Unfortunately the truth is that it's very easy for the rich to silence those who dare to stand up to them. It's not even anything that new - Melbourne, Lloyd George and Grafton all spring to mind. It should be becoming more difficult in the age of Twitter but with Twitter owned by one of the worst offenders in this regard it isn't.
It doesn't even need to be the rich, or positions that make them especially powerful - I could name two former school heads in Staffordshire who were both sacked for multiple criminal offences including against children but have never faced prosecution despite multiple whistleblowing attempts. Indeed, one is still working for OFSTED (and still committing safeguarding breaches) while the other runs his own consultancy business.
How does one climb the greasy pole?
In theory, being genuinely good at whatever one's nominal role is, and that certainly helps. But there's also a chunk of wanting to climb the greasy pole and having generic greasy-pole-climbing skills. Those arts are dark at the best of times and end up in the sort of behaviours we're lamenting here.
But as long as there are greasy poles to climb, and sinful men and women with a desire to climb them, we're kind of stuck. The nearest I have to an answer is to distribute power more- have more but shorter poles. But ardent pole-climbers would hate that almost as much as they hate scrutiny of their pole-climbing methods.
My first head of department:
‘It’s not the good ones that get to the top. It’s the ambitious ones.’
In a way I am reminded of the first series of The Apprentice. Never watched it but apparently the people on it were moderately good at doing the tasks, made money and getting fired was a bit harsh on whoever had to go. (The was a skit on Mitchell and Webb about it). Later series is populated by people who believe that they are successful, clever, talented people, but are in fact morons. And the show is much more entertaining for it.
I think very often in organisations there are a lot of good people, doing a good job and a lot of them are not that bothered about climbing the pole. I suspect I am one of them - I'm a senior lecturer at a decent Uni but won't make prof and have no desire to lead a department. There are however others around who DO want to climb, and they are not always the best for the role...
Which is why we should proactively encourage the good ones to seek promotion.
turbotubbs, think about going for professor!
I am amused that I have a vastly better publication record than our current HoD. But I also have a 3 year old and life with him is more important than writing grant proposals right now, which is the main barrier to my elevation!
It took me a while in academia to understand that grant income trumped all else (at least at our uni). The promotion criteria did not make it explicit, but when I got a fairly competitive fellowship I was immediately urged to go for promotion, which I got, even though I thought my publication record was a bit light (I'd changed fields and didn't have a lot in my new field at the time).
This, of course, makes perfect sense if you view the purpose of a university researcher primarily to generate income for the uni (and it's not a view I particularly argue with, but is not one that is said out loud very much). When I joined, a well respected professor in the department had never been PI on a research grant - I don't think that would be possible as a career now.
Yes, for most of my academic career its been obvious that grant money is the main/only measure of success. Now if you look at the promotion criteria that might not be fully obvious, as there are lots of other things looked at (membership on committees, teaching roles, conferences, publications etc) but really it boils down to cash. If you want to be a prof you need to be bringing in multi million pound grants and leading decent size research groups.
That’s true to a degree, but not always. Promotion committees sometimes look more broadly, and I think more of them are moving in that direction. I got promoted to professor off the back of good publications, lots of collaborative work, good teaching and some knowledge transfer work, without having being PI on multi-million pound grants and without leading a research group.
Good to hear. I think it's more that if you're bringing in the money then you can largely forget the rest. That's logical enough, if you're bringing in money to support a decent team (and uni overheads) then it makes sense to pay you whatever is supported by that income. With largely rigid pay scales below prof, that means prof - and if the current uni won't make that leap, others will offer the position.
It does, however, means that some profs are by no means the experts you would expect in their notional fields. Many are, of course, and some get there more slowly through sustained good academic output.
It used to be that half my department’s income was from research and half was from teaching. It’s now two thirds from teaching and rising. That reflects national trends. I encourage staff going for promotion who make significant teaching contributions to point out that they’re the ones bringing in the money these days!
My wife spent the war years in Wick and Orkney and have family there
Indeed it was the port of shelter we ran to when I was on a Lossiemouth fishing boat mid way to Norway when a storm broke out
Never were 'harbour lights' more welcome
Well Wick didn’t deserve Leon or people smugglers either, but evidently for Mr Simon it’s a far off place of which he knows little, and gives even less of a toss about. Time for a little north of Scotland reeducation.
What? Not content with bad-mouthing Jewish journalists, Josh Simon has also been bad-mouthing Wick?
Tbh, though, Wick: although I haven't been since 1992, I remember it as being pretty bleak.
(Though I have a minor affection for it because it was one of the destinations you had to reach in the board game "Great Game of Britain", at least on the steam train side of the board - though I preferred the obverse side set in the modern era, where the closest you might get was Thurso, and then only reluctantly ("You are tired of the crowds: go to John o Groats and stay there for two turns. Station: THURSO")
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
I wonder what proportion would agree that Andrew should be hanged,
Probably above 50%.
He might take the Epstein Checkout....
It's unlikely Epstein checked himself out. Would his assassins do the same for Andrew? He is probably less of a threat, as long as he doesn't start singing, and one imagines he'd be a little less easy to access.
So unless he's a DIY man, he's going to be around for a while.
Makerfield is just about the worst place I could think of for a Labour by election. Absolute nailed on Reform gain. Even Burnham wouldn't want it.
Is there a possibility of a by-election there? I hadn't heard of one.
The incumbent, Josh Simons, is implicated in the Labour Together scandal about digging dirt on hostile journalists. Presumably he won't be resigning, but can't his electors force him out through some sort of petition? But would they be likely to do so over this sort of issue? I mean... journalists?
Petitions are only triggered in limited circumstances:
Any custodial prison sentence, even if suspended. (A sentence longer than one year would lead to automatic removal under the Representation of the People Act 1981.)
A conviction for providing false or misleading expenses claims.
Suspension from the House of at least 10 sitting days or 14 calendar days, following a report by "any committee of the House of Commons concerned with the standards of conduct of individual members of that House" (typically the Commons Select Committee on Standards).
Yes. It takes quite a bit to force an MP out. I think we got quite used to by elections in the last parliament because it was clear a “change election” was coming up and there wasn’t as much incentive to hang around.
PB can get a bit excited about by-election prospects. I'm still waiting for UKIP to triumph in the Telford by-election, caused because the Tory incumbent was forced to resign after being horrid to one of her servants.
Makerfield is just about the worst place I could think of for a Labour by election. Absolute nailed on Reform gain. Even Burnham wouldn't want it.
Is there a possibility of a by-election there? I hadn't heard of one.
The incumbent, Josh Simons, is implicated in the Labour Together scandal about digging dirt on hostile journalists. Presumably he won't be resigning, but can't his electors force him out through some sort of petition? But would they be likely to do so over this sort of issue? I mean... journalists?
Petitions are only triggered in limited circumstances:
Any custodial prison sentence, even if suspended. (A sentence longer than one year would lead to automatic removal under the Representation of the People Act 1981.)
A conviction for providing false or misleading expenses claims.
Suspension from the House of at least 10 sitting days or 14 calendar days, following a report by "any committee of the House of Commons concerned with the standards of conduct of individual members of that House" (typically the Commons Select Committee on Standards).
Yes. It takes quite a bit to force an MP out. I think we got quite used to by elections in the last parliament because it was clear a “change election” was coming up and there wasn’t as much incentive to hang around.
PB can get a bit excited about by-election prospects. I'm still waiting for UKIP to triumph in the Telford by-election, caused because the Tory incumbent was forced to resign after being horrid to one of her servants.
Boris winning Northallerton after Rishi goes to Cali was a fun by election
For someone who considers themselves the most moral person on the planet you are prertty good at throwing unfounded accusations around like confetti. I am surprised PB gives you this pulpit.
I was waiting for the standard @Roger objection. Vague, but “I don’t like it”.
What unfounded accusations, @Roger? There’s oceans of court cases, tribunal, researched stories that illustrate every single point @Cyclefree is making.
Or is it that you feel we should owe a certain deference to The Right People?
Well I'm glad I didn't keep you waiting too long. You now have the rest of the day to do someting productive. If it gives you a warm feeling to read reams of 'holier-than-thou' scribbles I'm sure you can apply for a back catalogue. In my experience not everyone's motives are suspect nor is everyone malign.
So NO examples then.
One feature of Cyclefree's complaints about sex is that she denies women agency. Sex workers are sluts but women are chaste so they must have been trafficked and forced into degrading themselves. Some have, of course, but for many women, sex for money is a perfectly rational trade. More subtly, though, sometimes the trade is not sex for money but sex for access to power or fame, including the most talented, richest, or most powerful men on the planet. I don't suppose Monica Lewinski was paid in luncheon vouchers but she did get to rub shoulders (!) with the leader of the free world.
This is why we need to be careful about the age of consent, of course, and why in recent years we have added further limits where there are power imbalances.
Then we have medical scandals like the Bristol heart cases, and more recently Lucy Letby. If we closed every unit with a below-par survival rate in a month, we'd have no hospitals left. Look at the peaks and troughs in economic statistics, for instance, even in today's news. On the other hand, if we wait for certainty, many will die or be maimed who could and should have been saved.
But I'm not sure acting on rumour, even when (especially when) that rumour coincides with one's own prejudice, is the answer.
I have never ever said that some women are sluts and others are chaste or denied women agency. And I don't believe that. But a woman who is coerced - for a variety of reasons - does not really have agency in any meaningful sense. It is worth reading what many ex-prostitutes write about the reality of what they do and how they are treated. What happens to them is not consensual sex in any sense of the term. It is abuse - often violent. I feel sympathy for them. They are my sisters not some underclass and I would like to see them much better treated and spoken about than they are and not treated in the appalling way they are by men.
I wonder what proportion would agree that Andrew should be hanged,
Probably above 50%.
Royals were beheaded as a courtesy in the past, rather than hanging etc.
Of course AMW is no longer a Royal so perhaps has lost that perk.
Apparently, shortly before the death penalty in the UK was finally abolished in 1998 (for treason, piracy etc) the law was changed so that beheading could be substituted for hanging. Presumably the Home Office no longer kept a trained hangman on the books. Lack of a trained headsman might be an equal issue, but I presume a guillotine would be used.
For someone who considers themselves the most moral person on the planet you are prertty good at throwing unfounded accusations around like confetti. I am surprised PB gives you this pulpit.
I was waiting for the standard @Roger objection. Vague, but “I don’t like it”.
What unfounded accusations, @Roger? There’s oceans of court cases, tribunal, researched stories that illustrate every single point @Cyclefree is making.
Or is it that you feel we should owe a certain deference to The Right People?
Well I'm glad I didn't keep you waiting too long. You now have the rest of the day to do someting productive. If it gives you a warm feeling to read reams of 'holier-than-thou' scribbles I'm sure you can apply for a back catalogue. In my experience not everyone's motives are suspect nor is everyone malign.
So NO examples then.
One feature of Cyclefree's complaints about sex is that she denies women agency. Sex workers are sluts but women are chaste so they must have been trafficked and forced into degrading themselves. Some have, of course, but for many women, sex for money is a perfectly rational trade. More subtly, though, sometimes the trade is not sex for money but sex for access to power or fame, including the most talented, richest, or most powerful men on the planet. I don't suppose Monica Lewinski was paid in luncheon vouchers but she did get to rub shoulders (!) with the leader of the free world.
This is why we need to be careful about the age of consent, of course, and why in recent years we have added further limits where there are power imbalances.
Then we have medical scandals like the Bristol heart cases, and more recently Lucy Letby. If we closed every unit with a below-par survival rate in a month, we'd have no hospitals left. Look at the peaks and troughs in economic statistics, for instance, even in today's news. On the other hand, if we wait for certainty, many will die or be maimed who could and should have been saved.
But I'm not sure acting on rumour, even when (especially when) that rumour coincides with one's own prejudice, is the answer.
