Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Labour, if they had any sense, might shoot her fox and give both of them the chop
Labour can't sack Hoyle. Do you mean Starmer and Healey should fall on their swords?
Hoyle has deliberately misled Parliament for quite a long period of time.
The Speaker holds his position only with the approval of parliament, and Labour MPs have a very large majority of the seats. Effectively Labour MPs could sack him, as his position seems indefensible over this, and it seems highly unlikely that the opposition will go into battle on his behalf.
No doubt some of them have committed some offences and got into trouble."@JohnHealey_MP tells #TimesRadio Afghans coming under government schemes were checked carefully but he "can't account" for individuals being responsible for criminal behaviour since they have arrived. pic.twitter.com/4qNGi04F5i
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
Rough game of choices, governing.
How many lives could be saved/agony ended by an injection of £7 billion into the NHS?
It does seem rather fitting that nobody gets sacked for thinking it was OK to store secret highly sensitive data in one massive excel spreadsheet and pass it around on the email resulting in a £7bn bill, but a bloke allegedly said a naughty word 10 years ago in a pub and his feet doesn't touch the floor as they are booted out.
Has the £7bn number suddenly become true again? I called that out when it was in the initial Sky piece yesterday.
It does seem rather fitting that nobody gets sacked for thinking it was OK to store secret highly sensitive data in one massive excel spreadsheet and pass it around on the email resulting in a £7bn bill, but a bloke allegedly said a naughty word 10 years ago in a pub and his feet doesn't touch the floor as they are booted out.
Has the £7bn number suddenly become true again? I called that out when it was in the initial Sky piece yesterday.
Follow It’s not the most incompetent thing by a long stretch but the government let stories run for hours (one they knew was coming) with suggestions the emergency Afghan relocation would cost £7bn and mean 100,000 people.
Which is completely wrong and they only got on top of that late yesterday.
In fact this emergency relocation has cost £850m and has only around 7000 coming.
There was around £6bn allocated over the course of an entire decade for all the relocation schemes ever run, not just this data breach. But that won’t stop blue ticks on X now spreading it far and wide.
The data breach with the worst ever Defence minister - Ben bringing all the Afghans was courageous not a coverup! Wallace - was not even close to the worst data breach 2019-24....
So, what do we think today’s major UK government fuck up will be? We’ve filled all our reservoirs with antifreeze? We’ve offered asylum to the Ayatollah? We’ve emailed our nuclear codes to Zimbabwe?
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
Rough game of choices, governing.
How many lives could be saved/agony ended by an injection of £7 billion into the NHS?
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
No no no
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
No doubt some of them have committed some offences and got into trouble."@JohnHealey_MP tells #TimesRadio Afghans coming under government schemes were checked carefully but he "can't account" for individuals being responsible for criminal behaviour since they have arrived. pic.twitter.com/4qNGi04F5i
Interesting angle of questioning from the Times. I wonder if they are banned like the Mail from discussing individual cases?
Yes I am pretty sure they are. My guess is that even worse details are still being obscured. Why would they not? It’s exactly what they’ve done so far - hide hide hide as long as possible
It does seem rather fitting that nobody gets sacked for thinking it was OK to store secret highly sensitive data in one massive excel spreadsheet and pass it around on the email resulting in a £7bn bill, but a bloke allegedly said a naughty word 10 years ago in a pub and his feet doesn't touch the floor as they are booted out.
Has the £7bn number suddenly become true again? I called that out when it was in the initial Sky piece yesterday.
Where is it from?
The legal proceedings - as quoted yesterday.
“ Mr Justice Chamberlain I'm starting to doubt myself - am I going bonkers, because it really is £6billion? [Later confirmed to be £7billion]”
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
Rough game of choices, governing.
How many lives could be saved/agony ended by an injection of £7 billion into the NHS?
It's not £7billion. Not even close.
You have no clear idea about this. None of us do. Too many facts are still obscure and too many accounts are still conflicting - partly because the government is still wilfully hiding crucial details behind injunctions
All we have is that transcript from the hearing when the judge asks “is it really £6bn?” And the lawyer corrects him - “No, it’s £7bn”
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
No no no
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
I’m not defending these people, it’s a shit show by both parties but it also makes me wonder about the effects/power of legal and civil service advice over democratically elected politicians and will be interested what comes out.
If you are a minister/government and your own lawyers are telling you that you really have to continue doing something for important legal reasons the are you going to just pull the pin and say “bollocks I’m going public whatever the legal implications”?
BTW the minister said on Today that the figures weren’t kept out of the immigrations Stats and the reporter was wrong - brave move and resigning matter (hahaha) if he is lying.
My former accountancy firm "lost" huge quantities of client data to the dark web, including NI, passport, bank account login details etc and denied it for over 2 months, they had login details and passwords stored in unprotected spreadsheets and text files and basically zero IT security or working procedures. Completely negligent. ICO gave them a very mild telling off.
I expect the Co-op had infinitely better IT security and followed procedures.
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
No no no
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
I’m not defending these people, it’s a shit show by both parties but it also makes me wonder about the effects/power of legal and civil service advice over democratically elected politicians and will be interested what comes out.
If you are a minister/government and your own lawyers are telling you that you really have to continue doing something for important legal reasons the are you going to just pull the pin and say “bollocks I’m going public whatever the legal implications”?
BTW the minister said on Today that the figures weren’t kept out of the immigrations Stats and the reporter was wrong - brave move and resigning matter (hahaha) if he is lying.
I’d wager money he’s lying - in some form
Your defence of these people is pitiful and grotesque
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
Rough game of choices, governing.
How many lives could be saved/agony ended by an injection of £7 billion into the NHS?
It's not £7billion. Not even close.
So - how many billions do you think the NHS has been deprived? And who benefits from that £7billion number being put out there?
"The defence secretary has said he was "unable to say for sure" whether anyone had been killed as a result of a data breach that revealed the details of thousands of Afghans who had supported British forces.
But John Healey told the BBC it was "highly unlikely" being a name on the list alone would now increase the risk of being targeted by the Taliban.
Details of nearly 19,000 people who had applied to move to the UK after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan were mistakenly leaked in February 2022 by a British official. The previous government learned of this in August 2023 when details were posted on Facebook."
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
Rough game of choices, governing.
How many lives could be saved/agony ended by an injection of £7 billion into the NHS?
It's not £7billion. Not even close.
A lie designed to make the Prev govt look even worse
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
No no no
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
I’m not defending these people, it’s a shit show by both parties but it also makes me wonder about the effects/power of legal and civil service advice over democratically elected politicians and will be interested what comes out.
If you are a minister/government and your own lawyers are telling you that you really have to continue doing something for important legal reasons the are you going to just pull the pin and say “bollocks I’m going public whatever the legal implications”?
BTW the minister said on Today that the figures weren’t kept out of the immigrations Stats and the reporter was wrong - brave move and resigning matter (hahaha) if he is lying.
I’d wager money he’s lying - in some form
If he is then (metaphorically of course) string him up, but if we want to rip up the way things have been done via identifying the fuck ups then let’s do it with the facts - it looks like the £7b figure is a projection over the future which works to stir up anger but doesn’t help solve the problems if not the actual figure, likewise if the figures were included on immigration stats then that’s not one of the problems needing fixing.
We are no better than the idiots in power who screw things up if we run round demanding revolution based on bullshit and lies too. Pull apart what’s really wrong rather than the dramatic lies as it undermines any solutions people put forward if built on bullshit.
This is my off topic video for the day, a 1:20 minute marketing video for graded accessible routes for an initiative of the national parks called "Miles without Stiles" in the Lake District. Most of the parks have done it.
The non-joined up Government bit is that their "Accessible for All" category includes 1:10 hills, which Disabled organisations (and the most applicable Government guidelines - LTN 1/20) will tell you is not accessible (try a 50m long 1:10 hill using a manual wheelchair or a scooter). They work for most, but not all.
We are all over "but public footpaths have hills"; yes, but that there plenty that do not eg rail trails canal towpaths. Except in my area when they did loads of rail trials in the 1990s they demolished many of the bridges etc they go over and made them unusable.
Loosely on the subject of accessibility, here is a video posted by a blind people's group showing the hazards posed by so-called floating bus stops, where there is a cycle lane inside the stop. In theory cyclists give way to pedestrians but, well:- https://x.com/NFBUK/status/1944446586341163368
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
No no no
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
I’m not defending these people, it’s a shit show by both parties but it also makes me wonder about the effects/power of legal and civil service advice over democratically elected politicians and will be interested what comes out.
If you are a minister/government and your own lawyers are telling you that you really have to continue doing something for important legal reasons the are you going to just pull the pin and say “bollocks I’m going public whatever the legal implications”?
BTW the minister said on Today that the figures weren’t kept out of the immigrations Stats and the reporter was wrong - brave move and resigning matter (hahaha) if he is lying.
I’d wager money he’s lying - in some form
If he is then (metaphorically of course) string him up, but if we want to rip up the way things have been done via identifying the fuck ups then let’s do it with the facts - it looks like the £7b figure is a projection over the future which works to stir up anger but doesn’t help solve the problems if not the actual figure, likewise if the figures were included on immigration stats then that’s not one of the problems needing fixing.
We are no better than the idiots in power who screw things up if we run round demanding revolution based on bullshit and lies too. Pull apart what’s really wrong rather than the dramatic lies as it undermines any solutions people put forward if built on bullshit.
No. This is a time when we NEED to be angry. You failed
I can’t find much mention of the Afghan story in The Sun. But this is one that will reverberate through WhatsApp and pub chats. Reform going in hard vs Jenrick and Braverman.
This should not be reduced to an anti-immigration hobbyhorse. It's a serious matter of democratic accountability.
Reading between the lines on here, I would conclude that Baldy Ben, who I like and respect (Braverman and Jenrick - I'll just spit that out) did the right and proper thing with 24,000 Afghans who looked after our boys and girls in Helmand. Why Healy with the support of the Speaker kept the injunction going seems to be where the problem lies.
Reform really are a bucket of sh*t for trawling the original safety issue up and turning it onto a skin toned race issue. They are nonetheless welcome to chase down this government for the subsequent cover-up. Healy and Hoyle should be gone!
Looking after Afghans who had worked with British forces was absolutely right. Covering this story up through a general election was not even mildly excusable.
Hoyle, who seems to have been involved throughout, should be considering his position - or MPs should be questioning him at length, with a view to giving him the chop. Healey needs to explain to Parliament in detail why he didn't act, and unless he comes up with some very good reasons indeed (which seems unlikely), I agree that he also needs to go.
Kemi has the opportunity to tear the Government apart. Will she take it?
Check the dates. Otherwise it will be yet another week of:-
Kemi: you dun f'kd up. Keir: actually that was your lot and we're sorting out the mess.
I can see this is going to be a morning when every other post is yet more manic bilge from Leon.
The beach calls...
You’ll be glad to hear that I am about to paint my bedroom radiator. A job that allows no multi tasking
Hope you use the right paint. And then cook it off at the recommended period of having central heating system on temperature with the windows open. Else things get very nasty with offgassing.
(Unless radiator paints have changed since the last time I did that particular job on our c/h piping.)
It does seem rather fitting that nobody gets sacked for thinking it was OK to store secret highly sensitive data in one massive excel spreadsheet and pass it around on the email resulting in a £7bn bill, but a bloke allegedly said a naughty word 10 years ago in a pub and his feet doesn't touch the floor as they are booted out.
Has the £7bn number suddenly become true again? I called that out when it was in the initial Sky piece yesterday.
Follow It’s not the most incompetent thing by a long stretch but the government let stories run for hours (one they knew was coming) with suggestions the emergency Afghan relocation would cost £7bn and mean 100,000 people.
Which is completely wrong and they only got on top of that late yesterday.
In fact this emergency relocation has cost £850m and has only around 7000 coming.
There was around £6bn allocated over the course of an entire decade for all the relocation schemes ever run, not just this data breach. But that won’t stop blue ticks on X now spreading it far and wide.
The numbers were in the Commons statement at lunchtime, and the £7bn was identified as "a previous estimate" for the whole shebang not the data leak.
So I might summarise it as shitty management of our shitty media .
For PB, I called BS on the $7bn number some time yesterday morning, but I got the reason wrong - I said Sky provided no source, which they did not, but suggested it was pulled out of a media person's backside rather than being an old guess.
"The defence secretary has said he was "unable to say for sure" whether anyone had been killed as a result of a data breach that revealed the details of thousands of Afghans who had supported British forces.
But John Healey told the BBC it was "highly unlikely" being a name on the list alone would now increase the risk of being targeted by the Taliban.
Details of nearly 19,000 people who had applied to move to the UK after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan were mistakenly leaked in February 2022 by a British official. The previous government learned of this in August 2023 when details were posted on Facebook."
- BBC
"unable to say for sure" = "you are unable to prove FOR SURE anyone has died from this cock-up. So I'm going nowhere..."
I can see this is going to be a morning when every other post is yet more manic bilge from Leon.
The beach calls...
You’ll be glad to hear that I am about to paint my bedroom radiator. A job that allows no multi tasking
Hope you use the right paint. And then cook it off at the recommended period of having central heating system on temperature with the windows open. Else things get very nasty with offgassing.
(Unless radiator paints have changed since the last time I did that particular job on our c/h piping.)
I have a super geeky super clever DIY friend who is closely supervising (remotely)
It sounds a lot simpler now. Clean, sand, primer, paint. No heating needed. Done in one day
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
No no no
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
I’m not defending these people, it’s a shit show by both parties but it also makes me wonder about the effects/power of legal and civil service advice over democratically elected politicians and will be interested what comes out.
If you are a minister/government and your own lawyers are telling you that you really have to continue doing something for important legal reasons the are you going to just pull the pin and say “bollocks I’m going public whatever the legal implications”?
BTW the minister said on Today that the figures weren’t kept out of the immigrations Stats and the reporter was wrong - brave move and resigning matter (hahaha) if he is lying.
I’d wager money he’s lying - in some form
Your defence of these people is pitiful and grotesque
I can see this is going to be a morning when every other post is yet more manic bilge from Leon.
The beach calls...
You’ll be glad to hear that I am about to paint my bedroom radiator. A job that allows no multi tasking
Hope you use the right paint. And then cook it off at the recommended period of having central heating system on temperature with the windows open. Else things get very nasty with offgassing.
(Unless radiator paints have changed since the last time I did that particular job on our c/h piping.)
Fortunately for screams echoing across Primrose Hill it's not 32C today.
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
No no no
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
I’m not defending these people, it’s a shit show by both parties but it also makes me wonder about the effects/power of legal and civil service advice over democratically elected politicians and will be interested what comes out.
