Meanwhile, in "I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it" news,
Musk joins German far right's opening rally remotely, instructs Germans to stop feeling guilty and reminds them how impressed Caesar had been with German tribes' ability to fight.
And of course most of the Roman army that was in Germany wasn't even Roman and a minority Italian: IIRC it was about half citizen legionaries (ie Italians and some Gauls, transalpine as well as cisalpine, thanks to C. Julius Caesar) and half auxiliaries from other parts of the Empire, plus a wodge of irregular detachments from the rougher fringes.
They did conquer and stay in much of Germany. Colonia Agrippinensis is still called that, albeit a bit shortened.
"Asylum seekers loitering outside school is ‘cultural’ issue, say police Residents of Deanshanger in Northamptonshire have raised concerns about behaviour of migrants living in a hotel near primary school"
“Yeah OK they might abduct your kids, but it’s just a “cultural issue””
Honestly, this stuff is going to DESTROY Labour, and guarantee a Reform government
You may well be right.
But the article does include the police saying this: We have had no evidence of any crimes submitted to us, or any verified first-person reports. All reports received at present have been assessed to be third-party reports, primarily based on social media posts and not by people who live in the village.
But you may well be right because such is the power of social media-spread misinformation.
The article makes it very difficult to work out what is going on, but it appears that they're actually outside the hotel they're staying at, which is across a field from the school.
One quote is from a parent worried they're going to go on the school field, so it sound like they're actually not going particularly near.
Clearly the 'cultural' comment is nothing to do with the "loitering by a school". It's obviously referring to the fact that it's quite common in lots of countries to sit, or stand outside chatting with friends. Doing so next to where they live sounds pretty normal to me.
The headline is deliberately misleading, which is sadly pretty common with The Telegraph. Long gone are the days, when it aimed to provide serious news from an establishment/right wing perspective.
Yes, but it gives some of us something to get excited about.
I don't need it.
Now going out to work out how to repair my fence, and empty the rainwater barrel before the coming frosts.
You lost a fence as well as the other one (whoever it was)?
My top tip is a hedge, or wind permeable panels - in my area they are called "Hit and Miss", and are like palisade fencing panels with an extra one on the other side over the gaps.
Heavy and somewhat expensive, but tend to last longer on my first house which is on the top of an escarpment at the highest point in Notts.
THanks. That's very helpful as I am just about to get my tame concrete and outdoor works chap to give a quotation for some brickwork repairs and new fencing. I was actually wondering about something of that nature which is common locally, which is probably a warning sign!
It's fairly safe to look at fences in the same position - ie exposed if you are exposed.
What I so these days if I am doing a panel fence is to use things called "post repair spurs", which are things you use to repair rotten posts at the base without demolishing your fence or moving your panels.
The important thing is that wooden posts or wooden panels must never be wet, or they rot - and you get a 7-10 year fence, not a 15-25 year fence. You can use plastic posts or metal posts. or if you *must* use wooden posts, get Postsavers (as used by Railtrack).
Or I put fence repair spurs into the ground - these are 4ft long and give you 2ft in the postcrete and 2ft sticking up. They come with boltholes. Then I bolt 180cm 100x75-ish posts to these clear of the ground, and attach the fence panels to these. That is a fence which will outlast me. They also make removal of a panel easy if you ever need eg a digger.
(I have done a *lot* of fences.)
Here's an example from my garden of the technique. The frame in front is support for blackberries.
Thanks. Will talk to the concrete chap and the neighbours. There is actually a part of fence running beside my workshed (on the footprint of an old garage to avoid the need for planning application) that needs to be removable for maintenance so that could be the solution.
Here's a piccie of one done using this technique to look attractive from the road side (from the thread) with arched hit-and-miss panels which are permeable. These panels were about £55 each a few years ago, and weigh 40-50kg, so need two people (or a fencer with shoulders to handle). It is a gravel drive, so they could go close to the ground; there are also extra 1x4 planks to cover the gaps - leave slightly too much space not too little between your posts or your panels may not fit and you are in trouble, and if necessary attach so as to allow expansion with moisture etc.
(I am on Uzbekistan Time, where it is now 10 past midnight.)
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
So very quick with the quips and so laggardly when it comes to the really important stuff!
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
But they had to make the stupid promises to get elected.
Labour had a 20 point lead for months. They had plenty of room to do what Cameron and Osborne did, and gain a mandate for some tougher measures.
Instead, they pretended everything would be fine, then in office made a vague comment of tax rises leaving imaginations to run riot for moths, talked down the economy, then hiked NI.
Labour inherited a very bad economic situation. They then proceeded to make it worse.
My feelings about Labour are best summarised as better than the last lot, have some of the right ideas at least, but still not very good. What proportion of their errors are down to incompetence and what proportion are the natural consequence of dealing with a miserable and cakeist electorate is debatable.
Is the country effectively ungovernable now.
Quite possibly. The social contract has collapsed, and once that happens - when the distribution of wealth and opportunity is very unequal, when taxation of earnings is high, and when most of the money raised produces no apparent benefit for those from whom it is being taken - then we very quickly arrive at an every man and woman for themselves situation.
Taxation of earnings is not particularly high compared with most of Western Europe.
Unfortunately you get poor value for what you do pay - public services aren't up to much in many areas - and housing costs are horrendous. The existing settlement is still quite good to you if you are an outright homeowner, and especially a retired one. For younger and less well-off people it is rubbish. And the bigger the gap grows between haves and have nots, with the former obliged to rely more on their own resources in areas such as healthcare, the greater the tendency to guard wealth jealously and resent being asked to stump up to help the less fortunate.
As I have said before the biggest problem we have is a public sector that is consuming more and producing less, whether it is the NHS with its appalling queues and hopeless mental health care, education with failing schools and a forthcoming crisis in Universities, criminal justice with swamped courts, ludicrous delays and police who, well, are focused on other things, Social work and social care both failing their tasks and armed forces with more admirals than ships and as many generals as MBTs.
All of them insisting they cannot possibly provide even a basic service without lots more of our cash. The result is that private medicine is growing fast, people are scrimping to pay VAT on the money they are saving the taxpayer in education costs, the Scottish government now has prisoners serving 40% of their sentences before release, our navy comprises 2 broken down aircraft carriers we cannot protect and our army would find it impossible to sustain an army in the field the size of that sent into Iraq for more than a few weeks.
It is not a happy state of affairs.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
Looks like Scotland is significantly lower in terms of birthrate than the UK overall
You're the one who argued that the RC Church had an excessive influence in Scotland compared to England because there wasn't a Protestant Established Church in Scotland any more.
Well percentage wise 13% of Scots are Roman Catholic (Scotland hasn't had an established church since the 16th century and that was the RC church), compared to 9% in England and 6% in Wales. Wales also had an established Anglican church until the 20th century
Er. Scotland did have an established churcn [edut] in Stuart times. By Stuart definition, which I'd have thought you would accept.
And what was all that disestablishment row about in the Seven Years War of 1837-43, and later? IIRC the disestablishment came in 1920 or so.
"Asylum seekers loitering outside school is ‘cultural’ issue, say police Residents of Deanshanger in Northamptonshire have raised concerns about behaviour of migrants living in a hotel near primary school"
“Yeah OK they might abduct your kids, but it’s just a “cultural issue””
Honestly, this stuff is going to DESTROY Labour, and guarantee a Reform government
You may well be right.
But the article does include the police saying this: We have had no evidence of any crimes submitted to us, or any verified first-person reports. All reports received at present have been assessed to be third-party reports, primarily based on social media posts and not by people who live in the village.
But you may well be right because such is the power of social media-spread misinformation.
The article makes it very difficult to work out what is going on, but it appears that they're actually outside the hotel they're staying at, which is across a field from the school.
One quote is from a parent worried they're going to go on the school field, so it sound like they're actually not going particularly near.
Clearly the 'cultural' comment is nothing to do with the "loitering by a school". It's obviously referring to the fact that it's quite common in lots of countries to sit, or stand outside chatting with friends. Doing so next to where they live sounds pretty normal to me.
The headline is deliberately misleading, which is sadly pretty common with The Telegraph. Long gone are the days, when it aimed to provide serious news from an establishment/right wing perspective.
Yes, but it gives some of us something to get excited about.
I don't need it.
Now going out to work out how to repair my fence, and empty the rainwater barrel before the coming frosts.
You lost a fence as well as the other one (whoever it was)?
My top tip is a hedge, or wind permeable panels - in my area they are called "Hit and Miss", and are like palisade fencing panels with an extra one on the other side over the gaps.
Heavy and somewhat expensive, but tend to last longer on my first house which is on the top of an escarpment at the highest point in Notts.