I have never ever said that some women are sluts and others are chaste or denied women agency. And I don't believe that. But a woman who is coerced - for a variety of reasons - does not really have agency in any meaningful sense. It is worth reading what many ex-prostitutes write about the reality of what they do and how they are treated. What happens to them is not consensual sex in any sense of the term. It is abuse - often violent. I feel sympathy for them. They are my sisters not some underclass and I would like to see them much better treated and spoken about than they are and not treated in the appalling way they are by men.
At a Freshers' Induction in Oxford about 10 years ago, there was a sharp intake of breath when the College Chaplain said that he didn't think "consent" was a suitable test for sexual encounters. He then went on to say that he expected "exuberant enthusiasm" instead. I think he might have had a point.
I wonder what proportion would agree that Andrew should be hanged,
Probably above 50%.
He might take the Epstein Checkout....
It's unlikely Epstein checked himself out. Would his assassins do the same for Andrew? He is probably less of a threat, as long as he doesn't start singing, and one imagines he'd be a little less easy to access.
So unless he's a DIY man, he's going to be around for a while.
The problem the rich and powerful have with AMW, of course, is that he's stupid. Very stupid. Very very very stupid. Like, dafter than a bag of spanners, but without the charm or from-within-a-paper-bag-navigational ability. So who knows what he'll do if left alone.
I wonder what proportion would agree that Andrew should be hanged,
Probably above 50%.
He might take the Epstein Checkout....
It's unlikely Epstein checked himself out. Would his assassins do the same for Andrew? He is probably less of a threat, as long as he doesn't start singing, and one imagines he'd be a little less easy to access.
So unless he's a DIY man, he's going to be around for a while.
The problem the rich and powerful have with AMW, of course, is that he's stupid. Very stupid. Very very very stupid. Like, dafter than a bag of spanners,. but without the charm or from-within-a-paper-bag-navigational ability. So who knows what he'll do if left alone.
That also means that despite his high-profile, he probably didn't have much of a clue about what was going on.
For someone who considers themselves the most moral person on the planet you are prertty good at throwing unfounded accusations around like confetti. I am surprised PB gives you this pulpit.
I was waiting for the standard @Roger objection. Vague, but “I don’t like it”.
What unfounded accusations, @Roger? There’s oceans of court cases, tribunal, researched stories that illustrate every single point @Cyclefree is making.
Or is it that you feel we should owe a certain deference to The Right People?
Well I'm glad I didn't keep you waiting too long. You now have the rest of the day to do someting productive. If it gives you a warm feeling to read reams of 'holier-than-thou' scribbles I'm sure you can apply for a back catalogue. In my experience not everyone's motives are suspect nor is everyone malign.
So NO examples then.
One feature of Cyclefree's complaints about sex is that she denies women agency. Sex workers are sluts but women are chaste so they must have been trafficked and forced into degrading themselves. Some have, of course, but for many women, sex for money is a perfectly rational trade. More subtly, though, sometimes the trade is not sex for money but sex for access to power or fame, including the most talented, richest, or most powerful men on the planet. I don't suppose Monica Lewinski was paid in luncheon vouchers but she did get to rub shoulders (!) with the leader of the free world.
This is why we need to be careful about the age of consent, of course, and why in recent years we have added further limits where there are power imbalances.
Then we have medical scandals like the Bristol heart cases, and more recently Lucy Letby. If we closed every unit with a below-par survival rate in a month, we'd have no hospitals left. Look at the peaks and troughs in economic statistics, for instance, even in today's news. On the other hand, if we wait for certainty, many will die or be maimed who could and should have been saved.
But I'm not sure acting on rumour, even when (especially when) that rumour coincides with one's own prejudice, is the answer.
I have never ever said that some women are sluts and others are chaste or denied women agency. And I don't believe that. But a woman who is coerced - for a variety of reasons - does not really have agency in any meaningful sense. It is worth reading what many ex-prostitutes write about the reality of what they do and how they are treated. What happens to them is not consensual sex in any sense of the term. It is abuse - often violent. I feel sympathy for them. They are my sisters not some underclass and I would like to see them much better treated and spoken about than they are and not treated in the appalling way they are by men.
Your point about the inequality of the law is a decent one, too. Either prostitution should be legal for both (consenting) parties, or illegal for both.
I wonder what proportion would agree that Andrew should be hanged,
Probably above 50%.
He might take the Epstein Checkout....
It's unlikely Epstein checked himself out. Would his assassins do the same for Andrew? He is probably less of a threat, as long as he doesn't start singing, and one imagines he'd be a little less easy to access.
So unless he's a DIY man, he's going to be around for a while.
The problem the rich and powerful have with AMW, of course, is that he's stupid. Very stupid. Very very very stupid. Like, dafter than a bag of spanners, but without the charm or from-within-a-paper-bag-navigational ability. So who knows what he'll do if left alone.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
For someone who considers themselves the most moral person on the planet you are prertty good at throwing unfounded accusations around like confetti. I am surprised PB gives you this pulpit.
I was waiting for the standard @Roger objection. Vague, but “I don’t like it”.
What unfounded accusations, @Roger? There’s oceans of court cases, tribunal, researched stories that illustrate every single point @Cyclefree is making.
Or is it that you feel we should owe a certain deference to The Right People?
Well I'm glad I didn't keep you waiting too long. You now have the rest of the day to do someting productive. If it gives you a warm feeling to read reams of 'holier-than-thou' scribbles I'm sure you can apply for a back catalogue. In my experience not everyone's motives are suspect nor is everyone malign.
So NO examples then.
One feature of Cyclefree's complaints about sex is that she denies women agency. Sex workers are sluts but women are chaste so they must have been trafficked and forced into degrading themselves. Some have, of course, but for many women, sex for money is a perfectly rational trade. More subtly, though, sometimes the trade is not sex for money but sex for access to power or fame, including the most talented, richest, or most powerful men on the planet. I don't suppose Monica Lewinski was paid in luncheon vouchers but she did get to rub shoulders (!) with the leader of the free world.
This is why we need to be careful about the age of consent, of course, and why in recent years we have added further limits where there are power imbalances.
Then we have medical scandals like the Bristol heart cases, and more recently Lucy Letby. If we closed every unit with a below-par survival rate in a month, we'd have no hospitals left. Look at the peaks and troughs in economic statistics, for instance, even in today's news. On the other hand, if we wait for certainty, many will die or be maimed who could and should have been saved.
But I'm not sure acting on rumour, even when (especially when) that rumour coincides with one's own prejudice, is the answer.
I have never ever said that some women are sluts and others are chaste or denied women agency. And I don't believe that. But a woman who is coerced - for a variety of reasons - does not really have agency in any meaningful sense. It is worth reading what many ex-prostitutes write about the reality of what they do and how they are treated. What happens to them is not consensual sex in any sense of the term. It is abuse - often violent. I feel sympathy for them. They are my sisters not some underclass and I would like to see them much better treated and spoken about than they are and not treated in the appalling way they are by men.
At a Freshers' Induction in Oxford about 10 years ago, there was a sharp intake of breath when the College Chaplain said that he didn't think "consent" was a suitable test for sexual encounters. He then went on to say that he expected "exuberant enthusiasm" instead. I think he might have had a point.
I wonder what proportion would agree that Andrew should be hanged,
Probably above 50%.
Royals were beheaded as a courtesy in the past, rather than hanging etc.
Of course AMW is no longer a Royal so perhaps has lost that perk.
Apparently, shortly before the death penalty in the UK was finally abolished in 1998 (for treason, piracy etc) the law was changed so that beheading could be substituted for hanging. Presumably the Home Office no longer kept a trained hangman on the books. Lack of a trained headsman might be an equal issue, but I presume a guillotine would be used.
A hanging carried out by a poorly trained hangman tends to result in decapitation.
I wonder what proportion would agree that Andrew should be hanged,
Probably above 50%.
He might take the Epstein Checkout....
It's unlikely Epstein checked himself out. Would his assassins do the same for Andrew? He is probably less of a threat, as long as he doesn't start singing, and one imagines he'd be a little less easy to access.
So unless he's a DIY man, he's going to be around for a while.
The problem the rich and powerful have with AMW, of course, is that he's stupid. Very stupid. Very very very stupid. Like, dafter than a bag of spanners, but without the charm or from-within-a-paper-bag-navigational ability. So who knows what he'll do if left alone.
You would not call him in your own defence unless you were equally stupid, for example.
I wonder what proportion would agree that Andrew should be hanged,
Probably above 50%.
Royals were beheaded as a courtesy in the past, rather than hanging etc.
Of course AMW is no longer a Royal so perhaps has lost that perk.
Apparently, shortly before the death penalty in the UK was finally abolished in 1998 (for treason, piracy etc) the law was changed so that beheading could be substituted for hanging. Presumably the Home Office no longer kept a trained hangman on the books. Lack of a trained headsman might be an equal issue, but I presume a guillotine would be used.
A hanging carried out by a poorly trained hangman tends to result in decapitation.
Didn’t that happen to some of Saddams Co accused/convicted ?
I think the world Cyclefree describes so well is likely to carry on in some form unless there is some remarkable transformation in the areas of human nature, sex, money, power, fame, and the imbalances of the law.
In particular Cyclefree's own point describes it. 'Not Brave Enough'. Drawing attention to certain truths requires courage, willingness to face loss, risk, the law's imbalances and sometimes other dangers.
I mention just one set of very particular imbalances. A lowly allegation maker will find it is open season on their character, prospects and person. The rich and powerful have the advantage of 'innocent until proved guilty', in criminal matters the advantage of 'beyond reasonable doubt', the advantage of being able to use the legal system to shut down little people and the advantage of a network of the powerful.
As long as 'telling truth to power' carries this degree of cost and imbalance, requiring that degree of courage, human nature tells us we have a problem.
I think we saw this in the Peggie vs NHS Fife tribunal. Its entirely irrelevant to whether woman should have a single sex changing room that she once shared some sub-Jim Davidson 'jokes' on WhatsApp. Yet now, on X, all the pro-trans posters portray Peggie, a nurse with 30 years on unblemished service, as a latter day Enoch Powell or Bernard Manning.
The NHS is notorious for going after every whistle-blower or internal complainant in this fashion. Occasionally some poor soul puts their head above the parapet & has their life destroyed by NHS management “pour encourager les autres”.
It’s all very well for Cyclefree to argue that people should simply be braver, but when you are part of a system that will cheerfully destroy your ability to work in your chosen career ever again, it (unsurprisingly) turns out that few people are willing to call out bad behaviour when the price of doing so is so very, very high.
You are quite right about the NHS.
But to answer your interesting point, I have spent much of my career establishing whistleblowing functions and investigating whistleblowing complaints. By the end a good half of my work related to such investigations. And it is precisely because we cannot rely on individual brave heroes that we need to establish really effective ways of allowing those complaints or issues to be raised and investigated in a way which does not require suicidal bravery by one individual.
It is not a matter of having a well written procedure. What you need above all is an effective investigations team stuffed by people with integrity and guts but above all people who are trustworthy and visible. I did investigations so I had a licence to ask questions others didn't. But the best thing I did by talking endlessly to everyone in the firm about my team's work and why it mattered was to give people a route to raise concerns without needing to put themselves in the firing line. They knew they could trust my team - to keep their confidences, to be professional, to protect them and, in the words of one "not to be afraid of anyone". Every time I did a talk I would get people coming to me or my team to raise issues. They knew the existence of my team gave them permission to speak up, to be a little bit brave but it also took the burden off them. We were a sort of lightning rod.
That is what the NHS and many other organisations need.
And then if you encourage people to raise issues early they are not crises to be managed but small problems which can be sorted, usually relatively easily without too much pain and without forcing people into horrible moral dilemmas.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
I wonder what proportion would agree that Andrew should be hanged,
Probably above 50%.