If you are a minister/government and your own lawyers are telling you that you really have to continue doing something for important legal reasons the are you going to just pull the pin and say “bollocks I’m going public whatever the legal implications”?
BTW the minister said on Today that the figures weren’t kept out of the immigrations Stats and the reporter was wrong - brave move and resigning matter (hahaha) if he is lying.
I’d wager money he’s lying - in some form
Your defence of these people is pitiful and grotesque
I'll wager money your numbers are balls too.
Except...Leon has a number referenced (and corrected) in court to rely on.
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
No no no
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
I’m not defending these people, it’s a shit show by both parties but it also makes me wonder about the effects/power of legal and civil service advice over democratically elected politicians and will be interested what comes out.
If you are a minister/government and your own lawyers are telling you that you really have to continue doing something for important legal reasons the are you going to just pull the pin and say “bollocks I’m going public whatever the legal implications”?
BTW the minister said on Today that the figures weren’t kept out of the immigrations Stats and the reporter was wrong - brave move and resigning matter (hahaha) if he is lying.
I’d wager money he’s lying - in some form
Your defence of these people is pitiful and grotesque
I'll wager money your numbers are balls too.
But I’m the one quoting the judge in the transcript. Who seems the only reliable actor here. All the other numbers - which vary wildly from £400m to £800m to £2bn to £7bn to £10bn (and up) come from politicians with an agenda, and we KNOW these people are lying. They admitted it. “We want to set a false narrative as cover”
This is my off topic video for the day, a 1:20 minute marketing video for graded accessible routes for an initiative of the national parks called "Miles without Stiles" in the Lake District. Most of the parks have done it.
The non-joined up Government bit is that their "Accessible for All" category includes 1:10 hills, which Disabled organisations (and the most applicable Government guidelines - LTN 1/20) will tell you is not accessible (try a 50m long 1:10 hill using a manual wheelchair or a scooter). They work for most, but not all.
We are all over "but public footpaths have hills"; yes, but that there plenty that do not eg rail trails canal towpaths. Except in my area when they did loads of rail trials in the 1990s they demolished many of the bridges etc they go over and made them unusable.
Loosely on the subject of accessibility, here is a video posted by a blind people's group showing the hazards posed by so-called floating bus stops, where there is a cycle lane inside the stop. In theory cyclists give way to pedestrians but, well:- https://x.com/NFBUK/status/1944446586341163368
It's a clear design flaw. UK highway engineers are good at designing in obvious flaws. See also road narrowing for bus stops / pedestrian crossings, pavement sticks out up to 1m, cycle lane just stops. narrow cycle lanes painted in door zone alongside parking spaces cycle lanes that just stop when it gets too difficult (dangerous)
They can't even blame the Tories on inflation, the previous government left office with inflation down to 2% and generally falling/stable. This is all on Labour and their idiotic tax/spending policies. There's no new external shocks, no COVID, the wars in Ukraine/Israel have already been factored in, Trump's tariffs should make UK prices lower given export diversion by China and other affected countries.
If ever we needed evidence that Labour haven't got a clue how to run the economy this is it. In fairly benign conditions, with no substantial external factors they've let inflation go up from 2.2% when they took over in July to 3.6% last month and still rising. They've caused this, not global conditions, not the previous government, they did. The Tories need to absolutely destroy them on inflation, they actually did the hard work and got inflation back down to acceptable levels, Labour have completely thrown that away.
They weren't great but I've no doubt at all that Sunak and Hunt were a better choice than Starmer and Reeves. Alas post-covid the public were minded to kick out the incumbents, and Labour benefitted from that to win a huge majority with very little real support, which has already withered away to election losing levels.
Labour are alright a diagnosing the problems we face, but don't seem to have any particular idea as to what to do, and are politically inept as well as weak when facing back-bench opposition. I'm not expecting much from this government over the next few years, and fear we could end up with Farage unless Labour can make some real and rapid progress.
I can’t find much mention of the Afghan story in The Sun. But this is one that will reverberate through WhatsApp and pub chats. Reform going in hard vs Jenrick and Braverman.
This should not be reduced to an anti-immigration hobbyhorse. It's a serious matter of democratic accountability.
Reading between the lines on here, I would conclude that Baldy Ben, who I like and respect (Braverman and Jenrick - I'll just spit that out) did the right and proper thing with 24,000 Afghans who looked after our boys and girls in Helmand. Why Healy with the support of the Speaker kept the injunction going seems to be where the problem lies.
Reform really are a bucket of sh*t for trawling the original safety issue up and turning it onto a skin toned race issue. They are nonetheless welcome to chase down this government for the subsequent cover-up. Healy and Hoyle should be gone!
Looking after Afghans who had worked with British forces was absolutely right. Covering this story up through a general election was not even mildly excusable.
Hoyle, who seems to have been involved throughout, should be considering his position - or MPs should be questioning him at length, with a view to giving him the chop. Healey needs to explain to Parliament in detail why he didn't act, and unless he comes up with some very good reasons indeed (which seems unlikely), I agree that he also needs to go.
Kemi has the opportunity to tear the Government apart. Will she take it?
Check the dates. Otherwise it will be yet another week of:-
Kemi: you dun f'kd up. Keir: actually that was your lot and we're sorting out the mess.
Kemi would be stupid to go on this today. Which means it’s entirely plausible she does, but I suspect both sides will stay oddly quiet on this one.
This is my off topic video for the day, a 1:20 minute marketing video for graded accessible routes for an initiative of the national parks called "Miles without Stiles" in the Lake District. Most of the parks have done it.
The non-joined up Government bit is that their "Accessible for All" category includes 1:10 hills, which Disabled organisations (and the most applicable Government guidelines - LTN 1/20) will tell you is not accessible (try a 50m long 1:10 hill using a manual wheelchair or a scooter). They work for most, but not all.
We are all over "but public footpaths have hills"; yes, but that there plenty that do not eg rail trails canal towpaths. Except in my area when they did loads of rail trials in the 1990s they demolished many of the bridges etc they go over and made them unusable.
Loosely on the subject of accessibility, here is a video posted by a blind people's group showing the hazards posed by so-called floating bus stops, where there is a cycle lane inside the stop. In theory cyclists give way to pedestrians but, well:- https://x.com/NFBUK/status/1944446586341163368
They're reasonably common elsewhere as a concept, but with far more space for bus passengers,* better demarcation and normally some traffic calming on the cycle lane (even if just an enforced wiggle/chicane to get around the island).
*trying to think back to experiences in other countries - the whole bus stop, including any shelter, tends to be floating, I think. So very unlike this one, which is utterly insane.
Do we think the decapitation of Torode saves Tiger Tim Davie?
I think that's the idea. Axe the cooks and that mouthy footballer who also went on telly in just his underpants, while the bosses who did not anticipate or even notice the Gasto rants and Gaza doc keep their pensions.
They can't even blame the Tories on inflation, the previous government left office with inflation down to 2% and generally falling/stable. This is all on Labour and their idiotic tax/spending policies. There's no new external shocks, no COVID, the wars in Ukraine/Israel have already been factored in, Trump's tariffs should make UK prices lower given export diversion by China and other affected countries.
If ever we needed evidence that Labour haven't got a clue how to run the economy this is it. In fairly benign conditions, with no substantial external factors they've let inflation go up from 2.2% when they took over in July to 3.6% last month and still rising. They've caused this, not global conditions, not the previous government, they did. The Tories need to absolutely destroy them on inflation, they actually did the hard work and got inflation back down to acceptable levels, Labour have completely thrown that away.
They weren't great but I've no doubt at all that Sunak and Hunt were a better choice than Starmer and Reeves. Alas post-covid the public were minded to kick out the incumbents, and Labour benefitted from that to win a huge majority with very little real support, which has already withered away to election losing levels.
Labour are alright a diagnosing the problems we face, but don't seem to have any particular idea as to what to do, and are politically inept as well as weak when facing back-bench opposition. I'm not expecting much from this government over the next few years, and fear we could end up with Farage unless Labour can make some real and rapid progress.
I think Sunak and Hunt would likely be managing the day to day of the economy better (unsurprising given Rachel’s tendency to lurch from crisis to embarrassment to crisis and back) but they’d be doing little to fix the underlying structural problems, and probably making them worse.
Truth be told we didn’t need the Tories in charge and it’s becoming increasingly clear we didn’t need Labour either. We need a new approach. I am very unconvinced that such an approach is offered by Farage, but I understand why he is doing well.
They can't even blame the Tories on inflation, the previous government left office with inflation down to 2% and generally falling/stable. This is all on Labour and their idiotic tax/spending policies. There's no new external shocks, no COVID, the wars in Ukraine/Israel have already been factored in, Trump's tariffs should make UK prices lower given export diversion by China and other affected countries.
If ever we needed evidence that Labour haven't got a clue how to run the economy this is it. In fairly benign conditions, with no substantial external factors they've let inflation go up from 2.2% when they took over in July to 3.6% last month and still rising. They've caused this, not global conditions, not the previous government, they did. The Tories need to absolutely destroy them on inflation, they actually did the hard work and got inflation back down to acceptable levels, Labour have completely thrown that away.
They weren't great but I've no doubt at all that Sunak and Hunt were a better choice than Starmer and Reeves. Alas post-covid the public were minded to kick out the incumbents, and Labour benefitted from that to win a huge majority with very little real support, which has already withered away to election losing levels.
Labour are alright a diagnosing the problems we face, but don't seem to have any particular idea as to what to do, and are politically inept as well as weak when facing back-bench opposition. I'm not expecting much from this government over the next few years, and fear we could end up with Farage unless Labour can make some real and rapid progress.
Given everything we've just learned about this latest fuck up by the civil service and the subsequent cover up, would you really begrudge the public voting in Farage as PM?
The whole civil service needs burning down and rebooting, neither the Tories nor Labour will deliver that. I don't particularly think Reform will either, yet they have a higher probability of doing it than either of the other two.
It does seem rather fitting that nobody gets sacked for thinking it was OK to store secret highly sensitive data in one massive excel spreadsheet and pass it around on the email resulting in a £7bn bill, but a bloke allegedly said a naughty word 10 years ago in a pub and his feet doesn't touch the floor as they are booted out.
Where's the data loss prevention or information rights management software? It's not just who sent it that needs investigating, but how was it possible.
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
No no no
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
I’m not defending these people, it’s a shit show by both parties but it also makes me wonder about the effects/power of legal and civil service advice over democratically elected politicians and will be interested what comes out.
If you are a minister/government and your own lawyers are telling you that you really have to continue doing something for important legal reasons the are you going to just pull the pin and say “bollocks I’m going public whatever the legal implications”?
BTW the minister said on Today that the figures weren’t kept out of the immigrations Stats and the reporter was wrong - brave move and resigning matter (hahaha) if he is lying.
I’d wager money he’s lying - in some form
Your defence of these people is pitiful and grotesque
I'll wager money your numbers are balls too.
But I’m the one quoting the judge in the transcript. Who seems the only reliable actor here. All the other numbers - which vary wildly from £400m to £800m to £2bn to £7bn to £10bn (and up) come from politicians with an agenda, and we KNOW these people are lying. They admitted it. “We want to set a false narrative as cover”
Why is the judge's number authoritative in any sense ? He has no powers of audit, and no more information than he has been given, so it's a number which came second hand from the politicians whose numbers you don't believe. He can clearly speak with authority on the legal position, but has little more idea than do you on what this is costing.
FWIW, the cost estimate for this particular mess is around an order of magnitude less https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg8zy78787o The government also revealed on Tuesday: The MoD believes 600 Afghan soldiers included in the leak, plus 1,800 of their family members, are still in Afghanistan The scheme is being closed down, but relocation offers already made to those who remain in Afghanistan will be honoured The secret scheme - officially called the Afghan Relocation Route - has cost £400m so far, and is expected to cost a further £400m to £450m The breach was committed mistakenly by an unnamed official at the MoD People whose details were leaked were only informed on Tuesday
As I noted upthread, the sensible way to deal with this is for the PAC to get to work and ferret out the actual numbers.
Your syllogism "everyone is lying, so I am right" is a load of nonsense.
Do we think the decapitation of Torode saves Tiger Tim Davie?
I think that's the idea. Axe the cooks and that mouthy footballer who also went on telly in just his underpants, while the bosses who did not anticipate or even notice the Gasto rants and Gaza doc keep their pensions.
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Labour, if they had any sense, might shoot her fox and give both of them the chop
Labour can't sack Hoyle. Do you mean Starmer and Healey should fall on their swords?
Hoyle has deliberately misled Parliament for quite a long period of time.
The Speaker holds his position only with the approval of parliament, and Labour MPs have a very large majority of the seats. Effectively Labour MPs could sack him, as his position seems indefensible over this, and it seems highly unlikely that the opposition will go into battle on his behalf.
I have less respect for Hoyle than any other Speaker I can remember, including Bercow and Martin. He doesn’t appear to be impartial, and seems to make the rules up to suit himself.
Could she really not have known about this? And what is ‘an huge’ all about?
I am shocked by the secrecy and cover-up over the admission of thousands of Afghans to Britain at the cost of £7bn to the taxpayer. A decision that was in itself wrong.
It is an huge betrayal of public trust.
Those responsible in both Governments and the bureaucracy need to be held to account.
Northern (Leeds) roots for "an huge". We don't waste time sounding out consonants round 'ere
Which reminds me, I discovered a few months ago that my son (six at the time) thought 'huge' was pronounced 'fuge'. I got him to repeat something he said and it was clearly an 'f' there. Challenged on the spelling/phonics, he said he'd just assumed it was one of the ''harder to read and spell' words. Massive huck up by the educations system. Or the parents
ETA: A few years into our marriage, I had great difficulty explaining to my (Yorkshire born and bred) mother in law that I was going to be working in Hull for a few days. "Hull," I said, "Hull". My wife laughed at me and said, "Oooll!" and comprehension dawned
Can anyone explain why some people say "arks" instead of "ask"?
One of my sisters-in-law-in-law does it, and it just sounds daft.
Mind, she is from Birmingham, so that is the least of her linguistic problems.
It’s seems to be a common thing with black English speakers. If you watch any tv series with lots of black characters, whether UK like Top Boy or US like the Wire as two examples, it’s a noticeable tick that “ask” is pronounced more like “aks”.
I know a weirder one which I have never been able to understand.
My mother in law was from Co Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland and had the normal Irish accent you would expect, so three became tree, and so on. However, she reversed the process with some words beginning with t-e-a, so teacher became theacher. This is such an unnatural thing to do that I can only guess she was doing it deliberately to overcompensate for something she thought of (wrongly) as poor pronunciation.
I can't say I've ever come across any other Irish person exhibiting this quirk. Has anyone here?
