converted bro-in-law to it. Mind, his father read the Express!
They regarded me, as a Herald>Guardian reader as odd!
58 is my birth year. 88 is the birth year of my twins I saw test cricket from the early 70s I learnt Latin at School... A very interesting little red book called The Latin Way R L Chambers. My first experience of watching Cricket was Scarborough Festival August 1972 Sunday League Yorkshire v Essex I am the biggest Anti Fascist you could imagine so it really is very funny to see myself linked to obscure groups like 18 and 88. No I don't have a spiderweb tattoo either. I fact I don't have a tattoo.
An anti-fascist who’s a shill for a fascist regime.
Reading the Daily Mail this morning, I felt that they have rather lost their touch. The stories are really dull, although of course still tinged with their characteristic whinging. It is almost as if their heart really isn´t in it.
Its the journalistic equivalent of a badly run care home- infantile but smelling quite strongly of incontinence pants.
I can´t believe that even the very elderly are either buying the editorial line or -actually- interested in the stories.
So- perhaps a wager on how much the total readership of the Mail falls over the course of the coming year?
I am rather surprised you would be bothered reading the mail
It's circulation in Nov 24 was 667,299 down 7.8% on the year
We can't be sure (The Sun haven't released their figures for years) but that's possibly Britain's biggest newspaper.
They have have way less reach and impact than a few years ago, and an age profile that doesn't speak to.them.having much of a future. "What the papers say" is a cheap, reliable thing for news outlets to cover, but what's the point exactly?
As for the shrillness, that's all they have left. One of the unambiguously good things about Starmer compared to Blair is that he showed that elections can be won without the full-throated endorsement of the press barons.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
58 is my birth year. 88 is the birth year of my twins I saw test cricket from the early 70s I learnt Latin at School... A very interesting little red book called The Latin Way R L Chambers. My first experience of watching Cricket was Scarborough Festival August 1972 Sunday League Yorkshire v Essex I am the biggest Anti Fascist you could imagine so it really is very funny to see myself linked to obscure groups like 18 and 88. No I don't have a spiderweb tattoo either. I fact I don't have a tattoo.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
While I despise Trump with every fibre of my being, I have to agree with @Sean_F and @MaxPB that Xi is a whole lot worse. Trump is a violent and unstable criminal and a clear cut risk to our security, but hasn't the intellect or the patience to be controlling in the way Xi is or the intention of being a mass murderer. That's partly why I think Vance, De Santis and Ramaswamy are actually in many ways more dangerous than he is.
I am not so sure about Musk. I think he has all the attributes of Xi - the greed, ruthlessness, erratic embrace of conspiracy theories, utter narcissism, the hatred of minorities and above all the same control freakery - but fortunately for various reasons is never likely to get the same level of power, even though as it is he's got far too much.
Here is our strategic challenge - Xi is a brilliant capitalist. There is a whole load of things to dislike about China. A lot of a lot of things. And yet how many things in your house have they made? And are you prepared to pay a lot more to have them made elsewhere?
"The west" - however you want to define that - is pretty dependent on China. We could wean ourselves off, but our society now demands that we buy an expensive new phone every couple of years and the only way we can possibly afford them is to have them made somewhere cheap.
The way to defeat China economically is stop buying so much stuff from them.
A wise Government would work for them and with them to destroy Trump economically and in so doing destroy Musk.
I would definitely pay more to have things made elsewhere. I usually do except when there is no real choice.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
While I despise Trump with every fibre of my being, I have to agree with @Sean_F and @MaxPB that Xi is a whole lot worse. Trump is a violent and unstable criminal and a clear cut risk to our security, but hasn't the intellect or the patience to be controlling in the way Xi is or the intention of being a mass murderer. That's partly why I think Vance, De Santis and Ramaswamy are actually in many ways more dangerous than he is.
I am not so sure about Musk. I think he has all the attributes of Xi - the greed, ruthlessness, erratic embrace of conspiracy theories, utter narcissism, the hatred of minorities and above all the same control freakery - but fortunately for various reasons is never likely to get the same level of power, even though as it is he's got far too much.
It is inevitable that China will replace the US as the global superpower in the next decade or two. Just compare economic size, growth rates and long term strategic intent.
A stable world is in China's interests in order to support its international trade and political expansion. So it will become the world's policeman. China is already reining in Putin. The last thing China wants is WWW3.
Fast forward twenty years and the UK may value its "special relationship" with China more than with the US.
Chinese growth has decelerated sharply and its population is falling. The USA’s population is rising, and is growing steadily.
China has purchased enough oil and gas from Putin to keep his war machine functioning.
