Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Anson Street Press or a similar publisher might do it. They print low-volume books, generic covers, of novels that are out-of-copyright or easy to print. To my delight they appear to have the whole of the Lensman series.
Alfred was sent to Rome twice as a child Marc Morris says in his superb 'The Anglo Saxons' history.
Thinking more long term, I wonder if Reform are here to stay.
The LDs were, in their time, the repository of protest votes from the disillusioned, frustrated and angry but of course disappointed when they got to power and were comprehensively rejected in 2015.
The Conservatives got their come uppance in 2024 (and 1997) while Labour have lost power in 1979 and 2010.
Yet none of them has gone - all are still here.
If Reform win in 2028/9 and disappoint and lose power in 2033/4, will they fold up their tents and disappear back into obscurity? I suspect not - their brand of nationalist, anti-immigrant, socially conservative politics has a niche which I suspect none of the other parties can fully replace.
It may well be we are entering a prolonged period of political instability and electoral volatility.
Reform are an existential threat to stable politics - not because of who they are but because they have captured the Broken Britain zeitgeist which has been building for years but dismissed by mainstream parties. What really makes them a threat to stability is their own inability:
1) Reform aren't a coherent political group. Most of their supporters seem unaware that Reforms policies will fuck them harder than the failed politics they are protesting against. The disconnect between the flag shaggers and the capitalist screw the workers subsets will become evident as and when Reform actually gain power in places. Labour and the Tories have both been on the receiving end of voter rage when they fail. Reform will try and deflect but so dod Labour and the Tories...
2) Reform are the cult of Farage. He ejects and expels anyone who forgets their place and that process is already ongoing. We already have the Advance UK schism and there inevitably will be more before the election. With the hard right engaged in a race to the bottom on policy, the schisms only force ever harder policies which creates more tension and more schisms.
What is needed is for a mainstream party to actually accept the country is broken and engage in political rebuilding. We need the new Beveridge Report.
Interesting post.
Only comment I would add is that the problem is unrealistic voter expectations. Very difficult to govern now. And "political rebuilding" would require a leader with very special qualities indeed. Maybe cometh the hour, cometh the man (or woman)?
Boris, curiously, managed for a time to ride it all out with the distractions of Brexit and Covid (and the promise of levellling up - brilliant politics) but his conduct and the economic impact of Covid did for him.
As you say, if Reform actually form a Government, the contact with reality is likely to lead to a collapse. Nige will skip off and that'll be that. But then what? My real fear is the dissolution of the UK as a result of all this. Things can always get worse.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why? - The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national” - From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport - Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship. - So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.
In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.
It’s all been done before
As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.
History tells us that things done to the “undesirables” at breakfast are done to the Jews by mid-morning, to blacks at lunchtime and everyone else by afternoon tea.
“Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
Deporting people who have a legal right to be here has been done to black people multiple times already - hence the Windrush scandal.
They had no right to be here. Many just got here, and nobody bothered to enforce immigration status. Natural justice of course means they to deport after such a long time is not really fair.
Er no. They had the right to be here. At the time many came here, any citizen of the Empire was a British Subject and entitled to live here. But because they arrived at a time when paperwork wasn't required, they had trouble proving it in our more bureaucratic age.
My view is the immigration service deliberately targeted people they knew probably had the right to live here, but were easy pickings.
Melania (motivated, he has said, by Trump) threatened Michael Wolff (Trump biographer, Epstein biographer with a lot of research material still to come out) with a $1bn lawsuit if he doesn't withdraw and apologise yadda yadda yadda.
He's moved first by asking for a Declaratory Judgement that any case would be baseless, which could pull all the relevant people into testifying on oath if called into court. He's using anti-SLAPP law.
Wolff’s central allegation was that it was Epstein who introduced Melania to Donald, which is provably false and defamatory according to the First Lady.
According to Wolff he never said that as quoted, and the source is a HuffPo article which he did not write, based on his podcasts.
The one that they may be more concerned about is the intention to pull all the relevant parties into court to be interviewed ("deposed"?) after subpoena.
- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why? - The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national” - From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport - Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship. - So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.
In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.
It’s all been done before
As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.
History tells us that things done to the “undesirables” at breakfast are done to the Jews by mid-morning, to blacks at lunchtime and everyone else by afternoon tea.
“Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
Deporting people who have a legal right to be here has been done to black people multiple times already - hence the Windrush scandal.
Windrush scandal, from unfortunate oversight to policy of main opposition parties in ten years.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Also was he really King of England rather than King of Wessex?
I'd need to check but I think by the end Alfred styled himself as Rex Angul-Saxonum[sp], King of the Anglo-Saxons. I'm inclined to agree with you, though, that the first king of England was the now much-overlooked Aethelstan.
Athelstan is usually regarded as the first king of a unified nation state, but Alfred appointed the Ealderman of Mercia so ruled more than just Wessex, so can be regarded as the first king of an English nation. His son Edward the Elder is also sometimes regarded as the first English king - if Edward the Confessor is given a number it is usually III
- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why? - The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national” - From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport - Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship. - So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.
In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.
It’s all been done before
As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.
History tells us that things done to the “undesirables” at breakfast are done to the Jews by mid-morning, to blacks at lunchtime and everyone else by afternoon tea.
“Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
Deporting people who have a legal right to be here has been done to black people multiple times already - hence the Windrush scandal.
They had no right to be here. Many just got here, and nobody bothered to enforce immigration status. Natural justice of course means they to deport after such a long time is not really fair.
Er no. They had the right to be here. At the time many came here, any citizen of the Empire was a British Subject and entitled to live here. But because they arrived at a time when paperwork wasn't required, they had trouble proving it in our more bureaucratic age.
My view is the immigration service deliberately targeted people they knew probably had the right to live here, but were easy pickings.
Friend of mine, his father came on the Windrush. I found the passenger manifest online for him, much to his joy. But guess what is printed in bold at the top of every page?
Newly elected fuker becomes locally very unpopular very quickly when people realise they are not getting a moon on a stick. Fukers turn nasty.