I’ve also noticed another weird Irishism in that every Irish person I know says “Euro” when referring to a plural of Euros. I don’t know why they do it - the same people say Dollars and Pounds. My life must be very dull as it inexplicably winds me up.
I say that. "Here's twenty Euro". Sounds more natural that "Here's twenty Euros". But I'd say "Here's twenty dollars". Language is a funny thing. How it sounds is important rather than consistent rules.
Could she really not have known about this? And what is ‘an huge’ all about?
I am shocked by the secrecy and cover-up over the admission of thousands of Afghans to Britain at the cost of £7bn to the taxpayer. A decision that was in itself wrong.
It is an huge betrayal of public trust.
Those responsible in both Governments and the bureaucracy need to be held to account.
Northern (Leeds) roots for "an huge". We don't waste time sounding out consonants round 'ere
Which reminds me, I discovered a few months ago that my son (six at the time) thought 'huge' was pronounced 'fuge'. I got him to repeat something he said and it was clearly an 'f' there. Challenged on the spelling/phonics, he said he'd just assumed it was one of the ''harder to read and spell' words. Massive huck up by the educations system. Or the parents
ETA: A few years into our marriage, I had great difficulty explaining to my (Yorkshire born and bred) mother in law that I was going to be working in Hull for a few days. "Hull," I said, "Hull". My wife laughed at me and said, "Oooll!" and comprehension dawned
Can anyone explain why some people say "arks" instead of "ask"?
One of my sisters-in-law-in-law does it, and it just sounds daft.
Mind, she is from Birmingham, so that is the least of her linguistic problems.
It’s seems to be a common thing with black English speakers. If you watch any tv series with lots of black characters, whether UK like Top Boy or US like the Wire as two examples, it’s a noticeable tick that “ask” is pronounced more like “aks”.
I know a weirder one which I have never been able to understand.
My mother in law was from Co Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland and had the normal Irish accent you would expect, so three became tree, and so on. However, she reversed the process with some words beginning with t-e-a, so teacher became theacher. This is such an unnatural thing to do that I can only guess she was doing it deliberately to overcompensate for something she thought of (wrongly) as poor pronunciation.
I can't say I've ever come across any other Irish person exhibiting this quirk. Has anyone here?
I’ve also noticed another weird Irishism in that every Irish person I know says “Euro” when referring to a plural of Euros. I don’t know why they do it - the same people say Dollars and Pounds. My life must be very dull as it inexplicably winds me up.
I say that. "Here's twenty Euro". Sounds more natural that "Here's twenty Euros". But I'd say "Here's twenty dollars". Language is a funny thing. How it sounds is important rather than consistent rules.
Could she really not have known about this? And what is ‘an huge’ all about?
I am shocked by the secrecy and cover-up over the admission of thousands of Afghans to Britain at the cost of £7bn to the taxpayer. A decision that was in itself wrong.
It is an huge betrayal of public trust.
Those responsible in both Governments and the bureaucracy need to be held to account.
Northern (Leeds) roots for "an huge". We don't waste time sounding out consonants round 'ere
Which reminds me, I discovered a few months ago that my son (six at the time) thought 'huge' was pronounced 'fuge'. I got him to repeat something he said and it was clearly an 'f' there. Challenged on the spelling/phonics, he said he'd just assumed it was one of the ''harder to read and spell' words. Massive huck up by the educations system. Or the parents
ETA: A few years into our marriage, I had great difficulty explaining to my (Yorkshire born and bred) mother in law that I was going to be working in Hull for a few days. "Hull," I said, "Hull". My wife laughed at me and said, "Oooll!" and comprehension dawned
Can anyone explain why some people say "arks" instead of "ask"?
One of my sisters-in-law-in-law does it, and it just sounds daft.
Mind, she is from Birmingham, so that is the least of her linguistic problems.
It’s seems to be a common thing with black English speakers. If you watch any tv series with lots of black characters, whether UK like Top Boy or US like the Wire as two examples, it’s a noticeable tick that “ask” is pronounced more like “aks”.
I know a weirder one which I have never been able to understand.
My mother in law was from Co Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland and had the normal Irish accent you would expect, so three became tree, and so on. However, she reversed the process with some words beginning with t-e-a, so teacher became theacher. This is such an unnatural thing to do that I can only guess she was doing it deliberately to overcompensate for something she thought of (wrongly) as poor pronunciation.
I can't say I've ever come across any other Irish person exhibiting this quirk. Has anyone here?
I’ve also noticed another weird Irishism in that every Irish person I know says “Euro” when referring to a plural of Euros. I don’t know why they do it - the same people say Dollars and Pounds. My life must be very dull as it inexplicably winds me up.
I say that. "Here's twenty Euro". Sounds more natural that "Here's twenty Euros". But I'd say "Here's twenty dollars". Language is a funny thing. How it sounds is important rather than consistent rules.
It does seem rather fitting that nobody gets sacked for thinking it was OK to store secret highly sensitive data in one massive excel spreadsheet and pass it around on the email resulting in a £7bn bill, but a bloke allegedly said a naughty word 10 years ago in a pub and his feet doesn't touch the floor as they are booted out.
Where's the data loss prevention or information rights management software? It's not just who sent it that needs investigating, but how was it possible.
They can't even blame the Tories on inflation, the previous government left office with inflation down to 2% and generally falling/stable. This is all on Labour and their idiotic tax/spending policies. There's no new external shocks, no COVID, the wars in Ukraine/Israel have already been factored in, Trump's tariffs should make UK prices lower given export diversion by China and other affected countries.
If ever we needed evidence that Labour haven't got a clue how to run the economy this is it. In fairly benign conditions, with no substantial external factors they've let inflation go up from 2.2% when they took over in July to 3.6% last month and still rising. They've caused this, not global conditions, not the previous government, they did. The Tories need to absolutely destroy them on inflation, they actually did the hard work and got inflation back down to acceptable levels, Labour have completely thrown that away.
They weren't great but I've no doubt at all that Sunak and Hunt were a better choice than Starmer and Reeves. Alas post-covid the public were minded to kick out the incumbents, and Labour benefitted from that to win a huge majority with very little real support, which has already withered away to election losing levels.
Labour are alright a diagnosing the problems we face, but don't seem to have any particular idea as to what to do, and are politically inept as well as weak when facing back-bench opposition. I'm not expecting much from this government over the next few years, and fear we could end up with Farage unless Labour can make some real and rapid progress.
I think Sunak and Hunt would likely be managing the day to day of the economy better (unsurprising given Rachel’s tendency to lurch from crisis to embarrassment to crisis and back) but they’d be doing little to fix the underlying structural problems, and probably making them worse.
Truth be told we didn’t need the Tories in charge and it’s becoming increasingly clear we didn’t need Labour either. We need a new approach. I am very unconvinced that such an approach is offered by Farage, but I understand why he is doing well.
The key risk with voting Tory at the last election isn't what Sunak or Hunt might have done - though they'd left a lot of booby traps in the public finances, so it wasn't going to be great either way - but how long until the Tories gave them the heave and inflicted another Truss on the country.
The Tories absolutely had to receive a total spanking at GE2024 to teach them the lesson that sort of thing was not on. And the voters, bless them, went the extra mile and made sure that Truss was removed from the Commons too.
I do not get the impression from the Parliamentary Conservative Party that they have digested this lesson from the voters, which is one reason why the voters will look elsewhere if they decide it's necessary to punish Labour for their failures in government.
This is one reason why the crux for the next election is the Liberal Democrats. If Labour do not improve in government, then it's only the Liberal Democrats who can provide an alternative for the voters that isn't Farage. At the moment there isn't much sign of them being able to do that.
They can't even blame the Tories on inflation, the previous government left office with inflation down to 2% and generally falling/stable. This is all on Labour and their idiotic tax/spending policies. There's no new external shocks, no COVID, the wars in Ukraine/Israel have already been factored in, Trump's tariffs should make UK prices lower given export diversion by China and other affected countries.
If ever we needed evidence that Labour haven't got a clue how to run the economy this is it. In fairly benign conditions, with no substantial external factors they've let inflation go up from 2.2% when they took over in July to 3.6% last month and still rising. They've caused this, not global conditions, not the previous government, they did. The Tories need to absolutely destroy them on inflation, they actually did the hard work and got inflation back down to acceptable levels, Labour have completely thrown that away.
They weren't great but I've no doubt at all that Sunak and Hunt were a better choice than Starmer and Reeves. Alas post-covid the public were minded to kick out the incumbents, and Labour benefitted from that to win a huge majority with very little real support, which has already withered away to election losing levels.
Labour are alright a diagnosing the problems we face, but don't seem to have any particular idea as to what to do, and are politically inept as well as weak when facing back-bench opposition. I'm not expecting much from this government over the next few years, and fear we could end up with Farage unless Labour can make some real and rapid progress.
I think Sunak and Hunt would likely be managing the day to day of the economy better (unsurprising given Rachel’s tendency to lurch from crisis to embarrassment to crisis and back) but they’d be doing little to fix the underlying structural problems, and probably making them worse.
Truth be told we didn’t need the Tories in charge and it’s becoming increasingly clear we didn’t need Labour either. We need a new approach. I am very unconvinced that such an approach is offered by Farage, but I understand why he is doing well.
Someone needs to take the Civil Service in hand. The current government have a big enough majority and sufficient time to do it. They won’t, because Starmer and the Sir Humphreys are two cheeks of the same arse. I dread a Reform government, but if they were the only ones with the cojones to take on the Civil Service, it may be worth it.
Could she really not have known about this? And what is ‘an huge’ all about?
I am shocked by the secrecy and cover-up over the admission of thousands of Afghans to Britain at the cost of £7bn to the taxpayer. A decision that was in itself wrong.
It is an huge betrayal of public trust.
Those responsible in both Governments and the bureaucracy need to be held to account.
Northern (Leeds) roots for "an huge". We don't waste time sounding out consonants round 'ere
Which reminds me, I discovered a few months ago that my son (six at the time) thought 'huge' was pronounced 'fuge'. I got him to repeat something he said and it was clearly an 'f' there. Challenged on the spelling/phonics, he said he'd just assumed it was one of the ''harder to read and spell' words. Massive huck up by the educations system. Or the parents
ETA: A few years into our marriage, I had great difficulty explaining to my (Yorkshire born and bred) mother in law that I was going to be working in Hull for a few days. "Hull," I said, "Hull". My wife laughed at me and said, "Oooll!" and comprehension dawned
Can anyone explain why some people say "arks" instead of "ask"?
One of my sisters-in-law-in-law does it, and it just sounds daft.
Mind, she is from Birmingham, so that is the least of her linguistic problems.
It’s seems to be a common thing with black English speakers. If you watch any tv series with lots of black characters, whether UK like Top Boy or US like the Wire as two examples, it’s a noticeable tick that “ask” is pronounced more like “aks”.
I know a weirder one which I have never been able to understand.
My mother in law was from Co Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland and had the normal Irish accent you would expect, so three became tree, and so on. However, she reversed the process with some words beginning with t-e-a, so teacher became theacher. This is such an unnatural thing to do that I can only guess she was doing it deliberately to overcompensate for something she thought of (wrongly) as poor pronunciation.
I can't say I've ever come across any other Irish person exhibiting this quirk. Has anyone here?
I’ve also noticed another weird Irishism in that every Irish person I know says “Euro” when referring to a plural of Euros. I don’t know why they do it - the same people say Dollars and Pounds. My life must be very dull as it inexplicably winds me up.
I say that. "Here's twenty Euro". Sounds more natural that "Here's twenty Euros". But I'd say "Here's twenty dollars". Language is a funny thing. How it sounds is important rather than consistent rules.
Where's that 20 quid you owe me?
People often say "20 pound" as well, especially native Londoners. Maybe "euro" is like "lego". Nothing sounds more wrong linguistically than when Americans refer to "legos".
They can't even blame the Tories on inflation, the previous government left office with inflation down to 2% and generally falling/stable. This is all on Labour and their idiotic tax/spending policies. There's no new external shocks, no COVID, the wars in Ukraine/Israel have already been factored in, Trump's tariffs should make UK prices lower given export diversion by China and other affected countries.
If ever we needed evidence that Labour haven't got a clue how to run the economy this is it. In fairly benign conditions, with no substantial external factors they've let inflation go up from 2.2% when they took over in July to 3.6% last month and still rising. They've caused this, not global conditions, not the previous government, they did. The Tories need to absolutely destroy them on inflation, they actually did the hard work and got inflation back down to acceptable levels, Labour have completely thrown that away.
They weren't great but I've no doubt at all that Sunak and Hunt were a better choice than Starmer and Reeves. Alas post-covid the public were minded to kick out the incumbents, and Labour benefitted from that to win a huge majority with very little real support, which has already withered away to election losing levels.
Labour are alright a diagnosing the problems we face, but don't seem to have any particular idea as to what to do, and are politically inept as well as weak when facing back-bench opposition. I'm not expecting much from this government over the next few years, and fear we could end up with Farage unless Labour can make some real and rapid progress.
Given everything we've just learned about this latest fuck up by the civil service and the subsequent cover up, would you really begrudge the public voting in Farage as PM?
The whole civil service needs burning down and rebooting, neither the Tories nor Labour will deliver that. I don't particularly think Reform will either, yet they have a higher probability of doing it than either of the other two.
This is a deeply nihilistic point of view.
I don't have any more faith in Labour or Tories than you, but I can only see Reform making things worse. A lot worse.
They're further away from caring about good governance than any of the parties.
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Labour, if they had any sense, might shoot her fox and give both of them the chop
Labour can't sack Hoyle. Do you mean Starmer and Healey should fall on their swords?
Hoyle has deliberately misled Parliament for quite a long period of time.
The Speaker holds his position only with the approval of parliament, and Labour MPs have a very large majority of the seats. Effectively Labour MPs could sack him, as his position seems indefensible over this, and it seems highly unlikely that the opposition will go into battle on his behalf.
I have less respect for Hoyle than any other Speaker I can remember, including Bercow and Martin. He doesn’t appear to be impartial, and seems to make the rules up to suit himself.
You have just described Bercow there, to be fair.
I can’t say I’m a particular fan of Hoyle either though.
Martin was weak, and there was always the sneaking suspicion that the Labour Man in him hadn’t ever left him upon elevation to the speakership.
In truth we’ve not had a decent speaker since Boothroyd.
Could she really not have known about this? And what is ‘an huge’ all about?
I am shocked by the secrecy and cover-up over the admission of thousands of Afghans to Britain at the cost of £7bn to the taxpayer. A decision that was in itself wrong.
It is an huge betrayal of public trust.
Those responsible in both Governments and the bureaucracy need to be held to account.
