Will this impact Reform’s chances in the Senedd? – politicalbetting.com
Will this impact Reform’s chances in the Senedd? – politicalbetting.com
The Reform UK party's former leader in Wales – Nathan Gill – has pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery relating to pro-Russia statements he made in the European Parliament, as well as newspaper opinion pieces. pic.twitter.com/pR0026UJ7R
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Indeed Starmer running scared of forthcoming Senedd election in Caerphilly
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/keir-starmer-no-plans-visit-32558918
FPT, in response to questions on the ID database issue :
I must say that I wouldn't agree with that.
Whar do we have.? A ckear push from the government to make Britain an AI hub, and accompanying contracts in the public sector to companies that develop both AI and large-scale data integration, with the former depending on the latter.
We have the quotes in the Byline Times article from yesterday, and Glasman coming away from being schmoozed by Thiel at Trump"s inauguration, saying, "I want fucking AI everything. A national system draped in the Union Jack." And Starmer's special visit to Palantir in February, where they were quoted as saying "He gets it, he has the will".
None of this inspires confidence that Palantir either aren't being lined up for the main contract, or as is likely in any case, will have wide access to its data through the contracts they're racking up across the public sector, for their key function of data mining A.I.
In this respect at least the Party truly represents the British wing of the MAGA movement.
Nobody has cared before, so why should Gill matter?
In this case, those people evidently don’t include the Russian government.
It has the additional merit of portraying wonderfully a rural world (Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire border) which is both just within living memory, and as vanished as dinosaurs.
It's the steady drip drip of anti-vaxxer, Taliban Tax, deporting pensioners, Russian influence, NHS privatisation that will have a cumulative effect. But only the Lib Dems are going in two-footed at the moment - I think Lab/Con need to do the same.
If nothings fixed Reform win through exasperation not because people particularly like, trust or believe them.
I mean yes you are right. But no party is going to be able to sustain that argument against Reform for more than 5 minutes.
However, there does come a tipping point. For example I would have no qualms describing Trump as the enemy of America - he is clearly inimicable to their interests, whether democratically elected or not.
The former leader of the party in Wales being in hock to Russia is in no way equivalent, but it contributes (in a small way) to a narrative that Reform are serving masters other than the British people. I strongly suspect that this narrative will prove to be true over the course of time, and that Reform will turn out to be our enemies.
Such an electoral strategy would mostly achieve two things. A higher share for NOTA. Or a different protest vote further along the Overton window. Or possibly the first, followed next time by the second.
Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.
US deal most things are still up in the air. By the time the UK gets in the EU defence procurement scheme, all the money will have been given out to the French and German companies, etc. One In One Out is a pilot at a rate of about 4 out a week that will require renegotiating again after 12 months.
He really is Mr "Empty Desk".
https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/nigel-farage-from-russia-with-love
"A 13-year-old boy has been arrested after three cyclists and an elderly pedestrian were allegedly hit by a vehicle in four separate incidents in Lincolnshire that police believe are linked."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wdxepn0keo
1) No, because Welsh Labour has plenty of people who've been taking the Russian shilling for years including at least one in the current cabinet whom I won't name;
2) Even if that weren't true, I kind of hope it doesn't:, because Reform are repellent, but if ever a party needed turfing from government it's Welsh Labour and I think Reform are the only party that can do it.
I choose patriotic renewal.
https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1971681627198968019
The remake of Trainspotting doesn't sound very good.
Good thread on ID cards.
Why don't we have legislators/civil servants who can understand and explain this, and legislate accordingly ?
1/ I don’t instinctively like the idea of ID cards. It offends my liberal sensibilities. But Digital IDs aren’t the privacy catastrophe they would have been in the 2000s...
https://x.com/LawrenceLundy/status/1971543613868998952
7/ “Done right” is doing a lot of heavy lifting yes. Of course, the devil is in design. A “canonical event log” of every check could easily tip into surveillance. Guardrails are needed around logs, retention, transparency reports.