Use the unpopularity of elected fukers as the political weather vane. They're making an embarrassment of themselves in places like Kent, and there is a lot more to come.
Why would one elected Senedd member become unpopular? They are not going to be in a position to offer a moon on a stick as the Welsh government will remain Labour. The new Senedd member will be freely able to snipe from the sidelines
Good morning
As you say one Reform member is not going to change anything, but what should worry labour is that it is very likely many Reform candidates will be elected to the Senedd next May, as well as Plaid, posing the problem of who actually governs Wales in the next Senedd
The only possible governing combinations are, surely, Plaid/Labour or Reform/Tory and the former will presumably return more members to the Senedd. So seems nailed on.
If it is a hung parliament due to the LibDems or Greens getting a few then, again, it's going to be a Plaid FM and Labour DFM. Inconceivable that LibDems or Greens would touch Reform.
Then again, my knowledge of Welsh politics is less than profound.
In the medium term, you could see Reform's dream scenario as winning the Assembly election by getting most votes and seats, but then being blocked from taking power by a Labour-Plaid coalition. Excellent grievance material to take into the general election.
- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why? - The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national” - From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport - Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship. - So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.
In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.
It’s all been done before
As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.
History tells us that things done to the “undesirables” at breakfast are done to the Jews by mid-morning, to blacks at lunchtime and everyone else by afternoon tea.
“Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
Deporting people who have a legal right to be here has been done to black people multiple times already - hence the Windrush scandal.
Windrush scandal, from unfortunate oversight to policy of main opposition parties in ten years.
It forced the resignation of a Tory Home Secretary, and now it is Tory party policy.
The opinion polls suggest that more than half the vote at the next GE will go to Reform and the Tories. Things can deteriorate very quickly.
10 days until I can make my application for Irish citizenship.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why? - The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national” - From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport - Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship. - So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.
In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.
It’s all been done before
As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.
History tells us that things done to the “undesirables” at breakfast are done to the Jews by mid-morning, to blacks at lunchtime and everyone else by afternoon tea.
“Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
Deporting people who have a legal right to be here has been done to black people multiple times already - hence the Windrush scandal.
Windrush scandal, from unfortunate oversight to policy of main opposition parties in ten years.
It forced the resignation of a Tory Home Secretary, and now it is Tory party policy.
The opinion polls suggest that more than half the vote at the next GE will go to Reform and the Tories. Things can deteriorate very quickly.
10 days until I can make my application for Irish citizenship.
Jealous. Unfortunately my Irish heritage stopped at a great grandparent.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Also was he really King of England rather than King of Wessex?
I'd need to check but I think by the end Alfred styled himself as Rex Angul-Saxonum[sp], King of the Anglo-Saxons. I'm inclined to agree with you, though, that the first king of England was the now much-overlooked Aethelstan.
Athelstan is usually regarded as the first king of a unified nation state, but Alfred appointed the Ealderman of Mercia so ruled more than just Wessex, so can be regarded as the first king of an English nation. His son Edward the Elder is also sometimes regarded as the first English king - if Edward the Confessor is given a number it is usually III
To Medieval English people Athelstan was The Man, that any subsequent king wanted to emulate.
For centuries, people referred to Brunanburgh as “The Battle.”
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Musk is a moron. He is All In on AI and autonomy. To be fair to xAI (which is X, not Tesla) they went from Zero to leading edge in a couple of years. But on vehicles? Even their CFO said that fleetwide takeup of Full Self Driving is 12%. That isn't helped by Tesla selling a lot of vehicles incapable of FSD - Europe, Japan, older vehicles. But even with cars capable of running it takeup is c. 20%. Why? Because people like to drive.
So what is the big plan? A fleet of wheeled robots which will put Uber et al out of business. And then Optimus robots which supposedly can replace surgeons and Elon describes as a "robot army"
Elon Musk - the man calling for the violent overthrow of governments like here in the UK - thinks these governments will license him to sell a "robot army". Which will utterly destroy jobs and crash economies. If the likes of him want to start talking about UBI then maybe, but they never do.
Just build cars man. The best selling car in the world which is also the safest car ever tested. Which makes a GM profit. Why on earth would you not want to out-think and out-compete legacy dinosaur manufacturers who make serious negative GM on their EVs and keep going bankrupt?
The self-driving cars are only useful once they are allowed to drive empty and/or pick you up from the pub.
Self-driving where the liability is on the driver to stay alert and take over when it goes bong, is the worst of all worlds.
It’s probably a couple of years away, but it’s been a couple of years away for the best part of a decade so far.
Tesla Q3 revenue up from $25.2bn to $28.1bn year-on-year is a pretty good effort in today’s car market.
Waymo et al are already on the road in the US. They are coming here.
Buying your own self driving car is just the next step.
Buying a personal Waymo at the moment would cost about $200k, plus the subscription to the call center for helping when it gets stuck, and it can only go on roads it’s mapped in a small area.
I can have an S-Class and a driver for the same money.
But yes each iteration gets better and cheaper. It’s coming, just not quite there yet.
Waymo has got to the stage that calls to the operator are very, very few. And they are apparently not actual remote driving requests (99%+) but requests for “which of these options should I pick?”
They are expanding their range, trying harder and harder areas.
Very easy to see selling operator backup as a subscription.
I bet there are zillionaires trying to get a personal Waymo, right now.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Oh, they get read all right. I'm just doing different genres in turn. At the moment it's de Bedoyere's history Populus, and ( at bedtime) a history of the Saturn 1b rocket.
I'm putting my £10 on Plaid. Having listened to a few vox pops the Caerphillies know a smarmy sleazebag when the see one. They won't want the whiff that a Reform MP will bring to their pretty ittle valley. They'll go for the Welsh choice.
For those of us who went to prep school there and had to seing through tears 'We'll Keep a Welcome' please don't vote reform!.....
Melania (motivated, he has said, by Trump) threatened Michael Wolff (Trump biographer, Epstein biographer with a lot of research material still to come out) with a $1bn lawsuit if he doesn't withdraw and apologise yadda yadda yadda.