Northern (Leeds) roots for "an huge". We don't waste time sounding out consonants round 'ere
Which reminds me, I discovered a few months ago that my son (six at the time) thought 'huge' was pronounced 'fuge'. I got him to repeat something he said and it was clearly an 'f' there. Challenged on the spelling/phonics, he said he'd just assumed it was one of the ''harder to read and spell' words. Massive huck up by the educations system. Or the parents
ETA: A few years into our marriage, I had great difficulty explaining to my (Yorkshire born and bred) mother in law that I was going to be working in Hull for a few days. "Hull," I said, "Hull". My wife laughed at me and said, "Oooll!" and comprehension dawned
Can anyone explain why some people say "arks" instead of "ask"?
One of my sisters-in-law-in-law does it, and it just sounds daft.
Mind, she is from Birmingham, so that is the least of her linguistic problems.
It’s seems to be a common thing with black English speakers. If you watch any tv series with lots of black characters, whether UK like Top Boy or US like the Wire as two examples, it’s a noticeable tick that “ask” is pronounced more like “aks”.
I know a weirder one which I have never been able to understand.
My mother in law was from Co Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland and had the normal Irish accent you would expect, so three became tree, and so on. However, she reversed the process with some words beginning with t-e-a, so teacher became theacher. This is such an unnatural thing to do that I can only guess she was doing it deliberately to overcompensate for something she thought of (wrongly) as poor pronunciation.
I can't say I've ever come across any other Irish person exhibiting this quirk. Has anyone here?
I’ve also noticed another weird Irishism in that every Irish person I know says “Euro” when referring to a plural of Euros. I don’t know why they do it - the same people say Dollars and Pounds. My life must be very dull as it inexplicably winds me up.
I say that. "Here's twenty Euro". Sounds more natural that "Here's twenty Euros". But I'd say "Here's twenty dollars". Language is a funny thing. How it sounds is important rather than consistent rules.
They can't even blame the Tories on inflation, the previous government left office with inflation down to 2% and generally falling/stable. This is all on Labour and their idiotic tax/spending policies. There's no new external shocks, no COVID, the wars in Ukraine/Israel have already been factored in, Trump's tariffs should make UK prices lower given export diversion by China and other affected countries.
If ever we needed evidence that Labour haven't got a clue how to run the economy this is it. In fairly benign conditions, with no substantial external factors they've let inflation go up from 2.2% when they took over in July to 3.6% last month and still rising. They've caused this, not global conditions, not the previous government, they did. The Tories need to absolutely destroy them on inflation, they actually did the hard work and got inflation back down to acceptable levels, Labour have completely thrown that away.
They weren't great but I've no doubt at all that Sunak and Hunt were a better choice than Starmer and Reeves. Alas post-covid the public were minded to kick out the incumbents, and Labour benefitted from that to win a huge majority with very little real support, which has already withered away to election losing levels.
Labour are alright a diagnosing the problems we face, but don't seem to have any particular idea as to what to do, and are politically inept as well as weak when facing back-bench opposition. I'm not expecting much from this government over the next few years, and fear we could end up with Farage unless Labour can make some real and rapid progress.
I think Sunak and Hunt would likely be managing the day to day of the economy better (unsurprising given Rachel’s tendency to lurch from crisis to embarrassment to crisis and back) but they’d be doing little to fix the underlying structural problems, and probably making them worse.
Truth be told we didn’t need the Tories in charge and it’s becoming increasingly clear we didn’t need Labour either. We need a new approach. I am very unconvinced that such an approach is offered by Farage, but I understand why he is doing well.
The key risk with voting Tory at the last election isn't what Sunak or Hunt might have done - though they'd left a lot of booby traps in the public finances, so it wasn't going to be great either way - but how long until the Tories gave them the heave and inflicted another Truss on the country.
The Tories absolutely had to receive a total spanking at GE2024 to teach them the lesson that sort of thing was not on. And the voters, bless them, went the extra mile and made sure that Truss was removed from the Commons too.
I do not get the impression from the Parliamentary Conservative Party that they have digested this lesson from the voters, which is one reason why the voters will look elsewhere if they decide it's necessary to punish Labour for their failures in government.
This is one reason why the crux for the next election is the Liberal Democrats. If Labour do not improve in government, then it's only the Liberal Democrats who can provide an alternative for the voters that isn't Farage. At the moment there isn't much sign of them being able to do that.
It would be quite something to see a Liberal government again after 100 years, but not entirely impossible, I think. Possibly both the LDs and Greens are heading for power at some point,too, ranged against a Tory: Reform alliance.
They can't even blame the Tories on inflation, the previous government left office with inflation down to 2% and generally falling/stable. This is all on Labour and their idiotic tax/spending policies. There's no new external shocks, no COVID, the wars in Ukraine/Israel have already been factored in, Trump's tariffs should make UK prices lower given export diversion by China and other affected countries.
If ever we needed evidence that Labour haven't got a clue how to run the economy this is it. In fairly benign conditions, with no substantial external factors they've let inflation go up from 2.2% when they took over in July to 3.6% last month and still rising. They've caused this, not global conditions, not the previous government, they did. The Tories need to absolutely destroy them on inflation, they actually did the hard work and got inflation back down to acceptable levels, Labour have completely thrown that away.
They weren't great but I've no doubt at all that Sunak and Hunt were a better choice than Starmer and Reeves. Alas post-covid the public were minded to kick out the incumbents, and Labour benefitted from that to win a huge majority with very little real support, which has already withered away to election losing levels.
Labour are alright a diagnosing the problems we face, but don't seem to have any particular idea as to what to do, and are politically inept as well as weak when facing back-bench opposition. I'm not expecting much from this government over the next few years, and fear we could end up with Farage unless Labour can make some real and rapid progress.
Given everything we've just learned about this latest fuck up by the civil service and the subsequent cover up, would you really begrudge the public voting in Farage as PM?
The whole civil service needs burning down and rebooting, neither the Tories nor Labour will deliver that. I don't particularly think Reform will either, yet they have a higher probability of doing it than either of the other two.
This is a deeply nihilistic point of view.
I don't have any more faith in Labour or Tories than you, but I can only see Reform making things worse. A lot worse.
They're further away from caring about good governance than any of the parties.
I voted Tory last year. I am regretting it now I know what they were covering up.
Could she really not have known about this? And what is ‘an huge’ all about?
I am shocked by the secrecy and cover-up over the admission of thousands of Afghans to Britain at the cost of £7bn to the taxpayer. A decision that was in itself wrong.
It is an huge betrayal of public trust.
Those responsible in both Governments and the bureaucracy need to be held to account.
Northern (Leeds) roots for "an huge". We don't waste time sounding out consonants round 'ere
Which reminds me, I discovered a few months ago that my son (six at the time) thought 'huge' was pronounced 'fuge'. I got him to repeat something he said and it was clearly an 'f' there. Challenged on the spelling/phonics, he said he'd just assumed it was one of the ''harder to read and spell' words. Massive huck up by the educations system. Or the parents
ETA: A few years into our marriage, I had great difficulty explaining to my (Yorkshire born and bred) mother in law that I was going to be working in Hull for a few days. "Hull," I said, "Hull". My wife laughed at me and said, "Oooll!" and comprehension dawned
Can anyone explain why some people say "arks" instead of "ask"?
One of my sisters-in-law-in-law does it, and it just sounds daft.
Mind, she is from Birmingham, so that is the least of her linguistic problems.
It’s seems to be a common thing with black English speakers. If you watch any tv series with lots of black characters, whether UK like Top Boy or US like the Wire as two examples, it’s a noticeable tick that “ask” is pronounced more like “aks”.
I know a weirder one which I have never been able to understand.
My mother in law was from Co Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland and had the normal Irish accent you would expect, so three became tree, and so on. However, she reversed the process with some words beginning with t-e-a, so teacher became theacher. This is such an unnatural thing to do that I can only guess she was doing it deliberately to overcompensate for something she thought of (wrongly) as poor pronunciation.
I can't say I've ever come across any other Irish person exhibiting this quirk. Has anyone here?
I’ve also noticed another weird Irishism in that every Irish person I know says “Euro” when referring to a plural of Euros. I don’t know why they do it - the same people say Dollars and Pounds. My life must be very dull as it inexplicably winds me up.
I say that. "Here's twenty Euro". Sounds more natural that "Here's twenty Euros". But I'd say "Here's twenty dollars". Language is a funny thing. How it sounds is important rather than consistent rules.
Where's that 20 quid you owe me?
People often say "20 pound" as well, especially native Londoners. Maybe "euro" is like "lego". Nothing sounds more wrong linguistically than when Americans refer to "legos".
And of course the French cheat by writing Euros but saying Euro.
I can’t find much mention of the Afghan story in The Sun. But this is one that will reverberate through WhatsApp and pub chats. Reform going in hard vs Jenrick and Braverman.
I don't think Zia is helping himself with Reform going in studs up on Suella (or Jenrick for that matter) I wouldn't be surprised if he suddenly 'doesnt want to spend his time getting Reform elected' again
The consistency in the polls is such that Reform really need to start thinking about how they would govern. Labour had been out of power for an age but they could still lean on plenty of serving MPs and grandees with experience of government.
Seems to me Farage would be well served by having a couple of ex cabinet ministers in his ranks to help navigate the den of vipers in Whitehall. The first job of a leader is to recruit well and we’ve not seen a lot of evidence Farage is much good at it. As 2029 inches closer will be fascinating to see what he does.
A point I made on Sunday, to two quite prominent members of that party. You aren't a party of protest any longer, you are likely to win if not the next election, then the one after that, and you have to prepare your core voters for some hard choices (like dropping the triple lock).
Compared with the actual hard choices facing us dropping the triple lock is a small thing.
Could she really not have known about this? And what is ‘an huge’ all about?
I am shocked by the secrecy and cover-up over the admission of thousands of Afghans to Britain at the cost of £7bn to the taxpayer. A decision that was in itself wrong.
It is an huge betrayal of public trust.
Those responsible in both Governments and the bureaucracy need to be held to account.
Northern (Leeds) roots for "an huge". We don't waste time sounding out consonants round 'ere
Which reminds me, I discovered a few months ago that my son (six at the time) thought 'huge' was pronounced 'fuge'. I got him to repeat something he said and it was clearly an 'f' there. Challenged on the spelling/phonics, he said he'd just assumed it was one of the ''harder to read and spell' words. Massive huck up by the educations system. Or the parents
ETA: A few years into our marriage, I had great difficulty explaining to my (Yorkshire born and bred) mother in law that I was going to be working in Hull for a few days. "Hull," I said, "Hull". My wife laughed at me and said, "Oooll!" and comprehension dawned
Can anyone explain why some people say "arks" instead of "ask"?
One of my sisters-in-law-in-law does it, and it just sounds daft.
Mind, she is from Birmingham, so that is the least of her linguistic problems.
It’s seems to be a common thing with black English speakers. If you watch any tv series with lots of black characters, whether UK like Top Boy or US like the Wire as two examples, it’s a noticeable tick that “ask” is pronounced more like “aks”.
I know a weirder one which I have never been able to understand.
My mother in law was from Co Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland and had the normal Irish accent you would expect, so three became tree, and so on. However, she reversed the process with some words beginning with t-e-a, so teacher became theacher. This is such an unnatural thing to do that I can only guess she was doing it deliberately to overcompensate for something she thought of (wrongly) as poor pronunciation.
I can't say I've ever come across any other Irish person exhibiting this quirk. Has anyone here?
I’ve also noticed another weird Irishism in that every Irish person I know says “Euro” when referring to a plural of Euros. I don’t know why they do it - the same people say Dollars and Pounds. My life must be very dull as it inexplicably winds me up.
I say that. "Here's twenty Euro". Sounds more natural that "Here's twenty Euros". But I'd say "Here's twenty dollars". Language is a funny thing. How it sounds is important rather than consistent rules.
Where's that 20 quid you owe me?
People often say "20 pound" as well, especially native Londoners. Maybe "euro" is like "lego". Nothing sounds more wrong linguistically than when Americans refer to "legos".
Isn’t that “20 paahnnd” though which of course is less than 20 pounds as it’s usually prefaced with “it’s only”.
Could she really not have known about this? And what is ‘an huge’ all about?
I am shocked by the secrecy and cover-up over the admission of thousands of Afghans to Britain at the cost of £7bn to the taxpayer. A decision that was in itself wrong.
It is an huge betrayal of public trust.
Those responsible in both Governments and the bureaucracy need to be held to account.
Northern (Leeds) roots for "an huge". We don't waste time sounding out consonants round 'ere
Which reminds me, I discovered a few months ago that my son (six at the time) thought 'huge' was pronounced 'fuge'. I got him to repeat something he said and it was clearly an 'f' there. Challenged on the spelling/phonics, he said he'd just assumed it was one of the ''harder to read and spell' words. Massive huck up by the educations system. Or the parents
ETA: A few years into our marriage, I had great difficulty explaining to my (Yorkshire born and bred) mother in law that I was going to be working in Hull for a few days. "Hull," I said, "Hull". My wife laughed at me and said, "Oooll!" and comprehension dawned
Can anyone explain why some people say "arks" instead of "ask"?
One of my sisters-in-law-in-law does it, and it just sounds daft.
Mind, she is from Birmingham, so that is the least of her linguistic problems.
It’s seems to be a common thing with black English speakers. If you watch any tv series with lots of black characters, whether UK like Top Boy or US like the Wire as two examples, it’s a noticeable tick that “ask” is pronounced more like “aks”.
I know a weirder one which I have never been able to understand.
My mother in law was from Co Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland and had the normal Irish accent you would expect, so three became tree, and so on. However, she reversed the process with some words beginning with t-e-a, so teacher became theacher. This is such an unnatural thing to do that I can only guess she was doing it deliberately to overcompensate for something she thought of (wrongly) as poor pronunciation.
I can't say I've ever come across any other Irish person exhibiting this quirk. Has anyone here?
I’ve also noticed another weird Irishism in that every Irish person I know says “Euro” when referring to a plural of Euros. I don’t know why they do it - the same people say Dollars and Pounds. My life must be very dull as it inexplicably winds me up.
I say that. "Here's twenty Euro". Sounds more natural that "Here's twenty Euros". But I'd say "Here's twenty dollars". Language is a funny thing. How it sounds is important rather than consistent rules.
They can't even blame the Tories on inflation, the previous government left office with inflation down to 2% and generally falling/stable. This is all on Labour and their idiotic tax/spending policies. There's no new external shocks, no COVID, the wars in Ukraine/Israel have already been factored in, Trump's tariffs should make UK prices lower given export diversion by China and other affected countries.
