As someone living in a country with ID cards, let’s just say that the big database is entirely the point, and that something intended for very limited use quickly becomes ubiquitous for every interaction with the both the State, and any number of private companies.
Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.
I posted this last night.
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.
Agreed, but if those guarantees were in place I would accept ID cards. That's why I won't sign the petition - it's too blanket anti.
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.
They don't want to put the guardrails in place because they want to access all the data and share it and be able to transfer it to whoever the hell they like and they like the idea that they will be able to control the population more easily.
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 don't agree. I am in group (a) but oppose ID cards. I think the government is a bit like a bumbling uncle. Means well, but farts a lot and sometimes sits on the Lego model you've spent all week building.
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.
Off topic: I'm not averse to a good moan on here about the state of the education system, so thought I should balance that out with a bit of praise.
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.
It does seem the start of the school year always takes schools by surprise. Reminds me of the finance department at the quangos where I used to work, who were always taken by surprise by the end of the financial year.
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
As someone living in a country with ID cards, let’s just say that the big database is entirely the point, and that something intended for very limited use quickly becomes ubiquitous for every interaction with the both the State, and any number of private companies.
Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.
I posted this last night.
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.
Agreed, but if those guarantees were in place I would accept ID cards. That's why I won't sign the petition - it's too blanket anti.
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.
They don't want to put the guardrails in place because they want to access all the data and share it and be able to transfer it to whoever the hell they like and they like the idea that they will be able to control the population more easily.
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.
The argument about ID cards is a near total distraction from the real one we should be having over the principles which constrain (or fail to) government's use of personal data.
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.
Yes, exactly - ID cards are a totem but the reality is the government has all our personal data anyway, and I suspect access to real-time tracking via our smartphones.
You want privacy? Leave your phone at home, and walk out with a wallet and cash.
The government has our data, but it is chaotic, inaccurate and conflicting, and duplicated in a number of different places. Arguably it would be better in one place.
As someone living in a country with ID cards, let’s just say that the big database is entirely the point, and that something intended for very limited use quickly becomes ubiquitous for every interaction with the both the State, and any number of private companies.
Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.
I posted this last night.
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.
Agreed, but if those guarantees were in place I would accept ID cards. That's why I won't sign the petition - it's too blanket anti.
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.
They don't want to put the guardrails in place because they want to access all the data and share it and be able to transfer it to whoever the hell they like and they like the idea that they will be able to control the population more easily.
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.
The argument about ID cards is a near total distraction from the real one we should be having over the principles which constrain (or fail to) government's use of personal data.
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.
Yes, exactly - ID cards are a totem but the reality is the government has all our personal data anyway, and I suspect access to real-time tracking via our smartphones.
You want privacy? Leave your phone at home, and walk out with a wallet and cash.
The government has our data, but it is chaotic, inaccurate and conflicting, and duplicated in a number of different places. Arguably it would be better in one place.
And much better for the development of AI and companies like Palantir, for it to be in one place.
Hence they will be involved in it at some level, probably significantly.
I imagine a petition to pull the UK out of the ECHR would have reached double that number in the same period - it really is not as significant as you appear to believe it is. In a country this size you could get a couple of million people to sign a petition on just about anything.
As someone living in a country with ID cards, let’s just say that the big database is entirely the point, and that something intended for very limited use quickly becomes ubiquitous for every interaction with the both the State, and any number of private companies.
Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.
I posted this last night.
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.
Agreed, but if those guarantees were in place I would accept ID cards. That's why I won't sign the petition - it's too blanket anti.
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.
They don't want to put the guardrails in place because they want to access all the data and share it and be able to transfer it to whoever the hell they like and they like the idea that they will be able to control the population more easily.
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.
The argument about ID cards is a near total distraction from the real one we should be having over the principles which constrain (or fail to) government's use of personal data.
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.
Yes, exactly - ID cards are a totem but the reality is the government has all our personal data anyway, and I suspect access to real-time tracking via our smartphones.
You want privacy? Leave your phone at home, and walk out with a wallet and cash.
Yes, I used to be bothered by ID cards, but really dont care much either way now.
Between smartphones (which are now effectively compulsory at work, as much is done via apps) and the ubiquity of CCTV in the UK we long since abolished privacy. Previously it wasn't practicable to follow everyone because of the vast sea of data, but now with AI and facial recognition it is already possible to track anyone and everyone.
As someone living in a country with ID cards, let’s just say that the big database is entirely the point, and that something intended for very limited use quickly becomes ubiquitous for every interaction with the both the State, and any number of private companies.
Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.
I posted this last night.
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.
Agreed, but if those guarantees were in place I would accept ID cards. That's why I won't sign the petition - it's too blanket anti.
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.
They don't want to put the guardrails in place because they want to access all the data and share it and be able to transfer it to whoever the hell they like and they like the idea that they will be able to control the population more easily.
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 don't agree. I am in group (a) but oppose ID cards. I think the government is a bit like a bumbling uncle. Means well, but farts a lot and sometimes sits on the Lego model you've spent all week building.
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.
I honestly do not understand how anyone could think our government is like a bumbling uncle given the copious evidence of the malice and harm it has inflicted over the years on so many of its citizens. More like an abusive uncle IMO.
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future....
The remake of Trainspotting doesn't sound very good.
Patriotic Renewal sounds like one of those comedy vehicle parties jostling on the nationalist right for a piece of the grifting action. Not that I'm suggesting Sir Keir has anything in common with them, oh no.
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.
I wouldn't touch Reform with a barge pole. The Tory party's schmoozing of dubious Russians and some dubious Ukrainians (long before the war) was a disgrace. The cosying up to China - not our friend - by politicians of all parties is disgraceful. And now we have Starmer cosying up to Trump and his backers who are less than robust on Putin and Russia, a threat to us all.
Good morning everybody. Fine and bright for the last day of the cricket season, with Essex having and excellent chance of winning, although, as my wife often reminds me, this is cricket. And the unexpected frequently happens!
No-one has yet explained to me how ID cards as a basis for employment will work in a society where some, including apparently some quite big, employers are quite happy to 'employ' people on a temporary, cash in hand, no records basis.
I'm afraid that people are still quite complacent about the difference between the diverse types of personal data, that we're increasingly sharing, and *integrated* data.
The lifeblood and profits of the burgeoning AI sector is in integrated data.
I neither shudder nor salivate at the notion of ID cards. My main concern is whether the British State is capable of doing the project. I recall our efforts on Test Track Trace during the pandemic. We couldn't seem to manage it.
As someone living in a country with ID cards, let’s just say that the big database is entirely the point, and that something intended for very limited use quickly becomes ubiquitous for every interaction with the both the State, and any number of private companies.
Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.
I posted this last night.
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.
Agreed, but if those guarantees were in place I would accept ID cards. That's why I won't sign the petition - it's too blanket anti.
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.
They don't want to put the guardrails in place because they want to access all the data and share it and be able to transfer it to whoever the hell they like and they like the idea that they will be able to control the population more easily.
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.
The argument about ID cards is a near total distraction from the real one we should be having over the principles which constrain (or fail to) government's use of personal data.
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.
Yes, exactly - ID cards are a totem but the reality is the government has all our personal data anyway, and I suspect access to real-time tracking via our smartphones.
You want privacy? Leave your phone at home, and walk out with a wallet and cash.
The government has our data, but it is chaotic, inaccurate and conflicting, and duplicated in a number of different places. Arguably it would be better in one place.
And much better for the development of AI and companies like Palantir, for it to be in one place.
Hence they will be involved in it at some level, probably significantly.
Hence perhaps it's better left chaotic inaccurate and conflicting, at least in government hands.
I imagine a petition to pull the UK out of the ECHR would have reached double that number in the same period - it really is not as significant as you appear to believe it is. In a country this size you could get a couple of million people to sign a petition on just about anything.
As per the Commons Library paper, only 5 Petitions have got over a million signatures in the 10 years that the site has operated:
Call a general election, 2024
End food poverty - no child should be going hungry, 2021
Revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU, 2019
EU Referendum rules triggering a 2nd EU Referendum, 2016
Prevent Donald Trump from making a state visit to the UK, 2016
The report is a really interesting read which I recommend for no reason whatsoever 😇
Isn't it in the nature of Reform supporters to ignore what they don't want to know about? 'It's all a onspiracy and if he is a crook, he is at least our kind of crook.'
In this respect at least the Party truly represents the British wing of the MAGA movement.
That might be the nature of the hardcore supporters but we are now talking about the millions of swing voters. Reform can't win without getting their support as well.
That's true, but it seems to me that huge swathes of generally non-political people are cheesed off with all the traditional parties.
Doesn't mean that in three and a half years' time, they'll still see Reform as any real alternative Government. Reform are currently used by the voters to kick the other parties up the arse. If you want to see a swing in how voters can behave, look at the meaningless Euro elections in 2019 (where the Tories came 5th) and then the whopping Westminster majority Boris got 6 months later.
Russia has been trying to cultivate politicians worldwide for years, and in the UK it has been remarkably even-handed with who it approached. In the Conservatives you had the likes of Boris and Osborne; Labour Mandelson, Goldsmith and Brown; the SNP Salmond, and UKIP/Reform has Farage himself and others, as shown in the Gill court case. The Lib Dems had Mike Hancock.
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.
Yes, I suppose if you're going to do something anyway, then being paid for it would seem harmless. And there may well be people who take the money and do their own thing anyway. What sanctions can be exerted?
As someone living in a country with ID cards, let’s just say that the big database is entirely the point, and that something intended for very limited use quickly becomes ubiquitous for every interaction with the both the State, and any number of private companies.
Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.
I posted this last night.
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.
Agreed, but if those guarantees were in place I would accept ID cards. That's why I won't sign the petition - it's too blanket anti.
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.
They don't want to put the guardrails in place because they want to access all the data and share it and be able to transfer it to whoever the hell they like and they like the idea that they will be able to control the population more easily.
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 don't agree. I am in group (a) but oppose ID cards. I think the government is a bit like a bumbling uncle. Means well, but farts a lot and sometimes sits on the Lego model you've spent all week building.
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.