He's moved first by asking for a Declaratory Judgement that any case would be baseless, which could pull all the relevant people into testifying on oath if called into court. He's using anti-SLAPP law.
Wolff’s central allegation was that it was Epstein who introduced Melania to Donald, which is provably false and defamatory according to the First Lady.
According to Wolff he never said that as quoted, and the source is a HuffPo article which he did not write, based on his podcasts.
The one that they may be more concerned about is the intention to pull all the relevant parties into court to be interviewed ("deposed"?) after subpoena.
There should be an archive copy of the first edition of his book, and of the relevant podcasts, that would clear this up pretty quickly one way or the other.
If he’s not used the exact words, he’s certainly danced around the subject or had lawyers edit very carefully.
I'm putting my £10 on Plaid. Having listened to a few vox pops the Caerphillies know a smarmy sleazebag when the see one. They won't want the whiff that a Reform MP will bring to their pretty ittle valley. They'll go for the Welsh choice.
For those of us who went to prep school there and had to seing through tears 'We'll Keep a Welcome' please don't vote reform!.....
Catherine Connolly is currently 1/18 to win the election tomorrow. The latest poll put her on 56% of the first preference vote, ahead of Humphreys on 32% and the withdrawn Gavin (who is still on the ballot paper, and some people intend to use as a cipher for RON/a protest vote) on 13%.
- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why? - The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national” - From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport - Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship. - So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.
In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.
It’s all been done before
As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.
History tells us that things done to the “undesirables” at breakfast are done to the Jews by mid-morning, to blacks at lunchtime and everyone else by afternoon tea.
“Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
Deporting people who have a legal right to be here has been done to black people multiple times already - hence the Windrush scandal.
Windrush scandal, from unfortunate oversight to policy of main opposition parties in ten years.
It forced the resignation of a Tory Home Secretary, and now it is Tory party policy.
The opinion polls suggest that more than half the vote at the next GE will go to Reform and the Tories. Things can deteriorate very quickly.
10 days until I can make my application for Irish citizenship.
- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why? - The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national” - From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport - Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship. - So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.
In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.
It’s all been done before
As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.
History tells us that things done to the “undesirables” at breakfast are done to the Jews by mid-morning, to blacks at lunchtime and everyone else by afternoon tea.
“Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
Deporting people who have a legal right to be here has been done to black people multiple times already - hence the Windrush scandal.
Windrush scandal, from unfortunate oversight to policy of main opposition parties in ten years.
It forced the resignation of a Tory Home Secretary, and now it is Tory party policy.
The opinion polls suggest that more than half the vote at the next GE will go to Reform and the Tories. Things can deteriorate very quickly.
10 days until I can make my application for Irish citizenship.
Jealous. Unfortunately my Irish heritage stopped at a great grandparent.
Is watching Val Doonican on TV in the 70s, enough to claim it?
I have asked before and I will again. How does the frequency of 'incidents' with new Reform councillors match up to the whole? Rotten Boroughs details on a biweekly basis the utter shit that goes down in local government around the country. I see little different in Reform, except that everyone is paying attention.
- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why? - The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national” - From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport - Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship. - So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.
In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.
It’s all been done before
As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.
History tells us that things done to the “undesirables” at breakfast are done to the Jews by mid-morning, to blacks at lunchtime and everyone else by afternoon tea.
“Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
Deporting people who have a legal right to be here has been done to black people multiple times already - hence the Windrush scandal.
Windrush scandal, from unfortunate oversight to policy of main opposition parties in ten years.
It forced the resignation of a Tory Home Secretary, and now it is Tory party policy.
The opinion polls suggest that more than half the vote at the next GE will go to Reform and the Tories. Things can deteriorate very quickly.
10 days until I can make my application for Irish citizenship.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
Excellent, tsundoko is right up there with döstädning as epitomising life for me.
Musk is a moron. He is All In on AI and autonomy. To be fair to xAI (which is X, not Tesla) they went from Zero to leading edge in a couple of years. But on vehicles? Even their CFO said that fleetwide takeup of Full Self Driving is 12%. That isn't helped by Tesla selling a lot of vehicles incapable of FSD - Europe, Japan, older vehicles. But even with cars capable of running it takeup is c. 20%. Why? Because people like to drive.
So what is the big plan? A fleet of wheeled robots which will put Uber et al out of business. And then Optimus robots which supposedly can replace surgeons and Elon describes as a "robot army"
Elon Musk - the man calling for the violent overthrow of governments like here in the UK - thinks these governments will license him to sell a "robot army". Which will utterly destroy jobs and crash economies. If the likes of him want to start talking about UBI then maybe, but they never do.
Just build cars man. The best selling car in the world which is also the safest car ever tested. Which makes a GM profit. Why on earth would you not want to out-think and out-compete legacy dinosaur manufacturers who make serious negative GM on their EVs and keep going bankrupt?
The self-driving cars are only useful once they are allowed to drive empty and/or pick you up from the pub.
Self-driving where the liability is on the driver to stay alert and take over when it goes bong, is the worst of all worlds.
It’s probably a couple of years away, but it’s been a couple of years away for the best part of a decade so far.
Tesla Q3 revenue up from $25.2bn to $28.1bn year-on-year is a pretty good effort in today’s car market.
Waymo et al are already on the road in the US. They are coming here.
Buying your own self driving car is just the next step.
Buying a personal Waymo at the moment would cost about $200k, plus the subscription to the call center for helping when it gets stuck, and it can only go on roads it’s mapped in a small area.
I can have an S-Class and a driver for the same money.
But yes each iteration gets better and cheaper. It’s coming, just not quite there yet.
Waymo has got to the stage that calls to the operator are very, very few. And they are apparently not actual remote driving requests (99%+) but requests for “which of these options should I pick?”
They are expanding their range, trying harder and harder areas.
Very easy to see selling operator backup as a subscription.