China, at least under the Communist Party, will never be anything other than a brutal dictatorship, and is not our friend.
But it is though. We are its supplicants. Completely hooked on its industrial production - cars, computers, phones, 702,000 items on Amazon, most of the kids toys being gifted next Wednesday.
It isn't just our friend, its our dealer, its our Santa.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
So the cure for the alt-right is actual Fascism?
HH eh?
Hadolf Hitler? Hoseph Hoebbels? Hermann Hoering? Hudolf Hess?
I believe the cure for the BNP was Harriet Harman.
She introduced the Equality Act, which then enabled them to be taken to court for their racist constitution.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
While I despise Trump with every fibre of my being, I have to agree with @Sean_F and @MaxPB that Xi is a whole lot worse. Trump is a violent and unstable criminal and a clear cut risk to our security, but hasn't the intellect or the patience to be controlling in the way Xi is or the intention of being a mass murderer. That's partly why I think Vance, De Santis and Ramaswamy are actually in many ways more dangerous than he is.
I am not so sure about Musk. I think he has all the attributes of Xi - the greed, ruthlessness, erratic embrace of conspiracy theories, utter narcissism, the hatred of minorities and above all the same control freakery - but fortunately for various reasons is never likely to get the same level of power, even though as it is he's got far too much.
Here is our strategic challenge - Xi is a brilliant capitalist. There is a whole load of things to dislike about China. A lot of a lot of things. And yet how many things in your house have they made? And are you prepared to pay a lot more to have them made elsewhere?
"The west" - however you want to define that - is pretty dependent on China. We could wean ourselves off, but our society now demands that we buy an expensive new phone every couple of years and the only way we can possibly afford them is to have them made somewhere cheap.
The way to defeat China economically is stop buying so much stuff from them.
A wise Government would work for them and with them to destroy Trump economically and in so doing destroy Musk.
Destroying Trump economically and, by that account, the US too is not in our interests whatsoever. It would also harm the U.K. economically, considerably so.
Selling England by the pound. Once again the government opens the door for British assets to flow abroad.
Selling off the family silver* as McMillan put it. One of the less welcome legacies of Thatcher.
*To foreign asset strippers.
Because we British are too obsessed with buying property instead of productive stuff.
Buying property is not the real issue because the alternative, renting homes, is also very expensive. Whether someone rents or buys, a large part of their post-tax income is simply not available for discretionary purchases.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
So the cure for the alt-right is actual Fascism?
HH eh?
Hadolf Hitler? Hoseph Hoebbels? Hermann Hoering? Hudolf Hess?
He was often known during WWII as 'Herr Hitler'. When I started learning German in the early '50's I realised that this mean Mr Hitler.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
While I despise Trump with every fibre of my being, I have to agree with @Sean_F and @MaxPB that Xi is a whole lot worse. Trump is a violent and unstable criminal and a clear cut risk to our security, but hasn't the intellect or the patience to be controlling in the way Xi is or the intention of being a mass murderer. That's partly why I think Vance, De Santis and Ramaswamy are actually in many ways more dangerous than he is.
I am not so sure about Musk. I think he has all the attributes of Xi - the greed, ruthlessness, erratic embrace of conspiracy theories, utter narcissism, the hatred of minorities and above all the same control freakery - but fortunately for various reasons is never likely to get the same level of power, even though as it is he's got far too much.
It is inevitable that China will replace the US as the global superpower in the next decade or two. Just compare economic size, growth rates and long term strategic intent.
A stable world is in China's interests in order to support its international trade and political expansion. So it will become the world's policeman. China is already reining in Putin. The last thing China wants is WWW3.
Fast forward twenty years and the UK may value its "special relationship" with China more than with the US.
Chinese growth has decelerated sharply and its population is falling. The USA’s population is rising, and is growing steadily.
China has purchased enough oil and gas from Putin to keep his war machine functioning.
China, at least under the Communist Party, will never be anything other than a brutal dictatorship, and is not our friend.
But it is though. We are its supplicants. Completely hooked on its industrial production - cars, computers, phones, 702,000 items on Amazon, most of the kids toys being gifted next Wednesday.
It isn't just our friend, its our dealer, its our Santa.
Not only that the much vaunted onshoring or bringing back production from China will be far harder to achieve than many people expect.
Whether people,like it or not we are inextricably tied together
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
So the cure for the alt-right is actual Fascism?
HH eh?
Hadolf Hitler? Hoseph Hoebbels? Hermann Hoering? Hudolf Hess?
I believe the cure for the BNP was Harriet Harman.
She introduced the Equality Act, which then enabled them to be taken to court for their racist constitution.
