The rule in any organisation is to undertake one's dirty washing in private. Burnham seems, with his interview with the Labour house journal, the Daily Telegraph to have forgotten this.
Let's not ignore the fact that Starmer has been a poor PM. Continuity Sunak was not what we voted for, but the personal hatred for the man in the press and on here has been obvious from the moment that he was elected LOTO. Granted that was at peak Johnson but who remembers the daily diet of comedy slurs on here, some of which have proven to be appropriate?
I wonder why there is such a visceral hatred of the man since his election as LOTO. Undermining the God that is Jeremy Corbyn or being the Shadow Minister for the second referendum. It's the latter isn't it? A true Brexit traitor.
Burnham's being a bit of a shit. Longing to harm, but fearing to strike.
Which is not how you organise a coup at all. A well-executed coup should be largely bloodless, at the point of flagrante delicto, as all the pieces have already been played.
Burnham undermining Starmer via the Daily Telegraph demonstrates that he is wholly unsuited to become PM. I'd like to see Starmer replaced by a real f*****' animal who doesn't give a shiny one, but Labour seem bereft of attack dogs, but are manned by an abundance of quislings.
They're eating the swans. They're eating the geese. They're eating the pets, of the people that live there.
When I lived in Oxfordshire, I used to walk along the Thames. I came across a spot used by Eastern European anglers. A swan had been plucked there. Just saying.
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
The rule in any organisation is to undertake one's dirty washing in private. Burnham seems, with his interview with the Labour house journal, the Daily Telegraph to have forgotten this.
Let's not ignore the fact that Starmer has been a poor PM. Continuity Sunak was not what we voted for, but the personal hatred for the man in the press and on here has been obvious from the moment that he was elected LOTO. Granted that was at peak Johnson but who remembers the daily diet of comedy slurs on here, some of which have proven to be appropriate?
I wonder why there is such a visceral hatred of the man since his election as LOTO. Undermining the God that is Jeremy Corbyn or being the Shadow Minister for the second referendum. It's the latter isn't it? A true Brexit traitor.
No it is simply that the billionaire class want to destroy our establishment as it will give them more power. And our establishment, including Starmer, Sunak et al are too dumb to respond.
Do we have any good data on how much tactical voting there has been at previous general elections?
Today's by-elections could be interesting; three Green defences and an SNP.
Greens aren't defending their highland seat, but im not going to even try and guess who wins the two (ok, i will - indy and SNP?) Manchester should be a Green hold Ashford probably goes Reform or possibly Conservative but i wouldnt rule out Green hold (least likely of the three options though for me)
Pb scooped the BBC (and the government?) by a week or so.
The speed with which the government has acted on this is lamentable. We are probably within 10 days of production restarting and we are still talking about possible support. Many of the suppliers will have been without work for weeks already and for some it is probably too late.
I think the government needs to give much more serious consideration to cyber attacks, both in prevention and amelioration when they occur. We have seen a few major UK companies very badly damaged by this already. It is unlikely to stop. The economic effects are sufficiently large to engage the national interest.
They are just getting around to working that out, too.
The idea for JLR is to pay the suppliers to stockpile parts. That's not a thing which would be practical for more than a few weeks at most, and risks leaving them with a glut of stock which they'll then struggle to sell.
I think the reality is that there's no great way to mitigate a very lengthy disruption to a large company's business, other than to prevent it.
I wonder how much cyber protection and cyber insurance JLR had.
Insurance does nothing to help for the knock on effects. And the money could arguably be better spent on prevention.
If we are to start regularly paying out hundreds of millions to maintain UK firms (and perhaps we should) then lets add a levy to the biggest companies profits to cover those costs.
I agree. I am not suggesting HMG do this for free. But if GCHQ have identified how to deal with certain classes of malware, for example, or how to quickly identify weaknesses in cyber security then it would be unfortunate if they are keeping this to themselves. I would suggest that firms should be invited to pay for a simulated attack from GCHQ on a regular basis to ensure that their systems are up to scratch. As I said earlier this is a problem that is not going to go away.
I think it's worth remembering that the weak link in cyber security is almost always people.
This is why a recovery plan is almost as important as trying to prevent an attack. Some attacks are always going to work, so you need to be able to recover from one.
While we're talking about large British companies here, the really big risk to Britain would be a cyber attack on, say, railway infrastructure, HMRC, or DWP. Is anyone confident about Network Rail's ability to rapidly recover from a cyber attack?
The pattern in the most recent attacks is that the attackers don’t just go after data. Everyone has a copies of their database saved to a server in a Cold War nuclear bunker.
So what the attackers do is go after the infrastructure - the applications the data. There’s always tons of custom setup, little scripts that dev ops have written etc.
So trash that and it’s build again from scratch.
This is why the British Library is still partially down.
Which is why “configuration as data” is a thing. As is imaging your servers - a photocopy of everything. Rather than just the data. But the restores are not simple, even then.
Nigel and the swan-eating thing is curious. It seems less of a planned controversy and more of an outburst when he was asked to defend, yet again, the ramblings of Donald Trump. A sore spot was obviously touched and this is turning into a bit of a problem for Nigel. He needs to cut Trump loose and stop acting as his butler. It seems Trump has some weird hold over Nigel that I cannot fathom.
It sounds to me as if it could be an old family tape that he just pulled out again as it seemed relevant, and he thought the line could stir it up. The mention of TPUK and their fake videos is interesting.
Challenged on who was taking the swans and carp from the parks, he said: “People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so.”
Pressed on whether it was eastern Europeans, Mr Farage said: “So I believe.” ... Earlier this year, the campaign group Turning Point UK shared a video claiming to show an RSPCA worker supposedly catching migrants cooking an unknown bird.
Another video shared by the pressure group was debunked after it emerged the swan in the clip was in fact being rescued by a volunteer with the Swan Sanctuary.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims that the Queen’s swans were being stolen and eaten by asylum seekers.
Pb scooped the BBC (and the government?) by a week or so.
The speed with which the government has acted on this is lamentable. We are probably within 10 days of production restarting and we are still talking about possible support. Many of the suppliers will have been without work for weeks already and for some it is probably too late.
I think the government needs to give much more serious consideration to cyber attacks, both in prevention and amelioration when they occur. We have seen a few major UK companies very badly damaged by this already. It is unlikely to stop. The economic effects are sufficiently large to engage the national interest.
They are just getting around to working that out, too.
The idea for JLR is to pay the suppliers to stockpile parts. That's not a thing which would be practical for more than a few weeks at most, and risks leaving them with a glut of stock which they'll then struggle to sell.
I think the reality is that there's no great way to mitigate a very lengthy disruption to a large company's business, other than to prevent it.
I wonder how much cyber protection and cyber insurance JLR had.
Insurance does nothing to help for the knock on effects. And the money could arguably be better spent on prevention.
If we are to start regularly paying out hundreds of millions to maintain UK firms (and perhaps we should) then lets add a levy to the biggest companies profits to cover those costs.
I agree. I am not suggesting HMG do this for free. But if GCHQ have identified how to deal with certain classes of malware, for example, or how to quickly identify weaknesses in cyber security then it would be unfortunate if they are keeping this to themselves. I would suggest that firms should be invited to pay for a simulated attack from GCHQ on a regular basis to ensure that their systems are up to scratch. As I said earlier this is a problem that is not going to go away.
I think it's worth remembering that the weak link in cyber security is almost always people.
This is why a recovery plan is almost as important as trying to prevent an attack. Some attacks are always going to work, so you need to be able to recover from one.
While we're talking about large British companies here, the really big risk to Britain would be a cyber attack on, say, railway infrastructure, HMRC, or DWP. Is anyone confident about Network Rail's ability to rapidly recover from a cyber attack?
The pattern in the most recent attacks is that the attackers don’t just go after data. Everyone has a copies of their database saved to a server in a Cold War nuclear bunker.
So what the attackers do is go after the infrastructure - the applications the data. There’s always tons of custom setup, little scripts that dev ops have written etc.
So trash that and it’s build again from scratch.
This is why the British Library is still partially down.
Which is why “configuration as data” is a thing. As is imaging your servers - a photocopy of everything. Rather than just the data. But the restores are not simple, even then.
For a large business/institution, how much more of a cost is it to setup such a full restore backup in advance, as a rough proportion of an existing IT budget ? (I am something of an ignoramus in these matters, unlike quite a large number of PBers.)
And I get that it's not "simple', but it must be at least an order of magnitude easier than rebuilding from scratch, like the British Library ?
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
Pb scooped the BBC (and the government?) by a week or so.
The speed with which the government has acted on this is lamentable. We are probably within 10 days of production restarting and we are still talking about possible support. Many of the suppliers will have been without work for weeks already and for some it is probably too late.
I think the government needs to give much more serious consideration to cyber attacks, both in prevention and amelioration when they occur. We have seen a few major UK companies very badly damaged by this already. It is unlikely to stop. The economic effects are sufficiently large to engage the national interest.
They are just getting around to working that out, too.
The idea for JLR is to pay the suppliers to stockpile parts. That's not a thing which would be practical for more than a few weeks at most, and risks leaving them with a glut of stock which they'll then struggle to sell.
I think the reality is that there's no great way to mitigate a very lengthy disruption to a large company's business, other than to prevent it.
I wonder how much cyber protection and cyber insurance JLR had.
Insurance does nothing to help for the knock on effects. And the money could arguably be better spent on prevention.
If we are to start regularly paying out hundreds of millions to maintain UK firms (and perhaps we should) then lets add a levy to the biggest companies profits to cover those costs.
I agree. I am not suggesting HMG do this for free. But if GCHQ have identified how to deal with certain classes of malware, for example, or how to quickly identify weaknesses in cyber security then it would be unfortunate if they are keeping this to themselves. I would suggest that firms should be invited to pay for a simulated attack from GCHQ on a regular basis to ensure that their systems are up to scratch. As I said earlier this is a problem that is not going to go away.
I think it's worth remembering that the weak link in cyber security is almost always people.
This is why a recovery plan is almost as important as trying to prevent an attack. Some attacks are always going to work, so you need to be able to recover from one.
While we're talking about large British companies here, the really big risk to Britain would be a cyber attack on, say, railway infrastructure, HMRC, or DWP. Is anyone confident about Network Rail's ability to rapidly recover from a cyber attack?
The pattern in the most recent attacks is that the attackers don’t just go after data. Everyone has a copies of their database saved to a server in a Cold War nuclear bunker.
So what the attackers do is go after the infrastructure - the applications the data. There’s always tons of custom setup, little scripts that dev ops have written etc.
So trash that and it’s build again from scratch.
This is why the British Library is still partially down.
Which is why “configuration as data” is a thing. As is imaging your servers - a photocopy of everything. Rather than just the data. But the restores are not simple, even then.
Perhaps a lesson in “less is more” and “keep it simple stupid”.
Nigel and the swan-eating thing is curious. It seems less of a planned controversy and more of an outburst when he was asked to defend, yet again, the ramblings of Donald Trump. A sore spot was obviously touched and this is turning into a bit of a problem for Nigel. He needs to cut Trump loose and stop acting as his butler. It seems Trump has some weird hold over Nigel that I cannot fathom.
It sounds to me as if it could be an old family tape that he just pulled out again as it seemed relevant, and he thought the line could stir it up. The mention of TPUK and their fake videos is interesting.
Challenged on who was taking the swans and carp from the parks, he said: “People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so.”
Pressed on whether it was eastern Europeans, Mr Farage said: “So I believe.” ... Earlier this year, the campaign group Turning Point UK shared a video claiming to show an RSPCA worker supposedly catching migrants cooking an unknown bird.
Another video shared by the pressure group was debunked after it emerged the swan in the clip was in fact being rescued by a volunteer with the Swan Sanctuary.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims that the Queen’s swans were being stolen and eaten by asylum seekers.
If the greatest problem facing the UK is the occasional swan being eaten, we are a fortunate country indeed. This does not seem like remotely serious politics.
