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The LDs now a 99% betting chance in Somerton & Frome – politicalbetting.com
The LDs now a 99% betting chance in Somerton & Frome – politicalbetting.com
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The LDs now a 99% betting chance in Somerton & Frome – politicalbetting.com
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There is now a legal action, focused on the inadequate consultation process:
https://www.leighday.co.uk/news/news/2023-news/disabled-people-launch-legal-challenge-to-consultation-over-planned-closure-of-rail-ticket-offices/
Interesting that Doug Paulley is involved. He has quite the record.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/30/doug-paulley-not-my-benefit-tackling-injustice
No, hang on, it's Maid Marion and Her Merry Men from 1989.
I laid Trump and backed Biden as next President at very short odds at the time of the legal challenges at the last Presidential election. Maybe I was wrong and Trump had a non-zero chance. But it felt like taking small sums from idiots.
King Charles III is to receive a huge pay rise from the UK taxpayer, according to government plans to boost public funding of the monarchy by 45% from 2025.
Details of the increase, which comes against the backdrop of a cost of living crisis, were contained in a review of royal funding published by the Treasury on Thursday. It revealed the royal family’s grant is due to increase from £86m to £125m.
The monarchy’s annual budget, known as the sovereign grant, is pegged against the profits from a national property portfolio called the crown estate.
The review of the royal funding settlement was heavily spun by the Treasury to give the impression that the king would be taking a pay cut so that crown estate funds could instead be spent on public services.
In fact, the report reveals the monarchy is due to receive a huge pay increase, although the rise will not kick in for another two years.
Next year, the sovereign grant will remain unchanged at £86.3m. However, in 2025, the king’s public funding will increase by a projected £38.5m, giving the monarchy an annual stipend of £124.8m. In 2026, it will be £126m.
Contacted by the Guardian, Buckingham Palace and the Treasury did not dispute that the sovereign grant was expected to significantly increase in the coming years.
Lord Turnbull, a former cabinet secretary, Whitehall’s most senior civil servant, who was involved in official discussions over royal financing, accused the Treasury of seeking to obfuscate how the monarchy was funded.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jul/20/king-charles-to-receive-huge-pay-rise-from-uk-taxpayers
The government spent hundreds of thousands of pounds paying off senior ministers, including the former prime ministers Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, and another £2.9m in payouts to their advisers.
Rishi Sunak handed back nearly £17,000 that he received after quitting as Boris Johnson’s chancellor, and others are under pressure to do the same, as Labour and the Liberal Democrats attacked senior Conservatives for taking large one-off sums having overseen deteriorating economic conditions.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/20/truss-and-kwarteng-given-more-than-16000-each-after-leaving-office
But I'd be a bit concerned that someone would find something to object to in it these days. There's a bit of caricature about some of the characters that people often kick up a fuss about these days. And hasn't Tony Robinson been cancelled for one offence or another?
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/636542
The Govt have done the 10,000 response, which uses exactly the same claims as the Rail Delivery Group, and - as one would expect - slopes shoulders.
Edit: I see this has been mentioned before.
Edit - maybe put "failed'' between "another" and "Conservative"?
Could also be localized, for example to England and/or specific constituencies?
It does worry me that we have this move towards claiming that minority characters can only be played by someone from that minority. It seems to undermine the whole point of acting.
Unexpected Coutts Account Holders, pt.II: Thom Yorke.
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-66186362
Is that correct? I haven't been more interested than to go "OMG", and switch to BBC WS radio or DW or France 24, all of which are more bearable at that time.
What baffles me is that such a thing should be news of any sort. I'm happy to see it reported upon, but really that's as far as it seems sensible.
I think there is a great deal to be said about the problem of celebrity - Huw Edwards - Do we care? We do now because he's a celebrity. Farage, to his credit, hasn't quite embraced this historically, but he's now wanting to do so.
The Republicans just released the document they've claimed shows bribes were paid to President Biden. It has a few cryptic references to payments by a man* who later definitively told Rudy Giuliani "no one from Burisma ever had any contacts with VP Biden"
https://twitter.com/Fritschner/status/1682072808371765257
*Also currently a fugitive from justice.
Makes the Steele dossier look cast iron in comparison.
https://kyivindependent.com/ryanair-announces-post-war-return-to-ukraine-3-billion-investment/
But the thing is, it was good.
You can get away with a lot if your product is actually good. Nowadays, mostly they forget that bit (see Women Ghostbusters (can't remember the real name)).
Everybody now: It's pancake day, it's pancake day, it's p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-pancake day...
I appreciate you may think the risk is sufficient not to bother on this one, and indeed I'm not. But very short odds betting isn't crazy if you're certain and the payout timeline is very short.