The real cure for the BNP was, of course, getting Nick Griffin on Question Time.
Comments
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Instead we have severely damaged a generation of kids - indeed maybe everyone - and racked up crippling national debt. Not good
“68. We are aware of the Court judgments relating to recent judicial review proceedings4. DWP told us that the Courts have already ruled that:
there was no legal duty to communicate the changes in State Pension age, and
the Courts found as a matter of fact that the steps DWP took to communicate the changes were adequate.
69. We agree that the Courts have ruled there was no legal (that is, statutory or common law) duty to communicate the changes. However, as noted earlier, this does not mean that there was no requirement for DWP to adequately communicate the changes as a matter of good administration.”
Europe needs to play catch up. Invest bigly to get ahead of the curve as China did a decade ago, and then play to the strengths of existing brands. But no, said brands think they can keep ripping people off with daft paid extras and dafter servicing - BMW want to sell you a service plan for EVs which covers engine oil changes.
Getting Chinese marques to build here could be done - if we’re targeted with threatened tariffs and generous with the state aid. But we’d need to do that *and* invest to get head of the curve.
Does Starmer have the strategic vision? And the balls?
People should always have the choice to take it or not, especially one with such a short phase 3 trial and no phase 4 data which ended up showing a lot of issues that would have resulted in the AZ vaccine being withdrawn and both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines being withdrawn for men under 50.
But again, the merits of the case are separate from the politics. Labour said (or appeared to say) one thing in opposition and another in government. That is the point.
I doubt the MSM hate labour any more than the Tories. It’s all about controversy and whatever will drive traffic and engagement.
It was also indirectly beneficial because the supply-side reforms necessary to encourage that investment, such as lower taxes and deregulation, boosted the UK economy hugely, and contributed to its greater dynamism, at least until the governments since 1997 ruined it.
That is what the ombudsman found. Maladministration in delaying sending a batch of letters.
However it does not mean they deserve compensation for it especially when there was no legal requirement to let people now.
And it's not even on the list!
The avoidable one was lockdown 2, which was caused by covid pouring back into the country with every returning holiday flight. All the effort of lockdown 1 was wasted because the government pandered to people who wanted their week in Benidorm.
American cash to Reform = Bad
I think the one thing that 99% of us here can agree on, is that foreigners funding UK political parties is a bad idea.
It was a variation on the Cost Plus comedy - as used in the US - where everything is accounted for at insane cost.
So Nuffield sold the research and designs, and made stuff for the Army. Who didn’t require the paperwork.
Apart from anything else, it shovelled a fair amount of the support cash overseas!
For those who continued to go to their place of work and had minimal or zero time on furlough it wasn't too different - there was just fewer things to do outside of work and some had restrictions.
Whereas for those who had long periods on furlough or who worked from home the effects were greater and often longer lasting.
Far less.
In 2022/3, there were 758,855 international students in the UK. That’s about a quarter of all students. International students make up a majority of full-time taught postgrad students. China has been the largest source since 2018/9, but was overtaken by India in 2022/3. The top six were:
India
China
Nigeria
Pakistan
US
Bangladesh
Also up there are Malaysia, UAE, Saudi Arabia, France and Ireland.
But, a totalitarian, genocidal, regime like China calling the shots would be far worse than Trump or Musk.
Which was twenty years ago Thursday (!!).
If there are levels of bad though Musk is a far greater risk to our Country than China.
China would not impose communist rule
Musk will impose a form of White Supremisist Fascism
For a few billion, we could buy the US Presidency.
It’s the lack of thinking, in investment, that is doing this country down.
Ayesha Hazarika suggested that letting mps debate freely and honestly in the house more often would be a good way forward
It certainly has merits but doubt it is likely
HH eh?
The mistake was repeated in the spring when the delta variant was imported from India by returning 'snowbirds' (as predicted by PB's Foxy) and Boris desperately trying to delay travel restrictions so that he could have his official trip to India.
The latest Chinese strategy is to lend your country money to build infrastructure that will never be able to be paid back, and your country will end up utterly beholden to Chinese values in the future.
US and UK values are much closer, and investors in both can accept that sometimes projects make a loss.
The UN is more hampered by Russia having a veto on the Security Council. The UN General Assembly has passed multiple resolutions against Russia, notably including ES-11/6 in 2023, 5 out of 6 of their resolutions in 2022, and 68/262 in 2014.
EVs are a genuine threat to the likes of BMW though. They have a network of dealerships to maintain, who make mega money sitting you on a nice sofa drinking nice coffee whilst they charge you £howmuch to fettle the complicated expensive drivetrain that is the biggest value in the car.
