I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
But that is an incredibly BIPOC Cabinet
My goodness. Kwarteng, Cleverley, Patel, Badenoch, Braverman
I like it. Truss clearly intends to tackle the dinghy people and say Fuck the Woke
BIPOC?
Darkies Black, Indigenous, and people of colour.
If you know of a better term, now we have abandoned "BAME", do please tell
Brits.
Mate, if only. If only we could all be "Brits". That would - genuinely - be a marvellous day
But you know the Guardian won't allow it. They are already looking for the new word. BIPOC won't last, it is too clumsy, but something else will come along, and last for about 2 years, before being discarded as "racist"
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
But that is an incredibly BIPOC Cabinet
My goodness. Kwarteng, Cleverley, Patel, Badenoch, Braverman
I like it. Truss clearly intends to tackle the dinghy people and say Fuck the Woke
BIPOC?
A nonsense acronym from America (where it should stay)
Black, Indigenous People Of Colour
So, what replaces it then?
People of Colour works, if we must have something.
God it really doesn't. It's ghastly. Reducing people to degree of skin colour. And how "coloured" do you have to be to be a POC? Brown? Beige? Ecru? Off white? Faded bra? Cream-grey?
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
Be more compassionate. This is every parents worst nightmare. I can’t imagine what this would be like or how I would behave.
Me neither. However, a "compassionate" Christian group might be offering every resource they had to help the parents come to terms with their unimaginable loss. Rather than an army of lawyers to prolong their pain.
Yes she is wrong and this needs to be done but I still think she needs compassion.
Nope. she can be allowed a couple of weeks to come to terms with stuff, but after that she should have realised that the child was either not sentient or if sentient, in an appalling situation which should have been terminated ASAP. Child abuse is nor mitigated by the fact that it's a parent doing it.
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
But that is an incredibly BIPOC Cabinet
My goodness. Kwarteng, Cleverley, Patel, Badenoch, Braverman
I like it. Truss clearly intends to tackle the dinghy people and say Fuck the Woke
BIPOC?
A nonsense acronym from America (where it should stay)
Black, Indigenous People Of Colour
So, what replaces it then?
People of Colour works, if we must have something.
God it really doesn't. It's ghastly. Reducing people to degree of skin colour. And how "coloured" do you have to be to be a POC? Brown? Beige? Ecru? Off white? Faded bra? Cream-grey?
It's hideous. Get rid
The whole point of the term is to reduce people to a skin colour.
Its intended to include all non-whites, but of course the term “non-white” is not acceptable.
Nick Clegg joins clique of Meta bosses switching to London
https:/Yes, is back, part time…
Clegg is back, and London is back!
From that thread of articles:
"Hoberman said: “They also move because they see the US so fractionalised. As San Francisco loses its density [of tech headquarters], there’s a chance for London to be the global leader.”"
This is absolutely true. Why step over homeless addict in SF when you can be in glorious sunny London? In King's X? With no threat of Trump? And two hours from all of Europe?
I saw recently that parts of East London have taken over SF for density of tech startups. Kings cross looks like the choice for established tech so will be another huge draw for startups looking for global locations. I know one SAAS company which is currently HQ'd in SF that's considering moving operationally to London from there and leaving behind a small outpost of sales people in NYC. That's the other one that's coming for SF, operational excellence in development by being based in London and sales/GTM based on the East Coast of the US either in NYC or Miami. It's such a better set of timezones. SF used to have the advantage of crossover with APAC countries but with the ease of remote work and setting up remote workers on a single payroll tech companies are choosing to hire locally in Singapore, Melbourne and Wellington.
FPT
Yes, and more: as NYC sinks into crime, and is menaced by deeper political division, a lot of business in NYC will come here. Remote working suddenly benefits the UK
Really. Why would you work in NYC or LA or SF if you can work in London?
NYC is a truly great city and LA is jolly interesting and SF has a certain beauty, but they have grave downsides, and they are all trillions of miles from anywhere else
Fly two hours from NYC and you are in, er, Toronto
Compare that with London, when in 2 hours or less you can be in Paris, Venice, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Rome, Florence, Edinburgh, Nice... and the Alps, the Balearics, Sicily, western Ireland, Burgundy, the Algarve, the Black Forest, the Dordogne, the Italian lakes, the Dolomites, Tyrol,...
There is no comparison. If your job is no longer quite so tied to the Silicon Valley office, you will move to London
NYC makes sense for a lot of reasons despite the crime (and it's nowhere near as bad as SF) it's got the 2pm-6pm crossover with London, there's already quite a few companies in the area, it's bigger and better connected than SF (which means people have the option of living in NJ and commuting in) and it's only 7h on a cheap business class flight from London for business meetings. For tech startups there's also a fuckton of potential clients on the doorstep in NYC because there's so many financial services companies looking to cut costs. The City is one of the reasons tech has thrived in London, its clients and financing for startups.
NYC is unquestionably a magnificent city (as I said in my earlier comment), but so is London. And the downsides of NYC - crime, racial tension, MAGA-Trump, divided country, healthcare, opiates, guns - now seem to me to outweigh the downsides of London: weather, greyness, grotty areas
Both are English-speaking world cities with glorious culture, London has more history, New York City has that skyline
The proximity of the rest of Europe might be the clincher for me, if I was a highly paid tech exec. And where do you want your kids to grow up? Safely?
But of course I am biased
I think we will see more American execs choosing London on a quasi-WFH basis. It will be a complex and remarkable irony if post-Brexit London ascends to world capital status (again?)..... because it is in Europe
Yes, that's why I think London is a good shout for operational and potentially tax HQ. My point on NYC is more in relation to having the sales function for NA run out of there rather than SF because it has significantly better crossover with London and it's only a 7h flight for when seniors and execs need face to face meetings.
The London/NYC split works brilliantly for financial services, it being replicated for tech would be no surprise.
The last piece of the puzzle is higher risk funds in London willing to invest hundreds of millions for series D onwards.
Yes, I concur
Finance/sales stuff might stay in NYC but a lot of intellectual/HQ heft will move to London
Add in the boost from Hong Kong and - perhaps unexpectedly - London could really thrive in the next decade
I wonder if this is what I sensed in King's X yesterday. Essentially they are - wittingly or not - creating a Silicon Valley in an amazing new London neighborhood, but with added universities and science institutes and art galleries and biochemistry labs and the British Library and the rest, and all of it 300m from St Pancras and the eurostar, and half an hour from Heathrow via the Liz Line, with Shoreditch and the Silicon roundabout just down the road
It is completely unique. London - esp King's X - has the chance to be THE tech hub for the world, or at least the western world
If I was the head of Instagram, I'd move from California to King's Cross (never thought I'd write that). Just to see
Kings Cross? Would you like to know about living there in the before times? Of COURSE you would...
I moved to that London in July 1999. I had graduated with a Journalism Degree in summer 1998 already working in radio on various short term contracts. By late spring 1999 there was a gap, and I was a bit fed up with the GF I was living with. So moved to London to find a job.
Which I did in 7 working days. Literally. Arrived Sunday. Agency interviews Monday, job interviews later that week, a 2nd interview the following Monday and started working for Nature the science journal straight away.
Their office is on Crinan Street, the north end of KX station with the canal basin behind. So I rented a 1 bed mini bedsit at the top of Grays Inn Road and started work. Kings Cross at the time was home to only one thriving industry - hookers. I was propositioned at 8am one morning crossing the road by the station on the way to work! There was so little in the way of facilities in Kings Cross that the company had a free canteen for its employees - there literally being nothing available in the vicinity.
At the top of Crinan Street was a pub which had been an old canal warehouse - now demolished and the site of Guardian Newspapers building. And a wine bar on Balfe Street. Aside from the Flying Scotsman fight bar on Caledonian Road, that was it.
The transformation in 20 years is literally mindblowing.
I remember that! Went to see someone in that office a few years earlier, perhaps 1992-3, when it was still very new. I did wince when I turned out of KX and saw the ambience of that street, and I was glad to be getting back to the train while it was still daylight.
In those days there was a ramp off the end of platform 1 out onto York Road. So you could exit the station, cross the street and be into the Nature building inside 30 seconds. Barely time to wave at Clive Sinclair in his penthouse...