8/ Citizens need three guarantees:
– Share less, prove more.
– No new central database.
– Errors are visible and appealable...
That means NOT giving the contract to Palantir, of course.
I don't have much confidence that we'll follow those principles.
That, and Putin personally congratulating his London ambassador of the time, who in his turn had been very effusive about Johnson's ennobling of his chum, Lebedev.
My school had an INSET day yesterday. In times gone by these days would be crammed full of sessions focused on the senior leadership team members' pet projects or fads, which immediately get forgotten because noone has time to implement them.
Yesterday, aside from an hour where we discussed how to respond to the London riots (we have a very diverse student body) we were trusted to use the day to deal with all the backlog of tasks that always arise in September as a result of the new school year.
This was a really conscious choice on the school's part to reduce burnout amongst staff. It is something the headteacher has agency over, and is exactly the sort of thing that will stop our school, and the system as a whole, bleeding staff. I managed to pin down my line manager to meet, meaning that I am now enthusiastic about how I can move my role forward over the next few months.
More importantly, I sorted out an assessment for students that will mean we can make sure they're in the right class to prepare for their GCSEs, and give them and home a month's warning of the assessment, rather than springing it on them. The school's decision to reduce the crap they throw our way will have a tangible positive impact on our students' experience of preparing for their maths GCSE.
I'm impressed.
At the same time, our own low IQ sage was trying to persuade us that Putin was the savour of western civilisation.
..Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told the court: "Nathan Gill has admitted having asked questions, made statements and carried out other activities in or connected with the European Parliament in support of pro-Russian parties in the Ukraine conflict."..
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194
I still maintain the nightclub scene from Trainspotting 2 is one of cinema's finest scenes.
This argument doesn't convince me because, and there are a lot of similar replies, the current system is just as open to future misuse. The important friction against more malicious government data joining isn't that the joins are hard. It's that our laws and norms oppose them.
https://x.com/thomasforth/status/1971509741836009832
But a drugged up 13-year old? Grim.
Whereas they've got a really good deal out of Farage and his chums.
But it is certainly the case that after they brought in death by dangerous driving, because it was hard to get a manslaughter conviction, that they never now prosecute for manslaughter. My view is they should prosecute both and let the jury decide
I’ve got to the point where I’ve worked on enough Government projects across Europe to know that our biggest issue is identifying that the person claiming to be Dave is actually Dave and so why one login is so important. And that’s coming anyway folks it’s a long term project being slowly and carefully implemented as new systems are created or old systems are updated.
So the database already exists - now the question is do you want poorer people in the UK to have limited job opportunities or not
(Incidentally, I recently watched a program from a few years back where a young man was interviewed. He claimed to have got on drugs aged 11 or so. Whilst asleep on a sofa at home, someone injected him with (I think) heroin. Grim indeed.)
I suspect that the government is trying to do too many things at once with this (dead cat, performative action on the boats, backroom deals with Palantir to try to curry favour on AI) and that's why they won't put these guarantees in place.
If ID cards really were about the right to work, it would be easy to put guardrails in place to stop them being just another way that our data gets forcibly transferred into the hands of billionaires.
A friend who is a teacher at a sixth form was complaining that they were dragged in to do enrolment which they could quite happy do from home. If they had taken the opportunity to do something like you describe, or even have an all-staff meeting, then I could understand it, but no, everyone just had to find somewhere to log onto their laptop and do their enrolment tasks individually
Barely a fag paper between all of them frankly.
As ever Starmer's problem is that he sounds inauthentic, even about stuff he probably genuinely believes in. No amount of coaching or bright ideas from a young comms team (even a good one let alone the rubbish one that No 10 appears to have) fixes that.
Which is why teachers end up doing so much extra work because work done at home isn’t visible
Mike Johnson is refusing to swear in a new Democratic member of Congress until her election results are “official” in mid-October.
He *just* swore a GOP member in on unofficial results.