He might take the Epstein Checkout....
It's unlikely Epstein checked himself out. Would his assassins do the same for Andrew? He is probably less of a threat, as long as he doesn't start singing, and one imagines he'd be a little less easy to access.
So unless he's a DIY man, he's going to be around for a while.
The problem the rich and powerful have with AMW, of course, is that he's stupid. Very stupid. Very very very stupid. Like, dafter than a bag of spanners, but without the charm or from-within-a-paper-bag-navigational ability. So who knows what he'll do if left alone.
Run for President?
Trump has charm (or at least he did at times).
Andrew has never exhibited any charm so running for even local dog warden would be a waste of effort
Hi folks, @viewcode here. Some days ago, somebody on PB mentioned an aphorism about research required to rebut a point on the internet took ten times more time than it took to put it there in the first place. They called it "B___"s Law, where "B___" was a longish word beginning with "B". The AIs are unhelpful so can somebody recall it for me?
My wife spent the war years in Wick and Orkney and have family there
Indeed it was the port of shelter we ran to when I was on a Lossiemouth fishing boat mid way to Norway when a storm broke out
Never were 'harbour lights' more welcome
Well Wick didn’t deserve Leon or people smugglers either, but evidently for Mr Simon it’s a far off place of which he knows little, and gives even less of a toss about. Time for a little north of Scotland reeducation.
Not dissimilar to how he regards Makerfield.
During my forthcoming UnDictatorship, such people will be redeployed to Rockall, where they will be given a guaranteed lifetime role in building the Royal Navy base there.
Those who are of suitable disposition will be given large teaspoons, for digging.
Mr Trump is now apparently determined to decline support for the transfer of the islands to Mauritius, arguing that the transter would reduce the utility of the Diego Garcia airbase. It is hard to disagree with his assessment. The result is that Sir Keir is in a bind of his own making.
"International law" compels the Prime Minister to seek Mr Trump's approval to surrender the islands; "international law" compels him to surrender the islands; "international law" compels him to block the use of the British bases, enraging the White House in the process. This is government as farce.
It is hard to escape the notion that in Sir Keir's ideal world, the job of Prime Minister would be purely ceremonial. There would be little room for individual judgment or decision making. All acts of government would emerge fully formed from the duties and obligations of the legal system. As much as it may disappoint him, that is not the world we live in. It is high time Sir Keir realised as much.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Most adults aren't sufficiently interested to vote in local elections or even in, for example, the Senedd elections in Wales (47% turnout last time, and that's calculated on who was registered to vote and some adults fail to even do that).
Hi folks, @viewcode here. Some days ago, somebody on PB mentioned an aphorism about research required to rebut a point on the internet took ten times more time than it took to put it there in the first place. They called it "B___"s Law, where "B___" was a longish word beginning with "B". The AIs are unhelpful so can somebody recall it for me?
Hi folks, @viewcode here. Some days ago, somebody on PB mentioned an aphorism about research required to rebut a point on the internet took ten times more time than it took to put it there in the first place. They called it "B___"s Law, where "B___" was a longish word beginning with "B". The AIs are unhelpful so can somebody recall it for me?
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Dropping the voting age to 0 could be a low cost way to improve birth rates.
Hi folks, @viewcode here. Some days ago, somebody on PB mentioned an aphorism about research required to rebut a point on the internet took ten times more time than it took to put it there in the first place. They called it "B___"s Law, where "B___" was a longish word beginning with "B". The AIs are unhelpful so can somebody recall it for me?
...the vast majority of trans women (i.e. a man) who has kept his male genitalia. Most do, after all...
I had an argument with Cyclefree some years ago about whether that was true. Then the same week - possibly the same day - a trans woman performer on a TV show stripped off and waved their willy about. So I'm not overkeen on revisiting this statistic. But the following points remain true
We can't agree on the number of trans people
We can't agree on the definition of a trans person
We can work out the number of genital surgeries carried out by the NHS, but it's more difficult to work out the number of genital surgeries carried out by all surgeons in the UK, and it's damn nearly impossible to estimate the number of genital surgeries carried out worldwide on British residents.
(Plus there's the thorny problem of trans inward migration to/outward migration from the UK, but let's put that to one side for the moment)
So while I'm content to accept the argument that N trans women/biological male/MTF/whatevers have got a penis for a nontrivial value of N, more than that is a bit of a reach.
I think it true that only a minority of Trans-folk have had gender confirmation surgery, but at least part of this is access. Over recent years accessing drug treatments, living in the new gender role and access to surgery have all become much more difficult, then Trans-folk are stigmatised for not having surgery. Its a real Catch 22.
Of course there a % who never seek these things and simply cross dress.
It's worth remembering that surgery as a prerequisite for gender recognition was declared unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights some time ago. The court ruled that forcing people to have surgery which effectively castrates and sterilises them in order to get their gender recognised was, for obvious reasons, wrong.
That only emphasises the problem which is that the word trans encompasses everyone from those men who have had full surgery to those with dysphoria but live with it, cross-dressers, some only part-time, men with sexual fetishes and men who are simply sexual predators taking advantage. And there is no way of distinguishing between any of them. None of them have any business being in women only spaces.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Dropping the voting age to 0 could be a low cost way to improve birth rates.
Wouldn't the anti-abortion crowd want it dropped to minus 9 months?
I wonder what proportion would agree that Andrew should be hanged,
Probably above 50%.
He might take the Epstein Checkout....
It's unlikely Epstein checked himself out. Would his assassins do the same for Andrew? He is probably less of a threat, as long as he doesn't start singing, and one imagines he'd be a little less easy to access.
So unless he's a DIY man, he's going to be around for a while.
The problem the rich and powerful have with AMW, of course, is that he's stupid. Very stupid. Very very very stupid. Like, dafter than a bag of spanners, but without the charm or from-within-a-paper-bag-navigational ability. So who knows what he'll do if left alone.
You would not call him in your own defence unless you were equally stupid, for example.
Oh, I don’t know
If my defence was that “AMW is actually the guilty party”, getting him on the stand would sound like quite a good idea.
Makerfield is just about the worst place I could think of for a Labour by election. Absolute nailed on Reform gain. Even Burnham wouldn't want it.
Yep. Reform 50% plus. The question is, is there any other party that could pose the 'stop reform' option? It doesnt seem Green or Galloway adjacent, not trad LD and the Con vote was chunky but has gone Ref. So Lab lose but their vote holds up a little bit by default?
It's where I grew up and where my family still live. All of those points are correct. It's also by most measures the longest continuously held Labour seat in the UK. The only possibility is a genuinely local soft Left Indy running against the government. But not one who bangs on about Palestine. Even then.
I think Rupert Lowe's setup will do significant damage to Reform, perhaps by peeling off quit a number of their grass roots leaders.
There's chatter this morning about the possibility of Jeremy Clarkson perhaps coming on board.
(Rupes says that Clarkson's sidekick Caleb dumps Clarkson's shit on the Lowe doorstep.)
Makerfield is just about the worst place I could think of for a Labour by election. Absolute nailed on Reform gain. Even Burnham wouldn't want it.
Yep. Reform 50% plus. The question is, is there any other party that could pose the 'stop reform' option? It doesnt seem Green or Galloway adjacent, not trad LD and the Con vote was chunky but has gone Ref. So Lab lose but their vote holds up a little bit by default?
It's where I grew up and where my family still live. All of those points are correct. It's also by most measures the longest continuously held Labour seat in the UK. The only possibility is a genuinely local soft Left Indy running against the government. But not one who bangs on about Palestine. Even then.
I think Rupert Lowe's setup will do significant damage to Reform, perhaps by peeling off quit a number of their grass roots leaders.
There's chatter this morning about the possibility of Jeremy Clarkson perhaps coming on board.
(Rupes says that Clarkson's sidekick Caleb dumps Clarkson's shit on the Lowe doorstep.)
...the vast majority of trans women (i.e. a man) who has kept his male genitalia. Most do, after all...
I had an argument with Cyclefree some years ago about whether that was true. Then the same week - possibly the same day - a trans woman performer on a TV show stripped off and waved their willy about. So I'm not overkeen on revisiting this statistic. But the following points remain true
We can't agree on the number of trans people
We can't agree on the definition of a trans person
We can work out the number of genital surgeries carried out by the NHS, but it's more difficult to work out the number of genital surgeries carried out by all surgeons in the UK, and it's damn nearly impossible to estimate the number of genital surgeries carried out worldwide on British residents.
(Plus there's the thorny problem of trans inward migration to/outward migration from the UK, but let's put that to one side for the moment)
So while I'm content to accept the argument that N trans women/biological male/MTF/whatevers have got a penis for a nontrivial value of N, more than that is a bit of a reach.
I think it true that only a minority of Trans-folk have had gender confirmation surgery, but at least part of this is access. Over recent years accessing drug treatments, living in the new gender role and access to surgery have all become much more difficult, then Trans-folk are stigmatised for not having surgery. Its a real Catch 22.
Of course there a % who never seek these things and simply cross dress.
It's worth remembering that surgery as a prerequisite for gender recognition was declared unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights some time ago. The court ruled that forcing people to have surgery which effectively castrates and sterilises them in order to get their gender recognised was, for obvious reasons, wrong.
That only emphasises the problem which is that the word trans encompasses everyone from those who have had full surgery to those with dysphoria but live with it, cross-dressers, some only part-time, men with sexual fetishes and men who are simply sexual predators taking advantage. And there is no way of distinguishing between any of them. None of them have any business being in women only spaces.
Why do you say there is no way of distinguishing between any of them? Or why is that any different to the inability to distinguish between criminals and non-criminals more generally?
Mr Trump is now apparently determined to decline support for the transfer of the islands to Mauritius, arguing that the transter would reduce the utility of the Diego Garcia airbase. It is hard to disagree with his assessment. The result is that Sir Keir is in a bind of his own making.
"International law" compels the Prime Minister to seek Mr Trump's approval to surrender the islands; "international law" compels him to surrender the islands; "international law" compels him to block the use of the British bases, enraging the White House in the process. This is government as farce.
It is hard to escape the notion that in Sir Keir's ideal world, the job of Prime Minister would be purely ceremonial. There would be little room for individual judgment or decision making. All acts of government would emerge fully formed from the duties and obligations of the legal system. As much as it may disappoint him, that is not the world we live in. It is high time Sir Keir realised as much.
The last paragraph is where the Process Stare worshippers think we can (and should go).
Interesting the people who get extremely angry when you point out the non-linear problem.
Makerfield is just about the worst place I could think of for a Labour by election. Absolute nailed on Reform gain. Even Burnham wouldn't want it.
Yep. Reform 50% plus. The question is, is there any other party that could pose the 'stop reform' option? It doesnt seem Green or Galloway adjacent, not trad LD and the Con vote was chunky but has gone Ref. So Lab lose but their vote holds up a little bit by default?
It's where I grew up and where my family still live. All of those points are correct. It's also by most measures the longest continuously held Labour seat in the UK. The only possibility is a genuinely local soft Left Indy running against the government. But not one who bangs on about Palestine. Even then.
I think Rupert Lowe's setup will do significant damage to Reform, perhaps by peeling off quit a number of their grass roots leaders.
There's chatter this morning about the possibility of Jeremy Clarkson perhaps coming on board.
(Rupes says that Clarkson's sidekick Caleb dumps Clarkson's shit on the Lowe doorstep.)
Makerfield is just about the worst place I could think of for a Labour by election. Absolute nailed on Reform gain. Even Burnham wouldn't want it.
Yep. Reform 50% plus. The question is, is there any other party that could pose the 'stop reform' option? It doesnt seem Green or Galloway adjacent, not trad LD and the Con vote was chunky but has gone Ref. So Lab lose but their vote holds up a little bit by default?