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
Nigel and the swan-eating thing is curious. It seems less of a planned controversy and more of an outburst when he was asked to defend, yet again, the ramblings of Donald Trump. A sore spot was obviously touched and this is turning into a bit of a problem for Nigel. He needs to cut Trump loose and stop acting as his butler. It seems Trump has some weird hold over Nigel that I cannot fathom.
It sounds to me as if it could be an old family tape that he just pulled out again as it seemed relevant, and he thought the line could stir it up. The mention of TPUK and their fake videos is interesting.
Challenged on who was taking the swans and carp from the parks, he said: “People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so.”
Pressed on whether it was eastern Europeans, Mr Farage said: “So I believe.” ... Earlier this year, the campaign group Turning Point UK shared a video claiming to show an RSPCA worker supposedly catching migrants cooking an unknown bird.
Another video shared by the pressure group was debunked after it emerged the swan in the clip was in fact being rescued by a volunteer with the Swan Sanctuary.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims that the Queen’s swans were being stolen and eaten by asylum seekers.
We had two swans nesting on the river which flows through this small town for several years. Then some evil whatsit shot one of them ...... catapult and ball-bearing it's thought. No suggestion, though, that the culprit was an immigrant; members of another minority and marginalised community were suggested but it's never been proved. The birds body was left where it fell, possibly because a couple of locals turned up. The other swan decided it didn't like the area any more and flew off. J
Just hoping another pair take a liking to our river again soon.
Pb scooped the BBC (and the government?) by a week or so.
The speed with which the government has acted on this is lamentable. We are probably within 10 days of production restarting and we are still talking about possible support. Many of the suppliers will have been without work for weeks already and for some it is probably too late.
I think the government needs to give much more serious consideration to cyber attacks, both in prevention and amelioration when they occur. We have seen a few major UK companies very badly damaged by this already. It is unlikely to stop. The economic effects are sufficiently large to engage the national interest.
They are just getting around to working that out, too.
The idea for JLR is to pay the suppliers to stockpile parts. That's not a thing which would be practical for more than a few weeks at most, and risks leaving them with a glut of stock which they'll then struggle to sell.
I think the reality is that there's no great way to mitigate a very lengthy disruption to a large company's business, other than to prevent it.
I wonder how much cyber protection and cyber insurance JLR had.
Insurance does nothing to help for the knock on effects. And the money could arguably be better spent on prevention.
If we are to start regularly paying out hundreds of millions to maintain UK firms (and perhaps we should) then lets add a levy to the biggest companies profits to cover those costs.
I agree. I am not suggesting HMG do this for free. But if GCHQ have identified how to deal with certain classes of malware, for example, or how to quickly identify weaknesses in cyber security then it would be unfortunate if they are keeping this to themselves. I would suggest that firms should be invited to pay for a simulated attack from GCHQ on a regular basis to ensure that their systems are up to scratch. As I said earlier this is a problem that is not going to go away.
I think it's worth remembering that the weak link in cyber security is almost always people.
This is why a recovery plan is almost as important as trying to prevent an attack. Some attacks are always going to work, so you need to be able to recover from one.
While we're talking about large British companies here, the really big risk to Britain would be a cyber attack on, say, railway infrastructure, HMRC, or DWP. Is anyone confident about Network Rail's ability to rapidly recover from a cyber attack?
The pattern in the most recent attacks is that the attackers don’t just go after data. Everyone has a copies of their database saved to a server in a Cold War nuclear bunker.
So what the attackers do is go after the infrastructure - the applications the data. There’s always tons of custom setup, little scripts that dev ops have written etc.
So trash that and it’s build again from scratch.
This is why the British Library is still partially down.
Which is why “configuration as data” is a thing. As is imaging your servers - a photocopy of everything. Rather than just the data. But the restores are not simple, even then.
For a large business/institution, how much more of a cost is it to setup such a full restore backup in advance, as a rough proportion of an existing IT budget ? (I am something of an ignoramus in these matters, unlike quite a large number of PBers.)
And I get that it's not "simple', but it must be at least an order of magnitude easier than rebuilding from scratch, like the British Library ?
Well, any organisation of any decent size should be running a copy of its production systems as a "Pre-Production" test environment, so that any changes made to the live system are fully tested in a separate system with the exact same settings. But presumably such systems are also taken down by a major cyber attack.
Nigel and the swan-eating thing is curious. It seems less of a planned controversy and more of an outburst when he was asked to defend, yet again, the ramblings of Donald Trump. A sore spot was obviously touched and this is turning into a bit of a problem for Nigel. He needs to cut Trump loose and stop acting as his butler. It seems Trump has some weird hold over Nigel that I cannot fathom.
It sounds to me as if it could be an old family tape that he just pulled out again as it seemed relevant, and he thought the line could stir it up. The mention of TPUK and their fake videos is interesting.
Challenged on who was taking the swans and carp from the parks, he said: “People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so.”
Pressed on whether it was eastern Europeans, Mr Farage said: “So I believe.” ... Earlier this year, the campaign group Turning Point UK shared a video claiming to show an RSPCA worker supposedly catching migrants cooking an unknown bird.
Another video shared by the pressure group was debunked after it emerged the swan in the clip was in fact being rescued by a volunteer with the Swan Sanctuary.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims that the Queen’s swans were being stolen and eaten by asylum seekers.
If the greatest problem facing the UK is the occasional swan being eaten, we are a fortunate country indeed. This does not seem like remotely serious politics.
But it does the job required; it helps spread hate.
Nigel and the swan-eating thing is curious. It seems less of a planned controversy and more of an outburst when he was asked to defend, yet again, the ramblings of Donald Trump. A sore spot was obviously touched and this is turning into a bit of a problem for Nigel. He needs to cut Trump loose and stop acting as his butler. It seems Trump has some weird hold over Nigel that I cannot fathom.
It sounds to me as if it could be an old family tape that he just pulled out again as it seemed relevant, and he thought the line could stir it up. The mention of TPUK and their fake videos is interesting.
Challenged on who was taking the swans and carp from the parks, he said: “People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so.”
Pressed on whether it was eastern Europeans, Mr Farage said: “So I believe.” ... Earlier this year, the campaign group Turning Point UK shared a video claiming to show an RSPCA worker supposedly catching migrants cooking an unknown bird.
Another video shared by the pressure group was debunked after it emerged the swan in the clip was in fact being rescued by a volunteer with the Swan Sanctuary.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims that the Queen’s swans were being stolen and eaten by asylum seekers.
Nigel and the swan-eating thing is curious. It seems less of a planned controversy and more of an outburst when he was asked to defend, yet again, the ramblings of Donald Trump. A sore spot was obviously touched and this is turning into a bit of a problem for Nigel. He needs to cut Trump loose and stop acting as his butler. It seems Trump has some weird hold over Nigel that I cannot fathom.
It sounds to me as if it could be an old family tape that he just pulled out again as it seemed relevant, and he thought the line could stir it up. The mention of TPUK and their fake videos is interesting.
Challenged on who was taking the swans and carp from the parks, he said: “People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so.”
Pressed on whether it was eastern Europeans, Mr Farage said: “So I believe.” ... Earlier this year, the campaign group Turning Point UK shared a video claiming to show an RSPCA worker supposedly catching migrants cooking an unknown bird.
Another video shared by the pressure group was debunked after it emerged the swan in the clip was in fact being rescued by a volunteer with the Swan Sanctuary.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims that the Queen’s swans were being stolen and eaten by asylum seekers.
If the greatest problem facing the UK is the occasional swan being eaten, we are a fortunate country indeed. This does not seem like remotely serious politics.
There are some great comments on the Telegraph story, which could have been written by Dave Gorman:
Why does the FT always choose the most bizarre picture of Farage. It is so childish.
“PETA has received no credible reports that anyone in Britain is eating swans.” So it has received reports, then?
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
Election landslides are not usually a good thing for the winning party, especially on a low share of the vote. Starmer's probably wishing he'd won a majority of 50 to 75.
Pb scooped the BBC (and the government?) by a week or so.
The speed with which the government has acted on this is lamentable. We are probably within 10 days of production restarting and we are still talking about possible support. Many of the suppliers will have been without work for weeks already and for some it is probably too late.
I think the government needs to give much more serious consideration to cyber attacks, both in prevention and amelioration when they occur. We have seen a few major UK companies very badly damaged by this already. It is unlikely to stop. The economic effects are sufficiently large to engage the national interest.
They are just getting around to working that out, too.
The idea for JLR is to pay the suppliers to stockpile parts. That's not a thing which would be practical for more than a few weeks at most, and risks leaving them with a glut of stock which they'll then struggle to sell.
I think the reality is that there's no great way to mitigate a very lengthy disruption to a large company's business, other than to prevent it.
I wonder how much cyber protection and cyber insurance JLR had.
Insurance does nothing to help for the knock on effects. And the money could arguably be better spent on prevention.
If we are to start regularly paying out hundreds of millions to maintain UK firms (and perhaps we should) then lets add a levy to the biggest companies profits to cover those costs.
I agree. I am not suggesting HMG do this for free. But if GCHQ have identified how to deal with certain classes of malware, for example, or how to quickly identify weaknesses in cyber security then it would be unfortunate if they are keeping this to themselves. I would suggest that firms should be invited to pay for a simulated attack from GCHQ on a regular basis to ensure that their systems are up to scratch. As I said earlier this is a problem that is not going to go away.
I think it's worth remembering that the weak link in cyber security is almost always people.
This is why a recovery plan is almost as important as trying to prevent an attack. Some attacks are always going to work, so you need to be able to recover from one.
While we're talking about large British companies here, the really big risk to Britain would be a cyber attack on, say, railway infrastructure, HMRC, or DWP. Is anyone confident about Network Rail's ability to rapidly recover from a cyber attack?
What. you mean something worse than leaves in the Autumn or ice in the winter or other wholly unforeseeable events?
Nigel and the swan-eating thing is curious. It seems less of a planned controversy and more of an outburst when he was asked to defend, yet again, the ramblings of Donald Trump. A sore spot was obviously touched and this is turning into a bit of a problem for Nigel. He needs to cut Trump loose and stop acting as his butler. It seems Trump has some weird hold over Nigel that I cannot fathom.
It sounds to me as if it could be an old family tape that he just pulled out again as it seemed relevant, and he thought the line could stir it up. The mention of TPUK and their fake videos is interesting.
Challenged on who was taking the swans and carp from the parks, he said: “People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so.”
Pressed on whether it was eastern Europeans, Mr Farage said: “So I believe.” ... Earlier this year, the campaign group Turning Point UK shared a video claiming to show an RSPCA worker supposedly catching migrants cooking an unknown bird.
Another video shared by the pressure group was debunked after it emerged the swan in the clip was in fact being rescued by a volunteer with the Swan Sanctuary.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims that the Queen’s swans were being stolen and eaten by asylum seekers.
They're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the swans...
Even though the idea has been debunked by the Royal Parks people the narrative has been written. It's this notion that a lie is half way around the World before the truth gets it's trousers on.
China has made a numerical pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions for the first time. Only 7-10% by 2035, but it's a notable step forward. Given the pace at which they are deploying renewable energy they're likely to comfortably exceed this target.
Nigel and the swan-eating thing is curious. It seems less of a planned controversy and more of an outburst when he was asked to defend, yet again, the ramblings of Donald Trump. A sore spot was obviously touched and this is turning into a bit of a problem for Nigel. He needs to cut Trump loose and stop acting as his butler. It seems Trump has some weird hold over Nigel that I cannot fathom.
It sounds to me as if it could be an old family tape that he just pulled out again as it seemed relevant, and he thought the line could stir it up. The mention of TPUK and their fake videos is interesting.
Challenged on who was taking the swans and carp from the parks, he said: “People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so.”
Pressed on whether it was eastern Europeans, Mr Farage said: “So I believe.” ... Earlier this year, the campaign group Turning Point UK shared a video claiming to show an RSPCA worker supposedly catching migrants cooking an unknown bird.
Another video shared by the pressure group was debunked after it emerged the swan in the clip was in fact being rescued by a volunteer with the Swan Sanctuary.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims that the Queen’s swans were being stolen and eaten by asylum seekers.