I bet there are zillionaires trying to get a personal Waymo, right now.
IIRC it’s still the case that Google doesn’t trust Waymo vehicles to drive with paying passengers on Highways / Motorways.
The problem being (presumably) that they can’t just stop & await human correction on the motorway, whereas that is usually a safe option in cities / towns. 99.99% self driving isn’t good enough if you can’t stop when you’re confused.
If they can get the confusion rate way down below the human rate, then they could argue that Waymo’s should be allowed to use them regardless, maybe? But there’s the inevitable bad PR to deal with there as well when a Waymo makes an inevitably dumb decision that a human would never make & kills someone, even if the overall death rate is way below the human one.
Musk is a moron. He is All In on AI and autonomy. To be fair to xAI (which is X, not Tesla) they went from Zero to leading edge in a couple of years. But on vehicles? Even their CFO said that fleetwide takeup of Full Self Driving is 12%. That isn't helped by Tesla selling a lot of vehicles incapable of FSD - Europe, Japan, older vehicles. But even with cars capable of running it takeup is c. 20%. Why? Because people like to drive.
So what is the big plan? A fleet of wheeled robots which will put Uber et al out of business. And then Optimus robots which supposedly can replace surgeons and Elon describes as a "robot army"
Elon Musk - the man calling for the violent overthrow of governments like here in the UK - thinks these governments will license him to sell a "robot army". Which will utterly destroy jobs and crash economies. If the likes of him want to start talking about UBI then maybe, but they never do.
Just build cars man. The best selling car in the world which is also the safest car ever tested. Which makes a GM profit. Why on earth would you not want to out-think and out-compete legacy dinosaur manufacturers who make serious negative GM on their EVs and keep going bankrupt?
The self-driving cars are only useful once they are allowed to drive empty and/or pick you up from the pub.
Self-driving where the liability is on the driver to stay alert and take over when it goes bong, is the worst of all worlds.
It’s probably a couple of years away, but it’s been a couple of years away for the best part of a decade so far.
Here's the problem. Getting UBER licensed has taken effort, because it puts cab drivers out of a job. Now Muskybaby wants to destroy the taxi industry as a whole. If you are a European government or even a city, why would you license that?
And the "robot army" (and he used those exact words to describe scaled production of Optimus). Which can take jobs in vast numbers. The same - why would you license it?
This is the reverse industrial revolution. People complained then that the machines would take their jobs, but for much of the time the expansion in economic output meant more jobs. AI and Robotics means the literal decimation of jobs, likely many times over. Unless governments are prepared to give money to the newly unemployed the rollout of these technologies will be a socioeconomic disaster...
A classic Luddite argument, mixed with economically illiterate socialism.
If the government really wants to help people keep working, it should keep them in jobs, by say reducing payroll taxes and taxes on corporate profits, rather than increasing them. It should also cut benefits that subsidise idleness, from fake incapacity to bullshit university courses or preventing asylum seekers from working. That will reduce the artificial incentive to automate. If we do that, we'd have a labour market that'd be robust for years or decades to come.
Blaming natural technological progress for a decimation of jobs lets the true culprit, who sits in Number 11 Downing Street, off the hook much too easily.
If the technology could create competition that would be one thing, but what Musk intends is a massive monopoly that he alone controls. Under no circumstances should he be allowed to have that power, even if he was not a fascist arsehole.
Musk is a moron. He is All In on AI and autonomy. To be fair to xAI (which is X, not Tesla) they went from Zero to leading edge in a couple of years. But on vehicles? Even their CFO said that fleetwide takeup of Full Self Driving is 12%. That isn't helped by Tesla selling a lot of vehicles incapable of FSD - Europe, Japan, older vehicles. But even with cars capable of running it takeup is c. 20%. Why? Because people like to drive.
So what is the big plan? A fleet of wheeled robots which will put Uber et al out of business. And then Optimus robots which supposedly can replace surgeons and Elon describes as a "robot army"
Elon Musk - the man calling for the violent overthrow of governments like here in the UK - thinks these governments will license him to sell a "robot army". Which will utterly destroy jobs and crash economies. If the likes of him want to start talking about UBI then maybe, but they never do.
Just build cars man. The best selling car in the world which is also the safest car ever tested. Which makes a GM profit. Why on earth would you not want to out-think and out-compete legacy dinosaur manufacturers who make serious negative GM on their EVs and keep going bankrupt?
The self-driving cars are only useful once they are allowed to drive empty and/or pick you up from the pub.
Self-driving where the liability is on the driver to stay alert and take over when it goes bong, is the worst of all worlds.
It’s probably a couple of years away, but it’s been a couple of years away for the best part of a decade so far.
Tesla Q3 revenue up from $25.2bn to $28.1bn year-on-year is a pretty good effort in today’s car market.
Waymo et al are already on the road in the US. They are coming here.
Buying your own self driving car is just the next step.
Buying a personal Waymo at the moment would cost about $200k, plus the subscription to the call center for helping when it gets stuck, and it can only go on roads it’s mapped in a small area.
I can have an S-Class and a driver for the same money.
But yes each iteration gets better and cheaper. It’s coming, just not quite there yet.
Waymo has got to the stage that calls to the operator are very, very few. And they are apparently not actual remote driving requests (99%+) but requests for “which of these options should I pick?”
They are expanding their range, trying harder and harder areas.
Very easy to see selling operator backup as a subscription.
I bet there are zillionaires trying to get a personal Waymo, right now.
IIRC it’s still the case that Google doesn’t trust Waymo vehicles to drive with paying passengers on Highways / Motorways.
The problem being (presumably) that they can’t just stop & await human correction on the motorway, whereas that is usually a safe option in cities / towns. 99.99% self driving isn’t good enough if you can’t stop when you’re confused.
If they can get the confusion rate way down below the human rate, then they could argue that Waymo’s should be allowed to use them regardless, maybe? But there’s the inevitable bad PR to deal with there as well when a Waymo makes an inevitably dumb decision that a human would never make & kills someone, even if the overall death rate is way below the human one.