I honestly do not understand how anyone could think our government is like a bumbling uncle given the copious evidence of the malice and harm it has inflicted over the years on so many of its citizens. More like an abusive uncle IMO.
Any bureaucracy acting at scale does harm to citizens.
I believe acts of malice are incredibly rare, and attempts are made to design them out of the bureaucracy when they arise.
Off topic: I'm not averse to a good moan on here about the state of the education system, so thought I should balance that out with a bit of praise.
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.
I went to a junior school yesterday which was a show put on for parents/grandparents. The kids were from 4-10 I think. Each group of about 40 or 50 were introduced and came onto a stage and then sang a few lines of a meaningful (woke) song they'd learnt. As you got to the older groups the hand and body movements became more in time with the song and each other.
I have to say I found it moving. They were all so nice and kind to each other and when they took us round their classrooms they were relaxed and confident and eager to show us what they'd done
But I couldn't help this gnawing question of how these beautiful bright young children without a prejudice in the world could have turned into those flag waving morons that turned out in London two Saturdays ago.
I imagine a petition to pull the UK out of the ECHR would have reached double that number in the same period - it really is not as significant as you appear to believe it is. In a country this size you could get a couple of million people to sign a petition on just about anything.
As per the Commons Library paper, only 5 Petitions have got over a million signatures in the 10 years that the site has operated:
Call a general election, 2024
End food poverty - no child should be going hungry, 2021
Revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU, 2019
EU Referendum rules triggering a 2nd EU Referendum, 2016
Prevent Donald Trump from making a state visit to the UK, 2016
The report is a really interesting read which I recommend for no reason whatsoever 😇
I wouldn't touch Reform with a barge pole. The Tory party's schmoozing of dubious Russians and some dubious Ukrainians (long before the war) was a disgrace. The cosying up to China - not our friend - by politicians of all parties is disgraceful. And now we have Starmer cosying up to Trump and his backers who are less than robust on Putin and Russia, a threat to us all.
Barely a fag paper between all of them frankly.
Yes, it shows the folly of Brexit.
We used to have friends.
No we didn't. This is the mistake made by all you fantasists whether pro EU or pro US. There are no friends. There are only overlapping spheres of mutual interest. And it is vested self interest. The job of a Government is to do what is best for their citizens and if that means screwing over another country they will do it like a shot.
It is the error we have made for decades in our dealings with both sides of the Atlantic. We thought that when push came to shove our 'allies' would be there for us even at a cost to themselves. That is a myth.
We should not be 'cosying up' to any other country. We can have coridal and mutiually beneficial relations with them but we should never lose sight of that vested self interest. It is what drives all diplomatic relationships the world over.
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future....
The remake of Trainspotting doesn't sound very good.
Patriotic Renewal sounds like one of those comedy vehicle parties jostling on the nationalist right for a piece of the grifting action. Not that I'm suggesting Sir Keir has anything in common with them, oh no.
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.
I'm interested in understanding the various Right of Centre think tank / publication setups that keep appearing out of thin air, and who they are.
I had a mailshot from one called The Restorationist this week, who publish shorn-of-the-fluff pieces that might have come from Alan Clark or his similars a generation ago, but has something whimsical and PG Wodehouse about it.
eg The Barbaric Practices Act: Confronting National Evil Alex Coppen, Michael C R Reiners As part of the Great Repeal program, the BPA deals with the despicable moral evils our country permits: foeticide, mercy killing, animal cruelty, malignant academia, Islamic dress, porn, cousin marriage, transgenderism, doxxing, reputation destruction, gay surrogacy, paternity fraud, and more.
+I don't want to live in a country where the state claims the right to prevent you from doing anything - buying food; walking the streets; chatting to a friend on a park bench - unless it is satisfied you can prove you're entitled to do that & it feels like allowing you to do so.
MKW @Mark_A_K_W This is Blairite introduction of Napoleonic / European statism granting of permission to do things, in place of English Common Law right for a person to do anything that is not explicitly forbidden by statute or Common Law.
As someone living in a country with ID cards, let’s just say that the big database is entirely the point, and that something intended for very limited use quickly becomes ubiquitous for every interaction with the both the State, and any number of private companies.
Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.
I posted this last night.
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.
Agreed, but if those guarantees were in place I would accept ID cards. That's why I won't sign the petition - it's too blanket anti.
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.
They don't want to put the guardrails in place because they want to access all the data and share it and be able to transfer it to whoever the hell they like and they like the idea that they will be able to control the population more easily.
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.
The argument about ID cards is a near total distraction from the real one we should be having over the principles which constrain (or fail to) government's use of personal data.
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.
As the catechism puts it,
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.)
I imagine a petition to pull the UK out of the ECHR would have reached double that number in the same period - it really is not as significant as you appear to believe it is. In a country this size you could get a couple of million people to sign a petition on just about anything.
As per the Commons Library paper, only 5 Petitions have got over a million signatures in the 10 years that the site has operated:
Call a general election, 2024
End food poverty - no child should be going hungry, 2021
Revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU, 2019
EU Referendum rules triggering a 2nd EU Referendum, 2016
Prevent Donald Trump from making a state visit to the UK, 2016
The report is a really interesting read which I recommend for no reason whatsoever 😇
Isn't it in the nature of Reform supporters to ignore what they don't want to know about? 'It's all a onspiracy and if he is a crook, he is at least our kind of crook.'
In this respect at least the Party truly represents the British wing of the MAGA movement.
That might be the nature of the hardcore supporters but we are now talking about the millions of swing voters. Reform can't win without getting their support as well.
That's true, but it seems to me that huge swathes of generally non-political people are cheesed off with all the traditional parties.
Doesn't mean that in three and a half years' time, they'll still see Reform as any real alternative Government. Reform are currently used by the voters to kick the other parties up the arse. If you want to see a swing in how voters can behave, look at the meaningless Euro elections in 2019 (where the Tories came 5th) and then the whopping Westminster majority Boris got 6 months later.
There was a reason for that, though. The Euro election was "didn't you listen, we said out!" and the Lib Dems got nearly 20% too campaigning on an explicitly Remain ticket.
But I agree, opinion polls now do not necessarily correlate with vote share in 3 years
As someone living in a country with ID cards, let’s just say that the big database is entirely the point, and that something intended for very limited use quickly becomes ubiquitous for every interaction with the both the State, and any number of private companies.
Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.
I posted this last night.
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.
Agreed, but if those guarantees were in place I would accept ID cards. That's why I won't sign the petition - it's too blanket anti.
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.
They don't want to put the guardrails in place because they want to access all the data and share it and be able to transfer it to whoever the hell they like and they like the idea that they will be able to control the population more easily.
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.
The argument about ID cards is a near total distraction from the real one we should be having over the principles which constrain (or fail to) government's use of personal data.
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.
Yes, exactly - ID cards are a totem but the reality is the government has all our personal data anyway, and I suspect access to real-time tracking via our smartphones.
You want privacy? Leave your phone at home, and walk out with a wallet and cash.
I wouldn't agree that they're a distraction. They offer a new opportunity for the integration of data.
The debate over them is.
It will dissipate all the passion and attention which ought to be given to the far more important principles.
Off topic: I'm not averse to a good moan on here about the state of the education system, so thought I should balance that out with a bit of praise.
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.
Hold on. What London riots?
Oops. Yes. Good point. I was thinking about the small proportion of the Tommy Robinson march that attacked police and misspoke.
Were you thinking about that small proportion because that's what your hour discussed, or did your hour address the whole thing?
+I don't want to live in a country where the state claims the right to prevent you from doing anything - buying food; walking the streets; chatting to a friend on a park bench - unless it is satisfied you can prove you're entitled to do that & it feels like allowing you to do so.
MKW @Mark_A_K_W This is Blairite introduction of Napoleonic / European statism granting of permission to do things, in place of English Common Law right for a person to do anything that is not explicitly forbidden by statute or Common Law.
Perhaps Arizona should count its votes quicker then.
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]
Off topic: I'm not averse to a good moan on here about the state of the education system, so thought I should balance that out with a bit of praise.
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.
Hold on. What London riots?
Oops. Yes. Good point. I was thinking about the small proportion of the Tommy Robinson march that attacked police and misspoke.
Were you thinking about that small proportion because that's what your hour discussed, or did your hour address the whole thing?
Surely we can go for an elegant compromise: the marchers that attacked the police were those possessed of small proportions?
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future....
The remake of Trainspotting doesn't sound very good.
Patriotic Renewal sounds like one of those comedy vehicle parties jostling on the nationalist right for a piece of the grifting action. Not that I'm suggesting Sir Keir has anything in common with them, oh no.
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.
I'm interested in understanding the various Right of Centre think tank / publication setups that keep appearing out of thin air, and who they are.
I had a mailshot from one called The Restorationist this week, who publish shorn-of-the-fluff pieces that might have come from Alan Clark or his similars a generation ago, but has something whimsical and PG Wodehouse about it.
eg The Barbaric Practices Act: Confronting National Evil Alex Coppen, Michael C R Reiners As part of the Great Repeal program, the BPA deals with the despicable moral evils our country permits: foeticide, mercy killing, animal cruelty, malignant academia, Islamic dress, porn, cousin marriage, transgenderism, doxxing, reputation destruction, gay surrogacy, paternity fraud, and more.
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future....
The remake of Trainspotting doesn't sound very good.
Patriotic Renewal sounds like one of those comedy vehicle parties jostling on the nationalist right for a piece of the grifting action. Not that I'm suggesting Sir Keir has anything in common with them, oh no.
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.
I'm interested in understanding the various Right of Centre think tank / publication setups that keep appearing out of thin air, and who they are.
I had a mailshot from one called The Restorationist this week, who publish shorn-of-the-fluff pieces that might have come from Alan Clark or his similars a generation ago, but has something whimsical and PG Wodehouse about it.
eg The Barbaric Practices Act: Confronting National Evil Alex Coppen, Michael C R Reiners As part of the Great Repeal program, the BPA deals with the despicable moral evils our country permits: foeticide, mercy killing, animal cruelty, malignant academia, Islamic dress, porn, cousin marriage, transgenderism, doxxing, reputation destruction, gay surrogacy, paternity fraud, and more.