If ever we needed evidence that Labour haven't got a clue how to run the economy this is it. In fairly benign conditions, with no substantial external factors they've let inflation go up from 2.2% when they took over in July to 3.6% last month and still rising. They've caused this, not global conditions, not the previous government, they did. The Tories need to absolutely destroy them on inflation, they actually did the hard work and got inflation back down to acceptable levels, Labour have completely thrown that away.
They weren't great but I've no doubt at all that Sunak and Hunt were a better choice than Starmer and Reeves. Alas post-covid the public were minded to kick out the incumbents, and Labour benefitted from that to win a huge majority with very little real support, which has already withered away to election losing levels.
Labour are alright a diagnosing the problems we face, but don't seem to have any particular idea as to what to do, and are politically inept as well as weak when facing back-bench opposition. I'm not expecting much from this government over the next few years, and fear we could end up with Farage unless Labour can make some real and rapid progress.
Given everything we've just learned about this latest fuck up by the civil service and the subsequent cover up, would you really begrudge the public voting in Farage as PM?
The whole civil service needs burning down and rebooting, neither the Tories nor Labour will deliver that. I don't particularly think Reform will either, yet they have a higher probability of doing it than either of the other two.
This is a deeply nihilistic point of view.
I don't have any more faith in Labour or Tories than you, but I can only see Reform making things worse. A lot worse.
They're further away from caring about good governance than any of the parties.
I voted Tory last year. I am regretting it now I know what they were covering up.
A rule that will work over 90% of the time is all governments cover up as much as they think they can get away with.
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Labour, if they had any sense, might shoot her fox and give both of them the chop
Labour can't sack Hoyle. Do you mean Starmer and Healey should fall on their swords?
Hoyle has deliberately misled Parliament for quite a long period of time.
The Speaker holds his position only with the approval of parliament, and Labour MPs have a very large majority of the seats. Effectively Labour MPs could sack him, as his position seems indefensible over this, and it seems highly unlikely that the opposition will go into battle on his behalf.
I have less respect for Hoyle than any other Speaker I can remember, including Bercow and Martin. He doesn’t appear to be impartial, and seems to make the rules up to suit himself.
You have just described Bercow there, to be fair.
I can’t say I’m a particular fan of Hoyle either though.
Martin was weak, and there was always the sneaking suspicion that the Labour Man in him hadn’t ever left him upon elevation to the speakership.
In truth we’ve not had a decent speaker since Boothroyd.
Boothroyd's speakership is seen as a golden age but at the time MPs complained she had her old favourites and made it hard for new members to catch her eye.
Could she really not have known about this? And what is ‘an huge’ all about?
I am shocked by the secrecy and cover-up over the admission of thousands of Afghans to Britain at the cost of £7bn to the taxpayer. A decision that was in itself wrong.
It is an huge betrayal of public trust.
Those responsible in both Governments and the bureaucracy need to be held to account.
Northern (Leeds) roots for "an huge". We don't waste time sounding out consonants round 'ere
Which reminds me, I discovered a few months ago that my son (six at the time) thought 'huge' was pronounced 'fuge'. I got him to repeat something he said and it was clearly an 'f' there. Challenged on the spelling/phonics, he said he'd just assumed it was one of the ''harder to read and spell' words. Massive huck up by the educations system. Or the parents
ETA: A few years into our marriage, I had great difficulty explaining to my (Yorkshire born and bred) mother in law that I was going to be working in Hull for a few days. "Hull," I said, "Hull". My wife laughed at me and said, "Oooll!" and comprehension dawned
Can anyone explain why some people say "arks" instead of "ask"?
One of my sisters-in-law-in-law does it, and it just sounds daft.
Mind, she is from Birmingham, so that is the least of her linguistic problems.
It’s seems to be a common thing with black English speakers. If you watch any tv series with lots of black characters, whether UK like Top Boy or US like the Wire as two examples, it’s a noticeable tick that “ask” is pronounced more like “aks”.
I know a weirder one which I have never been able to understand.
My mother in law was from Co Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland and had the normal Irish accent you would expect, so three became tree, and so on. However, she reversed the process with some words beginning with t-e-a, so teacher became theacher. This is such an unnatural thing to do that I can only guess she was doing it deliberately to overcompensate for something she thought of (wrongly) as poor pronunciation.
I can't say I've ever come across any other Irish person exhibiting this quirk. Has anyone here?
I’ve also noticed another weird Irishism in that every Irish person I know says “Euro” when referring to a plural of Euros. I don’t know why they do it - the same people say Dollars and Pounds. My life must be very dull as it inexplicably winds me up.
I say that. "Here's twenty Euro". Sounds more natural that "Here's twenty Euros". But I'd say "Here's twenty dollars". Language is a funny thing. How it sounds is important rather than consistent rules.
Where's that 20 quid you owe me?
People often say "20 pound" as well, especially native Londoners. Maybe "euro" is like "lego". Nothing sounds more wrong linguistically than when Americans refer to "legos".
They must realise there's more than one brick, after doing the math.
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Labour, if they had any sense, might shoot her fox and give both of them the chop
Labour can't sack Hoyle. Do you mean Starmer and Healey should fall on their swords?
Hoyle has deliberately misled Parliament for quite a long period of time.
The Speaker holds his position only with the approval of parliament, and Labour MPs have a very large majority of the seats. Effectively Labour MPs could sack him, as his position seems indefensible over this, and it seems highly unlikely that the opposition will go into battle on his behalf.
I have less respect for Hoyle than any other Speaker I can remember, including Bercow and Martin. He doesn’t appear to be impartial, and seems to make the rules up to suit himself.
You have just described Bercow there, to be fair.
I can’t say I’m a particular fan of Hoyle either though.
Martin was weak, and there was always the sneaking suspicion that the Labour Man in him hadn’t ever left him upon elevation to the speakership.
In truth we’ve not had a decent speaker since Boothroyd.
I wonder if it would result in a better speaker if a new speaker was elected after each GE but they could not come from either the government or the official opposition so that even if they have an inescapable subconscious bias it is offset by them being heavily outnumbered by MPs from the two main parties.
Could she really not have known about this? And what is ‘an huge’ all about?
I am shocked by the secrecy and cover-up over the admission of thousands of Afghans to Britain at the cost of £7bn to the taxpayer. A decision that was in itself wrong.
It is an huge betrayal of public trust.
Those responsible in both Governments and the bureaucracy need to be held to account.
Northern (Leeds) roots for "an huge". We don't waste time sounding out consonants round 'ere
Which reminds me, I discovered a few months ago that my son (six at the time) thought 'huge' was pronounced 'fuge'. I got him to repeat something he said and it was clearly an 'f' there. Challenged on the spelling/phonics, he said he'd just assumed it was one of the ''harder to read and spell' words. Massive huck up by the educations system. Or the parents
ETA: A few years into our marriage, I had great difficulty explaining to my (Yorkshire born and bred) mother in law that I was going to be working in Hull for a few days. "Hull," I said, "Hull". My wife laughed at me and said, "Oooll!" and comprehension dawned
Can anyone explain why some people say "arks" instead of "ask"?
One of my sisters-in-law-in-law does it, and it just sounds daft.
Mind, she is from Birmingham, so that is the least of her linguistic problems.
It’s seems to be a common thing with black English speakers. If you watch any tv series with lots of black characters, whether UK like Top Boy or US like the Wire as two examples, it’s a noticeable tick that “ask” is pronounced more like “aks”.
I know a weirder one which I have never been able to understand.
My mother in law was from Co Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland and had the normal Irish accent you would expect, so three became tree, and so on. However, she reversed the process with some words beginning with t-e-a, so teacher became theacher. This is such an unnatural thing to do that I can only guess she was doing it deliberately to overcompensate for something she thought of (wrongly) as poor pronunciation.
I can't say I've ever come across any other Irish person exhibiting this quirk. Has anyone here?
I’ve also noticed another weird Irishism in that every Irish person I know says “Euro” when referring to a plural of Euros. I don’t know why they do it - the same people say Dollars and Pounds. My life must be very dull as it inexplicably winds me up.
I say that. "Here's twenty Euro". Sounds more natural that "Here's twenty Euros". But I'd say "Here's twenty dollars". Language is a funny thing. How it sounds is important rather than consistent rules.
Where's that 20 quid you owe me?
People often say "20 pound" as well, especially native Londoners. Maybe "euro" is like "lego". Nothing sounds more wrong linguistically than when Americans refer to "legos".
Isn’t that “20 paahnnd” though which of course is less than 20 pounds as it’s usually prefaced with “it’s only”.
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
No no no
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
I’m not defending these people, it’s a shit show by both parties but it also makes me wonder about the effects/power of legal and civil service advice over democratically elected politicians and will be interested what comes out.
If you are a minister/government and your own lawyers are telling you that you really have to continue doing something for important legal reasons the are you going to just pull the pin and say “bollocks I’m going public whatever the legal implications”?
BTW the minister said on Today that the figures weren’t kept out of the immigrations Stats and the reporter was wrong - brave move and resigning matter (hahaha) if he is lying.
I’d wager money he’s lying - in some form
Your defence of these people is pitiful and grotesque
I'll wager money your numbers are balls too.
But I’m the one quoting the judge in the transcript. Who seems the only reliable actor here. All the other numbers - which vary wildly from £400m to £800m to £2bn to £7bn to £10bn (and up) come from politicians with an agenda, and we KNOW these people are lying. They admitted it. “We want to set a false narrative as cover”
Why is the judge's number authoritative in any sense ? He has no powers of audit, and no more information than he has been given, so it's a number which came second hand from the politicians whose numbers you don't believe. He can clearly speak with authority on the legal position, but has little more idea than do you on what this is costing.
FWIW, the cost estimate for this particular mess is around an order of magnitude less https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg8zy78787o The government also revealed on Tuesday: The MoD believes 600 Afghan soldiers included in the leak, plus 1,800 of their family members, are still in Afghanistan The scheme is being closed down, but relocation offers already made to those who remain in Afghanistan will be honoured The secret scheme - officially called the Afghan Relocation Route - has cost £400m so far, and is expected to cost a further £400m to £450m The breach was committed mistakenly by an unnamed official at the MoD People whose details were leaked were only informed on Tuesday
As I noted upthread, the sensible way to deal with this is for the PAC to get to work and ferret out the actual numbers.
Your syllogism "everyone is lying, so I am right" is a load of nonsense.
And yet you blindly trust the new numbers given by a government which ADMITS IT IS LYING ON THIS EXACT ISSUE
You’re never the smartest but this is a new level of intellectual mediocrity
Could she really not have known about this? And what is ‘an huge’ all about?
I am shocked by the secrecy and cover-up over the admission of thousands of Afghans to Britain at the cost of £7bn to the taxpayer. A decision that was in itself wrong.
It is an huge betrayal of public trust.
Those responsible in both Governments and the bureaucracy need to be held to account.
Northern (Leeds) roots for "an huge". We don't waste time sounding out consonants round 'ere
Which reminds me, I discovered a few months ago that my son (six at the time) thought 'huge' was pronounced 'fuge'. I got him to repeat something he said and it was clearly an 'f' there. Challenged on the spelling/phonics, he said he'd just assumed it was one of the ''harder to read and spell' words. Massive huck up by the educations system. Or the parents
ETA: A few years into our marriage, I had great difficulty explaining to my (Yorkshire born and bred) mother in law that I was going to be working in Hull for a few days. "Hull," I said, "Hull". My wife laughed at me and said, "Oooll!" and comprehension dawned
Can anyone explain why some people say "arks" instead of "ask"?
One of my sisters-in-law-in-law does it, and it just sounds daft.
Mind, she is from Birmingham, so that is the least of her linguistic problems.
It’s seems to be a common thing with black English speakers. If you watch any tv series with lots of black characters, whether UK like Top Boy or US like the Wire as two examples, it’s a noticeable tick that “ask” is pronounced more like “aks”.
I know a weirder one which I have never been able to understand.
My mother in law was from Co Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland and had the normal Irish accent you would expect, so three became tree, and so on. However, she reversed the process with some words beginning with t-e-a, so teacher became theacher. This is such an unnatural thing to do that I can only guess she was doing it deliberately to overcompensate for something she thought of (wrongly) as poor pronunciation.
I can't say I've ever come across any other Irish person exhibiting this quirk. Has anyone here?
I’ve also noticed another weird Irishism in that every Irish person I know says “Euro” when referring to a plural of Euros. I don’t know why they do it - the same people say Dollars and Pounds. My life must be very dull as it inexplicably winds me up.
I say that. "Here's twenty Euro". Sounds more natural that "Here's twenty Euros". But I'd say "Here's twenty dollars". Language is a funny thing. How it sounds is important rather than consistent rules.
They can't even blame the Tories on inflation, the previous government left office with inflation down to 2% and generally falling/stable. This is all on Labour and their idiotic tax/spending policies. There's no new external shocks, no COVID, the wars in Ukraine/Israel have already been factored in, Trump's tariffs should make UK prices lower given export diversion by China and other affected countries.
If ever we needed evidence that Labour haven't got a clue how to run the economy this is it. In fairly benign conditions, with no substantial external factors they've let inflation go up from 2.2% when they took over in July to 3.6% last month and still rising. They've caused this, not global conditions, not the previous government, they did. The Tories need to absolutely destroy them on inflation, they actually did the hard work and got inflation back down to acceptable levels, Labour have completely thrown that away.
They weren't great but I've no doubt at all that Sunak and Hunt were a better choice than Starmer and Reeves. Alas post-covid the public were minded to kick out the incumbents, and Labour benefitted from that to win a huge majority with very little real support, which has already withered away to election losing levels.
Labour are alright a diagnosing the problems we face, but don't seem to have any particular idea as to what to do, and are politically inept as well as weak when facing back-bench opposition. I'm not expecting much from this government over the next few years, and fear we could end up with Farage unless Labour can make some real and rapid progress.
Given everything we've just learned about this latest fuck up by the civil service and the subsequent cover up, would you really begrudge the public voting in Farage as PM?
The whole civil service needs burning down and rebooting, neither the Tories nor Labour will deliver that. I don't particularly think Reform will either, yet they have a higher probability of doing it than either of the other two.
This is a deeply nihilistic point of view.
I don't have any more faith in Labour or Tories than you, but I can only see Reform making things worse. A lot worse.
They're further away from caring about good governance than any of the parties.
Reform could potentially take us to Trumpist levels of corruption, because of several of their candidates' fondness for authoritarianism.
This is my off topic video for the day, a 1:20 minute marketing video for graded accessible routes for an initiative of the national parks called "Miles without Stiles" in the Lake District. Most of the parks have done it.
The non-joined up Government bit is that their "Accessible for All" category includes 1:10 hills, which Disabled organisations (and the most applicable Government guidelines - LTN 1/20) will tell you is not accessible (try a 50m long 1:10 hill using a manual wheelchair or a scooter). They work for most, but not all.