Once they're allowed on highways they're competing with rail (and at longer distances) air - both of whom have better bought politicians than taxi/Uber drivers.
- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why? - The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national” - From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport - Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship. - So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.
In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.
It’s all been done before
As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.
History tells us that things done to the “undesirables” at breakfast are done to the Jews by mid-morning, to blacks at lunchtime and everyone else by afternoon tea.
“Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
Deporting people who have a legal right to be here has been done to black people multiple times already - hence the Windrush scandal.
Windrush scandal, from unfortunate oversight to policy of main opposition parties in ten years.
It forced the resignation of a Tory Home Secretary, and now it is Tory party policy.
The opinion polls suggest that more than half the vote at the next GE will go to Reform and the Tories. Things can deteriorate very quickly.
10 days until I can make my application for Irish citizenship.
I have asked before and I will again. How does the frequency of 'incidents' with new Reform councillors match up to the whole? Rotten Boroughs details on a biweekly basis the utter shit that goes down in local government around the country. I see little different in Reform, except that everyone is paying attention.
The, err, quality of Reform candidates suggests a higher rate of shithousery a priori.
But yes, in general the average quality of local councillors is poor & my family’s experience suggests that anyone with any professional experience at all gets pushed straight into the more complex roles.
One of the comments I heard was that Labour struggled with this more than the Tories did at the local level, because the candidate pool for Tory Councillors tended to include more people with relevant professional experience - be it legal, accountancy or whatever. Modern Councils are little more than administrative bodies for the implementation of government policy these days, sadly.
Musk is a moron. He is All In on AI and autonomy. To be fair to xAI (which is X, not Tesla) they went from Zero to leading edge in a couple of years. But on vehicles? Even their CFO said that fleetwide takeup of Full Self Driving is 12%. That isn't helped by Tesla selling a lot of vehicles incapable of FSD - Europe, Japan, older vehicles. But even with cars capable of running it takeup is c. 20%. Why? Because people like to drive.
So what is the big plan? A fleet of wheeled robots which will put Uber et al out of business. And then Optimus robots which supposedly can replace surgeons and Elon describes as a "robot army"
Elon Musk - the man calling for the violent overthrow of governments like here in the UK - thinks these governments will license him to sell a "robot army". Which will utterly destroy jobs and crash economies. If the likes of him want to start talking about UBI then maybe, but they never do.
Just build cars man. The best selling car in the world which is also the safest car ever tested. Which makes a GM profit. Why on earth would you not want to out-think and out-compete legacy dinosaur manufacturers who make serious negative GM on their EVs and keep going bankrupt?
The self-driving cars are only useful once they are allowed to drive empty and/or pick you up from the pub.
Self-driving where the liability is on the driver to stay alert and take over when it goes bong, is the worst of all worlds.
It’s probably a couple of years away, but it’s been a couple of years away for the best part of a decade so far.
Tesla Q3 revenue up from $25.2bn to $28.1bn year-on-year is a pretty good effort in today’s car market.
Waymo et al are already on the road in the US. They are coming here.
Buying your own self driving car is just the next step.
Buying a personal Waymo at the moment would cost about $200k, plus the subscription to the call center for helping when it gets stuck, and it can only go on roads it’s mapped in a small area.
I can have an S-Class and a driver for the same money.
But yes each iteration gets better and cheaper. It’s coming, just not quite there yet.
Waymo has got to the stage that calls to the operator are very, very few. And they are apparently not actual remote driving requests (99%+) but requests for “which of these options should I pick?”
They are expanding their range, trying harder and harder areas.
Very easy to see selling operator backup as a subscription.
I bet there are zillionaires trying to get a personal Waymo, right now.
IIRC it’s still the case that Google doesn’t trust Waymo vehicles to drive with paying passengers on Highways / Motorways.
The problem being (presumably) that they can’t just stop & await human correction on the motorway, whereas that is usually a safe option in cities / towns. 99.99% self driving isn’t good enough if you can’t stop when you’re confused.
If they can get the confusion rate way down below the human rate, then they could argue that Waymo’s should be allowed to use them regardless, maybe? But there’s the inevitable bad PR to deal with there as well when a Waymo makes an inevitably dumb decision that a human would never make & kills someone, even if the overall death rate is way below the human one.
Once they're allowed on highways they're competing with rail (and at longer distances) air - both of whom have better bought politicians than taxi/Uber drivers.
I don’t think that’s what’s stopping Waymo from offering service on Highways in the USA. Quite a few States are very pro self-driving.
So this isn't a Westminster by-election? Where's the fun in that???
For one thing, speaking Welsh at the hustings when your opponents don't know it and can't even do a John Redwood.
My Physics teacher at Ilford County kept banging on about a job interview he had in Wales. He said "And they asked me "can you speak Welsh?" and I knew they were going to ask me that!"
Musk is a moron. He is All In on AI and autonomy. To be fair to xAI (which is X, not Tesla) they went from Zero to leading edge in a couple of years. But on vehicles? Even their CFO said that fleetwide takeup of Full Self Driving is 12%. That isn't helped by Tesla selling a lot of vehicles incapable of FSD - Europe, Japan, older vehicles. But even with cars capable of running it takeup is c. 20%. Why? Because people like to drive.
So what is the big plan? A fleet of wheeled robots which will put Uber et al out of business. And then Optimus robots which supposedly can replace surgeons and Elon describes as a "robot army"
Elon Musk - the man calling for the violent overthrow of governments like here in the UK - thinks these governments will license him to sell a "robot army". Which will utterly destroy jobs and crash economies. If the likes of him want to start talking about UBI then maybe, but they never do.
Just build cars man. The best selling car in the world which is also the safest car ever tested. Which makes a GM profit. Why on earth would you not want to out-think and out-compete legacy dinosaur manufacturers who make serious negative GM on their EVs and keep going bankrupt?
The self-driving cars are only useful once they are allowed to drive empty and/or pick you up from the pub.
Self-driving where the liability is on the driver to stay alert and take over when it goes bong, is the worst of all worlds.