It's where I grew up and where my family still live. All of those points are correct. It's also by most measures the longest continuously held Labour seat in the UK. The only possibility is a genuinely local soft Left Indy running against the government. But not one who bangs on about Palestine. Even then.
I think Rupert Lowe's setup will do significant damage to Reform, perhaps by peeling off quit a number of their grass roots leaders.
There's chatter this morning about the possibility of Jeremy Clarkson perhaps coming on board.
(Rupes says that Clarkson's sidekick Caleb dumps Clarkson's shit on the Lowe doorstep.)
Makerfield is just about the worst place I could think of for a Labour by election. Absolute nailed on Reform gain. Even Burnham wouldn't want it.
Yep. Reform 50% plus. The question is, is there any other party that could pose the 'stop reform' option? It doesnt seem Green or Galloway adjacent, not trad LD and the Con vote was chunky but has gone Ref. So Lab lose but their vote holds up a little bit by default?
It's where I grew up and where my family still live. All of those points are correct. It's also by most measures the longest continuously held Labour seat in the UK. The only possibility is a genuinely local soft Left Indy running against the government. But not one who bangs on about Palestine. Even then.
I think Rupert Lowe's setup will do significant damage to Reform, perhaps by peeling off quit a number of their grass roots leaders.
There's chatter this morning about the possibility of Jeremy Clarkson perhaps coming on board.
(Rupes says that Clarkson's sidekick Caleb dumps Clarkson's shit on the Lowe doorstep.)
Makerfield is just about the worst place I could think of for a Labour by election. Absolute nailed on Reform gain. Even Burnham wouldn't want it.
Yep. Reform 50% plus. The question is, is there any other party that could pose the 'stop reform' option? It doesnt seem Green or Galloway adjacent, not trad LD and the Con vote was chunky but has gone Ref. So Lab lose but their vote holds up a little bit by default?
It's where I grew up and where my family still live. All of those points are correct. It's also by most measures the longest continuously held Labour seat in the UK. The only possibility is a genuinely local soft Left Indy running against the government. But not one who bangs on about Palestine. Even then.
I think Rupert Lowe's setup will do significant damage to Reform, perhaps by peeling off quit a number of their grass roots leaders.
There's chatter this morning about the possibility of Jeremy Clarkson perhaps coming on board.
(Rupes says that Clarkson's sidekick Caleb dumps Clarkson's shit on the Lowe doorstep.)
Hi folks, @viewcode here. Some days ago, somebody on PB mentioned an aphorism about research required to rebut a point on the internet took ten times more time than it took to put it there in the first place. They called it "B___"s Law, where "B___" was a longish word beginning with "B". The AIs are unhelpful so can somebody recall it for me?
(and no, I'm not thinking of Cunningham's Law)
It's literally the first result if you google "research required to rebut a point on the internet took ten times more time than it took to put it there in the first place"
Makerfield is just about the worst place I could think of for a Labour by election. Absolute nailed on Reform gain. Even Burnham wouldn't want it.
Yep. Reform 50% plus. The question is, is there any other party that could pose the 'stop reform' option? It doesnt seem Green or Galloway adjacent, not trad LD and the Con vote was chunky but has gone Ref. So Lab lose but their vote holds up a little bit by default?
It's where I grew up and where my family still live. All of those points are correct. It's also by most measures the longest continuously held Labour seat in the UK. The only possibility is a genuinely local soft Left Indy running against the government. But not one who bangs on about Palestine. Even then.
I think Rupert Lowe's setup will do significant damage to Reform, perhaps by peeling off quit a number of their grass roots leaders.
There's chatter this morning about the possibility of Jeremy Clarkson perhaps coming on board.
(Rupes says that Clarkson's sidekick Caleb dumps Clarkson's shit on the Lowe doorstep.)
Makerfield is just about the worst place I could think of for a Labour by election. Absolute nailed on Reform gain. Even Burnham wouldn't want it.
Yep. Reform 50% plus. The question is, is there any other party that could pose the 'stop reform' option? It doesnt seem Green or Galloway adjacent, not trad LD and the Con vote was chunky but has gone Ref. So Lab lose but their vote holds up a little bit by default?
It's where I grew up and where my family still live. All of those points are correct. It's also by most measures the longest continuously held Labour seat in the UK. The only possibility is a genuinely local soft Left Indy running against the government. But not one who bangs on about Palestine. Even then.
I think Rupert Lowe's setup will do significant damage to Reform, perhaps by peeling off quit a number of their grass roots leaders.
There's chatter this morning about the possibility of Jeremy Clarkson perhaps coming on board.
(Rupes says that Clarkson's sidekick Caleb dumps Clarkson's shit on the Lowe doorstep.)
What the hell has Wick done to deserve that? Its a depressing enough place without having Josh Simon as well.
The shocking thing is the blatant nature of the lying. He claimed that APCO had exceeded their brief. A brief that he set. That was very clear in its scope. And which was not exceeded. Did he really think for a minute APCO were going to simply say, "yeah, fair enough, my mistake"? Personally, this goes beyond resigning from the Cabinet office. He should be resigning as an MP.
Hi folks, @viewcode here. Some days ago, somebody on PB mentioned an aphorism about research required to rebut a point on the internet took ten times more time than it took to put it there in the first place. They called it "B___"s Law, where "B___" was a longish word beginning with "B". The AIs are unhelpful so can somebody recall it for me?
(and no, I'm not thinking of Cunningham's Law)
It's literally the first result if you google "research required to rebut a point on the internet took ten times more time than it took to put it there in the first place"
Hi folks, viewcode here. Some days ago, somebody on PB mentioned an aphorism about research required to rebut a point on the internet took ten times more time than it took to put it there in the first place. They called it "B___"s Law, where "B___" was a longish word beginning with "B". The AIs are unhelpful so can somebody recall it for me?
(and no, I'm not thinking of Cunningham's Law)
It's literally the first result if you google "research required to rebut a point on the internet took ten times more time than it took to put it there in the first place"
Google doesn't like me anymore. I keep using Bing.
Can't quite tell whether Gordon Brown is sending the police useful info based on his past experience in govt or is going full amateur private detective in his retirement.
Remember it is Gordon Brown whose government was being betrayed and undermined by Mandelson with his leaks to Epstein's circle. For Brown it is personal as well as political and criminal.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
At my GP surgery the other day, a chap asked for the forms to register himself and his children with the practice. He was told to go away and apply online.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Dropping the voting age to 0 could be a low cost way to improve birth rates.
Wouldn't the anti-abortion crowd want it dropped to minus 9 months?
Doubt it, as it introduces the moral hazard of women getting pregnant obtaining 2 votes then aborting. Also it's difficult to verify if someone is say a day pregnant, women could just claim they are.
...the vast majority of trans women (i.e. a man) who has kept his male genitalia. Most do, after all...
I had an argument with Cyclefree some years ago about whether that was true. Then the same week - possibly the same day - a trans woman performer on a TV show stripped off and waved their willy about. So I'm not overkeen on revisiting this statistic. But the following points remain true
We can't agree on the number of trans people
We can't agree on the definition of a trans person
We can work out the number of genital surgeries carried out by the NHS, but it's more difficult to work out the number of genital surgeries carried out by all surgeons in the UK, and it's damn nearly impossible to estimate the number of genital surgeries carried out worldwide on British residents.
(Plus there's the thorny problem of trans inward migration to/outward migration from the UK, but let's put that to one side for the moment)
So while I'm content to accept the argument that N trans women/biological male/MTF/whatevers have got a penis for a nontrivial value of N, more than that is a bit of a reach.
I think it true that only a minority of Trans-folk have had gender confirmation surgery, but at least part of this is access. Over recent years accessing drug treatments, living in the new gender role and access to surgery have all become much more difficult, then Trans-folk are stigmatised for not having surgery. Its a real Catch 22.
Of course there a % who never seek these things and simply cross dress.
It's worth remembering that surgery as a prerequisite for gender recognition was declared unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights some time ago. The court ruled that forcing people to have surgery which effectively castrates and sterilises them in order to get their gender recognised was, for obvious reasons, wrong.
That only emphasises the problem which is that the word trans encompasses everyone from those who have had full surgery to those with dysphoria but live with it, cross-dressers, some only part-time, men with sexual fetishes and men who are simply sexual predators taking advantage. And there is no way of distinguishing between any of them. None of them have any business being in women only spaces.
Why do you say there is no way of distinguishing between any of them? Or why is that any different to the inability to distinguish between criminals and non-criminals more generally?
Cyclefree makes a reasonable point, but there are workarounds. If you have a difficult sieve where the rules are arbitrary and not easily discernable, then you give it to a committee - the obvious example is a parole board. Combined with strong penalties for later recidivism, you have a viable way forward. If the pre-FWS system had been set up with a demandable certificate instead of one which is enforceably private, it could have been modified to fit that. But Parliament ignored it and the Supreme Court went down another path.
It may be instructive in future to track how other countries cope. Ireland allows for self-id but the rules are reviewed periodically, and thanks to the antics of the repellent Barbie Kardashian (NSFW to google) they are amending the rules to ban biological males in female prisons. What in the UK was the matter of fraught shouting and demonstrations is being resolved in Ireland in a less fraught manner.
For someone who considers themselves the most moral person on the planet you are prertty good at throwing unfounded accusations around like confetti. I am surprised PB gives you this pulpit.
I was waiting for the standard @Roger objection. Vague, but “I don’t like it”.
What unfounded accusations, @Roger? There’s oceans of court cases, tribunal, researched stories that illustrate every single point @Cyclefree is making.
Or is it that you feel we should owe a certain deference to The Right People?
Well I'm glad I didn't keep you waiting too long. You now have the rest of the day to do someting productive. If it gives you a warm feeling to read reams of 'holier-than-thou' scribbles I'm sure you can apply for a back catalogue. In my experience not everyone's motives are suspect nor is everyone malign.
So NO examples then.
One feature of Cyclefree's complaints about sex is that she denies women agency. Sex workers are sluts but women are chaste so they must have been trafficked and forced into degrading themselves. Some have, of course, but for many women, sex for money is a perfectly rational trade. More subtly, though, sometimes the trade is not sex for money but sex for access to power or fame, including the most talented, richest, or most powerful men on the planet. I don't suppose Monica Lewinski was paid in luncheon vouchers but she did get to rub shoulders (!) with the leader of the free world.
This is why we need to be careful about the age of consent, of course, and why in recent years we have added further limits where there are power imbalances.
Then we have medical scandals like the Bristol heart cases, and more recently Lucy Letby. If we closed every unit with a below-par survival rate in a month, we'd have no hospitals left. Look at the peaks and troughs in economic statistics, for instance, even in today's news. On the other hand, if we wait for certainty, many will die or be maimed who could and should have been saved.
But I'm not sure acting on rumour, even when (especially when) that rumour coincides with one's own prejudice, is the answer.
I have never ever said that some women are sluts and others are chaste or denied women agency. And I don't believe that. But a woman who is coerced - for a variety of reasons - does not really have agency in any meaningful sense. It is worth reading what many ex-prostitutes write about the reality of what they do and how they are treated. What happens to them is not consensual sex in any sense of the term. It is abuse - often violent. I feel sympathy for them. They are my sisters not some underclass and I would like to see them much better treated and spoken about than they are and not treated in the appalling way they are by men.
Its a genuinely difficult question. Juries are told that reluctant consent is still consent. But they are also told that consent has to be free, that is without pressure.
There is obviously a tension between these 2 and it arises in a lot of cases. Does the woman who is in an abusive relationship "consent" when she agrees to have sex because of fear or simply a desire for a quiet, non violent life? Does the young girl who is desperate to maintain a relationship with this older boy "consent" when he asks her for sex? These things tend to be very fact specific and it is entirely possible that different juries would come to different conclusions.