EV? No complex drivetrain, no service needed, no dollah for the dealerships. Its a problem - and they don't even make the expensive bit of the car any more. They don't even own the IP.
Its the journalistic equivalent of a badly run care home- infantile but smelling quite strongly of incontinence pants.
I can´t believe that even the very elderly are either buying the editorial line or -actually- interested in the stories.
So- perhaps a wager on how much the total readership of the Mail falls over the course of the coming year?
I am not so sure about Musk. I think he has all the attributes of Xi - the greed, ruthlessness, erratic embrace of conspiracy theories, utter narcissism, the hatred of minorities and above all the same control freakery - but fortunately for various reasons is never likely to get the same level of power, even though as it is he's got far too much.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
The Selzer Iowa poll was a 16-point miss, and had prominent Democrats pushing it hard in advance of publication. I suspect that, as with the ABC lawsuit, the respondents would prefer to settle than go through the discovery process.
US political polling is a mess, as has been discussed at length on this forum, and there’s a need to better regulate it than is currently the case.
Problems ahead
Truman didn’t sue pollsters who put Dewey ahead, in 1948, but then, Truman was not a manchild.
"The west" - however you want to define that - is pretty dependent on China. We could wean ourselves off, but our society now demands that we buy an expensive new phone every couple of years and the only way we can possibly afford them is to have them made somewhere cheap.
The way to defeat China economically is stop buying so much stuff from them.
Which is also why Merlin parts that were not deemed good enough for flight were derated and made into the first Meteor tank/vehicle engines, which were massively successful. In fact, the first Meteor engines were developed from parts recovered from crashed aircraft.
It's circulation in Nov 24 was 667,299 down 7.8% on the year
https://pressgazette.co.uk/media-audience-and-business-data/media_metrics/most-popular-newspapers-uk-abc-monthly-circulation-figures-2/
The big one was the Christmas lockdown, when many ‘influencers’ turned up in the sandpit for months and promoted themselves on social media as having a great time out here. That went down like a cup of cold sick back in the UK.
A stable world is in China's interests in order to support its international trade and political expansion. So it will become the world's policeman. China is already reining in Putin. The last thing China wants is WWW3.
Fast forward twenty years and the UK may value its "special relationship" with China more than with the US.
The guy closing the London Fixed Gear Single Speed site is a forum hosting hobbyist, and has 300 forums sites, all of which he is closing.
To me the wording looks broad enough to catch Twitter etc, though since they are published to the UK that would already apply for existing laws.
Bloggers all used the hosting abroad dodge back in the day after the "Boris Johnson Closedown by Fasthosts" event, but I think that is no longer enough.
The mail can't compete with that level of inaninity.
Hoseph Hoebbels?
Hermann Hoering?
Hudolf Hess?
China has purchased enough oil and gas from Putin to keep his war machine functioning.
China, at least under the Communist Party, will never be anything other than a brutal dictatorship, and is not our friend.
https://x.com/zelenskyyua/status/1870616938566561906
Victory!
So important and so needed by all of us right now.
By defending his championship belt, Oleksandr @usykaa proves: we are Ukrainians and we will not give up what is ours! No matter how hard it gets—we will overcome everything. Whether it is in the ring, on the battlefield or in the diplomatic arena—we will fight and we will not give up what is ours!
Congratulations on your victory, Cossack!
Congratulations on your victory, Ukraine!
Glory to Ukraine!
🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦
88 is the birth year of my twins
I saw test cricket from the early 70s
I learnt Latin at School... A very interesting little red book called The Latin Way R L Chambers.
My first experience of watching Cricket was Scarborough Festival August 1972 Sunday League Yorkshire v Essex
I am the biggest Anti Fascist you could imagine so it really is very funny to see myself linked to obscure groups like 18 and 88.
No I don't have a spiderweb tattoo either. I fact I don't have a tattoo.
Mind, his father read the Express!
They regarded me, as a Herald>Guardian reader as odd!
They have have way less reach and impact than a few years ago, and an age profile that doesn't speak to.them.having much of a future. "What the papers say" is a cheap, reliable thing for news outlets to cover, but what's the point exactly?
As for the shrillness, that's all they have left. One of the unambiguously good things about Starmer compared to Blair is that he showed that elections can be won without the full-throated endorsement of the press barons.
How's the weather in Beijing today? Smoggy again?
It isn't just our friend, its our dealer, its our Santa.
She introduced the Equality Act, which then enabled them to be taken to court for their racist constitution.
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
It is utter lunacy.
Whether people,like it or not we are inextricably tied together
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.