It’s probably a couple of years away, but it’s been a couple of years away for the best part of a decade so far.
Tesla Q3 revenue up from $25.2bn to $28.1bn year-on-year is a pretty good effort in today’s car market.
Waymo et al are already on the road in the US. They are coming here.
Buying your own self driving car is just the next step.
Buying a personal Waymo at the moment would cost about $200k, plus the subscription to the call center for helping when it gets stuck, and it can only go on roads it’s mapped in a small area.
I can have an S-Class and a driver for the same money.
But yes each iteration gets better and cheaper. It’s coming, just not quite there yet.
Waymo has got to the stage that calls to the operator are very, very few. And they are apparently not actual remote driving requests (99%+) but requests for “which of these options should I pick?”
They are expanding their range, trying harder and harder areas.
Very easy to see selling operator backup as a subscription.
I bet there are zillionaires trying to get a personal Waymo, right now.
IIRC it’s still the case that Google doesn’t trust Waymo vehicles to drive with paying passengers on Highways / Motorways.
The problem being (presumably) that they can’t just stop & await human correction on the motorway, whereas that is usually a safe option in cities / towns. 99.99% self driving isn’t good enough if you can’t stop when you’re confused.
If they can get the confusion rate way down below the human rate, then they could argue that Waymo’s should be allowed to use them regardless, maybe? But there’s the inevitable bad PR to deal with there as well when a Waymo makes an inevitably dumb decision that a human would never make & kills someone, even if the overall death rate is way below the human one.
Once they're allowed on highways they're competing with rail (and at longer distances) air - both of whom have better bought politicians than taxi/Uber drivers.
I don’t think that’s what’s stopping Waymo from offering service on Highways in the USA. Quite a few States are very pro self-driving.
It's also easier to rebalance fleets if they've not gone too far away from home base.
They look to be testing highway driving in Phoenix.
So this isn't a Westminster by-election? Where's the fun in that???
For one thing, speaking Welsh at the hustings when your opponents don't know it and can't even do a John Redwood.
My Physics teacher at Ilford County kept banging on about a job interview he had in Wales. He said "And they asked me "can you speak Welsh?" and I knew they were going to ask me that!"
What did he expect to be asked about, Western Tasmanian?
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
Excellent, tsundoko is right up there with döstädning as epitomising life for me.
Having looked up döstädning, there is a certain amount of clash.
There is a legitimate case for giving away books that have been read, and that book shelves should be reserved for unread books. I try to do this, but do make an exception for reference works.
I have asked before and I will again. How does the frequency of 'incidents' with new Reform councillors match up to the whole? Rotten Boroughs details on a biweekly basis the utter shit that goes down in local government around the country. I see little different in Reform, except that everyone is paying attention.
The, err, quality of Reform candidates suggests a higher rate of shithousery a priori.
But yes, in general the average quality of local councillors is poor & my family’s experience suggests that anyone with any professional experience at all gets pushed straight into the more complex roles.
One of the comments I heard was that Labour struggled with this more than the Tories did at the local level, because the candidate pool for Tory Councillors tended to include more people with relevant professional experience - be it legal, accountancy or whatever. Modern Councils are little more than administrative bodies for the implementation of government policy these days, sadly.
The most important function of a councillor is governance. They are similar, in that respect, to a non-exec director, but there to represent the interests of the community rather than shareholders. So experience working in a committee-based organisation is helpful, and being well-enough informed about what is going on, to challenge, and hold to account. Does require a certain level of ability and experience to that. Angry-faced blowhards fresh from the pub unlikely to be effective.
If you're not careful councils end up being run of behalf of their employees rather than the people who rely on their services - a common fate of any organisation not faced with the icy asperities of the market-place.
Musk is a moron. He is All In on AI and autonomy. To be fair to xAI (which is X, not Tesla) they went from Zero to leading edge in a couple of years. But on vehicles? Even their CFO said that fleetwide takeup of Full Self Driving is 12%. That isn't helped by Tesla selling a lot of vehicles incapable of FSD - Europe, Japan, older vehicles. But even with cars capable of running it takeup is c. 20%. Why? Because people like to drive.
So what is the big plan? A fleet of wheeled robots which will put Uber et al out of business. And then Optimus robots which supposedly can replace surgeons and Elon describes as a "robot army"
Elon Musk - the man calling for the violent overthrow of governments like here in the UK - thinks these governments will license him to sell a "robot army". Which will utterly destroy jobs and crash economies. If the likes of him want to start talking about UBI then maybe, but they never do.
Just build cars man. The best selling car in the world which is also the safest car ever tested. Which makes a GM profit. Why on earth would you not want to out-think and out-compete legacy dinosaur manufacturers who make serious negative GM on their EVs and keep going bankrupt?
The self-driving cars are only useful once they are allowed to drive empty and/or pick you up from the pub.
Self-driving where the liability is on the driver to stay alert and take over when it goes bong, is the worst of all worlds.
It’s probably a couple of years away, but it’s been a couple of years away for the best part of a decade so far.
Here's the problem. Getting UBER licensed has taken effort, because it puts cab drivers out of a job. Now Muskybaby wants to destroy the taxi industry as a whole. If you are a European government or even a city, why would you license that?
And the "robot army" (and he used those exact words to describe scaled production of Optimus). Which can take jobs in vast numbers. The same - why would you license it?
This is the reverse industrial revolution. People complained then that the machines would take their jobs, but for much of the time the expansion in economic output meant more jobs. AI and Robotics means the literal decimation of jobs, likely many times over. Unless governments are prepared to give money to the newly unemployed the rollout of these technologies will be a socioeconomic disaster...
A classic Luddite argument, mixed with economically illiterate socialism.
If the government really wants to help people keep working, it should keep them in jobs, by say reducing payroll taxes and taxes on corporate profits, rather than increasing them. It should also cut benefits that subsidise idleness, from fake incapacity to bullshit university courses or preventing asylum seekers from working. That will reduce the artificial incentive to automate. If we do that, we'd have a labour market that'd be robust for years or decades to come.