Big question is how the engines will stack up once they start firing in anger.
It doesn’t matter if Ferrari engined cars are the only ones capable of starting on the grid line with others starting in the pit lane.
From what I’ve heard Ferrari know they can start the car quickly when on the start lane but the other engines can’t
Sorry for slow reply, was AFK.
Footage from a practice start (I think from yesterday) showed Ferrari starting very nicely, but also Haas (same engine). Worth bearing in mind for the lap 1 leader market, unless Ferrari end up on the front row.
It’s a funny one as Ferrari can start quickest, but soon get lapped by Mercedes and Red Bull engines who are half a second quicker this season due to having their things measured when cold, but they actually change shape when warmed up making the cars half a second quicker. I think it’s fair enough, it is as much advantage through clever engineering sport as it is racing sport. Even if it’s changed in September to penalise clever engineering, the season is just about the clever engines by then, Ferrari etc nowhere their season soon over this year.
For someone who considers themselves the most moral person on the planet you are prertty good at throwing unfounded accusations around like confetti. I am surprised PB gives you this pulpit.
I was waiting for the standard @Roger objection. Vague, but “I don’t like it”.
What unfounded accusations, @Roger? There’s oceans of court cases, tribunal, researched stories that illustrate every single point @Cyclefree is making.
Or is it that you feel we should owe a certain deference to The Right People?
Well I'm glad I didn't keep you waiting too long. You now have the rest of the day to do someting productive. If it gives you a warm feeling to read reams of 'holier-than-thou' scribbles I'm sure you can apply for a back catalogue. In my experience not everyone's motives are suspect nor is everyone malign.
So NO examples then.
One feature of Cyclefree's complaints about sex is that she denies women agency. Sex workers are sluts but women are chaste so they must have been trafficked and forced into degrading themselves. Some have, of course, but for many women, sex for money is a perfectly rational trade. More subtly, though, sometimes the trade is not sex for money but sex for access to power or fame, including the most talented, richest, or most powerful men on the planet. I don't suppose Monica Lewinski was paid in luncheon vouchers but she did get to rub shoulders (!) with the leader of the free world.
This is why we need to be careful about the age of consent, of course, and why in recent years we have added further limits where there are power imbalances.
Then we have medical scandals like the Bristol heart cases, and more recently Lucy Letby. If we closed every unit with a below-par survival rate in a month, we'd have no hospitals left. Look at the peaks and troughs in economic statistics, for instance, even in today's news. On the other hand, if we wait for certainty, many will die or be maimed who could and should have been saved.
But I'm not sure acting on rumour, even when (especially when) that rumour coincides with one's own prejudice, is the answer.
I have never ever said that some women are sluts and others are chaste or denied women agency. And I don't believe that. But a woman who is coerced - for a variety of reasons - does not really have agency in any meaningful sense. It is worth reading what many ex-prostitutes write about the reality of what they do and how they are treated. What happens to them is not consensual sex in any sense of the term. It is abuse - often violent. I feel sympathy for them. They are my sisters not some underclass and I would like to see them much better treated and spoken about than they are and not treated in the appalling way they are by men.
Its a genuinely difficult
It almost as if a set of rigid rules is less useful than a system with discretion run by people with a moral compass. And effective audit and oversight.
Hi folks, viewcode here. Some days ago, somebody on PB mentioned an aphorism about research required to rebut a point on the internet took ten times more time than it took to put it there in the first place. They called it "B___"s Law, where "B___" was a longish word beginning with "B". The AIs are unhelpful so can somebody recall it for me?
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
This week the IFS (somehow a respected economic think tank) called Reeves useless and an idiot for her fiscal rule to use so much income to pay back and clear debt rather than spending it. This fiscal rule they said is keeping UK economy in a zombie state.
I’m with you David. We can’t keep paying out a £1T a year state spending bill financed by borrowed money - to respect the NHS etc and put it on sure footing can’t keep funding it on a maxed out credit card.
From what I've heard so far the IFS was not suggesting that at all.
What they basically said is that one of the problems with the fiscal rules is that polticans sail as close to the wind as they dare on them. So when the OBR changes the growth projections by 0.01% and it magically increases the headroom by £10bn, rather than use this to borrow less, they rush off and spend it. But then when, next time round, the OBR revise their forecast back to were it was, and remove £10bn of headroom again, the politicians panic and cut something random, or increase tax in an ill thought out way.
Leaving aside the question of if the government is spending or taxing an appropriate amount, it's fair to say knee jerk policy making like this is a pretty bad idea.
Incidentally, in all the excitement about the tax take for January, people seem not to have noticed that this is almost entirely because of a surge in Capital Gains recepts, because they put the rates up from next year. That merely tells you that incentives matter, and people are realising gains to ensure they only pay the old rate. This is bad news for the government, because it tell us 1) the people modeling this in the treasury aren't very good at it and 2) future recepts will be substantially lower than modeled.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Most adults aren't sufficiently interested to vote in local elections or even in, for example, the Senedd elections in Wales (47% turnout last time, and that's calculated on who was registered to vote and some adults fail to even do that).
I like my idea. Which will never be implemented.
1) Registration for elections is automatic 2) Not turning up to vote is a vote for Reopen Nominations. 3) RON Is on the ballot papers, as well. 4) If RON wins, all the candidates in the election are ineligible to stand in the following special election.
What the hell has Wick done to deserve that? Its a depressing enough place without having Josh Simon as well.
The shocking thing is the blatant nature of the lying. He claimed that APCO had exceeded their brief. A brief that he set. That was very clear in its scope. And which was not exceeded. Did he really think for a minute APCO were going to simply say, "yeah, fair enough, my mistake"? Personally, this goes beyond resigning from the Cabinet office. He should be resigning as an MP.
I visited Wick in July 2022 upon arriving on the Inveness train. I survived.
For someone who considers themselves the most moral person on the planet you are prertty good at throwing unfounded accusations around like confetti. I am surprised PB gives you this pulpit.
I was waiting for the standard @Roger objection. Vague, but “I don’t like it”.
What unfounded accusations, @Roger? There’s oceans of court cases, tribunal, researched stories that illustrate every single point @Cyclefree is making.
Or is it that you feel we should owe a certain deference to The Right People?
Well I'm glad I didn't keep you waiting too long. You now have the rest of the day to do someting productive. If it gives you a warm feeling to read reams of 'holier-than-thou' scribbles I'm sure you can apply for a back catalogue. In my experience not everyone's motives are suspect nor is everyone malign.
So NO examples then.
One feature of Cyclefree's complaints about sex is that she denies women agency. Sex workers are sluts but women are chaste so they must have been trafficked and forced into degrading themselves. Some have, of course, but for many women, sex for money is a perfectly rational trade. More subtly, though, sometimes the trade is not sex for money but sex for access to power or fame, including the most talented, richest, or most powerful men on the planet. I don't suppose Monica Lewinski was paid in luncheon vouchers but she did get to rub shoulders (!) with the leader of the free world.
This is why we need to be careful about the age of consent, of course, and why in recent years we have added further limits where there are power imbalances.
Then we have medical scandals like the Bristol heart cases, and more recently Lucy Letby. If we closed every unit with a below-par survival rate in a month, we'd have no hospitals left. Look at the peaks and troughs in economic statistics, for instance, even in today's news. On the other hand, if we wait for certainty, many will die or be maimed who could and should have been saved.
But I'm not sure acting on rumour, even when (especially when) that rumour coincides with one's own prejudice, is the answer.
I have never ever said that some women are sluts and others are chaste or denied women agency. And I don't believe that. But a woman who is coerced - for a variety of reasons - does not really have agency in any meaningful sense. It is worth reading what many ex-prostitutes write about the reality of what they do and how they are treated. What happens to them is not consensual sex in any sense of the term. It is abuse - often violent. I feel sympathy for them. They are my sisters not some underclass and I would like to see them much better treated and spoken about than they are and not treated in the appalling way they are by men.
Its a genuinely difficult
It almost as if a set of rigid rules is less useful than a system with discretion run by people with a moral compass. And effective audit and oversight.
I agree with all of that. But I do worry about a Justice system dealing with so many young men that has what can only be called a random element to it.
Mr Trump is now apparently determined to decline support for the transfer of the islands to Mauritius, arguing that the transter would reduce the utility of the Diego Garcia airbase. It is hard to disagree with his assessment. The result is that Sir Keir is in a bind of his own making.
"International law" compels the Prime Minister to seek Mr Trump's approval to surrender the islands; "international law" compels him to surrender the islands; "international law" compels him to block the use of the British bases, enraging the White House in the process. This is government as farce.
It is hard to escape the notion that in Sir Keir's ideal world, the job of Prime Minister would be purely ceremonial. There would be little room for individual judgment or decision making. All acts of government would emerge fully formed from the duties and obligations of the legal system. As much as it may disappoint him, that is not the world we live in. It is high time Sir Keir realised as much.
Oh dear. Bless. The bone head “ignore law and international order - respect might is always right” pirates are flapping about these days. Sad little things they are.
I wonder what proportion would agree that Andrew should be hanged,
Probably above 50%.
He might take the Epstein Checkout....
It's unlikely Epstein checked himself out. Would his assassins do the same for Andrew? He is probably less of a threat, as long as he doesn't start singing, and one imagines he'd be a little less easy to access.
So unless he's a DIY man, he's going to be around for a while.
The problem the rich and powerful have with AMW, of course, is that he's stupid. Very stupid. Very very very stupid. Like, dafter than a bag of spanners, but without the charm or from-within-a-paper-bag-navigational ability. So who knows what he'll do if left alone.
Andrew is what used to be described as “educationally sub-normal”.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Most adults aren't sufficiently interested to vote in local elections or even in, for example, the Senedd elections in Wales (47% turnout last time, and that's calculated on who was registered to vote and some adults fail to even do that).
I like my idea. Which will never be implemented.
1) Registration for elections is automatic 2) Not turning up to vote is a vote for Reopen Nominations. 3) RON Is on the ballot papers, as well. 4) If RON wins, all the candidates in the election are ineligible to stand in the following special election.
5) The process continues until every possible candidate has been declared ineligible 6) The process state marches on without the inconvenience of politicians
Mr Trump is now apparently determined to decline support for the transfer of the islands to Mauritius, arguing that the transter would reduce the utility of the Diego Garcia airbase. It is hard to disagree with his assessment. The result is that Sir Keir is in a bind of his own making.
"International law" compels the Prime Minister to seek Mr Trump's approval to surrender the islands; "international law" compels him to surrender the islands; "international law" compels him to block the use of the British bases, enraging the White House in the process. This is government as farce.
It is hard to escape the notion that in Sir Keir's ideal world, the job of Prime Minister would be purely ceremonial. There would be little room for individual judgment or decision making. All acts of government would emerge fully formed from the duties and obligations of the legal system. As much as it may disappoint him, that is not the world we live in. It is high time Sir Keir realised as much.
Oh dear. Bless. The bone head “ignore law and international order - respect might is always right” pirates are flapping about these days. Sad little things they are.
Sitting around and expecting "International Law" to do your morals and thinking for you is equally stupid.
At its finest, International Law is a framework against which actions can be judged. Not a policy document.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Most adults aren't sufficiently interested to vote in local elections or even in, for example, the Senedd elections in Wales (47% turnout last time, and that's calculated on who was registered to vote and some adults fail to even do that).
I like my idea. Which will never be implemented.
1) Registration for elections is automatic 2) Not turning up to vote is a vote for Reopen Nominations. 3) RON Is on the ballot papers, as well. 4) If RON wins, all the candidates in the election are ineligible to stand in the following special election.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Dropping the voting age to 0 could be a low cost way to improve birth rates.
Wouldn't the anti-abortion crowd want it dropped to minus 9 months?