+I don't want to live in a country where the state claims the right to prevent you from doing anything - buying food; walking the streets; chatting to a friend on a park bench - unless it is satisfied you can prove you're entitled to do that & it feels like allowing you to do so.
MKW @Mark_A_K_W This is Blairite introduction of Napoleonic / European statism granting of permission to do things, in place of English Common Law right for a person to do anything that is not explicitly forbidden by statute or Common Law.
+I don't want to live in a country where the state claims the right to prevent you from doing anything - buying food; walking the streets; chatting to a friend on a park bench - unless it is satisfied you can prove you're entitled to do that & it feels like allowing you to do so.
MKW @Mark_A_K_W This is Blairite introduction of Napoleonic / European statism granting of permission to do things, in place of English Common Law right for a person to do anything that is not explicitly forbidden by statute or Common Law.
And all this is apparently because the Home Office can't police our borders.
Can't police our borders or will not police our borders ?
Process State is not processing. Same with anything that requires some sort of performance to statute or common law. We're just not into compliance now.
I wouldn't touch Reform with a barge pole. The Tory party's schmoozing of dubious Russians and some dubious Ukrainians (long before the war) was a disgrace. The cosying up to China - not our friend - by politicians of all parties is disgraceful. And now we have Starmer cosying up to Trump and his backers who are less than robust on Putin and Russia, a threat to us all.
Barely a fag paper between all of them frankly.
New Labour was quite cosy with the Russians too.
Mandelson being big buddies with both Russians and Epstein.
Russia has been trying to cultivate politicians worldwide for years, and in the UK it has been remarkably even-handed with who it approached. In the Conservatives you had the likes of Boris and Osborne; Labour Mandelson, Goldsmith and Brown; the SNP Salmond, and UKIP/Reform has Farage himself and others, as shown in the Gill court case. The Lib Dems had Mike Hancock.
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.
Was there not also a Lib Dem fifty-something sex god?
Off topic: I'm not averse to a good moan on here about the state of the education system, so thought I should balance that out with a bit of praise.
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.
Hold on. What London riots?
Oops. Yes. Good point. I was thinking about the small proportion of the Tommy Robinson march that attacked police and misspoke.
Were you thinking about that small proportion because that's what your hour discussed, or did your hour address the whole thing?
Neither - we only referenced it in passing really - the hour was spent considering how we can encourage all our students to take pride in their own heritage whilst valuing the community of those from another group.
My own thinking reflects both the image used in the introduction (police horses and marches facing off against one another) and my own prejudices about the march as a whole (but not the marchers themselves, I have quite a lot of sympathy even if I disagree)
I wouldn't touch Reform with a barge pole. The Tory party's schmoozing of dubious Russians and some dubious Ukrainians (long before the war) was a disgrace. The cosying up to China - not our friend - by politicians of all parties is disgraceful. And now we have Starmer cosying up to Trump and his backers who are less than robust on Putin and Russia, a threat to us all.
Barely a fag paper between all of them frankly.
Who would you have us cosy up to? No-one? Striking out alone, bravely? That's fine, but a bold choice economically.
I mean, the EU remains the obvious economic partner, but we have rather burnt our teacakes with that one, haven't we?
There is a difference between having diplomatic relations with a country but being sceptical, wary, supping with a long spoon and the sort of naive desperate cosying up we are seeing all too often. British politicians have no self-respect, behaving like the fat child in class desperate to do anything just to have a "friend" who in reality despises them.
We are now 100% in agreement.
All politicians do the financial schmoozing. This is why every French President ends up prosecuted. For example.
As usual, we are heading down a path the Americans have walked before us. Which ends up with everyone in Congress (elected every two years) spending more time working a phone back to donors than actual legislation. Both parties have buildings in Washington where the politicians go to sit in a cubicle and phone people for money.
Unless of course the Congress Criter in question is wholly owned by group of “special interests” or is a multi-multi-millionaire and self funds
As someone living in a country with ID cards, let’s just say that the big database is entirely the point, and that something intended for very limited use quickly becomes ubiquitous for every interaction with the both the State, and any number of private companies.
Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.
I posted this last night.
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.
Agreed, but if those guarantees were in place I would accept ID cards. That's why I won't sign the petition - it's too blanket anti.
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.
They don't want to put the guardrails in place because they want to access all the data and share it and be able to transfer it to whoever the hell they like and they like the idea that they will be able to control the population more easily.
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 don't agree. I am in group (a) but oppose ID cards. I think the government is a bit like a bumbling uncle. Means well, but farts a lot and sometimes sits on the Lego model you've spent all week building.
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.
And what exactly do we get out of this? Nothing.
Nonsense
Less than nothing, obviously.
Already, the scuttlebutt is that instead of starting with the passport database and maybe reconciling with the driving license, they will use “AI” to mash together all the government data they can find.
Complete with promises of 95% of the population covered in one go.
So the initial data set will be a disaster.
On the up side, the government will be handing a complete copy of everything to Peter Thiel & chums.
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future....
The remake of Trainspotting doesn't sound very good.
Patriotic Renewal sounds like one of those comedy vehicle parties jostling on the nationalist right for a piece of the grifting action. Not that I'm suggesting Sir Keir has anything in common with them, oh no.
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.
I'm interested in understanding the various Right of Centre think tank / publication setups that keep appearing out of thin air, and who they are.
I had a mailshot from one called The Restorationist this week, who publish shorn-of-the-fluff pieces that might have come from Alan Clark or his similars a generation ago, but has something whimsical and PG Wodehouse about it.
eg The Barbaric Practices Act: Confronting National Evil Alex Coppen, Michael C R Reiners As part of the Great Repeal program, the BPA deals with the despicable moral evils our country permits: foeticide, mercy killing, animal cruelty, malignant academia, Islamic dress, porn, cousin marriage, transgenderism, doxxing, reputation destruction, gay surrogacy, paternity fraud, and more.
To be honest I am not seeing anything whimsical about it. Chilling is the term I would use.
I'd see the proposal as dangerous and deluded, but the politics behind it seem to me also to be strangely, in that it is a heap of small pieces with little organising principle beyond a hunt for a mythical, imagined past.
I think they are dreaming about being the intellectual engine of the Right.
+I don't want to live in a country where the state claims the right to prevent you from doing anything - buying food; walking the streets; chatting to a friend on a park bench - unless it is satisfied you can prove you're entitled to do that & it feels like allowing you to do so.
MKW @Mark_A_K_W This is Blairite introduction of Napoleonic / European statism granting of permission to do things, in place of English Common Law right for a person to do anything that is not explicitly forbidden by statute or Common Law.
And all this is apparently because the Home Office can't police our borders.
Can't police our borders or will not police our borders ?
Can't. When everyone who rocks up here illegally then claims that they are fleeing persecution and wants asylum, we have to let them in and go through the seventeen hoops it takes to get rid of a small fraction of them.
Arrived from France? Then feck off back, it's a safe country is, sadly, not an option available to us.
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future....
The remake of Trainspotting doesn't sound very good.
Patriotic Renewal sounds like one of those comedy vehicle parties jostling on the nationalist right for a piece of the grifting action. Not that I'm suggesting Sir Keir has anything in common with them, oh no.
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.
I'm interested in understanding the various Right of Centre think tank / publication setups that keep appearing out of thin air, and who they are.
I had a mailshot from one called The Restorationist this week, who publish shorn-of-the-fluff pieces that might have come from Alan Clark or his similars a generation ago, but has something whimsical and PG Wodehouse about it.
eg The Barbaric Practices Act: Confronting National Evil Alex Coppen, Michael C R Reiners As part of the Great Repeal program, the BPA deals with the despicable moral evils our country permits: foeticide, mercy killing, animal cruelty, malignant academia, Islamic dress, porn, cousin marriage, transgenderism, doxxing, reputation destruction, gay surrogacy, paternity fraud, and more.
To be honest I am not seeing anything whimsical about it. Chilling is the term I would use.
I'd see the proposal as dangerous and deluded, but the politics behind it seem to me also to be strangely, in that it is a heap of small pieces with little organising principle beyond a hunt for a mythical, imagined past.
I think they are dreaming about being the intellectual engine of the Right.
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future....
The remake of Trainspotting doesn't sound very good.
Patriotic Renewal sounds like one of those comedy vehicle parties jostling on the nationalist right for a piece of the grifting action. Not that I'm suggesting Sir Keir has anything in common with them, oh no.
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.
I'm interested in understanding the various Right of Centre think tank / publication setups that keep appearing out of thin air, and who they are.
I had a mailshot from one called The Restorationist this week, who publish shorn-of-the-fluff pieces that might have come from Alan Clark or his similars a generation ago, but has something whimsical and PG Wodehouse about it.
eg The Barbaric Practices Act: Confronting National Evil Alex Coppen, Michael C R Reiners As part of the Great Repeal program, the BPA deals with the despicable moral evils our country permits: foeticide, mercy killing, animal cruelty, malignant academia, Islamic dress, porn, cousin marriage, transgenderism, doxxing, reputation destruction, gay surrogacy, paternity fraud, and more.
Russia has been trying to cultivate politicians worldwide for years, and in the UK it has been remarkably even-handed with who it approached. In the Conservatives you had the likes of Boris and Osborne; Labour Mandelson, Goldsmith and Brown; the SNP Salmond, and UKIP/Reform has Farage himself and others, as shown in the Gill court case. The Lib Dems had Mike Hancock.
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.
Was there not also a Lib Dem fifty-something sex god?
As someone living in a country with ID cards, let’s just say that the big database is entirely the point, and that something intended for very limited use quickly becomes ubiquitous for every interaction with the both the State, and any number of private companies.
Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.
I posted this last night.
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.
Agreed, but if those guarantees were in place I would accept ID cards. That's why I won't sign the petition - it's too blanket anti.
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.
They don't want to put the guardrails in place because they want to access all the data and share it and be able to transfer it to whoever the hell they like and they like the idea that they will be able to control the population more easily.
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.
The argument about ID cards is a near total distraction from the real one we should be having over the principles which constrain (or fail to) government's use of personal data.
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.
Yes, exactly - ID cards are a totem but the reality is the government has all our personal data anyway, and I suspect access to real-time tracking via our smartphones.
