The Times on the trend for not vaccinating children
There is a particular crisis in reaching immigrant groups in urban areas, particularly those whose first language is not English. Uptake is also often low in Muslim communities, a phenomenon linked to the use of pork gelatine in some vaccines, although alternatives are widely available.
She added: “The other big problem [for vaccine uptake] is that there are vast inequalities in uptake. We know that uptake is also lower among some ethnic minority groups, notably black Caribbean and African populations.
Indeed; this has been known for years. I vaguely STR there was some controversy over money being spent on schemes to try to improve uptake of the Covid vaccine amongst ethnic minority groups?
Though combating the b/s coming out of America via mass-murderer JFK Junior might be money better spent.
I thought so, that’s why I was surprised to read on here the other day that the low uptake of vaccinations in children was a white working class problem
A lot of my friends were anti vaxxers during covid, and they are all WWC, so maybe that’s where the confusion comes from.
I believe other factors were noted too such as recent arrivals and hippy middle class types.
But the white working class antivax group is a recent addition so will show up in the figures in the next few years.
But the aggressive behaviour towards medical professionals comes pretty much from the WWC based on the conversations from my father’s ex-colleagues who are of all races including WWC.
We are needing a war to provide an outlet for WWC aggression. Supporting the Ukrainians on the Russian front, perhaps.
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
But the CCN has since revised its analysis and now says the reorganisation could make no savings and actually cost money in some scenarios.
I wonder how much time Rayner spends doing her job compared to her own housing dealings:
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, has been accused of avoiding £40,000 in stamp duty on her new flat by the sea after she told authorities it was her primary residence.
Rayner, who is also the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, was said to have removed her name from the official deed to her house in Greater Manchester weeks before buying an £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex.
According to The Telegraph, Rayner would have had to pay £70,000 in stamp duty on a second property, so the change saved her £40,000. She is thought to have paid only £30,000.
She also told Tameside council in Greater Manchester that the house in her constituency was still her main home, before telling Brighton and Hove council that her new flat was her second home, which would change her status for council tax.
As we know Rayner has a long history of dubious housing transactions.
I’m awaiting for the ‘more targetting of an aspirational working class woman’ spin on this from her fans.
It's the different taxation of different residences for stamp duty and council tax that is the problem. If both were replaced by a property tax of perhaps 1% of value each year then the problem goes away.
Dr. Foxy, what do you think the cost would be of assessing the value of every single house every year?
It may well be prohibitive, in both political and financial terms.
You wouldn't do a valuation every year, for crying out loud. Up until 1990 there was an annual property tax on value. It was considered to be a cost-effective tax, it was dispensed with for ideological not economic reasons.
Ok, so, how often?
Individual assessments will still take a lot of time and cost initially. And the increase in cost to taxpayers will be politically difficult. It's the same reason council bands haven't been reformed, even though they should've been years ago.
Just use the last sale price plus changes to the HPI. That has the added bonus of incentivising people to improve their homes (because you won't get taxed on that bit), as well as not seek out places with a hot housing market.
I've just checked it on my flat and it's pretty accurate at an LA level based on my latest mortgage valuation. I guess you could get more granular data too.
The Times on the trend for not vaccinating children
There is a particular crisis in reaching immigrant groups in urban areas, particularly those whose first language is not English. Uptake is also often low in Muslim communities, a phenomenon linked to the use of pork gelatine in some vaccines, although alternatives are widely available.
She added: “The other big problem [for vaccine uptake] is that there are vast inequalities in uptake. We know that uptake is also lower among some ethnic minority groups, notably black Caribbean and African populations.
Indeed; this has been known for years. I vaguely STR there was some controversy over money being spent on schemes to try to improve uptake of the Covid vaccine amongst ethnic minority groups?
Though combating the b/s coming out of America via mass-murderer JFK Junior might be money better spent.
I thought so, that’s why I was surprised to read on here the other day that the low uptake of vaccinations in children was a white working class problem
A lot of my friends were anti vaxxers during covid, and they are all WWC, so maybe that’s where the confusion comes from.
I'd *guess* that there are more anti-vaxxers amongst Reform-party voters than amongst those of other parties (except perhaps Greens?) because they seem to take more notice of American new and traditional media, which is filled with JFK Jr's b/s. I'd also guess the fewest anti-vaxxers were amongst the Lib Dems. But I might be wrong.
I get lots of anti-vax b/s on my 'For you' Twix feed.
“For you” is one of the most irritating features of X. It’s Elon trying to push stuff I’m not interested in plus loads of spammy clickbait.
You could always go to Bluesk -
Oh, wait. LOL
We'll see - I currently run both. Bluesky is currently ticking towards 40m users.
We won't know about success for at least another 12 months, nor whether being the Next Door of social media is the correct measure.
Some pb-ers may rate Bluesky and Twatter not on active users, but on how much fasc-adjacent hyperbole they can promote.
The Times on the trend for not vaccinating children
There is a particular crisis in reaching immigrant groups in urban areas, particularly those whose first language is not English. Uptake is also often low in Muslim communities, a phenomenon linked to the use of pork gelatine in some vaccines, although alternatives are widely available.
She added: “The other big problem [for vaccine uptake] is that there are vast inequalities in uptake. We know that uptake is also lower among some ethnic minority groups, notably black Caribbean and African populations.
Indeed; this has been known for years. I vaguely STR there was some controversy over money being spent on schemes to try to improve uptake of the Covid vaccine amongst ethnic minority groups?
Though combating the b/s coming out of America via mass-murderer JFK Junior might be money better spent.
I thought so, that’s why I was surprised to read on here the other day that the low uptake of vaccinations in children was a white working class problem
A lot of my friends were anti vaxxers during covid, and they are all WWC, so maybe that’s where the confusion comes from.
I'd *guess* that there are more anti-vaxxers amongst Reform-party voters than amongst those of other parties (except perhaps Greens?) because they seem to take more notice of American new and traditional media, which is filled with JFK Jr's b/s. I'd also guess the fewest anti-vaxxers were amongst the Lib Dems. But I might be wrong.
I get lots of anti-vax b/s on my 'For you' Twix feed.
Reform UK 2024 manifesto:
Excess Deaths and Vaccine Harms Public Inquiry
Excess deaths are nearly as high as they were during the Covid pandemic. Young people are over-represented.
This is classic anti-vaxx stuff. Reform UK, RFK Jnr?
What are the excess deaths now, as you have brought it up.
Appeals court decision today on the hotel in Essex. The govt position is the asylum seekers take priority over the locals. Something their legal team made quite clear. I saw it on Twitter and assumed it was a joke so didn’t comment on it or post it here.
Be interesting to see how the decision goes. Popcorn time if the govt win.
So the national interest (in the short term, these people have to go somewhere) overrides the local one (not near me). Nimbies are bad, in other words.
Politically, it's not a popular line, but it may well be the right one.
There is a number of levels at which this story is useful to consider.
I've asked lawyers, on several occasions, about their responsibility for fall out from their actions. A couple of the lawyers for Capn. Hook (this rum blossom - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Hamza_al-Masri) - they were very clear that their belief was that all such extraditions must be stopped. I pointed out that the result was the government enacting ever more extreme laws. Their response to that was an aggressive denial of any moral responsibility for the reaction to judgements they had sought.
Another level - the principle that a tiny number of objectors can delay any government decision, by repeated court cases. Previously, the legal hack was that the hotels were licensed to house and feed hundreds. So housing and feeding hundreds didn't require any action. The Process State has reacted here - the idea that a government can simply do things, without years of lawyers arguing about it, is inimical to people in the Enquiry Industrial Complex.
Another - many people in what used to be called the establishment take the view that the needs of some groups of foreigners exceed those of UK citizens. Aside from a comic incident at a City Diner, there are the differential tariffs on import of components and completed electronic items. The people behind the Raspberry Pi computer wanted to try and manufacture in the UK - but the tariffs on components were higher. They were told the tarrifs (as they were) were important to China, and changing them would cause "offence". I got the same response when I enquired.
If it’s going to survive in the longer (decade+) term then at some point BlueSky is going to have to actually figure out how to earn some money to cover its costs.
They’ve ruled out IPO and advertising and, at some point, the rich men who’s plaything it is are going to get bored and wander off/die.
So is it just being bankrolled by wealthy people ?
Perhaps subscription model then.
Subs to post would be brave for a platform whose unique daily user numbers are in decline. As would subs to read.
Padel and pickleball have rocketed in popularity at amateur and professional levels in the past three or four years. Goldrush or bubble?
Isn't one of them the fastest growing sport worldwide?
I can see why, much easier than tennis. But I also think that it is short lived (you heard it here on PB first) because ultimately neither are as rewarding as tennis and tennis-playing padel/pickle-curious players will eventually return to tennis.
Watch the video. It is also about packing the courts in to get more paying customers per acre, and then there are nascent professional tours funded by those presumably hoping for media rights to pay off.
Have esports replaced the Olympics? Has UFC replaced boxing? You know who else launched new sports leagues? Hitler ‘America's Hitler’.
UFC really SHOULD replace boxing, tho. It is much more interesting, much more popular, and probably a lot less corrupt (tho I do not know for sure)
Wrong. Notwithstanding its homoerotic attractions many UFC fights are 80% of minute movements while both fighters are locked together on the ground.
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
IMO it's not about money; it's about creating something that functions to help support better communities.
Given that local gov in England has been gutted like a dead fish for 20 years losing perhaps 25-30% of its resources, we know it needs seriously increased resources - built up in parallel with the capacity to use them (which was also gutted) - anyway.
The "make it better by cutting the staff by X%, or all their salaries by X%" line is a Taxpayers Alliance masturbation fantasy.
We learnt all of that during the attacks on LG in the noughties, whilst they were encouraged to take on risky investments, which landed us where we are now - with much of current income going to pay debt interest. That's just one more multi-year black hole that the current Government need to repair.
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
But the CCN has since revised its analysis and now says the reorganisation could make no savings and actually cost money in some scenarios.
I wonder how much time Rayner spends doing her job compared to her own housing dealings:
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, has been accused of avoiding £40,000 in stamp duty on her new flat by the sea after she told authorities it was her primary residence.
Rayner, who is also the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, was said to have removed her name from the official deed to her house in Greater Manchester weeks before buying an £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex.
According to The Telegraph, Rayner would have had to pay £70,000 in stamp duty on a second property, so the change saved her £40,000. She is thought to have paid only £30,000.
She also told Tameside council in Greater Manchester that the house in her constituency was still her main home, before telling Brighton and Hove council that her new flat was her second home, which would change her status for council tax.
As we know Rayner has a long history of dubious housing transactions.
I’m awaiting for the ‘more targetting of an aspirational working class woman’ spin on this from her fans.
It's the different taxation of different residences for stamp duty and council tax that is the problem. If both were replaced by a property tax of perhaps 1% of value each year then the problem goes away.
Dr. Foxy, what do you think the cost would be of assessing the value of every single house every year?
It may well be prohibitive, in both political and financial terms.
You wouldn't do a valuation every year, for crying out loud. Up until 1990 there was an annual property tax on value. It was considered to be a cost-effective tax, it was dispensed with for ideological not economic reasons.
Ok, so, how often?
Individual assessments will still take a lot of time and cost initially. And the increase in cost to taxpayers will be politically difficult. It's the same reason council bands haven't been reformed, even though they should've been years ago.
Just use the last sale price plus changes to the HPI. That has the added bonus of incentivising people to improve their homes, as well as not seek out places with a hot housing market.
I've just checked it on my flat and it's pretty accurate at an LA level based on my latest mortgage valuation. I guess you could get more granular data too.
Good morning
House price data is much more available today then when the bands were originally introduced, so it should not be impossible to revalue all homes though a difficulty may arise in those homes which have had extensive changes
We need a lot more bands, as the present system is not only unfair but ludicrous, with the wealthy getting away with not paying anything like enough
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
IMO it's not about money; it's about creating something that functions to help support better communities.