Doubt it, as it introduces the moral hazard of women getting pregnant obtaining 2 votes then aborting. Also it's difficult to verify if someone is say a day pregnant, women could just claim they are.
Mr Trump is now apparently determined to decline support for the transfer of the islands to Mauritius, arguing that the transter would reduce the utility of the Diego Garcia airbase. It is hard to disagree with his assessment. The result is that Sir Keir is in a bind of his own making.
* "International law" compels the Prime Minister to seek Mr Trump's approval to surrender the islands; "international law" compels him to surrender the islands; * "international law" compels him to block the use of the British bases, enraging the White House in the process.
This is government as farce.
It is hard to escape the notion that in Sir Keir's ideal world, the job of Prime Minister would be purely ceremonial. There would be little room for individual judgment or decision making. All acts of government would emerge fully formed from the duties and obligations of the legal system. As much as it may disappoint him, that is not the world we live in. It is high time Sir Keir realised as much.
Harsh, but brutally fair. He doesn't know how to fly the plane, or even that the plane needs flying. Political parties really should stop fielding innocents like this: believing that he is "fundamentally decent" is really not enough. He's the most unfit PM since May.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Most adults aren't sufficiently interested to vote in local elections or even in, for example, the Senedd elections in Wales (47% turnout last time, and that's calculated on who was registered to vote and some adults fail to even do that).
I like my idea. Which will never be implemented.
1) Registration for elections is automatic 2) Not turning up to vote is a vote for Reopen Nominations. 3) RON Is on the ballot papers, as well. 4) If RON wins, all the candidates in the election are ineligible to stand in the following special election.
5) The process continues until every possible candidate has been declared ineligible 6) The process state marches on without the inconvenience of politicians
Worked well enough in Belgium....
Alternatively, and I know this a crazy idea, we could try offering politicians for election whom the electorate *likes*.
Bearing in mind there are active proceedings, so I will word carefully:
Does anyone know if the US State Dep't are prepared to release unredacted information to the British police ?
If they aren't or won't all this is going nowhere since redacted emails are not permissible in a UK court of law.
The emails may have been redacted by the US, but by the nature of emails presumably the originals still exist as sent by AMW and others in other forms, and these may well be available unredacted to the British police.
What the hell has Wick done to deserve that? Its a depressing enough place without having Josh Simon as well.
The shocking thing is the blatant nature of the lying. He claimed that APCO had exceeded their brief. A brief that he set. That was very clear in its scope. And which was not exceeded. Did he really think for a minute APCO were going to simply say, "yeah, fair enough, my mistake"? Personally, this goes beyond resigning from the Cabinet office. He should be resigning as an MP.
I visited Wick in July 2022 upon arriving on the Inveness train. I survived.
For someone who considers themselves the most moral person on the planet you are prertty good at throwing unfounded accusations around like confetti. I am surprised PB gives you this pulpit.
I was waiting for the standard @Roger objection. Vague, but “I don’t like it”.
What unfounded accusations, @Roger? There’s oceans of court cases, tribunal, researched stories that illustrate every single point @Cyclefree is making.
Or is it that you feel we should owe a certain deference to The Right People?
Well I'm glad I didn't keep you waiting too long. You now have the rest of the day to do someting productive. If it gives you a warm feeling to read reams of 'holier-than-thou' scribbles I'm sure you can apply for a back catalogue. In my experience not everyone's motives are suspect nor is everyone malign.
So NO examples then.
One feature of Cyclefree's complaints about sex is that she denies women agency. Sex workers are sluts but women are chaste so they must have been trafficked and forced into degrading themselves. Some have, of course, but for many women, sex for money is a perfectly rational trade. More subtly, though, sometimes the trade is not sex for money but sex for access to power or fame, including the most talented, richest, or most powerful men on the planet. I don't suppose Monica Lewinski was paid in luncheon vouchers but she did get to rub shoulders (!) with the leader of the free world.
This is why we need to be careful about the age of consent, of course, and why in recent years we have added further limits where there are power imbalances.
Then we have medical scandals like the Bristol heart cases, and more recently Lucy Letby. If we closed every unit with a below-par survival rate in a month, we'd have no hospitals left. Look at the peaks and troughs in economic statistics, for instance, even in today's news. On the other hand, if we wait for certainty, many will die or be maimed who could and should have been saved.
But I'm not sure acting on rumour, even when (especially when) that rumour coincides with one's own prejudice, is the answer.
I have never ever said that some women are sluts and others are chaste or denied women agency. And I don't believe that. But a woman who is coerced - for a variety of reasons - does not really have agency in any meaningful sense. It is worth reading what many ex-prostitutes write about the reality of what they do and how they are treated. What happens to them is not consensual sex in any sense of the term. It is abuse - often violent. I feel sympathy for them. They are my sisters not some underclass and I would like to see them much better treated and spoken about than they are and not treated in the appalling way they are by men.
Its a genuinely difficult
It almost as if a set of rigid rules is less useful than a system with discretion run by people with a moral compass. And effective audit and oversight.
I agree with all of that. But I do worry about a Justice system dealing with so many young men that has what can only be called a random element to it.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Most adults aren't sufficiently interested to vote in local elections or even in, for example, the Senedd elections in Wales (47% turnout last time, and that's calculated on who was registered to vote and some adults fail to even do that).
I like my idea. Which will never be implemented.
1) Registration for elections is automatic 2) Not turning up to vote is a vote for Reopen Nominations. 3) RON Is on the ballot papers, as well. 4) If RON wins, all the candidates in the election are ineligible to stand in the following special election.
That would be one way to abolish local government, as RON would win every time.
Mr Trump is now apparently determined to decline support for the transfer of the islands to Mauritius, arguing that the transter would reduce the utility of the Diego Garcia airbase. It is hard to disagree with his assessment. The result is that Sir Keir is in a bind of his own making.
"International law" compels the Prime Minister to seek Mr Trump's approval to surrender the islands; "international law" compels him to surrender the islands; "international law" compels him to block the use of the British bases, enraging the White House in the process. This is government as farce.
It is hard to escape the notion that in Sir Keir's ideal world, the job of Prime Minister would be purely ceremonial. There would be little room for individual judgment or decision making. All acts of government would emerge fully formed from the duties and obligations of the legal system. As much as it may disappoint him, that is not the world we live in. It is high time Sir Keir realised as much.
Oh dear. Bless. The bone head “ignore law and international order - respect might is always right” pirates are flapping about these days. Sad little things they are.
And 'might is right' is really not in the interests of the vast majority of people either in the UK or elsewhere.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Most adults aren't sufficiently interested to vote in local elections or even in, for example, the Senedd elections in Wales (47% turnout last time, and that's calculated on who was registered to vote and some adults fail to even do that).
I like my idea. Which will never be implemented.
1) Registration for elections is automatic 2) Not turning up to vote is a vote for Reopen Nominations. 3) RON Is on the ballot papers, as well. 4) If RON wins, all the candidates in the election are ineligible to stand in the following special election.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Dropping the voting age to 0 could be a low cost way to improve birth rates.
Wouldn't the anti-abortion crowd want it dropped to minus 9 months?
Doubt it, as it introduces the moral hazard of women getting pregnant obtaining 2 votes then aborting. Also it's difficult to verify if someone is say a day pregnant, women could just claim they are.
Twins = 3 votes
There's a set of twins at our daughter's nursery. 3 votes is the least the parents deserves tbh.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
This week the IFS (somehow a respected economic think tank) called Reeves useless and an idiot for her fiscal rule to use so much income to pay back and clear debt rather than spending it. This fiscal rule they said is keeping UK economy in a zombie state.
I’m with you David. We can’t keep paying out a £1T a year state spending bill financed by borrowed money - to respect the NHS etc and put it on sure footing can’t keep funding it on a maxed out credit card.
From what I've heard so far the IFS was not suggesting that at all.
What they basically said is that one of the problems with the fiscal rules is that polticans sail as close to the wind as they dare on them. So when the OBR changes the growth projections by 0.01% and it magically increases the headroom by £10bn, rather than use this to borrow less, they rush off and spend it. But then when, next time round, the OBR revise their forecast back to were it was, and remove £10bn of headroom again, the politicians panic and cut something random, or increase tax in an ill thought out way.
Leaving aside the question of if the government is spending or taxing an appropriate amount, it's fair to say knee jerk policy making like this is a pretty bad idea.
Incidentally, in all the excitement about the tax take for January, people seem not to have noticed that this is almost entirely because of a surge in Capital Gains recepts, because they put the rates up from next year. That merely tells you that incentives matter, and people are realising gains to ensure they only pay the old rate. This is bad news for the government, because it tell us 1) the people modeling this in the treasury aren't very good at it and 2) future recepts will be substantially lower than modeled.
And then people will use the fact that future returns are substantially lower than expected as an excuse to cut capital gains tax rates - leading to a delay in profit taking…
...the vast majority of trans women (i.e. a man) who has kept his male genitalia. Most do, after all...
I had an argument with Cyclefree some years ago about whether that was true. Then the same week - possibly the same day - a trans woman performer on a TV show stripped off and waved their willy about. So I'm not overkeen on revisiting this statistic. But the following points remain true
We can't agree on the number of trans people
We can't agree on the definition of a trans person
We can work out the number of genital surgeries carried out by the NHS, but it's more difficult to work out the number of genital surgeries carried out by all surgeons in the UK, and it's damn nearly impossible to estimate the number of genital surgeries carried out worldwide on British residents.
(Plus there's the thorny problem of trans inward migration to/outward migration from the UK, but let's put that to one side for the moment)
So while I'm content to accept the argument that N trans women/biological male/MTF/whatevers have got a penis for a nontrivial value of N, more than that is a bit of a reach.
I think it true that only a minority of Trans-folk have had gender confirmation surgery, but at least part of this is access. Over recent years accessing drug treatments, living in the new gender role and access to surgery have all become much more difficult, then Trans-folk are stigmatised for not having surgery. Its a real Catch 22.
Of course there a % who never seek these things and simply cross dress.
It's worth remembering that surgery as a prerequisite for gender recognition was declared unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights some time ago. The court ruled that forcing people to have surgery which effectively castrates and sterilises them in order to get their gender recognised was, for obvious reasons, wrong.
That only emphasises the problem which is that the word trans encompasses everyone from those men who have had full surgery to those with dysphoria but live with it, cross-dressers, some only part-time, men with sexual fetishes and men who are simply sexual predators taking advantage. And there is no way of distinguishing between any of them. None of them have any business being in women only spaces.
I agree with most of what you say above, but it really doesn't relate to my point above.
Similtaneously we have contrived to arrive at a system that denies Trans-folk access to gender-confirming care, then pillories them for not having had it. It is quite a cruel and unsustainable position.
Mr Trump is now apparently determined to decline support for the transfer of the islands to Mauritius, arguing that the transter would reduce the utility of the Diego Garcia airbase. It is hard to disagree with his assessment. The result is that Sir Keir is in a bind of his own making.
* "International law" compels the Prime Minister to seek Mr Trump's approval to surrender the islands; "international law" compels him to surrender the islands; * "international law" compels him to block the use of the British bases, enraging the White House in the process.
This is government as farce.
It is hard to escape the notion that in Sir Keir's ideal world, the job of Prime Minister would be purely ceremonial. There would be little room for individual judgment or decision making. All acts of government would emerge fully formed from the duties and obligations of the legal system. As much as it may disappoint him, that is not the world we live in. It is high time Sir Keir realised as much.
Harsh, but brutally fair. He doesn't know how to fly the plane, or even that the plane needs flying. Political parties really should stop fielding innocents like this: believing that he is "fundamentally decent" is really not enough. He's the most unfit PM since May.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Dropping the voting age to 0 could be a low cost way to improve birth rates.
Wouldn't the anti-abortion crowd want it dropped to minus 9 months?