We are all over "but public footpaths have hills"; yes, but that there plenty that do not eg rail trails canal towpaths. Except in my area when they did loads of rail trials in the 1990s they demolished many of the bridges etc they go over and made them unusable.
Loosely on the subject of accessibility, here is a video posted by a blind people's group showing the hazards posed by so-called floating bus stops, where there is a cycle lane inside the stop. In theory cyclists give way to pedestrians but, well:- https://x.com/NFBUK/status/1944446586341163368
It's a clear design flaw. UK highway engineers are good at designing in obvious flaws. See also road narrowing for bus stops / pedestrian crossings, pavement sticks out up to 1m, cycle lane just stops. narrow cycle lanes painted in door zone alongside parking spaces cycle lanes that just stop when it gets too difficult (dangerous)
It's quite often Councils not following standards, because standards are "Guidelines" not "Regulations". There's a particular problem where for years Outer London boroughs did things for quantity, not quality, and salami sliced the resources on roads which were not TFL managed. That's not to say TFL are perfect. One sympathizes on budget cuts by 25% since 2010 etc, but that does not justify using designs that enforce conflict.
That vid is of a busy location where a "Bus Border" as used is not appropriate (as per the LTN 1/20 guidance); it's a very wide pavement with lots of space so a proper bus stop bypass would be doable.
NFBUK are a tiny fringe group who make inflammatory videos from editing the juicy bit from hours of filming at substandard, non-standard or old bits of infra, and then demand that all of it be banned by feeding their vids to the Telegraph, Mail, Express etc.
They try to set up "disabled people vs cyclist" narratives, neglecting to mention that that is actually a mobility track where disabled people use powerchairs and mobility scooters, never mind that a standard cycle or EAPC is also a common mobility aid.
Many of of us in the space regard them as bad faith actors, generically anti-cycling because they incorporate all the standard talking points - registration plates, insurance *, the whole lot.
When I started asking them for evidence or their better proposals, they just blocked me; that was years ago. So I don't bother with them.
They were making the same demands back in 2014-15, and demanding research. Research was done, they did not like the results, and they just continued on the same track.
Inconsiderate cycling is a problem for the police, and perhaps local authorities, but not a reason to throw disabled people who use mobility aids out into the traffic at every bus stop.
There are ore thoughtful organisations suggesting more nuanced answers. Here is the current view of Wheels for Wellbeing:
It does seem rather fitting that nobody gets sacked for thinking it was OK to store secret highly sensitive data in one massive excel spreadsheet and pass it around on the email resulting in a £7bn bill, but a bloke allegedly said a naughty word 10 years ago in a pub and his feet doesn't touch the floor as they are booted out.
Where's the data loss prevention or information rights management software? It's not just who sent it that needs investigating, but how was it possible.
They can't even blame the Tories on inflation, the previous government left office with inflation down to 2% and generally falling/stable. This is all on Labour and their idiotic tax/spending policies. There's no new external shocks, no COVID, the wars in Ukraine/Israel have already been factored in, Trump's tariffs should make UK prices lower given export diversion by China and other affected countries.
If ever we needed evidence that Labour haven't got a clue how to run the economy this is it. In fairly benign conditions, with no substantial external factors they've let inflation go up from 2.2% when they took over in July to 3.6% last month and still rising. They've caused this, not global conditions, not the previous government, they did. The Tories need to absolutely destroy them on inflation, they actually did the hard work and got inflation back down to acceptable levels, Labour have completely thrown that away.
They weren't great but I've no doubt at all that Sunak and Hunt were a better choice than Starmer and Reeves. Alas post-covid the public were minded to kick out the incumbents, and Labour benefitted from that to win a huge majority with very little real support, which has already withered away to election losing levels.
Labour are alright a diagnosing the problems we face, but don't seem to have any particular idea as to what to do, and are politically inept as well as weak when facing back-bench opposition. I'm not expecting much from this government over the next few years, and fear we could end up with Farage unless Labour can make some real and rapid progress.
Given everything we've just learned about this latest fuck up by the civil service and the subsequent cover up, would you really begrudge the public voting in Farage as PM?
The whole civil service needs burning down and rebooting, neither the Tories nor Labour will deliver that. I don't particularly think Reform will either, yet they have a higher probability of doing it than either of the other two.
I am coming to the same conclusion.
Like the Reformation, or the French Revolution, one can argue whether things were made better or worse, but the current situation is unstainable.
The data breach with the worst ever Defence minister - Ben bringing all the Afghans was courageous not a coverup! Wallace - was not even close to the worst data breach 2019-24....
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
No no no
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
I’m not defending these people, it’s a shit show by both parties but it also makes me wonder about the effects/power of legal and civil service advice over democratically elected politicians and will be interested what comes out.
If you are a minister/government and your own lawyers are telling you that you really have to continue doing something for important legal reasons the are you going to just pull the pin and say “bollocks I’m going public whatever the legal implications”?
BTW the minister said on Today that the figures weren’t kept out of the immigrations Stats and the reporter was wrong - brave move and resigning matter (hahaha) if he is lying.
I’d wager money he’s lying - in some form
Your defence of these people is pitiful and grotesque
I'll wager money your numbers are balls too.
But I’m the one quoting the judge in the transcript. Who seems the only reliable actor here. All the other numbers - which vary wildly from £400m to £800m to £2bn to £7bn to £10bn (and up) come from politicians with an agenda, and we KNOW these people are lying. They admitted it. “We want to set a false narrative as cover”
Why is the judge's number authoritative in any sense ? He has no powers of audit, and no more information than he has been given, so it's a number which came second hand from the politicians whose numbers you don't believe. He can clearly speak with authority on the legal position, but has little more idea than do you on what this is costing.
FWIW, the cost estimate for this particular mess is around an order of magnitude less https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg8zy78787o The government also revealed on Tuesday: The MoD believes 600 Afghan soldiers included in the leak, plus 1,800 of their family members, are still in Afghanistan The scheme is being closed down, but relocation offers already made to those who remain in Afghanistan will be honoured The secret scheme - officially called the Afghan Relocation Route - has cost £400m so far, and is expected to cost a further £400m to £450m The breach was committed mistakenly by an unnamed official at the MoD People whose details were leaked were only informed on Tuesday
As I noted upthread, the sensible way to deal with this is for the PAC to get to work and ferret out the actual numbers.
Your syllogism "everyone is lying, so I am right" is a load of nonsense.
And yet you blindly trust the new numbers given by a government which ADMITS IT IS LYING ON THIS EXACT ISSUE
You’re never the smartest but this is a new level of intellectual mediocrity
Are you seriously of such low IQ that you're incapable of comprehending some quite simple posts of mine ?
I've repeatedly said that the only way to get to the true figures is for them to be ferreted out. The Commons Pubic Accounts Committee is one of the better bodies for the task, as it has a pretty good record, and won't take a dozen years to get a result. I'm entirely open to better suggestions, of which you have produced ... approximately zero.
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
No no no
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
I’m not defending these people, it’s a shit show by both parties but it also makes me wonder about the effects/power of legal and civil service advice over democratically elected politicians and will be interested what comes out.
If you are a minister/government and your own lawyers are telling you that you really have to continue doing something for important legal reasons the are you going to just pull the pin and say “bollocks I’m going public whatever the legal implications”?
BTW the minister said on Today that the figures weren’t kept out of the immigrations Stats and the reporter was wrong - brave move and resigning matter (hahaha) if he is lying.
I’d wager money he’s lying - in some form
Your defence of these people is pitiful and grotesque
I'll wager money your numbers are balls too.
But I’m the one quoting the judge in the transcript. Who seems the only reliable actor here. All the other numbers - which vary wildly from £400m to £800m to £2bn to £7bn to £10bn (and up) come from politicians with an agenda, and we KNOW these people are lying. They admitted it. “We want to set a false narrative as cover”
Why is the judge's number authoritative in any sense ? He has no powers of audit, and no more information than he has been given, so it's a number which came second hand from the politicians whose numbers you don't believe. He can clearly speak with authority on the legal position, but has little more idea than do you on what this is costing.
FWIW, the cost estimate for this particular mess is around an order of magnitude less https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg8zy78787o The government also revealed on Tuesday: The MoD believes 600 Afghan soldiers included in the leak, plus 1,800 of their family members, are still in Afghanistan The scheme is being closed down, but relocation offers already made to those who remain in Afghanistan will be honoured The secret scheme - officially called the Afghan Relocation Route - has cost £400m so far, and is expected to cost a further £400m to £450m The breach was committed mistakenly by an unnamed official at the MoD People whose details were leaked were only informed on Tuesday
As I noted upthread, the sensible way to deal with this is for the PAC to get to work and ferret out the actual numbers.
Your syllogism "everyone is lying, so I am right" is a load of nonsense.
And yet you blindly trust the new numbers given by a government which ADMITS IT IS LYING ON THIS EXACT ISSUE
You’re never the smartest but this is a new level of intellectual mediocrity
Are you seriously of such low IQ that you're incapable of comprehending some quite simple posts of mine ?
I've repeatedly said that the only way to get to the true figures is for them to be ferreted out. The Commons Pubic Accounts Committee is one of the better bodies for the task, as it has a pretty good record, and won't take a dozen years to get a result. I'm entirely open to better suggestions, of which you have produced ... approximately zero.
Can't someone get on the blower to Gove and ask him to task @Leon with a lengthy and lucrative assignment to a place with vastly limited internet access?
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Labour, if they had any sense, might shoot her fox and give both of them the chop
Labour can't sack Hoyle. Do you mean Starmer and Healey should fall on their swords?
Hoyle has deliberately misled Parliament for quite a long period of time.
The Speaker holds his position only with the approval of parliament, and Labour MPs have a very large majority of the seats. Effectively Labour MPs could sack him, as his position seems indefensible over this, and it seems highly unlikely that the opposition will go into battle on his behalf.
I have less respect for Hoyle than any other Speaker I can remember, including Bercow and Martin. He doesn’t appear to be impartial, and seems to make the rules up to suit himself.
You have just described Bercow there, to be fair.
I can’t say I’m a particular fan of Hoyle either though.
Martin was weak, and there was always the sneaking suspicion that the Labour Man in him hadn’t ever left him upon elevation to the speakership.
In truth we’ve not had a decent speaker since Boothroyd.
I wonder if it would result in a better speaker if a new speaker was elected after each GE but they could not come from either the government or the official opposition so that even if they have an inescapable subconscious bias it is offset by them being heavily outnumbered by MPs from the two main parties.
Since the Scottish Parliament was set up, there have been Presiding Officers from the Lib Dems, Labour, Conservatives, SNP and Greens. When was the last time the Speaker was not from the Labour or Conservative parties?
Could she really not have known about this? And what is ‘an huge’ all about?
I am shocked by the secrecy and cover-up over the admission of thousands of Afghans to Britain at the cost of £7bn to the taxpayer. A decision that was in itself wrong.
It is an huge betrayal of public trust.
Those responsible in both Governments and the bureaucracy need to be held to account.
Northern (Leeds) roots for "an huge". We don't waste time sounding out consonants round 'ere
Which reminds me, I discovered a few months ago that my son (six at the time) thought 'huge' was pronounced 'fuge'. I got him to repeat something he said and it was clearly an 'f' there. Challenged on the spelling/phonics, he said he'd just assumed it was one of the ''harder to read and spell' words. Massive huck up by the educations system. Or the parents
ETA: A few years into our marriage, I had great difficulty explaining to my (Yorkshire born and bred) mother in law that I was going to be working in Hull for a few days. "Hull," I said, "Hull". My wife laughed at me and said, "Oooll!" and comprehension dawned
Can anyone explain why some people say "arks" instead of "ask"?
One of my sisters-in-law-in-law does it, and it just sounds daft.
Mind, she is from Birmingham, so that is the least of her linguistic problems.
It’s seems to be a common thing with black English speakers. If you watch any tv series with lots of black characters, whether UK like Top Boy or US like the Wire as two examples, it’s a noticeable tick that “ask” is pronounced more like “aks”.
I know a weirder one which I have never been able to understand.
My mother in law was from Co Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland and had the normal Irish accent you would expect, so three became tree, and so on. However, she reversed the process with some words beginning with t-e-a, so teacher became theacher. This is such an unnatural thing to do that I can only guess she was doing it deliberately to overcompensate for something she thought of (wrongly) as poor pronunciation.
I can't say I've ever come across any other Irish person exhibiting this quirk. Has anyone here?
I’ve also noticed another weird Irishism in that every Irish person I know says “Euro” when referring to a plural of Euros. I don’t know why they do it - the same people say Dollars and Pounds. My life must be very dull as it inexplicably winds me up.
I say that. "Here's twenty Euro". Sounds more natural that "Here's twenty Euros". But I'd say "Here's twenty dollars". Language is a funny thing. How it sounds is important rather than consistent rules.
Where's that 20 quid you owe me?
People often say "20 pound" as well, especially native Londoners. Maybe "euro" is like "lego". Nothing sounds more wrong linguistically than when Americans refer to "legos".
Isn’t that “20 paahnnd” though which of course is less than 20 pounds as it’s usually prefaced with “it’s only”.
'score', innit?
"Here's fifty dollars," sounds correct as they hand you a fistful of mutilated, dog-eared greenbacks impressed with multiple generations of accumulated spit and excrement. "Here's a fifty dollar bill," sounds better in so many ways.
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
No no no
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
I’m not defending these people, it’s a shit show by both parties but it also makes me wonder about the effects/power of legal and civil service advice over democratically elected politicians and will be interested what comes out.
If you are a minister/government and your own lawyers are telling you that you really have to continue doing something for important legal reasons the are you going to just pull the pin and say “bollocks I’m going public whatever the legal implications”?
BTW the minister said on Today that the figures weren’t kept out of the immigrations Stats and the reporter was wrong - brave move and resigning matter (hahaha) if he is lying.
I’d wager money he’s lying - in some form
Your defence of these people is pitiful and grotesque
I'll wager money your numbers are balls too.
But I’m the one quoting the judge in the transcript. Who seems the only reliable actor here. All the other numbers - which vary wildly from £400m to £800m to £2bn to £7bn to £10bn (and up) come from politicians with an agenda, and we KNOW these people are lying. They admitted it. “We want to set a false narrative as cover”
Why is the judge's number authoritative in any sense ? He has no powers of audit, and no more information than he has been given, so it's a number which came second hand from the politicians whose numbers you don't believe. He can clearly speak with authority on the legal position, but has little more idea than do you on what this is costing.
