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 ...
I was at a day conference on Ultralocal news and blogging in Birmingham in 2008, where I shared a platform with Sion Simon the famous journalist. The chap from Ventnor Blog was an eye-opener.
FWIW one of the main takeaways from a couple of focus groups on Lucy Connolly/her interview held by different pollsters was
‘You don’t starve in prison do you?’
I imagine you also spend a lot of time sitting or lying down. I'd expect that the cardiovascular health of people who spend time in prison declines considerably.
One (arguably minor) reason for reducing the number of people sentences to prison, perhaps?
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."
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
I think she’s a vile individual but also think the original sentence was over the top .
Yes, the harsh sentencing guidelines for incitement to violence were clearly intended for use against Muslim preachers telling their followers to attack people rather than white women telling their followers to attack people.
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.
That is *really* near me. Really, really near. Not quite so near as that I could throw a stone and hit it, but near enough that a medium-sized trebuchet might hit it. Their access road and car park makes for a good place for me to extend a run by a mile or so, and they don't seem to mind me running along the paths outside their building.
I haven't really noticed a decline in council services after the scheme started, but I am not a heavy user of council services, and anecdotally others have (though people always complain...).
What bothers me about the scheme is that the council's leader is doing her doctoral thesis on the scheme, and that seems like a rather heavy incentive for the scheme to be seen as a success. Oh, and apparently she did not publicise the subject of her thesis when the scheme was discussed.
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...."
Perhaps it would have given a different result?
You’d still might get an issue because them some will get irritated that she only served 10 months and that could have effected the polling but I do get your overall point .
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 ...
Aha - that one.
I thought that that rule had been suspended several months ago, except for certain individuals.
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".
10 months is unnecessary. 10 weeks arguably reasonable as would a community sentence and education order be.
Plenty of lefty and centrist liberals will be thinking like that in addition to those who agree with the sentiment, surprised it is not a majority who think 10 months excessive. Like a lot of this type of polling it is probably a proxy for do you like/support that person rather than answering the bloody question.
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 am going off the MoreInCommon email, Luke is paraphrasing.
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 ...
I was at a day conference on Ultralocal news and blogging in Birmingham in 2008, where I shared a platform with Sion Simon the famous journalist. The chap from Ventnor Blog was an eye-opener.
It was a fun day.
That would be Mr Perry? They're still going, employing a team now, and covering the whole island
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.
That is *really* near me. Really, really near. Not quite so near as that I could throw a stone and hit it, but near enough that a medium-sized trebuchet might hit it. Their access road and car park makes for a good place for me to extend a run by a mile or so, and they don't seem to mind me running along the paths outside their building.
I haven't really noticed a decline in council services after the scheme started, but I am not a heavy user of council services, and anecdotally others have (though people always complain...).
What bothers me about the scheme is that the council's leader is doing her doctoral thesis on the scheme, and that seems like a rather heavy incentive for the scheme to be seen as a success. Oh, and apparently she did not publicise the subject of her thesis when the scheme was discussed.
Potholes & Public Footpaths 2025 vs Potholes & Public Footpaths 2005?
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.
Friend of mine is a retired journalist, who spent his life in local newspapers, ending up as editor of what was once the most significant local one. He's saddened by what it has now become; doesn't really understand why anyone buys it.
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 ...
I was at a day conference on Ultralocal news and blogging in Birmingham in 2008, where I shared a platform with Sion Simon the famous journalist. The chap from Ventnor Blog was an eye-opener.
It was a fun day.
That would be Mr Perry? They're still going, employing a team now, and covering the whole island
Probably. They were the first site I recall that had a spat with the local council about wanting to report meetings, and were chucked out. There was quite a kerfuffle.
There are lots of experiments happening quietly. We have one locally called The Spirit of Alfreton, which is one of several run by a trust. That's where I picked up my local railway station having a new footbridge-lift from.
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.
Who the fuck do you think works at that refinery in Saratov that Ukraine droned last week? Spetsnaz?
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?
It looks like a legal minefield to me, so, No. I do not wish to trouble the mods (or get banned)
But 20 minutes on X or whatever will flesh it out
Oh, go on. These citizen journalists are risking it. If it's true, and all reputable sources check their facts, I'm sure you'll have no problem. Tell you what, retweet the relevant posts so we can pop over and save ourselves 20 mins.
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?
No, but I am suspicious the anti-oldies framing originates from Russian trolls stirring up intergenerational conflict. There are many poor pensioners, and calling them boomers is taken from America whose postwar baby boom came earlier than ours. And I suspect my analysis captures more truth than yours.
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.
Friend of mine is a retired journalist, who spent his life in local newspapers, ending up as editor of what was once the most significant local one. He's saddened by what it has now become; doesn't really understand why anyone buys it.
I'm old enough to remember when the CARTOONIST on our local paper was something of a local celebrity. It sold 15-20,000 copies. A local paper for a small city (and county). It probably employed 30 people, and it mattered. Incredible, looking back
Vance on undermining the Federal Reserve: "I don't think we allow bureaucrats to make decisions about monetary policy and interest rates without any input from the people that were elected to serve the American people...POTUS is much better able to make these determinations."
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...
That wasn't what the judge said when jailing him. Sentencing him, Judge Gibbney said: "It's clear that when you did work, the work was good. You are an experienced man in your profession. You are a man with a passion for your job.
"You took the view this was an opportunity to make hay while the sun shined and you could earn significant sums of money doing work for local authorities confident in the knowledge they weren't as diligent in establishing you were doing all that was set you."
The judge rejected Howells' claim that the councils had not suffered loss, telling him: "You did not do in any given week, three lots or four lots of 37 hours." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3dp7m4yv2xo
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.
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.
Who the fuck do you think works at that refinery in Saratov that Ukraine droned last week? Spetsnaz?
False equivalence there. Russia has very clearly been a lot more indiscriminate in its targeting of civilians than Ukraine has.
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.
Who the fuck do you think works at that refinery in Saratov that Ukraine droned last week? Spetsnaz?
There is a difference between hitting workers at a plant that is intimately connected with Russia's war economy, and hitting tower blocks where people are sleeping.
Not only is the M I C poll based on a misleading premise, it's well-established that when you give people three options, a lot of respondents will plump for the middle one, as it sounds reasonable.
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?
No, but I am suspicious the anti-oldies framing originates from Russian trolls stirring up intergenerational conflict. There are many poor pensioners, and calling them boomers is taken from America whose postwar baby boom came earlier than ours. And I suspect my analysis captures more truth than yours.
I don't disagree, I also didn't agree with the assessment on boomers either.
France already taxes the wealthy quite a lot, going even further with a wealth tax like Hollande did just sees them go abroad.
Its problem is not that it undertaxes the rich, nor even the number of boomers it has beyond raising the French retirement age from 64 (which even then had huge opposition when raised from 62).