Blaming natural technological progress for a decimation of jobs lets the true culprit, who sits in Number 11 Downing Street, off the hook much too easily.
If the technology could create competition that would be one thing, but what Musk intends is a massive monopoly that he alone controls. Under no circumstances should he be allowed to have that power, even if he was not a fascist arsehole.
I agree that he can be an arsehole. But i have not seen anything that would fit fascism.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
Excellent, tsundoko is right up there with döstädning as epitomising life for me.
Having looked up döstädning, there is a certain amount of clash.
There is a legitimate case for giving away books that have been read, and that book shelves should be reserved for unread books. I try to do this, but do make an exception for reference works.
If you have a book that nobody in the house is ever going to read (again), then it doesn't belong in your house.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
Excellent, tsundoko is right up there with döstädning as epitomising life for me.
Having looked up döstädning, there is a certain amount of clash.
There is a legitimate case for giving away books that have been read, and that book shelves should be reserved for unread books. I try to do this, but do make an exception for reference works.
I prefer to call it a dynamic balance - keeping my favourites, but being generous otherwise.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
Excellent, tsundoko is right up there with döstädning as epitomising life for me.
Having looked up döstädning, there is a certain amount of clash.
There is a legitimate case for giving away books that have been read, and that book shelves should be reserved for unread books. I try to do this, but do make an exception for reference works.
If you have a book that nobody in the house is ever going to read (again), then it doesn't belong in your house.
Books are not ornaments.
...although they do function remarkably well as insulation.
I have asked before and I will again. How does the frequency of 'incidents' with new Reform councillors match up to the whole? Rotten Boroughs details on a biweekly basis the utter shit that goes down in local government around the country. I see little different in Reform, except that everyone is paying attention.
Much more common with Reform, I think. Remember that fewer than 1000 of over 18,000 councillors in the UK are Reform - Lib Dems have more than three times as many, Tories more than four times as many, and Labour more than five times as many. There are a dozen Reform led councils out of 369. They'll hope and expect to grow that in 2026 and beyond, but they're on a par with the Greens as a force in local government at the moment.
Whilst I appreciate there is some more focus on them, you've got to see numbers of suspensions and problems in the context of a party that is really pretty small in terms of numbers of councillors.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Looks nervously at the Steam collection on my desktop...
I think that a beautiful photograph, partly for the tailoring and panache. We rarely see such dandyism in the UK.
The uniformed cops expression of disdain and menace completes the image. Two contrasting styles of police, and how to be French. It would make a great buddy movie.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Yes, there is. "Books Do Furnish a Room".
And there is the satisfaction of building up a library for perusal in the years to come - like laying down a wine cellar. (But you can't re-drink a bottle of wine)
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
I like the phrase ‘books do furnish a room’ (incidentally the title of one of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time series which I have read and is on my bookshelves) which is literally true and also covers the room of the mind. My partner disagrees, I fear having moved on from expelling the motorbike in the spare room and carbs in the cupboard, unnecessary books may be next. She now reads more books than me but has a very pragmatic attitude towards them.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Yes, there is. "Books Do Furnish a Room".
And there is the satisfaction of building up a library for perusal in the years to come - like laying down a wine cellar. (But you can't re-drink a bottle of wine)
Reform will likely win the Caerphilly by election unless the remaining Labour vote goes tactically for Plaid. If the remaining Conservative vote goes tactically for Reform though, Reform could even get over 50%
- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why? - The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national” - From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport - Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship. - So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.
In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.
It’s all been done before
As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.
History tells us that things done to the “undesirables” at breakfast are done to the Jews by mid-morning, to blacks at lunchtime and everyone else by afternoon tea.
“Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
Deporting people who have a legal right to be here has been done to black people multiple times already - hence the Windrush scandal.
Windrush scandal, from unfortunate oversight to policy of main opposition parties in ten years.
It forced the resignation of a Tory Home Secretary, and now it is Tory party policy.
The opinion polls suggest that more than half the vote at the next GE will go to Reform and the Tories. Things can deteriorate very quickly.
10 days until I can make my application for Irish citizenship.
Clearly there are lots of fellow travellers to Tommy & Co in NI, but I don't know too much about the politics of the Right down south. Could the horseshoe apply? (cf - somewhat obscurely - assaults of Republicans on the Chinese minority in NI).
GB News have spent the last couple of days fulminating about one of their affiliate reporters who was allegedly "pepper sprayed by the Guardia". He placed himself in front of the lines of rioters facing the riot coppers.
The GB News comments are full of the same conspiracy theories about the Guardia as they are about the police in the UK.
I think that a beautiful photograph, partly for the tailoring and panache. We rarely see such dandyism in the UK.
The uniformed cops expression of disdain and menace completes the image. Two contrasting styles of police, and how to be French. It would make a great buddy movie.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
I like the phrase ‘books do furnish a room’ (incidentally the title of one of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time series which I have read and is on my bookshelves) which is literally true and also covers the room of the mind. My partner disagrees, I fear having moved on from expelling the motorbike in the spare room and carbs in the cupboard, unnecessary books may be next. She now reads more books than me but has a very pragmatic attitude towards them.
There is some pleasure to be had in shelves of books that have been enjoyed, even if unlikely to ever be read again.
I read perhaps a book every fortnight, and even if I live another 3 decades am unlikely to get back to many, particularly with so many unread books on the shelf. So they are better off elsewhere.
Sadly, my motorbike went some years ago, though I still have helmet and dreams.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
I like the phrase ‘books do furnish a room’ (incidentally the title of one of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time series which I have read and is on my bookshelves) which is literally true and also covers the room of the mind. My partner disagrees, I fear having moved on from expelling the motorbike in the spare room and carbs in the cupboard, unnecessary books may be next. She now reads more books than me but has a very pragmatic attitude towards them.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Yes, there is. "Books Do Furnish a Room".