FWIW, the cost estimate for this particular mess is around an order of magnitude less https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg8zy78787o The government also revealed on Tuesday: The MoD believes 600 Afghan soldiers included in the leak, plus 1,800 of their family members, are still in Afghanistan The scheme is being closed down, but relocation offers already made to those who remain in Afghanistan will be honoured The secret scheme - officially called the Afghan Relocation Route - has cost £400m so far, and is expected to cost a further £400m to £450m The breach was committed mistakenly by an unnamed official at the MoD People whose details were leaked were only informed on Tuesday
As I noted upthread, the sensible way to deal with this is for the PAC to get to work and ferret out the actual numbers.
Your syllogism "everyone is lying, so I am right" is a load of nonsense.
And yet you blindly trust the new numbers given by a government which ADMITS IT IS LYING ON THIS EXACT ISSUE
You’re never the smartest but this is a new level of intellectual mediocrity
Are you seriously of such low IQ that you're incapable of comprehending some quite simple posts of mine ?
I've repeatedly said that the only way to get to the true figures is for them to be ferreted out. The Commons Pubic Accounts Committee is one of the better bodies for the task, as it has a pretty good record, and won't take a dozen years to get a result. I'm entirely open to better suggestions, of which you have produced ... approximately zero.
If the were seemingly willing to lie in the House and to get the ONS to lie in their stats, why wouldn't they be willing to lie to the PAC?
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
No no no
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
I’m not defending these people, it’s a shit show by both parties but it also makes me wonder about the effects/power of legal and civil service advice over democratically elected politicians and will be interested what comes out.
If you are a minister/government and your own lawyers are telling you that you really have to continue doing something for important legal reasons the are you going to just pull the pin and say “bollocks I’m going public whatever the legal implications”?
BTW the minister said on Today that the figures weren’t kept out of the immigrations Stats and the reporter was wrong - brave move and resigning matter (hahaha) if he is lying.
I’d wager money he’s lying - in some form
Your defence of these people is pitiful and grotesque
I'll wager money your numbers are balls too.
But I’m the one quoting the judge in the transcript. Who seems the only reliable actor here. All the other numbers - which vary wildly from £400m to £800m to £2bn to £7bn to £10bn (and up) come from politicians with an agenda, and we KNOW these people are lying. They admitted it. “We want to set a false narrative as cover”
Why is the judge's number authoritative in any sense ? He has no powers of audit, and no more information than he has been given, so it's a number which came second hand from the politicians whose numbers you don't believe. He can clearly speak with authority on the legal position, but has little more idea than do you on what this is costing.
FWIW, the cost estimate for this particular mess is around an order of magnitude less https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg8zy78787o The government also revealed on Tuesday: The MoD believes 600 Afghan soldiers included in the leak, plus 1,800 of their family members, are still in Afghanistan The scheme is being closed down, but relocation offers already made to those who remain in Afghanistan will be honoured The secret scheme - officially called the Afghan Relocation Route - has cost £400m so far, and is expected to cost a further £400m to £450m The breach was committed mistakenly by an unnamed official at the MoD People whose details were leaked were only informed on Tuesday
As I noted upthread, the sensible way to deal with this is for the PAC to get to work and ferret out the actual numbers.
Your syllogism "everyone is lying, so I am right" is a load of nonsense.
And yet you blindly trust the new numbers given by a government which ADMITS IT IS LYING ON THIS EXACT ISSUE
You’re never the smartest but this is a new level of intellectual mediocrity
Are you seriously of such low IQ that you're incapable of comprehending some quite simple posts of mine ?
I've repeatedly said that the only way to get to the true figures is for them to be ferreted out. The Commons Pubic Accounts Committee is one of the better bodies for the task, as it has a pretty good record, and won't take a dozen years to get a result. I'm entirely open to better suggestions, of which you have produced ... approximately zero.
Get them in court and sling them all in jail. For a long long time. But first sack the woke lawyers and judges so we make sure the courts are hard and fair - but hard
I’m done with “inquiries” and “committees” and all this self serving, bullshitting nonsense where no one ever pays a price for anything. The Nu10k. They all need to be in prison; they are destroying the country and they seem to be doing it deliberately. They cannot even defend our beaches from invaders
I want a revolution (peaceful, please). I want to see lots of pro politicians facing 20 year jail terms. I want to tear it all down and start again. I’m done
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
No no no
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
I’m not defending these people, it’s a shit show by both parties but it also makes me wonder about the effects/power of legal and civil service advice over democratically elected politicians and will be interested what comes out.
If you are a minister/government and your own lawyers are telling you that you really have to continue doing something for important legal reasons the are you going to just pull the pin and say “bollocks I’m going public whatever the legal implications”?
BTW the minister said on Today that the figures weren’t kept out of the immigrations Stats and the reporter was wrong - brave move and resigning matter (hahaha) if he is lying.
I’d wager money he’s lying - in some form
Your defence of these people is pitiful and grotesque
I'll wager money your numbers are balls too.
But I’m the one quoting the judge in the transcript. Who seems the only reliable actor here. All the other numbers - which vary wildly from £400m to £800m to £2bn to £7bn to £10bn (and up) come from politicians with an agenda, and we KNOW these people are lying. They admitted it. “We want to set a false narrative as cover”
Why is the judge's number authoritative in any sense ? He has no powers of audit, and no more information than he has been given, so it's a number which came second hand from the politicians whose numbers you don't believe. He can clearly speak with authority on the legal position, but has little more idea than do you on what this is costing.
FWIW, the cost estimate for this particular mess is around an order of magnitude less https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg8zy78787o The government also revealed on Tuesday: The MoD believes 600 Afghan soldiers included in the leak, plus 1,800 of their family members, are still in Afghanistan The scheme is being closed down, but relocation offers already made to those who remain in Afghanistan will be honoured The secret scheme - officially called the Afghan Relocation Route - has cost £400m so far, and is expected to cost a further £400m to £450m The breach was committed mistakenly by an unnamed official at the MoD People whose details were leaked were only informed on Tuesday
As I noted upthread, the sensible way to deal with this is for the PAC to get to work and ferret out the actual numbers.
Your syllogism "everyone is lying, so I am right" is a load of nonsense.
And yet you blindly trust the new numbers given by a government which ADMITS IT IS LYING ON THIS EXACT ISSUE
You’re never the smartest but this is a new level of intellectual mediocrity
Are you seriously of such low IQ that you're incapable of comprehending some quite simple posts of mine ?
I've repeatedly said that the only way to get to the true figures is for them to be ferreted out. The Commons Pubic Accounts Committee is one of the better bodies for the task, as it has a pretty good record, and won't take a dozen years to get a result. I'm entirely open to better suggestions, of which you have produced ... approximately zero.
If the were seemingly willing to lie in the House and to get the ONS to lie in their stats, why wouldn't they be willing to lie to the PAC?
They can't even blame the Tories on inflation, the previous government left office with inflation down to 2% and generally falling/stable. This is all on Labour and their idiotic tax/spending policies. There's no new external shocks, no COVID, the wars in Ukraine/Israel have already been factored in, Trump's tariffs should make UK prices lower given export diversion by China and other affected countries.
If ever we needed evidence that Labour haven't got a clue how to run the economy this is it. In fairly benign conditions, with no substantial external factors they've let inflation go up from 2.2% when they took over in July to 3.6% last month and still rising. They've caused this, not global conditions, not the previous government, they did. The Tories need to absolutely destroy them on inflation, they actually did the hard work and got inflation back down to acceptable levels, Labour have completely thrown that away.
They weren't great but I've no doubt at all that Sunak and Hunt were a better choice than Starmer and Reeves. Alas post-covid the public were minded to kick out the incumbents, and Labour benefitted from that to win a huge majority with very little real support, which has already withered away to election losing levels.
Labour are alright a diagnosing the problems we face, but don't seem to have any particular idea as to what to do, and are politically inept as well as weak when facing back-bench opposition. I'm not expecting much from this government over the next few years, and fear we could end up with Farage unless Labour can make some real and rapid progress.
Given everything we've just learned about this latest fuck up by the civil service and the subsequent cover up, would you really begrudge the public voting in Farage as PM?
The whole civil service needs burning down and rebooting, neither the Tories nor Labour will deliver that. I don't particularly think Reform will either, yet they have a higher probability of doing it than either of the other two.
I am coming to the same conclusion.
Like the Reformation, or the French Revolution, one can argue whether things were made better or worse, but the current situation is unstainable.
It definitely needs reworking majorly however how that’s done isn’t simple. We don’t want a situation where each new gov brings in their own civil service people to ensure delivery of their agenda and I suspect there are plenty of politicised civil servants who actively push back against political demands they don’t agree with.
Maybe we need to look at when the civil service was best run. At which point in history was the civil service most effective, efficient, neutral, delivered. How did we get there, who did they employ, how many were needed for a proportional workload and try and copy that. People might not like how it was done but if it worked the. It’s best for the country.
The all time heat record for Iceland is one of the, if not the (I’ll check) longest standing national records in the world.
1939 perhaps not the ideal year to be shooting at...
Yes, Oslo has been seriously hot
Right up in the north it's warmer here than in the IOW currently, despite being sunny also at home.
They deserve a sunny summer, having had lots stormy, rainy weather during spring through June, while we were dodging the storms passing to the north of the UK. But everyone here is saying they cannot remember a spell of unbroken sunshine like this...it's heading for 14 days of unbroken sunshine, maybe only broken for an hour by the next sunset in five or six days time
This is such a great hiking destination a s the views are to die for, with a horizon probably thirty miles away. But it's just too hot and the beach too pleasant
They can't even blame the Tories on inflation, the previous government left office with inflation down to 2% and generally falling/stable. This is all on Labour and their idiotic tax/spending policies. There's no new external shocks, no COVID, the wars in Ukraine/Israel have already been factored in, Trump's tariffs should make UK prices lower given export diversion by China and other affected countries.
If ever we needed evidence that Labour haven't got a clue how to run the economy this is it. In fairly benign conditions, with no substantial external factors they've let inflation go up from 2.2% when they took over in July to 3.6% last month and still rising. They've caused this, not global conditions, not the previous government, they did. The Tories need to absolutely destroy them on inflation, they actually did the hard work and got inflation back down to acceptable levels, Labour have completely thrown that away.
They weren't great but I've no doubt at all that Sunak and Hunt were a better choice than Starmer and Reeves. Alas post-covid the public were minded to kick out the incumbents, and Labour benefitted from that to win a huge majority with very little real support, which has already withered away to election losing levels.
Labour are alright a diagnosing the problems we face, but don't seem to have any particular idea as to what to do, and are politically inept as well as weak when facing back-bench opposition. I'm not expecting much from this government over the next few years, and fear we could end up with Farage unless Labour can make some real and rapid progress.
Given everything we've just learned about this latest fuck up by the civil service and the subsequent cover up, would you really begrudge the public voting in Farage as PM?
The whole civil service needs burning down and rebooting, neither the Tories nor Labour will deliver that. I don't particularly think Reform will either, yet they have a higher probability of doing it than either of the other two.
I am coming to the same conclusion.
Like the Reformation, or the French Revolution, one can argue whether things were made better or worse, but the current situation is unstainable.
In essence, we need a real small-r reforming government, akin to Attlee or Thatcher, and perhaps even more radical. The problem is that a government of that type needs real guts and drive from those who lead it. They have to make difficult choices, and particularly in the case of Thatcher, hold firm in seeing their ideas through.
From what I see of Reform, I suspect that their MPs will be a fairly chaotic bunch, probably elected on the promise of quite a lot of jam for their voters, and I am not convinced any of them will enter the Commons with a drive to push through unpopular structural reform. Does Farage want to be that kind of leader? I’m very unconvinced.
Instead I suspect that they will go native, fight amongst themselves, maybe achieve one or two popular goals (every government achieves a few relatively positive things) and probably bring the tipping point even closer. But that’s just my view at this point.
They can't even blame the Tories on inflation, the previous government left office with inflation down to 2% and generally falling/stable. This is all on Labour and their idiotic tax/spending policies. There's no new external shocks, no COVID, the wars in Ukraine/Israel have already been factored in, Trump's tariffs should make UK prices lower given export diversion by China and other affected countries.
If ever we needed evidence that Labour haven't got a clue how to run the economy this is it. In fairly benign conditions, with no substantial external factors they've let inflation go up from 2.2% when they took over in July to 3.6% last month and still rising. They've caused this, not global conditions, not the previous government, they did. The Tories need to absolutely destroy them on inflation, they actually did the hard work and got inflation back down to acceptable levels, Labour have completely thrown that away.
They weren't great but I've no doubt at all that Sunak and Hunt were a better choice than Starmer and Reeves. Alas post-covid the public were minded to kick out the incumbents, and Labour benefitted from that to win a huge majority with very little real support, which has already withered away to election losing levels.
Labour are alright a diagnosing the problems we face, but don't seem to have any particular idea as to what to do, and are politically inept as well as weak when facing back-bench opposition. I'm not expecting much from this government over the next few years, and fear we could end up with Farage unless Labour can make some real and rapid progress.
Given everything we've just learned about this latest fuck up by the civil service and the subsequent cover up, would you really begrudge the public voting in Farage as PM?
The whole civil service needs burning down and rebooting, neither the Tories nor Labour will deliver that. I don't particularly think Reform will either, yet they have a higher probability of doing it than either of the other two.
I am coming to the same conclusion.
Like the Reformation, or the French Revolution, one can argue whether things were made better or worse, but the current situation is unstainable.
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Why does Healey have to go?
Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.
As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?
We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.
What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.
No no no
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
I’m not defending these people, it’s a shit show by both parties but it also makes me wonder about the effects/power of legal and civil service advice over democratically elected politicians and will be interested what comes out.
If you are a minister/government and your own lawyers are telling you that you really have to continue doing something for important legal reasons the are you going to just pull the pin and say “bollocks I’m going public whatever the legal implications”?
BTW the minister said on Today that the figures weren’t kept out of the immigrations Stats and the reporter was wrong - brave move and resigning matter (hahaha) if he is lying.
I’d wager money he’s lying - in some form
Your defence of these people is pitiful and grotesque
I'll wager money your numbers are balls too.
But I’m the one quoting the judge in the transcript. Who seems the only reliable actor here. All the other numbers - which vary wildly from £400m to £800m to £2bn to £7bn to £10bn (and up) come from politicians with an agenda, and we KNOW these people are lying. They admitted it. “We want to set a false narrative as cover”
Why is the judge's number authoritative in any sense ? He has no powers of audit, and no more information than he has been given, so it's a number which came second hand from the politicians whose numbers you don't believe. He can clearly speak with authority on the legal position, but has little more idea than do you on what this is costing.