They're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the swans...
Even though the idea has been debunked by the Royal Parks people the narrative has been written. It's this notion that a lie is half way around the World before the truth gets it's trousers on.
Trump and Farage are masters of this.
Whenever Trump says anything I assume that either he's lying or that there's some financial advantage to him in what he's saying.
Pb scooped the BBC (and the government?) by a week or so.
The speed with which the government has acted on this is lamentable. We are probably within 10 days of production restarting and we are still talking about possible support. Many of the suppliers will have been without work for weeks already and for some it is probably too late.
I think the government needs to give much more serious consideration to cyber attacks, both in prevention and amelioration when they occur. We have seen a few major UK companies very badly damaged by this already. It is unlikely to stop. The economic effects are sufficiently large to engage the national interest.
They are just getting around to working that out, too.
The idea for JLR is to pay the suppliers to stockpile parts. That's not a thing which would be practical for more than a few weeks at most, and risks leaving them with a glut of stock which they'll then struggle to sell.
I think the reality is that there's no great way to mitigate a very lengthy disruption to a large company's business, other than to prevent it.
I wonder how much cyber protection and cyber insurance JLR had.
Insurance does nothing to help for the knock on effects. And the money could arguably be better spent on prevention.
If we are to start regularly paying out hundreds of millions to maintain UK firms (and perhaps we should) then lets add a levy to the biggest companies profits to cover those costs.
I agree. I am not suggesting HMG do this for free. But if GCHQ have identified how to deal with certain classes of malware, for example, or how to quickly identify weaknesses in cyber security then it would be unfortunate if they are keeping this to themselves. I would suggest that firms should be invited to pay for a simulated attack from GCHQ on a regular basis to ensure that their systems are up to scratch. As I said earlier this is a problem that is not going to go away.
I think it's worth remembering that the weak link in cyber security is almost always people.
This is why a recovery plan is almost as important as trying to prevent an attack. Some attacks are always going to work, so you need to be able to recover from one.
While we're talking about large British companies here, the really big risk to Britain would be a cyber attack on, say, railway infrastructure, HMRC, or DWP. Is anyone confident about Network Rail's ability to rapidly recover from a cyber attack?
What. you mean something worse than leaves in the Autumn or ice in the winter or other wholly unforeseeable events?
I've said it several times before, but Liz Truss's tenure as PM, as replacement for Boris Johnson, should forever cure us of thinking that things can't get any worse. Things can always get worse.
Pb scooped the BBC (and the government?) by a week or so.
The speed with which the government has acted on this is lamentable. We are probably within 10 days of production restarting and we are still talking about possible support. Many of the suppliers will have been without work for weeks already and for some it is probably too late.
I think the government needs to give much more serious consideration to cyber attacks, both in prevention and amelioration when they occur. We have seen a few major UK companies very badly damaged by this already. It is unlikely to stop. The economic effects are sufficiently large to engage the national interest.
They are just getting around to working that out, too.
The idea for JLR is to pay the suppliers to stockpile parts. That's not a thing which would be practical for more than a few weeks at most, and risks leaving them with a glut of stock which they'll then struggle to sell.
I think the reality is that there's no great way to mitigate a very lengthy disruption to a large company's business, other than to prevent it.
I wonder how much cyber protection and cyber insurance JLR had.
Insurance does nothing to help for the knock on effects. And the money could arguably be better spent on prevention.
If we are to start regularly paying out hundreds of millions to maintain UK firms (and perhaps we should) then lets add a levy to the biggest companies profits to cover those costs.
I agree. I am not suggesting HMG do this for free. But if GCHQ have identified how to deal with certain classes of malware, for example, or how to quickly identify weaknesses in cyber security then it would be unfortunate if they are keeping this to themselves. I would suggest that firms should be invited to pay for a simulated attack from GCHQ on a regular basis to ensure that their systems are up to scratch. As I said earlier this is a problem that is not going to go away.
I think it's worth remembering that the weak link in cyber security is almost always people.
This is why a recovery plan is almost as important as trying to prevent an attack. Some attacks are always going to work, so you need to be able to recover from one.
While we're talking about large British companies here, the really big risk to Britain would be a cyber attack on, say, railway infrastructure, HMRC, or DWP. Is anyone confident about Network Rail's ability to rapidly recover from a cyber attack?
The pattern in the most recent attacks is that the attackers don’t just go after data. Everyone has a copies of their database saved to a server in a Cold War nuclear bunker.
So what the attackers do is go after the infrastructure - the applications the data. There’s always tons of custom setup, little scripts that dev ops have written etc.
So trash that and it’s build again from scratch.
This is why the British Library is still partially down.
Which is why “configuration as data” is a thing. As is imaging your servers - a photocopy of everything. Rather than just the data. But the restores are not simple, even then.
For a large business/institution, how much more of a cost is it to setup such a full restore backup in advance, as a rough proportion of an existing IT budget ? (I am something of an ignoramus in these matters, unlike quite a large number of PBers.)
And I get that it's not "simple', but it must be at least an order of magnitude easier than rebuilding from scratch, like the British Library ?
That would very much be a company specific thing. You’d need to answer basic questions like: do you host your own mail or outsource it? Ditto CRM. Timesheets. Etc. Do you use COTS VMs for everything or are you running a specialist high availability system somewhere?
And then you’ve got to keep it in sync - but not in sync enough that any breach would gut your secondary platform along with your primary platform. And even then you’d probably still be vulnerable to certain supply chain attacks.
If this is peak Reform, and we dont know that yet, how much unwind in their polling we get before the next set of elections will have a big say in the final results in May
3 different parties have led the last 3 polls in Senedd opinion polling (going by wikipedia). My guess would be any Reform unwind would not lump back in with the Tories or Labour monolithically, but others will be better informed than me
I sense the paracetamol stuff is a claim too far for a lot of people, seen by the amount of health professionals putting out clips on social media to dissipate scare stories.
Reform seem to be more an anti establishment rabble, putting out claims and counter arguments they don't need to, in order to attract attention. Can't they sit down and form coherent policy? How will they deal with migration?
When it comes down to who to vote for, a working class man eats food, not flags, and it's who he can trust to help him put food on the table which will win the next election. Reform have more chance of retaining the pension age vote
Definitely sense a ratcheting up in attacks on Reform from Labour and other parties this week, Farage is not going to go away if you ignore him
Nigel and the swan-eating thing is curious. It seems less of a planned controversy and more of an outburst when he was asked to defend, yet again, the ramblings of Donald Trump. A sore spot was obviously touched and this is turning into a bit of a problem for Nigel. He needs to cut Trump loose and stop acting as his butler. It seems Trump has some weird hold over Nigel that I cannot fathom.
It sounds to me as if it could be an old family tape that he just pulled out again as it seemed relevant, and he thought the line could stir it up. The mention of TPUK and their fake videos is interesting.
Challenged on who was taking the swans and carp from the parks, he said: “People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so.”
Pressed on whether it was eastern Europeans, Mr Farage said: “So I believe.” ... Earlier this year, the campaign group Turning Point UK shared a video claiming to show an RSPCA worker supposedly catching migrants cooking an unknown bird.
Another video shared by the pressure group was debunked after it emerged the swan in the clip was in fact being rescued by a volunteer with the Swan Sanctuary.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims that the Queen’s swans were being stolen and eaten by asylum seekers.
If the greatest problem facing the UK is the occasional swan being eaten, we are a fortunate country indeed. This does not seem like remotely serious politics.
We live in a country that spends £100mn on a bat tunnel and bans kite festivals because they might have to cut the grass.
If the swan killers were rich Tories you'd be all over this like white on rice, rather than this sudden laissez faire attitude.
I suspect this would be a very brief relief rally in VI. Not enough to call the GE that would be demanded given Burnhams complete lack of legitimacy to the electorate
Nigel and the swan-eating thing is curious. It seems less of a planned controversy and more of an outburst when he was asked to defend, yet again, the ramblings of Donald Trump. A sore spot was obviously touched and this is turning into a bit of a problem for Nigel. He needs to cut Trump loose and stop acting as his butler. It seems Trump has some weird hold over Nigel that I cannot fathom.
It sounds to me as if it could be an old family tape that he just pulled out again as it seemed relevant, and he thought the line could stir it up. The mention of TPUK and their fake videos is interesting.
Challenged on who was taking the swans and carp from the parks, he said: “People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so.”
Pressed on whether it was eastern Europeans, Mr Farage said: “So I believe.” ... Earlier this year, the campaign group Turning Point UK shared a video claiming to show an RSPCA worker supposedly catching migrants cooking an unknown bird.
Another video shared by the pressure group was debunked after it emerged the swan in the clip was in fact being rescued by a volunteer with the Swan Sanctuary.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims that the Queen’s swans were being stolen and eaten by asylum seekers.
They're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the swans...
Even though the idea has been debunked by the Royal Parks people the narrative has been written. It's this notion that a lie is half way around the World before the truth gets it's trousers on.
Trump and Farage are masters of this.
Whenever Trump says anything I assume that either he's lying or that there's some financial advantage to him in what he's saying.
No, sometimes he is just batshit. See windmills, sharks, electric motors, covfeve, etc.
Election landslides are not usually a good thing for the winning party, especially on a low share of the vote. Starmer's probably wishing he'd won a majority of 50 to 75.
Francis Pym was sacked for making the same point to Mrs Thatcher.
Nigel and the swan-eating thing is curious. It seems less of a planned controversy and more of an outburst when he was asked to defend, yet again, the ramblings of Donald Trump. A sore spot was obviously touched and this is turning into a bit of a problem for Nigel. He needs to cut Trump loose and stop acting as his butler. It seems Trump has some weird hold over Nigel that I cannot fathom.
It sounds to me as if it could be an old family tape that he just pulled out again as it seemed relevant, and he thought the line could stir it up. The mention of TPUK and their fake videos is interesting.
Challenged on who was taking the swans and carp from the parks, he said: “People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so.”
Pressed on whether it was eastern Europeans, Mr Farage said: “So I believe.” ... Earlier this year, the campaign group Turning Point UK shared a video claiming to show an RSPCA worker supposedly catching migrants cooking an unknown bird.
Another video shared by the pressure group was debunked after it emerged the swan in the clip was in fact being rescued by a volunteer with the Swan Sanctuary.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims that the Queen’s swans were being stolen and eaten by asylum seekers.
If the greatest problem facing the UK is the occasional swan being eaten, we are a fortunate country indeed. This does not seem like remotely serious politics.
We live in a country that spends £100mn on a bat tunnel and bans kite festivals because they might have to cut the grass.
If the swan killers were rich Tories you'd be all over this like white on rice, rather than this sudden laissez faire attitude.
If the swan eaters existed at all (according to the Royal Parks Authority, they don't) they could be Asylum Seekers, Eastern Europeans, Labour MPs or former Tory Cabinet Ministers. You can accuse anyone of anything if the basic narrative is untrue.
If this is peak Reform, and we dont know that yet, how much unwind in their polling we get before the next set of elections will have a big say in the final results in May
3 different parties have led the last 3 polls in Senedd opinion polling (going by wikipedia). My guess would be any Reform unwind would not lump back in with the Tories or Labour monolithically, but others will be better informed than me
I sense the paracetamol stuff is a claim too far for a lot of people, seen by the amount of health professionals putting out clips on social media to dissipate scare stories.
Reform seem to be more an anti establishment rabble, putting out claims and counter arguments they don't need to, in order to attract attention. Can't they sit down and form coherent policy? How will they deal with migration?
When it comes down to who to vote for, a working class man eats food, not flags, and it's who he can trust to help him put food on the table which will win the next election. Reform have more chance of retaining the pension age vote
Definitely sense a ratcheting up in attacks on Reform from Labour and other parties this week, Farage is not going to go away if you ignore him
They will also be pressuring the BoE today to cut interest rates opening a flank to attack them on inflation/CoL Reforms problem is they are very unlikely to do as well in May as in May 2024 - they will make progress in London but probably be just 'in the mix' and not dominant. They could undershoots at Holyrood and come 4th in seats on a poorish night and if they don't form the givernment at the Senedd then any 'momentum' will be district councils and mayors - but that could be lost in a 'surge fading' narrative.