THanks. That's very helpful as I am just about to get my tame concrete and outdoor works chap to give a quotation for some brickwork repairs and new fencing. I was actually wondering about something of that nature which is common locally, which is probably a warning sign!
It's fairly safe to look at fences in the same position - ie exposed if you are exposed.
What I so these days if I am doing a panel fence is to use things called "post repair spurs", which are things you use to repair rotten posts at the base without demolishing your fence or moving your panels.
The important thing is that wooden posts or wooden panels must never be wet, or they rot - and you get a 7-10 year fence, not a 15-25 year fence. You can use plastic posts or metal posts. or if you *must* use wooden posts, get Postsavers (as used by Railtrack).
Or I put fence repair spurs into the ground - these are 4ft long and give you 2ft in the postcrete and 2ft sticking up. They come with boltholes. Then I bolt 180cm 100x75-ish posts to these clear of the ground, and attach the fence panels to these. That is a fence which will outlast me. They also make removal of a panel easy if you ever need eg a digger.
(I have done a *lot* of fences.)
Here's an example from my garden of the technique. The frame in front is support for blackberries.
Thanks. Will talk to the concrete chap and the neighbours. There is actually a part of fence running beside my workshed (on the footprint of an old garage to avoid the need for planning application) that needs to be removable for maintenance so that could be the solution.
Here's a piccie of one done using this technique to look attractive from the road side (from the thread) with arched hit-and-miss panels which are permeable. These panels were about £55 each a few years ago, and weigh 40-50kg, so need two people (or a fencer with shoulders to handle). It is a gravel drive, so they could go close to the ground; there are also extra 1x4 planks to cover the gaps - leave too much space not too little between your posts.
(I am on Uzbekistan Time, where it is now 10 past midnight.)
Thanks. Had no idea they came as panels. Hmm. Duly saved for discussion!
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
So very quick with the quips and so laggardly when it comes to the really important stuff!
Really sir, what a silly post. That implies awesome puns are unimportant.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
But they had to make the stupid promises to get elected.
Labour had a 20 point lead for months. They had plenty of room to do what Cameron and Osborne did, and gain a mandate for some tougher measures.
Instead, they pretended everything would be fine, then in office made a vague comment of tax rises leaving imaginations to run riot for moths, talked down the economy, then hiked NI.
Labour inherited a very bad economic situation. They then proceeded to make it worse.
My feelings about Labour are best summarised as better than the last lot, have some of the right ideas at least, but still not very good. What proportion of their errors are down to incompetence and what proportion are the natural consequence of dealing with a miserable and cakeist electorate is debatable.
Is the country effectively ungovernable now.
Quite possibly. The social contract has collapsed, and once that happens - when the distribution of wealth and opportunity is very unequal, when taxation of earnings is high, and when most of the money raised produces no apparent benefit for those from whom it is being taken - then we very quickly arrive at an every man and woman for themselves situation.
Taxation of earnings is not particularly high compared with most of Western Europe.
Unfortunately you get poor value for what you do pay - public services aren't up to much in many areas - and housing costs are horrendous. The existing settlement is still quite good to you if you are an outright homeowner, and especially a retired one. For younger and less well-off people it is rubbish. And the bigger the gap grows between haves and have nots, with the former obliged to rely more on their own resources in areas such as healthcare, the greater the tendency to guard wealth jealously and resent being asked to stump up to help the less fortunate.
As I have said before the biggest problem we have is a public sector that is consuming more and producing less, whether it is the NHS with its appalling queues and hopeless mental health care, education with failing schools and a forthcoming crisis in Universities, criminal justice with swamped courts, ludicrous delays and police who, well, are focused on other things, Social work and social care both failing their tasks and armed forces with more admirals than ships and as many generals as MBTs.
All of them insisting they cannot possibly provide even a basic service without lots more of our cash. The result is that private medicine is growing fast, people are scrimping to pay VAT on the money they are saving the taxpayer in education costs, the Scottish government now has prisoners serving 40% of their sentences before release, our navy comprises 2 broken down aircraft carriers we cannot protect and our army would find it impossible to sustain an army in the field the size of that sent into Iraq for more than a few weeks.
It is not a happy state of affairs.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
Looks like Scotland is significantly lower in terms of birthrate than the UK overall
You're the one who argued that the RC Church had an excessive influence in Scotland compared to England because there wasn't a Protestant Established Church in Scotland any more.
Well percentage wise 13% of Scots are Roman Catholic (Scotland hasn't had an established church since the 16th century and that was the RC church), compared to 9% in England and 6% in Wales. Wales also had an established Anglican church until the 20th century
Er. Scotland did have an established churcn [edut] in Stuart times. By Stuart definition, which I'd have thought you would accept.
And what was all that disestablishment row about in the Seven Years War of 1837-43, and later? IIRC the disestablishment came in 1920 or so.
From the link I posted earlier:
The Church of Scotland Act 1921 does not use the term “established”. Rather Article III of the Declaratory Articles (contained in the Schedule to the Act) describe the Kirk as the “national Church representative of the Christian Faith of the Scottish people”. Nevertheless, the UK Parliament had recognised the Church of Scotland’s “spiritual independence”, what the academic Ian Bradley has called “a unique definition of church establishment”. The former Lord Advocate and Labour MP Ronald King Murray agreed that while the 1921 Act was “a very real mark of freedom”, it was “not at all a mark of disestablishment”. Colin Munro viewed it as “an interesting model for a ‘lighter’ form of establishment”.
The long and short of it is, although the Act didn't declare it established, as it didn't declare it *disestablished* it probably still legally was.
However, since that brought no special legal or political privileges that probably is a distinction without a difference.
And given the current state of the Church of Scotland, the issue's probably moot anyway.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
But they had to make the stupid promises to get elected.
Labour had a 20 point lead for months. They had plenty of room to do what Cameron and Osborne did, and gain a mandate for some tougher measures.
Instead, they pretended everything would be fine, then in office made a vague comment of tax rises leaving imaginations to run riot for moths, talked down the economy, then hiked NI.
Labour inherited a very bad economic situation. They then proceeded to make it worse.
My feelings about Labour are best summarised as better than the last lot, have some of the right ideas at least, but still not very good. What proportion of their errors are down to incompetence and what proportion are the natural consequence of dealing with a miserable and cakeist electorate is debatable.
Is the country effectively ungovernable now.
Quite possibly. The social contract has collapsed, and once that happens - when the distribution of wealth and opportunity is very unequal, when taxation of earnings is high, and when most of the money raised produces no apparent benefit for those from whom it is being taken - then we very quickly arrive at an every man and woman for themselves situation.
Taxation of earnings is not particularly high compared with most of Western Europe.
Unfortunately you get poor value for what you do pay - public services aren't up to much in many areas - and housing costs are horrendous. The existing settlement is still quite good to you if you are an outright homeowner, and especially a retired one. For younger and less well-off people it is rubbish. And the bigger the gap grows between haves and have nots, with the former obliged to rely more on their own resources in areas such as healthcare, the greater the tendency to guard wealth jealously and resent being asked to stump up to help the less fortunate.
As I have said before the biggest problem we have is a public sector that is consuming more and producing less, whether it is the NHS with its appalling queues and hopeless mental health care, education with failing schools and a forthcoming crisis in Universities, criminal justice with swamped courts, ludicrous delays and police who, well, are focused on other things, Social work and social care both failing their tasks and armed forces with more admirals than ships and as many generals as MBTs.
All of them insisting they cannot possibly provide even a basic service without lots more of our cash. The result is that private medicine is growing fast, people are scrimping to pay VAT on the money they are saving the taxpayer in education costs, the Scottish government now has prisoners serving 40% of their sentences before release, our navy comprises 2 broken down aircraft carriers we cannot protect and our army would find it impossible to sustain an army in the field the size of that sent into Iraq for more than a few weeks.
It is not a happy state of affairs.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
Looks like Scotland is significantly lower in terms of birthrate than the UK overall
As you know this is an area in which we disagree. I don't want to stop people having children if they want them but I am not in favour of the state interfering:
a) because I am not in favour of state interfering in anything if it can be avoided
b) the world has too many people and we need to find another way of dealing with the generational problem of the ratio of older people to the young. This is less of a problem than over population.
For a time it looked like Covid might be the answer to your second point.
Perhaps Sunak's National Service idea, but spent working in a care home rather than learning how to shoot straight?
The sooner the global population starts to decline the better.