Given that local gov in England has been gutted like a dead fish for 20 years, we know it needs seriously increased resources - built up in parallel with the capacity to use them (which was also gutted) - anyway.
The "make it better by cutting the staff by X%, or all their salaries by X%" line is a Taxpayers Alliance masturbation fantasy.
I'm not sure how it supports communities just to forcibly merge existing authorities together. Here on the Surrey/Hants border we could really do with a local authority covering both sides of the Blackwater and that just hasn't been considered
How could we tell? What would they do differently?
Let's see if there are any more sackings of navy contenders in the next couple of weeks.
⚠️ US, UK and Norway launched a major hunt for a Russian submarine suspected of threatening US Navy's USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier in the Norwegian Sea.
The Royal Air Force (RAF) made eight P-8A Poseidon flights from RAF base Lossiemouth in Scotland.
The Norwegian Air Force launched three from Evenes Air Base near Narvik, inside the Arctic Circle.
The US Navy used a base in Iceland but the scale of the operation meant they were reinforced by at least two US Poseidons from Sicily.
The mission appears to have started this past Sunday and lasted almost 48 hours, with Tom Sharpe, a former Navy commander, saying:
“It looks like they have found a Russian submarine and they are hammering it.
Padel and pickleball have rocketed in popularity at amateur and professional levels in the past three or four years. Goldrush or bubble?
Isn't one of them the fastest growing sport worldwide?
I can see why, much easier than tennis. But I also think that it is short lived (you heard it here on PB first) because ultimately neither are as rewarding as tennis and tennis-playing padel/pickle-curious players will eventually return to tennis.
Watch the video. It is also about packing the courts in to get more paying customers per acre, and then there are nascent professional tours funded by those presumably hoping for media rights to pay off.
Have esports replaced the Olympics? Has UFC replaced boxing? You know who else launched new sports leagues? Hitler ‘America's Hitler’.
I play padel - once or twi e fortnight or so. I love it, it's great fun. I never seriously played tennis, but AFAICS padel has the following advantages: It's easier, so rallies are longer. It's easier to get an enjoyably competitive game between players where there is a slight gap in standard. Because the court is enclosed, you spend a much smaller proportion of your energy going to fetch the ball at the end of each point.
As I understand it, its expansion is being bankrolled by the Emir of Qatar. Which strikes me as a relatively benign use of his billions.
The Atlantic reports Trump is ‘disappointed’ with Zelensky & Europe, calling their demands unrealistic. He just wants the war over ‘no matter how’, even if it means Ukraine losing land. Now he pushes for a Putin-Zelensky summit only if he’s at the table. To me, Trump is openly aligning with Putin, eroding any trust in the US government. https://x.com/olddog100ua/status/1961295032167629191
Padel and pickleball have rocketed in popularity at amateur and professional levels in the past three or four years. Goldrush or bubble?
Isn't one of them the fastest growing sport worldwide?
I can see why, much easier than tennis. But I also think that it is short lived (you heard it here on PB first) because ultimately neither are as rewarding as tennis and tennis-playing padel/pickle-curious players will eventually return to tennis.
Watch the video. It is also about packing the courts in to get more paying customers per acre, and then there are nascent professional tours funded by those presumably hoping for media rights to pay off.
Have esports replaced the Olympics? Has UFC replaced boxing? You know who else launched new sports leagues? Hitler ‘America's Hitler’.
UFC really SHOULD replace boxing, tho. It is much more interesting, much more popular, and probably a lot less corrupt (tho I do not know for sure)
Wrong. Notwithstanding its homoerotic attractions many UFC fights are 80% of minute movements while both fighters are locked together on the ground.
Fair enough, I confess I am basing my entire knowledge of UFC on highlights shown on Joe Rogan
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
But the CCN has since revised its analysis and now says the reorganisation could make no savings and actually cost money in some scenarios.
I wonder how much time Rayner spends doing her job compared to her own housing dealings:
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, has been accused of avoiding £40,000 in stamp duty on her new flat by the sea after she told authorities it was her primary residence.
Rayner, who is also the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, was said to have removed her name from the official deed to her house in Greater Manchester weeks before buying an £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex.
According to The Telegraph, Rayner would have had to pay £70,000 in stamp duty on a second property, so the change saved her £40,000. She is thought to have paid only £30,000.
She also told Tameside council in Greater Manchester that the house in her constituency was still her main home, before telling Brighton and Hove council that her new flat was her second home, which would change her status for council tax.
As we know Rayner has a long history of dubious housing transactions.
I’m awaiting for the ‘more targetting of an aspirational working class woman’ spin on this from her fans.
It's the different taxation of different residences for stamp duty and council tax that is the problem. If both were replaced by a property tax of perhaps 1% of value each year then the problem goes away.
Dr. Foxy, what do you think the cost would be of assessing the value of every single house every year?
It may well be prohibitive, in both political and financial terms.
You wouldn't do a valuation every year, for crying out loud. Up until 1990 there was an annual property tax on value. It was considered to be a cost-effective tax, it was dispensed with for ideological not economic reasons.
Ok, so, how often?
Individual assessments will still take a lot of time and cost initially. And the increase in cost to taxpayers will be politically difficult. It's the same reason council bands haven't been reformed, even though they should've been years ago.
Just use the last sale price plus changes to the HPI. That has the added bonus of incentivising people to improve their homes, as well as not seek out places with a hot housing market.
I've just checked it on my flat and it's pretty accurate at an LA level based on my latest mortgage valuation. I guess you could get more granular data too.
Good morning
House price data is much more available today then when the bands were originally introduced, so it should not be impossible to revalue all homes though a difficulty may arise in those homes which have had extensive changes
We need a lot more bands, as the present system is not only unfair but ludicrous, with the wealthy getting away with not paying anything like enough
But I don't think we should tax home improvements at all. The only additional bit I want to tax is general price inflation from the point at which you bought the property. I'd even apply a negative tax rate for solar, batteries, EV chargers and heating pumps.
Cost 10 years ago: £200k Improvements: £50k Green improvements: £20k HPI increase over 10 year: £60k
Value of home under my tax = 200 + 60 - 20 = 240k.
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
IMO it's not about money; it's about creating something that functions to help support better communities.
Given that local gov in England has been gutted like a dead fish for 20 years losing perhaps 25-30% of its resources, we know it needs seriously increased resources - built up in parallel with the capacity to use them (which was also gutted) - anyway.
The "make it better by cutting the staff by X%, or all their salaries by X%" line is a Taxpayers Alliance masturbation fantasy.
We learnt all of that during the attacks on LG in the noughties, whilst they were encouraged to take on risky investments, which landed us where we are now - with much of current income going to pay debt interest. That's just one more multi-year black hole that the current Government need to repair.
The process by which merging organisations in the name of efficiency creates costs, and increases the number of people employed, was detailed in Yes Minister. With real world examples.
The Atlantic reports Trump is ‘disappointed’ with Zelensky & Europe, calling their demands unrealistic. He just wants the war over ‘no matter how’, even if it means Ukraine losing land. Now he pushes for a Putin-Zelensky summit only if he’s at the table. To me, Trump is openly aligning with Putin, eroding any trust in the US government. https://x.com/olddog100ua/status/1961295032167629191
Putin won't accept any peace deal without gaining some Ukrainian territory anyway and Zelensky won't accept any loss of land beyond Crimea and maybe not even that.
The best that could be hoped for is a ceasefire on current lines of occupation
The Times on the trend for not vaccinating children
There is a particular crisis in reaching immigrant groups in urban areas, particularly those whose first language is not English. Uptake is also often low in Muslim communities, a phenomenon linked to the use of pork gelatine in some vaccines, although alternatives are widely available.
She added: “The other big problem [for vaccine uptake] is that there are vast inequalities in uptake. We know that uptake is also lower among some ethnic minority groups, notably black Caribbean and African populations.
Indeed; this has been known for years. I vaguely STR there was some controversy over money being spent on schemes to try to improve uptake of the Covid vaccine amongst ethnic minority groups?
Though combating the b/s coming out of America via mass-murderer JFK Junior might be money better spent.
I thought so, that’s why I was surprised to read on here the other day that the low uptake of vaccinations in children was a white working class problem
A lot of my friends were anti vaxxers during covid, and they are all WWC, so maybe that’s where the confusion comes from.
I believe other factors were noted too such as recent arrivals and hippy middle class types.
But the white working class antivax group is a recent addition so will show up in the figures in the next few years.
But the aggressive behaviour towards medical professionals comes pretty much from the WWC based on the conversations from my father’s ex-colleagues who are of all races including WWC.
We are needing a war to provide an outlet for WWC aggression. Supporting the Ukrainians on the Russian front, perhaps.
Ah yes. People going abroad to fight in other people's domestic disturbances have never come back and caused trouble at home. No sir.
Balkans 1990s - there's a direct line from there to comedy in the UK.
Appeals court decision today on the hotel in Essex. The govt position is the asylum seekers take priority over the locals. Something their legal team made quite clear. I saw it on Twitter and assumed it was a joke so didn’t comment on it or post it here.
Be interesting to see how the decision goes. Popcorn time if the govt win.
So the national interest (in the short term, these people have to go somewhere) overrides the local one (not near me). Nimbies are bad, in other words.
Politically, it's not a popular line, but it may well be the right one.
There is a number of levels at which this story is useful to consider.
I've asked lawyers, on several occasions, about their responsibility for fall out from their actions. A couple of the lawyers for Capn. Hook (this rum blossom - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Hamza_al-Masri) - they were very clear that their belief was that all such extraditions must be stopped. I pointed out that the result was the government enacting ever more extreme laws. Their response to that was an aggressive denial of any moral responsibility for the reaction to judgements they had sought.
Another level - the principle that a tiny number of objectors can delay any government decision, by repeated court cases. Previously, the legal hack was that the hotels were licensed to house and feed hundreds. So housing and feeding hundreds didn't require any action. The Process State has reacted here - the idea that a government can simply do things, without years of lawyers arguing about it, is inimical to people in the Enquiry Industrial Complex.
Another - many people in what used to be called the establishment take the view that the needs of some groups of foreigners exceed those of UK citizens. Aside from a comic incident at a City Diner, there are the differential tariffs on import of components and completed electronic items. The people behind the Raspberry Pi computer wanted to try and manufacture in the UK - but the tariffs on components were higher. They were told the tarrifs (as they were) were important to China, and changing them would cause "offence". I got the same response when I enquired.
Your argument about the Process State would make more sense if there wasn't two separate planning categories for hotels and hostels.
Alternatively the Government can pass an act of parliament next week.
What is needed is not to allow the government to override the law in "the national interest" (unless it is really an emergency) but to have a more streamlined and simple legal system. Arguably lawyers shouldn't be allowed anywhere near government as it is always in their interest to make the legal system ever more complex.
(Ditto accountants. You should be able to calculate your tax yourself on the back of an envelope without risking overpayment)
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
But the CCN has since revised its analysis and now says the reorganisation could make no savings and actually cost money in some scenarios.
I wonder how much time Rayner spends doing her job compared to her own housing dealings:
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, has been accused of avoiding £40,000 in stamp duty on her new flat by the sea after she told authorities it was her primary residence.
Rayner, who is also the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, was said to have removed her name from the official deed to her house in Greater Manchester weeks before buying an £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex.
According to The Telegraph, Rayner would have had to pay £70,000 in stamp duty on a second property, so the change saved her £40,000. She is thought to have paid only £30,000.
She also told Tameside council in Greater Manchester that the house in her constituency was still her main home, before telling Brighton and Hove council that her new flat was her second home, which would change her status for council tax.
As we know Rayner has a long history of dubious housing transactions.
I’m awaiting for the ‘more targetting of an aspirational working class woman’ spin on this from her fans.