I need to go back and explore the KX/StP area properly when I next visit my Camden friend; so much change there, including StP itself which was still very much its original state when I knew it, as described in Jack Simmons's history; didn't have time to more than pay homage to Hardy at the eponymous church, and to register the degree of change when passing through it in recent years, which needed a new edition of the history.
You can spend a whole day there, pretty much
Explore the new urbanism, check out the art galleries, see St Martin's, go to a movie or a play or a concert in one of the venues, have lunch or dinner (or both) in one of about 40 restaurants. Walk around Camley Street Wildpark, stroll along the Regent's Canal to Camden and Primrose Hill and back, go to the British Library, and more
All in that one district. Surrounded by industrial history Vs the new Google HQ. Fab
Mm, that's an idea - the canal walk in particular, especially as my chum lives in Camden.
This reminds me I got hold of this paper some years back for him - archaeological dig. No idea if it is of interest but he was very taken with it.
I had a little historical frisson yesterday. The HS2 guys are digging right outside my front door. I had a chat with one of them, a nice guy, and seriously Irish
And it occurred to me that this was a superb echo of when the very first railways were built, when Irish navvies would have worked in the exact same spot, then gone off to drink in the Dublin Castle (hence its name)
They would have worked by the houses in this famous print, middle right. One of these houses, as it happens, being the house where I now live
There's a quite good Melvin Bragg thing (possibly an In Our Time) about the first railways to come out of London. Broad arch of the story is that it was too expensive to roll them through the already posh parts, so they ploughed them through the slums. Middle-class people from the posh parts who could afford the newfangled trains were then exposed to the slums in ways they hadn't been before and lo-and-behold huge reforms began.
You got me looking for that In Our Time railway episode, which sounds fascinating.
I haven't found it (yet) but there are a mind-blowing 959 IOT episodes! Of which I've listened to about a dozen.
You have sorted out my podcast listening for the next few months. Thanks!
It's a remarkable series. One of the gems of BBC radio.
For some reason I don’t always put Melvyn in my top 10 greatest living Englishmen* (the luxuriant hair maybe?) but he should definitely be there.
*English person
Northern boy ends up in Hampstead and there the similarity ends. He's one of those people who channels his fundamental unease at our 'situation' into massive lifelong productivity. I remember the SB Show when it started, bit of intellectual telly on a Saturday night, feeling slightly pleased with myself for liking it.
His novels are actually pretty good also, better than I sniffly expected anyway.
Bragg’s productivity is incredible. I was interested to note from an interview that he foreswears alcohol for 6 months a year (not interested enough to consider that as antidote to my own sloth of course).
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
But that is an incredibly BIPOC Cabinet
My goodness. Kwarteng, Cleverley, Patel, Badenoch, Braverman
I like it. Truss clearly intends to tackle the dinghy people and say Fuck the Woke
BIPOC?
Darkies Black, Indigenous, and people of colour.
If you know of a better term, now we have abandoned "BAME", do please tell
Brits.
Mate, if only. If only we could all be "Brits". That would - genuinely - be a marvellous day
But you know the Guardian won't allow it. They are already looking for the new word. BIPOC won't last, it is too clumsy, but something else will come along, and last for about 2 years, before being discarded as "racist"
Ok, call us Enochs.
We now have the whip hand.
Edit - Ugh, sounds too much like eunuchs.
There's Good Enochs who are a sort of pinky-gray colour, and Bad Enochs which is everyone else.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
I agree. Children's intensive care for several months is not just a financial expense, but also has a major opportunity cost in that that bed cannot be used to support neurosurgery or cardiac surgery on other children. In the USA the medical bill would probably be half a million dollars by now, but no cost to the parents.
Of course the death of a child is traumatic and tragic, but ventilating a corpse for another few months is not appropriate treatment of parental bereavement.
The parents are Christians. Someone should tell them that their son's soul has left his body, and what remains is not the true 'him'.
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
But that is an incredibly BIPOC Cabinet
My goodness. Kwarteng, Cleverley, Patel, Badenoch, Braverman
I like it. Truss clearly intends to tackle the dinghy people and say Fuck the Woke
BIPOC?
Darkies Black, Indigenous, and people of colour.
If you know of a better term, now we have abandoned "BAME", do please tell
Brits.
Mate, if only. If only we could all be "Brits". That would - genuinely - be a marvellous day
But you know the Guardian won't allow it. They are already looking for the new word. BIPOC won't last, it is too clumsy, but something else will come along, and last for about 2 years, before being discarded as "racist"
Truss, Kwarteng, Cleverley and Braverman in the four great offices of state is a package so lightweight it could get on a Ryanair flight without paying extra.
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
Hmmm.
Offering Sunak HS is quite a good idea.
Offering my daughter’s new cat HS is a good idea if the alternative is Braverman.
Ah, my HS stood for Health Secretary - not a sensible abbreviation. That's the rumoured offer. It's senior enough for it not to be a snub, but takes him out of the running of the country bit, and gives him plenty of scope for penny pinching.
I wouldn't move Patel from Home Secretary myself - just keep her in there forever. Swapping her with Braverman I see nothing to be gained, and a fair bit of experience in the role lost.
I saw a comment recently that the UK was increasingly a health service with a small country attached. Health and Social Care Secretary is responsible for almost 1/3 of all government spending. It’s a serious job and I hope Sunak takes it.
Given what's coming down the track for the schools'n'hospitals, the jobs of Health Sec and Education Sec are chalices full of poison.
I'd say they were hospital passes, but have you seen the waiting lists and A+E wait times recently?
Nick Clegg joins clique of Meta bosses switching to London
https:/Yes, is back, part time…
Clegg is back, and London is back!
From that thread of articles:
"Hoberman said: “They also move because they see the US so fractionalised. As San Francisco loses its density [of tech headquarters], there’s a chance for London to be the global leader.”"
This is absolutely true. Why step over homeless addict in SF when you can be in glorious sunny London? In King's X? With no threat of Trump? And two hours from all of Europe?
I saw recently that parts of East London have taken over SF for density of tech startups. Kings cross looks like the choice for established tech so will be another huge draw for startups looking for global locations. I know one SAAS company which is currently HQ'd in SF that's considering moving operationally to London from there and leaving behind a small outpost of sales people in NYC. That's the other one that's coming for SF, operational excellence in development by being based in London and sales/GTM based on the East Coast of the US either in NYC or Miami. It's such a better set of timezones. SF used to have the advantage of crossover with APAC countries but with the ease of remote work and setting up remote workers on a single payroll tech companies are choosing to hire locally in Singapore, Melbourne and Wellington.
FPT
Yes, and more: as NYC sinks into crime, and is menaced by deeper political division, a lot of business in NYC will come here. Remote working suddenly benefits the UK
Really. Why would you work in NYC or LA or SF if you can work in London?
NYC is a truly great city and LA is jolly interesting and SF has a certain beauty, but they have grave downsides, and they are all trillions of miles from anywhere else
Fly two hours from NYC and you are in, er, Toronto
Compare that with London, when in 2 hours or less you can be in Paris, Venice, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Rome, Florence, Edinburgh, Nice... and the Alps, the Balearics, Sicily, western Ireland, Burgundy, the Algarve, the Black Forest, the Dordogne, the Italian lakes, the Dolomites, Tyrol,...
There is no comparison. If your job is no longer quite so tied to the Silicon Valley office, you will move to London
NYC makes sense for a lot of reasons despite the crime (and it's nowhere near as bad as SF) it's got the 2pm-6pm crossover with London, there's already quite a few companies in the area, it's bigger and better connected than SF (which means people have the option of living in NJ and commuting in) and it's only 7h on a cheap business class flight from London for business meetings. For tech startups there's also a fuckton of potential clients on the doorstep in NYC because there's so many financial services companies looking to cut costs. The City is one of the reasons tech has thrived in London, its clients and financing for startups.
NYC is unquestionably a magnificent city (as I said in my earlier comment), but so is London. And the downsides of NYC - crime, racial tension, MAGA-Trump, divided country, healthcare, opiates, guns - now seem to me to outweigh the downsides of London: weather, greyness, grotty areas
Both are English-speaking world cities with glorious culture, London has more history, New York City has that skyline
The proximity of the rest of Europe might be the clincher for me, if I was a highly paid tech exec. And where do you want your kids to grow up? Safely?