"Asylum seekers loitering outside school is ‘cultural’ issue, say police Residents of Deanshanger in Northamptonshire have raised concerns about behaviour of migrants living in a hotel near primary school"
“Yeah OK they might abduct your kids, but it’s just a “cultural issue””
Honestly, this stuff is going to DESTROY Labour, and guarantee a Reform government
You may well be right.
But the article does include the police saying this: We have had no evidence of any crimes submitted to us, or any verified first-person reports. All reports received at present have been assessed to be third-party reports, primarily based on social media posts and not by people who live in the village.
But you may well be right because such is the power of social media-spread misinformation.
The article makes it very difficult to work out what is going on, but it appears that they're actually outside the hotel they're staying at, which is across a field from the school.
One quote is from a parent worried they're going to go on the school field, so it sound like they're actually not going particularly near.
Clearly the 'cultural' comment is nothing to do with the "loitering by a school". It's obviously referring to the fact that it's quite common in lots of countries to sit, or stand outside chatting with friends. Doing so next to where they live sounds pretty normal to me.
The headline is deliberately misleading, which is sadly pretty common with The Telegraph. Long gone are the days, when it aimed to provide serious news from an establishment/right wing perspective.
Yes, but it gives some of us something to get excited about.
I don't need it.
Now going out to work out how to repair my fence, and empty the rainwater barrel before the coming frosts.
You lost a fence as well as the other one (whoever it was)?
My top tip is a hedge, or wind permeable panels - in my area they are called "Hit and Miss", and are like palisade fencing panels with an extra one on the other side over the gaps.
Heavy and somewhat expensive, but tend to last longer on my first house which is on the top of an escarpment at the highest point in Notts.
THanks. That's very helpful as I am just about to get my tame concrete and outdoor works chap to give a quotation for some brickwork repairs and new fencing. I was actually wondering about something of that nature which is common locally, which is probably a warning sign!
It's fairly safe to look at fences in the same position - ie exposed if you are exposed.
What I so these days if I am doing a panel fence is to use things called "post repair spurs", which are things you use to repair rotten posts at the base without demolishing your fence or moving your panels.
The important thing is that wooden posts or wooden panels must never be wet, or they rot - and you get a 7-10 year fence, not a 15-25 year fence. You can use plastic posts or metal posts. or if you *must* use wooden posts, get Postsavers (as used by Railtrack).
Or I put fence repair spurs into the ground - these are 4ft long and give you 2ft in the postcrete and 2ft sticking up. They come with boltholes. Then I bolt 180cm 100x75-ish posts to these clear of the ground, and attach the fence panels to these. That is a fence which will outlast me. They also make removal of a panel easy if you ever need eg a digger.
(I have done a *lot* of fences.)
Here's an example from my garden of the technique. The frame in front is support for blackberries.
Thanks. Will talk to the concrete chap and the neighbours. There is actually a part of fence running beside my workshed (on the footprint of an old garage to avoid the need for planning application) that needs to be removable for maintenance so that could be the solution.
Here's a piccie of one done using this technique to look attractive from the road side (from the thread) with arched hit-and-miss panels which are permeable. These panels were about £55 each a few years ago, and weigh 40-50kg, so need two people (or a fencer with shoulders to handle). It is a gravel drive, so they could go close to the ground; there are also extra 1x4 planks to cover the gaps - leave slightly too much space not too little between your posts or your panels may not fit and you are in trouble, and if necessary attach so as to allow expansion with moisture etc.
(I am on Uzbekistan Time, where it is now 10 past midnight.)
* One advantage of using say bolts through everything not screws is that you can make the holes in the posts "pass-thru" holes which are a little freer which gives 1-2mm for movement, so fence panels are not rigidly attached except at the faces; big washers so not to damage the wood. That also makes it easy to remove / replace without damage.
There are all kind of wrinkles that you can think up, and all of them help and make it a pleasure to do. It's important to tell the fence man quality not speed, and mean it - paying on a day rate ideally and being there to watch.
What's with all this chat about fences? Doesn't everyone have dry stone walls surrounding their property?
And since it's today:
Trowth, Caesar, whyles they're fash't enough: A cotter howkin in a sheugh, Wi' dirty stanes biggin a dyke, Baring a quarry, an' sic like; Himself, a wife, he thus sustains, A smytrie o' wee duddie weans, An' nought but his han' darg to keep Them right an' tight in thack an' rape. An' when they meet wi' sair disasters, Like loss o' health or want o' masters, Ye maist wad think, a wee touch langer, An' they maun starve o' cauld and hunger: But how it comes, I never kend yet, They're maistly wonderfu' contented; An' buirdly chiels, an' clever hizzies, Are bred in sic a way as this is.
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
So very quick with the quips and so laggardly when it comes to the really important stuff!
Really sir, what a silly post. That implies awesome puns are unimportant.
The most hilarious and stupendously amusing comment I ever made passed without comment here on PB. I remember thinking how funny and amusing it was and rolling around and crying with whatever the comic's glee is called. Anyway, totally passed over.
Therefore whilst amusing I regard your cheap and scattergun approach to humour with some distain.
My advice to all wannabe criminal masterminds is don't get married.
The absolute basics about removing fingerprints, use and correct disposal of burner phones, the dangers of images on social media and social media generally for identification and trackability, and when and how not to answer questions in a police station ought to be on the civic and social responsibility curriculum in every secondary school.
I disagree. We don't want to teach people how to commit crimes more effectively. Most criminals, fortunately, are pretty stupid, and that limits their effectiveness.
If we teach criminals to commit crimes more effectively they will be less likely to be caught so overall prison time will drop and the cost of imprisioning them will be less
So they can commit murder, burglery and rape for instance more effectively and not even be caught and imprisoned for public protection?
I merely commented if they got caught less it would cost less. Do you disagree?
Hmmmm - an academic paper beckons.
“The effects of increased professionalism on productivity in U.K. crime”….
Well, if one lot of criminals learns enough in prison to stay out of prison, then the future value of prison as an academy of excellence in crime will gradually degrade, so younger criminals won't be as skilled.
Meanwhile, in "I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it" news,
Musk joins German far right's opening rally remotely, instructs Germans to stop feeling guilty and reminds them how impressed Caesar had been with German tribes' ability to fight.
Better still, please STFU and stop embarrassing yourselves.
Im beginning to think Musk is a total fraud. How does he have time to run 7 companies tweet all day, follow Trump around like a puppy dog and attend far right rallies. Not to mention his dozen kids.
The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.
But the agency issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory.
This release is at the behest of the CIA’s new director, put there by the new President, who has always favoured the lab leak idea, although the re-assessment was begun under the previous administration. A Trump appointee promoting a MAGA conspiracy theory is sadly going to be a familiar story for the next 4 years.
C.I.A. NOW FAVORS LAB LEAK THEORY TO EXPLAIN COVID’S ORIGINS: NYT
The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
So very quick with the quips and so laggardly when it comes to the really important stuff!
Really sir, what a silly post. That implies awesome puns are unimportant.
The most hilarious and stupendously amusing comment I ever made passed without comment here on PB. I remember thinking how funny and amusing it was and rolling around and crying with whatever the comic's glee is called. Anyway, totally passed over.
Therefore whilst amusing I regard your cheap and scattergun approach to humour with some distain.
Chickens don't cross roads!
Some of my most awesome comedic work on PB gets no likes. I can't understand it! I put it down to my sophistication and the PB collective's earnestness.
C.I.A. NOW FAVORS LAB LEAK THEORY TO EXPLAIN COVID’S ORIGINS: NYT
The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.
The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.
But the agency issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory.
This release is at the behest of the CIA’s new director, put there by the new President, who has always favoured the lab leak idea, although the re-assessment was begun under the previous administration. A Trump appointee promoting a MAGA conspiracy theory is sadly going to be a familiar story for the next 4 years.
Do you believe China's official data suggesting only c.5,000 of their population of 1.4 billion died with Covid?
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
So very quick with the quips and so laggardly when it comes to the really important stuff!
Really sir, what a silly post. That implies awesome puns are unimportant.
The most hilarious and stupendously amusing comment I ever made passed without comment here on PB. I remember thinking how funny and amusing it was and rolling around and crying with whatever the comic's glee is called. Anyway, totally passed over.
Therefore whilst amusing I regard your cheap and scattergun approach to humour with some distain.
Chickens don't cross roads!
Some of my most awesome comedic work on PB gets no likes. I can't understand it! I put it down to my sophistication and the PB collective's earnestness.
Strangely, my best puns generally tend to be ignored as well.
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
So very quick with the quips and so laggardly when it comes to the really important stuff!
Really sir, what a silly post. That implies awesome puns are unimportant.