You want privacy? Leave your phone at home, and walk out with a wallet and cash.
Or cycle it doesn't help that upload everything to Strava...
As someone living in a country with ID cards, let’s just say that the big database is entirely the point, and that something intended for very limited use quickly becomes ubiquitous for every interaction with the both the State, and any number of private companies.
Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.
I posted this last night.
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.
Agreed, but if those guarantees were in place I would accept ID cards. That's why I won't sign the petition - it's too blanket anti.
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.
They don't want to put the guardrails in place because they want to access all the data and share it and be able to transfer it to whoever the hell they like and they like the idea that they will be able to control the population more easily.
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 don't agree. I am in group (a) but oppose ID cards. I think the government is a bit like a bumbling uncle. Means well, but farts a lot and sometimes sits on the Lego model you've spent all week building.
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.
I honestly do not understand how anyone could think our government is like a bumbling uncle given the copious evidence of the malice and harm it has inflicted over the years on so many of its citizens. More like an abusive uncle IMO.
Any bureaucracy acting at scale does harm to citizens.
I believe acts of malice are incredibly rare, and attempts are made to design them out of the bureaucracy when they arise.
Hence bumbling rather than abusive.
"Acts of malice" are incredibly rare????
NHS maternity scandals. The Francis Report into Staffordshire. Blackpool Victoria Hospital. Gosport War Memorial Hospital. The Post Office Horizon scandal and now also the previous IT system - Capture. Blood contamination. Grenfell. Hillsborough. Endless miscarriages of justice. Grooming gangs and child abuse scandals in local authority homes - see IICSA. And that's just some in recent years. There are plenty more going back decades.
The malice is in not dealing with the problems when they first manifest themselves, not putting them right - even after endless inquiries and recommendations (the idea that attempts are made to design failures out of the bureaucracy is laughable) and worst of all, the utter callousness and cruelty with which the victims are treated.
It happens so regularly and in much the same way every single time that it is now the default of how the British state behaves towards its citizens. This is malice. Not bumbling.
Such a state cannot be trusted with ID cards. Digital ID should be voluntary, rigorously controlled with citizens having an absolute right to see all information held on them, the right to alter it and the right to be told who has had access to their data and why and if unauthorised to be punished. They should also have the right not to have their data used for AI purposes or shared with any private company without express permission or transferred out of the country.
I'm pretty open to the arguments for an ID - was 10 years ago too.
Curious why this has been launched now... surely the government has enough on their plates without opening up this debate - it seems to have pissed off both left and right in equal measure.
The govt knows who has the right to work in the UK already, and it is already a legal requirement to do right to work checks. So it could be seen as an cynical attempt to get this through while the temperature on immigration is high. I'd like to learn more about the broader benefits of the ID, but the suggestion that this will be a magic bullet against illegal immigration (as opposed to securing borders, leaving the ECHR, enforcing existing rules etc) seems frankly a bit daft.
How long is it since people started to use inflatables to cross the Channel? Prior to their introduction the number of 'small boats across the Channel' was infinitesimal.
When I frequented a yacht club from which people frequently made Channel crossings smuggling was an issue but never people. The Middle East was a lot more peaceful then, of course.
As someone living in a country with ID cards, let’s just say that the big database is entirely the point, and that something intended for very limited use quickly becomes ubiquitous for every interaction with the both the State, and any number of private companies.
Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.
I posted this last night.
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.
Agreed, but if those guarantees were in place I would accept ID cards. That's why I won't sign the petition - it's too blanket anti.
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.
They don't want to put the guardrails in place because they want to access all the data and share it and be able to transfer it to whoever the hell they like and they like the idea that they will be able to control the population more easily.
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.
The argument about ID cards is a near total distraction from the real one we should be having over the principles which constrain (or fail to) government's use of personal data.
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.
Yes, exactly - ID cards are a totem but the reality is the government has all our personal data anyway, and I suspect access to real-time tracking via our smartphones.
You want privacy? Leave your phone at home, and walk out with a wallet and cash.
Or cycle it doesn't help that upload everything to Strava...
As an experiment I am considering migrating my phone over to graphene os which promises to tell me whenever my phone is broadcasting anything about me to others, and to prevent this by default (largely by working around Google's inbuilt data harvesting in android). Anyone have any knowledge of this and whether graphene os lives up to its claims?
(I am aware that this is a largely futile exercise as tracking and data harvesting is so deeply embedded in our lives these days that even if I sort out my OS I'll still be tracked in other ways).
+I don't want to live in a country where the state claims the right to prevent you from doing anything - buying food; walking the streets; chatting to a friend on a park bench - unless it is satisfied you can prove you're entitled to do that & it feels like allowing you to do so.
MKW @Mark_A_K_W This is Blairite introduction of Napoleonic / European statism granting of permission to do things, in place of English Common Law right for a person to do anything that is not explicitly forbidden by statute or Common Law.
And all this is apparently because the Home Office can't police our borders.
Can't police our borders or will not police our borders ?
Can't. When everyone who rocks up here illegally then claims that they are fleeing persecution and wants asylum, we have to let them in and go through the seventeen hoops it takes to get rid of a small fraction of them.
Arrived from France? Then feck off back, it's a safe country is, sadly, not an option available to us.
Once people are on British soil, we need some sort of agreement from somewhere else to send them away.
Once you accept that, however grumpily, it all makes sense. We have never had utter control of our borders to keep all undesirables out, which is why smugglers were a thing. And you can't get absolute security without a sort of Berlin Wall all along the Channel coast.
(In any case, despite what polls say, boats aren't the main route for immigration. They might not even be the main route for immigration that we haven't asked for.)
Once you remove the impossible, whatever remains, however dismal, contains the truth.
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future....
The remake of Trainspotting doesn't sound very good.
Patriotic Renewal sounds like one of those comedy vehicle parties jostling on the nationalist right for a piece of the grifting action. Not that I'm suggesting Sir Keir has anything in common with them, oh no.
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.
I'm interested in understanding the various Right of Centre think tank / publication setups that keep appearing out of thin air, and who they are.
I had a mailshot from one called The Restorationist this week, who publish shorn-of-the-fluff pieces that might have come from Alan Clark or his similars a generation ago, but has something whimsical and PG Wodehouse about it.
eg The Barbaric Practices Act: Confronting National Evil Alex Coppen, Michael C R Reiners As part of the Great Repeal program, the BPA deals with the despicable moral evils our country permits: foeticide, mercy killing, animal cruelty, malignant academia, Islamic dress, porn, cousin marriage, transgenderism, doxxing, reputation destruction, gay surrogacy, paternity fraud, and more.
To be honest I am not seeing anything whimsical about it. Chilling is the term I would use.
I'd see the proposal as dangerous and deluded, but the politics behind it seem to me also to be strangely, in that it is a heap of small pieces with little organising principle beyond a hunt for a mythical, imagined past.
I think they are dreaming about being the intellectual engine of the Right.
As someone living in a country with ID cards, let’s just say that the big database is entirely the point, and that something intended for very limited use quickly becomes ubiquitous for every interaction with the both the State, and any number of private companies.
Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.
I posted this last night.
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.
Agreed, but if those guarantees were in place I would accept ID cards. That's why I won't sign the petition - it's too blanket anti.
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.
They don't want to put the guardrails in place because they want to access all the data and share it and be able to transfer it to whoever the hell they like and they like the idea that they will be able to control the population more easily.
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 don't agree. I am in group (a) but oppose ID cards. I think the government is a bit like a bumbling uncle. Means well, but farts a lot and sometimes sits on the Lego model you've spent all week building.
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.
I honestly do not understand how anyone could think our government is like a bumbling uncle given the copious evidence of the malice and harm it has inflicted over the years on so many of its citizens. More like an abusive uncle IMO.
Any bureaucracy acting at scale does harm to citizens.
I believe acts of malice are incredibly rare, and attempts are made to design them out of the bureaucracy when they arise.
Hence bumbling rather than abusive.
"Acts of malice" are incredibly rare????
NHS maternity scandals. The Francis Report into Staffordshire. Blackpool Victoria Hospital. Gosport War Memorial Hospital. The Post Office Horizon scandal and now also the previous IT system - Capture. Blood contamination. Grenfell. Hillsborough. Endless miscarriages of justice. Grooming gangs and child abuse scandals in local authority homes - see IICSA. And that's just some in recent years. There are plenty more going back decades.
The malice is in not dealing with the problems when they first manifest themselves, not putting them right - even after endless inquiries and recommendations (the idea that attempts are made to design failures out of the bureaucracy is laughable) and worst of all, the utter callousness and cruelty with which the victims are treated.
It happens so regularly and in much the same way every single time that it is now the default of how the British state behaves towards its citizens. This is malice. Not bumbling.
Such a state cannot be trusted with ID cards. Digital ID should be voluntary, rigorously controlled with citizens having an absolute right to see all information held on them, the right to alter it and the right to be told who has had access to their data and why and if unauthorised to be punished. They should also have the right not to have their data used for AI purposes or shared with any private company without express permission or transferred out of the country.
Your last paragraph I agree completely with.
As for the rest, we just have a different definition of malice. And the UK is in no way unusual in being a state that mistreats it's citizens - that is pretty much baked into the notion of statehood.
+I don't want to live in a country where the state claims the right to prevent you from doing anything - buying food; walking the streets; chatting to a friend on a park bench - unless it is satisfied you can prove you're entitled to do that & it feels like allowing you to do so.
MKW @Mark_A_K_W This is Blairite introduction of Napoleonic / European statism granting of permission to do things, in place of English Common Law right for a person to do anything that is not explicitly forbidden by statute or Common Law.
And all this is apparently because the Home Office can't police our borders.
Can't police our borders or will not police our borders ?
Can't. When everyone who rocks up here illegally then claims that they are fleeing persecution and wants asylum, we have to let them in and go through the seventeen hoops it takes to get rid of a small fraction of them.
Arrived from France? Then feck off back, it's a safe country is, sadly, not an option available to us.
Once people are on British soil, we need some sort of agreement from somewhere else to send them away.
Once you accept that, however grumpily, it all makes sense. We have never had utter control of our borders to keep all undesirables out, which is why smugglers were a thing. And you can't get absolute security without a sort of Berlin Wall all along the Channel coast.