It is more that France has 56% of its gdp spent by the government and an average working week of just 36 hours but neither Melenchon nor Le Pen and Bardella want to do much about that so Macron and Barnier and now Bayrou can't get the shift in a more Thatcherite direction Macron and LRs want through
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.
Who the fuck do you think works at that refinery in Saratov that Ukraine droned last week? Spetsnaz?
False equivalence there. Russia has very clearly been a lot more indiscriminate in its targeting of civilians than Ukraine has.
Been obvious for a while that destroying Russias's hydrocarbon industry destroys Russia's ability to undertake its terrorist missile war on Ukraine's hospitals, schools, old people's homes, residential blocks and other war crime targets.
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.
Who the fuck do you think works at that refinery in Saratov that Ukraine droned last week? Spetsnaz?
There is a difference between hitting workers at a plant that is intimately connected with Russia's war economy, and hitting tower blocks where people are sleeping.
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.
Who the fuck do you think works at that refinery in Saratov that Ukraine droned last week? Spetsnaz?
There is a difference between hitting workers at a plant that is intimately connected with Russia's war economy, and hitting tower blocks where people are sleeping.
I think that poll on Connolly is concerning from a non-Reform point of view.
Why? It unsurprisingly went on party lines, Labour and LD voters mostly fine with her sentence, Tory voters split, Reform voters appalled by it
I think the numbers saying Too harsh are higher than we should ordinarily expect. Just because a majority are saying too lenient/about right, isn't enough in my opinion. You'd like to see the Too harsh number around 10%.
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?
No, but I am suspicious the anti-oldies framing originates from Russian trolls stirring up intergenerational conflict. There are many poor pensioners, and calling them boomers is taken from America whose postwar baby boom came earlier than ours. And I suspect my analysis captures more truth than yours.
I don't disagree, I also didn't agree with the assessment on boomers either.
France already taxes the wealthy quite a lot, going even further with a wealth tax like Hollande did just sees them go abroad.
Its problem is not that it undertaxes the rich, nor even the number of boomers it has beyond raising the French retirement age from 64 (which even then had huge opposition when raised from 62).
It is more that France has 56% of its gdp spent by the government and an average working week of just 36 hours but neither Melenchon nor Le Pen and Bardella want to do much about that so Macron and Barnier and now Bayrou can't get the shift in a more Thatcherite direction Macron and LRs want through
At least in France you can see where all the money goes. The towns and cities gleam, the infra is fantastic, the trains whizz by
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.
Labour or LD or Green councils might well do that, Tory or Reform councils largely won't
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.
Who the fuck do you think works at that refinery in Saratov that Ukraine droned last week? Spetsnaz?
False equivalence there. Russia has very clearly been a lot more indiscriminate in its targeting of civilians than Ukraine has.
Been obvious for a while that destroying Russias's hydrocarbon industry destroys Russia's ability to undertake its terrorist missile war on Ukraine's hospitals, schools, old people's homes, residential blocks and other war crime targets.
It's working too.
It's also a matter of settled international law that energy infrastructure such as oil refineries are legitimate targets of war.
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.
Hence unitaries, the question is how big unitaries should be
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 ...
I was at a day conference on Ultralocal news and blogging in Birmingham in 2008, where I shared a platform with Sion Simon the famous journalist. The chap from Ventnor Blog was an eye-opener.
It was a fun day.
That would be Mr Perry? They're still going, employing a team now, and covering the whole island
Probably. They were the first site I recall that had a spat with the local council about wanting to report meetings, and were chucked out. There was quite a kerfuffle.
Probably about the then council's ill-fated schools reorg?
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.
Well given that might lead to the death of most of our population in a nuclear war that is hardly surprising.
This is not the Crimean War when it might have been an option as nukes had not yet been invented
I think that poll on Connolly is concerning from a non-Reform point of view.
Why? It unsurprisingly went on party lines, Labour and LD voters mostly fine with her sentence, Tory voters split, Reform voters appalled by it
I think the numbers saying Too harsh are higher than we should ordinarily expect. Just because a majority are saying too lenient/about right, isn't enough in my opinion. You'd like to see the Too harsh number around 10%.
Check the wording of the poll. They didn't actually poll on her sentence. They polled on time served, 10 months, and pretended that was her sentence, in the question
It's seriously misleading. I thought More in Common were meant to be pukka and high-minded: this is unimpressive
There are two truths: Broadcast TV is obsolete Social Media "news" is often fake
The world has moved on from broadcasting. I read that BSkyB are likely to cease satellite transmission in the next few years. So there is little point in anyone trying to set up a new broadcaster, hyperlocal or not, fully streamed or not. Content is NOW, not when people try to schedule it.
The second of my points is the biggest worry. The incident in Dundee is a case in point - a video is amplified with a context attached which is not truthful. Now that the truth is out, people still insist that the lie is the truth and the truth is the lie.
I don't believe that you can counter lies with the truth when the people accepting the lies want the lie to be true, What you can do is hold a mirror up to reality and shout as loud as you can for attention.
I am going to engage in an interesting experiment of sticking my whole Holyrood campaign out on social media, supported by my local party colleagues who are giving me freedom to do what I please. We will see how long the LibDems tolerate it, but as long as I am not getting my cock out shouting willy banjo I hope they will use it as an interesting experiment...
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.
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
Setting aside the lurid speculation about blackmail material and the obvious desire for Trump to make money via a rapprochement with Russia, it seems that the main determinant of Trump's approach is an assumption of Russian strength that leads to Trump making the US far weaker and subservient than it is.
I cannot think of any other national leader who has so drastically undermined the strength of their country by such an assumption of its relative weakness.
Sad as it is, I don't find it hard to understand voters electing an unpleasant person, or selectively overlooking their past misdemeanours. But to support someone so weak is something I am struggling to make sense of.
More than anything I think it was the weakness that Corbyn displayed over Russia and other issues that led to the decline in his electoral appeal between 2017 and 2019. As I said at the time, if Corbyn wasn't strong enough to root out antisemites from his own party, then he wasn't going to be remotely strong enough to take on international capitalism and remould Britain in the fashion that he aspired to.
So why is there such a reality distortion field when it comes to Trump's weakness?
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.
Who the fuck do you think works at that refinery in Saratov that Ukraine droned last week? Spetsnaz?
There is a difference between hitting workers at a plant that is intimately connected with Russia's war economy, and hitting tower blocks where people are sleeping.
As one who was, as a child, put to bed in an air-raid shelter while the enemies bombers were overhead, heading for East London, I'm rather surprised the civilian casualties aren't higher.
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.
Well given that might lead to the death of most of our population in a nuclear war that is hardly surprising.