Might be a case of too much, too soon Time will tell
The rule in any organisation is to undertake one's dirty washing in private. Burnham seems, with his interview with the Labour house journal, the Daily Telegraph to have forgotten this.
Let's not ignore the fact that Starmer has been a poor PM. Continuity Sunak was not what we voted for, but the personal hatred for the man in the press and on here has been obvious from the moment that he was elected LOTO. Granted that was at peak Johnson but who remembers the daily diet of comedy slurs on here, some of which have proven to be appropriate?
I wonder why there is such a visceral hatred of the man since his election as LOTO. Undermining the God that is Jeremy Corbyn or being the Shadow Minister for the second referendum. It's the latter isn't it? A true Brexit traitor.
Burnham's being a bit of a shit. Longing to harm, but fearing to strike.
Which is not how you organise a coup at all. A well-executed coup should be largely bloodless, at the point of flagrante delicto, as all the pieces have already been played.
Not sure who is advising Burnham but I think he’s handling this badly . I hope he crashes and burns and I say this not as a Starmer fan .
This is a big misstep from Burnham, IMHO.
It’s not so much of a nudge-nudge as being outwardly provocative and antagonistic.
No matter one’s views on Starmer, it is a bit unseemly to be so openly critical of a party colleague at a sensitive time.
He might succeed for all I know, but the bad blood that will be generated won’t help the party in the long run, I predict.
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
It seems about half the Teslas in London have the "I bought this car before Elon went crazy" sticker.
Musk is odd. He's massively into space travel, going to Mars and beyond, interplanetary exploration/colonisation, really big picture stuff, can't get bigger, and people like that usually have an affectionate uplifting perspective on humanity. Eg those astronauts you hear about who have gazed back at our little blue orb from up there and marvelled at the wonder of it, our one and only precious home populated by billions of human beings whose essential similarity and kinship dwarfs all differences and in particular makes obsessing about things like 'race' seem utterly ridiculous. Yet Musk, in his politics, is the opposite of this. He does obsess about things like 'race. His politics in general is ugly and mean and small-minded. It doesn't scan for me. Something's gone awry with the brain chemistry.
Nigel and the swan-eating thing is curious. It seems less of a planned controversy and more of an outburst when he was asked to defend, yet again, the ramblings of Donald Trump. A sore spot was obviously touched and this is turning into a bit of a problem for Nigel. He needs to cut Trump loose and stop acting as his butler. It seems Trump has some weird hold over Nigel that I cannot fathom.
It sounds to me as if it could be an old family tape that he just pulled out again as it seemed relevant, and he thought the line could stir it up. The mention of TPUK and their fake videos is interesting.
Challenged on who was taking the swans and carp from the parks, he said: “People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so.”
Pressed on whether it was eastern Europeans, Mr Farage said: “So I believe.” ... Earlier this year, the campaign group Turning Point UK shared a video claiming to show an RSPCA worker supposedly catching migrants cooking an unknown bird.
Another video shared by the pressure group was debunked after it emerged the swan in the clip was in fact being rescued by a volunteer with the Swan Sanctuary.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims that the Queen’s swans were being stolen and eaten by asylum seekers.
We had two swans nesting on the river which flows through this small town for several years. Then some evil whatsit shot one of them ...... catapult and ball-bearing it's thought. No suggestion, though, that the culprit was an immigrant; members of another minority and marginalised community were suggested but it's never been proved. The birds body was left where it fell, possibly because a couple of locals turned up. The other swan decided it didn't like the area any more and flew off. J
Just hoping another pair take a liking to our river again soon.
I've known native Brits who were more than happy to kill birds of protected types by whatever means, and these were generally people who you'd now expect to be voting Reform.
Nigel and the swan-eating thing is curious. It seems less of a planned controversy and more of an outburst when he was asked to defend, yet again, the ramblings of Donald Trump. A sore spot was obviously touched and this is turning into a bit of a problem for Nigel. He needs to cut Trump loose and stop acting as his butler. It seems Trump has some weird hold over Nigel that I cannot fathom.
It sounds to me as if it could be an old family tape that he just pulled out again as it seemed relevant, and he thought the line could stir it up. The mention of TPUK and their fake videos is interesting.
Challenged on who was taking the swans and carp from the parks, he said: “People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so.”
Pressed on whether it was eastern Europeans, Mr Farage said: “So I believe.” ... Earlier this year, the campaign group Turning Point UK shared a video claiming to show an RSPCA worker supposedly catching migrants cooking an unknown bird.
Another video shared by the pressure group was debunked after it emerged the swan in the clip was in fact being rescued by a volunteer with the Swan Sanctuary.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims that the Queen’s swans were being stolen and eaten by asylum seekers.
If the greatest problem facing the UK is the occasional swan being eaten, we are a fortunate country indeed. This does not seem like remotely serious politics.
We live in a country that spends £100mn on a bat tunnel and bans kite festivals because they might have to cut the grass.
If the swan killers were rich Tories you'd be all over this like white on rice, rather than this sudden laissez faire attitude.
You like to talk about the major economic and structural problems that you consider the UK faces. You praise Truss for her economic radicalism. Are you really going to debase yourself defending a dog-whistle slur about Eastern Europeans eating swans?
This is bullish from Zelensky. He seems confident of receiving additional weapons from Trump. Let's hope it's not misplaced.
An Axios journalist asked what those working in the Kremlin should know after an attack on Kyiv’s government building. Zelensky answered plainly: "first, know where your bomb shelters are. If you do not stop the war, you will need them."
Nigel and the swan-eating thing is curious. It seems less of a planned controversy and more of an outburst when he was asked to defend, yet again, the ramblings of Donald Trump. A sore spot was obviously touched and this is turning into a bit of a problem for Nigel. He needs to cut Trump loose and stop acting as his butler. It seems Trump has some weird hold over Nigel that I cannot fathom.
It sounds to me as if it could be an old family tape that he just pulled out again as it seemed relevant, and he thought the line could stir it up. The mention of TPUK and their fake videos is interesting.
Challenged on who was taking the swans and carp from the parks, he said: “People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so.”
Pressed on whether it was eastern Europeans, Mr Farage said: “So I believe.” ... Earlier this year, the campaign group Turning Point UK shared a video claiming to show an RSPCA worker supposedly catching migrants cooking an unknown bird.
Another video shared by the pressure group was debunked after it emerged the swan in the clip was in fact being rescued by a volunteer with the Swan Sanctuary.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims that the Queen’s swans were being stolen and eaten by asylum seekers.
If the greatest problem facing the UK is the occasional swan being eaten, we are a fortunate country indeed. This does not seem like remotely serious politics.
We live in a country that spends £100mn on a bat tunnel and bans kite festivals because they might have to cut the grass.
If the swan killers were rich Tories you'd be all over this like white on rice, rather than this sudden laissez faire attitude.
Or Maisters of the Quean’s Musik! (Cod Orkney accent for effect).
Pb scooped the BBC (and the government?) by a week or so.
The speed with which the government has acted on this is lamentable. We are probably within 10 days of production restarting and we are still talking about possible support. Many of the suppliers will have been without work for weeks already and for some it is probably too late.
I think the government needs to give much more serious consideration to cyber attacks, both in prevention and amelioration when they occur. We have seen a few major UK companies very badly damaged by this already. It is unlikely to stop. The economic effects are sufficiently large to engage the national interest.
They are just getting around to working that out, too.
The idea for JLR is to pay the suppliers to stockpile parts. That's not a thing which would be practical for more than a few weeks at most, and risks leaving them with a glut of stock which they'll then struggle to sell.
I think the reality is that there's no great way to mitigate a very lengthy disruption to a large company's business, other than to prevent it.
I wonder how much cyber protection and cyber insurance JLR had.
Insurance does nothing to help for the knock on effects. And the money could arguably be better spent on prevention.
If we are to start regularly paying out hundreds of millions to maintain UK firms (and perhaps we should) then lets add a levy to the biggest companies profits to cover those costs.
I agree. I am not suggesting HMG do this for free. But if GCHQ have identified how to deal with certain classes of malware, for example, or how to quickly identify weaknesses in cyber security then it would be unfortunate if they are keeping this to themselves. I would suggest that firms should be invited to pay for a simulated attack from GCHQ on a regular basis to ensure that their systems are up to scratch. As I said earlier this is a problem that is not going to go away.
I think it's worth remembering that the weak link in cyber security is almost always people.
This is why a recovery plan is almost as important as trying to prevent an attack. Some attacks are always going to work, so you need to be able to recover from one.
While we're talking about large British companies here, the really big risk to Britain would be a cyber attack on, say, railway infrastructure, HMRC, or DWP. Is anyone confident about Network Rail's ability to rapidly recover from a cyber attack?
The pattern in the most recent attacks is that the attackers don’t just go after data. Everyone has a copies of their database saved to a server in a Cold War nuclear bunker.
So what the attackers do is go after the infrastructure - the applications the data. There’s always tons of custom setup, little scripts that dev ops have written etc.
So trash that and it’s build again from scratch.
This is why the British Library is still partially down.
Which is why “configuration as data” is a thing. As is imaging your servers - a photocopy of everything. Rather than just the data. But the restores are not simple, even then.
For a large business/institution, how much more of a cost is it to setup such a full restore backup in advance, as a rough proportion of an existing IT budget ? (I am something of an ignoramus in these matters, unlike quite a large number of PBers.)
And I get that it's not "simple', but it must be at least an order of magnitude easier than rebuilding from scratch, like the British Library ?
Well a 10-server Veeam backup licence runs to around £2k a year, which basically backs up an image of your server in real time to a disk array. The difficult bit is always the restore and the data integrity.
I still don’t understand what the hell happened at the British Library, I’m thinking it must have been some old in-house system for which the source code was lost and couldn’t be rebuilt. Always keep offline backups of stuff like that.
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
It seems about half the Teslas in London have the "I bought this car before Elon went crazy" sticker.
Musk is odd. He's massively into space travel, going to Mars and beyond, interplanetary exploration/colonisation, really big picture stuff, can't get bigger, and people like that usually have an affectionate uplifting perspective on humanity. Eg those astronauts you hear about who have gazed back at our little blue orb from up there and marvelled at the wonder of it, our one and only precious home populated by billions of human beings whose essential similarity and kinship dwarfs all differences and in particular makes obsessing about things like 'race' seem utterly ridiculous. Yet Musk, in his politics, is the opposite of this. He does obsess about things like 'race. His politics in general is ugly and mean and small-minded. It doesn't scan for me. Something's gone awry with the brain chemistry.
This is bullish from Zelensky. He seems confident of receiving additional weapons from Trump. Let's hope it's not misplaced.
An Axios journalist asked what those working in the Kremlin should know after an attack on Kyiv’s government building. Zelensky answered plainly: "first, know where your bomb shelters are. If you do not stop the war, you will need them."
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
It seems about half the Teslas in London have the "I bought this car before Elon went crazy" sticker.
Musk is odd. He's massively into space travel, going to Mars and beyond, interplanetary exploration/colonisation, really big picture stuff, can't get bigger, and people like that usually have an affectionate uplifting perspective on humanity. Eg those astronauts you hear about who have gazed back at our little blue orb from up there and marvelled at the wonder of it, our one and only precious home populated by billions of human beings whose essential similarity and kinship dwarfs all differences and in particular makes obsessing about things like 'race' seem utterly ridiculous. Yet Musk, in his politics, is the opposite of this. He does obsess about things like 'race. His politics in general is ugly and mean and small-minded. It doesn't scan for me. Something's gone awry with the brain chemistry.
His motivation for space travel is as a lifeboat to escape from a collapsed Earth. It's a very nihilistic motivation, entirely consistent with his politics.
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
It seems about half the Teslas in London have the "I bought this car before Elon went crazy" sticker.