The most hilarious and stupendously amusing comment I ever made passed without comment here on PB. I remember thinking how funny and amusing it was and rolling around and crying with whatever the comic's glee is called. Anyway, totally passed over.
Therefore whilst amusing I regard your cheap and scattergun approach to humour with some distain.
The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.
But the agency issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory.
This release is at the behest of the CIA’s new director, put there by the new President, who has always favoured the lab leak idea, although the re-assessment was begun under the previous administration. A Trump appointee promoting a MAGA conspiracy theory is sadly going to be a familiar story for the next 4 years.
Do you believe China's official data suggesting only c.5,000 of their population of 1.4 billion died with Covid?
You asked me that before and I answered before. I don’t believe that, but China don’t even say that either.
You think they would finish plucking it before they put it in the can.
Out in the wild, realising their time is nigh, they instinctively crawl into a discarded can to die. The better ones chose seventy-shilling ale, the lesser ones Irn Bru.
My advice to all wannabe criminal masterminds is don't get married.
The absolute basics about removing fingerprints, use and correct disposal of burner phones, the dangers of images on social media and social media generally for identification and trackability, and when and how not to answer questions in a police station ought to be on the civic and social responsibility curriculum in every secondary school.
I disagree. We don't want to teach people how to commit crimes more effectively. Most criminals, fortunately, are pretty stupid, and that limits their effectiveness.
If we teach criminals to commit crimes more effectively they will be less likely to be caught so overall prison time will drop and the cost of imprisioning them will be less
So they can commit murder, burglery and rape for instance more effectively and not even be caught and imprisoned for public protection?
I merely commented if they got caught less it would cost less. Do you disagree?
Talking about rape, try asking HYUFD if he approves of abortion for rape victims.
Edit: seriously. It's a particularly important issue.
Why are you asking me I never said a word about either my views on abortion or abortion for rape victims?
The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.
But the agency issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory.
This release is at the behest of the CIA’s new director, put there by the new President, who has always favoured the lab leak idea, although the re-assessment was begun under the previous administration. A Trump appointee promoting a MAGA conspiracy theory is sadly going to be a familiar story for the next 4 years.
Do you believe China's official data suggesting only c.5,000 of their population of 1.4 billion died with Covid?
You asked me that before and I answered before. I don’t believe that, but China don’t even say that either.
Turkmenistan has had 0 COVID-19 deaths. Lots of funny pneumonia killing people, but absolutely no COVID-19 deaths.
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
So very quick with the quips and so laggardly when it comes to the really important stuff!
Really sir, what a silly post. That implies awesome puns are unimportant.
The most hilarious and stupendously amusing comment I ever made passed without comment here on PB. I remember thinking how funny and amusing it was and rolling around and crying with whatever the comic's glee is called. Anyway, totally passed over.
Therefore whilst amusing I regard your cheap and scattergun approach to humour with some distain.
Chickens don't cross roads!
Q. Why did the lawyer cross the road?
A. I can't tell you for legal reasons!
I rate you amongst the finest posters on PB. You posted (a long while ago) some wonderful travel snippets. But here I am trying to lambast the 12th rate comedian @ydoethur for all of his many sins, and you nip in and undermine the case! What sort of randomocracy is PB running!
What's with all this chat about fences? Doesn't everyone have dry stone walls surrounding their property?
And since it's today:
Trowth, Caesar, whyles they're fash't enough: A cotter howkin in a sheugh, Wi' dirty stanes biggin a dyke, Baring a quarry, an' sic like; Himself, a wife, he thus sustains, A smytrie o' wee duddie weans, An' nought but his han' darg to keep Them right an' tight in thack an' rape. An' when they meet wi' sair disasters, Like loss o' health or want o' masters, Ye maist wad think, a wee touch langer, An' they maun starve o' cauld and hunger: But how it comes, I never kend yet, They're maistly wonderfu' contented; An' buirdly chiels, an' clever hizzies, Are bred in sic a way as this is.
A new doctor is being shown around a hospital in Glasgow.
As they enter one ward, the nearest patient turns to him and says "Fair fa' your honest sonsie face, great chieftain o' the pudden race!"
Before the doctor can react, the patient in the next bed adds "Wee sleekit cowerin' timorous beastie! O what a panic's in thy breastie!"
And not to be outdone, the third patient responds "Some ha' meat and cannae eat, and some wad eat that want it!"
The doctor murmurs to the orderly "So this is the mental health ward?"
You think they would finish plucking it before they put it in the can.
Out in the wild, realising their time is nigh, they instinctively crawl into a discarded can to die. The better ones chose seventy-shilling ale, the lesser ones Irn Bru.
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
So very quick with the quips and so laggardly when it comes to the really important stuff!
Really sir, what a silly post. That implies awesome puns are unimportant.
The most hilarious and stupendously amusing comment I ever made passed without comment here on PB. I remember thinking how funny and amusing it was and rolling around and crying with whatever the comic's glee is called. Anyway, totally passed over.
Therefore whilst amusing I regard your cheap and scattergun approach to humour with some distain.
Chickens don't cross roads!
Q. Why did the lawyer cross the road?
A. I can't tell you for legal reasons!
I rate you amongst the finest posters on PB. You posted (a long while ago) some wonderful travel snippets. But here I am trying to lambast the 12th rate comedian @ydoethur for all of his many sins, and you nip in and undermine the case! What sort of randomocracy is PB running!
Careful.
You don't want to have a load of twelfth rate comedians pissed off with you.
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
So very quick with the quips and so laggardly when it comes to the really important stuff!
Really sir, what a silly post. That implies awesome puns are unimportant.
The most hilarious and stupendously amusing comment I ever made passed without comment here on PB. I remember thinking how funny and amusing it was and rolling around and crying with whatever the comic's glee is called. Anyway, totally passed over.
Therefore whilst amusing I regard your cheap and scattergun approach to humour with some distain.
Chickens don't cross roads!
Q. Why did the lawyer cross the road?
A. I can't tell you for legal reasons!
I rate you amongst the finest posters on PB. You posted (a long while ago) some wonderful travel snippets. But here I am trying to lambast the 12th rate comedian @ydoethur for all of his many sins, and you nip in and undermine the case! What sort of randomocracy is PB running!
The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.
But the agency issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory.
This release is at the behest of the CIA’s new director, put there by the new President, who has always favoured the lab leak idea, although the re-assessment was begun under the previous administration. A Trump appointee promoting a MAGA conspiracy theory is sadly going to be a familiar story for the next 4 years.
Given that the present administration has been in place for five days, we can conclude that the re-assessment was completed - or very nearly so - under it, and really all the present administration has done is to publish it.
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
So very quick with the quips and so laggardly when it comes to the really important stuff!
Really sir, what a silly post. That implies awesome puns are unimportant.
The most hilarious and stupendously amusing comment I ever made passed without comment here on PB. I remember thinking how funny and amusing it was and rolling around and crying with whatever the comic's glee is called. Anyway, totally passed over.
Therefore whilst amusing I regard your cheap and scattergun approach to humour with some distain.
Chickens don't cross roads!
Q. Why did the lawyer cross the road?
A. I can't tell you for legal reasons!
I rate you amongst the finest posters on PB. You posted (a long while ago) some wonderful travel snippets. But here I am trying to lambast the 12th rate comedian @ydoethur for all of his many sins, and you nip in and undermine the case! What sort of randomocracy is PB running!
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
So very quick with the quips and so laggardly when it comes to the really important stuff!
Really sir, what a silly post. That implies awesome puns are unimportant.
The most hilarious and stupendously amusing comment I ever made passed without comment here on PB. I remember thinking how funny and amusing it was and rolling around and crying with whatever the comic's glee is called. Anyway, totally passed over.
Therefore whilst amusing I regard your cheap and scattergun approach to humour with some distain.
Chickens don't cross roads!
Q. Why did the lawyer cross the road?
A. I can't tell you for legal reasons!
I rate you amongst the finest posters on PB. You posted (a long while ago) some wonderful travel snippets. But here I am trying to lambast the 12th rate comedian @ydoethur for all of his many sins, and you nip in and undermine the case! What sort of randomocracy is PB running!
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
But they had to make the stupid promises to get elected.
Labour had a 20 point lead for months. They had plenty of room to do what Cameron and Osborne did, and gain a mandate for some tougher measures.
Instead, they pretended everything would be fine, then in office made a vague comment of tax rises leaving imaginations to run riot for moths, talked down the economy, then hiked NI.
Labour inherited a very bad economic situation. They then proceeded to make it worse.
My feelings about Labour are best summarised as better than the last lot, have some of the right ideas at least, but still not very good. What proportion of their errors are down to incompetence and what proportion are the natural consequence of dealing with a miserable and cakeist electorate is debatable.