It's the different taxation of different residences for stamp duty and council tax that is the problem. If both were replaced by a property tax of perhaps 1% of value each year then the problem goes away.
Dr. Foxy, what do you think the cost would be of assessing the value of every single house every year?
It may well be prohibitive, in both political and financial terms.
You wouldn't do a valuation every year, for crying out loud. Up until 1990 there was an annual property tax on value. It was considered to be a cost-effective tax, it was dispensed with for ideological not economic reasons.
Ok, so, how often?
Individual assessments will still take a lot of time and cost initially. And the increase in cost to taxpayers will be politically difficult. It's the same reason council bands haven't been reformed, even though they should've been years ago.
Just use the last sale price plus changes to the HPI. That has the added bonus of incentivising people to improve their homes, as well as not seek out places with a hot housing market.
I've just checked it on my flat and it's pretty accurate at an LA level based on my latest mortgage valuation. I guess you could get more granular data too.
Good morning
House price data is much more available today then when the bands were originally introduced, so it should not be impossible to revalue all homes though a difficulty may arise in those homes which have had extensive changes
We need a lot more bands, as the present system is not only unfair but ludicrous, with the wealthy getting away with not paying anything like enough
But I don't think we should tax home improvements at all. The only additional bit I want to tax is general price inflation from the point at which you bought the property. I'd even apply a negative tax rate for solar, batteries, EV chargers and heating pumps.
Cost 10 years ago: £200k Improvements: £50k Green improvements: £20k HPI increase over 10 year: £60k
Value of home under my tax = 200 + 60 - 20 = 240k.
The problem is if you have a tax based on property value then creating exceptions makes the process more complex
Not to mention briefing against Angela Rayner. Starmer's perceived woman problem is why I suspect a Cooper/Reeves job swap is more likely than dismissing either, although I guess you could argue that both ways.
This is a very odd story. Woman takes $15 million worth of drugs into the US. Claims to be a victim but refuses to tell who they were as she’s scared. Try’s to leave the country. Looking at a massive sentence.
It's a pretty problem. Does Trump believe in deporting foreign criminals, or does he believe in keeping them in the USA at taxpayers' expense for decades?
No great surprise to see some of the extravagant claims regarding savings from Local Government Reorganisation discredited given their source. There are County Unitaries out there - Cornwall, Shropshire and Somerset to name but three but every local authority area is different.
In Surrey, for example, replacing the eleven District and Borough Councils and County Council looks superficially attractive - a single Council Tax collecting and administration function instead of eleven for example - but what’s the point of local Government if you end up with an authority stretching as far from one side to the other as the distance from London to Brighton?
There’s an argument for the consolidation of back office functions across councils but even that doesn’t deliver the big savings you might expect.
The main and possibly most dubious advantage would be to reduce the number of councillors from 81 County and 453 District/Borough.
The other aspect is or are the not inconsiderable transitional costs - every contract has to be re-negotiated or re-tendered, every lease or license cha ged, every piece of signage changed.
That's quite surprising polling. Link to the data?
No it's not. People detest this kind of thing, whether it's JSO blocking motorways or people inciting mass murder.
I remain surprised that Labour councillor got off. I wonder if he benefitted from an inverse reaction, where people basically agreed with him that far-right rioters should be, well, killed. Quite an authoritarian bunch the British.
Is it true though? Or rather, is that the only available framing?
Could it also be said the group that has most benefited is the upper middle class whose family incomes and assets have increased markedly since the 1990s? The gap between top and bottom salaries has multiplied, the number of dual-income families likewise, and this is a multiplicative effect as lawyers marry lawyers and shop-workers marry shop-workers (so two £100k salaries against two £25k salaries) and in turn this has allowed these families to buy assets whose value has also increased.
So you want to hammer them with tax then like Melenchon?
Boulay, have you noticed how we sometimes discuss politics in other countries? Maybe you noticed the headers on the 26th, 20th, 18th, 15th, 7th and 3rd of August, for example?
I think it's a story that says a lot about the US and politics in the US, and thus can inform people's betting on US elections.
I can't find the data on the More in Common website, perhaps someone else can
But Goodall appears to be basing his tweet on a Daily Mirror report of it, which gets fundamental things wrong:
"More than half of respondents said her 10-month prison sentence was either about right (32%) or too lenient (20%), while a third (35%) said it was too harsh."
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
But the CCN has since revised its analysis and now says the reorganisation could make no savings and actually cost money in some scenarios.
I wonder how much time Rayner spends doing her job compared to her own housing dealings:
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, has been accused of avoiding £40,000 in stamp duty on her new flat by the sea after she told authorities it was her primary residence.
Rayner, who is also the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, was said to have removed her name from the official deed to her house in Greater Manchester weeks before buying an £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex.
According to The Telegraph, Rayner would have had to pay £70,000 in stamp duty on a second property, so the change saved her £40,000. She is thought to have paid only £30,000.
She also told Tameside council in Greater Manchester that the house in her constituency was still her main home, before telling Brighton and Hove council that her new flat was her second home, which would change her status for council tax.
As we know Rayner has a long history of dubious housing transactions.
I’m awaiting for the ‘more targetting of an aspirational working class woman’ spin on this from her fans.
It's the different taxation of different residences for stamp duty and council tax that is the problem. If both were replaced by a property tax of perhaps 1% of value each year then the problem goes away.
Dr. Foxy, what do you think the cost would be of assessing the value of every single house every year?
It may well be prohibitive, in both political and financial terms.
You wouldn't do a valuation every year, for crying out loud. Up until 1990 there was an annual property tax on value. It was considered to be a cost-effective tax, it was dispensed with for ideological not economic reasons.
Ok, so, how often?
Individual assessments will still take a lot of time and cost initially. And the increase in cost to taxpayers will be politically difficult. It's the same reason council bands haven't been reformed, even though they should've been years ago.
Just use the last sale price plus changes to the HPI. That has the added bonus of incentivising people to improve their homes, as well as not seek out places with a hot housing market.
I've just checked it on my flat and it's pretty accurate at an LA level based on my latest mortgage valuation. I guess you could get more granular data too.
Good morning
House price data is much more available today then when the bands were originally introduced, so it should not be impossible to revalue all homes though a difficulty may arise in those homes which have had extensive changes
We need a lot more bands, as the present system is not only unfair but ludicrous, with the wealthy getting away with not paying anything like enough
But I don't think we should tax home improvements at all. The only additional bit I want to tax is general price inflation from the point at which you bought the property. I'd even apply a negative tax rate for solar, batteries, EV chargers and heating pumps.
Cost 10 years ago: £200k Improvements: £50k Green improvements: £20k HPI increase over 10 year: £60k
Value of home under my tax = 200 + 60 - 20 = 240k.
The problem is if you have a tax based on property value then creating exceptions makes the process more complex
Perhaps. You don't have to do the green thing. A simple cost + HPI would work fine.
The Times on the trend for not vaccinating children
There is a particular crisis in reaching immigrant groups in urban areas, particularly those whose first language is not English. Uptake is also often low in Muslim communities, a phenomenon linked to the use of pork gelatine in some vaccines, although alternatives are widely available.
She added: “The other big problem [for vaccine uptake] is that there are vast inequalities in uptake. We know that uptake is also lower among some ethnic minority groups, notably black Caribbean and African populations.
Indeed; this has been known for years. I vaguely STR there was some controversy over money being spent on schemes to try to improve uptake of the Covid vaccine amongst ethnic minority groups?
Though combating the b/s coming out of America via mass-murderer JFK Junior might be money better spent.
I thought so, that’s why I was surprised to read on here the other day that the low uptake of vaccinations in children was a white working class problem
A lot of my friends were anti vaxxers during covid, and they are all WWC, so maybe that’s where the confusion comes from.
I'd *guess* that there are more anti-vaxxers amongst Reform-party voters than amongst those of other parties (except perhaps Greens?) because they seem to take more notice of American new and traditional media, which is filled with JFK Jr's b/s. I'd also guess the fewest anti-vaxxers were amongst the Lib Dems. But I might be wrong.
I get lots of anti-vax b/s on my 'For you' Twix feed.
Reform UK 2024 manifesto:
Excess Deaths and Vaccine Harms Public Inquiry
Excess deaths are nearly as high as they were during the Covid pandemic. Young people are over-represented.
This is classic anti-vaxx stuff. Reform UK, RFK Jnr?
What are the excess deaths now, as you have brought it up.
They're a fantasy in the minds of conspiratorial-thinking Reform UK people.
The Times on the trend for not vaccinating children
There is a particular crisis in reaching immigrant groups in urban areas, particularly those whose first language is not English. Uptake is also often low in Muslim communities, a phenomenon linked to the use of pork gelatine in some vaccines, although alternatives are widely available.
She added: “The other big problem [for vaccine uptake] is that there are vast inequalities in uptake. We know that uptake is also lower among some ethnic minority groups, notably black Caribbean and African populations.
Indeed; this has been known for years. I vaguely STR there was some controversy over money being spent on schemes to try to improve uptake of the Covid vaccine amongst ethnic minority groups?
Though combating the b/s coming out of America via mass-murderer JFK Junior might be money better spent.
I thought so, that’s why I was surprised to read on here the other day that the low uptake of vaccinations in children was a white working class problem
A lot of my friends were anti vaxxers during covid, and they are all WWC, so maybe that’s where the confusion comes from.
I'd *guess* that there are more anti-vaxxers amongst Reform-party voters than amongst those of other parties (except perhaps Greens?) because they seem to take more notice of American new and traditional media, which is filled with JFK Jr's b/s. I'd also guess the fewest anti-vaxxers were amongst the Lib Dems. But I might be wrong.
I get lots of anti-vax b/s on my 'For you' Twix feed.
Reform UK 2024 manifesto:
Excess Deaths and Vaccine Harms Public Inquiry
Excess deaths are nearly as high as they were during the Covid pandemic. Young people are over-represented.
This is classic anti-vaxx stuff. Reform UK, RFK Jnr?
What are the excess deaths now, as you have brought it up.
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
IMO it's not about money; it's about creating something that functions to help support better communities.
Given that local gov in England has been gutted like a dead fish for 20 years losing perhaps 25-30% of its resources, we know it needs seriously increased resources - built up in parallel with the capacity to use them (which was also gutted) - anyway.
The "make it better by cutting the staff by X%, or all their salaries by X%" line is a Taxpayers Alliance masturbation fantasy.
We learnt all of that during the attacks on LG in the noughties, whilst they were encouraged to take on risky investments, which landed us where we are now - with much of current income going to pay debt interest. That's just one more multi-year black hole that the current Government need to repair.
That is more a discussion about increasing council tax than the shift to unitaries
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
But the CCN has since revised its analysis and now says the reorganisation could make no savings and actually cost money in some scenarios.
I wonder how much time Rayner spends doing her job compared to her own housing dealings:
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, has been accused of avoiding £40,000 in stamp duty on her new flat by the sea after she told authorities it was her primary residence.
Rayner, who is also the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, was said to have removed her name from the official deed to her house in Greater Manchester weeks before buying an £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex.
According to The Telegraph, Rayner would have had to pay £70,000 in stamp duty on a second property, so the change saved her £40,000. She is thought to have paid only £30,000.
She also told Tameside council in Greater Manchester that the house in her constituency was still her main home, before telling Brighton and Hove council that her new flat was her second home, which would change her status for council tax.
As we know Rayner has a long history of dubious housing transactions.
I’m awaiting for the ‘more targetting of an aspirational working class woman’ spin on this from her fans.
It's the different taxation of different residences for stamp duty and council tax that is the problem. If both were replaced by a property tax of perhaps 1% of value each year then the problem goes away.
Dr. Foxy, what do you think the cost would be of assessing the value of every single house every year?
It may well be prohibitive, in both political and financial terms.
You wouldn't do a valuation every year, for crying out loud. Up until 1990 there was an annual property tax on value. It was considered to be a cost-effective tax, it was dispensed with for ideological not economic reasons.