Doubt it, as it introduces the moral hazard of women getting pregnant obtaining 2 votes then aborting. Also it's difficult to verify if someone is say a day pregnant, women could just claim they are.
Compulsory ultrasound when you go vote to see how many votes should be counted.
Mr Trump is now apparently determined to decline support for the transfer of the islands to Mauritius, arguing that the transter would reduce the utility of the Diego Garcia airbase. It is hard to disagree with his assessment. The result is that Sir Keir is in a bind of his own making.
* "International law" compels the Prime Minister to seek Mr Trump's approval to surrender the islands; "international law" compels him to surrender the islands; * "international law" compels him to block the use of the British bases, enraging the White House in the process.
This is government as farce.
It is hard to escape the notion that in Sir Keir's ideal world, the job of Prime Minister would be purely ceremonial. There would be little room for individual judgment or decision making. All acts of government would emerge fully formed from the duties and obligations of the legal system. As much as it may disappoint him, that is not the world we live in. It is high time Sir Keir realised as much.
Harsh, but brutally fair. He doesn't know how to fly the plane, or even that the plane needs flying. Political parties really should stop fielding innocents like this: believing that he is "fundamentally decent" is really not enough. He's the most unfit PM since May.
May the PM or May 24?
Theresa May. In his book "May at 10", Anthony Seldon acknowledges her good points: her faith and her sincere intent to make the lives of the British and the good of the state better. But he also points out with some force that she was entirely unfit to the task.
It also occurs to me while I'm passing that I've traduced both May and Starmer. I'd forgotten about Truss, who wins the "what were they thinking" prize hands down.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Most adults aren't sufficiently interested to vote in local elections or even in, for example, the Senedd elections in Wales (47% turnout last time, and that's calculated on who was registered to vote and some adults fail to even do that).
I like my idea. Which will never be implemented.
1) Registration for elections is automatic 2) Not turning up to vote is a vote for Reopen Nominations. 3) RON Is on the ballot papers, as well. 4) If RON wins, all the candidates in the election are ineligible to stand in the following special election.
Mr Trump is now apparently determined to decline support for the transfer of the islands to Mauritius, arguing that the transter would reduce the utility of the Diego Garcia airbase. It is hard to disagree with his assessment. The result is that Sir Keir is in a bind of his own making.
"International law" compels the Prime Minister to seek Mr Trump's approval to surrender the islands; "international law" compels him to surrender the islands; "international law" compels him to block the use of the British bases, enraging the White House in the process. This is government as farce.
It is hard to escape the notion that in Sir Keir's ideal world, the job of Prime Minister would be purely ceremonial. There would be little room for individual judgment or decision making. All acts of government would emerge fully formed from the duties and obligations of the legal system. As much as it may disappoint him, that is not the world we live in. It is high time Sir Keir realised as much.
Oh dear. Bless. The bone head “ignore law and international order - respect might is always right” pirates are flapping about these days. Sad little things they are.
And 'might is right' is really not in the interests of the vast majority of people either in the UK or elsewhere.
The problem is, most of the world’s leaders do believe that might is right. Appeals to international law, to shame them into doing the correct thing, will not work.
I wonder what proportion would agree that Andrew should be hanged,
Probably above 50%.
He might take the Epstein Checkout....
It's unlikely Epstein checked himself out. Would his assassins do the same for Andrew? He is probably less of a threat, as long as he doesn't start singing, and one imagines he'd be a little less easy to access.
So unless he's a DIY man, he's going to be around for a while.
The problem the rich and powerful have with AMW, of course, is that he's stupid. Very stupid. Very very very stupid. Like, dafter than a bag of spanners, but without the charm or from-within-a-paper-bag-navigational ability. So who knows what he'll do if left alone.
Andrew is what used to be described as “educationally sub-normal”.
Did he not fly helicopters in the Falklands? He cannot be that stupid, surely? Or do those things basically fly themselves?
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Most adults aren't sufficiently interested to vote in local elections or even in, for example, the Senedd elections in Wales (47% turnout last time, and that's calculated on who was registered to vote and some adults fail to even do that).
I like my idea. Which will never be implemented.
1) Registration for elections is automatic 2) Not turning up to vote is a vote for Reopen Nominations. 3) RON Is on the ballot papers, as well. 4) If RON wins, all the candidates in the election are ineligible to stand in the following special election.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Dropping the voting age to 0 could be a low cost way to improve birth rates.
Wouldn't the anti-abortion crowd want it dropped to minus 9 months?
Doubt it, as it introduces the moral hazard of women getting pregnant obtaining 2 votes then aborting. Also it's difficult to verify if someone is say a day pregnant, women could just claim they are.
Twins = 3 votes
There's a set of twins at our daughter's nursery. 3 votes is the least the parents deserves tbh.
I tend to agree. My colleagues (a couple) have twins a bit younger than my son. I have no idea how they cope. I suppose by now they might be playing/fighting together so taking the burden off mum and dad a bit, but crikey! The nappies alone.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
-----
The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Dropping the voting age to 0 could be a low cost way to improve birth rates.
Wouldn't the anti-abortion crowd want it dropped to minus 9 months?
Doubt it, as it introduces the moral hazard of women getting pregnant obtaining 2 votes then aborting. Also it's difficult to verify if someone is say a day pregnant, women could just claim they are.
Compulsory ultrasound when you go vote to see how many votes should be counted.
While my view is votes from birth, not before, I'm not sure you'd get massive numbers of pregnancies-then-abortions for the sake of an extra vote. It seems a remarkable level of inconvenience to go to for a very marginal gain.
I see in the previous thread PB tories are now complaining about a budget surplus in self assessment month. Good grief.
It's the BIGGEST ACHILLES HEEL of having an argumentaive know all with no policy of her own as Leader. All she can do is complain about everything even good news.
This is welcome news Ms Badenoch!
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The government's finances had a record monthly surplus in January as it took in more tax receipts than it spent.
The surplus - the difference between public spending and the tax take - was £30.4bn in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS said it was the highest surplus in any month since records began in 1993, and nearly double last January's £15.4bn monthly surplus.
Analysts had expected the surplus to be £23.8bn. The government usually collects more tax than it spends in January compared with other months due to the collection of self-assessed taxes, but higher levels of capital gains tax payments to HMRC pushed the figure to a record.
Borrowing in the 10 months to January was £112.1bn - 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago - although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.
HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be "the lowest since before the pandemic."
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: "We know there is more to do to stop one in every £10 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS."
This is undoubtedly good news and it would be churlish to say otherwise but that sentence from the Chief Secretary. They are going to HALVE borrowing (so still borrowing quite a lot) "so that the money (what money? reduced debt at best) can be SPENT (thereby not reducing borrowing) on policing, schools and hospitals."
Murray is supposed to be one of the smarter ones. That is frighteningly illiterate for a Chief Secretary.
Better to halve borrowing than to double it. I don’t understand those people who suggest this means we’re paying too much tax. If anything it shows we’re not paying enough tax.
Oh I agree. We should be running a surplus right now and should continue to do so for many years until the excesses of the Covid and Gas bill madness are paid back. This is a modest step in the right direction and very welcome on that basis but our finances remain seriously out of kilter.
You don't reduce the interest rate bill by halving borrowing, in those circumstances it is still going up. You reduce debt interest by repaying debt.
By repaying existing debt and by increasing market confidence in your future ability to repay, thus securing lower rates for new borrowing...
But they are not repaying existing debt, they are still borrowing more (at half the rate they are just now).
Just like the last government. Just like the next government.
Taking from the next generation to fund the lifestyles of the current generation.
At some point the government is spending over £100bn per year on debt interest.
At a later point the country imitates Greece or Argentina.
I think you have that way out of kilter. They are taking from the current generation to fund the lifestyle of the triple lock generation. Those are the ones that spent North Sea Oil, Council House receipts and privatisation receipts while simultaneously increasing national debt. When the young realise this and reject the accusations of the gerontocracy then there will be a reckoning.
Which brings me back to my proposal to extend the franchise to all British humans, not just adults, with the votes of those under a certain age (16? 18?) to be exercised on their behalf by their parents. At present, the old are disproportionately represented and the young not at all. It's no wonder the country is not run in the interests of the young.
So glad someone else has come to this conclusion!
I'd let children of whatever age claim their vote from their parents whenever they were able to find the relevant form and complete the request to their returning officer. That way young nerds such as myself would have been able to claim their vote earlier than people who weren't interested, and those adults with severe learning difficulties, or deemed unable to vote due to severe mental illness, would still have their vote exercised on their behalf by their guardian.
I also heard a recent interesting argument in favour of compulsory voting that would also rebalance things. Democracy is a duty as well as a right, perhaps.
Having the ability to fill in a particular form be the determiner for who gets to vote didn’t work well during the Jim Crow era.
How would you register people to vote without asking them to complete a form?
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
You were, it appears to me, suggesting that mental capacity (a child having sufficient maturity, excluding adults with severe learning difficulties, or those with severe mental illness) should be assessed by the ability to fill in a particular type of form. That approach was abused under Jim Crow. If your plan is to stick with the current very simple form, then it doesn't seem like you it would fulfill your aims. You'd basically just be dropping the voting age to 10 or so.
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
I don't foresee most 11 year olds being sufficiently interested or motivated to claim their vote, but I don't see it being a problem if they are.
Most adults aren't sufficiently interested to vote in local elections or even in, for example, the Senedd elections in Wales (47% turnout last time, and that's calculated on who was registered to vote and some adults fail to even do that).
I like my idea. Which will never be implemented.
1) Registration for elections is automatic 2) Not turning up to vote is a vote for Reopen Nominations. 3) RON Is on the ballot papers, as well. 4) If RON wins, all the candidates in the election are ineligible to stand in the following special election.
5) The process continues until every possible candidate has been declared ineligible 6) The process state marches on without the inconvenience of politicians
Worked well enough in Belgium....
Alternatively, and I know this a crazy idea, we could try offering politicians for election whom the electorate *likes*.
I wonder what proportion would agree that Andrew should be hanged,
Probably above 50%.
Royals were beheaded as a courtesy in the past, rather than hanging etc.
Of course AMW is no longer a Royal so perhaps has lost that perk.
Mainly Scottish monarchs who were beheaded, MQoS,Chaz 1
English monarchs generally suffered a more unusual demise, such as surfeit of lamphreys and meeting their maker via a red hot poker insertion
Could try a banishment, perhaps Rockall needs a new lighthouse keeper?
Rockall would need a new lighthouse first...
"Greenpeace placed a solar powered beacon over the frame of the existing navigation aid in 1997, and returned to upgrade this light in 1998. This was the only permanent mark of human occupation on Rockall until it too succumbed to the ravages of an Atlantic storm two years later."
I think the world Cyclefree describes so well is likely to carry on in some form unless there is some remarkable transformation in the areas of human nature, sex, money, power, fame, and the imbalances of the law.
In particular Cyclefree's own point describes it. 'Not Brave Enough'. Drawing attention to certain truths requires courage, willingness to face loss, risk, the law's imbalances and sometimes other dangers.
I mention just one set of very particular imbalances. A lowly allegation maker will find it is open season on their character, prospects and person. The rich and powerful have the advantage of 'innocent until proved guilty', in criminal matters the advantage of 'beyond reasonable doubt', the advantage of being able to use the legal system to shut down little people and the advantage of a network of the powerful.
As long as 'telling truth to power' carries this degree of cost and imbalance, requiring that degree of courage, human nature tells us we have a problem.
I think we saw this in the Peggie vs NHS Fife tribunal. Its entirely irrelevant to whether woman should have a single sex changing room that she once shared some sub-Jim Davidson 'jokes' on WhatsApp. Yet now, on X, all the pro-trans posters portray Peggie, a nurse with 30 years on unblemished service, as a latter day Enoch Powell or Bernard Manning.