Is the country effectively ungovernable now.
Quite possibly. The social contract has collapsed, and once that happens - when the distribution of wealth and opportunity is very unequal, when taxation of earnings is high, and when most of the money raised produces no apparent benefit for those from whom it is being taken - then we very quickly arrive at an every man and woman for themselves situation.
Taxation of earnings is not particularly high compared with most of Western Europe.
Unfortunately you get poor value for what you do pay - public services aren't up to much in many areas - and housing costs are horrendous. The existing settlement is still quite good to you if you are an outright homeowner, and especially a retired one. For younger and less well-off people it is rubbish. And the bigger the gap grows between haves and have nots, with the former obliged to rely more on their own resources in areas such as healthcare, the greater the tendency to guard wealth jealously and resent being asked to stump up to help the less fortunate.
As I have said before the biggest problem we have is a public sector that is consuming more and producing less, whether it is the NHS with its appalling queues and hopeless mental health care, education with failing schools and a forthcoming crisis in Universities, criminal justice with swamped courts, ludicrous delays and police who, well, are focused on other things, Social work and social care both failing their tasks and armed forces with more admirals than ships and as many generals as MBTs.
All of them insisting they cannot possibly provide even a basic service without lots more of our cash. The result is that private medicine is growing fast, people are scrimping to pay VAT on the money they are saving the taxpayer in education costs, the Scottish government now has prisoners serving 40% of their sentences before release, our navy comprises 2 broken down aircraft carriers we cannot protect and our army would find it impossible to sustain an army in the field the size of that sent into Iraq for more than a few weeks.
It is not a happy state of affairs.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
So very quick with the quips and so laggardly when it comes to the really important stuff!
Really sir, what a silly post. That implies awesome puns are unimportant.
The most hilarious and stupendously amusing comment I ever made passed without comment here on PB. I remember thinking how funny and amusing it was and rolling around and crying with whatever the comic's glee is called. Anyway, totally passed over.
Therefore whilst amusing I regard your cheap and scattergun approach to humour with some distain.
Chickens don't cross roads!
Q. Why did the lawyer cross the road?
A. I can't tell you for legal reasons!
I rate you amongst the finest posters on PB. You posted (a long while ago) some wonderful travel snippets. But here I am trying to lambast the 12th rate comedian @ydoethur for all of his many sins, and you nip in and undermine the case! What sort of randomocracy is PB running!
My advice to all wannabe criminal masterminds is don't get married.
The absolute basics about removing fingerprints, use and correct disposal of burner phones, the dangers of images on social media and social media generally for identification and trackability, and when and how not to answer questions in a police station ought to be on the civic and social responsibility curriculum in every secondary school.
I disagree. We don't want to teach people how to commit crimes more effectively. Most criminals, fortunately, are pretty stupid, and that limits their effectiveness.
If we teach criminals to commit crimes more effectively they will be less likely to be caught so overall prison time will drop and the cost of imprisioning them will be less
So they can commit murder, burglery and rape for instance more effectively and not even be caught and imprisoned for public protection?
I merely commented if they got caught less it would cost less. Do you disagree?
Talking about rape, try asking HYUFD if he approves of abortion for rape victims.
Edit: seriously. It's a particularly important issue.
Why are you asking me I never said a word about either my views on abortion or abortion for rape victims?
You didn't, not specifically, but the topic is about the wider public advantages of crime. Such as rape for improving the birth ratio. I'm wondering how far the logic goes. Not that I agree with it. Buit who espouses it?
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
So very quick with the quips and so laggardly when it comes to the really important stuff!
Really sir, what a silly post. That implies awesome puns are unimportant.
The most hilarious and stupendously amusing comment I ever made passed without comment here on PB. I remember thinking how funny and amusing it was and rolling around and crying with whatever the comic's glee is called. Anyway, totally passed over.
Therefore whilst amusing I regard your cheap and scattergun approach to humour with some distain.
Chickens don't cross roads!
Q. Why did the lawyer cross the road?
A. I can't tell you for legal reasons!
I rate you amongst the finest posters on PB. You posted (a long while ago) some wonderful travel snippets. But here I am trying to lambast the 12th rate comedian @ydoethur for all of his many sins, and you nip in and undermine the case! What sort of randomocracy is PB running!
My half-hearted attempt to acknowledge Burns Night was to order some haggis slices and crispy rolls via the supermarket.
Which they substituted with black pudding slices and brioche buns.
I feel Burns would have been aghast and yet intrigued.
Is there that owre his French ragout, Or olio that wad staw a sow, Or fricassee wad mak her spew Wi perfect scunner, Looks down wi sneering, scornfu view On sic a dinner?
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
My current career is looking after part of the British food chain. So I am not as daft as others on here have been to fall for this trying to kid us with “open season on wild Haggis stops once Burn’s night finish”. You will find the Haggis consumed, especially the ones that end up tinned, are properly farmed, not wild ones.
The wild one in the photograph probably full of worms and crawling with lice.
Of course, apologies if that’s just put you off your dinner.
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
So very quick with the quips and so laggardly when it comes to the really important stuff!
Really sir, what a silly post. That implies awesome puns are unimportant.
The most hilarious and stupendously amusing comment I ever made passed without comment here on PB. I remember thinking how funny and amusing it was and rolling around and crying with whatever the comic's glee is called. Anyway, totally passed over.
Therefore whilst amusing I regard your cheap and scattergun approach to humour with some distain.
Chickens don't cross roads!
Q. Why did the lawyer cross the road?
A. I can't tell you for legal reasons!
I rate you amongst the finest posters on PB. You posted (a long while ago) some wonderful travel snippets. But here I am trying to lambast the 12th rate comedian @ydoethur for all of his many sins, and you nip in and undermine the case! What sort of randomocracy is PB running!
You think they would finish plucking it before they put it in the can.
Out in the wild, realising their time is nigh, they instinctively crawl into a discarded can to die. The better ones chose seventy-shilling ale, the lesser ones Irn Bru.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
My current career is looking after part of the British food chain. So I am not as daft as others on here have been to fall for this trying to kid us with “open season on wild Haggis stops once Burn’s night finish”. You will find the Haggis consumed, especially the ones that end up tinned, are properly farmed, not wild ones.
The wild one in the photograph probably full of worms and crawling with lice.
Of course, apologies if that’s just put you off your dinner.
I had a decently tasty vegan haggis in a bun from the burger van at Kilt Rock, Isle of Skye, in 2019.
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
So very quick with the quips and so laggardly when it comes to the really important stuff!
Really sir, what a silly post. That implies awesome puns are unimportant.
The most hilarious and stupendously amusing comment I ever made passed without comment here on PB. I remember thinking how funny and amusing it was and rolling around and crying with whatever the comic's glee is called. Anyway, totally passed over.
Therefore whilst amusing I regard your cheap and scattergun approach to humour with some distain.
Chickens don't cross roads!
Q. Why did the lawyer cross the road?
A. I can't tell you for legal reasons!
I rate you amongst the finest posters on PB. You posted (a long while ago) some wonderful travel snippets. But here I am trying to lambast the 12th rate comedian @ydoethur for all of his many sins, and you nip in and undermine the case! What sort of randomocracy is PB running!
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
My current career is looking after part of the British food chain. So I am not as daft as others on here have been to fall for this trying to kid us with “open season on wild Haggis stops once Burn’s night finish”. You will find the Haggis consumed, especially the ones that end up tinned, are properly farmed, not wild ones.
The wild one in the photograph probably full of worms and crawling with lice.
Of course, apologies if that’s just put you off your dinner.
I had a decently tasty vegan haggis in a bun from the burger van at Kilt Rock, Isle of Skye, in 2019.
Can it be really vegan, a beefburger cant be vegan it doesn't contain beef....its in the definition likewise a haggis is emcompassed in a sheeps stomach to be a haggis...the only way to make a vegan haggis therefore is to stuff the sheeps stomach with minced vegans
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
My current career is looking after part of the British food chain. So I am not as daft as others on here have been to fall for this trying to kid us with “open season on wild Haggis stops once Burn’s night finish”. You will find the Haggis consumed, especially the ones that end up tinned, are properly farmed, not wild ones.
The wild one in the photograph probably full of worms and crawling with lice.
Of course, apologies if that’s just put you off your dinner.
I had a decently tasty vegan haggis in a bun from the burger van at Kilt Rock, Isle of Skye, in 2019.
The important part of a good haggis is the spicing. It’s one of the few foods where the vegetarian version can be as tasty to a carnivore as the meat based version.