But of course I am biased
I think we will see more American execs choosing London on a quasi-WFH basis. It will be a complex and remarkable irony if post-Brexit London ascends to world capital status (again?)..... because it is in Europe
Yes, that's why I think London is a good shout for operational and potentially tax HQ. My point on NYC is more in relation to having the sales function for NA run out of there rather than SF because it has significantly better crossover with London and it's only a 7h flight for when seniors and execs need face to face meetings.
The London/NYC split works brilliantly for financial services, it being replicated for tech would be no surprise.
The last piece of the puzzle is higher risk funds in London willing to invest hundreds of millions for series D onwards.
Yes, I concur
Finance/sales stuff might stay in NYC but a lot of intellectual/HQ heft will move to London
Add in the boost from Hong Kong and - perhaps unexpectedly - London could really thrive in the next decade
I wonder if this is what I sensed in King's X yesterday. Essentially they are - wittingly or not - creating a Silicon Valley in an amazing new London neighborhood, but with added universities and science institutes and art galleries and biochemistry labs and the British Library and the rest, and all of it 300m from St Pancras and the eurostar, and half an hour from Heathrow via the Liz Line, with Shoreditch and the Silicon roundabout just down the road
It is completely unique. London - esp King's X - has the chance to be THE tech hub for the world, or at least the western world
If I was the head of Instagram, I'd move from California to King's Cross (never thought I'd write that). Just to see
Kings Cross? Would you like to know about living there in the before times? Of COURSE you would...
I moved to that London in July 1999. I had graduated with a Journalism Degree in summer 1998 already working in radio on various short term contracts. By late spring 1999 there was a gap, and I was a bit fed up with the GF I was living with. So moved to London to find a job.
Which I did in 7 working days. Literally. Arrived Sunday. Agency interviews Monday, job interviews later that week, a 2nd interview the following Monday and started working for Nature the science journal straight away.
Their office is on Crinan Street, the north end of KX station with the canal basin behind. So I rented a 1 bed mini bedsit at the top of Grays Inn Road and started work. Kings Cross at the time was home to only one thriving industry - hookers. I was propositioned at 8am one morning crossing the road by the station on the way to work! There was so little in the way of facilities in Kings Cross that the company had a free canteen for its employees - there literally being nothing available in the vicinity.
At the top of Crinan Street was a pub which had been an old canal warehouse - now demolished and the site of Guardian Newspapers building. And a wine bar on Balfe Street. Aside from the Flying Scotsman fight bar on Caledonian Road, that was it.
The transformation in 20 years is literally mindblowing.
I remember that! Went to see someone in that office a few years earlier, perhaps 1992-3, when it was still very new. I did wince when I turned out of KX and saw the ambience of that street, and I was glad to be getting back to the train while it was still daylight.
In those days there was a ramp off the end of platform 1 out onto York Road. So you could exit the station, cross the street and be into the Nature building inside 30 seconds. Barely time to wave at Clive Sinclair in his penthouse...
I need to go back and explore the KX/StP area properly when I next visit my Camden friend; so much change there, including StP itself which was still very much its original state when I knew it, as described in Jack Simmons's history; didn't have time to more than pay homage to Hardy at the eponymous church, and to register the degree of change when passing through it in recent years, which needed a new edition of the history.
You can spend a whole day there, pretty much
Explore the new urbanism, check out the art galleries, see St Martin's, go to a movie or a play or a concert in one of the venues, have lunch or dinner (or both) in one of about 40 restaurants. Walk around Camley Street Wildpark, stroll along the Regent's Canal to Camden and Primrose Hill and back, go to the British Library, and more
All in that one district. Surrounded by industrial history Vs the new Google HQ. Fab
Mm, that's an idea - the canal walk in particular, especially as my chum lives in Camden.
This reminds me I got hold of this paper some years back for him - archaeological dig. No idea if it is of interest but he was very taken with it.
I had a little historical frisson yesterday. The HS2 guys are digging right outside my front door. I had a chat with one of them, a nice guy, and seriously Irish
And it occurred to me that this was a superb echo of when the very first railways were built, when Irish navvies would have worked in the exact same spot, then gone off to drink in the Dublin Castle (hence its name)
They would have worked by the houses in this famous print, middle right. One of these houses, as it happens, being the house where I now live
There's a quite good Melvin Bragg thing (possibly an In Our Time) about the first railways to come out of London. Broad arch of the story is that it was too expensive to roll them through the already posh parts, so they ploughed them through the slums. Middle-class people from the posh parts who could afford the newfangled trains were then exposed to the slums in ways they hadn't been before and lo-and-behold huge reforms began.
You got me looking for that In Our Time railway episode, which sounds fascinating.
I haven't found it (yet) but there are a mind-blowing 959 IOT episodes! Of which I've listened to about a dozen.
You have sorted out my podcast listening for the next few months. Thanks!
It's a remarkable series. One of the gems of BBC radio.
For some reason I don’t always put Melvyn in my top 10 greatest living Englishmen* (the luxuriant hair maybe?) but he should definitely be there.
*English person
Yeah. He seems genuinely interested in stuff he knows nowt about. And even if he isn't really, he gives off the impression that he is, or ought to be. Even if you aren't. I find some of the IOT fascinating. Some deathly dull. Some bewildering. But I'm glad it exists.
Since Wokeness really motored into action, making everyone terrifically aware of skin colour, I am much more aware of skin colour
I cannot see this as a good thing. It is a bad thing. Did I have some residual racism in my being, beforehand? Probably, but so do all humans. It is part of the human condition
But, in Britain at least, we were potentially moving beyond that. Now we are being dragged back to hyper-hyper-awareness of.... fucking skin pigmentation. Melanin. Stuff in skin cells. Dividing people. So depressing
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
I agree. Children's intensive care for several months is not just a financial expense, but also has a major opportunity cost in that that bed cannot be used to support neurosurgery or cardiac surgery on other children. In the USA the medical bill would probably be half a million dollars by now, but no cost to the parents.
Of course the death of a child is traumatic and tragic, but ventilating a corpse for another few months is not appropriate treatment of parental bereavement.
The parents are Christians. Someone should tell them that their son's soul has left his body, and what remains is not the true 'him'.
They usually counter that with It is the Lord's will that he stays alive till he doesn't. and I don't think they are particularly Christian, they have just been adopted by a bunch of utterly creepy American fundamentalists who routinely pounce on this sort of opportunity
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
But that is an incredibly BIPOC Cabinet
My goodness. Kwarteng, Cleverley, Patel, Badenoch, Braverman
I like it. Truss clearly intends to tackle the dinghy people and say Fuck the Woke
BIPOC?
A nonsense acronym from America (where it should stay)
Black, Indigenous People Of Colour
So, what replaces it then?
People of Colour works, if we must have something.
God it really doesn't. It's ghastly. Reducing people to degree of skin colour. And how "coloured" do you have to be to be a POC? Brown? Beige? Ecru? Off white? Faded bra? Cream-grey?
It's hideous. Get rid
The whole point of the term is to reduce people to a skin colour.
Its intended to include all non-whites, but of course the term “non-white” is not acceptable.
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
But that is an incredibly BIPOC Cabinet
My goodness. Kwarteng, Cleverley, Patel, Badenoch, Braverman
I like it. Truss clearly intends to tackle the dinghy people and say Fuck the Woke
BIPOC?
A nonsense acronym from America (where it should stay)
Black, Indigenous People Of Colour
So, what replaces it then?
People of Colour works, if we must have something.
I don't think it works at all. It really is no better than 'coloured'. Grossly patronising and horribly American sounding, to say nothing of being genuinely racist, in its assumption that whiteness is the lodestar and everything else is a colourful jazzed-up variation on it.
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
But that is an incredibly BIPOC Cabinet
My goodness. Kwarteng, Cleverley, Patel, Badenoch, Braverman
I like it. Truss clearly intends to tackle the dinghy people and say Fuck the Woke
BIPOC?
A nonsense acronym from America (where it should stay)
Black, Indigenous People Of Colour
So, what replaces it then?
People of Colour works, if we must have something.
Mrs P has been gently trying to ease her 90 yo father away from referring to any non-white people as 'coloured' (which was a big improvement on what his 40 yo self would have said tbf).