(In any case, despite what polls say, boats aren't the main route for immigration. They might not even be the main route for immigration that we haven't asked for.)
Once you remove the impossible, whatever remains, however dismal, contains the truth.
Having water between the UK and France has turned out to be a bug, not a feature when it comes to preventing illegal entry.
With a land border you can built walls, fences, razorwire barricades or whatever. Our border is in the middle of the Channel. We can’t act on the French side, and once the boats cross the median line the occupants are our responsibility.
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future....
The remake of Trainspotting doesn't sound very good.
Patriotic Renewal sounds like one of those comedy vehicle parties jostling on the nationalist right for a piece of the grifting action. Not that I'm suggesting Sir Keir has anything in common with them, oh no.
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.
I'm interested in understanding the various Right of Centre think tank / publication setups that keep appearing out of thin air, and who they are.
I had a mailshot from one called The Restorationist this week, who publish shorn-of-the-fluff pieces that might have come from Alan Clark or his similars a generation ago, but has something whimsical and PG Wodehouse about it.
eg The Barbaric Practices Act: Confronting National Evil Alex Coppen, Michael C R Reiners As part of the Great Repeal program, the BPA deals with the despicable moral evils our country permits: foeticide, mercy killing, animal cruelty, malignant academia, Islamic dress, porn, cousin marriage, transgenderism, doxxing, reputation destruction, gay surrogacy, paternity fraud, and more.
To be honest I am not seeing anything whimsical about it. Chilling is the term I would use.
I'd see the proposal as dangerous and deluded, but the politics behind it seem to me also to be strangely, in that it is a heap of small pieces with little organising principle beyond a hunt for a mythical, imagined past.
I think they are dreaming about being the intellectual engine of the Right.
Whose funding these guys?
A think tank (some ambitious grads on internship rates) and a website probably don't cost much.
One one hand, I'm glad that we don't have the US model of politics costing squillions. However, we need to recalibrate our understanding about what a nice website tells us about the reality of a political organisation.
Back in the days of In Touch leaflets (anyone still do those?), you at least needed enough supporters to get the damn things through every letterbox.
As someone living in a country with ID cards, let’s just say that the big database is entirely the point, and that something intended for very limited use quickly becomes ubiquitous for every interaction with the both the State, and any number of private companies.
Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.
I posted this last night.
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.
Agreed, but if those guarantees were in place I would accept ID cards. That's why I won't sign the petition - it's too blanket anti.
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.
They don't want to put the guardrails in place because they want to access all the data and share it and be able to transfer it to whoever the hell they like and they like the idea that they will be able to control the population more easily.
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.
The argument about ID cards is a near total distraction from the real one we should be having over the principles which constrain (or fail to) government's use of personal data.
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.
Yes, exactly - ID cards are a totem but the reality is the government has all our personal data anyway, and I suspect access to real-time tracking via our smartphones.
You want privacy? Leave your phone at home, and walk out with a wallet and cash.
Or cycle it doesn't help that upload everything to Strava...
My assumption (probably wrongly) is that Strava only seems to be selling me more Strava and a private profile (or one shared with a small number of actual friends) is reasonably private.
I wouldn't post the same data to Facebook (or even have any kind of Facebook account, for that matter).
Maybe the CIA are watching everyone but given the heat map of bases in Afghanistan got leaked I doubt it.
It isn't really the actual data being held that is at issue, it is that the government actually has power to screw your life up, whereas Strava does not.
Isn't it in the nature of Reform supporters to ignore what they don't want to know about? 'It's all a onspiracy and if he is a crook, he is at least our kind of crook.'
In this respect at least the Party truly represents the British wing of the MAGA movement.
"Isn't it in the nature of Reform supporters to ignore what they don't want to know about? 'It's all a onspiracy and if he is a crook, he is at least our kind of crook.'
It's how I feel about Starmer and Centrists. They let him off things that they'd crucify opponents for. It is the nature of tribal politics I suppose
How long is it since people started to use inflatables to cross the Channel? Prior to their introduction the number of 'small boats across the Channel' was infinitesimal.
When I frequented a yacht club from which people frequently made Channel crossings smuggling was an issue but never people. The Middle East was a lot more peaceful then, of course.
There's a long tradition of crossing seas in small boats.
When I was a lad the smallest yacht to have sailed the Atlantic was called April Fool, and was 5-foot, 11-inch long - in 1968.
The same chap - Hugo Vihlen - did it in another yacht called Father' Day, which is 5-foot, 4-inches long, in 1993. This is in the Maritime Museum in Falmouth. He went from Canada because on the first attempt the US Coast Guard stopped him. He also shortened it by 1.5" as a competitor had a slightly smaller boat. My piccie for the day.
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future....
The remake of Trainspotting doesn't sound very good.
Patriotic Renewal sounds like one of those comedy vehicle parties jostling on the nationalist right for a piece of the grifting action. Not that I'm suggesting Sir Keir has anything in common with them, oh no.
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.
I'm interested in understanding the various Right of Centre think tank / publication setups that keep appearing out of thin air, and who they are.
I had a mailshot from one called The Restorationist this week, who publish shorn-of-the-fluff pieces that might have come from Alan Clark or his similars a generation ago, but has something whimsical and PG Wodehouse about it.
eg The Barbaric Practices Act: Confronting National Evil Alex Coppen, Michael C R Reiners As part of the Great Repeal program, the BPA deals with the despicable moral evils our country permits: foeticide, mercy killing, animal cruelty, malignant academia, Islamic dress, porn, cousin marriage, transgenderism, doxxing, reputation destruction, gay surrogacy, paternity fraud, and more.
To be honest I am not seeing anything whimsical about it. Chilling is the term I would use.
I'd see the proposal as dangerous and deluded, but the politics behind it seem to me also to be strangely, in that it is a heap of small pieces with little organising principle beyond a hunt for a mythical, imagined past.
I think they are dreaming about being the intellectual engine of the Right.
Whose funding these guys?
A think tank (some ambitious grads on internship rates) and a website probably don't cost much.
One one hand, I'm glad that we don't have the US model of politics costing squillions. However, we need to recalibrate our understanding about what a nice website tells us about the reality of a political organisation.
Back in the days of In Touch leaflets (anyone still do those?), you at least needed enough supporters to get the damn things through every letterbox.
Does their little list include onanism, and are we entitled to draw conclusions if it doesn't?
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future....
The remake of Trainspotting doesn't sound very good.
Patriotic Renewal sounds like one of those comedy vehicle parties jostling on the nationalist right for a piece of the grifting action. Not that I'm suggesting Sir Keir has anything in common with them, oh no.
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.
I'm interested in understanding the various Right of Centre think tank / publication setups that keep appearing out of thin air, and who they are.
I had a mailshot from one called The Restorationist this week, who publish shorn-of-the-fluff pieces that might have come from Alan Clark or his similars a generation ago, but has something whimsical and PG Wodehouse about it.
eg The Barbaric Practices Act: Confronting National Evil Alex Coppen, Michael C R Reiners As part of the Great Repeal program, the BPA deals with the despicable moral evils our country permits: foeticide, mercy killing, animal cruelty, malignant academia, Islamic dress, porn, cousin marriage, transgenderism, doxxing, reputation destruction, gay surrogacy, paternity fraud, and more.
To be honest I am not seeing anything whimsical about it. Chilling is the term I would use.
I'd see the proposal as dangerous and deluded, but the politics behind it seem to me also to be strangely, in that it is a heap of small pieces with little organising principle beyond a hunt for a mythical, imagined past.
I think they are dreaming about being the intellectual engine of the Right.
Whose funding these guys?
A think tank (some ambitious grads on internship rates) and a website probably don't cost much.
One one hand, I'm glad that we don't have the US model of politics costing squillions. However, we need to recalibrate our understanding about what a nice website tells us about the reality of a political organisation.
Back in the days of In Touch leaflets (anyone still do those?), you at least needed enough supporters to get the damn things through every letterbox.
Must have designed 40 or 50 In Touch leaflets in my time.....
They're still popular amongst the older demographic, but social media is increasingly superseding them
Isn't it in the nature of Reform supporters to ignore what they don't want to know about? 'It's all a onspiracy and if he is a crook, he is at least our kind of crook.'
In this respect at least the Party truly represents the British wing of the MAGA movement.
"Isn't it in the nature of Reform supporters to ignore what they don't want to know about? 'It's all a onspiracy and if he is a crook, he is at least our kind of crook.'
It's how I feel about Starmer and Centrists. They let him off things that they'd crucify opponents for. It is the nature of tribal politics I suppose
Eh? The equivalent of Russian bribes/anti-vaxx on the left would be Corbyn at his battiest. Not Starmer.
I think there's a very small number of nations, who due to historic ties, ties of kinship, would have our backs (probably Canada, Australia, New Zealand).
There's a wider group, which likely comprises most of Europe, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, the United States (under sane leadership), with which we have cordial relations, important economic and cultural ties, but who we should have no reason to believe would sacrifice their interests on our behalf.
Then, by far the largest group, those whose relations with us are neither good nor bad, but simply correct.
And then, those that are hostile, to varying degrees.
Keir Starmer has tasked a Conservative peer with writing a new planning bill to remove the ability for environmental groups to delay projects such as Heathrow’s third runway with judicial reviews.
The Guardian understands that leaving the Aarhus convention is being discussed as an option. This is an international treaty signed up to by the EU and other countries in Europe, which protects the right for campaigners to bring legal claims against large infrastructure projects such as waste plants, nuclear power stations and motorways.
Doing this would “destabilise Britain’s constitution” and silence legitimate objections, leading planning lawyers have warned.
A Labour politician abused his mayoral office to try to secure immigration visas to bring 41 family members and friends from Bangladesh to Britain, a Telegraph investigation has found.
Cllr Mohammad Amirul Islam sent both “official” and “doctored” letters emblazoned with his council’s crest and logo to the British High Commission in Dhaka in an attempt to get visa applications treated “favourably”.
Keir Starmer has tasked a Conservative peer with writing a new planning bill to remove the ability for environmental groups to delay projects such as Heathrow’s third runway with judicial reviews.