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
So very quick with the quips and so laggardly when it comes to the really important stuff!
Really sir, what a silly post. That implies awesome puns are unimportant.
The most hilarious and stupendously amusing comment I ever made passed without comment here on PB. I remember thinking how funny and amusing it was and rolling around and crying with whatever the comic's glee is called. Anyway, totally passed over.
Therefore whilst amusing I regard your cheap and scattergun approach to humour with some distain.
Chickens don't cross roads!
Q. Why did the lawyer cross the road?
A. I can't tell you for legal reasons!
I rate you amongst the finest posters on PB. You posted (a long while ago) some wonderful travel snippets. But here I am trying to lambast the 12th rate comedian @ydoethur for all of his many sins, and you nip in and undermine the case! What sort of randomocracy is PB running!
Hmmm... I did the whole East Kilbride branch back in 2018, but thanks for the heads-up.
You will have to wait a while. The whole branch is closing for four months for upgrading.
I did it already in 2018, both directions. On the other hand, I only did Troon to Kilmarnock eastbound only. Similarly, only done Middlesbrough to Whitby eastbound only.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
My current career is looking after part of the British food chain. So I am not as daft as others on here have been to fall for this trying to kid us with “open season on wild Haggis stops once Burn’s night finish”. You will find the Haggis consumed, especially the ones that end up tinned, are properly farmed, not wild ones.
The wild one in the photograph probably full of worms and crawling with lice.
Of course, apologies if that’s just put you off your dinner.
I had a decently tasty vegan haggis in a bun from the burger van at Kilt Rock, Isle of Skye, in 2019.
Can it be really vegan, a beefburger cant be vegan it doesn't contain beef....its in the definition likewise a haggis is emcompassed in a sheeps stomach to be a haggis...the only way to make a vegan haggis therefore is to stuff the sheeps stomach with minced vegans
Haggis is whatever my butcher decides it is. No questions asked.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
My current career is looking after part of the British food chain. So I am not as daft as others on here have been to fall for this trying to kid us with “open season on wild Haggis stops once Burn’s night finish”. You will find the Haggis consumed, especially the ones that end up tinned, are properly farmed, not wild ones.
The wild one in the photograph probably full of worms and crawling with lice.
Of course, apologies if that’s just put you off your dinner.
I had a decently tasty vegan haggis in a bun from the burger van at Kilt Rock, Isle of Skye, in 2019.
Can it be really vegan, a beefburger cant be vegan it doesn't contain beef....its in the definition likewise a haggis is emcompassed in a sheeps stomach to be a haggis...the only way to make a vegan haggis therefore is to stuff the sheeps stomach with minced vegans
“Plant based” would be ok - it’s plant based but has a sheep’s stomach lining.
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
Just a reminder everyone...
I happened to spot this entry but please can you put the word 'competition' in any further entry posts - I am searching through the threads for 'competition' to find entries. Thx
Badenoch can't survive these kinds of numbers surely?
Local by-election data imply the Tories are at least level with if not ahead of Labour.
I’m a veteran of too many past moments where the Liberal / Lib Dem polling implied we should go back to our constituencies and prepare for government. Reform supporters should take note. The duopoly doesn’t die easily.
Badenoch can't survive these kinds of numbers surely?
Who else would do any better? The Tories can't out-Farage, Farage.
The only real alternative for the Tories would be Boris but bringing him back is the same issue they had in Rishi's last year... He's not an MP and getting him back into Parliament involves a by election and that's fraught with danger for the Tories.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
My current career is looking after part of the British food chain. So I am not as daft as others on here have been to fall for this trying to kid us with “open season on wild Haggis stops once Burn’s night finish”. You will find the Haggis consumed, especially the ones that end up tinned, are properly farmed, not wild ones.
The wild one in the photograph probably full of worms and crawling with lice.
Of course, apologies if that’s just put you off your dinner.
I had a decently tasty vegan haggis in a bun from the burger van at Kilt Rock, Isle of Skye, in 2019.
Can it be really vegan, a beefburger cant be vegan it doesn't contain beef....its in the definition likewise a haggis is emcompassed in a sheeps stomach to be a haggis...the only way to make a vegan haggis therefore is to stuff the sheeps stomach with minced vegans
Haggis is whatever my butcher decides it is. No questions asked.
well if you have somehow found the worlds only vegan butcher
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
My current career is looking after part of the British food chain. So I am not as daft as others on here have been to fall for this trying to kid us with “open season on wild Haggis stops once Burn’s night finish”. You will find the Haggis consumed, especially the ones that end up tinned, are properly farmed, not wild ones.
The wild one in the photograph probably full of worms and crawling with lice.
Of course, apologies if that’s just put you off your dinner.
I had a decently tasty vegan haggis in a bun from the burger van at Kilt Rock, Isle of Skye, in 2019.
Can it be really vegan, a beefburger cant be vegan it doesn't contain beef....its in the definition likewise a haggis is emcompassed in a sheeps stomach to be a haggis...the only way to make a vegan haggis therefore is to stuff the sheeps stomach with minced vegans
Haggis is whatever my butcher decides it is. No questions asked.
well if you have somehow found the worlds only vegan butcher
"While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things, The fate of Empires and the fall of Kings; While quacks of State must each produce his plan, And even children lisp the Rights of Man; Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention, The Rights of Woman merit some attention."
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
My current career is looking after part of the British food chain. So I am not as daft as others on here have been to fall for this trying to kid us with “open season on wild Haggis stops once Burn’s night finish”. You will find the Haggis consumed, especially the ones that end up tinned, are properly farmed, not wild ones.
The wild one in the photograph probably full of worms and crawling with lice.
Of course, apologies if that’s just put you off your dinner.
I had a decently tasty vegan haggis in a bun from the burger van at Kilt Rock, Isle of Skye, in 2019.
Can it be really vegan, a beefburger cant be vegan it doesn't contain beef....its in the definition likewise a haggis is emcompassed in a sheeps stomach to be a haggis...the only way to make a vegan haggis therefore is to stuff the sheeps stomach with minced vegans
Haggis is whatever my butcher decides it is. No questions asked.
well if you have somehow found the worlds only vegan butcher
Badenoch can't survive these kinds of numbers surely?
Who else would do any better? The Tories can't out-Farage, Farage.
The only real alternative for the Tories would be Boris but bringing him back is the same issue they had in Rishi's last year... He's not an MP and getting him back into Parliament involves a by election and that's fraught with danger for the Tories.
So Kemi survives, IMO.
Good evening
There is no other alternative than Kemi and from the ratings it is clear she remains an unknown and has not cut through yet
What is more concerning for labour, is they do not seem to be benefiting from Trump's arrival as POTUS
Anyone who thinks they can predict the future of politics is either wish casting or entirely out of touch
Badenoch can't survive these kinds of numbers surely?
Who else would do any better? The Tories can't out-Farage, Farage.
The only real alternative for the Tories would be Boris but bringing him back is the same issue they had in Rishi's last year... He's not an MP and getting him back into Parliament involves a by election and that's fraught with danger for the Tories.
So Kemi survives, IMO.
Good evening
There is no other alternative than Kemi and from the ratings it is clear she remains an unknown and has not cut through yet
What is more concerning for labour, is they do not seem to be benefiting from Trump's arrival as POTUS
Anyone who thinks they can predict the future of politics is either wish casting or entirely out of touch
There are plenty of alternatives to Kemi.....voting for any non tory party for a start
Badenoch can't survive these kinds of numbers surely?
Who else would do any better? The Tories can't out-Farage, Farage.
The only real alternative for the Tories would be Boris but bringing him back is the same issue they had in Rishi's last year... He's not an MP and getting him back into Parliament involves a by election and that's fraught with danger for the Tories.
So Kemi survives, IMO.
Good evening
There is no other alternative than Kemi and from the ratings it is clear she remains an unknown and has not cut through yet
What is more concerning for labour, is they do not seem to be benefiting from Trump's arrival as POTUS
Anyone who thinks they can predict the future of politics is either wish casting or entirely out of touch
If Labour were expecting to benefit from Trump's arrival as POTUS then I suggest they were being a bit silly.
Badenoch can't survive these kinds of numbers surely?
Who else would do any better? The Tories can't out-Farage, Farage.
The only real alternative for the Tories would be Boris but bringing him back is the same issue they had in Rishi's last year... He's not an MP and getting him back into Parliament involves a by election and that's fraught with danger for the Tories.
So Kemi survives, IMO.