All this to hide the Epstein files?
https://x.com/Angry_Staffer/status/1971782028048957478
The argument about ID cards is an argument between (a) those who believe governments and bureaucracies are essentially benevolent, get things wrong by mistake and will try to correct their mistakes and (b) those who look at the reality and believe that governments and bureaucracies are much more capable of malice and much less benevolent than we like to believe and do not much care about making mistakes or the harm they will cause because they calculate, rightly, that they can get away with this.
There is lots of evidence for the latter and, frankly, not much evidence for the former. Digital ID should be voluntary so that the trusting and naive (group a) can take their chances. If they work without the downsides that others fear they will be adopted soon enough.
I mean, the EU remains the obvious economic partner, but we have rather burnt our teacakes with that one, haven't we?
This does not mean any of the above did anything wrong; just that Russia was really trying to cultivate influence. Some of the interactions may have appeared totally benign to the targets. Whether they succeeded in the case of the individuals mentioned is questionable; though in the case of Gill, they definitely did.
All the bad stuff will happen, irrespective of ID cards, if that argument is abandoned.
Which it largely will be if and when the ID card scheme is blocked.
We used to have friends.
But I refer you to my other post: people in all parties do this. I fully expect some top politicians in all parties to have had some embarrassing and potentially illegal contacts with China.
My real issue is that governments of all stripes (with our willing cheerleading) have got themselves so deep into the muck and mire economically that any big project has to made more affordable by being stuffed full of economic incentives for private enterprise to profit from it.
My conjecture: Palantir will make millions from our data, and (in theory) prostrating ourselves at their door will make the initial setup and ongoing administration of an ID cards system cheaper for our cash-strapped government.
That might, of course, not be a bad thing for the UK if it discredited them.
But I would be uneasy about Plaid forming a government because I cannot see a route for them to do so without Labour support unless something rather dramatic happens to the Liberal Democrats or Greens. And what Wales needs, above all and for however short a time, is a non-Labour government.
Teacher management is poor, at best they treat the staff as if they were teenagers, and at worst, little kids. But then they have spent their entire career up to that point managing children.
In my view this will become one of the major political battlegrounds of the future.
Not just the government - we should own, control and have visibility over the use of our personal data across public and private spheres.
You want privacy? Leave your phone at home, and walk out with a wallet and cash.
Perhaps we should copy Singapore's approach of paying our politicians lots more but chopping off vital appendages if they are corrupt.
What meanest thou by this word Sacrament?
I mean an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us, ordained by Christ himself, as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof.
How many parts are there in a Sacrament?
Two: the outward visible sign, and the inward spiritual grace.
The card or app is the outward and visible sign, the database is the inward and spiritual (dis)grace. And although the human mind links the two, there is no particular reason to do so. (That works even for sacraments, come to think of it. During the pandemic, the church dusted off the old idea of 'Spiritual Communion'- as long as you devoutly wanted the graces attached to the bread and the wine, you didn't actually need to ingest them to get the benefit.)
Being able to use it for travel would also be good, but unlikely to happen as we don't take EU ID cards as travel documents and I don't think we take any (other than maybe UK immigrant ID cards which I understand are being phased out anyway)
And who is this new GOP member sworn in on unofficial results ?
Two weeks ago a new DEM representative was sworn in the day after the election:
Walkinshaw won a 10-candidate Democratic primary race for the seat with 60% of the vote on June 28, 2025.[27][28][3][29] He defeated Republican Stewart Whitson by approximately 50 percentage points in the general election on September 9.[30] Walkinshaw was sworn in the following day.[31]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Walkinshaw
It is a pretty universal rule that when voters vote for a party* on the basis of "things couldn't get worse" that they almost always rapidly do get worse.
*or Brexit...
He comes across as self-centred and self-absorbed, while trying to mask it with a veneer of sincerity, but if his priorities and the sands shift, he won’t hesitate to throw others under the bus.
That’s hardly the basis for inspiring leadership.