Musk is odd. He's massively into space travel, going to Mars and beyond, interplanetary exploration/colonisation, really big picture stuff, can't get bigger, and people like that usually have an affectionate uplifting perspective on humanity. Eg those astronauts you hear about who have gazed back at our little blue orb from up there and marvelled at the wonder of it, our one and only precious home populated by billions of human beings whose essential similarity and kinship dwarfs all differences and in particular makes obsessing about things like 'race' seem utterly ridiculous. Yet Musk, in his politics, is the opposite of this. He does obsess about things like 'race. His politics in general is ugly and mean and small-minded. It doesn't scan for me. Something's gone awry with the brain chemistry.
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
I do wonder how many people who want to see Tesla fail were also repeating Jimmy Kimmel’s words about loads of people losing their jobs because of a reaction to what someone has said.
No great fan of Musk but glee over Tesla crapping out and anger over Kimmel production crew losing jobs would be a little hypocritical.
I don't think I've seen anyone repeating Kimmel's words about loads of people losing their jobs.
Your post is a bit of a strawman: I do no care about Tesla in itself. They're a company that's done some amazing things, but which has a f'load of technical debt and is led by a really nasty man who is calling for chaos in this country. He gets most of his power from Tesla, and a good way of getting him to fail is for Tesla to become less powerful.
If Tesla was run by someone else, and Musk had no influence over it and no shares in it, I might be cheering them along. Still concerned about the technical debt, though...
The point about Farage’s nonsense claim that eastern Europeans are eating swans is perhaps about who the target is. We only have one big group of recent Eastern Europeans immigrants: refugees from Ukraine.
Now, who would want the people of UK to turn against Ukrainian refugees?
I suspect this would be a very brief relief rally in VI. Not enough to call the GE that would be demanded given Burnhams complete lack of legitimacy to the electorate
To me there are two pretty significant objections to Burnham.
One is opportunism. If he really felt he was the right person to lead Labour and be PM he should and would have bothered to take the steps to become an MP in 2024.
The second is his basic stance. he presents as typically what is wrong with most Labour MPs. Disproportionately interested in the state spending even more money, especially on people who might vote Labour; and disproportionately uninterested in how the state gets to have all that money to spend in the first place. The rhetoric is always the same: the money raised comes from somewhere and someone else.
This is bullish from Zelensky. He seems confident of receiving additional weapons from Trump. Let's hope it's not misplaced.
An Axios journalist asked what those working in the Kremlin should know after an attack on Kyiv’s government building. Zelensky answered plainly: "first, know where your bomb shelters are. If you do not stop the war, you will need them."
I wonder if it’ll start to tighten again next spring as the world approaches next year’s Taiwan invasion season?
Supposedly the Chinese are committed to sustaining Russia's war so that it distracts the US from the Pacific. The obvious corollary is that a Ukrainian victory over Russia frees the US to concentrate on China.
If Zelensky has managed to convince Trump that a Ukrainian victory is an "America First" interest, then perhaps @Sandpit will be due a few apologies in the coming months?
Though clearly I am allowing my inherent optimism to run away from me with that.
Pb scooped the BBC (and the government?) by a week or so.
The speed with which the government has acted on this is lamentable. We are probably within 10 days of production restarting and we are still talking about possible support. Many of the suppliers will have been without work for weeks already and for some it is probably too late.
I think the government needs to give much more serious consideration to cyber attacks, both in prevention and amelioration when they occur. We have seen a few major UK companies very badly damaged by this already. It is unlikely to stop. The economic effects are sufficiently large to engage the national interest.
They are just getting around to working that out, too.
The idea for JLR is to pay the suppliers to stockpile parts. That's not a thing which would be practical for more than a few weeks at most, and risks leaving them with a glut of stock which they'll then struggle to sell.
I think the reality is that there's no great way to mitigate a very lengthy disruption to a large company's business, other than to prevent it.
I wonder how much cyber protection and cyber insurance JLR had.
Insurance does nothing to help for the knock on effects. And the money could arguably be better spent on prevention.
If we are to start regularly paying out hundreds of millions to maintain UK firms (and perhaps we should) then lets add a levy to the biggest companies profits to cover those costs.
I agree. I am not suggesting HMG do this for free. But if GCHQ have identified how to deal with certain classes of malware, for example, or how to quickly identify weaknesses in cyber security then it would be unfortunate if they are keeping this to themselves. I would suggest that firms should be invited to pay for a simulated attack from GCHQ on a regular basis to ensure that their systems are up to scratch. As I said earlier this is a problem that is not going to go away.
I think it's worth remembering that the weak link in cyber security is almost always people.
This is why a recovery plan is almost as important as trying to prevent an attack. Some attacks are always going to work, so you need to be able to recover from one.
While we're talking about large British companies here, the really big risk to Britain would be a cyber attack on, say, railway infrastructure, HMRC, or DWP. Is anyone confident about Network Rail's ability to rapidly recover from a cyber attack?
The pattern in the most recent attacks is that the attackers don’t just go after data. Everyone has a copies of their database saved to a server in a Cold War nuclear bunker.
So what the attackers do is go after the infrastructure - the applications the data. There’s always tons of custom setup, little scripts that dev ops have written etc.
So trash that and it’s build again from scratch.
This is why the British Library is still partially down.
Which is why “configuration as data” is a thing. As is imaging your servers - a photocopy of everything. Rather than just the data. But the restores are not simple, even then.
For a large business/institution, how much more of a cost is it to setup such a full restore backup in advance, as a rough proportion of an existing IT budget ? (I am something of an ignoramus in these matters, unlike quite a large number of PBers.)
And I get that it's not "simple', but it must be at least an order of magnitude easier than rebuilding from scratch, like the British Library ?
It’s a major re-engineering exercise - you have to document the whole process of setting up your systems, modernise it, then setup the system to restore infrastructure from backup.
A copy/paste of the production servers won’t, generally work.
You might end up doing all the work they are doing now at the British Library. But before the disaster.
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
I just got a BYD Seal (haven't tried a Tesla), it's such a weird car. On the one hand it's ludicrously fast (at a very reasonable price), it does 0-100 km/h in 3.8 seconds which is much faster than you actually need to speed up. But it doesn't feel like a performance thing. The general vibe is kind of abstracting away the fact that you're in a car. It's totally silent, really smooth, the road noise is also really silent and the autopilot does a lot of the driving in a very chilled kind of way. It has the big glass roof they copied off the Tesla so it's kind of a big glass bowl. You're not driving so much as just kind of drifting through the world.
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
It seems about half the Teslas in London have the "I bought this car before Elon went crazy" sticker.
Musk is odd. He's massively into space travel, going to Mars and beyond, interplanetary exploration/colonisation, really big picture stuff, can't get bigger, and people like that usually have an affectionate uplifting perspective on humanity. Eg those astronauts you hear about who have gazed back at our little blue orb from up there and marvelled at the wonder of it, our one and only precious home populated by billions of human beings whose essential similarity and kinship dwarfs all differences and in particular makes obsessing about things like 'race' seem utterly ridiculous. Yet Musk, in his politics, is the opposite of this. He does obsess about things like 'race. His politics in general is ugly and mean and small-minded. It doesn't scan for me. Something's gone awry with the brain chemistry.
Before Musk went weird for Trump I was very supportive of Tesla. "Tesla's mission statement is "to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy," reflecting its commitment to promoting renewable energy solutions and reducing reliance on fossil fuels." So why would he support someone who "digs coal", hates renewables and want to "dig baby dig"? Biden ignored Tesla when he held an electric car meeting, maybe it's personal and about money (taxes)? I still think that Tesla is an overall good, the switchover to electric would have taken much longer without it.
This is bullish from Zelensky. He seems confident of receiving additional weapons from Trump. Let's hope it's not misplaced.
An Axios journalist asked what those working in the Kremlin should know after an attack on Kyiv’s government building. Zelensky answered plainly: "first, know where your bomb shelters are. If you do not stop the war, you will need them."
I wonder if it’ll start to tighten again next spring as the world approaches next year’s Taiwan invasion season?
Supposedly the Chinese are committed to sustaining Russia's war so that it distracts the US from the Pacific. The obvious corollary is that a Ukrainian victory over Russia frees the US to concentrate on China.
If Zelensky has managed to convince Trump that a Ukrainian victory is an "America First" interest, then perhaps @Sandpit will be due a few apologies in the coming months?
Though clearly I am allowing my inherent optimism to run away from me with that.
@Sandpit got the narrative wrong for the first 9 months of the Administration. I don't believe he was expecting Zelensky to get brutally mugged by Trump and Vance in the Oval Office. No apology needed.
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
It seems about half the Teslas in London have the "I bought this car before Elon went crazy" sticker.
Musk is odd. He's massively into space travel, going to Mars and beyond, interplanetary exploration/colonisation, really big picture stuff, can't get bigger, and people like that usually have an affectionate uplifting perspective on humanity. Eg those astronauts you hear about who have gazed back at our little blue orb from up there and marvelled at the wonder of it, our one and only precious home populated by billions of human beings whose essential similarity and kinship dwarfs all differences and in particular makes obsessing about things like 'race' seem utterly ridiculous. Yet Musk, in his politics, is the opposite of this. He does obsess about things like 'race. His politics in general is ugly and mean and small-minded. It doesn't scan for me. Something's gone awry with the brain chemistry.
His motivation for space travel is as a lifeboat to escape from a collapsed Earth. It's a very nihilistic motivation, entirely consistent with his politics.
If he were one of those astronauts he'd be gazing down at Earth and mouthing the inspirational words: "what a shithole, I deserve better".
It won't happen in time for him to escape unless he gets a move on with his SpaceX. Unless of course he can crack that 'eternal life' thing that all the billionaires seem to be beavering away on these days.
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
I just got a BYD Seal (haven't tried a Tesla), it's such a weird car. On the one hand it's ludicrously fast (at a very reasonable price), it does 0-100 km/h in 3.8 seconds which is much faster than you actually need to speed up. But it doesn't feel like a performance thing. The general vibe is kind of abstracting away the fact that you're in a car. It's totally silent, really smooth, the road noise is also really silent and the autopilot does a lot of the driving in a very chilled kind of way. It has the big glass roof they copied off the Tesla so it's kind of a big glass bowl. You're not driving so much as just kind of drifting through the world.
Crazy we allow cars to have that level of acceleration. A significant proportion of drivers around London struggle at 20-30 mph. Put an acceleration limiter on them as part of licensing.
If this is peak Reform, and we dont know that yet, how much unwind in their polling we get before the next set of elections will have a big say in the final results in May
3 different parties have led the last 3 polls in Senedd opinion polling (going by wikipedia). My guess would be any Reform unwind would not lump back in with the Tories or Labour monolithically, but others will be better informed than me
I sense the paracetamol stuff is a claim too far for a lot of people, seen by the amount of health professionals putting out clips on social media to dissipate scare stories.
Reform seem to be more an anti establishment rabble, putting out claims and counter arguments they don't need to, in order to attract attention. Can't they sit down and form coherent policy? How will they deal with migration?
When it comes down to who to vote for, a working class man eats food, not flags, and it's who he can trust to help him put food on the table which will win the next election. Reform have more chance of retaining the pension age vote
Definitely sense a ratcheting up in attacks on Reform from Labour and other parties this week, Farage is not going to go away if you ignore him
They will also be pressuring the BoE today to cut interest rates opening a flank to attack them on inflation/CoL Reforms problem is they are very unlikely to do as well in May as in May 2024 - they will make progress in London but probably be just 'in the mix' and not dominant. They could undershoots at Holyrood and come 4th in seats on a poorish night and if they don't form the givernment at the Senedd then any 'momentum' will be district councils and mayors - but that could be lost in a 'surge fading' narrative.