Ok, so, how often?
Individual assessments will still take a lot of time and cost initially. And the increase in cost to taxpayers will be politically difficult. It's the same reason council bands haven't been reformed, even though they should've been years ago.
IMO it's not difficult. The information for many years is already recorded, and for much of the stock it can be done on a sample-and-adjust basis. Plenty of other countries can do it; so can we.
Plenty of other places do it, so I'd suggest that objections are mainly political.
Not sure if anyone mentioned this yesterday but Post Nord Denmark, the Danish Post Office, are going to stop accepting and delivering letters from the end of the year and will, from 2026, simply be a parcel courier.
Post Nord cited a 90% fall in letters handled since 2000 and have started removing Denmark’s 1500 mailboxes.
Basically, from 2026, it will be open to private companies like the equivalent of Evri to operate a letter service using their own home delivery and shop facilities if they so choose. The much more active parcel service, as here, will see a plethora of companies and options.
I’m sure someone on here will know how many letters are still handled by the UK Post Office and how many letter boxes there are.
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
But the CCN has since revised its analysis and now says the reorganisation could make no savings and actually cost money in some scenarios.
I wonder how much time Rayner spends doing her job compared to her own housing dealings:
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, has been accused of avoiding £40,000 in stamp duty on her new flat by the sea after she told authorities it was her primary residence.
Rayner, who is also the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, was said to have removed her name from the official deed to her house in Greater Manchester weeks before buying an £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex.
According to The Telegraph, Rayner would have had to pay £70,000 in stamp duty on a second property, so the change saved her £40,000. She is thought to have paid only £30,000.
She also told Tameside council in Greater Manchester that the house in her constituency was still her main home, before telling Brighton and Hove council that her new flat was her second home, which would change her status for council tax.
As we know Rayner has a long history of dubious housing transactions.
I’m awaiting for the ‘more targetting of an aspirational working class woman’ spin on this from her fans.
It's the different taxation of different residences for stamp duty and council tax that is the problem. If both were replaced by a property tax of perhaps 1% of value each year then the problem goes away.
Dr. Foxy, what do you think the cost would be of assessing the value of every single house every year?
It may well be prohibitive, in both political and financial terms.
You wouldn't do a valuation every year, for crying out loud. Up until 1990 there was an annual property tax on value. It was considered to be a cost-effective tax, it was dispensed with for ideological not economic reasons.
Ok, so, how often?
Individual assessments will still take a lot of time and cost initially. And the increase in cost to taxpayers will be politically difficult. It's the same reason council bands haven't been reformed, even though they should've been years ago.
Just use the last sale price plus changes to the HPI. That has the added bonus of incentivising people to improve their homes, as well as not seek out places with a hot housing market.
I've just checked it on my flat and it's pretty accurate at an LA level based on my latest mortgage valuation. I guess you could get more granular data too.
Good morning
House price data is much more available today then when the bands were originally introduced, so it should not be impossible to revalue all homes though a difficulty may arise in those homes which have had extensive changes
We need a lot more bands, as the present system is not only unfair but ludicrous, with the wealthy getting away with not paying anything like enough
But I don't think we should tax home improvements at all. The only additional bit I want to tax is general price inflation from the point at which you bought the property. I'd even apply a negative tax rate for solar, batteries, EV chargers and heating pumps.
Cost 10 years ago: £200k Improvements: £50k Green improvements: £20k HPI increase over 10 year: £60k
Value of home under my tax = 200 + 60 - 20 = 240k.
The problem is if you have a tax based on property value then creating exceptions makes the process more complex
Perhaps. You don't have to do the green thing. A simple cost + HPI would work fine.
To be fair once a nationwide revaluation has taken place and more bands added then those homes remain in those bands
It is the simplest way though there would inevitable be some variations to the general policy
The Atlantic reports Trump is ‘disappointed’ with Zelensky & Europe, calling their demands unrealistic. He just wants the war over ‘no matter how’, even if it means Ukraine losing land. Now he pushes for a Putin-Zelensky summit only if he’s at the table. To me, Trump is openly aligning with Putin, eroding any trust in the US government. https://x.com/olddog100ua/status/1961295032167629191
Putin won't accept any peace deal without gaining some Ukrainian territory anyway and Zelensky won't accept any loss of land beyond Crimea and maybe not even that.
The best that could be hoped for is a ceasefire on current lines of occupation
If we could help take territory off Russia, that would even up the negotiations. We’re too feart, though, because of the threat of nuclear war.
The Atlantic reports Trump is ‘disappointed’ with Zelensky & Europe, calling their demands unrealistic. He just wants the war over ‘no matter how’, even if it means Ukraine losing land. Now he pushes for a Putin-Zelensky summit only if he’s at the table. To me, Trump is openly aligning with Putin, eroding any trust in the US government. https://x.com/olddog100ua/status/1961295032167629191
A Ukraine peace deal was too hard, he got bored and has moved onto other topics.
It's shameful he is so neutral on this while civilians are targeted by Russia in Kyiv. Russia and Putin should be treated as a terrorist state.
Fortunately, he's not able to force an awful peace deal (which is any deal Putin would accept at present) on Ukraine and Europe.
Lucy Connolly has been released this week after serving 10 months in jail. Connolly pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred after she posted the following message online during last summer's riots "Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you're at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it".
That tweet is like reporting on a poll that has Party A on 35%, Party B on 32% and Party C on 20% with the Headline “Over half of respondents thought Party A was the wrong choice, only a third want them in power”
No great surprise to see some of the extravagant claims regarding savings from Local Government Reorganisation discredited given their source. There are County Unitaries out there - Cornwall, Shropshire and Somerset to name but three but every local authority area is different.
In Surrey, for example, replacing the eleven District and Borough Councils and County Council looks superficially attractive - a single Council Tax collecting and administration function instead of eleven for example - but what’s the point of local Government if you end up with an authority stretching as far from one side to the other as the distance from London to Brighton?
There’s an argument for the consolidation of back office functions across councils but even that doesn’t deliver the big savings you might expect.
The main and possibly most dubious advantage would be to reduce the number of councillors from 81 County and 453 District/Borough.
The other aspect is or are the not inconsiderable transitional costs - every contract has to be re-negotiated or re-tendered, every lease or license cha ged, every piece of signage changed.
There might have been a case to just have one unitary authority replacing the county and district councils in each county if the powers of Parish and Town councils were also increased. That doesn't look on the cards though
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
But the CCN has since revised its analysis and now says the reorganisation could make no savings and actually cost money in some scenarios.
I wonder how much time Rayner spends doing her job compared to her own housing dealings:
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, has been accused of avoiding £40,000 in stamp duty on her new flat by the sea after she told authorities it was her primary residence.
Rayner, who is also the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, was said to have removed her name from the official deed to her house in Greater Manchester weeks before buying an £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex.
According to The Telegraph, Rayner would have had to pay £70,000 in stamp duty on a second property, so the change saved her £40,000. She is thought to have paid only £30,000.
She also told Tameside council in Greater Manchester that the house in her constituency was still her main home, before telling Brighton and Hove council that her new flat was her second home, which would change her status for council tax.
As we know Rayner has a long history of dubious housing transactions.
I’m awaiting for the ‘more targetting of an aspirational working class woman’ spin on this from her fans.
It's the different taxation of different residences for stamp duty and council tax that is the problem. If both were replaced by a property tax of perhaps 1% of value each year then the problem goes away.
Dr. Foxy, what do you think the cost would be of assessing the value of every single house every year?
It may well be prohibitive, in both political and financial terms.
You wouldn't do a valuation every year, for crying out loud. Up until 1990 there was an annual property tax on value. It was considered to be a cost-effective tax, it was dispensed with for ideological not economic reasons.
Ok, so, how often?
Individual assessments will still take a lot of time and cost initially. And the increase in cost to taxpayers will be politically difficult. It's the same reason council bands haven't been reformed, even though they should've been years ago.
Just use the last sale price plus changes to the HPI. That has the added bonus of incentivising people to improve their homes, as well as not seek out places with a hot housing market.
I've just checked it on my flat and it's pretty accurate at an LA level based on my latest mortgage valuation. I guess you could get more granular data too.
Good morning
House price data is much more available today then when the bands were originally introduced, so it should not be impossible to revalue all homes though a difficulty may arise in those homes which have had extensive changes
We need a lot more bands, as the present system is not only unfair but ludicrous, with the wealthy getting away with not paying anything like enough
But I don't think we should tax home improvements at all. The only additional bit I want to tax is general price inflation from the point at which you bought the property. I'd even apply a negative tax rate for solar, batteries, EV chargers and heating pumps.
Cost 10 years ago: £200k Improvements: £50k Green improvements: £20k HPI increase over 10 year: £60k
Value of home under my tax = 200 + 60 - 20 = 240k.
Both Rightmove and Zoopla produce monthly valuations. There's a 26k difference between the two for me (Zoopla is higher), my valuation for mortgage purposes is still the 2020 valuation though as I moved banks, it wasn't updated in 2025 since I hit the 60% LTV threshold on the 2020 valuation.
The lower of Zoopla & Rightmove could be used in all honesty.
How could we tell? What would they do differently?
Let's see if there are any more sackings of navy contenders in the next couple of weeks.
⚠️ US, UK and Norway launched a major hunt for a Russian submarine suspected of threatening US Navy's USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier in the Norwegian Sea.
The Royal Air Force (RAF) made eight P-8A Poseidon flights from RAF base Lossiemouth in Scotland.
The Norwegian Air Force launched three from Evenes Air Base near Narvik, inside the Arctic Circle.
The US Navy used a base in Iceland but the scale of the operation meant they were reinforced by at least two US Poseidons from Sicily.
The mission appears to have started this past Sunday and lasted almost 48 hours, with Tom Sharpe, a former Navy commander, saying:
“It looks like they have found a Russian submarine and they are hammering it.
The Times on the trend for not vaccinating children
There is a particular crisis in reaching immigrant groups in urban areas, particularly those whose first language is not English. Uptake is also often low in Muslim communities, a phenomenon linked to the use of pork gelatine in some vaccines, although alternatives are widely available.
She added: “The other big problem [for vaccine uptake] is that there are vast inequalities in uptake. We know that uptake is also lower among some ethnic minority groups, notably black Caribbean and African populations.
Indeed; this has been known for years. I vaguely STR there was some controversy over money being spent on schemes to try to improve uptake of the Covid vaccine amongst ethnic minority groups?
Though combating the b/s coming out of America via mass-murderer JFK Junior might be money better spent.
I thought so, that’s why I was surprised to read on here the other day that the low uptake of vaccinations in children was a white working class problem
A lot of my friends were anti vaxxers during covid, and they are all WWC, so maybe that’s where the confusion comes from.
I'd *guess* that there are more anti-vaxxers amongst Reform-party voters than amongst those of other parties (except perhaps Greens?) because they seem to take more notice of American new and traditional media, which is filled with JFK Jr's b/s. I'd also guess the fewest anti-vaxxers were amongst the Lib Dems. But I might be wrong.
I get lots of anti-vax b/s on my 'For you' Twix feed.
“For you” is one of the most irritating features of X. It’s Elon trying to push stuff I’m not interested in plus loads of spammy clickbait.
You could always go to Bluesk -
Oh, wait. LOL
We'll see - I currently run both. Bluesky is currently ticking towards 40m users.
We won't know about success for at least another 12 months, nor whether being the Next Door of social media is the correct measure.
All metrics on BlueSky that track activity are still trending down, albeit the rate of decrease has slowed. Zooming out those same activity metrics are now back down roughly the levels from a year ago i.e. no real growth.
User numbers are a bit like subscriber numbers on YouTube channels. It tells you something, but not really the whole picture. With YouTube, you look at the views on across a range of videos and then calculate that as a percentage of the subscriber total, to get a handle on if that is a healthy channel or not.