The Guardian understands that leaving the Aarhus convention is being discussed as an option. This is an international treaty signed up to by the EU and other countries in Europe, which protects the right for campaigners to bring legal claims against large infrastructure projects such as waste plants, nuclear power stations and motorways.
Doing this would “destabilise Britain’s constitution” and silence legitimate objections, leading planning lawyers have warned.
Keir Starmer has tasked a Conservative peer with writing a new planning bill to remove the ability for environmental groups to delay projects such as Heathrow’s third runway with judicial reviews.
The Guardian understands that leaving the Aarhus convention is being discussed as an option. This is an international treaty signed up to by the EU and other countries in Europe, which protects the right for campaigners to bring legal claims against large infrastructure projects such as waste plants, nuclear power stations and motorways.
Doing this would “destabilise Britain’s constitution” and silence legitimate objections, leading planning lawyers have warned.
We still don’t know what Johnson was up to - when actually serving as British PM - giving his security the slip and going off to meet that Russian oligarch in his Italian villa. I’d imagine MI6 know, and it will all come out one day.
The theory that Boris was in bed with the Russians is a strange one. Among the core powers, he was initially a remarkably lone voice in powerfully fighting Ukraine’s corner. I have directly heard it this month that when the war eventually ends, British contractors will be welcomed with open arms in Ukraine, and that Brits “will never understand just how many lives they saved” in 2022.
Having bring in Ukraine last month, that is very much correct.
Whatever one might have to say about Boris Johnson, Ukrainians absolutely love him. He was the face of the initial Western response to the war as far as they are concerned. And yes, there will be a lot of work in clearing up and rebuilding much of the country after the war, will be a huge opportunity for British companies.
Russia has been trying to cultivate politicians worldwide for years, and in the UK it has been remarkably even-handed with who it approached. In the Conservatives you had the likes of Boris and Osborne; Labour Mandelson, Goldsmith and Brown; the SNP Salmond, and UKIP/Reform has Farage himself and others, as shown in the Gill court case. The Lib Dems had Mike Hancock.
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.
Was there not also a Lib Dem fifty-something sex god?
Isn't it in the nature of Reform supporters to ignore what they don't want to know about? 'It's all a onspiracy and if he is a crook, he is at least our kind of crook.'
In this respect at least the Party truly represents the British wing of the MAGA movement.
"Isn't it in the nature of Reform supporters to ignore what they don't want to know about? 'It's all a onspiracy and if he is a crook, he is at least our kind of crook.'
It's how I feel about Starmer and Centrists. They let him off things that they'd crucify opponents for. It is the nature of tribal politics I suppose
I think being a witting asset of Russian intelligence is something that ALL parties should condemn. The fact that there is even hesitation is disgraceful. That does, I think, ask serious questions of ex-Russia Today presenter, Nigel Farage
Off topic: I'm not averse to a good moan on here about the state of the education system, so thought I should balance that out with a bit of praise.
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.
I went to a junior school yesterday which was a show put on for parents/grandparents. The kids were from 4-10 I think. Each group of about 40 or 50 were introduced and came onto a stage and then sang a few lines of a meaningful (woke) song they'd learnt. As you got to the older groups the hand and body movements became more in time with the song and each other.
I have to say I found it moving. They were all so nice and kind to each other and when they took us round their classrooms they were relaxed and confident and eager to show us what they'd done
But I couldn't help this gnawing question of how these beautiful bright young children without a prejudice in the world could have turned into those flag waving morons that turned out in London two Saturdays ago.
I'm not in sympathy with the themes of the march, but it's possible to be mild 90% of the time and still nurse passionate prejudices and resentment. If we write them all off as flag-waving morons we miss the point. A lot of people are emotional about politics on the rare occasions when they pay attention to it at all. The challenge is to engage that emotion positively without expecting them suddenly to subscribe to the Guardian.
A Labour politician abused his mayoral office to try to secure immigration visas to bring 41 family members and friends from Bangladesh to Britain, a Telegraph investigation has found.
Cllr Mohammad Amirul Islam sent both “official” and “doctored” letters emblazoned with his council’s crest and logo to the British High Commission in Dhaka in an attempt to get visa applications treated “favourably”.
Proof that the councillor loves Britain and hates Bangladesh. Give him a peerage.
That is the paradox of the whole immigration debate, from both left and right who argue Britain is a terrible place and declining further. People want to come here because Britain is better than wherever they are.
Keir Starmer has tasked a Conservative peer with writing a new planning bill to remove the ability for environmental groups to delay projects such as Heathrow’s third runway with judicial reviews.
The Guardian understands that leaving the Aarhus convention is being discussed as an option. This is an international treaty signed up to by the EU and other countries in Europe, which protects the right for campaigners to bring legal claims against large infrastructure projects such as waste plants, nuclear power stations and motorways.
Doing this would “destabilise Britain’s constitution” and silence legitimate objections, leading planning lawyers have warned.
How long is it since people started to use inflatables to cross the Channel? Prior to their introduction the number of 'small boats across the Channel' was infinitesimal.
When I frequented a yacht club from which people frequently made Channel crossings smuggling was an issue but never people. The Middle East was a lot more peaceful then, of course.
From 2018 after they had closed the smuggling by trucks
Isn't it in the nature of Reform supporters to ignore what they don't want to know about? 'It's all a onspiracy and if he is a crook, he is at least our kind of crook.'
In this respect at least the Party truly represents the British wing of the MAGA movement.
"Isn't it in the nature of Reform supporters to ignore what they don't want to know about? 'It's all a onspiracy and if he is a crook, he is at least our kind of crook.'
It's how I feel about Starmer and Centrists. They let him off things that they'd crucify opponents for. It is the nature of tribal politics I suppose
Eh? The equivalent of Russian bribes/anti-vaxx on the left would be Corbyn at his battiest. Not Starmer.
Yes, that would be the equivalent on the left, but I was talking about centrists. It doesn't really matter what the issue is, we let people we like off easier than we would opponents
We still don’t know what Johnson was up to - when actually serving as British PM - giving his security the slip and going off to meet that Russian oligarch in his Italian villa. I’d imagine MI6 know, and it will all come out one day.
The theory that Boris was in bed with the Russians is a strange one. Among the core powers, he was initially a remarkably lone voice in powerfully fighting Ukraine’s corner. I have directly heard it this month that when the war eventually ends, British contractors will be welcomed with open arms in Ukraine, and that Brits “will never understand just how many lives they saved” in 2022.
Having bring in Ukraine last month, that is very much correct.
Whatever one might have to say about Boris Johnson, Ukrainians absolutely love him. He was the face of the initial Western response to the war as far as they are concerned. And yes, there will be a lot of work in clearing up and rebuilding much of the country after the war, will be a huge opportunity for British companies.
That journalist who demanded no fly zones wasn’t a fan
I think there's a very small number of nations, who due to historic ties, ties of kinship, would have our backs (probably Canada, Australia, New Zealand).
There's a wider group, which likely comprises most of Europe, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, the United States (under sane leadership), with which we have cordial relations, important economic and cultural ties, but who we should have no reason to believe would sacrifice their interests on our behalf.
Then, by far the largest group, those whose relations with us are neither good nor bad, but simply correct.
And then, those that are hostile, to varying degrees.
From what I read, it seems that we are diverging from all of Australia, New Zealand and Canada in that they are convinced that male & female are meaningless/ interchangeable. That will lead to their citizens being seriously inconvenienced, at the very least, if they came here. How much inconvenience will they consider non-hostile?
FPT, I suspect Starmer is widely disliked—both by colleagues and opponents—because he offers no vision beyond advancing his own career, and shows little interest in anything outside himself. He lacks the curiosity to build relationships that might shape his thinking or strengthen his positioning, and may not even see the need. And, unsurprisingly, people notice that.
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.
He is the very definition of a careerist. I have never been particularly convinced of his character but he was the one who seemed to offer a bit of hope that he might have a bit more substance, at the last GE. A shame it has proven that that wasn’t the case.
Off topic: I'm not averse to a good moan on here about the state of the education system, so thought I should balance that out with a bit of praise.
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.
I went to a junior school yesterday which was a show put on for parents/grandparents. The kids were from 4-10 I think. Each group of about 40 or 50 were introduced and came onto a stage and then sang a few lines of a meaningful (woke) song they'd learnt. As you got to the older groups the hand and body movements became more in time with the song and each other.
I have to say I found it moving. They were all so nice and kind to each other and when they took us round their classrooms they were relaxed and confident and eager to show us what they'd done
But I couldn't help this gnawing question of how these beautiful bright young children without a prejudice in the world could have turned into those flag waving morons that turned out in London two Saturdays ago.
I'm not in sympathy with the themes of the march, but it's possible to be mild 90% of the time and still nurse passionate prejudices and resentment. If we write them all off as flag-waving morons we miss the point. A lot of people are emotional about politics on the rare occasions when they pay attention to it at all. The challenge is to engage that emotion positively without expecting them suddenly to subscribe to the Guardian.
We are a people who've been told we have no culture. To me the march looked like people who are seeking their roots, and remembering (in the visibility of Islam) that those roots are Christian.
We still don’t know what Johnson was up to - when actually serving as British PM - giving his security the slip and going off to meet that Russian oligarch in his Italian villa. I’d imagine MI6 know, and it will all come out one day.
The theory that Boris was in bed with the Russians is a strange one. Among the core powers, he was initially a remarkably lone voice in powerfully fighting Ukraine’s corner. I have directly heard it this month that when the war eventually ends, British contractors will be welcomed with open arms in Ukraine, and that Brits “will never understand just how many lives they saved” in 2022.
Having bring in Ukraine last month, that is very much correct.
Whatever one might have to say about Boris Johnson, Ukrainians absolutely love him. He was the face of the initial Western response to the war as far as they are concerned. And yes, there will be a lot of work in clearing up and rebuilding much of the country after the war, will be a huge opportunity for British companies.
In regards to Russia, I suspect Boris liked the idea of a supply of potential party money, and so was taking very much a 'two letters' approach to it.