She should probably give up because a) he's 90 (diminishing returns and all that) and b) the target term keeps changing.
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
But that is an incredibly BIPOC Cabinet
My goodness. Kwarteng, Cleverley, Patel, Badenoch, Braverman
I like it. Truss clearly intends to tackle the dinghy people and say Fuck the Woke
BIPOC?
A nonsense acronym from America (where it should stay)
Black, Indigenous People Of Colour
So, what replaces it then?
People of Colour works, if we must have something.
God it really doesn't. It's ghastly. Reducing people to degree of skin colour. And how "coloured" do you have to be to be a POC? Brown? Beige? Ecru? Off white? Faded bra? Cream-grey?
It's hideous. Get rid
The whole point of the term is to reduce people to a skin colour.
Its intended to include all non-whites, but of course the term “non-white” is not acceptable.
Isn't white a colour?
OED says it is.
Can you imagine anything creepier than an actually white person? As opposed to pinkish, but light brown in summer?
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
But that is an incredibly BIPOC Cabinet
My goodness. Kwarteng, Cleverley, Patel, Badenoch, Braverman
I like it. Truss clearly intends to tackle the dinghy people and say Fuck the Woke
BIPOC?
A nonsense acronym from America (where it should stay)
Black, Indigenous People Of Colour
So, what replaces it then?
People of Colour works, if we must have something.
I don't think it works at all. It really is no better than 'coloured'. Grossly patronising and horribly American sounding, to say nothing of being genuinely racist, in its assumption that whiteness is the lodestar and everything else is a colourful jazzed-up variation on it.
Yes, it is obviously grotesque and insulting (as was BAME) and I'd say America is about 12-18 months away from realising this, and abandoning the term in revulsion (just as they abandoned colored, Afro-American etc etc etc)
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
But that is an incredibly BIPOC Cabinet
My goodness. Kwarteng, Cleverley, Patel, Badenoch, Braverman
I like it. Truss clearly intends to tackle the dinghy people and say Fuck the Woke
BIPOC?
A nonsense acronym from America (where it should stay)
Black, Indigenous People Of Colour
So, what replaces it then?
People of Colour works, if we must have something.
God it really doesn't. It's ghastly. Reducing people to degree of skin colour. And how "coloured" do you have to be to be a POC? Brown? Beige? Ecru? Off white? Faded bra? Cream-grey?
It's hideous. Get rid
The whole point of the term is to reduce people to a skin colour.
Its intended to include all non-whites, but of course the term “non-white” is not acceptable.
Truss, Kwarteng, Cleverley and Braverman in the four great offices of state is a package so lightweight it could get on a Ryanair flight without paying extra.
That’s the future that awaits us under Doris Johnson…..
Nick Clegg joins clique of Meta bosses switching to London
https:/Yes, is back, part time…
Clegg is back, and London is back!
From that thread of articles:
"Hoberman said: “They also move because they see the US so fractionalised. As San Francisco loses its density [of tech headquarters], there’s a chance for London to be the global leader.”"
This is absolutely true. Why step over homeless addict in SF when you can be in glorious sunny London? In King's X? With no threat of Trump? And two hours from all of Europe?
I saw recently that parts of East London have taken over SF for density of tech startups. Kings cross looks like the choice for established tech so will be another huge draw for startups looking for global locations. I know one SAAS company which is currently HQ'd in SF that's considering moving operationally to London from there and leaving behind a small outpost of sales people in NYC. That's the other one that's coming for SF, operational excellence in development by being based in London and sales/GTM based on the East Coast of the US either in NYC or Miami. It's such a better set of timezones. SF used to have the advantage of crossover with APAC countries but with the ease of remote work and setting up remote workers on a single payroll tech companies are choosing to hire locally in Singapore, Melbourne and Wellington.
FPT
Yes, and more: as NYC sinks into crime, and is menaced by deeper political division, a lot of business in NYC will come here. Remote working suddenly benefits the UK
Really. Why would you work in NYC or LA or SF if you can work in London?
NYC is a truly great city and LA is jolly interesting and SF has a certain beauty, but they have grave downsides, and they are all trillions of miles from anywhere else
Fly two hours from NYC and you are in, er, Toronto
Compare that with London, when in 2 hours or less you can be in Paris, Venice, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Rome, Florence, Edinburgh, Nice... and the Alps, the Balearics, Sicily, western Ireland, Burgundy, the Algarve, the Black Forest, the Dordogne, the Italian lakes, the Dolomites, Tyrol,...
There is no comparison. If your job is no longer quite so tied to the Silicon Valley office, you will move to London
NYC makes sense for a lot of reasons despite the crime (and it's nowhere near as bad as SF) it's got the 2pm-6pm crossover with London, there's already quite a few companies in the area, it's bigger and better connected than SF (which means people have the option of living in NJ and commuting in) and it's only 7h on a cheap business class flight from London for business meetings. For tech startups there's also a fuckton of potential clients on the doorstep in NYC because there's so many financial services companies looking to cut costs. The City is one of the reasons tech has thrived in London, its clients and financing for startups.
NYC is unquestionably a magnificent city (as I said in my earlier comment), but so is London. And the downsides of NYC - crime, racial tension, MAGA-Trump, divided country, healthcare, opiates, guns - now seem to me to outweigh the downsides of London: weather, greyness, grotty areas
Both are English-speaking world cities with glorious culture, London has more history, New York City has that skyline
The proximity of the rest of Europe might be the clincher for me, if I was a highly paid tech exec. And where do you want your kids to grow up? Safely?
But of course I am biased
I think we will see more American execs choosing London on a quasi-WFH basis. It will be a complex and remarkable irony if post-Brexit London ascends to world capital status (again?)..... because it is in Europe
Yes, that's why I think London is a good shout for operational and potentially tax HQ. My point on NYC is more in relation to having the sales function for NA run out of there rather than SF because it has significantly better crossover with London and it's only a 7h flight for when seniors and execs need face to face meetings.
The London/NYC split works brilliantly for financial services, it being replicated for tech would be no surprise.
The last piece of the puzzle is higher risk funds in London willing to invest hundreds of millions for series D onwards.
Yes, I concur
Finance/sales stuff might stay in NYC but a lot of intellectual/HQ heft will move to London
Add in the boost from Hong Kong and - perhaps unexpectedly - London could really thrive in the next decade
I wonder if this is what I sensed in King's X yesterday. Essentially they are - wittingly or not - creating a Silicon Valley in an amazing new London neighborhood, but with added universities and science institutes and art galleries and biochemistry labs and the British Library and the rest, and all of it 300m from St Pancras and the eurostar, and half an hour from Heathrow via the Liz Line, with Shoreditch and the Silicon roundabout just down the road
It is completely unique. London - esp King's X - has the chance to be THE tech hub for the world, or at least the western world
If I was the head of Instagram, I'd move from California to King's Cross (never thought I'd write that). Just to see
Kings Cross? Would you like to know about living there in the before times? Of COURSE you would...
I moved to that London in July 1999. I had graduated with a Journalism Degree in summer 1998 already working in radio on various short term contracts. By late spring 1999 there was a gap, and I was a bit fed up with the GF I was living with. So moved to London to find a job.
Which I did in 7 working days. Literally. Arrived Sunday. Agency interviews Monday, job interviews later that week, a 2nd interview the following Monday and started working for Nature the science journal straight away.
Their office is on Crinan Street, the north end of KX station with the canal basin behind. So I rented a 1 bed mini bedsit at the top of Grays Inn Road and started work. Kings Cross at the time was home to only one thriving industry - hookers. I was propositioned at 8am one morning crossing the road by the station on the way to work! There was so little in the way of facilities in Kings Cross that the company had a free canteen for its employees - there literally being nothing available in the vicinity.
At the top of Crinan Street was a pub which had been an old canal warehouse - now demolished and the site of Guardian Newspapers building. And a wine bar on Balfe Street. Aside from the Flying Scotsman fight bar on Caledonian Road, that was it.
The transformation in 20 years is literally mindblowing.
I remember that! Went to see someone in that office a few years earlier, perhaps 1992-3, when it was still very new. I did wince when I turned out of KX and saw the ambience of that street, and I was glad to be getting back to the train while it was still daylight.
In those days there was a ramp off the end of platform 1 out onto York Road. So you could exit the station, cross the street and be into the Nature building inside 30 seconds. Barely time to wave at Clive Sinclair in his penthouse...