FWIW, the cost estimate for this particular mess is around an order of magnitude less https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg8zy78787o The government also revealed on Tuesday: The MoD believes 600 Afghan soldiers included in the leak, plus 1,800 of their family members, are still in Afghanistan The scheme is being closed down, but relocation offers already made to those who remain in Afghanistan will be honoured The secret scheme - officially called the Afghan Relocation Route - has cost £400m so far, and is expected to cost a further £400m to £450m The breach was committed mistakenly by an unnamed official at the MoD People whose details were leaked were only informed on Tuesday
As I noted upthread, the sensible way to deal with this is for the PAC to get to work and ferret out the actual numbers.
Your syllogism "everyone is lying, so I am right" is a load of nonsense.
And yet you blindly trust the new numbers given by a government which ADMITS IT IS LYING ON THIS EXACT ISSUE
You’re never the smartest but this is a new level of intellectual mediocrity
Are you seriously of such low IQ that you're incapable of comprehending some quite simple posts of mine ?
I've repeatedly said that the only way to get to the true figures is for them to be ferreted out. The Commons Pubic Accounts Committee is one of the better bodies for the task, as it has a pretty good record, and won't take a dozen years to get a result. I'm entirely open to better suggestions, of which you have produced ... approximately zero.
Get them in court and sling them all in jail. For a long long time. But first sack the woke lawyers and judges so we make sure the courts are hard and fair - but hard
I’m done with “inquiries” and “committees” and all this self serving, bullshitting nonsense where no one ever pays a price for anything. The Nu10k. They all need to be in prison; they are destroying the country and they seem to be doing it deliberately. They cannot even defend our beaches from invaders
I want a revolution (peaceful, please). I want to see lots of pro politicians facing 20 year jail terms. I want to tear it all down and start again. I’m done
Yes, you just want a Leon dictatorship. You keep your fantasies; the rest of us will struggle on.
Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.
Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?
Labour, if they had any sense, might shoot her fox and give both of them the chop
Labour can't sack Hoyle. Do you mean Starmer and Healey should fall on their swords?
Hoyle has deliberately misled Parliament for quite a long period of time.
The Speaker holds his position only with the approval of parliament, and Labour MPs have a very large majority of the seats. Effectively Labour MPs could sack him, as his position seems indefensible over this, and it seems highly unlikely that the opposition will go into battle on his behalf.
I have less respect for Hoyle than any other Speaker I can remember, including Bercow and Martin. He doesn’t appear to be impartial, and seems to make the rules up to suit himself.
You have just described Bercow there, to be fair.
I can’t say I’m a particular fan of Hoyle either though.
Martin was weak, and there was always the sneaking suspicion that the Labour Man in him hadn’t ever left him upon elevation to the speakership.
In truth we’ve not had a decent speaker since Boothroyd.
I wonder if it would result in a better speaker if a new speaker was elected after each GE but they could not come from either the government or the official opposition so that even if they have an inescapable subconscious bias it is offset by them being heavily outnumbered by MPs from the two main parties.
Since the Scottish Parliament was set up, there have been Presiding Officers from the Lib Dems, Labour, Conservatives, SNP and Greens. When was the last time the Speaker was not from the Labour or Conservative parties?
In answer to my own question, John Henry Whitley (Liberal) 1921 - 1928.
Comments
The Speaker holds his position only with the approval of parliament, and Labour MPs have a very large majority of the seats. Effectively Labour MPs could sack him, as his position seems indefensible over this, and it seems highly unlikely that the opposition will go into battle on his behalf.
— Times Radio (@TimesRadio) July 16, 2025
Interesting angle of questioning from the Times. I wonder if they are banned like the Mail from discussing individual cases?
How many lives could be saved/agony ended by an injection of £7 billion into the NHS?
Where is it from?
@jessicaelgot.bsky.social
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It’s not the most incompetent thing by a long stretch but the government let stories run for hours (one they knew was coming) with suggestions the emergency Afghan relocation would cost £7bn and mean 100,000 people.
Which is completely wrong and they only got on top of that late yesterday.
Jessica Elgot
@jessicaelgot.bsky.social
· 37m
In fact this emergency relocation has cost £850m and has only around 7000 coming.
There was around £6bn allocated over the course of an entire decade for all the relocation schemes ever run, not just this data breach. But that won’t stop blue ticks on X now spreading it far and wide.
https://bsky.app/profile/jessicaelgot.bsky.social/post/3lu2zhdccfs2p
https://x.com/Dominic2306/status/1945392380565209375
Hare been set running....
So, what do we think today’s major UK government fuck up will be? We’ve filled all our reservoirs with antifreeze? We’ve offered asylum to the Ayatollah? We’ve emailed our nuclear codes to Zimbabwe?
The government as recently as June was eager to maintain the super injunction and indeed EXPAND the scheme to even more Afghans. Thus spending £7bn at least
They also connived in keeping the figures out of the ONS migration stats and it was the Labour government that decided to deliberately lie to the public, in the Commons, as to why all these afghans are arriving. They wanted to set a “false narrative”
This was one reason the judge lost his cool and decided it had all gone too far. Absolutely outrageous contempt for electors and democracy and a sacking offence in itself
What the F are you doing defending these people. They all need to go
“ Mr Justice Chamberlain
I'm starting to doubt myself - am I going bonkers, because it really is £6billion? [Later confirmed to be £7billion]”
All we have is that transcript from the hearing when the judge asks “is it really £6bn?” And the lawyer corrects him - “No, it’s £7bn”
If you are a minister/government and your own lawyers are telling you that you really have to continue doing something for important legal reasons the are you going to just pull the pin and say “bollocks I’m going public whatever the legal implications”?
BTW the minister said on Today that the figures weren’t kept out of the immigrations Stats and the reporter was wrong - brave move and resigning matter (hahaha) if he is lying.
My former accountancy firm "lost" huge quantities of client data to the dark web, including NI, passport, bank account login details etc and denied it for over 2 months, they had login details and passwords stored in unprotected spreadsheets and text files and basically zero IT security or working procedures. Completely negligent.
ICO gave them a very mild telling off.
I expect the Co-op had infinitely better IT security and followed procedures.
Your defence of these people is pitiful and grotesque
But John Healey told the BBC it was "highly unlikely" being a name on the list alone would now increase the risk of being targeted by the Taliban.
Details of nearly 19,000 people who had applied to move to the UK after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan were mistakenly leaked in February 2022 by a British official. The previous government learned of this in August 2023 when details were posted on Facebook."
- BBC
We are no better than the idiots in power who screw things up if we run round demanding revolution based on bullshit and lies too. Pull apart what’s really wrong rather than the dramatic lies as it undermines any solutions people put forward if built on bullshit.
The beach calls...
https://x.com/NFBUK/status/1944446586341163368
Kemi: you dun f'kd up.
Keir: actually that was your lot and we're sorting out the mess.
(Unless radiator paints have changed since the last time I did that particular job on our c/h piping.)
The numbers were in the Commons statement at lunchtime, and the £7bn was identified as "a previous estimate" for the whole shebang not the data leak.
So I might summarise it as shitty management of our shitty media
For PB, I called BS on the $7bn number some time yesterday morning, but I got the reason wrong - I said Sky provided no source, which they did not, but suggested it was pulled out of a media person's backside rather than being an old guess.
We have let in Afghans with only tenuous links to the UK, while others who fought bravely for us are excluded
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/07/15/johnny-mercer-ineptitude-of-british-state-exposed/ (£££)
Johnny Mercer goes ballistic at MoD, HMG, Uncle Tom Cobley & all.
Here's the free link:-
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/4d47d5cddbe0cb9e
It sounds a lot simpler now. Clean, sand, primer, paint. No heating needed. Done in one day
You? Hopium....
See also
road narrowing for bus stops / pedestrian crossings, pavement sticks out up to 1m, cycle lane just stops.
narrow cycle lanes painted in door zone alongside parking spaces
cycle lanes that just stop when it gets too difficult (dangerous)
Labour are alright a diagnosing the problems we face, but don't seem to have any particular idea as to what to do, and are politically inept as well as weak when facing back-bench opposition. I'm not expecting much from this government over the next few years, and fear we could end up with Farage unless Labour can make some real and rapid progress.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2nnvgv2qlo
"'It felt personal': Si King on avoiding Sycamore Gap tree felling site until now"
*trying to think back to experiences in other countries - the whole bus stop, including any shelter, tends to be floating, I think. So very unlike this one, which is utterly insane.
Truth be told we didn’t need the Tories in charge and it’s becoming increasingly clear we didn’t need Labour either. We need a new approach. I am very unconvinced that such an approach is offered by Farage, but I understand why he is doing well.
The whole civil service needs burning down and rebooting, neither the Tories nor Labour will deliver that. I don't particularly think Reform will either, yet they have a higher probability of doing it than either of the other two.
He has no powers of audit, and no more information than he has been given, so it's a number which came second hand from the politicians whose numbers you don't believe.
He can clearly speak with authority on the legal position, but has little more idea than do you on what this is costing.
FWIW, the cost estimate for this particular mess is around an order of magnitude less
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg8zy78787o
The government also revealed on Tuesday:
The MoD believes 600 Afghan soldiers included in the leak, plus 1,800 of their family members, are still in Afghanistan
The scheme is being closed down, but relocation offers already made to those who remain in Afghanistan will be honoured
The secret scheme - officially called the Afghan Relocation Route - has cost £400m so far, and is expected to cost a further £400m to £450m
The breach was committed mistakenly by an unnamed official at the MoD
People whose details were leaked were only informed on Tuesday
As I noted upthread, the sensible way to deal with this is for the PAC to get to work and ferret out the actual numbers.
Your syllogism "everyone is lying, so I am right" is a load of nonsense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvWNghDy4Jo
Language is a funny thing. How it sounds is important rather than consistent rules.
The Tories absolutely had to receive a total spanking at GE2024 to teach them the lesson that sort of thing was not on. And the voters, bless them, went the extra mile and made sure that Truss was removed from the Commons too.
I do not get the impression from the Parliamentary Conservative Party that they have digested this lesson from the voters, which is one reason why the voters will look elsewhere if they decide it's necessary to punish Labour for their failures in government.
This is one reason why the crux for the next election is the Liberal Democrats. If Labour do not improve in government, then it's only the Liberal Democrats who can provide an alternative for the voters that isn't Farage. At the moment there isn't much sign of them being able to do that.
Maybe "euro" is like "lego". Nothing sounds more wrong linguistically than when Americans refer to "legos".
I don't have any more faith in Labour or Tories than you, but I can only see Reform making things worse. A lot worse.
They're further away from caring about good governance than any of the parties.
I can’t say I’m a particular fan of Hoyle either though.
Martin was weak, and there was always the sneaking suspicion that the Labour Man in him hadn’t ever left him upon elevation to the speakership.
In truth we’ve not had a decent speaker since Boothroyd.
I seem to remember that they said pounds not punts. Punts is the Irish for pounds. I think a punt was worth a pound sterling.
I tend to say Euros in English, but the official documentation apparently has no 's' in English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_and_the_euro
Although like Reform councillors 16 year old clean skins have had less time to post racist and sexist material on social media.
You’re never the smartest but this is a new level of intellectual mediocrity
That vid is of a busy location where a "Bus Border" as used is not appropriate (as per the LTN 1/20 guidance); it's a very wide pavement with lots of space so a proper bus stop bypass would be doable.
NFBUK are a tiny fringe group who make inflammatory videos from editing the juicy bit from hours of filming at substandard, non-standard or old bits of infra, and then demand that all of it be banned by feeding their vids to the Telegraph, Mail, Express etc.
They try to set up "disabled people vs cyclist" narratives, neglecting to mention that that is actually a mobility track where disabled people use powerchairs and mobility scooters, never mind that a standard cycle or EAPC is also a common mobility aid.
Many of of us in the space regard them as bad faith actors, generically anti-cycling because they incorporate all the standard talking points - registration plates, insurance *, the whole lot.
When I started asking them for evidence or their better proposals, they just blocked me; that was years ago. So I don't bother with them.
They were making the same demands back in 2014-15, and demanding research. Research was done, they did not like the results, and they just continued on the same track.
Inconsiderate cycling is a problem for the police, and perhaps local authorities, but not a reason to throw disabled people who use mobility aids out into the traffic at every bus stop.
There are ore thoughtful organisations suggesting more nuanced answers. Here is the current view of Wheels for Wellbeing:
https://wheelsforwellbeing.org.uk/disabled-peoples-mobility-why-bus-stop-bypasses-are-sometimes-essential-briefing/
* Despite the fact that a vast majority already have insurance with a standard home contents policy.
Like the Reformation, or the French Revolution, one can argue whether things were made better or worse, but the current situation is unstainable.
I've repeatedly said that the only way to get to the true figures is for them to be ferreted out.
The Commons Pubic Accounts Committee is one of the better bodies for the task, as it has a pretty good record, and won't take a dozen years to get a result.
I'm entirely open to better suggestions, of which you have produced ... approximately zero.
https://grapevine.is/news/2025/07/14/incoming-heatwave-could-break-1939-records/
The all time heat record for Iceland is one of the, if not the (I’ll check) longest standing national records in the world.
I’m done with “inquiries” and “committees” and all this self serving, bullshitting nonsense where no one ever pays a price for anything. The Nu10k. They all need to be in prison; they are destroying the country and they seem to be doing it deliberately. They cannot even defend our beaches from invaders
I want a revolution (peaceful, please). I want to see lots of pro politicians facing 20 year jail terms. I want to tear it all down and start again. I’m done
Maybe we need to look at when the civil service was best run. At which point in history was the civil service most effective, efficient, neutral, delivered. How did we get there, who did they employ, how many were needed for a proportional workload and try and copy that. People might not like how it was done but if it worked the. It’s best for the country.
Yes, Oslo has been seriously hot
Right up in the north it's warmer here than in the IOW currently, despite being sunny also at home.
They deserve a sunny summer, having had lots stormy, rainy weather during spring through June, while we were dodging the storms passing to the north of the UK. But everyone here is saying they cannot remember a spell of unbroken sunshine like this...it's heading for 14 days of unbroken sunshine, maybe only broken for an hour by the next sunset in five or six days time
This is such a great hiking destination a s the views are to die for, with a horizon probably thirty miles away. But it's just too hot and the beach too pleasant
From what I see of Reform, I suspect that their MPs will be a fairly chaotic bunch, probably elected on the promise of quite a lot of jam for their voters, and I am not convinced any of them will enter the Commons with a drive to push through unpopular structural reform. Does Farage want to be that kind of leader? I’m very unconvinced.
Instead I suspect that they will go native, fight amongst themselves, maybe achieve one or two popular goals (every government achieves a few relatively positive things) and probably bring the tipping point even closer. But that’s just my view at this point.
You keep your fantasies; the rest of us will struggle on.