As for the BBC News UK/World merger and the train ticket office thing, they're both canaries for the state of the nation.
A properly high-minded BBC News channel that looked at the world with its feet rooted in the UK... That would probably work. Might not get a huge audience, but like the World Service on radio, it could work as an idea. But what we've got is a mess, because it's just about cuts to save money. (Talking of which, the BBC local fiasco is starting to bite.)
Similarly, you could get rid of train ticket offices as a sign of confidence- the system is so simple and easy to use that people behind counters are literally redundant. But what we're getting is just another bit of cheese paring. And everyone knows it.
Unfortunately, we can't have nice things, because we're not rich enough any more
The whole point of the fairy tale is that she has snowy white skin. Hence her name
I’ve no problem with casting anyone as anyone, within reason, but when it actually destroys the basic premise of the story: then yes. I have a problem.
New Florida teaching standards say African Americans received some ‘personal benefit’ from slavery
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/20/florida-black-history-teaching-standards-00107067
It's a sign of a BBC that has completely lost its confidence and its sense of self.
DW I would describe as "generally stolid".
But both routinely carry Putin-sympathetic views as one end of round table discussions (!) more often than UK media. BBC tends to editorialise more.
Here's the ending of that essay: "Where the Third Great Awakening will lead--who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes . . . Me . . . Me . . . Me . . . Me . . ."
(That's from a collection of his, "The Purple Decades". Which I would recommend to almost everyone interested in American politics. As a sop to modern sensibilities, I perhaps should include a trigger warning with that recommendation, for some.)
For example, latest is touting . . . wait for it . . . Robert F Kennedy Jr.
They also think that Jim Jordan is the bees knees.
And saws online, that Forbes is now under majority-Chinese/HK ownership. Coincidence?
Is this value?
Lynda La Plante, when she was a jobbing actor, appeared in it for a season or two.
It’s entertaining stuff.
And I thought the writing was lazy. Its a bit like the Jodie Whittaker Doctor Who. She is a fab actress and it could have been fab. The fact it wasn't has nothing to do with her at all and everything to do with really (REALLY!) poor writing that walked all over canon.
And no, not seen anything of it.
I wonder whether this will cause the same furore as when Disney remade the Little Mermaid with a black actor, Halle Bailey, in the title role - when everyone knows that mermaids are white!
Reckon the strategy is to absolutely smash us to 200 lead then stick them in just before lunch.
Thoughts?
The question is whether Nigel Farage has got Russian snow on his boots. This is a man who
1. Has frequently appeared on Russia Today.
2. Was a leading figure on one side of the Brexit referendum pushing for a result that among foreign leaders practically only President Putin signalled that he wanted.
3. Represents a political tendency that is somewhat fluid and has been backed by the Russian state elsewhere including in France.
4. Acts in a way that shall we say causes awkwardness in the City of London, at a time when the Russian government has signalled that it puts a lot of blame on the British government for backing the Ukrainian war effort including with specific reference to the latest Kerch bridge incident, to which they said they would respond.
OK roleplay it please. Say you watch British politics and media at the Russian embassy in London or the Britain desk in Moscow. Let's assume for the sake of argument that you had no involvement in the Coutts and Farage story. Do you frame it as a positive or negative development? Then take it from there.
Not that it is really worth falling out over
I do check out some political stuff, but NOT enough to deserve FBN. Which appears to be similar to GB.
This has been an Ashes series of nip and tuck, of ebb and flow, of fine margins and a pendulum that has swung one way and then the other. But on a giddy second day at Old Trafford these themes were burned to the ground by a frankly absurd 189 from Zak Crawley and three sessions of outright English dominance over Australia.
Will it be enough to set up a blockbuster decider at the Oval? The weather gods may yet have their say. But England could scarcely have put themselves in a better position to make it so, their plunderbats having treated Pat Cummins & co with a level of contempt last witnessed from the Fast Show’s competitive dad all those years ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/jul/20/england-australia-ashes-fourth-test-day-two-match-report
BTT that "anyone who has watched it as an adult will know" is pretty juvenile IMHO.
Your point 2 is meaningless - of course he was on the side of Brexit. He was there long before any world leaders could be involved.
1, 3 and 4 aren't terribly damning either.
Stupidly, always assumed it was because she was pure at heart.
the next thing about which Coutts is shitting themselves, is when it transpires that Farage was sacked off for (partly) the rather tenuous russian links you allege, whereas Ivan Denisovich Godunov Borisovsky of Moscow and 100 of his cousins have painlessly maintained their Couttski accounts throughout the Ukrainian SMO, with the Social Purity Committee in Coutts not lifting a finger to exclude them.