Good evening
There is no other alternative than Kemi and from the ratings it is clear she remains an unknown and has not cut through yet
What is more concerning for labour, is they do not seem to be benefiting from Trump's arrival as POTUS
Anyone who thinks they can predict the future of politics is either wish casting or entirely out of touch
The mainstream news coverage of Trump’s first days as leader has been so uniformly positive that I’m not surprised. It’s essentially the beeb, ITV, Sky and all and sundry shouting hurrah for the blackshirts.
We are all sufficiently experienced in the politics of populism to know that his aura won’t fade until and unless he fails economically. The rest will just be forgiven or ignored, as it has been in China since Deng Xiaoping.
Badenoch can't survive these kinds of numbers surely?
Who else would do any better? The Tories can't out-Farage, Farage.
The only real alternative for the Tories would be Boris but bringing him back is the same issue they had in Rishi's last year... He's not an MP and getting him back into Parliament involves a by election and that's fraught with danger for the Tories.
So Kemi survives, IMO.
Good evening
There is no other alternative than Kemi and from the ratings it is clear she remains an unknown and has not cut through yet
What is more concerning for labour, is they do not seem to be benefiting from Trump's arrival as POTUS
Anyone who thinks they can predict the future of politics is either wish casting or entirely out of touch
There are plenty of alternatives to Kemi.....voting for any non tory party for a start
I’ve been agonising about whether and when to switch temporarily into cash. It’s been a good run the last few months. Would be nice to cash out at the top.
I’ve been agonising about whether and when to switch temporarily into cash. It’s been a good run the last few months. Would be nice to cash out at the top.
Badenoch can't survive these kinds of numbers surely?
Who else would do any better? The Tories can't out-Farage, Farage.
The only real alternative for the Tories would be Boris but bringing him back is the same issue they had in Rishi's last year... He's not an MP and getting him back into Parliament involves a by election and that's fraught with danger for the Tories.
So Kemi survives, IMO.
Good evening
There is no other alternative than Kemi and from the ratings it is clear she remains an unknown and has not cut through yet
What is more concerning for labour, is they do not seem to be benefiting from Trump's arrival as POTUS
Anyone who thinks they can predict the future of politics is either wish casting or entirely out of touch
The mainstream news coverage of Trump’s first days as leader has been so uniformly positive that I’m not surprised. It’s essentially the beeb, ITV, Sky and all and sundry shouting hurrah for the blackshirts.
We are all sufficiently experienced in the politics of populism to know that his aura won’t fade until and unless he fails economically. The rest will just be forgiven or ignored, as it has been in China since Deng Xiaoping.
Badenoch can't survive these kinds of numbers surely?
Who else would do any better? The Tories can't out-Farage, Farage.
The only real alternative for the Tories would be Boris but bringing him back is the same issue they had in Rishi's last year... He's not an MP and getting him back into Parliament involves a by election and that's fraught with danger for the Tories.
So Kemi survives, IMO.
Good evening
There is no other alternative than Kemi and from the ratings it is clear she remains an unknown and has not cut through yet
What is more concerning for labour, is they do not seem to be benefiting from Trump's arrival as POTUS
Anyone who thinks they can predict the future of politics is either wish casting or entirely out of touch
If Labour were expecting to benefit from Trump's arrival as POTUS then I suggest they were being a bit silly.
There's only one certain beneficiary from Trump's arrival as POTUS.
"While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things, The fate of Empires and the fall of Kings; While quacks of State must each produce his plan, And even children lisp the Rights of Man; Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention, The Rights of Woman merit some attention."
Brilliant. I have never seen that one before. And it remains so pertinent.
Badenoch can't survive these kinds of numbers surely?
Who else would do any better? The Tories can't out-Farage, Farage.
The only real alternative for the Tories would be Boris but bringing him back is the same issue they had in Rishi's last year... He's not an MP and getting him back into Parliament involves a by election and that's fraught with danger for the Tories.
So Kemi survives, IMO.
Boris should go for the London Mayor's job. That's the only chance the Tories have of winning the thing. He's a bigger figure* than anyone Reform can muster, and stands a decent chance of mopping up some of their vote to add to the Tory's vote and a general disgruntlement with Khan and hope that's enough. Londoners will have fairly positive memories of his time in office.
Badenoch can't survive these kinds of numbers surely?
Who else would do any better? The Tories can't out-Farage, Farage.
The only real alternative for the Tories would be Boris but bringing him back is the same issue they had in Rishi's last year... He's not an MP and getting him back into Parliament involves a by election and that's fraught with danger for the Tories.
So Kemi survives, IMO.
Good evening
There is no other alternative than Kemi and from the ratings it is clear she remains an unknown and has not cut through yet
What is more concerning for labour, is they do not seem to be benefiting from Trump's arrival as POTUS
Anyone who thinks they can predict the future of politics is either wish casting or entirely out of touch
The mainstream news coverage of Trump’s first days as leader has been so uniformly positive that I’m not surprised. It’s essentially the beeb, ITV, Sky and all and sundry shouting hurrah for the blackshirts.
We are all sufficiently experienced in the politics of populism to know that his aura won’t fade until and unless he fails economically. The rest will just be forgiven or ignored, as it has been in China since Deng Xiaoping.
I’ve been agonising about whether and when to switch temporarily into cash. It’s been a good run the last few months. Would be nice to cash out at the top.
My former partner (in a law firm) had some very sound advice. Always leave a little bit for the next guy. Several markets in both the US and here are looking distinctly toppy at the moment. It won't take much in the way of unexpected bad news for there to be a significant reset.
Badenoch can't survive these kinds of numbers surely?
Who else would do any better? The Tories can't out-Farage, Farage.
The only real alternative for the Tories would be Boris but bringing him back is the same issue they had in Rishi's last year... He's not an MP and getting him back into Parliament involves a by election and that's fraught with danger for the Tories.
So Kemi survives, IMO.
Good evening
There is no other alternative than Kemi and from the ratings it is clear she remains an unknown and has not cut through yet
What is more concerning for labour, is they do not seem to be benefiting from Trump's arrival as POTUS
Anyone who thinks they can predict the future of politics is either wish casting or entirely out of touch
There are plenty of alternatives to Kemi.....voting for any non tory party for a start
Well - you know what I mean !!!!!
Shrugs the alternative many will take though....the tory party is in its dodo days
Badenoch can't survive these kinds of numbers surely?
Who else would do any better? The Tories can't out-Farage, Farage.
The only real alternative for the Tories would be Boris but bringing him back is the same issue they had in Rishi's last year... He's not an MP and getting him back into Parliament involves a by election and that's fraught with danger for the Tories.
So Kemi survives, IMO.
Boris should go for the London Mayor's job. That's the only chance the Tories have of winning the thing. He's a bigger figure* than anyone Reform can muster, and stands a decent chance of mopping up some of their vote to add to the Tory's vote and a general disgruntlement with Khan and hope that's enough. Londoners will have fairly positive memories of his time in office.
*it's all muscle
In the context of a collapse in Labour's national vote share, London should be very winnable for the Tories with a decent candidate but it can't be Boris. Ideally they'd want someone like Jeremy Hunt who could help them reestablish their credentials as the sensible pro-business party.
Badenoch can't survive these kinds of numbers surely?
Who else would do any better? The Tories can't out-Farage, Farage.
The only real alternative for the Tories would be Boris but bringing him back is the same issue they had in Rishi's last year... He's not an MP and getting him back into Parliament involves a by election and that's fraught with danger for the Tories.
So Kemi survives, IMO.
Boris should go for the London Mayor's job. That's the only chance the Tories have of winning the thing. He's a bigger figure* than anyone Reform can muster, and stands a decent chance of mopping up some of their vote to add to the Tory's vote and a general disgruntlement with Khan and hope that's enough. Londoners will have fairly positive memories of his time in office.
*it's all muscle
Now is about the right time for a Boris revival. I hate to say it, but that word cloud in a previous thread says as much.
I walked around a fascinating temporary exhibition at the Bethlem hospital museum of the mind this afternoon, by Charlotte Johnson Wahl who’d produced a series of paintings while a psychiatric patient. It was only right at the end, looking at a portrait of “Stanley” and a picture of “the family” that I realised she was Boris’ mother.
Meanwhile, in "I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it" news,
Musk joins German far right's opening rally remotely, instructs Germans to stop feeling guilty and reminds them how impressed Caesar had been with German tribes' ability to fight.
Meanwhile, in "I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it" news,
Musk joins German far right's opening rally remotely, instructs Germans to stop feeling guilty and reminds them how impressed Caesar had been with German tribes' ability to fight.
Badenoch can't survive these kinds of numbers surely?
Who else would do any better? The Tories can't out-Farage, Farage.