I found it. More in Common have used some really convoluted wording to get this result - I cannot find any other usage of the phrase "sentence to jail time" as they have used it
They also included her whole (and deeply offensive ) tweet in the question, which is maybe fair enough, but if you're going to give that context why not also mention that she deleted it quite soon after?
No great surprise to see some of the extravagant claims regarding savings from Local Government Reorganisation discredited given their source. There are County Unitaries out there - Cornwall, Shropshire and Somerset to name but three but every local authority area is different.
In Surrey, for example, replacing the eleven District and Borough Councils and County Council looks superficially attractive - a single Council Tax collecting and administration function instead of eleven for example - but what’s the point of local Government if you end up with an authority stretching as far from one side to the other as the distance from London to Brighton?
There’s an argument for the consolidation of back office functions across councils but even that doesn’t deliver the big savings you might expect.
The main and possibly most dubious advantage would be to reduce the number of councillors from 81 County and 453 District/Borough.
The other aspect is or are the not inconsiderable transitional costs - every contract has to be re-negotiated or re-tendered, every lease or license cha ged, every piece of signage changed.
London to Brighton? Just think how unwieldy Highland Council is. Ardnamurchan Point to John O’ Groats is in no way local.
I can't find the data on the More in Common website, perhaps someone else can
But Goodall appears to be basing his tweet on a Daily Mirror report of it, which gets fundamental things wrong:
"More than half of respondents said her 10-month prison sentence was either about right (32%) or too lenient (20%), while a third (35%) said it was too harsh."
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
IMO it's not about money; it's about creating something that functions to help support better communities.
Given that local gov in England has been gutted like a dead fish for 20 years losing perhaps 25-30% of its resources, we know it needs seriously increased resources - built up in parallel with the capacity to use them (which was also gutted) - anyway.
The "make it better by cutting the staff by X%, or all their salaries by X%" line is a Taxpayers Alliance masturbation fantasy.
We learnt all of that during the attacks on LG in the noughties, whilst they were encouraged to take on risky investments, which landed us where we are now - with much of current income going to pay debt interest. That's just one more multi-year black hole that the current Government need to repair.
That is more a discussion about increasing council tax than the shift to unitaries
I think it's both, and an overlapping debate; I have a District - County - Regional Mayor setup and too many things fall down the gap. Increasing LG income is a necessary condition for improvement, but so is joined up local government with skills and capacity to improve.
Every time I go down my local main road I see 150m of nice shared pavement, which abruptly turns back into dodgy 1970s narrowness at either end because District (who manage Planning Conditions) and County (who manage highways) between them managed to fail to impose the same "improve the pavement next to your estate" condition on the next 4 estate planning permissions over the following years.
Re local news. Our Editor has gone/left or retired..... Our local newspaper had two articles in it a few weeks back in the same edition. One lauding the opening of a new restaurant in town, the other saying the opening has been delayed. 🤔🤔🤔
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
But the CCN has since revised its analysis and now says the reorganisation could make no savings and actually cost money in some scenarios.
I wonder how much time Rayner spends doing her job compared to her own housing dealings:
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, has been accused of avoiding £40,000 in stamp duty on her new flat by the sea after she told authorities it was her primary residence.
Rayner, who is also the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, was said to have removed her name from the official deed to her house in Greater Manchester weeks before buying an £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex.
According to The Telegraph, Rayner would have had to pay £70,000 in stamp duty on a second property, so the change saved her £40,000. She is thought to have paid only £30,000.
She also told Tameside council in Greater Manchester that the house in her constituency was still her main home, before telling Brighton and Hove council that her new flat was her second home, which would change her status for council tax.
As we know Rayner has a long history of dubious housing transactions.
I’m awaiting for the ‘more targetting of an aspirational working class woman’ spin on this from her fans.
It's the different taxation of different residences for stamp duty and council tax that is the problem. If both were replaced by a property tax of perhaps 1% of value each year then the problem goes away.
Dr. Foxy, what do you think the cost would be of assessing the value of every single house every year?
It may well be prohibitive, in both political and financial terms.
You wouldn't do a valuation every year, for crying out loud. Up until 1990 there was an annual property tax on value. It was considered to be a cost-effective tax, it was dispensed with for ideological not economic reasons.
Ok, so, how often?
Individual assessments will still take a lot of time and cost initially. And the increase in cost to taxpayers will be politically difficult. It's the same reason council bands haven't been reformed, even though they should've been years ago.
Just use the last sale price plus changes to the HPI. That has the added bonus of incentivising people to improve their homes, as well as not seek out places with a hot housing market.
I've just checked it on my flat and it's pretty accurate at an LA level based on my latest mortgage valuation. I guess you could get more granular data too.
Good morning
House price data is much more available today then when the bands were originally introduced, so it should not be impossible to revalue all homes though a difficulty may arise in those homes which have had extensive changes
We need a lot more bands, as the present system is not only unfair but ludicrous, with the wealthy getting away with not paying anything like enough
But I don't think we should tax home improvements at all. The only additional bit I want to tax is general price inflation from the point at which you bought the property. I'd even apply a negative tax rate for solar, batteries, EV chargers and heating pumps.
Cost 10 years ago: £200k Improvements: £50k Green improvements: £20k HPI increase over 10 year: £60k
Value of home under my tax = 200 + 60 - 20 = 240k.
The problem is if you have a tax based on property value then creating exceptions makes the process more complex
Perhaps. You don't have to do the green thing. A simple cost + HPI would work fine.
To be fair once a nationwide revaluation has taken place and more bands added then those homes remain in those bands
It is the simplest way though there would inevitable be some variations to the general policy
Then you end up with the same problem in 20 years time. It needs to be regular valuation at short intervals.
The Atlantic reports Trump is ‘disappointed’ with Zelensky & Europe, calling their demands unrealistic. He just wants the war over ‘no matter how’, even if it means Ukraine losing land. Now he pushes for a Putin-Zelensky summit only if he’s at the table. To me, Trump is openly aligning with Putin, eroding any trust in the US government. https://x.com/olddog100ua/status/1961295032167629191
Putin won't accept any peace deal without gaining some Ukrainian territory anyway and Zelensky won't accept any loss of land beyond Crimea and maybe not even that.
The best that could be hoped for is a ceasefire on current lines of occupation
Putin's terms are actually a lot worse than that. If it were the case that he's accept a frozen conflict along the current front line, we'd already have had a ceasefire ahead of negotiations by now.
The reality is that he will not accept genuine Ukrainian sovereignty. Any security for Ukraine requires, as a bare minimum, some sort of military defensive pact between Europe and Ukraine. Putin is adamant he won't accept that.
On topic, there's something grounded and calming about local news. Whenever I make the effort to sit down and read a local paper I always feel better for it. I should do it more often. We all should imo. Try it today if you can. Allocate a couple of hours to forget about what Sir Keir Starmer is or isn't doing under the bonnet, the screeching dog whistles from Jenrick and Farage, the latest steaming turd from Donald Trump's global enshittification project, put it all aside, plus stay off PB as well since that will only drag you back into the mire, and read up about what's going on in your own neck of the woods.
No great surprise to see some of the extravagant claims regarding savings from Local Government Reorganisation discredited given their source. There are County Unitaries out there - Cornwall, Shropshire and Somerset to name but three but every local authority area is different.
In Surrey, for example, replacing the eleven District and Borough Councils and County Council looks superficially attractive - a single Council Tax collecting and administration function instead of eleven for example - but what’s the point of local Government if you end up with an authority stretching as far from one side to the other as the distance from London to Brighton?
There’s an argument for the consolidation of back office functions across councils but even that doesn’t deliver the big savings you might expect.
The main and possibly most dubious advantage would be to reduce the number of councillors from 81 County and 453 District/Borough.
The other aspect is or are the not inconsiderable transitional costs - every contract has to be re-negotiated or re-tendered, every lease or license cha ged, every piece of signage changed.
London to Brighton? Just think how unwieldy Highland Council is. Ardnamurchan Point to John O’ Groats is in no way local.
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
But the CCN has since revised its analysis and now says the reorganisation could make no savings and actually cost money in some scenarios.
I wonder how much time Rayner spends doing her job compared to her own housing dealings:
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, has been accused of avoiding £40,000 in stamp duty on her new flat by the sea after she told authorities it was her primary residence.
Rayner, who is also the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, was said to have removed her name from the official deed to her house in Greater Manchester weeks before buying an £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex.
According to The Telegraph, Rayner would have had to pay £70,000 in stamp duty on a second property, so the change saved her £40,000. She is thought to have paid only £30,000.
She also told Tameside council in Greater Manchester that the house in her constituency was still her main home, before telling Brighton and Hove council that her new flat was her second home, which would change her status for council tax.
As we know Rayner has a long history of dubious housing transactions.
I’m awaiting for the ‘more targetting of an aspirational working class woman’ spin on this from her fans.
It's the different taxation of different residences for stamp duty and council tax that is the problem. If both were replaced by a property tax of perhaps 1% of value each year then the problem goes away.
Dr. Foxy, what do you think the cost would be of assessing the value of every single house every year?
It may well be prohibitive, in both political and financial terms.
You wouldn't do a valuation every year, for crying out loud. Up until 1990 there was an annual property tax on value. It was considered to be a cost-effective tax, it was dispensed with for ideological not economic reasons.
Ok, so, how often?
Individual assessments will still take a lot of time and cost initially. And the increase in cost to taxpayers will be politically difficult. It's the same reason council bands haven't been reformed, even though they should've been years ago.
IMO it's not difficult. The information for many years is already recorded, and for much of the stock it can be done on a sample-and-adjust basis. Plenty of other countries can do it; so can we.
Plenty of other places do it, so I'd suggest that objections are mainly political.
PS On the exact question, I'd say twice a decade plus exceptions such as an extension requiring planning permission. I have not looked at the numbers, but it may well be less expensive to administer - the rating system was very well thought of as being simple to administer. *
* Though there were occurrences of values not being updated. In the late 1980s I was in a house with a "Rateable Value" of about £39. They updated the rate in the £ every year, and sometimes missed the updates. At that point it had not been sold since 1926.
I can't find the data on the More in Common website, perhaps someone else can
But Goodall appears to be basing his tweet on a Daily Mirror report of it, which gets fundamental things wrong:
"More than half of respondents said her 10-month prison sentence was either about right (32%) or too lenient (20%), while a third (35%) said it was too harsh."
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
IMO it's not about money; it's about creating something that functions to help support better communities.
Given that local gov in England has been gutted like a dead fish for 20 years losing perhaps 25-30% of its resources, we know it needs seriously increased resources - built up in parallel with the capacity to use them (which was also gutted) - anyway.
The "make it better by cutting the staff by X%, or all their salaries by X%" line is a Taxpayers Alliance masturbation fantasy.
We learnt all of that during the attacks on LG in the noughties, whilst they were encouraged to take on risky investments, which landed us where we are now - with much of current income going to pay debt interest. That's just one more multi-year black hole that the current Government need to repair.
That is more a discussion about increasing council tax than the shift to unitaries
Something has to give. Council tax will probably need to go up considerably over the next few years to cover the statutory requirements.
Not sure if anyone mentioned this yesterday but Post Nord Denmark, the Danish Post Office, are going to stop accepting and delivering letters from the end of the year and will, from 2026, simply be a parcel courier.
Post Nord cited a 90% fall in letters handled since 2000 and have started removing Denmark’s 1500 mailboxes.
Basically, from 2026, it will be open to private companies like the equivalent of Evri to operate a letter service using their own home delivery and shop facilities if they so choose. The much more active parcel service, as here, will see a plethora of companies and options.
I’m sure someone on here will know how many letters are still handled by the UK Post Office and how many letter boxes there are.