This is not the Crimean War when it might have been an option as nukes had not yet been invented
How do you think usage of nukes would help Russia, in the tactical or strategic sense?
Go on.
The answer is why Putin has not used them already.
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
Setting aside the lurid speculation about blackmail material and the obvious desire for Trump to make money via a rapprochement with Russia, it seems that the main determinant of Trump's approach is an assumption of Russian strength that leads to Trump making the US far weaker and subservient than it is.
I cannot think of any other national leader who has so drastically undermined the strength of their country by such an assumption of its relative weakness.
Sad as it is, I don't find it hard to understand voters electing an unpleasant person, or selectively overlooking their past misdemeanours. But to support someone so weak is something I am struggling to make sense of.
More than anything I think it was the weakness that Corbyn displayed over Russia and other issues that led to the decline in his electoral appeal between 2017 and 2019. As I said at the time, if Corbyn wasn't strong enough to root out antisemites from his own party, then he wasn't going to be remotely strong enough to take on international capitalism and remould Britain in the fashion that he aspired to.
So why is there such a reality distortion field when it comes to Trump's weakness?
Most Trump voters don't give a shit about anywhere other than the USA. Trump was elected by them to end US involvement in foreign wars, build border walls and deport immigrants, go to war on woke and cut taxes and government spending and by evangelicals to cut back abortion.
The average Trump voter couldn't care less about the relative power of the US abroad as they have little interest in abroad and many will not even have travelled much beyond their state in the South or Midwest or mountain West let alone have a passport and been abroad
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.
Labour or LD or Green councils might well do that, Tory or Reform councils largely won't
Tory and/or Reform councils will just let services to the community deteriorate. While, for the moment, blaming central government.
The average Trump voter couldn't care less about the relative power of the US abroad as they have little interest in abroad and many will not even have travelled much beyond their state in the South or Midwest or mountain West let alone have a passport and been abroad
Except 'abroad' is where much of their wealth and stuff comes from. As both decline, perhaps awareness will rise to compensate
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.
Indeed, she gets £56 a week from doing some prison jobs ie less than the £92 a week Job Seeker's Allowance now pays or the £400 a month Universal Credit pays a single person and is serving a whole life sentence.
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".
10 months is unnecessary. 10 weeks arguably reasonable as would a community sentence and education order be.
Plenty of lefty and centrist liberals will be thinking like that in addition to those who agree with the sentiment, surprised it is not a majority who think 10 months excessive. Like a lot of this type of polling it is probably a proxy for do you like/support that person rather than answering the bloody question.
I see the sentence as a modern equivalent of reading the riot act. When there is widespread public disorder it is generally accepted that more extreme punishments are warranted to regain order. I think this applies to people online who are inciting the violence and disorder as much as the people directly engaged in it.
A sentence such as you describe would be appropriate in normal times, but the wider context makes her harsher sentence justified in my view.
gives the Nuthall East by-election result (with the party's spin, but I've not seen it elsewhere yet). The ward (on the edge of my old patch) is usually solidly conservative - quite well-off, but not very rich. The Browtowe Alliance is a local Notts split from Labour, likely to affiliate to the new party according to one member who I know.
The average Trump voter couldn't care less about the relative power of the US abroad as they have little interest in abroad and many will not even have travelled much beyond their state in the South or Midwest or mountain West let alone have a passport and been abroad
Except 'abroad' is where much of their wealth and stuff comes from. As both decline, perhaps awareness will rise to compensate
Or. As we can see. Prompt a more furious determination to make the world be more like America. Aided by quislings, shills and useful idiots endlessly repeating talking points they've seen on billionaire owned platforms.
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?
No, but I am suspicious the anti-oldies framing originates from Russian trolls stirring up intergenerational conflict. There are many poor pensioners, and calling them boomers is taken from America whose postwar baby boom came earlier than ours. And I suspect my analysis captures more truth than yours.
I don't disagree, I also didn't agree with the assessment on boomers either.
France already taxes the wealthy quite a lot, going even further with a wealth tax like Hollande did just sees them go abroad.
Its problem is not that it undertaxes the rich, nor even the number of boomers it has beyond raising the French retirement age from 64 (which even then had huge opposition when raised from 62).
It is more that France has 56% of its gdp spent by the government and an average working week of just 36 hours but neither Melenchon nor Le Pen and Bardella want to do much about that so Macron and Barnier and now Bayrou can't get the shift in a more Thatcherite direction Macron and LRs want through
At least in France you can see where all the money goes. The towns and cities gleam, the infra is fantastic, the trains whizz by
Where does our money go?
Well to be fair even now the UK government only spends 44% of gdp, 12% less than France and we are getting HS2.
Plus we have the same population as France in a third of the land area
I think that poll on Connolly is concerning from a non-Reform point of view.
Why? It unsurprisingly went on party lines, Labour and LD voters mostly fine with her sentence, Tory voters split, Reform voters appalled by it
I think the numbers saying Too harsh are higher than we should ordinarily expect. Just because a majority are saying too lenient/about right, isn't enough in my opinion. You'd like to see the Too harsh number around 10%.
Not happening with Reform on 30% in the polls, Connolly is Reform voters martyr against 2 tier Sir Kier
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...
That wasn't what the judge said when jailing him. Sentencing him, Judge Gibbney said: "It's clear that when you did work, the work was good. You are an experienced man in your profession. You are a man with a passion for your job.
"You took the view this was an opportunity to make hay while the sun shined and you could earn significant sums of money doing work for local authorities confident in the knowledge they weren't as diligent in establishing you were doing all that was set you."
The judge rejected Howells' claim that the councils had not suffered loss, telling him: "You did not do in any given week, three lots or four lots of 37 hours." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3dp7m4yv2xo
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.
Indeed, she gets £56 a week from doing some prison jobs ie less than the £92 a week Job Seeker's Allowance now pays or the £400 a month Universal Credit pays a single person and is serving a whole life sentence.
She doesn't have a housing allowance either. Scandalous.
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?
No, but I am suspicious the anti-oldies framing originates from Russian trolls stirring up intergenerational conflict. There are many poor pensioners, and calling them boomers is taken from America whose postwar baby boom came earlier than ours. And I suspect my analysis captures more truth than yours.
I don't disagree, I also didn't agree with the assessment on boomers either.
France already taxes the wealthy quite a lot, going even further with a wealth tax like Hollande did just sees them go abroad.
Its problem is not that it undertaxes the rich, nor even the number of boomers it has beyond raising the French retirement age from 64 (which even then had huge opposition when raised from 62).
It is more that France has 56% of its gdp spent by the government and an average working week of just 36 hours but neither Melenchon nor Le Pen and Bardella want to do much about that so Macron and Barnier and now Bayrou can't get the shift in a more Thatcherite direction Macron and LRs want through
At least in France you can see where all the money goes. The towns and cities gleam, the infra is fantastic, the trains whizz by
Where does our money go?