I need to go back and explore the KX/StP area properly when I next visit my Camden friend; so much change there, including StP itself which was still very much its original state when I knew it, as described in Jack Simmons's history; didn't have time to more than pay homage to Hardy at the eponymous church, and to register the degree of change when passing through it in recent years, which needed a new edition of the history.
You can spend a whole day there, pretty much
Explore the new urbanism, check out the art galleries, see St Martin's, go to a movie or a play or a concert in one of the venues, have lunch or dinner (or both) in one of about 40 restaurants. Walk around Camley Street Wildpark, stroll along the Regent's Canal to Camden and Primrose Hill and back, go to the British Library, and more
All in that one district. Surrounded by industrial history Vs the new Google HQ. Fab
Mm, that's an idea - the canal walk in particular, especially as my chum lives in Camden.
This reminds me I got hold of this paper some years back for him - archaeological dig. No idea if it is of interest but he was very taken with it.
I had a little historical frisson yesterday. The HS2 guys are digging right outside my front door. I had a chat with one of them, a nice guy, and seriously Irish
And it occurred to me that this was a superb echo of when the very first railways were built, when Irish navvies would have worked in the exact same spot, then gone off to drink in the Dublin Castle (hence its name)
They would have worked by the houses in this famous print, middle right. One of these houses, as it happens, being the house where I now live
There's a quite good Melvin Bragg thing (possibly an In Our Time) about the first railways to come out of London. Broad arch of the story is that it was too expensive to roll them through the already posh parts, so they ploughed them through the slums. Middle-class people from the posh parts who could afford the newfangled trains were then exposed to the slums in ways they hadn't been before and lo-and-behold huge reforms began.
You got me looking for that In Our Time railway episode, which sounds fascinating.
I haven't found it (yet) but there are a mind-blowing 959 IOT episodes! Of which I've listened to about a dozen.
You have sorted out my podcast listening for the next few months. Thanks!
It's a remarkable series. One of the gems of BBC radio.
For some reason I don’t always put Melvyn in my top 10 greatest living Englishmen* (the luxuriant hair maybe?) but he should definitely be there.
*English person
Northern boy ends up in Hampstead and there the similarity ends. He's one of those people who channels his fundamental unease at our 'situation' into massive lifelong productivity. I remember the SB Show when it started, bit of intellectual telly on a Saturday night, feeling slightly pleased with myself for liking it.
His novels are actually pretty good also, better than I sniffly expected anyway.
Bragg’s productivity is incredible. I was interested to note from an interview that he foreswears alcohol for 6 months a year (not interested enough to consider that as antidote to my own sloth of course).
Currently on Sky Arts with the South Bank Show tonight. A damning indictment of what Thatcher's Broadcasting Act did to ITV ( and Channel 4, and highbrow broadcasting in Britain in general ).
I don't give a monkeys how anyone describes this putative Cabinet. Do they have any answers at all to CofL or that the NE is being economically overtaken by the Baltic States?
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
I agree. Children's intensive care for several months is not just a financial expense, but also has a major opportunity cost in that that bed cannot be used to support neurosurgery or cardiac surgery on other children. In the USA the medical bill would probably be half a million dollars by now, but no cost to the parents.
Of course the death of a child is traumatic and tragic, but ventilating a corpse for another few months is not appropriate treatment of parental bereavement.
The parents are Christians. Someone should tell them that their son's soul has left his body, and what remains is not the true 'him'.
They usually counter that with It is the Lord's will that he stays alive till he doesn't. and I don't think they are particularly Christian, they have just been adopted by a bunch of utterly creepy American fundamentalists who routinely pounce on this sort of opportunity
You'd think the same people wouldn't be keen on a National Health Service.
I don't give a monkeys how anyone describes this putative Cabinet. Do they have any answers at all to CofL or that the NE is being economically overtaken by the Baltic States?
Evening all. Just back from an exhilarating stroll up Cosdon Beacon on Dartmoor. A forgiving hill, grassy and soft. From the top, Dartmoor stretches out like an ocean to the south and west, while rural Devon nestles cosily beneath you to the north and east. Not a soul about, a stone circle and a reward sunset, the sky pinkening to the north in its aftermath. It occurs to me that the sunset at the equinox probably nestles between the gap in the rocks at the top of Yes Tor, which is satisfying. Probably.
I don't give a monkeys how anyone describes this putative Cabinet. Do they have any answers at all to CofL or that the NE is being economically overtaken by the Baltic States?
No, they do not.
Not only do they not have the answers, they don't even recognise the questions.
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
But that is an incredibly BIPOC Cabinet
My goodness. Kwarteng, Cleverley, Patel, Badenoch, Braverman
I like it. Truss clearly intends to tackle the dinghy people and say Fuck the Woke
BIPOC?
A nonsense acronym from America (where it should stay)
Black, Indigenous People Of Colour
So, what replaces it then?
People of Colour works, if we must have something.
It is absurd that "People of Colour" is prefered, yet use "Coloured People" will get you damned.
I would just describe such a cabinet as ethnically diverse.
People have literally been sacked for saying "coloured people" rather than "people of colour". No joke
A friend of mine, a well known pro actor, was doing a Zoom presentation to about 100 acting students during the pando, and he accidentally said "coloured people" when he meant to say "people of colour". A mere slip
He told me that his whole life flashed before him as he waited for someone to pick him up on it, but no one did, and no one - it seems - recorded the lecture, so he was fine. But he was that close to career disaster. The TV actor that said "coloured people"!
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
There is a minor revolt in the US against all the racial classifications -- which I have joined. When the census asks us, every 10 years, for our race, we check "other". And then specify "American". I am pretty sure they still code us "white", but I still feel a little better doing that.)
I've just put some music onto my new computer, and despite putting nearly a thousand tracks on, I've realised I have none beginning with X or Z.
So, classic music tracks whose titles begin with 'x' or 'z' ?
Zobi La Mouche by Les Negresses Vertes, William Orbit remix. Sublime late '80s French folk-pop.
There is an argument that Vince Clarke ripping off Orbit's mix to make his own remix of the Happy Mondays' 'Wrote for Luck' is what kickstarted Madchester, and hence Britpop, and... But that may be going too far.
Braverman and Cleverley are both manifestly incompetent, to the extent that matters.
Kwarteng comes from the Rishi-Sunak-school-of-do-nothing, but is presumably there as someone Truss believes will do her bidding.
IDS’s return is potentially not a bad idea in that if you have to have nutters in your cabinet, he is probably the least awful.
Pushing Patel away from any executive responsibility is also a small mercy.
IDS to Chief Whip is the rumour. Braverman as Home Secretary to make Patel look liberal. Kwarteng a heavyweight Chancellor. Cleverly our first BME Foreign Secretary
I don't give a monkeys how anyone describes this putative Cabinet. Do they have any answers at all to CofL or that the NE is being economically overtaken by the Baltic States?
It looks like Truss is putting all her eggs in the culture war basket, hoping that people are so distracted they don’t notice the cost of living crisis, the collapse of public services and the ongoing disasters of the Brexit the government chose to pursue. I am not sure it’s a strategy that can hold for two years.
I don't give a monkeys how anyone describes this putative Cabinet. Do they have any answers at all to CofL or that the NE is being economically overtaken by the Baltic States?
No, they do not.
Don't give a toss whether they are woke or anti-woke either.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
The feeling is mutual I assure you
Loathing a fellow human being doesn't sound like following Christ's teaching to me.
Pesky non white types - cluttering up the language. Why oh why can't we all be just PEOPLE?
"Why oh why can't we all be just PEOPLE?"
There was a time when this was the rallying cry of the Left. That's when the Left was admirable and noble, and a genuine force for good. Now you say this sarcastically
And thus the Left is reduced to this cranky, weird, ugly, divisive cult, obsessed with sexual and racial identity to the exclusion of all other things, and everyone must be put in a box, and not be mixed with everyone else, and everyone stays in their lane lest they "culturally appropriate" pasta or sombreros. Bleak
I don't give a monkeys how anyone describes this putative Cabinet. Do they have any answers at all to CofL or that the NE is being economically overtaken by the Baltic States?