Might be a case of too much, too soon Time will tell
You get the feeling now that the 'establishment' parties, SNP included, are starting to hit them harder and will seek to hoover up votes put off by their more extreme views
If there was to be real momentum, Farage would want to secure a few more defections - past MPs, people who used to be important and now Lords don't cut through as much
It's a long way off but I can see them 3rd (or worse) at Holyrood, once the debates get going the public get to see a different side. A little over 7 months to go, and as far as I can see still no Reform candidates for Scottish parliament selected
The biggest question is, when do they peak? if Farage goes, I doubt they'll poll anywhere near 30% across the UK
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
I do wonder how many people who want to see Tesla fail were also repeating Jimmy Kimmel’s words about loads of people losing their jobs because of a reaction to what someone has said.
No great fan of Musk but glee over Tesla crapping out and anger over Kimmel production crew losing jobs would be a little hypocritical.
I don't think I've seen anyone repeating Kimmel's words about loads of people losing their jobs.
Your post is a bit of a strawman: I do no care about Tesla in itself. They're a company that's done some amazing things, but which has a f'load of technical debt and is led by a really nasty man who is calling for chaos in this country. He gets most of his power from Tesla, and a good way of getting him to fail is for Tesla to become less powerful.
If Tesla was run by someone else, and Musk had no influence over it and no shares in it, I might be cheering them along. Still concerned about the technical debt, though...
What is 'technical debt'?
Technical debt is all the stuff you should have done but didn’t because you ran out of time/money/kit/warm bodies/sanity.
Documentation is the classic one. Keeping on top of upgrades for code libraries or for your development environment are other forms of tech debt.
Nigel has certainly been making a number of unforced errors in recent times. Has his performance degraded, or are we just now seeing things that were really always there?
FWIW, unsurprisingly, I am quite a fan of Manchesterism. I'm no fan of the Labour Party, but I think the Manchester Labour Party has done a tremendous job this last 30-odd years. The approach of 'we advance the interests of the common man - but those interests are best served by bringing investment to the city' has paid far more dividends than our neighbour's approach of 'it's not fair - give us some money'. I still think Andy Burnham, while he thinks he is in the centre ground, doesn't really understand quite how far to the left along the identarian spectrum he is. As the article says, perhaps that will change when (if) he talks to the country rather than the Labour party.
It doesn't address TSE's perfectly reasonable question of the mechanics by which AB as PM might actually happen though!
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
I do wonder how many people who want to see Tesla fail were also repeating Jimmy Kimmel’s words about loads of people losing their jobs because of a reaction to what someone has said.
No great fan of Musk but glee over Tesla crapping out and anger over Kimmel production crew losing jobs would be a little hypocritical.
I don't think I've seen anyone repeating Kimmel's words about loads of people losing their jobs.
Your post is a bit of a strawman: I do no care about Tesla in itself. They're a company that's done some amazing things, but which has a f'load of technical debt and is led by a really nasty man who is calling for chaos in this country. He gets most of his power from Tesla, and a good way of getting him to fail is for Tesla to become less powerful.
If Tesla was run by someone else, and Musk had no influence over it and no shares in it, I might be cheering them along. Still concerned about the technical debt, though...
What is 'technical debt'?
In this case, promising things that have not been developed yet, and may not be able to be delivered in any meaningful timespan. Promising things that will require resources to develop and make that you will not have available.
Example of the former is FSD/Autopilot, which is *far* from what he promised for 2017, and may not be possible with the tech they're building into the cars. An example of the latter is the Roadster 2; promised for many years with loads of expensive deposits taken, yet still does not exist.
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
I just got a BYD Seal (haven't tried a Tesla), it's such a weird car. On the one hand it's ludicrously fast (at a very reasonable price), it does 0-100 km/h in 3.8 seconds which is much faster than you actually need to speed up. But it doesn't feel like a performance thing. The general vibe is kind of abstracting away the fact that you're in a car. It's totally silent, really smooth, the road noise is also really silent and the autopilot does a lot of the driving in a very chilled kind of way. It has the big glass roof they copied off the Tesla so it's kind of a big glass bowl. You're not driving so much as just kind of drifting through the world.
Crazy we allow cars to have that level of acceleration. A significant proportion of drivers around London struggle at 20-30 mph. Put an acceleration limiter on them as part of licensing.
No data either way but I don't think the acceleration is dangerous particularly? My insurance on it is really cheap but maybe that's because Japanese people still think electric cars are things like the Prius and they haven't got the memo that they can go fast.
Nigel has certainly been making a number of unforced errors in recent times. Has his performance degraded, or are we just now seeing things that were really always there?
If he can keep the narrative as "Why do we pay £600 for migrant taxis?" he wins easily. If the narrative becomes "How Reform will fix immigration?" it will be a narrow victory. If the narrative becomes "How Reform will run the country?" it will be a narrow loss.
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
I do wonder how many people who want to see Tesla fail were also repeating Jimmy Kimmel’s words about loads of people losing their jobs because of a reaction to what someone has said.
No great fan of Musk but glee over Tesla crapping out and anger over Kimmel production crew losing jobs would be a little hypocritical.
I don't think I've seen anyone repeating Kimmel's words about loads of people losing their jobs.
Your post is a bit of a strawman: I do no care about Tesla in itself. They're a company that's done some amazing things, but which has a f'load of technical debt and is led by a really nasty man who is calling for chaos in this country. He gets most of his power from Tesla, and a good way of getting him to fail is for Tesla to become less powerful.
If Tesla was run by someone else, and Musk had no influence over it and no shares in it, I might be cheering them along. Still concerned about the technical debt, though...
What is 'technical debt'?
Technical debt is all the stuff you should have done but didn’t because you ran out of time/money/kit/warm bodies/sanity.
Documentation is the classic one. Keeping on top of upgrades for code libraries or for your development environment are other forms of tech debt.
That's the sense I know, but I think JJ was using it in a somewhat different sense.
This is bullish from Zelensky. He seems confident of receiving additional weapons from Trump. Let's hope it's not misplaced.
An Axios journalist asked what those working in the Kremlin should know after an attack on Kyiv’s government building. Zelensky answered plainly: "first, know where your bomb shelters are. If you do not stop the war, you will need them."
I wonder if it’ll start to tighten again next spring as the world approaches next year’s Taiwan invasion season?
Supposedly the Chinese are committed to sustaining Russia's war so that it distracts the US from the Pacific. The obvious corollary is that a Ukrainian victory over Russia frees the US to concentrate on China.
If Zelensky has managed to convince Trump that a Ukrainian victory is an "America First" interest, then perhaps @Sandpit will be due a few apologies in the coming months?
Though clearly I am allowing my inherent optimism to run away from me with that.
We’ll see, I’m also an inherent optimist.
I’ve not been a fan of Trump’s approach to the Ukraine war so far, but can understand where he’s coming from in his approach.
It’s now clear that that approach isn’t working, that Putin has no intention of ending the war, but also that the whole Western world is behind Ukraine winning the war irrespective of what happens between Washington and Moscow.
Trump wants his peace prize, and he now realises that this happens from being unequivocally on the Ukranian side.
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
I just got a BYD Seal (haven't tried a Tesla), it's such a weird car. On the one hand it's ludicrously fast (at a very reasonable price), it does 0-100 km/h in 3.8 seconds which is much faster than you actually need to speed up. But it doesn't feel like a performance thing. The general vibe is kind of abstracting away the fact that you're in a car. It's totally silent, really smooth, the road noise is also really silent and the autopilot does a lot of the driving in a very chilled kind of way. It has the big glass roof they copied off the Tesla so it's kind of a big glass bowl. You're not driving so much as just kind of drifting through the world.
Crazy we allow cars to have that level of acceleration. A significant proportion of drivers around London struggle at 20-30 mph. Put an acceleration limiter on them as part of licensing.
No data either way but I don't think the acceleration is dangerous particularly? My insurance on it is really cheap but maybe that's because Japanese people still think electric cars are things like the Prius and they haven't got the memo that they can go fast.
Not hard to imagine someone at city centre traffic lights unused to that kind of car and acceleration completely overdoing it.
Pb scooped the BBC (and the government?) by a week or so.
The speed with which the government has acted on this is lamentable. We are probably within 10 days of production restarting and we are still talking about possible support. Many of the suppliers will have been without work for weeks already and for some it is probably too late.
I think the government needs to give much more serious consideration to cyber attacks, both in prevention and amelioration when they occur. We have seen a few major UK companies very badly damaged by this already. It is unlikely to stop. The economic effects are sufficiently large to engage the national interest.
They are just getting around to working that out, too.
The idea for JLR is to pay the suppliers to stockpile parts. That's not a thing which would be practical for more than a few weeks at most, and risks leaving them with a glut of stock which they'll then struggle to sell.
I think the reality is that there's no great way to mitigate a very lengthy disruption to a large company's business, other than to prevent it.
I wonder how much cyber protection and cyber insurance JLR had.
Insurance does nothing to help for the knock on effects. And the money could arguably be better spent on prevention.
If we are to start regularly paying out hundreds of millions to maintain UK firms (and perhaps we should) then lets add a levy to the biggest companies profits to cover those costs.
It’s not as simple as maintaining UK firms, JLR doesn’t need to have manufacturing here, it doesn’t need to use UK parts suppliers. JLR are losing (according to Today’s two different guests this morning) between £50m and “hundreds of millions” per week.
As we are seeing with the life sciences industry, if you make the financial environment trickier for companies, especially global companies, they actually do vote with their feet.
You do realise that the Lifesciences companies are currently in the middle of a negotiation on the NHS rebate? They had a tough meeting with Reeves (not only was she was inflexible but she was shouty and ill-prepared). And then all these coordinated announcements (not actions) are made as a way to put pressure on them
Nigel has certainly been making a number of unforced errors in recent times. Has his performance degraded, or are we just now seeing things that were really always there?
It's easy to be popular by being Not-Labour and Not-Conservative. But presenting an actual policy that the public can approve or disapprove of is more difficult.
Got to say I really disliked the policy on ILR, but I wasn't going to vote Reform anyway.
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
It seems about half the Teslas in London have the "I bought this car before Elon went crazy" sticker.
Musk is odd. He's massively into space travel, going to Mars and beyond, interplanetary exploration/colonisation, really big picture stuff, can't get bigger, and people like that usually have an affectionate uplifting perspective on humanity. Eg those astronauts you hear about who have gazed back at our little blue orb from up there and marvelled at the wonder of it, our one and only precious home populated by billions of human beings whose essential similarity and kinship dwarfs all differences and in particular makes obsessing about things like 'race' seem utterly ridiculous. Yet Musk, in his politics, is the opposite of this. He does obsess about things like 'race. His politics in general is ugly and mean and small-minded. It doesn't scan for me. Something's gone awry with the brain chemistry.
Before Musk went weird for Trump I was very supportive of Tesla. "Tesla's mission statement is "to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy," reflecting its commitment to promoting renewable energy solutions and reducing reliance on fossil fuels." So why would he support someone who "digs coal", hates renewables and want to "dig baby dig"? Biden ignored Tesla when he held an electric car meeting, maybe it's personal and about money (taxes)? I still think that Tesla is an overall good, the switchover to electric would have taken much longer without it.
This is the point that boggles my tiny mind - why is Musk so attached to the political movement who despises his mission for humanity?
Its bad for business if nothing else, but I then get attacked by the Musk simps who think I'm pitching for the opposition because I ask questions...
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
I do wonder how many people who want to see Tesla fail were also repeating Jimmy Kimmel’s words about loads of people losing their jobs because of a reaction to what someone has said.
No great fan of Musk but glee over Tesla crapping out and anger over Kimmel production crew losing jobs would be a little hypocritical.
I don't think I've seen anyone repeating Kimmel's words about loads of people losing their jobs.
Your post is a bit of a strawman: I do no care about Tesla in itself. They're a company that's done some amazing things, but which has a f'load of technical debt and is led by a really nasty man who is calling for chaos in this country. He gets most of his power from Tesla, and a good way of getting him to fail is for Tesla to become less powerful.
If Tesla was run by someone else, and Musk had no influence over it and no shares in it, I might be cheering them along. Still concerned about the technical debt, though...
What is 'technical debt'?
Technical debt is all the stuff you should have done but didn’t because you ran out of time/money/kit/warm bodies/sanity.
Documentation is the classic one. Keeping on top of upgrades for code libraries or for your development environment are other forms of tech debt.