The old The poor The sick The old poor The sick poor The sick old The sick old poor Debt interest
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
Setting aside the lurid speculation about blackmail material and the obvious desire for Trump to make money via a rapprochement with Russia, it seems that the main determinant of Trump's approach is an assumption of Russian strength that leads to Trump making the US far weaker and subservient than it is.
I cannot think of any other national leader who has so drastically undermined the strength of their country by such an assumption of its relative weakness.
Sad as it is, I don't find it hard to understand voters electing an unpleasant person, or selectively overlooking their past misdemeanours. But to support someone so weak is something I am struggling to make sense of.
More than anything I think it was the weakness that Corbyn displayed over Russia and other issues that led to the decline in his electoral appeal between 2017 and 2019. As I said at the time, if Corbyn wasn't strong enough to root out antisemites from his own party, then he wasn't going to be remotely strong enough to take on international capitalism and remould Britain in the fashion that he aspired to.
So why is there such a reality distortion field when it comes to Trump's weakness?
Most Trump voters don't give a shit about anywhere other than the USA. Trump was elected by them to end US involvement in foreign wars, build border walls and deport immigrants, go to war on woke and cut taxes and government spending and by evangelicals to cut back abortion.
The average Trump voter couldn't care less about the relative power of the US abroad as they have little interest in abroad and many will not even have travelled much beyond their state in the South or Midwest or mountain West let alone have a passport and been abroad
It's not a matter of caring about abroad. It's a question of image and projecting a sender of strength and confidence.
Trumps neediness in respect to Putin is embarrassing.
The average Trump voter couldn't care less about the relative power of the US abroad as they have little interest in abroad and many will not even have travelled much beyond their state in the South or Midwest or mountain West let alone have a passport and been abroad
Except 'abroad' is where much of their wealth and stuff comes from. As both decline, perhaps awareness will rise to compensate
Well we will see if Trump's tariffs revive US manufacturing as his voters hope for or just lead to inflation
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.
Indeed, she gets £56 a week from doing some prison jobs ie less than the £92 a week Job Seeker's Allowance now pays or the £400 a month Universal Credit pays a single person and is serving a whole life sentence.
She doesn't have a housing allowance either. Scandalous.
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.
Who the fuck do you think works at that refinery in Saratov that Ukraine droned last week? Spetsnaz?
There is a difference between hitting workers at a plant that is intimately connected with Russia's war economy, and hitting tower blocks where people are sleeping.
Russia will run out of refineries far quicker than Ukraine will run out of tower blocks.
That Russia is willing to accept dozens of military casualties to inflict a few civilians casualties is a very good ratio for the world.
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?
No, but I am suspicious the anti-oldies framing originates from Russian trolls stirring up intergenerational conflict. There are many poor pensioners, and calling them boomers is taken from America whose postwar baby boom came earlier than ours. And I suspect my analysis captures more truth than yours.
I don't disagree, I also didn't agree with the assessment on boomers either.
France already taxes the wealthy quite a lot, going even further with a wealth tax like Hollande did just sees them go abroad.
Its problem is not that it undertaxes the rich, nor even the number of boomers it has beyond raising the French retirement age from 64 (which even then had huge opposition when raised from 62).
It is more that France has 56% of its gdp spent by the government and an average working week of just 36 hours but neither Melenchon nor Le Pen and Bardella want to do much about that so Macron and Barnier and now Bayrou can't get the shift in a more Thatcherite direction Macron and LRs want through
At least in France you can see where all the money goes. The towns and cities gleam, the infra is fantastic, the trains whizz by
Where does our money go?
"the trains whizz by"
From what I've heard, that is true for the TGV. The local lines are far from that, with worse punctuality and frequency compared to ours. Indeed, there is some grumbling that too much of France's rail funding goes into the high-profile TV services, and not local services.
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.
Indeed, she gets £56 a week from doing some prison jobs ie less than the £92 a week Job Seeker's Allowance now pays or the £400 a month Universal Credit pays a single person and is serving a whole life sentence.
She doesn't have a housing allowance either. Scandalous.
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...
That wasn't what the judge said when jailing him. Sentencing him, Judge Gibbney said: "It's clear that when you did work, the work was good. You are an experienced man in your profession. You are a man with a passion for your job.
"You took the view this was an opportunity to make hay while the sun shined and you could earn significant sums of money doing work for local authorities confident in the knowledge they weren't as diligent in establishing you were doing all that was set you."
The judge rejected Howells' claim that the councils had not suffered loss, telling him: "You did not do in any given week, three lots or four lots of 37 hours." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3dp7m4yv2xo
Again not sure 3 years prison is sensible here.
I suspect Thatcher might have given him a medal for working 3 full time jobs but we are in the era of Starmer where rightwing tweeters and public sector workers working more than 1 job get jailed (even if there may be some justification for that several years jail is excessive)
"I spent the evening watching the BBC’s Archive. It’s better than anything on TV today An excellent YouTube channel showcases the Corporation’s best programming, from eccentric fluff to in-depth investigations" (£)
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.
Well given that might lead to the death of most of our population in a nuclear war that is hardly surprising.
This is not the Crimean War when it might have been an option as nukes had not yet been invented
How do you think usage of nukes would help Russia, in the tactical or strategic sense?
Go on.
The answer is why Putin has not used them already.
If Putin thought he would lose the war outright he could well use at least a tactical nuke, as he knows he would lose the Presidency if he lost the war outright so would have nothing to lose
Took my son round RGU's open day yesterday. What a brilliant university! And when you look out from the funky buildings over the River Dee all you can see is trees on the south bank.
4 years in Art School? If he doesn't want to do it, I will...
The average Trump voter couldn't care less about the relative power of the US abroad as they have little interest in abroad and many will not even have travelled much beyond their state in the South or Midwest or mountain West let alone have a passport and been abroad
Except 'abroad' is where much of their wealth and stuff comes from. As both decline, perhaps awareness will rise to compensate
Well we will see if Trump's tariffs revive US manufacturing as his voters hope for or just lead to inflation
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.
Who the fuck do you think works at that refinery in Saratov that Ukraine droned last week? Spetsnaz?
There is a difference between hitting workers at a plant that is intimately connected with Russia's war economy, and hitting tower blocks where people are sleeping.
Russia will run out of refineries far quicker than Ukraine will run out of tower blocks.
That Russia is willing to accept dozens of military casualties to inflict a few civilians casualties is a very good ratio for the world.