The NHS is notorious for going after every whistle-blower or internal complainant in this fashion. Occasionally some poor soul puts their head above the parapet & has their life destroyed by NHS management “pour encourager les autres”.
It’s all very well for Cyclefree to argue that people should simply be braver, but when you are part of a system that will cheerfully destroy your ability to work in your chosen career ever again, it (unsurprisingly) turns out that few people are willing to call out bad behaviour when the price of doing so is so very, very high.
You are quite right about the NHS.
But to answer your interesting point, I have spent much of my career establishing whistleblowing functions and investigating whistleblowing complaints. By the end a good half of my work related to such investigations. And it is precisely because we cannot rely on individual brave heroes that we need to establish really effective ways of allowing those complaints or issues to be raised and investigated in a way which does not require suicidal bravery by one individual.
It is not a matter of having a well written procedure. What you need above all is an effective investigations team stuffed by people with integrity and guts but above all people who are trustworthy and visible. I did investigations so I had a licence to ask questions others didn't. But the best thing I did by talking endlessly to everyone in the firm about my team's work and why it mattered was to give people a route to raise concerns without needing to put themselves in the firing line. They knew they could trust my team - to keep their confidences, to be professional, to protect them and, in the words of one "not to be afraid of anyone". Every time I did a talk I would get people coming to me or my team to raise issues. They knew the existence of my team gave them permission to speak up, to be a little bit brave but it also took the burden off them. We were a sort of lightning rod.
That is what the NHS and many other organisations need.
And then if you encourage people to raise issues early they are not crises to be managed but small problems which can be sorted, usually relatively easily without too much pain and without forcing people into horrible moral dilemmas.
I diagree about whistleblowing in the NHS.
As a junior doctor 3 decades ago, I blew the whistle on a senior Consultant who I discovered had done some serious malpractice. I did this after taking advice from my medical indemnity advisors. The Consultant in question left the Trust after the investigation, with compensation going to the patient involved. It was completely confidential. After the dust settled the Medical Director personally phoned me to thank me for my actions.
As a senior Consultant myself I have done a fair bit of work for the Medical Director's* "Secret Police" investigating a varied number of concerns about senior clinicians with accusations of financial fraud, clinical incompetence, bullying, sexual harrassement etc etc. Some of these were inconclusive, with insufficient evidence for disciplinary action/sacking/prosecution, but I cannot remember one where the whistleblower raising the concerns was ostracised in any way.
Perhaps my Trust is exceptional, but I do not think so. We only hear about whistleblowers being torn to shreds when it goes wrong. It simply isn't news when the system works.
New Omnisis poll of Gorton and Denton by-election gives Greens a *two point* lead over Reform and four points over Labour.
Basically neck and neck and within margin of error.
Hannah Spencer (Greens): 22% Matt Goodwin (REF UK): 20% Angeliki Stogia (Lab): 18% Charlotte Cadden (Conservatives): 3%
Assuming that the other odds and ends are on 5% or so, excluding don’t knows gives Green 32%, Reform 29%, Labour 26%. I’d expect Reform to reach 33%, and if the Labour vote is holding up to this extent, that might make Reform slight favourites.
Omnisis normally do online polling but it would be more difficult to do that in this instance . If it was a phone poll then the Reform figure is likely to be an underestimate.
Comments
Tbh, though, Wick: although I haven't been since 1992, I remember it as being pretty bleak.
(Though I have a minor affection for it because it was one of the destinations you had to reach in the board game "Great Game of Britain", at least on the steam train side of the board - though I preferred the obverse side set in the modern era, where the closest you might get was Thurso, and then only reluctantly ("You are tired of the crowds: go to John o Groats and stay there for two turns. Station: THURSO")
Are you comparing Britain's electoral registration system to Jim Crow laws? How bizarre.
So unless he's a DIY man, he's going to be around for a while.
https://www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/news/courts/restore-councillor-leaves-sinister-party-and-asks-reform-to-take-him-back-two-days-after-quitting-5605313
I note that current UK law does not stop adults with severe learning difficulties or severe mental illness from voting.
They weren’t in a position to complain though.
But to answer your interesting point, I have spent much of my career establishing whistleblowing functions and investigating whistleblowing complaints. By the end a good half of my work related to such investigations. And it is precisely because we cannot rely on individual brave heroes that we need to establish really effective ways of allowing those complaints or issues to be raised and investigated in a way which does not require suicidal bravery by one individual.
It is not a matter of having a well written procedure. What you need above all is an effective investigations team stuffed by people with integrity and guts but above all people who are trustworthy and visible. I did investigations so I had a licence to ask questions others didn't. But the best thing I did by talking endlessly to everyone in the firm about my team's work and why it mattered was to give people a route to raise concerns without needing to put themselves in the firing line. They knew they could trust my team - to keep their confidences, to be professional, to protect them and, in the words of one "not to be afraid of anyone". Every time I did a talk I would get people coming to me or my team to raise issues. They knew the existence of my team gave them permission to speak up, to be a little bit brave but it also took the burden off them. We were a sort of lightning rod.
That is what the NHS and many other organisations need.
And then if you encourage people to raise issues early they are not crises to be managed but small problems which can be sorted, usually relatively easily without too much pain and without forcing people into horrible moral dilemmas.
Andrew has never exhibited any charm so running for even local dog warden would be a waste of effort
(and no, I'm not thinking of Cunningham's Law)
Those who are of suitable disposition will be given large teaspoons, for digging.
Mr Trump is now apparently determined to decline support for the transfer of the islands to Mauritius, arguing that the transter would reduce the utility of the Diego Garcia airbase. It is hard to disagree with his assessment. The result is that Sir Keir is in a bind of his own making.
"International law" compels the Prime Minister to seek Mr Trump's approval to surrender the islands; "international law" compels him to surrender the islands;
"international law" compels him to block the use of the British bases, enraging the White House in the process. This is government as farce.
It is hard to escape the notion that in Sir Keir's ideal world, the job of Prime Minister would be purely ceremonial. There would be little room for individual judgment or decision making. All acts of government would emerge fully formed from the duties and obligations of the legal system. As much as it may disappoint him, that is not the world we live in. It is high time Sir Keir realised as much.
Donald Trump's administration has threatened to retaliate against European countries if the EU favors domestic weapons-makers in a drive to rearm the continent.
https://x.com/POLITICOEurope/status/2024766503745122760
That only emphasises the problem which is that the word trans encompasses everyone from those men who have had full surgery to those with dysphoria but live with it, cross-dressers, some only part-time, men with sexual fetishes and men who are simply sexual predators taking advantage. And there is no way of distinguishing between any of them. None of them have any business being in women only spaces.
If my defence was that “AMW is actually the guilty party”, getting him on the stand would sound like quite a good idea.
JRM would not be a surprise nor McVey and Davis
Interesting the people who get extremely angry when you point out the non-linear problem.
https://x.com/theliamnissan/status/2024502193672315302
Clarkson won't join them either, he was a Remainer and is a friend of Cameron
The shocking thing is the blatant nature of the lying. He claimed that APCO had exceeded their brief. A brief that he set. That was very clear in its scope. And which was not exceeded. Did he really think for a minute APCO were going to simply say, "yeah, fair enough, my mistake"? Personally, this goes beyond resigning from the Cabinet office. He should be resigning as an MP.
Google doesn't like me anymore. I keep using Bing.
It may be instructive in future to track how other countries cope. Ireland allows for self-id but the rules are reviewed periodically, and thanks to the antics of the repellent Barbie Kardashian (NSFW to google) they are amending the rules to ban biological males in female prisons. What in the UK was the matter of fraught shouting and demonstrations is being resolved in Ireland in a less fraught manner.
There is obviously a tension between these 2 and it arises in a lot of cases. Does the woman who is in an abusive relationship "consent" when she agrees to have sex because of fear or simply a desire for a quiet, non violent life? Does the young girl who is desperate to maintain a relationship with this older boy "consent" when he asks her for sex? These things tend to be very fact specific and it is entirely possible that different juries would come to different conclusions.
Correct me where wrong.
From what I've heard so far the IFS was not suggesting that at all.
What they basically said is that one of the problems with the fiscal rules is that polticans sail as close to the wind as they dare on them. So when the OBR changes the growth projections by 0.01% and it magically increases the headroom by £10bn, rather than use this to borrow less, they rush off and spend it. But then when, next time round, the OBR revise their forecast back to were it was, and remove £10bn of headroom again, the politicians panic and cut something random, or increase tax in an ill thought out way.
Leaving aside the question of if the government is spending or taxing an appropriate amount, it's fair to say knee jerk policy making like this is a pretty bad idea.
Incidentally, in all the excitement about the tax take for January, people seem not to have noticed that this is almost entirely because of a surge in Capital Gains recepts, because they put the rates up from next year. That merely tells you that incentives matter, and people are realising gains to ensure they only pay the old rate. This is bad news for the government, because it tell us 1) the people modeling this in the treasury aren't very good at it and 2) future recepts will be substantially lower than modeled.
1) Registration for elections is automatic
2) Not turning up to vote is a vote for Reopen Nominations.
3) RON Is on the ballot papers, as well.
4) If RON wins, all the candidates in the election are ineligible to stand in the following special election.
6) The process state marches on without the inconvenience of politicians
At its finest, International Law is a framework against which actions can be judged. Not a policy document.
Alternatively, and I know this a crazy idea, we could try offering politicians for election whom the electorate *likes*.
English monarchs generally suffered a more unusual demise, such as surfeit of lamphreys and meeting their maker via a red hot poker insertion
Could try a banishment, perhaps Rockall needs a new lighthouse keeper?
I do not favour executing AMW, at least not before his trial. Currently the pillory of Social Media seems sufficient.
Similtaneously we have contrived to arrive at a system that denies Trans-folk access to gender-confirming care, then pillories them for not having had it. It is quite a cruel and unsustainable position.
New Omnisis poll of Gorton and Denton by-election gives Greens a *two point* lead over Reform and four points over Labour.
Basically neck and neck and within margin of error.
Hannah Spencer (Greens): 22%
Matt Goodwin (REF UK): 20%
Angeliki Stogia (Lab): 18%
Charlotte Cadden (Conservatives): 3%
It also occurs to me while I'm passing that I've traduced both May and Starmer. I'd forgotten about Truss, who wins the "what were they thinking" prize hands down.
Some have suggested that the long period with a Belgian government meant they failed to stop a terrorist attack.
Indeed it’s never really been that enforceable to begin with . Starmer seems to be living in a different world or a bygone era.
"Greenpeace placed a solar powered beacon over the frame of the existing navigation aid in 1997, and returned to upgrade this light in 1998. This was the only permanent mark of human occupation on Rockall until it too succumbed to the ravages of an Atlantic storm two years later."
As a junior doctor 3 decades ago, I blew the whistle on a senior Consultant who I discovered had done some serious malpractice. I did this after taking advice from my medical indemnity advisors. The Consultant in question left the Trust after the investigation, with compensation going to the patient involved. It was completely confidential. After the dust settled the Medical Director personally phoned me to thank me for my actions.
As a senior Consultant myself I have done a fair bit of work for the Medical Director's* "Secret Police" investigating a varied number of concerns about senior clinicians with accusations of financial fraud, clinical incompetence, bullying, sexual harrassement etc etc. Some of these were inconclusive, with insufficient evidence for disciplinary action/sacking/prosecution, but I cannot remember one where the whistleblower raising the concerns was ostracised in any way.
Perhaps my Trust is exceptional, but I do not think so. We only hear about whistleblowers being torn to shreds when it goes wrong. It simply isn't news when the system works.
* Different Trust and different Medical Director.
If I lived there I'd be undecided. Don't have a steer on who best to bring Goodwin down a peg.
28% Reform
25% Labour
Once you account for those who won’t vote and are undecided