That's the sense I know, but I think JJ was using it in a somewhat different sense.
It's a slightly wooly term. In the case above it means making decisions that are cheap and quick now, but are much more costly to fix later. An example might be using a cheap capacitor which might cause product failures that will have to be corrected. Or putting in some code that works for the moment, but which you know will have to be reworked later.
Or, in Tesla's case, making vast promises about their FSD tech that may not be deliverable, especially with their camera-only system.
Pb scooped the BBC (and the government?) by a week or so.
The speed with which the government has acted on this is lamentable. We are probably within 10 days of production restarting and we are still talking about possible support. Many of the suppliers will have been without work for weeks already and for some it is probably too late.
I think the government needs to give much more serious consideration to cyber attacks, both in prevention and amelioration when they occur. We have seen a few major UK companies very badly damaged by this already. It is unlikely to stop. The economic effects are sufficiently large to engage the national interest.
They are just getting around to working that out, too.
The idea for JLR is to pay the suppliers to stockpile parts. That's not a thing which would be practical for more than a few weeks at most, and risks leaving them with a glut of stock which they'll then struggle to sell.
I think the reality is that there's no great way to mitigate a very lengthy disruption to a large company's business, other than to prevent it.
I wonder how much cyber protection and cyber insurance JLR had.
Insurance does nothing to help for the knock on effects. And the money could arguably be better spent on prevention.
If we are to start regularly paying out hundreds of millions to maintain UK firms (and perhaps we should) then lets add a levy to the biggest companies profits to cover those costs.
It’s not as simple as maintaining UK firms, JLR doesn’t need to have manufacturing here, it doesn’t need to use UK parts suppliers. JLR are losing (according to Today’s two different guests this morning) between £50m and “hundreds of millions” per week.
As we are seeing with the life sciences industry, if you make the financial environment trickier for companies, especially global companies, they actually do vote with their feet.
I'm extremely sceptical of the pharma companies on this. They are effectively threatening to cancel investment in research facilities in the UK because we won't adjust NHS drug pricing. The Eli Lilly article in the FT just came across as rent-seeking behaviour, special pleading.
The government should call their bluff on this.
Research is the highest value jobs plus future taxable licence payments - it’s what all governments really want
Nigel has certainly been making a number of unforced errors in recent times. Has his performance degraded, or are we just now seeing things that were really always there?
Farage doesn’t like scrutiny and is thin skinned . The latest immigration proposals were down to over-confidence and they’ve already fallen apart .
If this is peak Reform, and we dont know that yet, how much unwind in their polling we get before the next set of elections will have a big say in the final results in May
3 different parties have led the last 3 polls in Senedd opinion polling (going by wikipedia). My guess would be any Reform unwind would not lump back in with the Tories or Labour monolithically, but others will be better informed than me
I sense the paracetamol stuff is a claim too far for a lot of people, seen by the amount of health professionals putting out clips on social media to dissipate scare stories.
Reform seem to be more an anti establishment rabble, putting out claims and counter arguments they don't need to, in order to attract attention. Can't they sit down and form coherent policy? How will they deal with migration?
When it comes down to who to vote for, a working class man eats food, not flags, and it's who he can trust to help him put food on the table which will win the next election. Reform have more chance of retaining the pension age vote
Definitely sense a ratcheting up in attacks on Reform from Labour and other parties this week, Farage is not going to go away if you ignore him
They will also be pressuring the BoE today to cut interest rates opening a flank to attack them on inflation/CoL Reforms problem is they are very unlikely to do as well in May as in May 2024 - they will make progress in London but probably be just 'in the mix' and not dominant. They could undershoots at Holyrood and come 4th in seats on a poorish night and if they don't form the givernment at the Senedd then any 'momentum' will be district councils and mayors - but that could be lost in a 'surge fading' narrative.
Might be a case of too much, too soon Time will tell
You get the feeling now that the 'establishment' parties, SNP included, are starting to hit them harder and will seek to hoover up votes put off by their more extreme views
If there was to be real momentum, Farage would want to secure a few more defections - past MPs, people who used to be important and now Lords don't cut through as much
It's a long way off but I can see them 3rd (or worse) at Holyrood, once the debates get going the public get to see a different side. A little over 7 months to go, and as far as I can see still no Reform candidates for Scottish parliament selected
The biggest question is, when do they peak? if Farage goes, I doubt they'll poll anywhere near 30% across the UK
The big questions are how much of the 30% is raw dissatisfaction and how much of that dissatisfaction is motivated to actually vote on it. Labour were polling in the 40s and (a little earlier) 50s right up to actual voting time. 'Im super pissed off' becomes 'but not that super pissed off' for some when a vote looms. Reform are performing close to polling expectations in local by elections but on 25% turnouts. The 25 to 35% who will turn out at a GE on top are, I think, more likely to be Uniparty types than burn it downers - they are already registering their annoyance every chance they get. Ergo Refirm drift back in a campaign just like Labour did
Pb scooped the BBC (and the government?) by a week or so.
The speed with which the government has acted on this is lamentable. We are probably within 10 days of production restarting and we are still talking about possible support. Many of the suppliers will have been without work for weeks already and for some it is probably too late.
I think the government needs to give much more serious consideration to cyber attacks, both in prevention and amelioration when they occur. We have seen a few major UK companies very badly damaged by this already. It is unlikely to stop. The economic effects are sufficiently large to engage the national interest.
They are just getting around to working that out, too.
The idea for JLR is to pay the suppliers to stockpile parts. That's not a thing which would be practical for more than a few weeks at most, and risks leaving them with a glut of stock which they'll then struggle to sell.
I think the reality is that there's no great way to mitigate a very lengthy disruption to a large company's business, other than to prevent it.
I wonder how much cyber protection and cyber insurance JLR had.
Insurance does nothing to help for the knock on effects. And the money could arguably be better spent on prevention.
If we are to start regularly paying out hundreds of millions to maintain UK firms (and perhaps we should) then lets add a levy to the biggest companies profits to cover those costs.
It’s not as simple as maintaining UK firms, JLR doesn’t need to have manufacturing here, it doesn’t need to use UK parts suppliers. JLR are losing (according to Today’s two different guests this morning) between £50m and “hundreds of millions” per week.
As we are seeing with the life sciences industry, if you make the financial environment trickier for companies, especially global companies, they actually do vote with their feet.
You do realise that the Lifesciences companies are currently in the middle of a negotiation on the NHS rebate? They had a tough meeting with Reeves (not only was she was inflexible but she was shouty and ill-prepared). And then all these coordinated announcements (not actions) are made as a way to put pressure on them
Absolutely but it doesn’t change the point that companies have options to be in the UK or not and if you make it unviable or unwelcoming then they can leave, it might damage them to some extent but it will also damage the country.
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
I do wonder how many people who want to see Tesla fail were also repeating Jimmy Kimmel’s words about loads of people losing their jobs because of a reaction to what someone has said.
No great fan of Musk but glee over Tesla crapping out and anger over Kimmel production crew losing jobs would be a little hypocritical.
I don't think I've seen anyone repeating Kimmel's words about loads of people losing their jobs.
Your post is a bit of a strawman: I do no care about Tesla in itself. They're a company that's done some amazing things, but which has a f'load of technical debt and is led by a really nasty man who is calling for chaos in this country. He gets most of his power from Tesla, and a good way of getting him to fail is for Tesla to become less powerful.
If Tesla was run by someone else, and Musk had no influence over it and no shares in it, I might be cheering them along. Still concerned about the technical debt, though...
What is 'technical debt'?
Technical debt is all the stuff you should have done but didn’t because you ran out of time/money/kit/warm bodies/sanity.
Documentation is the classic one. Keeping on top of upgrades for code libraries or for your development environment are other forms of tech debt.
That's the sense I know, but I think JJ was using it in a somewhat different sense.
It's a slightly wooly term. In the case above it means making decisions that are cheap and quick now, but are much more costly to fix later. An example might be using a cheap capacitor which might cause product failures that will have to be corrected. Or putting in some code that works for the moment, but which you know will have to be reworked later.
Or, in Tesla's case, making vast promises about their FSD tech that may not be deliverable, especially with their camera-only system.
Yeah, I know the term best with reference to, for example, copying and pasting a bunch of code in order to get a new version out the door fast, but knowing that it needs to be properly refactored at some point to avoid future issues. It's debt because it's stuff that still needs doing even though the product (in its current state) is already delivered. You can run up technical debt in the short term to get a quick result, but it needs to be paid back afterwards (in the form of development work) to maintain future productivity.
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
I do wonder how many people who want to see Tesla fail were also repeating Jimmy Kimmel’s words about loads of people losing their jobs because of a reaction to what someone has said.
No great fan of Musk but glee over Tesla crapping out and anger over Kimmel production crew losing jobs would be a little hypocritical.
I don't think I've seen anyone repeating Kimmel's words about loads of people losing their jobs.
Your post is a bit of a strawman: I do no care about Tesla in itself. They're a company that's done some amazing things, but which has a f'load of technical debt and is led by a really nasty man who is calling for chaos in this country. He gets most of his power from Tesla, and a good way of getting him to fail is for Tesla to become less powerful.
If Tesla was run by someone else, and Musk had no influence over it and no shares in it, I might be cheering them along. Still concerned about the technical debt, though...
What is 'technical debt'?
In this case, promising things that have not been developed yet, and may not be able to be delivered in any meaningful timespan. Promising things that will require resources to develop and make that you will not have available.
Example of the former is FSD/Autopilot, which is *far* from what he promised for 2017, and may not be possible with the tech they're building into the cars. An example of the latter is the Roadster 2; promised for many years with loads of expensive deposits taken, yet still does not exist.
ChayGPT when asked 'Is Tesla's FSD safer than human drivers?' "Tentative conclusion: Is FSD safer overall?
Given what we know:
In certain contexts (highways, well marked roads, good weather, etc.), Tesla’s Autopilot / FSD likely does reduce the risk compared to average human driving. The data supports that in many cases, especially for more severe crashes, there's a measurable benefit.
However, it's not yet clear that FSD is universally safer than human drivers in all conditions, especially in complex or unpredictable driving scenarios (urban driving, intersections, poor visibility, pedestrians & cyclists, etc.), or when driver oversight is poor.
Also, because of limitations in data reporting, potential biases in which miles/modes are counted, and the level of human responsibility still required, the “safety advantage” needs to be understood with nuance—not as a blanket replacement of human judgment, but more like an assist that sometimes is much better than human, sometimes less so, depending on the situation."
Europe turning its back on Musk - Tesla sales down 43% year on year in first eight months of 2025. Meanwhile sales of Chinese BYD cars rocketing - notice them a lot in Dublin, not so much in the UK. Full details here in Guardian business blog.
It seems about half the Teslas in London have the "I bought this car before Elon went crazy" sticker.
Musk is odd. He's massively into space travel, going to Mars and beyond, interplanetary exploration/colonisation, really big picture stuff, can't get bigger, and people like that usually have an affectionate uplifting perspective on humanity. Eg those astronauts you hear about who have gazed back at our little blue orb from up there and marvelled at the wonder of it, our one and only precious home populated by billions of human beings whose essential similarity and kinship dwarfs all differences and in particular makes obsessing about things like 'race' seem utterly ridiculous. Yet Musk, in his politics, is the opposite of this. He does obsess about things like 'race. His politics in general is ugly and mean and small-minded. It doesn't scan for me. Something's gone awry with the brain chemistry.
Before Musk went weird for Trump I was very supportive of Tesla. "Tesla's mission statement is "to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy," reflecting its commitment to promoting renewable energy solutions and reducing reliance on fossil fuels." So why would he support someone who "digs coal", hates renewables and want to "dig baby dig"? Biden ignored Tesla when he held an electric car meeting, maybe it's personal and about money (taxes)? I still think that Tesla is an overall good, the switchover to electric would have taken much longer without it.
This is the point that boggles my tiny mind - why is Musk so attached to the political movement who despises his mission for humanity?