The feebleness of Russia's terror attacks is clearly shown by comparison with the V1 and V2:
The use of land-launched V-1s against Great Britain ended on 1 September after which the campaign continued using air-launched missiles. In total, 10,492 V-1s were launched against Britain, with a nominal aiming point of Tower Bridge. 7,500 incoming missiles were observed by the British defenders of which 1,847 were downed by fighters, 1,878 were destroyed by anti aircraft fire and 232 struck barrage balloons. 2,419 V-1s reached the London civil defence region, inflicting 6,184 fatalities and 17,981 serious injuries. On the 28 March the last V-1 reached London.
Antwerp, Belgium was a target for a large number of V-weapon attacks from October 1944 through to the virtual end of the war in March 1945, leaving 1,736 dead and 4,500 injured in greater Antwerp. Thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed as the city was struck by 590 direct hits. Hitler's hope that the Port of Antwerp dock gates wold be would be hit and the port put out of action was not achieved. The largest loss of life by a single rocket attack during the war came on 16 December 1944, when the roof of the crowded Cine Rex was struck, leaving 567 dead and 291 injured.
An estimated 2,754 civilians were killed in London by V-2 attacks with another 6,523 injured, which is two people killed per V-2 rocket. The death toll in London did not meet the Nazis' full expectations, during early usage, as they had not yet perfected the accuracy of the V-2, with many rockets being misdirected and exploding harmlessly. Accuracy increased during the war, particularly for batteries where the Leitstrahl (radio guide beam) system was used. Missile strikes that did hit targets could cause large numbers of deaths; 160 were killed and 108 seriously injured in one explosion at 12:26 pm on 25 November 1944, at a Woolworth's department store in New Cross, south-east London.
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.
Hence unitaries, the question is how big unitaries should be
I'm probably inclined to 250k to 350k each, with some leeway.
That would be 3 or 4 for Nottinghamshire including Nottingham.
And I would place some weight on how communities view themselves.
I think removing the extra tier is the important structural thing to do.
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.
Hence unitaries, the question is how big unitaries should be
I'm probably inclined to 250k to 350k each, with some leeway.
That would be 3 or 4 for Nottinghamshire including Nottingham.
And I would place some weight on how communities view themselves.
I think removing the extra tier is the important structural thing to do.
250k was deemed the desired size in the 1990s reorganisation.
Which is why Hull wasn't allowed to expand even though it wanted to and York was forced to expand even though it didn't want to.
The average Trump voter couldn't care less about the relative power of the US abroad as they have little interest in abroad and many will not even have travelled much beyond their state in the South or Midwest or mountain West let alone have a passport and been abroad
Except 'abroad' is where much of their wealth and stuff comes from. As both decline, perhaps awareness will rise to compensate
Well we will see if Trump's tariffs revive US manufacturing as his voters hope for or just lead to inflation
We already know the answer to that
I've seen one British exporter to US consumers offer their US customers a credit refund (to be used for future purchases) equal to the tariff charge of 10%. Another is simply eating the cost.
I think people are underestimating the extent to which exporters to the US will absorb the tariff cost, or make their customers in other markets share the cost. The US market is too big and important for companies to simply try and pass all of the cost of tariffs on.
So I would expect that the inflationary impact in the US will be lower than you think, but there could well be an inflationary impact elsewhere as well.
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.
Hence unitaries, the question is how big unitaries should be
I'm probably inclined to 250k to 350k each, with some leeway.
That would be 3 or 4 for Nottinghamshire including Nottingham.
And I would place some weight on how communities view themselves.
I think removing the extra tier is the important structural thing to do.
But District Councillors have traditionally been a sinecure for loyal members of the Tory Party...
The average Trump voter couldn't care less about the relative power of the US abroad as they have little interest in abroad and many will not even have travelled much beyond their state in the South or Midwest or mountain West let alone have a passport and been abroad
Except 'abroad' is where much of their wealth and stuff comes from. As both decline, perhaps awareness will rise to compensate
Well we will see if Trump's tariffs revive US manufacturing as his voters hope for or just lead to inflation
Well it certainly will not lead to low skilled manufacturing returning to small towns in the rust belt.
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".
10 months is unnecessary. 10 weeks arguably reasonable as would a community sentence and education order be.
Plenty of lefty and centrist liberals will be thinking like that in addition to those who agree with the sentiment, surprised it is not a majority who think 10 months excessive. Like a lot of this type of polling it is probably a proxy for do you like/support that person rather than answering the bloody question.
I see the sentence as a modern equivalent of reading the riot act. When there is widespread public disorder it is generally accepted that more extreme punishments are warranted to regain order. I think this applies to people online who are inciting the violence and disorder as much as the people directly engaged in it.
A sentence such as you describe would be appropriate in normal times, but the wider context makes her harsher sentence justified in my view.
You can achieve the same by sentencing heavily but releasing very early once things have calmed down.
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.
Who the fuck do you think works at that refinery in Saratov that Ukraine droned last week? Spetsnaz?
There is a difference between hitting workers at a plant that is intimately connected with Russia's war economy, and hitting tower blocks where people are sleeping.
Russia will run out of refineries far quicker than Ukraine will run out of tower blocks.
That Russia is willing to accept dozens of military casualties to inflict a few civilians casualties is a very good ratio for the world.
The feebleness of Russia's terror attacks is clearly shown by comparison with the V1 and V2:
The use of land-launched V-1s against Great Britain ended on 1 September after which the campaign continued using air-launched missiles. In total, 10,492 V-1s were launched against Britain, with a nominal aiming point of Tower Bridge. 7,500 incoming missiles were observed by the British defenders of which 1,847 were downed by fighters, 1,878 were destroyed by anti aircraft fire and 232 struck barrage balloons. 2,419 V-1s reached the London civil defence region, inflicting 6,184 fatalities and 17,981 serious injuries. On the 28 March the last V-1 reached London.
Antwerp, Belgium was a target for a large number of V-weapon attacks from October 1944 through to the virtual end of the war in March 1945, leaving 1,736 dead and 4,500 injured in greater Antwerp. Thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed as the city was struck by 590 direct hits. Hitler's hope that the Port of Antwerp dock gates wold be would be hit and the port put out of action was not achieved. The largest loss of life by a single rocket attack during the war came on 16 December 1944, when the roof of the crowded Cine Rex was struck, leaving 567 dead and 291 injured.
An estimated 2,754 civilians were killed in London by V-2 attacks with another 6,523 injured, which is two people killed per V-2 rocket. The death toll in London did not meet the Nazis' full expectations, during early usage, as they had not yet perfected the accuracy of the V-2, with many rockets being misdirected and exploding harmlessly. Accuracy increased during the war, particularly for batteries where the Leitstrahl (radio guide beam) system was used. Missile strikes that did hit targets could cause large numbers of deaths; 160 were killed and 108 seriously injured in one explosion at 12:26 pm on 25 November 1944, at a Woolworth's department store in New Cross, south-east London.
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?