That tweet is like reporting on a poll that has Party A on 35%, Party B on 32% and Party C on 20% with the Headline “Over half of respondents thought Party A was the wrong choice, only a third want them in power”
Boulay, have you noticed how we sometimes discuss politics in other countries? Maybe you noticed the headers on the 26th, 20th, 18th, 15th, 7th and 3rd of August, for example?
I think it's a story that says a lot about the US and politics in the US, and thus can inform people's betting on US elections.
I have noticed we discuss politics in other countries. I have however missed people posting nuggets about minor political situations in towns in uninfluential states, I do not see stories about mayors in France where there has been a racial problem, I do not see tweets reposted about an issue with a mayor in an afrikaaner area of South Africa.
It doesn’t say anything new about US politics especially “at the moment” as this sort of crap went on for decades and decades under administrations of both stripes. This story will have the tiniest micro effect on anyone’s betting on Us elections and that is being wildly generous.
What it is however is the bizarre belief that these stories have anything to do with us, that they bear any sort of lesson for us about whether we are slightly superior or “be careful, this is coming to your town under reform”. Reposting makes people feel good, “look I care about an irrelevant place in the US being racist because Trump”. That’s what the reposting here is really about.
So when you are posting stories about discrimination in small places in France or Australia or Brazil and how they might effect anyone who is thinking of betting on their elections then I will take your argument - until then I will believe you posted it as some sort of virtuous mirror as it’s a really irrelevant story to us, here and in the UK.
I found it. More in Common have used some really convoluted wording to get this result - I cannot find any other usage of the phrase "sentence to jail time" as they have used it
They also included her whole (and deeply offensive ) tweet in the question, which is maybe fair enough, but if you're going to give that context why not also mention that she deleted it quite soon after?
Didn't she also do a nose tapping tweet saying she better delete the bad stuff in case the coppers came calling? Looking at Connolly's whole tweeting history she seems undoubtedly a horrible racist rsole. Mystifying why people want to turn her into Joan of Arc, unless..
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
But the CCN has since revised its analysis and now says the reorganisation could make no savings and actually cost money in some scenarios.
I wonder how much time Rayner spends doing her job compared to her own housing dealings:
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, has been accused of avoiding £40,000 in stamp duty on her new flat by the sea after she told authorities it was her primary residence.
Rayner, who is also the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, was said to have removed her name from the official deed to her house in Greater Manchester weeks before buying an £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex.
According to The Telegraph, Rayner would have had to pay £70,000 in stamp duty on a second property, so the change saved her £40,000. She is thought to have paid only £30,000.
She also told Tameside council in Greater Manchester that the house in her constituency was still her main home, before telling Brighton and Hove council that her new flat was her second home, which would change her status for council tax.
As we know Rayner has a long history of dubious housing transactions.
I’m awaiting for the ‘more targetting of an aspirational working class woman’ spin on this from her fans.
It's the different taxation of different residences for stamp duty and council tax that is the problem. If both were replaced by a property tax of perhaps 1% of value each year then the problem goes away.
Dr. Foxy, what do you think the cost would be of assessing the value of every single house every year?
It may well be prohibitive, in both political and financial terms.
You wouldn't do a valuation every year, for crying out loud. Up until 1990 there was an annual property tax on value. It was considered to be a cost-effective tax, it was dispensed with for ideological not economic reasons.
Ok, so, how often?
Individual assessments will still take a lot of time and cost initially. And the increase in cost to taxpayers will be politically difficult. It's the same reason council bands haven't been reformed, even though they should've been years ago.
Just use the last sale price plus changes to the HPI. That has the added bonus of incentivising people to improve their homes, as well as not seek out places with a hot housing market.
I've just checked it on my flat and it's pretty accurate at an LA level based on my latest mortgage valuation. I guess you could get more granular data too.
Good morning
House price data is much more available today then when the bands were originally introduced, so it should not be impossible to revalue all homes though a difficulty may arise in those homes which have had extensive changes
We need a lot more bands, as the present system is not only unfair but ludicrous, with the wealthy getting away with not paying anything like enough
But I don't think we should tax home improvements at all. The only additional bit I want to tax is general price inflation from the point at which you bought the property. I'd even apply a negative tax rate for solar, batteries, EV chargers and heating pumps.
Cost 10 years ago: £200k Improvements: £50k Green improvements: £20k HPI increase over 10 year: £60k
Value of home under my tax = 200 + 60 - 20 = 240k.
The problem is if you have a tax based on property value then creating exceptions makes the process more complex
Perhaps. You don't have to do the green thing. A simple cost + HPI would work fine.
To be fair once a nationwide revaluation has taken place and more bands added then those homes remain in those bands
It is the simplest way though there would inevitable be some variations to the general policy
Then you end up with the same problem in 20 years time. It needs to be regular valuation at short intervals.
Possibly but the simplest taxes are the easiest to manage
No great surprise to see some of the extravagant claims regarding savings from Local Government Reorganisation discredited given their source. There are County Unitaries out there - Cornwall, Shropshire and Somerset to name but three but every local authority area is different.
In Surrey, for example, replacing the eleven District and Borough Councils and County Council looks superficially attractive - a single Council Tax collecting and administration function instead of eleven for example - but what’s the point of local Government if you end up with an authority stretching as far from one side to the other as the distance from London to Brighton?
There’s an argument for the consolidation of back office functions across councils but even that doesn’t deliver the big savings you might expect.
The main and possibly most dubious advantage would be to reduce the number of councillors from 81 County and 453 District/Borough.
The other aspect is or are the not inconsiderable transitional costs - every contract has to be re-negotiated or re-tendered, every lease or license cha ged, every piece of signage changed.
Having district AND county councillors is just a nuisance, though - I raised a query re a smallish road with my district councillor and was redirected to my county councillor. On topic, I switch off the news when it gets to local matters, as they are nearly always minor irrelevancies - a punchup at a bus stop, a proposed move of the town hall. I'm not convinced that local government attracts much genuine interest from voters - hence the low turnout. I suppose it's useful but having two tiers is just a waste of money.
On topic, there's something grounded and calming about local news. Whenever I make the effort to sit down and read a local paper I always feel better for it. I should do it more often. We all should imo. Try it today if you can. Allocate a couple of hours to forget about what Sir Keir Starmer is or isn't doing under the bonnet, the screeching dog whistles from Jenrick and Farage, the latest steaming turd from Donald Trump's global enshittification project, put it all aside, plus stay off PB as well since that will only drag you back into the mire, and read up about what's going on in your own neck of the woods.
The problem is a lot of local news comes back to how useless the councillors are and by default politics
Reach Plc has done far far more to damage local journalism than Reform could ever dream of.
Their "business model" has been an absolute disaster. Buy up all these local newspapers, transform them to online only, stuff the website with syndicated clickbait which has nothing to do with local area.
On topic, there's something grounded and calming about local news. Whenever I make the effort to sit down and read a local paper I always feel better for it. I should do it more often. We all should imo. Try it today if you can. Allocate a couple of hours to forget about what Sir Keir Starmer is or isn't doing under the bonnet, the screeching dog whistles from Jenrick and Farage, the latest steaming turd from Donald Trump's global enshittification project, put it all aside, plus stay off PB as well since that will only drag you back into the mire, and read up about what's going on in your own neck of the woods.
Agreed on the calming effect on reading local news, although I suppose it depends where you live!
When I came home after living in Gibraltar, my favourite tv show was London Tonight, because it just made me feel properly at home again. When I moved from the outskirts of London to proper Essex, I found it quite relaxing that the local itv news was telling me about a farmers troubles in Cambridgeshire rather than a stabbing in Streatham, although now that grates a little
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
But the CCN has since revised its analysis and now says the reorganisation could make no savings and actually cost money in some scenarios.
I wonder how much time Rayner spends doing her job compared to her own housing dealings:
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, has been accused of avoiding £40,000 in stamp duty on her new flat by the sea after she told authorities it was her primary residence.
Rayner, who is also the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, was said to have removed her name from the official deed to her house in Greater Manchester weeks before buying an £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex.
According to The Telegraph, Rayner would have had to pay £70,000 in stamp duty on a second property, so the change saved her £40,000. She is thought to have paid only £30,000.
She also told Tameside council in Greater Manchester that the house in her constituency was still her main home, before telling Brighton and Hove council that her new flat was her second home, which would change her status for council tax.
As we know Rayner has a long history of dubious housing transactions.
I’m awaiting for the ‘more targetting of an aspirational working class woman’ spin on this from her fans.
It's the different taxation of different residences for stamp duty and council tax that is the problem. If both were replaced by a property tax of perhaps 1% of value each year then the problem goes away.
Dr. Foxy, what do you think the cost would be of assessing the value of every single house every year?
It may well be prohibitive, in both political and financial terms.
You wouldn't do a valuation every year, for crying out loud. Up until 1990 there was an annual property tax on value. It was considered to be a cost-effective tax, it was dispensed with for ideological not economic reasons.
Ok, so, how often?
Individual assessments will still take a lot of time and cost initially. And the increase in cost to taxpayers will be politically difficult. It's the same reason council bands haven't been reformed, even though they should've been years ago.
Just use the last sale price plus changes to the HPI. That has the added bonus of incentivising people to improve their homes, as well as not seek out places with a hot housing market.
I've just checked it on my flat and it's pretty accurate at an LA level based on my latest mortgage valuation. I guess you could get more granular data too.
Good morning
House price data is much more available today then when the bands were originally introduced, so it should not be impossible to revalue all homes though a difficulty may arise in those homes which have had extensive changes
We need a lot more bands, as the present system is not only unfair but ludicrous, with the wealthy getting away with not paying anything like enough
But I don't think we should tax home improvements at all. The only additional bit I want to tax is general price inflation from the point at which you bought the property. I'd even apply a negative tax rate for solar, batteries, EV chargers and heating pumps.
Cost 10 years ago: £200k Improvements: £50k Green improvements: £20k HPI increase over 10 year: £60k
Value of home under my tax = 200 + 60 - 20 = 240k.
The problem is if you have a tax based on property value then creating exceptions makes the process more complex
Perhaps. You don't have to do the green thing. A simple cost + HPI would work fine.
To be fair once a nationwide revaluation has taken place and more bands added then those homes remain in those bands
It is the simplest way though there would inevitable be some variations to the general policy
Then you end up with the same problem in 20 years time. It needs to be regular valuation at short intervals.
Possibly but the simplest taxes are the easiest to manage
...what? An automatic annual valuation via HPI is far simpler than going round and manually surveying 30 million houses every 20 years.
Lucy Connolly has been released this week after serving 10 months in jail. Connolly pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred after she posted the following message online during last summer's riots "Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you're at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it".
But Luke Tryl, of More in Common, has tweeted this:
"Polling on Lucy Connolly tweet following her release finds that 35% think her sentence too harsh, but majority 52% say it was about right or too lenient. Most 2024 Reform voters say too harsh, Tory voters split harsh or lenient/about right. Most Labour/LD/Green the latter"
Which is simply not true. They didn't poll on her sentence - 31 months - he is referring to a poll on 10 months - time served. Which was not her sentence, though they have clumsily tried to conflate the two
I like to support journalism but this feels like a silly waste of money when locals will do it for free on social media
Like they did in Dundee...
And they are still doing it, and digging out the real story, right now. Go have a look
Can you summarise or provide links so I can understand what the “real story” is?
The "real story" is how a minor incident that would barely reach a local newspaper in decades past became a worldwide moral panic about asylum seekers attacking young Scottish girls (despite the fact no asylum seekers was involved, and the male involved was a Christian).
It has all the features of how international Social Media controlled by the algorithms of the Nerd Reich values clicks over truth, and why we need proper journalism.
I do a great deal of looking at old newspapers for research projects and the sheer volume of local journalism and reportage intil the end of the C20 just makes me want to cry. Sure, they had their axes to grind, political, owners' interests, and so on. But the contrast today is heartbreaking.