Its bad for business if nothing else, but I then get attacked by the Musk simps who think I'm pitching for the opposition because I ask questions...
IMV because he doesn't really have a mission for humanity. He's always known that people like those who have big dreams, and so you pick dreams that are really expansive and really far out. If enough people buy into your really big dream, they'll defend you and allow you to get on with whatever you really do want to do today. And if it is against that dream, you just say: "It's all part of the plan!"
This is bullish from Zelensky. He seems confident of receiving additional weapons from Trump. Let's hope it's not misplaced.
An Axios journalist asked what those working in the Kremlin should know after an attack on Kyiv’s government building. Zelensky answered plainly: "first, know where your bomb shelters are. If you do not stop the war, you will need them."
I wonder if it’ll start to tighten again next spring as the world approaches next year’s Taiwan invasion season?
Supposedly the Chinese are committed to sustaining Russia's war so that it distracts the US from the Pacific. The obvious corollary is that a Ukrainian victory over Russia frees the US to concentrate on China.
If Zelensky has managed to convince Trump that a Ukrainian victory is an "America First" interest, then perhaps @Sandpit will be due a few apologies in the coming months?
Though clearly I am allowing my inherent optimism to run away from me with that.
We’ll see, I’m also an inherent optimist.
I’ve not been a fan of Trump’s approach to the Ukraine war so far, but can understand where he’s coming from in his approach.
It’s now clear that that approach isn’t working, that Putin has no intention of ending the war, but also that the whole Western world is behind Ukraine winning the war irrespective of what happens between Washington and Moscow.
Trump wants his peace prize, and he now realises that this happens from being unequivocally on the Ukranian side.
Pokrvosk is looking like Stalingrad. The place where it becomes clear that the aggressor’s campaign has culminated.
Comments
Manchester should be a Green hold
Ashford probably goes Reform or possibly Conservative but i wouldnt rule out Green hold (least likely of the three options though for me)
So what the attackers do is go after the infrastructure - the applications the data. There’s always tons of custom setup, little scripts that dev ops have written etc.
So trash that and it’s build again from scratch.
This is why the British Library is still partially down.
Which is why “configuration as data” is a thing. As is imaging your servers - a photocopy of everything. Rather than just the data. But the restores are not simple, even then.
Challenged on who was taking the swans and carp from the parks, he said: “People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so.”
Pressed on whether it was eastern Europeans, Mr Farage said: “So I believe.”
...
Earlier this year, the campaign group Turning Point UK shared a video claiming to show an RSPCA worker supposedly catching migrants cooking an unknown bird.
Another video shared by the pressure group was debunked after it emerged the swan in the clip was in fact being rescued by a volunteer with the Swan Sanctuary.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims that the Queen’s swans were being stolen and eaten by asylum seekers.
But the force later said there was no evidence of asylum seekers or eastern Europeans being responsible for a reported decline in the swan population, with no arrests being made.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/24/farage-claims-migrants-eating-swans-royal-parks/
$ openssl s_client -connect politicalbetting.com:443 < /dev/null | openssl x509 -text |head
depth=2 C = US, ST = New Jersey, L = Jersey City, O = The USERTRUST Network, CN = USERTrust RSA Certification Authority
verify return:1
depth=1 C = GB, ST = Greater Manchester, L = Salford, O = Sectigo Limited, CN = Sectigo RSA Domain Validation Secure Server CA
verify return:1
depth=0 CN = *.politicalbetting.com
verify error:num=10:certificate has expired
notAfter=Mar 3 23:59:59 2025 GMT
Paging @rcs1000
(I am something of an ignoramus in these matters, unlike quite a large number of PBers.)
And I get that it's not "simple', but it must be at least an order of magnitude easier than rebuilding from scratch, like the British Library ?
The other swan decided it didn't like the area any more and flew off. J
Just hoping another pair take a liking to our river again soon.
Why does the FT always choose the most bizarre picture of Farage. It is so childish.
“PETA has received no credible reports that anyone in Britain is eating swans.” So it has received reports, then?
But mainly on this one they are debunking.
Also, Rachel Reeves is writing subsidy cheques to American and Chinese electric car makers. Still, I'm sure the government knows what it's doing.
He truly is the wannabe Britain Trump, with his master's stories of Latino immigrants eating cats and dogs.
Trump and Farage are masters of this.
https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2025/0925/1535249-china-climate-change/
Lol. THE KING IN THE NORTH!
https://x.com/visionergeo/status/1971078059282538502
Oh well, sh!t happens when you start a war you can’t win.
And then you’ve got to keep it in sync - but not in sync enough that any breach would gut your secondary platform along with your primary platform. And even then you’d probably still be vulnerable to certain supply chain attacks.
If this is peak Reform, and we dont know that yet, how much unwind in their polling we get before the next set of elections will have a big say in the final results in May
3 different parties have led the last 3 polls in Senedd opinion polling (going by wikipedia). My guess would be any Reform unwind would not lump back in with the Tories or Labour monolithically, but others will be better informed than me
I sense the paracetamol stuff is a claim too far for a lot of people, seen by the amount of health professionals putting out clips on social media to dissipate scare stories.
Reform seem to be more an anti establishment rabble, putting out claims and counter arguments they don't need to, in order to attract attention. Can't they sit down and form coherent policy? How will they deal with migration?
When it comes down to who to vote for, a working class man eats food, not flags, and it's who he can trust to help him put food on the table which will win the next election. Reform have more chance of retaining the pension age vote
Definitely sense a ratcheting up in attacks on Reform from Labour and other parties this week, Farage is not going to go away if you ignore him
If the swan killers were rich Tories you'd be all over this like white on rice, rather than this sudden laissez faire attitude.
https://x.com/gerashchenko_en/status/1970895791209197611
The Home Office is investigating DG Usama, who claimed his native country was too dangerous but enjoyed a sightseeing trip there last summer" (£)
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/afghan-refugee-asylum-returned-holiday-zcz62c60l
Reforms problem is they are very unlikely to do as well in May as in May 2024 - they will make progress in London but probably be just 'in the mix' and not dominant. They could undershoots at Holyrood and come 4th in seats on a poorish night and if they don't form the givernment at the Senedd then any 'momentum' will be district councils and mayors - but that could be lost in a 'surge fading' narrative.
Might be a case of too much, too soon
Time will tell
It’s not so much of a nudge-nudge as being outwardly provocative and antagonistic.
No matter one’s views on Starmer, it is a bit unseemly to be so openly critical of a party colleague at a sensitive time.
He might succeed for all I know, but the bad blood that will be generated won’t help the party in the long run, I predict.
The Damp King of the North.
(Cod Orkney accent for effect).
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/mar/19/arts.environment
I still don’t understand what the hell happened at the British Library, I’m thinking it must have been some old in-house system for which the source code was lost and couldn’t be rebuilt. Always keep offline backups of stuff like that.
Mans man
Now, who would want the people of UK to turn against Ukrainian refugees?
One is opportunism. If he really felt he was the right person to lead Labour and be PM he should and would have bothered to take the steps to become an MP in 2024.
The second is his basic stance. he presents as typically what is wrong with most Labour MPs. Disproportionately interested in the state spending even more money, especially on people who might vote Labour; and disproportionately uninterested in how the state gets to have all that money to spend in the first place. The rhetoric is always the same: the money raised comes from somewhere and someone else.
If Zelensky has managed to convince Trump that a Ukrainian victory is an "America First" interest, then perhaps @Sandpit will be due a few apologies in the coming months?
Though clearly I am allowing my inherent optimism to run away from me with that.
A copy/paste of the production servers won’t, generally work.
You might end up doing all the work they are doing now at the British Library. But before the disaster.
Anand Menon
@anandmenon.bsky.social
After years of making the running on immigration, Farage may this week have handed the initiative back to his opponents'.
@robfordmancs.bsky.social for @ukandeu.bsky.social on the unpopularity of Reform's proposals on ILR ukandeu.ac.uk/reforms-radi...
https://bsky.app/profile/anandmenon.bsky.social/post/3lznkqflrlc25
"Tesla's mission statement is "to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy," reflecting its commitment to promoting renewable energy solutions and reducing reliance on fossil fuels."
So why would he support someone who "digs coal", hates renewables and want to "dig baby dig"? Biden ignored Tesla when he held an electric car meeting, maybe it's personal and about money (taxes)?
I still think that Tesla is an overall good, the switchover to electric would have taken much longer without it.
It won't happen in time for him to escape unless he gets a move on with his SpaceX. Unless of course he can crack that 'eternal life' thing that all the billionaires seem to be beavering away on these days.
If there was to be real momentum, Farage would want to secure a few more defections - past MPs, people who used to be important and now Lords don't cut through as much
It's a long way off but I can see them 3rd (or worse) at Holyrood, once the debates get going the public get to see a different side. A little over 7 months to go, and as far as I can see still no Reform candidates for Scottish parliament selected
The biggest question is, when do they peak? if Farage goes, I doubt they'll poll anywhere near 30% across the UK
Documentation is the classic one. Keeping on top of upgrades for code libraries or for your development environment are other forms of tech debt.
https://unherd.com/newsroom/andy-burnhams-manchesterism-is-a-growing-threat-to-starmer/
FWIW, unsurprisingly, I am quite a fan of Manchesterism. I'm no fan of the Labour Party, but I think the Manchester Labour Party has done a tremendous job this last 30-odd years. The approach of 'we advance the interests of the common man - but those interests are best served by bringing investment to the city' has paid far more dividends than our neighbour's approach of 'it's not fair - give us some money'.
I still think Andy Burnham, while he thinks he is in the centre ground, doesn't really understand quite how far to the left along the identarian spectrum he is. As the article says, perhaps that will change when (if) he talks to the country rather than the Labour party.
It doesn't address TSE's perfectly reasonable question of the mechanics by which AB as PM might actually happen though!
Example of the former is FSD/Autopilot, which is *far* from what he promised for 2017, and may not be possible with the tech they're building into the cars. An example of the latter is the Roadster 2; promised for many years with loads of expensive deposits taken, yet still does not exist.
If the narrative becomes "How Reform will fix immigration?" it will be a narrow victory.
If the narrative becomes "How Reform will run the country?" it will be a narrow loss.
I’ve not been a fan of Trump’s approach to the Ukraine war so far, but can understand where he’s coming from in his approach.
It’s now clear that that approach isn’t working, that Putin has no intention of ending the war, but also that the whole Western world is behind Ukraine winning the war irrespective of what happens between Washington and Moscow.
Trump wants his peace prize, and he now realises that this happens from being unequivocally on the Ukranian side.
Got to say I really disliked the policy on ILR, but I wasn't going to vote Reform anyway.
Its bad for business if nothing else, but I then get attacked by the Musk simps who think I'm pitching for the opposition because I ask questions...
Or, in Tesla's case, making vast promises about their FSD tech that may not be deliverable, especially with their camera-only system.
Labour were polling in the 40s and (a little earlier) 50s right up to actual voting time. 'Im super pissed off' becomes 'but not that super pissed off' for some when a vote looms.
Reform are performing close to polling expectations in local by elections but on 25% turnouts. The 25 to 35% who will turn out at a GE on top are, I think, more likely to be Uniparty types than burn it downers - they are already registering their annoyance every chance they get. Ergo Refirm drift back in a campaign just like Labour did
"Tentative conclusion: Is FSD safer overall?
Given what we know:
In certain contexts (highways, well marked roads, good weather, etc.), Tesla’s Autopilot / FSD likely does reduce the risk compared to average human driving. The data supports that in many cases, especially for more severe crashes, there's a measurable benefit.
However, it's not yet clear that FSD is universally safer than human drivers in all conditions, especially in complex or unpredictable driving scenarios (urban driving, intersections, poor visibility, pedestrians & cyclists, etc.), or when driver oversight is poor.
Also, because of limitations in data reporting, potential biases in which miles/modes are counted, and the level of human responsibility still required, the “safety advantage” needs to be understood with nuance—not as a blanket replacement of human judgment, but more like an assist that sometimes is much better than human, sometimes less so, depending on the situation."
I fear another re-set !