It looks like a legal minefield to me, so, No. I do not wish to trouble the mods (or get banned)
But 20 minutes on X or whatever will flesh it out
Oh, go on. These citizen journalists are risking it. If it's true, and all reputable sources check their facts, I'm sure you'll have no problem. Tell you what, retweet the relevant posts so we can pop over and save ourselves 20 mins.
Out of genuine interest - what are your arrangements with the Granite Gazette?
Do you get advice and legal cover once they have reviewed articles?
Real citizen journalists can get a very good feel for where the lines are, and there is training available. When I was editing a reasonably prominent blog I had a barrister on my writing team partly to ask for a second opinion in such circs.
Are we getting to the stage where someone can commit any act of violence, claim it was a patriotic stand against immigrants, and then be proclaimed a hero and a martyr by Elon Musk and his kind?
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.
Labour or LD or Green councils might well do that, Tory or Reform councils largely won't
I agree. Tory Councils tend to use the reserves to keep council tax low. It's a short term strategy. It's a bit like privatisation to fund tax cuts - selling the family silver.
gives the Nuthall East by-election result (with the party's spin, but I've not seen it elsewhere yet). The ward (on the edge of my old patch) is usually solidly conservative - quite well-off, but not very rich. The Browtowe Alliance is a local Notts split from Labour, likely to affiliate to the new party according to one member who I know.
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
Are we getting to the stage where someone can commit any act of violence, claim it was a patriotic stand against immigrants, and then be proclaimed a hero and a martyr by Elon Musk and his kind?
Depends.
Painting a swastika on a Tesla doesn't qualify for some reason...
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.
Well given that might lead to the death of most of our population in a nuclear war that is hardly surprising.
This is not the Crimean War when it might have been an option as nukes had not yet been invented
How do you think usage of nukes would help Russia, in the tactical or strategic sense?
Go on.
The answer is why Putin has not used them already.
If Putin thought he would lose the war outright he could well use at least a tactical nuke, as he knows he would lose the Presidency if he lost the war outright so would have nothing to lose
And what good would the use of a tactical nuke do him? How would it militarily advantage him?
The answer is: it probably will not; and even if it does, it will be infinitesimal compared to the problems it would cause him.
Nukes are utterly impractical for the situation Russia finds itself in. The only use they have is to allow him to get what he wants through the *fear* of their use.
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
Back to The Land!!!! Lib Dems, where are you all?
A lot of Lib Dems were knocking up in West Hampstead yesterday!
gives the Nuthall East by-election result (with the party's spin, but I've not seen it elsewhere yet). The ward (on the edge of my old patch) is usually solidly conservative - quite well-off, but not very rich. The Browtowe Alliance is a local Notts split from Labour, likely to affiliate to the new party according to one member who I know.
That's interesting - a bit of slightly Greater Nottingham in Broxtowe, nearly all on an estate butting up against the Broxtowe Council Estate. Do they look down their noses at the Council Houses?
That area has horrible anti-wheelchair barriers on underpasses under the M1 and the Nuthall Traffic Island. I was somewhat in shock when I found those in "Nottingham", but they are not a high priority for me.
Way before your time, the parish church on the Broxtowe Estate was one of the first with a windmill on the top - that was back in about 1990.
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
Back to The Land!!!! Lib Dems, where are you all?
A lot of Lib Dems were knocking up in West Hampstead yesterday!
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
Back to The Land!!!! Lib Dems, where are you all?
A lot of Lib Dems were knocking up in West Hampstead yesterday!
Very basic take - Tories losing about 40% of their votes to a new Reform candidate, Labour losing more than half their vote, going 2/3rd LibDem, 1/3rd Green.
Russia will run out of refineries far quicker than Ukraine will run out of tower blocks.
That Russia is willing to accept dozens of military casualties to inflict a few civilians casualties is a very good ratio for the world.
I don't know why there's any debate about this, it's been demonstrated many times before. If you're bombing random civilians and the other side is bombing your fuel refineries, you lose the war. Cities have an incredible capacity to soak up damage and still function.
Many German cities took a very serious pounding in WWII, far greater than Kyiv is taking from Russia, and the output of their industries did not appreciably decline, nor did civilian morale collapse. The only raids that actually had a significant effect were the fire-storm raids on cities like Dresden and Cologne, but Russia does not possess the capability to mount anything on that scale without using nuclear weapons.
On the other hand, payback from hitting fuel infrastructure is immediate and out of all proportion to the effort involved. Russia is already seeing fuel supply problems, another few months of this and every sector of their economy will struggle to function.
It's a genius move by Ukraine. They can bomb Russian refineries all day, but Ukraine gets much of its fuel from countries Russian can't hit without provoking a direct response from NATO.
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
Back to The Land!!!! Lib Dems, where are you all?
A lot of Lib Dems were knocking up in West Hampstead yesterday!
Very basic take - Tories losing about 40% of their votes to a new Reform candidate, Labour losing more than half their vote, going 2/3rd LibDem, 1/3rd Green.
Mark Pack, on his site, is understandably very chuffed about it. Less so with the Broxtowe result, of course; no LibDem candidate. If there had been, of course, maybe Tory votes would have been siphoned off and Reform could have won.
Are we getting to the stage where someone can commit any act of violence, claim it was a patriotic stand against immigrants, and then be proclaimed a hero and a martyr by Elon Musk and his kind?
In other news - United will get relegated this season if Amorim is left in charge.
We're spending £lots on crazy players to try and fit an unplayable system. Need to hire a manager who can make these players play a system they can play.
Two previous managers have just been sacked and thus are back on the market - Ole Gunnar Solsjaer and Jose Mourinho. Either would be better than this...
In other news - United will get relegated this season if Amorim is left in charge.
We're spending £lots on crazy players to try and fit an unplayable system. Need to hire a manager who can make these players play a system they can play.
Two previous managers have just been sacked and thus are back on the market - Ole Gunnar Solsjaer and Jose Mourinho. Either would be better than this...
Did we do this one? I've not been tracking so diligently; this is a serious one.
Bomp ... bomp ... bomp ...
Reform councillor Robert Bloom, who has been in his North Northamptonshire Council post for just 117 days, has resigned after a neighbour alleged he used appalling racial slurs toward her family. Cllr Bloom (Lloyds and Corby Old Village) has today left his role following accusations he used the ‘n’ word against a black family who live close by to him.
He had been in post for just under four months after he was part of Reform’s council-winning team in May’s local elections.
A neighbour told this newspaper that he shouted the word ‘n*****’ at her repeatedly, said he would set the far-right English Defence League on her and told her there’d be ‘black body bags’ ... Cllr Martin Griffiths, the Reform leader of North Northamptonshire Council, said this evening (Tuesday): “I fully respect Councillor Robert Bloom’s decision to resign from the council, which he has done for personal reasons.