It's genuinely hard to believe any of them had successful careers before politics, because there's nothing they have said or done recently that makes me think "I can see how they have risen to such heights".
The last time I felt we had generally capable politicians in the cabinet was probably the Blair government, and it keeps on getting worse.
I don't give a monkeys how anyone describes this putative Cabinet. Do they have any answers at all to CofL or that the NE is being economically overtaken by the Baltic States?
No, they do not.
Not only do they not have the answers, they don't even recognise the questions.
Exactly. My last post was way too polite. We are ruled by idiots.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
The feeling is mutual I assure you
Loathing a fellow human being doesn't sound like following Christ's teaching to me.
Depends which bit of the Bible you read, the Old Testament is very much part of my Bible as much as the New. Certainly plenty of tough treatment of those who took on the true believers there.
I certainly don't do wet Christianity and I am quite prepared to give Ishmael as good as he gives out
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
But that is an incredibly BIPOC Cabinet
My goodness. Kwarteng, Cleverley, Patel, Badenoch, Braverman
I like it. Truss clearly intends to tackle the dinghy people and say Fuck the Woke
BIPOC?
Darkies Black, Indigenous, and people of colour.
‘Indigenous’ to the UK is quite a complicated category to conceptualise.
It's the Welsh isn't it? They are the originals.
PB pre-historians will no doubt weigh in on that.
The genetic evidence is that an awful lot of "white Britons" are descended from the first settlers who came over after the Ice Age (perhaps from northern Iberia and south west France - around the Basque Country). They are pre-Beaker
Since Wokeness really motored into action, making everyone terrifically aware of skin colour, I am much more aware of skin colour
I cannot see this as a good thing. It is a bad thing. Did I have some residual racism in my being, beforehand? Probably, but so do all humans. It is part of the human condition
But, in Britain at least, we were potentially moving beyond that. Now we are being dragged back to hyper-hyper-awareness of.... fucking skin pigmentation. Melanin. Stuff in skin cells. Dividing people. So depressing
Your yearning for the post racial society reminds me of Martin Luther King sometimes.
In the US there is a wonderful irony in the switch from "colored people" to "people of color": Our largest, and by far our most important, civil rights organization is the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of . . .
For all her manifold faults, Liz Truss will be our first declared atheist prime minister. Bozza is an atheist but pretends not to be occasionally so doesn’t count.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
The feeling is mutual I assure you
Not very Christian of you. Turn the other cheek, etc.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
Are we still talking about Archie Battersby or are you referring to Tory party members?
For all her manifold faults, Liz Truss will be our first declared atheist prime minister. Bozza is an atheist but pretends not to be occasionally so doesn’t count.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
The feeling is mutual I assure you
Loathing a fellow human being doesn't sound like following Christ's teaching to me.
Depends which bit of the Bible you read, the Old Testament is very much part of my Bible as much as the New. Certainly plenty of tough treatment of those who took on the true believers there.
I certainly don't do wet Christianity and I am quite prepared to give Ishmael as good as he gives out
"Wet Christianity" You mean the sort that Christ actually taught?
It's like 'Christianity would be perfect, if only that wet namby-pamby liberal Jesus hadn't poked his nose in.'
For all her manifold faults, Liz Truss will be our first declared atheist prime minister. Bozza is an atheist but pretends not to be occasionally so doesn’t count.
According to Wikipedia she identifies as a Christian
I don't give a monkeys how anyone describes this putative Cabinet. Do they have any answers at all to CofL or that the NE is being economically overtaken by the Baltic States?
It looks like Truss is putting all her eggs in the culture war basket, hoping that people are so distracted they don’t notice the cost of living crisis, the collapse of public services and the ongoing disasters of the Brexit the government chose to pursue. I am not sure it’s a strategy that can hold for two years.
It will have to be a blooming big culture war.
This is from the IMF, so it may turn out to be nonsense, but it doesn't look good for poor people in Blighty;
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
The feeling is mutual I assure you
Yes sure, love, but this is not one of those on the one hand, on the other, issues, is it? If you want to deny abortion to underage rape victims, I rate you morally lower than the paedophile. Not kidding. And so does everyone else.
It's your delusion that you are in some way following the teaching of Christ which perplexes me. As I have had to point out before I have actually read the new testament and you haven't, the best you can manage is one of the catchpenny Latin or worse still modern vernacular versions. I don't think I know very much about Him but it is abundantly clear to me that he was an active homosexual and a user of psychedelic drugs. You should imitate Him.
For all her manifold faults, Liz Truss will be our first declared atheist prime minister. Bozza is an atheist but pretends not to be occasionally so doesn’t count.
According to Wikipedia she identifies as a Christian
iirc at one of the hustings she said she identifies as a Christian but basically doesn't bother.
Since Wokeness really motored into action, making everyone terrifically aware of skin colour, I am much more aware of skin colour
I cannot see this as a good thing. It is a bad thing. Did I have some residual racism in my being, beforehand? Probably, but so do all humans. It is part of the human condition
But, in Britain at least, we were potentially moving beyond that. Now we are being dragged back to hyper-hyper-awareness of.... fucking skin pigmentation. Melanin. Stuff in skin cells. Dividing people. So depressing
Your yearning for the post racial society reminds me of Martin Luther King sometimes.
Yes, but you really don’t want to hear about his dreams.
If Braverman does move to the Home Office, Truss is going to have to find another lawyer willing to debase themselves, their office and the rule of law to replace her as Attorney General. Brandon Lewis maybe?
For all her manifold faults, Liz Truss will be our first declared atheist prime minister. Bozza is an atheist but pretends not to be occasionally so doesn’t count.
According to Wikipedia she identifies as a Christian
Sorry the term “Christian” is no longer acceptable. Unless you want to be cancelled, please refer to her as a person of Christianity.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
The feeling is mutual I assure you
Not very Christian of you. Turn the other cheek, etc.
We may no longer burn the likes of Ishmael at the stake but that does not mean I am going to not giving him as good as he gives out
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
The feeling is mutual I assure you
Not very Christian of you. Turn the other cheek, etc.
We may no longer burn the likes of Ishmael at the stake but that does not mean I am going to not giving him as good as he gives out
For all her manifold faults, Liz Truss will be our first declared atheist prime minister. Bozza is an atheist but pretends not to be occasionally so doesn’t count.
She isn't, she is Christian even if a token one, Johnson is Roman Catholic.
In any case we have had atheist PMs before, Callaghan and Attlee for starters.
Starmer is also an atheist, albeit married to a Jew and respectful of religion
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
The feeling is mutual I assure you
Not very Christian of you. Turn the other cheek, etc.
We may no longer burn the likes of Ishmael at the stake but that does not mean I am going to not giving him as good as he gives out
Truss is determined to make "Rwanda" work. That seems bold to me, because the only way you can make it work is by flying out serious numbers of migrants, so there really is a deterrent effect and the boats stop coming
That will take Cullions of Steel. I don't believe any UK government has the bravery to do this. Quite a test, and an early one
For all her manifold faults, Liz Truss will be our first declared atheist prime minister. Bozza is an atheist but pretends not to be occasionally so doesn’t count.
According to Wikipedia she identifies as a Christian
iirc at one of the hustings she said she identifies as a Christian but basically doesn't bother.
For all her manifold faults, Liz Truss will be our first declared atheist prime minister. Bozza is an atheist but pretends not to be occasionally so doesn’t count.
According to Wikipedia she identifies as a Christian
iirc at one of the hustings she said she identifies as a Christian but basically doesn't bother.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
The feeling is mutual I assure you
Yes sure, love, but this is not one of those on the one hand, on the other, issues, is it? If you want to deny abortion to underage rape victims, I rate you morally lower than the paedophile. Not kidding. And so does everyone else.
It's your delusion that you are in some way following the teaching of Christ which perplexes me. As I have had to point out before I have actually read the new testament and you haven't, the best you can manage is one of the catchpenny Latin or worse still modern vernacular versions. I don't think I know very much about Him but it is abundantly clear to me that he was an active homosexual and a user of psychedelic drugs. You should imitate Him.
Given @HYUFD’s record, if Christ resigned and was replaced by Muhammad, he would immediately become a staunch Muslim.
Pesky non white types - cluttering up the language. Why oh why can't we all be just PEOPLE?
"Why oh why can't we all be just PEOPLE?"