Local newspapers, especially. When I was first elected a councillor, there was a press table in the corner of the committee room, and at most committee meetings there'd be two local paper journalists there, looking for stories, and if we wanted to flag anything to the press it was easy to talk them through the story after the meeting. Even though this went in the late 90s, they'd still send journalists to the main council meetings into the 21st century, and there'd be journalists who actually wrote stories and investigated stuff. By the time I finished, you just emailed the press release to the paper and it would either appear, often word for word as you'd sent it, or it wouldn't, and you never dealt with any real people, or saw them at meetings, at all.
To be fair, here on the island, we do actually still have an active local paper, just about, which claims to be the most-read in the country. But that sort of thing has disappeared in many places.
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
IMO it's not about money; it's about creating something that functions to help support better communities.
Given that local gov in England has been gutted like a dead fish for 20 years losing perhaps 25-30% of its resources, we know it needs seriously increased resources - built up in parallel with the capacity to use them (which was also gutted) - anyway.
The "make it better by cutting the staff by X%, or all their salaries by X%" line is a Taxpayers Alliance masturbation fantasy.
We learnt all of that during the attacks on LG in the noughties, whilst they were encouraged to take on risky investments, which landed us where we are now - with much of current income going to pay debt interest. That's just one more multi-year black hole that the current Government need to repair.
That is more a discussion about increasing council tax than the shift to unitaries
Something has to give. Council tax will probably need to go up considerably over the next few years to cover the statutory requirements.
"Bryn Howells was employed by Tewkesbury Borough Council, South Gloucestershire Council and Publica Group - a company providing services on behalf of three district councils.
"By receiving four publicly funded salaries and benefits, Mr Howells' conduct was wholly dishonest and represents a serious breach of trust and misuse of public funds.
Mr Howells simultaneously held the roles of strategic housing and enabling officer, senior development surveyor, and valuer and estates surveyor.
He also held a fourth role with another council via an agency during this period, but this was not included in the prosecution case."
He seems to have been able to do all his roles competently at once, which suggests that as part of the reorganisation into larger councils we might be able to drop a few people off the payroll...
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
But the CCN has since revised its analysis and now says the reorganisation could make no savings and actually cost money in some scenarios.
I wonder how much time Rayner spends doing her job compared to her own housing dealings:
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, has been accused of avoiding £40,000 in stamp duty on her new flat by the sea after she told authorities it was her primary residence.
Rayner, who is also the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, was said to have removed her name from the official deed to her house in Greater Manchester weeks before buying an £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex.
According to The Telegraph, Rayner would have had to pay £70,000 in stamp duty on a second property, so the change saved her £40,000. She is thought to have paid only £30,000.
She also told Tameside council in Greater Manchester that the house in her constituency was still her main home, before telling Brighton and Hove council that her new flat was her second home, which would change her status for council tax.
That tweet is like reporting on a poll that has Party A on 35%, Party B on 32% and Party C on 20% with the Headline “Over half of respondents thought Party A was the wrong choice, only a third want them in power”
Is that you channelling your inner HYUFD?
Haha I can see it!
But it is just evidence of the slant different people can put on the same poll. Remainers used to include non voters/children in their numbers to say “72% of the British people didn’t vote for this!”, while Leavers citef the 17m who voted to Leave.
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
But the CCN has since revised its analysis and now says the reorganisation could make no savings and actually cost money in some scenarios.
I wonder how much time Rayner spends doing her job compared to her own housing dealings:
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, has been accused of avoiding £40,000 in stamp duty on her new flat by the sea after she told authorities it was her primary residence.
Rayner, who is also the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, was said to have removed her name from the official deed to her house in Greater Manchester weeks before buying an £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex.
According to The Telegraph, Rayner would have had to pay £70,000 in stamp duty on a second property, so the change saved her £40,000. She is thought to have paid only £30,000.
She also told Tameside council in Greater Manchester that the house in her constituency was still her main home, before telling Brighton and Hove council that her new flat was her second home, which would change her status for council tax.
As we know Rayner has a long history of dubious housing transactions.
I’m awaiting for the ‘more targetting of an aspirational working class woman’ spin on this from her fans.
It's the different taxation of different residences for stamp duty and council tax that is the problem. If both were replaced by a property tax of perhaps 1% of value each year then the problem goes away.
Dr. Foxy, what do you think the cost would be of assessing the value of every single house every year?
It may well be prohibitive, in both political and financial terms.
You wouldn't do a valuation every year, for crying out loud. Up until 1990 there was an annual property tax on value. It was considered to be a cost-effective tax, it was dispensed with for ideological not economic reasons.
Ok, so, how often?
Individual assessments will still take a lot of time and cost initially. And the increase in cost to taxpayers will be politically difficult. It's the same reason council bands haven't been reformed, even though they should've been years ago.
Just use the last sale price plus changes to the HPI. That has the added bonus of incentivising people to improve their homes, as well as not seek out places with a hot housing market.
I've just checked it on my flat and it's pretty accurate at an LA level based on my latest mortgage valuation. I guess you could get more granular data too.
Good morning
House price data is much more available today then when the bands were originally introduced, so it should not be impossible to revalue all homes though a difficulty may arise in those homes which have had extensive changes
We need a lot more bands, as the present system is not only unfair but ludicrous, with the wealthy getting away with not paying anything like enough
But I don't think we should tax home improvements at all. The only additional bit I want to tax is general price inflation from the point at which you bought the property. I'd even apply a negative tax rate for solar, batteries, EV chargers and heating pumps.
Cost 10 years ago: £200k Improvements: £50k Green improvements: £20k HPI increase over 10 year: £60k
Value of home under my tax = 200 + 60 - 20 = 240k.
The problem is if you have a tax based on property value then creating exceptions makes the process more complex
Perhaps. You don't have to do the green thing. A simple cost + HPI would work fine.
To be fair once a nationwide revaluation has taken place and more bands added then those homes remain in those bands
It is the simplest way though there would inevitable be some variations to the general policy
Then you end up with the same problem in 20 years time. It needs to be regular valuation at short intervals.
Possibly but the simplest taxes are the easiest to manage
...what? An automatic annual valuation via HPI is far simpler than going round and manually surveying 30 million houses every 20 years.
Only if there is an effective IT system in place, and HPI varies by regions, though I dont disagree with your wider point
The UK government did not do its own analysis of the cost of the biggest reorganisation of councils in England for decades, the BBC has learned.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said "a significant amount of money" could be saved by merging councils in 21 areas into single authorities.
Rayner's department, the ministry of local government, based its cost estimates on a 2020 report commissioned by the County Council Network (CCN) that said £2.9bn could be saved over five years.
IMO it's not about money; it's about creating something that functions to help support better communities.
Given that local gov in England has been gutted like a dead fish for 20 years losing perhaps 25-30% of its resources, we know it needs seriously increased resources - built up in parallel with the capacity to use them (which was also gutted) - anyway.
The "make it better by cutting the staff by X%, or all their salaries by X%" line is a Taxpayers Alliance masturbation fantasy.
We learnt all of that during the attacks on LG in the noughties, whilst they were encouraged to take on risky investments, which landed us where we are now - with much of current income going to pay debt interest. That's just one more multi-year black hole that the current Government need to repair.
That is more a discussion about increasing council tax than the shift to unitaries
Something has to give. Council tax will probably need to go up considerably over the next few years to cover the statutory requirements.
"Bryn Howells was employed by Tewkesbury Borough Council, South Gloucestershire Council and Publica Group - a company providing services on behalf of three district councils.
"By receiving four publicly funded salaries and benefits, Mr Howells' conduct was wholly dishonest and represents a serious breach of trust and misuse of public funds.
Mr Howells simultaneously held the roles of strategic housing and enabling officer, senior development surveyor, and valuer and estates surveyor.
He also held a fourth role with another council via an agency during this period, but this was not included in the prosecution case."
He seems to have been able to do all his roles competently at once, which suggests that as part of the reorganisation into larger councils we might be able to drop a few people off the payroll...
Council workers are able to do the same work in 80% of the time, obviously for the same salary. Obviously they did not have too little to do and stretched it out over 5 days.
I like to support journalism but this feels like a silly waste of money when locals will do it for free on social media
Like they did in Dundee...
Dundee? Did I miss something?
Edit: on reflection: just look at thenational.scot
Aha. If it was there I probably would miss it!
I can't look at all the ultralocal media .
I was actually worried about breaching a PB rule, else I'd have posted a linky. Just look at the stories on the front page with 'Dundee' on them ... Dundee is in Scotland, so ...
Lucy Connolly has been released this week after serving 10 months in jail. Connolly pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred after she posted the following message online during last summer's riots "Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you're at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it".
Can somebody tell me who "More in Common" are? I've somewhat lost track of all these popup pollsters.
On the apparent misrepresentation, is that any different from the papers claiming that "X walked free from Court", when they actually have a suspended prison sentence.
At the time it was I think "40% in jail minus time on remand, plus the rest on licence".
That tweet is like reporting on a poll that has Party A on 35%, Party B on 32% and Party C on 20% with the Headline “Over half of respondents thought Party A was the wrong choice, only a third want them in power”
The difference is that the Lucy Connolly polling is more of a binary question, rather than a choice from half a dozen options in a party poll.
How many are confusing her with Lucy Letby, the convicted murderer of babies in a neonatal unit?
I hope the general public aren't that stoopid, but perhaps MiC should have made it clear it was the brunette chubby racist Lucy rather than the blond slightly less chubby murdery Lucy.
No great surprise to see some of the extravagant claims regarding savings from Local Government Reorganisation discredited given their source. There are County Unitaries out there - Cornwall, Shropshire and Somerset to name but three but every local authority area is different.
In Surrey, for example, replacing the eleven District and Borough Councils and County Council looks superficially attractive - a single Council Tax collecting and administration function instead of eleven for example - but what’s the point of local Government if you end up with an authority stretching as far from one side to the other as the distance from London to Brighton?
There’s an argument for the consolidation of back office functions across councils but even that doesn’t deliver the big savings you might expect.
The main and possibly most dubious advantage would be to reduce the number of councillors from 81 County and 453 District/Borough.
The other aspect is or are the not inconsiderable transitional costs - every contract has to be re-negotiated or re-tendered, every lease or license cha ged, every piece of signage changed.
Having district AND county councillors is just a nuisance, though - I raised a query re a smallish road with my district councillor and was redirected to my county councillor. On topic, I switch off the news when it gets to local matters, as they are nearly always minor irrelevancies - a punchup at a bus stop, a proposed move of the town hall. I'm not convinced that local government attracts much genuine interest from voters - hence the low turnout. I suppose it's useful but having two tiers is just a waste of money.
Poor old chap that I am, desperately needing to occupy my mind, I take an interest in local politics and it seems to me that we could do very well round here with a beefed-up Parish Council (or similar) and a County Council. The only issue where the District Council seems to be active is in Planning and I suspect a Planning District Office of the County Council could do as well there.
How many are confusing her with Lucy Letby, the convicted murderer of babies in a neonatal unit?
There is no confusion with Letby. They make it very plain this is Connolly by giving the tweet in full. However the poll is arguably misleading to the point of worthlessness, because they ask people their views on her "sentence" and imply her sentence was 10 months. Whereas her sentence was 31 months, and 10 months was time served in chokey
Tut tut
Why didn't they simply ask "Lucy Connolly was given a 31 month jail sentence, and served 10, do you think this was justified...."
Comments
Lewis Goodall
@lewis_goodall
Polling from @Moreincommon_
on Lucy Connolly
More than half think her sentence was too lenient or about right. Only a third that it was too harsh.
Only 18% think politicians should associate themselves her, while 51% think they should actively distance themselves from her.
9:20 am · 29 Aug 2025
https://x.com/lewis_goodall/status/1961343068214628388
I've just checked it on my flat and it's pretty accurate at an LA level based on my latest mortgage valuation. I guess you could get more granular data too.