That he came down so unambiguously on the Ukrainian side of right at the key moment is one thing that reflects well on him, and the fact that strong Russian influence was batting about doesn't actually diminish that. The Ukrainians are not wrong in viewing it as a question of who came through for them when the moment came, whatever the previous.
Russia has been trying to cultivate politicians worldwide for years, and in the UK it has been remarkably even-handed with who it approached. In the Conservatives you had the likes of Boris and Osborne; Labour Mandelson, Goldsmith and Brown; the SNP Salmond, and UKIP/Reform has Farage himself and others, as shown in the Gill court case. The Lib Dems had Mike Hancock.
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.
Was there not also a Lib Dem fifty-something sex god?
I think Lembit has now joined Reform.
As the child of refugees to this country, Opik seems intent on pulling the ladder up behind him. I suppose Estonians tend to be very pale , therefore the right kind of refugees.
Russia has been trying to cultivate politicians worldwide for years, and in the UK it has been remarkably even-handed with who it approached. In the Conservatives you had the likes of Boris and Osborne; Labour Mandelson, Goldsmith and Brown; the SNP Salmond, and UKIP/Reform has Farage himself and others, as shown in the Gill court case. The Lib Dems had Mike Hancock.
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.
Was there not also a Lib Dem fifty-something sex god?
I think Lembit has now joined Reform.
I was not sure if he had, but if so that is one more for the the list of "MPs and ex-MPs".
I mean of course the one who allegedly seduced an alleged Russian spy, without being cheeky (Cough) .
+I don't want to live in a country where the state claims the right to prevent you from doing anything - buying food; walking the streets; chatting to a friend on a park bench - unless it is satisfied you can prove you're entitled to do that & it feels like allowing you to do so.
MKW @Mark_A_K_W This is Blairite introduction of Napoleonic / European statism granting of permission to do things, in place of English Common Law right for a person to do anything that is not explicitly forbidden by statute or Common Law.
+I don't want to live in a country where the state claims the right to prevent you from doing anything - buying food; walking the streets; chatting to a friend on a park bench - unless it is satisfied you can prove you're entitled to do that & it feels like allowing you to do so.
MKW @Mark_A_K_W This is Blairite introduction of Napoleonic / European statism granting of permission to do things, in place of English Common Law right for a person to do anything that is not explicitly forbidden by statute or Common Law.
And all this is apparently because the Home Office can't police our borders.
Can't police our borders or will not police our borders ?
Can't. When everyone who rocks up here illegally then claims that they are fleeing persecution and wants asylum, we have to let them in and go through the seventeen hoops it takes to get rid of a small fraction of them.
Arrived from France? Then feck off back, it's a safe country is, sadly, not an option available to us.
Once people are on British soil, we need some sort of agreement from somewhere else to send them away.
Once you accept that, however grumpily, it all makes sense. We have never had utter control of our borders to keep all undesirables out, which is why smugglers were a thing. And you can't get absolute security without a sort of Berlin Wall all along the Channel coast.
(In any case, despite what polls say, boats aren't the main route for immigration. They might not even be the main route for immigration that we haven't asked for.)
Once you remove the impossible, whatever remains, however dismal, contains the truth.
And yet we manage to track and intercept all boats.
If the law and will were there then we could do the same in reverse.
Isn't it in the nature of Reform supporters to ignore what they don't want to know about? 'It's all a onspiracy and if he is a crook, he is at least our kind of crook.'
In this respect at least the Party truly represents the British wing of the MAGA movement.
Its interesting reading the the comments beneath the occasional Centrist-Dad article that appears in Unherd (which has, intended or not, become a kind of Reform/MAGA inhouse journal). The commentators get really, really upset that the editor has allowed such stuff to invade their safe space and threaten to cancel their subscriptions etc. Such attitudes are not new (we had PB posters who'd shield themselves from other posters with a browser widget) but it does feel that it's now the modus operandi of an entire political movement.
A video I found interesting this week. An episode of The Rest is Politics where the interviewee is Austrian social scientist Gerald Knaus, who founded an organisation called the European Stability Initiative (ESI).
Off topic: I'm not averse to a good moan on here about the state of the education system, so thought I should balance that out with a bit of praise.
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.
I went to a junior school yesterday which was a show put on for parents/grandparents. The kids were from 4-10 I think. Each group of about 40 or 50 were introduced and came onto a stage and then sang a few lines of a meaningful (woke) song they'd learnt. As you got to the older groups the hand and body movements became more in time with the song and each other.
I have to say I found it moving. They were all so nice and kind to each other and when they took us round their classrooms they were relaxed and confident and eager to show us what they'd done
But I couldn't help this gnawing question of how these beautiful bright young children without a prejudice in the world could have turned into those flag waving morons that turned out in London two Saturdays ago.
I'm not in sympathy with the themes of the march, but it's possible to be mild 90% of the time and still nurse passionate prejudices and resentment. If we write them all off as flag-waving morons we miss the point. A lot of people are emotional about politics on the rare occasions when they pay attention to it at all. The challenge is to engage that emotion positively without expecting them suddenly to subscribe to the Guardian.
We are a people who've been told we have no culture. To me the march looked like people who are seeking their roots, and remembering (in the visibility of Islam) that those roots are Christian.
Our cultural roots are strongly intertwined with Christianity, but there are a lot of other sources too.
TL/DR; the Truss/Kwarteng plan to sell more gilts ran smack into the Bank's plan to sell more gilts and no-one noticed, or no-one was forewarned.
Yes, the Bank and fiscal policy (including energy bailout) together were the issue.
The mini budget was rather minor in isolation. The issue was the 3 combined all pushed in the same direction.
It's not even that. It's that Truss misunderstood the purpose of the OBR.
The purpose of the OBR is to provide reassurance to the markets that Britain will be able to repay its debts in the future, and thereby create the market confidence that allows Britain to continue merrily borrowing more money now.
By sidelining the OBR she shattered market confidence. The result was inevitable.
Off topic: I'm not averse to a good moan on here about the state of the education system, so thought I should balance that out with a bit of praise.
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.
I went to a junior school yesterday which was a show put on for parents/grandparents. The kids were from 4-10 I think. Each group of about 40 or 50 were introduced and came onto a stage and then sang a few lines of a meaningful (woke) song they'd learnt. As you got to the older groups the hand and body movements became more in time with the song and each other.
I have to say I found it moving. They were all so nice and kind to each other and when they took us round their classrooms they were relaxed and confident and eager to show us what they'd done
But I couldn't help this gnawing question of how these beautiful bright young children without a prejudice in the world could have turned into those flag waving morons that turned out in London two Saturdays ago.
I'm not in sympathy with the themes of the march, but it's possible to be mild 90% of the time and still nurse passionate prejudices and resentment. If we write them all off as flag-waving morons we miss the point. A lot of people are emotional about politics on the rare occasions when they pay attention to it at all. The challenge is to engage that emotion positively without expecting them suddenly to subscribe to the Guardian.
We are a people who've been told we have no culture. To me the march looked like people who are seeking their roots, and remembering (in the visibility of Islam) that those roots are Christian.
Our cultural roots are strongly intertwined with Christianity, but there are a lot of other sources too.
Indeed, and we can be proud of having led the way towards rejection of such superstitious nonsense, firstly by inventing our own Christianity-lite where adherents only have to pretend, and then by abandoning even that.
Not even that much interest in Nathan Gill on BBC Wales. It didn't really affect Wales, the accusation is he was just asking questions on behalf of Putin's Russia in the European Parliament for a bit of a bung. For BBC Wales it isn't really a scandal on the scale of Eluned Morgan's driving ban in 2022 or her failure to declare a union donation on time earlier this year.
Anyway, he's "former" Reform, so nothing really to do with Reform.
Russia has been trying to cultivate politicians worldwide for years, and in the UK it has been remarkably even-handed with who it approached. In the Conservatives you had the likes of Boris and Osborne; Labour Mandelson, Goldsmith and Brown; the SNP Salmond, and UKIP/Reform has Farage himself and others, as shown in the Gill court case. The Lib Dems had Mike Hancock.
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.
Was there not also a Lib Dem fifty-something sex god?
I think Lembit has now joined Reform.
If I were Reform, I wouldn't touch him with a barge poll. In 2010, a year when the LibDems increased their national vote share, he managed to lose a seat* which had been held by the party (and it's predecessors) for all but four years of the previous century and a half.
* A seat, I would note, where the LibDems had previously outpolled the Conservatives 2:1.
Comments
Jack Jenkins
@jackjenkins.me
Follow
I dunno man maybe the phones are just bad.
"After Ballard High School banned phones, they saw a 67% increase in students checking out library books." www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/20...
https://bsky.app/profile/jackjenkins.me/post/3lzquihn6hk2z
Hence they will be involved in it at some level, probably significantly.
Between smartphones (which are now effectively compulsory at work, as much is done via apps) and the ubiquity of CCTV in the UK we long since abolished privacy. Previously it wasn't practicable to follow everyone because of the vast sea of data, but now with AI and facial recognition it is already possible to track anyone and everyone.
We live in the presence of an omniscient state.
No-one has yet explained to me how ID cards as a basis for employment will work in a society where some, including apparently some quite big, employers are quite happy to 'employ' people on a temporary, cash in hand, no records basis.
The lifeblood and profits of the burgeoning AI sector is in integrated data.
Call a general election, 2024
End food poverty - no child should be going hungry,
2021
Revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU, 2019
EU Referendum rules triggering a 2nd EU Referendum,
2016
Prevent Donald Trump from making a state visit to the
UK, 2016
The report is a really interesting read which I recommend for no reason whatsoever 😇
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8620/
I believe acts of malice are incredibly rare, and attempts are made to design them out of the bureaucracy when they arise.
Hence bumbling rather than abusive.
I have to say I found it moving. They were all so nice and kind to each other and when they took us round their classrooms they were relaxed and confident and eager to show us what they'd done
But I couldn't help this gnawing question of how these beautiful bright young children without a prejudice in the world could have turned into those flag waving morons that turned out in London two Saturdays ago.
UK, 2025"
It is the error we have made for decades in our dealings with both sides of the Atlantic. We thought that when push came to shove our 'allies' would be there for us even at a cost to themselves. That is a myth.