Are we getting to the stage where someone can commit any act of violence, claim it was a patriotic stand against immigrants, and then be proclaimed a hero and a martyr by Elon Musk and his kind?
What we need are more armed 14 year olds. That'll sort everything apparently.
Russia will run out of refineries far quicker than Ukraine will run out of tower blocks.
That Russia is willing to accept dozens of military casualties to inflict a few civilians casualties is a very good ratio for the world.
I don't know why there's any debate about this, it's been demonstrated many times before. If you're bombing random civilians and the other side is bombing your fuel refineries, you lose the war. Cities have an incredible capacity to soak up damage and still function.
Many German cities took a very serious pounding in WWII, far greater than Kyiv is taking from Russia, and the output of their industries did not appreciably decline, nor did civilian morale collapse. The only raids that actually had a significant effect were the fire-storm raids on cities like Dresden and Cologne, but Russia does not possess the capability to mount anything on that scale without using nuclear weapons.
On the other hand, payback from hitting fuel infrastructure is immediate and out of all proportion to the effort involved. Russia is already seeing fuel supply problems, another few months of this and every sector of their economy will struggle to function.
It's a genius move by Ukraine. They can bomb Russian refineries all day, but Ukraine gets much of its fuel from countries Russian can't hit without provoking a direct response from NATO.
OTOH, Russia can, and almost certainly will start attacking power stations again, as winter approaches.
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
Back to The Land!!!! Lib Dems, where are you all?
A lot of Lib Dems were knocking up in West Hampstead yesterday!
Very basic take - Tories losing about 40% of their votes to a new Reform candidate, Labour losing more than half their vote, going 2/3rd LibDem, 1/3rd Green.
For fun, applying those swings nationally to the last GE result, you get:
Comments
It was a fun day.
One (arguably minor) reason for reducing the number of people sentences to prison, perhaps?
Apart from anything else, it's just so fucking boringly repetitive.
Though I guess I've just contributed........
I haven't really noticed a decline in council services after the scheme started, but I am not a heavy user of council services, and anecdotally others have (though people always complain...).
What bothers me about the scheme is that the council's leader is doing her doctoral thesis on the scheme, and that seems like a rather heavy incentive for the scheme to be seen as a success. Oh, and apparently she did not publicise the subject of her thesis when the scheme was discussed.
I thought that that rule had been suspended several months ago, except for certain individuals.
Plenty of lefty and centrist liberals will be thinking like that in addition to those who agree with the sentiment, surprised it is not a majority who think 10 months excessive. Like a lot of this type of polling it is probably a proxy for do you like/support that person rather than answering the bloody question.
There are lots of experiments happening quietly. We have one locally called The Spirit of Alfreton, which is one of several run by a trust. That's where I picked up my local railway station having a new footbridge-lift from.
https://alfreton.spiritof.uk/
To me they seem to need a community of 50k-100k people at least. So that would be approximately one per Parliamentary Constituency.
I saw him wreck a 100,000 dollar boat because he liked the splash.
Vance wants to do the same to the US economy...
@thebulwark.com
Vance on undermining the Federal Reserve: "I don't think we allow bureaucrats to make decisions about monetary policy and interest rates without any input from the people that were elected to serve the American people...POTUS is much better able to make these determinations."
https://bsky.app/profile/thebulwark.com/post/3lxiicfzqw524
"You took the view this was an opportunity to make hay while the sun shined and you could earn significant sums of money doing work for local authorities confident in the knowledge they weren't as diligent in establishing you were doing all that was set you."
The judge rejected Howells' claim that the councils had not suffered loss, telling him: "You did not do in any given week, three lots or four lots of 37 hours."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3dp7m4yv2xo
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/lucy-letby-binges-jail-wages-35594904
France already taxes the wealthy quite a lot, going even further with a wealth tax like Hollande did just sees them go abroad.
Its problem is not that it undertaxes the rich, nor even the number of boomers it has beyond raising the French retirement age from 64 (which even then had huge opposition when raised from 62).
It is more that France has 56% of its gdp spent by the government and an average working week of just 36 hours but neither Melenchon nor Le Pen and Bardella want to do much about that so Macron and Barnier and now Bayrou can't get the shift in a more Thatcherite direction Macron and LRs want through
It's working too.
Where does our money go?
Residential blocks of flats - not.
https://onthewight.com/news-onthewight-celebrates-its-18th-birthday/
This is not the Crimean War when it might have been an option as nukes had not yet been invented
It's seriously misleading. I thought More in Common were meant to be pukka and high-minded: this is unimpressive
Broadcast TV is obsolete
Social Media "news" is often fake
The world has moved on from broadcasting. I read that BSkyB are likely to cease satellite transmission in the next few years. So there is little point in anyone trying to set up a new broadcaster, hyperlocal or not, fully streamed or not. Content is NOW, not when people try to schedule it.
The second of my points is the biggest worry. The incident in Dundee is a case in point - a video is amplified with a context attached which is not truthful. Now that the truth is out, people still insist that the lie is the truth and the truth is the lie.
I don't believe that you can counter lies with the truth when the people accepting the lies want the lie to be true, What you can do is hold a mirror up to reality and shout as loud as you can for attention.
I am going to engage in an interesting experiment of sticking my whole Holyrood campaign out on social media, supported by my local party colleagues who are giving me freedom to do what I please. We will see how long the LibDems tolerate it, but as long as I am not getting my cock out shouting willy banjo I hope they will use it as an interesting experiment...
I cannot think of any other national leader who has so drastically undermined the strength of their country by such an assumption of its relative weakness.
Sad as it is, I don't find it hard to understand voters electing an unpleasant person, or selectively overlooking their past misdemeanours. But to support someone so weak is something I am struggling to make sense of.
More than anything I think it was the weakness that Corbyn displayed over Russia and other issues that led to the decline in his electoral appeal between 2017 and 2019. As I said at the time, if Corbyn wasn't strong enough to root out antisemites from his own party, then he wasn't going to be remotely strong enough to take on international capitalism and remould Britain in the fashion that he aspired to.
So why is there such a reality distortion field when it comes to Trump's weakness?
Go on.
The answer is why Putin has not used them already.
The average Trump voter couldn't care less about the relative power of the US abroad as they have little interest in abroad and many will not even have travelled much beyond their state in the South or Midwest or mountain West let alone have a passport and been abroad
Congress. The courts. The media. World leaders.
If everyone you know and everyone you see says he is strong, he 'looks' strong.
A sentence such as you describe would be appropriate in normal times, but the wider context makes her harsher sentence justified in my view.
gives the Nuthall East by-election result (with the party's spin, but I've not seen it elsewhere yet). The ward (on the edge of my old patch) is usually solidly conservative - quite well-off, but not very rich. The Browtowe Alliance is a local Notts split from Labour, likely to affiliate to the new party according to one member who I know.