I've asked lawyers, on several occasions, about their responsibility for fall out from their actions. A couple of the lawyers for Capn. Hook (this rum blossom - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Hamza_al-Masri) - they were very clear that their belief was that all such extraditions must be stopped. I pointed out that the result was the government enacting ever more extreme laws. Their response to that was an aggressive denial of any moral responsibility for the reaction to judgements they had sought.
Another level - the principle that a tiny number of objectors can delay any government decision, by repeated court cases. Previously, the legal hack was that the hotels were licensed to house and feed hundreds. So housing and feeding hundreds didn't require any action. The Process State has reacted here - the idea that a government can simply do things, without years of lawyers arguing about it, is inimical to people in the Enquiry Industrial Complex.
Another - many people in what used to be called the establishment take the view that the needs of some groups of foreigners exceed those of UK citizens. Aside from a comic incident at a City Diner, there are the differential tariffs on import of components and completed electronic items. The people behind the Raspberry Pi computer wanted to try and manufacture in the UK - but the tariffs on components were higher. They were told the tarrifs (as they were) were important to China, and changing them would cause "offence". I got the same response when I enquired.
Given that local gov in England has been gutted like a dead fish for 20 years losing perhaps 25-30% of its resources, we know it needs seriously increased resources - built up in parallel with the capacity to use them (which was also gutted) - anyway.
The "make it better by cutting the staff by X%, or all their salaries by X%" line is a Taxpayers Alliance masturbation fantasy.
We learnt all of that during the attacks on LG in the noughties, whilst they were encouraged to take on risky investments, which landed us where we are now - with much of current income going to pay debt interest. That's just one more multi-year black hole that the current Government need to repair.
House price data is much more available today then when the bands were originally introduced, so it should not be impossible to revalue all homes though a difficulty may arise in those homes which have had extensive changes
We need a lot more bands, as the present system is not only unfair but ludicrous, with the wealthy getting away with not paying anything like enough
Or not...
⚠️ US, UK and Norway launched a major hunt for a Russian submarine suspected of threatening US Navy's USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier in the Norwegian Sea.
The Royal Air Force (RAF) made eight P-8A Poseidon flights from RAF base Lossiemouth in Scotland.
The Norwegian Air Force launched three from Evenes Air Base near Narvik, inside the Arctic Circle.
The US Navy used a base in Iceland but the scale of the operation meant they were reinforced by at least two US Poseidons from Sicily.
The mission appears to have started this past Sunday and lasted almost 48 hours, with Tom Sharpe, a former Navy commander, saying:
“It looks like they have found a Russian submarine and they are hammering it.
“It is telling Russia: ‘We see you.'”
https://x.com/vanguardintel/status/1960682563351044394
If I were charged with a federal crime, I’d hire Pam Bondi’s brother as my lawyer. Because I don’t think this is a coincidence.
https://bsky.app/profile/markjacob.bsky.social/post/3lxj2lloghc26
It's easier, so rallies are longer.
It's easier to get an enjoyably competitive game between players where there is a slight gap in standard.
Because the court is enclosed, you spend a much smaller proportion of your energy going to fetch the ball at the end of each point.
As I understand it, its expansion is being bankrolled by the Emir of Qatar. Which strikes me as a relatively benign use of his billions.
To me, Trump is openly aligning with Putin, eroding any trust in the US government.
https://x.com/olddog100ua/status/1961295032167629191
I can't look at all the ultralocal media
Cost 10 years ago: £200k
Improvements: £50k
Green improvements: £20k
HPI increase over 10 year: £60k
Value of home under my tax = 200 + 60 - 20 = 240k.
The best that could be hoped for is a ceasefire on current lines of occupation
Balkans 1990s - there's a direct line from there to comedy in the UK.
Alternatively the Government can pass an act of parliament next week.
What is needed is not to allow the government to override the law in "the national interest" (unless it is really an emergency) but to have a more streamlined and simple legal system. Arguably lawyers shouldn't be allowed anywhere near government as it is always in their interest to make the legal system ever more complex.
(Ditto accountants. You should be able to calculate your tax yourself on the back of an envelope without risking overpayment)
Prime Minister under fire after it emerged principal private secretary Nin Pandit is to be replaced
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/08/28/keir-starmer-faces-revolt-over-cruelty-women/ (£££)
Not to mention briefing against Angela Rayner. Starmer's perceived woman problem is why I suspect a Cooper/Reeves job swap is more likely than dismissing either, although I guess you could argue that both ways.
No great surprise to see some of the extravagant claims regarding savings from Local Government Reorganisation discredited given their source. There are County Unitaries out there - Cornwall, Shropshire and Somerset to name but three but every local authority area is different.
In Surrey, for example, replacing the eleven District and Borough Councils and County Council looks superficially attractive - a single Council Tax collecting and administration function instead of eleven for example - but what’s the point of local Government if you end up with an authority stretching as far from one side to the other as the distance from London to Brighton?
There’s an argument for the consolidation of back office functions across councils but even that doesn’t deliver the big savings you might expect.
The main and possibly most dubious advantage would be to reduce the number of councillors from 81 County and 453 District/Borough.
The other aspect is or are the not inconsiderable transitional costs - every contract has to be re-negotiated or re-tendered, every lease or license cha ged, every piece of signage changed.
I remain surprised that Labour councillor got off. I wonder if he benefitted from an inverse reaction, where people basically agreed with him that far-right rioters should be, well, killed. Quite an authoritarian bunch the British.
I think it's a story that says a lot about the US and politics in the US, and thus can inform people's betting on US elections.
But Goodall appears to be basing his tweet on a Daily Mirror report of it, which gets fundamental things wrong:
"More than half of respondents said her 10-month prison sentence was either about right (32%) or too lenient (20%), while a third (35%) said it was too harsh."
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/politicians-given-warning-voters-over-35810229?int_source=amp_continue_reading&int_medium=amp&int_campaign=continue_reading_button#amp-readmore-target
She didn't get 10 months, she got 31 months
Ten months is a lot more reasonable, and might explain the findings. However the data is so mangled by the Mirror it's hard to know what's what
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/politicians-given-warning-voters-over-35810229.amp
This looks..... unusual to me
More in Common have told people her "sentence to jail time" was ten months. What does "sentence to jail time" even mean? Her sentence was 31 months
https://x.com/LukeTryl/status/1961344481682202789/photo/1
Plenty of other places do it, so I'd suggest that objections are mainly political.
Post Nord cited a 90% fall in letters handled since 2000 and have started removing Denmark’s 1500 mailboxes.
Basically, from 2026, it will be open to private companies like the equivalent of Evri to operate a letter service using their own home delivery and shop facilities if they so choose. The much more active parcel service, as here, will see a plethora of companies and options.
I’m sure someone on here will know how many letters are still handled by the UK Post Office and how many letter boxes there are.
It is the simplest way though there would inevitable be some variations to the general policy
It's shameful he is so neutral on this while civilians are targeted by Russia in Kyiv. Russia and Putin should be treated as a terrorist state.
Fortunately, he's not able to force an awful peace deal (which is any deal Putin would accept at present) on Ukraine and Europe.
Lucy Connolly has been released this week after serving 10 months in jail. Connolly pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred after she posted the following message online during last summer's riots "Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you're at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it".
The lower of Zoopla & Rightmove could be used in all honesty.
‘You don’t starve in prison do you?’
User numbers are a bit like subscriber numbers on YouTube channels. It tells you something, but not really the whole picture. With YouTube, you look at the views on across a range of videos and then calculate that as a percentage of the subscriber total, to get a handle on if that is a healthy channel or not.
They also included her whole (and deeply offensive ) tweet in the question, which is maybe fair enough, but if you're going to give that context why not also mention that she deleted it quite soon after?
Every time I go down my local main road I see 150m of nice shared pavement, which abruptly turns back into dodgy 1970s narrowness at either end because District (who manage Planning Conditions) and County (who manage highways) between them managed to fail to impose the same "improve the pavement next to your estate" condition on the next 4 estate planning permissions over the following years.
🤔🤔🤔
And democracy is failing partly for that reason.
If it were the case that he's accept a frozen conflict along the current front line, we'd already have had a ceasefire ahead of negotiations by now.
The reality is that he will not accept genuine Ukrainian sovereignty. Any security for Ukraine requires, as a bare minimum, some sort of military defensive pact between Europe and Ukraine. Putin is adamant he won't accept that.
😂😂😂😂
* Though there were occurrences of values not being updated. In the late 1980s I was in a house with a "Rateable Value" of about £39. They updated the rate in the £ every year, and sometimes missed the updates. At that point it had not been sold since 1926.
As an aside, I'd compared her in conversation to the lady who put a cat in a bin.
Anna Whittaker of BBC is one of several I believe who have started at the channel.
https://x.com/journoanna_
It doesn’t say anything new about US politics especially “at the moment” as this sort of crap went on for decades and decades under administrations of both stripes. This story will have the tiniest micro effect on anyone’s betting on Us elections and that is being wildly generous.
What it is however is the bizarre belief that these stories have anything to do with us, that they bear any sort of lesson for us about whether we are slightly superior or “be careful, this is coming to your town under reform”. Reposting makes people feel good, “look I care about an irrelevant place in the US being racist because Trump”. That’s what the reposting here is really about.
So when you are posting stories about discrimination in small places in France or Australia or Brazil and how they might effect anyone who is thinking of betting on their elections then I will take your argument - until then I will believe you posted it as some sort of virtuous mirror as it’s a really irrelevant story to us, here and in the UK.
Looking at Connolly's whole tweeting history she seems undoubtedly a horrible racist rsole. Mystifying why people want to turn her into Joan of Arc, unless..
When I came home after living in Gibraltar, my favourite tv show was London Tonight, because it just made me feel properly at home again. When I moved from the outskirts of London to proper Essex, I found it quite relaxing that the local itv news was telling me about a farmers troubles in Cambridgeshire rather than a stabbing in Streatham, although now that grates a little
"Polling on Lucy Connolly tweet following her release finds that 35% think her sentence too harsh, but majority 52% say it was about right or too lenient. Most 2024 Reform voters say too harsh, Tory voters split harsh or lenient/about right. Most Labour/LD/Green the latter"
Which is simply not true. They didn't poll on her sentence - 31 months - he is referring to a poll on 10 months - time served. Which was not her sentence, though they have clumsily tried to conflate the two
To be fair, here on the island, we do actually still have an active local paper, just about, which claims to be the most-read in the country. But that sort of thing has disappeared in many places.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80p9z29r1ko
"By receiving four publicly funded salaries and benefits, Mr Howells' conduct was wholly dishonest and represents a serious breach of trust and misuse of public funds.
Mr Howells simultaneously held the roles of strategic housing and enabling officer, senior development surveyor, and valuer and estates surveyor.
He also held a fourth role with another council via an agency during this period, but this was not included in the prosecution case."
He seems to have been able to do all his roles competently at once, which suggests that as part of the reorganisation into larger councils we might be able to drop a few people off the payroll...
And good morning from a very wet Northern France.
But it is just evidence of the slant different people can put on the same poll. Remainers used to include non voters/children in their numbers to say “72% of the British people didn’t vote for this!”, while Leavers citef the 17m who voted to Leave.
It's the analysis and conclusions and predictions and opinions that are brain dead.
More of this coming to a town hall near you.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn41nz07pnxo
On the apparent misrepresentation, is that any different from the papers claiming that "X walked free from Court", when they actually have a suspended prison sentence.
At the time it was I think "40% in jail minus time on remand, plus the rest on licence".
Scottish Green members have binned ex-minister Lorna Slater and chosen Ross Greer and Gillian Mackay as party's new co-leaders
The only issue where the District Council seems to be active is in Planning and I suspect a Planning District Office of the County Council could do as well there.
Tut tut
Why didn't they simply ask "Lucy Connolly was given a 31 month jail sentence, and served 10, do you think this was justified...."
Perhaps it would have given a different result?