We should not be 'cosying up' to any other country. We can have coridal and mutiually beneficial relations with them but we should never lose sight of that vested self interest. It is what drives all diplomatic relationships the world over.
I had a mailshot from one called The Restorationist this week, who publish shorn-of-the-fluff pieces that might have come from Alan Clark or his similars a generation ago, but has something whimsical and PG Wodehouse about it.
eg The Barbaric Practices Act: Confronting National Evil
Alex Coppen, Michael C R Reiners
As part of the Great Repeal program, the BPA deals with the despicable moral evils our country permits: foeticide, mercy killing, animal cruelty, malignant academia, Islamic dress, porn, cousin marriage, transgenderism, doxxing, reputation destruction, gay surrogacy, paternity fraud, and more.
https://restorationist.org.uk/the-barbaric-practices-act-confronting-national-evil/
@andrew_lilico
+I don't want to live in a country where the state claims the right to prevent you from doing anything - buying food; walking the streets; chatting to a friend on a park bench - unless it is satisfied you can prove you're entitled to do that & it feels like allowing you to do so.
MKW
@Mark_A_K_W
This is Blairite introduction of Napoleonic / European statism granting of permission to do things, in place of English Common Law right for a person to do anything that is not explicitly forbidden by statute or Common Law.
https://x.com/andrew_lilico/status/1971565397947433050
And all this is apparently because the Home Office can't police our borders.
But I agree, opinion polls now do not necessarily correlate with vote share in 3 years
It will dissipate all the passion and attention which ought to be given to the far more important principles.
So down on the swings in the two Florida special elections in April but still suggesting a Dem House majority next year of 20+.
It should, but is unlikely to achieve cut-through or be tied in enough to RefUK or Farage.
My own thinking reflects both the image used in the introduction (police horses and marches facing off against one another) and my own prejudices about the march as a whole (but not the marchers themselves, I have quite a lot of sympathy even if I disagree)
As usual, we are heading down a path the Americans have walked before us. Which ends up with everyone in Congress (elected every two years) spending more time working a phone back to donors than actual legislation. Both parties have buildings in Washington where the politicians go to sit in a cubicle and phone people for money.
Unless of course the Congress Criter in question is wholly owned by group of “special interests” or is a multi-multi-millionaire and self funds
Less than nothing, obviously.
Already, the scuttlebutt is that instead of starting with the passport database and maybe reconciling with the driving license, they will use “AI” to mash together all the government data they can find.
Complete with promises of 95% of the population covered in one go.
So the initial data set will be a disaster.
On the up side, the government will be handing a complete copy of everything to Peter Thiel & chums.
I think they are dreaming about being the intellectual engine of the Right.
Arrived from France? Then feck off back, it's a safe country is, sadly, not an option available to us.
NHS maternity scandals. The Francis Report into Staffordshire. Blackpool Victoria Hospital. Gosport War Memorial Hospital. The Post Office Horizon scandal and now also the previous IT system - Capture. Blood contamination. Grenfell. Hillsborough. Endless miscarriages of justice. Grooming gangs and child abuse scandals in local authority homes - see IICSA. And that's just some in recent years. There are plenty more going back decades.
The malice is in not dealing with the problems when they first manifest themselves, not putting them right - even after endless inquiries and recommendations (the idea that attempts are made to design failures out of the bureaucracy is laughable) and worst of all, the utter callousness and cruelty with which the victims are treated.
It happens so regularly and in much the same way every single time that it is now the default of how the British state behaves towards its citizens. This is malice. Not bumbling.
Such a state cannot be trusted with ID cards. Digital ID should be voluntary, rigorously controlled with citizens having an absolute right to see all information held on them, the right to alter it and the right to be told who has had access to their data and why and if unauthorised to be punished. They should also have the right not to have their data used for AI purposes or shared with any private company without express permission or transferred out of the country.
Curious why this has been launched now... surely the government has enough on their plates without opening up this debate - it seems to have pissed off both left and right in equal measure.
The govt knows who has the right to work in the UK already, and it is already a legal requirement to do right to work checks. So it could be seen as an cynical attempt to get this through while the temperature on immigration is high. I'd like to learn more about the broader benefits of the ID, but the suggestion that this will be a magic bullet against illegal immigration (as opposed to securing borders, leaving the ECHR, enforcing existing rules etc) seems frankly a bit daft.
When I frequented a yacht club from which people frequently made Channel crossings smuggling was an issue but never people. The Middle East was a lot more peaceful then, of course.
(I am aware that this is a largely futile exercise as tracking and data harvesting is so deeply embedded in our lives these days that even if I sort out my OS I'll still be tracked in other ways).
Once you accept that, however grumpily, it all makes sense. We have never had utter control of our borders to keep all undesirables out, which is why smugglers were a thing. And you can't get absolute security without a sort of Berlin Wall all along the Channel coast.
(In any case, despite what polls say, boats aren't the main route for immigration. They might not even be the main route for immigration that we haven't asked for.)
Once you remove the impossible, whatever remains, however dismal, contains the truth.
As for the rest, we just have a different definition of malice. And the UK is in no way unusual in being a state that mistreats it's citizens - that is pretty much baked into the notion of statehood.
With a land border you can built walls, fences, razorwire barricades or whatever. Our border is in the middle of the Channel. We can’t act on the French side, and once the boats cross the median line the occupants are our responsibility.
One one hand, I'm glad that we don't have the US model of politics costing squillions. However, we need to recalibrate our understanding about what a nice website tells us about the reality of a political organisation.
Back in the days of In Touch leaflets (anyone still do those?), you at least needed enough supporters to get the damn things through every letterbox.
I wouldn't post the same data to Facebook (or even have any kind of Facebook account, for that matter).
Maybe the CIA are watching everyone but given the heat map of bases in Afghanistan got leaked I doubt it.
It isn't really the actual data being held that is at issue, it is that the government actually has power to screw your life up, whereas Strava does not.
It's how I feel about Starmer and Centrists. They let him off things that they'd crucify opponents for. It is the nature of tribal politics I suppose
When I was a lad the smallest yacht to have sailed the Atlantic was called April Fool, and was 5-foot, 11-inch long - in 1968.
The same chap - Hugo Vihlen - did it in another yacht called Father' Day, which is 5-foot, 4-inches long, in 1993. This is in the Maritime Museum in Falmouth. He went from Canada because on the first attempt the US Coast Guard stopped him. He also shortened it by 1.5" as a competitor had a slightly smaller boat. My piccie for the day.
Hugo Vihlen, still around at 93.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Vihlen
Museum in Falmouth where the boat lives:
https://nmmc.co.uk/object/boats/fathers-day-the-smallest-boat-to-cross-the-atlantic/
I bet he wishes he never left Brighton now.
They're still popular amongst the older demographic, but social media is increasingly superseding them
I think there's a very small number of nations, who due to historic ties, ties of kinship, would have our backs (probably Canada, Australia, New Zealand).
There's a wider group, which likely comprises most of Europe, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, the United States (under sane leadership), with which we have cordial relations, important economic and cultural ties, but who we should have no reason to believe would sacrifice their interests on our behalf.
Then, by far the largest group, those whose relations with us are neither good nor bad, but simply correct.
And then, those that are hostile, to varying degrees.
The Guardian understands that leaving the Aarhus convention is being discussed as an option. This is an international treaty signed up to by the EU and other countries in Europe, which protects the right for campaigners to bring legal claims against large infrastructure projects such as waste plants, nuclear power stations and motorways.
Doing this would “destabilise Britain’s constitution” and silence legitimate objections, leading planning lawyers have warned.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/27/starmer-asks-conservative-peer-write-planning-bill-block-judicial-reviews
Cllr Mohammad Amirul Islam sent both “official” and “doctored” letters emblazoned with his council’s crest and logo to the British High Commission in Dhaka in an attempt to get visa applications treated “favourably”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/27/labour-mayor-demanded-visas-for-bangladeshi-family-friends/
The former prime minister says she was the victim of “deliberate sabotage”. What if she’s right?
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2025/09/liz-truss-is-still-at-war-with-the-deep-state
TL/DR; the Truss/Kwarteng plan to sell more gilts ran smack into the Bank's plan to sell more gilts and no-one noticed, or no-one was forewarned.
Whatever one might have to say about Boris Johnson, Ukrainians absolutely love him. He was the face of the initial Western response to the war as far as they are concerned. And yes, there will be a lot of work in clearing up and rebuilding much of the country after the war, will be a huge opportunity for British companies.
Somewhere in the archives there's one about coals to Newcastle.
That is the paradox of the whole immigration debate, from both left and right who argue Britain is a terrible place and declining further. People want to come here because Britain is better than wherever they are.
What constitution !!
2018 - 539
2019 - 1,843
2020 - 8,461
2021 - 28,526
2022 - 45,755
2023 - 29,437
2024 - 37,000
2025 - 30,000 to date
The mini budget was rather minor in isolation. The issue was the 3 combined all pushed in the same direction.
https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-crisis-activist-breaks-down-in-tears-as-she-confronts-boris-johnson-about-lack-of-no-fly-zone-12554760
That he came down so unambiguously on the Ukrainian side of right at the key moment is one thing that reflects well on him, and the fact that strong Russian influence was batting about doesn't actually diminish that. The Ukrainians are not wrong in viewing it as a question of who came through for them when the moment came, whatever the previous.
I mean of course the one who allegedly seduced an alleged Russian spy, without being cheeky (Cough) .
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pap4xFxn5F8
It's short but worth watching. (Don't miss the first clip)
If the law and will were there then we could do the same in reverse.
Link to the actual podcast start. https://youtu.be/QIAuED6VRU8?t=54 . 30 minutes.
He talks about how democracy can be undermined by looking at what happened in Austria in the 1930s, and drawing comparisons to Europe now.
Have a great day, all.
The purpose of the OBR is to provide reassurance to the markets that Britain will be able to repay its debts in the future, and thereby create the market confidence that allows Britain to continue merrily borrowing more money now.
By sidelining the OBR she shattered market confidence. The result was inevitable.
Anyway, he's "former" Reform, so nothing really to do with Reform.
* A seat, I would note, where the LibDems had previously outpolled the Conservatives 2:1.