There was a time when this was the rallying cry of the Left. That's when the Left was admirable and noble, and a genuine force for good. Now you say this sarcastically
And thus the Left is reduced to this cranky, weird, ugly, divisive cult, obsessed with sexual and racial identity to the exclusion of all other things, and everyone must be put in a box, and not be mixed with everyone else, and everyone stays in their lane lest they "culturally appropriate" pasta or sombreros. Bleak
Oh look it's more simple simon drivel from the gammon with a vocab. And what's worse it's still coming at 11 pm! How am I supposed to sleep if I get angry and start to tremble?
For all her manifold faults, Liz Truss will be our first declared atheist prime minister. Bozza is an atheist but pretends not to be occasionally so doesn’t count.
She isn't, she is Christian even if a token one, Johnson is Roman Catholic.
In any case we have had atheist PMs before, Callaghan and Attlee for starters.
Starmer is also an atheist, albeit married to a Jew and respectful of religion
Can someone explain to me the concept of a ‘token Christian’ ? Is it like Professor Richard Dawkins, a self-declared ‘cultural Christian’?
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
The feeling is mutual I assure you
Yes sure, love, but this is not one of those on the one hand, on the other, issues, is it? If you want to deny abortion to underage rape victims, I rate you morally lower than the paedophile. Not kidding. And so does everyone else.
It's your delusion that you are in some way following the teaching of Christ which perplexes me. As I have had to point out before I have actually read the new testament and you haven't, the best you can manage is one of the catchpenny Latin or worse still modern vernacular versions. I don't think I know very much about Him but it is abundantly clear to me that he was an active homosexual and a user of psychedelic drugs. You should imitate Him.
Given @HYUFD’s record, if Christ resigned and was replaced by Muhammad, he would immediately become a staunch Muslim.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
The feeling is mutual I assure you
Not very Christian of you. Turn the other cheek, etc.
We may no longer burn the likes of Ishmael at the stake but that does not mean I am going to not giving him as good as he gives out
You really think Christianity is about that, don't you, and gone down hill since those days? And where the fuck in the bible do you get that from?
Frightening. Never mind that you would probably like to burn Christ at the stake, for sodomy. Awkward.
The British in terms of looks have got better thanks to more mixing . Am I allowed to say that !
The Middle East obviously had some very good genes to start with and have some of the most handsome men and beautiful women so didn’t need much mixing to improve their looks.
It’s tragic that many women there are forced to hide their beauty .
Truss is determined to make "Rwanda" work. That seems bold to me, because the only way you can make it work is by flying out serious numbers of migrants, so there really is a deterrent effect and the boats stop coming
That will take Cullions of Steel. I don't believe any UK government has the bravery to do this. Quite a test, and an early one
You have to remember that everything she and Sunak say at the moment is pitched at the Tory membership.
Truss is determined to make "Rwanda" work. That seems bold to me, because the only way you can make it work is by flying out serious numbers of migrants, so there really is a deterrent effect and the boats stop coming
That will take Cullions of Steel. I don't believe any UK government has the bravery to do this. Quite a test, and an early one
She’ll be hoping against hope for a ruling it contravenes the ECHR. Then we can have a whole performative withdrawal saga around that.
Truss is determined to make "Rwanda" work. That seems bold to me, because the only way you can make it work is by flying out serious numbers of migrants, so there really is a deterrent effect and the boats stop coming
That will take Cullions of Steel. I don't believe any UK government has the bravery to do this. Quite a test, and an early one
Might be Braverman's problem and when she fails she can be ditched.
It's a rough old trade as Alan Watkins used to write.
Nick Clegg joins clique of Meta bosses switching to London
https:/Yes, is back, part time…
Clegg is back, and London is back!
From that thread of articles:
"Hoberman said: “They also move because they see the US so fractionalised. As San Francisco loses its density [of tech headquarters], there’s a chance for London to be the global leader.”"
This is absolutely true. Why step over homeless addict in SF when you can be in glorious sunny London? In King's X? With no threat of Trump? And two hours from all of Europe?
I saw recently that parts of East London have taken over SF for density of tech startups. Kings cross looks like the choice for established tech so will be another huge draw for startups looking for global locations. I know one SAAS company which is currently HQ'd in SF that's considering moving operationally to London from there and leaving behind a small outpost of sales people in NYC. That's the other one that's coming for SF, operational excellence in development by being based in London and sales/GTM based on the East Coast of the US either in NYC or Miami. It's such a better set of timezones. SF used to have the advantage of crossover with APAC countries but with the ease of remote work and setting up remote workers on a single payroll tech companies are choosing to hire locally in Singapore, Melbourne and Wellington.
FPT
Yes, and more: as NYC sinks into crime, and is menaced by deeper political division, a lot of business in NYC will come here. Remote working suddenly benefits the UK
Really. Why would you work in NYC or LA or SF if you can work in London?
NYC is a truly great city and LA is jolly interesting and SF has a certain beauty, but they have grave downsides, and they are all trillions of miles from anywhere else
Fly two hours from NYC and you are in, er, Toronto
Compare that with London, when in 2 hours or less you can be in Paris, Venice, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Rome, Florence, Edinburgh, Nice... and the Alps, the Balearics, Sicily, western Ireland, Burgundy, the Algarve, the Black Forest, the Dordogne, the Italian lakes, the Dolomites, Tyrol,...
There is no comparison. If your job is no longer quite so tied to the Silicon Valley office, you will move to London
NYC makes sense for a lot of reasons despite the crime (and it's nowhere near as bad as SF) it's got the 2pm-6pm crossover with London, there's already quite a few companies in the area, it's bigger and better connected than SF (which means people have the option of living in NJ and commuting in) and it's only 7h on a cheap business class flight from London for business meetings. For tech startups there's also a fuckton of potential clients on the doorstep in NYC because there's so many financial services companies looking to cut costs. The City is one of the reasons tech has thrived in London, its clients and financing for startups.
NYC is unquestionably a magnificent city (as I said in my earlier comment), but so is London. And the downsides of NYC - crime, racial tension, MAGA-Trump, divided country, healthcare, opiates, guns - now seem to me to outweigh the downsides of London: weather, greyness, grotty areas
Both are English-speaking world cities with glorious culture, London has more history, New York City has that skyline
The proximity of the rest of Europe might be the clincher for me, if I was a highly paid tech exec. And where do you want your kids to grow up? Safely?
But of course I am biased
I think we will see more American execs choosing London on a quasi-WFH basis. It will be a complex and remarkable irony if post-Brexit London ascends to world capital status (again?)..... because it is in Europe
Yes, that's why I think London is a good shout for operational and potentially tax HQ. My point on NYC is more in relation to having the sales function for NA run out of there rather than SF because it has significantly better crossover with London and it's only a 7h flight for when seniors and execs need face to face meetings.
The London/NYC split works brilliantly for financial services, it being replicated for tech would be no surprise.
The last piece of the puzzle is higher risk funds in London willing to invest hundreds of millions for series D onwards.
Yes, I concur
Finance/sales stuff might stay in NYC but a lot of intellectual/HQ heft will move to London
Add in the boost from Hong Kong and - perhaps unexpectedly - London could really thrive in the next decade
I wonder if this is what I sensed in King's X yesterday. Essentially they are - wittingly or not - creating a Silicon Valley in an amazing new London neighborhood, but with added universities and science institutes and art galleries and biochemistry labs and the British Library and the rest, and all of it 300m from St Pancras and the eurostar, and half an hour from Heathrow via the Liz Line, with Shoreditch and the Silicon roundabout just down the road
It is completely unique. London - esp King's X - has the chance to be THE tech hub for the world, or at least the western world
If I was the head of Instagram, I'd move from California to King's Cross (never thought I'd write that). Just to see
Kings Cross? Would you like to know about living there in the before times? Of COURSE you would...
I moved to that London in July 1999. I had graduated with a Journalism Degree in summer 1998 already working in radio on various short term contracts. By late spring 1999 there was a gap, and I was a bit fed up with the GF I was living with. So moved to London to find a job.
Which I did in 7 working days. Literally. Arrived Sunday. Agency interviews Monday, job interviews later that week, a 2nd interview the following Monday and started working for Nature the science journal straight away.