The only real alternative for the Tories would be Boris but bringing him back is the same issue they had in Rishi's last year... He's not an MP and getting him back into Parliament involves a by election and that's fraught with danger for the Tories.
So Kemi survives, IMO.
Boris should go for the London Mayor's job. That's the only chance the Tories have of winning the thing. He's a bigger figure* than anyone Reform can muster, and stands a decent chance of mopping up some of their vote to add to the Tory's vote and a general disgruntlement with Khan and hope that's enough. Londoners will have fairly positive memories of his time in office.
*it's all muscle
In the context of a collapse in Labour's national vote share, London should be very winnable for the Tories with a decent candidate but it can't be Boris. Ideally they'd want someone like Jeremy Hunt who could help them reestablish their credentials as the sensible pro-business party.
As an outsider to London I feel like you need a bit of indefinable oomph to get the mayoralty, willingness to go against national party and definite maverick tendencies. I'm not sure he has that.
Comments
They did conquer and stay in much of Germany. Colonia Agrippinensis is still called that, albeit a bit shortened.
(I am on Uzbekistan Time, where it is now 10 past midnight.)
And what was all that disestablishment row about in the Seven Years War of 1837-43, and later? IIRC the disestablishment came in 1920 or so.
Nigel Farage MP
@Nigel_Farage
Wes Streeting is so scared of Reform that he has now resorted to lying about our plans for the NHS.
Let me be clear, the NHS will always be free at the point of delivery under a Reform government.
The Church of Scotland Act 1921 does not use the term “established”. Rather Article III of the Declaratory Articles (contained in the Schedule to the Act) describe the Kirk as the “national Church representative of the Christian Faith of the Scottish people”.
Nevertheless, the UK Parliament had recognised the Church of Scotland’s “spiritual independence”, what the academic Ian Bradley has called “a unique definition of church establishment”. The former Lord Advocate and Labour MP Ronald King Murray agreed that while the 1921 Act was “a very real mark of freedom”, it was “not at all a mark of disestablishment”. Colin Munro viewed it as “an interesting model for a ‘lighter’ form of establishment”.
The long and short of it is, although the Act didn't declare it established, as it didn't declare it *disestablished* it probably still legally was.
However, since that brought no special legal or political privileges that probably is a distinction without a difference.
And given the current state of the Church of Scotland, the issue's probably moot anyway.
The barriers to a ReFuck government remain formidable.
There are all kind of wrinkles that you can think up, and all of them help and make it a pleasure to do. It's important to tell the fence man quality not speed, and mean it - paying on a day rate ideally and being there to watch.
Trowth, Caesar, whyles they're fash't enough:
A cotter howkin in a sheugh,
Wi' dirty stanes biggin a dyke,
Baring a quarry, an' sic like;
Himself, a wife, he thus sustains,
A smytrie o' wee duddie weans,
An' nought but his han' darg to keep
Them right an' tight in thack an' rape.
An' when they meet wi' sair disasters,
Like loss o' health or want o' masters,
Ye maist wad think, a wee touch langer,
An' they maun starve o' cauld and hunger:
But how it comes, I never kend yet,
They're maistly wonderfu' contented;
An' buirdly chiels, an' clever hizzies,
Are bred in sic a way as this is.
As it happens I lost 4m of a 5'5" stone wall this week; but that's my problem.
Therefore whilst amusing I regard your cheap and scattergun approach to humour with some distain.
Chickens don't cross roads!
Or something.
I'm on my 3rd Broadside.
This release is at the behest of the CIA’s new director, put there by the new President, who has always favoured the lab leak idea, although the re-assessment was begun under the previous administration. A Trump appointee promoting a MAGA conspiracy theory is sadly going to be a familiar story for the next 4 years.
C.I.A. NOW FAVORS LAB LEAK THEORY TO EXPLAIN COVID’S ORIGINS: NYT
The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.
But the agency issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory.
https://nytimes.com/2025/01/25/us/politics/cia-covid-lab-leak.html
https://x.com/DeItaone/status/1883229342093721605
I mean, it's not as though anything has changed recently, like a conspiracy theorist with dementia and an obsession with Covid taking over.
A. I can't tell you for legal reasons!
As they enter one ward, the nearest patient turns to him and says "Fair fa' your honest sonsie face, great chieftain o' the pudden race!"
Before the doctor can react, the patient in the next bed adds "Wee sleekit cowerin' timorous beastie! O what a panic's in thy breastie!"
And not to be outdone, the third patient responds "Some ha' meat and cannae eat, and some wad eat that want it!"
The doctor murmurs to the orderly "So this is the mental health ward?"
"Och no!" replies the orderly.
"...it's the Burns Unit!"
You don't want to have a load of twelfth rate comedians pissed off with you.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5097589#Comment_5097589
1.Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll: LAB – 33%, Con – 29%, LD 15%, Reform 31%
2.Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll: LAB – 20%, Con – 17%, LD 10%, Reform 18%
3.Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025: 5
4.Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025: 0
5.Westminster by-elections held in 2025: 1
6.Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025: 3
7.Number of seats won by the AfD in the 2025 German Federal Election: 135
8.UK CPI figure for November 2025: 2.6%
9.UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025: £135bn
10. UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025: 1.4%
11.US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025: 2.7%
12.EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025: 1.2%
13.USD/Ruble exchange rate on 31/12/2025: 135USD/RUB
14.2025-2026 Ashes series: Australia 3-0 England
BREAKING: House Republicans introduce bill to rename Dulles International Airport to Donald J. Trump International Airport.
https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1883247737224987028
'Dull arse' is not a bad description, anyway.
Which they substituted with black pudding slices and brioche buns.
I feel Burns would have been aghast and yet intrigued.
On my Bouquet List (hopefully) for later this year:
Milton Keynes to Bicester Village via Bletchley (East-West Rail)
Wednesbury to Dudley (West Midlands Metro)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn01qk2jdr7o
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad mak her spew
Wi perfect scunner,
Looks down wi sneering, scornfu view
On sic a dinner?
The wild one in the photograph probably full of worms and crawling with lice.
Of course, apologies if that’s just put you off your dinner.
https://oakden.co.uk/product/scottish-irish-girdle-griddle/
My grandmother/mother had two. One for the kippers.
I happened to spot this entry but please can you put the word 'competition' in any further entry posts - I am searching through the threads for 'competition' to find entries. Thx
(facepalm)
Half an entire country has joined a cult.
John Rentoul
@JohnRentoul
·
4m
Latest @OpiniumResearch poll, 22-24 Jan
Lab 28% -1
Reform 27% +3
Con 21% -2
Lib Dem 11% +1
Green 8% -1
(Change since 8-10 Jan)
I’m a veteran of too many past moments where the Liberal / Lib Dem polling implied we should go back to our constituencies and prepare for government. Reform supporters should take note. The duopoly doesn’t die easily.
The only real alternative for the Tories would be Boris but bringing him back is the same issue they had in Rishi's last year... He's not an MP and getting him back into Parliament involves a by election and that's fraught with danger for the Tories.
So Kemi survives, IMO.
The fate of Empires and the fall of Kings;
While quacks of State must each produce his plan,
And even children lisp the Rights of Man;
Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,
The Rights of Woman merit some attention."
There is no other alternative than Kemi and from the ratings it is clear she remains an unknown and has not cut through yet
What is more concerning for labour, is they do not seem to be benefiting from Trump's arrival as POTUS
Anyone who thinks they can predict the future of politics is either wish casting or entirely out of touch
Wall Street Apes
@WallStreetApes
·
16h
The extent to which the American worker has been replaced by cheap illegal migrant labor is SHOCKING
This job site employee is reporting only 8 out of 43 workers showed up for work due to immigration checkpoints and raids
Kagens Looking Glass ™
@KagensNews
My wife called me when she was at Costco and was telling me how empty it was. Friday evening and got in and out.
She asked the cashier what’s up and said “immigration” ? The cashier say yes and it was like this yesterday too.
The Trump effect.
https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/1883023919948710078
We are all sufficiently experienced in the politics of populism to know that his aura won’t fade until and unless he fails economically. The rest will just be forgiven or ignored, as it has been in China since Deng Xiaoping.
A
S
H
Trump’s Greatest Resistance Could Come From Wall Street
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/opinion/trump-bond-market-stocks.html
"What happens if the irresistible force of President Trump meets the immovable object of Wall Street? Wall Street will win."
*it's all muscle
I walked around a fascinating temporary exhibition at the Bethlem hospital museum of the mind this afternoon, by Charlotte Johnson Wahl who’d produced a series of paintings while a psychiatric patient. It was only right at the end, looking at a portrait of “Stanley” and a picture of “the family” that I realised she was Boris’ mother.