Aided by quislings, shills and useful idiots endlessly repeating talking points they've seen on billionaire owned platforms.
Make Abroad GOP Again.
Plus we have the same population as France in a third of the land area
Scandalous.
The poor
The sick
The old poor
The sick poor
The sick old
The sick old poor
Debt interest
Trumps neediness in respect to Putin is embarrassing.
The weak do what they must.
The weak willed do what the strong want anyway.
That Russia is willing to accept dozens of military casualties to inflict a few civilians casualties is a very good ratio for the world.
From what I've heard, that is true for the TGV. The local lines are far from that, with worse punctuality and frequency compared to ours. Indeed, there is some grumbling that too much of France's rail funding goes into the high-profile TV services, and not local services.
"I spent the evening watching the BBC’s Archive. It’s better than anything on TV today
An excellent YouTube channel showcases the Corporation’s best programming, from eccentric fluff to in-depth investigations" (£)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2025/08/29/i-spent-evening-watching-the-bbcs-archive
4 years in Art School? If he doesn't want to do it, I will...
The use of land-launched V-1s against Great Britain ended on 1 September after which the campaign continued using air-launched missiles. In total, 10,492 V-1s were launched against Britain, with a nominal aiming point of Tower Bridge. 7,500 incoming missiles were observed by the British defenders of which 1,847 were downed by fighters, 1,878 were destroyed by anti aircraft fire and 232 struck barrage balloons. 2,419 V-1s reached the London civil defence region, inflicting 6,184 fatalities and 17,981 serious injuries. On the 28 March the last V-1 reached London.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb#Effect
Antwerp, Belgium was a target for a large number of V-weapon attacks from October 1944 through to the virtual end of the war in March 1945, leaving 1,736 dead and 4,500 injured in greater Antwerp. Thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed as the city was struck by 590 direct hits. Hitler's hope that the Port of Antwerp dock gates wold be would be hit and the port put out of action was not achieved. The largest loss of life by a single rocket attack during the war came on 16 December 1944, when the roof of the crowded Cine Rex was struck, leaving 567 dead and 291 injured.
An estimated 2,754 civilians were killed in London by V-2 attacks with another 6,523 injured, which is two people killed per V-2 rocket. The death toll in London did not meet the Nazis' full expectations, during early usage, as they had not yet perfected the accuracy of the V-2, with many rockets being misdirected and exploding harmlessly. Accuracy increased during the war, particularly for batteries where the Leitstrahl (radio guide beam) system was used. Missile strikes that did hit targets could cause large numbers of deaths; 160 were killed and 108 seriously injured in one explosion at 12:26 pm on 25 November 1944, at a Woolworth's department store in New Cross, south-east London.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket#Assessment
That would be 3 or 4 for Nottinghamshire including Nottingham.
And I would place some weight on how communities view themselves.
I think removing the extra tier is the important structural thing to do.
BREAKING:
The U.S. just approved the sale of 3350 ERAM air-launched cruise missiles to Ukraine for $825 million.
Denmark, Norway and Netherlands have agreed to provide Ukraine with the money needed for the purchase
Which is why Hull wasn't allowed to expand even though it wanted to and York was forced to expand even though it didn't want to.
I think people are underestimating the extent to which exporters to the US will absorb the tariff cost, or make their customers in other markets share the cost. The US market is too big and important for companies to simply try and pass all of the cost of tariffs on.
So I would expect that the inflationary impact in the US will be lower than you think, but there could well be an inflationary impact elsewhere as well.
OK. I understand now the willingness to abolish.
Do you get advice and legal cover once they have reviewed articles?
Real citizen journalists can get a very good feel for where the lines are, and there is training available. When I was editing a reasonably prominent blog I had a barrister on my writing team partly to ask for a second opinion in such circs.
Tory Councils tend to use the reserves to keep council tax low. It's a short term strategy.
It's a bit like privatisation to fund tax cuts - selling the family silver.
"Well done to the Tories"
Painting a swastika on a Tesla doesn't qualify for some reason...
The answer is: it probably will not; and even if it does, it will be infinitesimal compared to the problems it would cause him.
Nukes are utterly impractical for the situation Russia finds itself in. The only use they have is to allow him to get what he wants through the *fear* of their use.
That area has horrible anti-wheelchair barriers on underpasses under the M1 and the Nuthall Traffic Island. I was somewhat in shock when I found those in "Nottingham", but they are not a high priority for me.
Way before your time, the parish church on the Broxtowe Estate was one of the first with a windmill on the top - that was back in about 1990.
Russia will soon be a "gas station" without any gas.
Then talks can begin.
Many German cities took a very serious pounding in WWII, far greater than Kyiv is taking from Russia, and the output of their industries did not appreciably decline, nor did civilian morale collapse. The only raids that actually had a significant effect were the fire-storm raids on cities like Dresden and Cologne, but Russia does not possess the capability to mount anything on that scale without using nuclear weapons.
On the other hand, payback from hitting fuel infrastructure is immediate and out of all proportion to the effort involved. Russia is already seeing fuel supply problems, another few months of this and every sector of their economy will struggle to function.
It's a genius move by Ukraine. They can bomb Russian refineries all day, but Ukraine gets much of its fuel from countries Russian can't hit without provoking a direct response from NATO.
We're spending £lots on crazy players to try and fit an unplayable system. Need to hire a manager who can make these players play a system they can play.
Two previous managers have just been sacked and thus are back on the market - Ole Gunnar Solsjaer and Jose Mourinho. Either would be better than this...
Bomp ... bomp ... bomp ...
Reform councillor Robert Bloom, who has been in his North Northamptonshire Council post for just 117 days, has resigned after a neighbour alleged he used appalling racial slurs toward her family.
Cllr Bloom (Lloyds and Corby Old Village) has today left his role following accusations he used the ‘n’ word against a black family who live close by to him.
He had been in post for just under four months after he was part of Reform’s council-winning team in May’s local elections.
A neighbour told this newspaper that he shouted the word ‘n*****’ at her repeatedly, said he would set the far-right English Defence League on her and told her there’d be ‘black body bags’
...
Cllr Martin Griffiths, the Reform leader of North Northamptonshire Council, said this evening (Tuesday): “I fully respect Councillor Robert Bloom’s decision to resign from the council, which he has done for personal reasons.
"The role of an elected member can be very rewarding but it can also be challenging at times, particularly when balancing the demands of the role with personal commitments.
https://www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/news/people/corby-reform-councillor-resigns-over-serious-racism-allegations-5289085
That'll sort everything apparently.
Con 15%
Lab 16%
LD 25%
Ref 25%
Grn 13%
Could be a two horse race between LD and Ref?