Their office is on Crinan Street, the north end of KX station with the canal basin behind. So I rented a 1 bed mini bedsit at the top of Grays Inn Road and started work. Kings Cross at the time was home to only one thriving industry - hookers. I was propositioned at 8am one morning crossing the road by the station on the way to work! There was so little in the way of facilities in Kings Cross that the company had a free canteen for its employees - there literally being nothing available in the vicinity.
At the top of Crinan Street was a pub which had been an old canal warehouse - now demolished and the site of Guardian Newspapers building. And a wine bar on Balfe Street. Aside from the Flying Scotsman fight bar on Caledonian Road, that was it.
The transformation in 20 years is literally mindblowing.
I remember that! Went to see someone in that office a few years earlier, perhaps 1992-3, when it was still very new. I did wince when I turned out of KX and saw the ambience of that street, and I was glad to be getting back to the train while it was still daylight.
In those days there was a ramp off the end of platform 1 out onto York Road. So you could exit the station, cross the street and be into the Nature building inside 30 seconds. Barely time to wave at Clive Sinclair in his penthouse...
I need to go back and explore the KX/StP area properly when I next visit my Camden friend; so much change there, including StP itself which was still very much its original state when I knew it, as described in Jack Simmons's history; didn't have time to more than pay homage to Hardy at the eponymous church, and to register the degree of change when passing through it in recent years, which needed a new edition of the history.
You can spend a whole day there, pretty much
Explore the new urbanism, check out the art galleries, see St Martin's, go to a movie or a play or a concert in one of the venues, have lunch or dinner (or both) in one of about 40 restaurants. Walk around Camley Street Wildpark, stroll along the Regent's Canal to Camden and Primrose Hill and back, go to the British Library, and more
All in that one district. Surrounded by industrial history Vs the new Google HQ. Fab
Mm, that's an idea - the canal walk in particular, especially as my chum lives in Camden.
This reminds me I got hold of this paper some years back for him - archaeological dig. No idea if it is of interest but he was very taken with it.
I had a little historical frisson yesterday. The HS2 guys are digging right outside my front door. I had a chat with one of them, a nice guy, and seriously Irish
And it occurred to me that this was a superb echo of when the very first railways were built, when Irish navvies would have worked in the exact same spot, then gone off to drink in the Dublin Castle (hence its name)
They would have worked by the houses in this famous print, middle right. One of these houses, as it happens, being the house where I now live
There's a quite good Melvin Bragg thing (possibly an In Our Time) about the first railways to come out of London. Broad arch of the story is that it was too expensive to roll them through the already posh parts, so they ploughed them through the slums. Middle-class people from the posh parts who could afford the newfangled trains were then exposed to the slums in ways they hadn't been before and lo-and-behold huge reforms began.
You got me looking for that In Our Time railway episode, which sounds fascinating.
I haven't found it (yet) but there are a mind-blowing 959 IOT episodes! Of which I've listened to about a dozen.
You have sorted out my podcast listening for the next few months. Thanks!
It's a remarkable series. One of the gems of BBC radio.
For some reason I don’t always put Melvyn in my top 10 greatest living Englishmen* (the luxuriant hair maybe?) but he should definitely be there.
*English person
Northern boy ends up in Hampstead and there the similarity ends. He's one of those people who channels his fundamental unease at our 'situation' into massive lifelong productivity. I remember the SB Show when it started, bit of intellectual telly on a Saturday night, feeling slightly pleased with myself for liking it.
His novels are actually pretty good also, better than I sniffly expected anyway.
Bragg’s productivity is incredible. I was interested to note from an interview that he foreswears alcohol for 6 months a year (not interested enough to consider that as antidote to my own sloth of course).
Comments
We now have the whip hand.
Edit - Ugh, sounds too much like eunuchs.
It's hideous. Get rid
So then we introduced BAME - that lasted a few years before people had to complain about it again
Now BIPOC - which just doesn't make sense over here
Give it a few years and there will be something wrong with that acronym
Its intended to include all non-whites, but of course the term “non-white” is not acceptable.
Bragg’s productivity is incredible. I was interested to note from an interview that he foreswears alcohol for 6 months a year (not interested enough to consider that as antidote to my own sloth of course).
I'd say they were hospital passes, but have you seen the waiting lists and A+E wait times recently?
I cannot see this as a good thing. It is a bad thing. Did I have some residual racism in my being, beforehand? Probably, but so do all humans. It is part of the human condition
But, in Britain at least, we were potentially moving beyond that. Now we are being dragged back to hyper-hyper-awareness of.... fucking skin pigmentation. Melanin. Stuff in skin cells. Dividing people. So depressing
OED says it is.
Baldies, Incontinent, Perverts, Occultists and Crackheads
She should probably give up because a) he's 90 (diminishing returns and all that) and b) the target term keeps changing.
And so this absurd cavalcade continues
I would just describe such a cabinet as ethnically diverse.
Do they have any answers at all to CofL or that the NE is being economically overtaken by the Baltic States?
Just back from an exhilarating stroll up Cosdon Beacon on Dartmoor. A forgiving hill, grassy and soft. From the top, Dartmoor stretches out like an ocean to the south and west, while rural Devon nestles cosily beneath you to the north and east. Not a soul about, a stone circle and a reward sunset, the sky pinkening to the north in its aftermath.
It
occurs to me that the sunset at the equinox probably nestles between the gap in the rocks at the top of Yes Tor, which is satisfying. Probably.
A friend of mine, a well known pro actor, was doing a Zoom presentation to about 100 acting students during the pando, and he accidentally said "coloured people" when he meant to say "people of colour". A mere slip
He told me that his whole life flashed before him as he waited for someone to pick him up on it, but no one did, and no one - it seems - recorded the lecture, so he was fine. But he was that close to career disaster. The TV actor that said "coloured people"!
Terminal
There is an argument that Vince Clarke ripping off Orbit's mix to make his own remix of the Happy Mondays' 'Wrote for Luck' is what kickstarted Madchester, and hence Britpop, and... But that may be going too far.
There was a time when this was the rallying cry of the Left. That's when the Left was admirable and noble, and a genuine force for good. Now you say this sarcastically
And thus the Left is reduced to this cranky, weird, ugly, divisive cult, obsessed with sexual and racial identity to the exclusion of all other things, and everyone must be put in a box, and not be mixed with everyone else, and everyone stays in their lane lest they "culturally appropriate" pasta or sombreros. Bleak
This forum is getting boring.
The last time I felt we had generally capable politicians in the cabinet was probably the Blair government, and it keeps on getting worse.
(just retweeted by the MD of my previous employer, for what it's worth)
I certainly don't do wet Christianity and I am quite prepared to give Ishmael as good as he gives out
Turn the other cheek, etc.
It's like 'Christianity would be perfect, if only that wet namby-pamby liberal Jesus hadn't poked his nose in.'
https://www.google.com/search?q=stewart+lee+beaker+people&oq=stewart+lee+beaker+people+&aqs=chrome..69i57.13498j0j7&client=ms-android-motorola-rvo3&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:ed4b51e7,vid:1cgeXd5kRDg,st:0
This is from the IMF, so it may turn out to be nonsense, but it doesn't look good for poor people in Blighty;
Source: https://blogs.imf.org/2022/08/03/how-europe-can-protect-the-poor-from-surging-energy-prices/
It's your delusion that you are in some way following the teaching of Christ which perplexes me. As I have had to point out before I have actually read the new testament and you haven't, the best you can manage is one of the catchpenny Latin or worse still modern vernacular versions. I don't think I know very much about Him but it is abundantly clear to me that he was an active homosexual and a user of psychedelic drugs. You should imitate Him.
In any case we have had atheist PMs before, Callaghan and Attlee for starters.
Starmer is also an atheist, albeit married to a Jew and respectful of religion
That will take Cullions of Steel. I don't believe any UK government has the bravery to do this. Quite a test, and an early one
Oh god.
She doesn’t believe in God. She’s an atheist.
Sorry @HYUFD - that's funny
Frightening. Never mind that you would probably like to burn Christ at the stake, for sodomy. Awkward.
The Middle East obviously had some very good genes to start with and have some of the most handsome men and beautiful women so didn’t need much mixing to improve their looks.
It’s tragic that many women there are forced to hide their beauty .
Next to none of it will survive beyond August.
It's a rough old trade as Alan Watkins used to write.