And there is the satisfaction of building up a library for perusal in the years to come - like laying down a wine cellar. (But you can't re-drink a bottle of wine)
If you have a pile of books, then best advice is to buy a bookshelf. The Argos Maine range is cheap and attractive and less prone to bending than the IKEA equivalents, although they don't have the notch at the back for the skirting board.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
I like the phrase ‘books do furnish a room’ (incidentally the title of one of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time series which I have read and is on my bookshelves) which is literally true and also covers the room of the mind. My partner disagrees, I fear having moved on from expelling the motorbike in the spare room and carbs in the cupboard, unnecessary books may be next. She now reads more books than me but has a very pragmatic attitude towards them.
What about books that nobody will likely ever read? A collection of old encyclopedias? Nice things but no use in the modern day.
Should they be pulped?
Or a collection of first editions? A bit too valuable to actually read. More pulp?
Off topic, on topic what's even the point of Worcestershire county council "consulting residents" on a 10% tax rise. The answer is going to be "No" (And that's as polite as it'll get). The "consultation" surely will cost money - if they really need to raise 10% they need to declare bankruptcy or some such, no point asking residents...
Newly elected fuker becomes locally very unpopular very quickly when people realise they are not getting a moon on a stick. Fukers turn nasty.
Use the unpopularity of elected fukers as the political weather vane. They're making an embarrassment of themselves in places like Kent, and there is a lot more to come.
Why would one elected Senedd member become unpopular? They are not going to be in a position to offer a moon on a stick as the Welsh government will remain Labour. The new Senedd member will be freely able to snipe from the sidelines
Good morning
As you say one Reform member is not going to change anything, but what should worry labour is that it is very likely many Reform candidates will be elected to the Senedd next May, as well as Plaid, posing the problem of who actually governs Wales in the next Senedd
The result of the Caerphilly by-election is significant, as it will be a strong indicator of whether or not Reform is likely to win the full Senedd election in May 2026. If they are successful then, I fear for the future of Wales.
- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why? - The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national” - From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport - Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship. - So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.
In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.
It’s all been done before
As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.
History tells us that things done to the “undesirables” at breakfast are done to the Jews by mid-morning, to blacks at lunchtime and everyone else by afternoon tea.
“Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
Deporting people who have a legal right to be here has been done to black people multiple times already - hence the Windrush scandal.
They had no right to be here. Many just got here, and nobody bothered to enforce immigration status. Natural justice of course means they to deport after such a long time is not really fair.
But lets focus on the illegals. There are millions. Deport every last one of them. Ignore the whingers, just do it. And as mentioned before, most people wont be horrified about deporting illegals, but more so that we werent deporting them anyway.
Not deporting people who have no right to be here is the extreme position.
The Windrush scandal concerns people who came to the UK prior to 1973 as British subjects and had the legal right to be here, but lacked the necessary paperwork to prove it. So you are wrong, sorry.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Yes, there is. "Books Do Furnish a Room".
And there is the satisfaction of building up a library for perusal in the years to come - like laying down a wine cellar. (But you can't re-drink a bottle of wine)
Still looking for my copy of Camel Ride to the Tomb.
Off topic, on topic what's even the point of Worcestershire county council "consulting residents" on a 10% tax rise. The answer is going to be "No" (And that's as polite as it'll get). The "consultation" surely will cost money - if they really need to raise 10% they need to declare bankruptcy or some such, no point asking residents...
Looking at the report and the first and last pages of the consultation document, it's all online, so presumably uses one of the common online[edit] questionnaire services that all sorts of societies and groups do. NB that if you can't do it because you aren't online, you have to ask for a paper copy online. So not that expensive.
The questio is how much this biases the result. And what the aim is. Could be to blame the government and the voters (including the ones who didn't fill it in).
Off topic, on topic what's even the point of Worcestershire county council "consulting residents" on a 10% tax rise. The answer is going to be "No" (And that's as polite as it'll get). The "consultation" surely will cost money - if they really need to raise 10% they need to declare bankruptcy or some such, no point asking residents...
The problem is they aren't bankrupt or close to being so but if they want to provide something other than the social care and the absolute bear minimum amount of legally required services for a few more years they need a lot of money now...
Remember social care is slowly bankrupting local authorities but the main word there is slowly, expect to see a lot of councils doing little for years but not going bankrupt until finally the social care bill destroys them
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Yes, there is. "Books Do Furnish a Room".
And there is the satisfaction of building up a library for perusal in the years to come - like laying down a wine cellar. (But you can't re-drink a bottle of wine)
There is also the benefit of when you have guests to stay who might pick up one of your books and find something new and interesting that enriches their life and sparks a new interest.
There have been times where I have given books of mine to people after I have read them when the book or subject has come up in conversation and I think they will enjoy or find interesting.
Possibly one of the best gifts you can give someone - a new insight, knowledge, enjoyment. They might also find they understand you better having read something you loved to read and pass it on to them.
I have asked before and I will again. How does the frequency of 'incidents' with new Reform councillors match up to the whole? Rotten Boroughs details on a biweekly basis the utter shit that goes down in local government around the country. I see little different in Reform, except that everyone is paying attention.
Much more common with Reform, I think. Remember that fewer than 1000 of over 18,000 councillors in the UK are Reform - Lib Dems have more than three times as many, Tories more than four times as many, and Labour more than five times as many. There are a dozen Reform led councils out of 369. They'll hope and expect to grow that in 2026 and beyond, but they're on a par with the Greens as a force in local government at the moment.
Whilst I appreciate there is some more focus on them, you've got to see numbers of suspensions and problems in the context of a party that is really pretty small in terms of numbers of councillors.
I reckon that too. Current numbers by party are:
Labour (5,981), Conservative (4,268), and Liberal Democrats (3,206). Other parties include Reform UK (926), the Green Party (906) https://opencouncildata.co.uk/
Reform have lost 31 in just under 6 months, including 8-9 in September, and half a dozen in recent days. Dates are a little ambiguous of course, as it is a varied process. And that is irregular losses, not involving normal elections.
Pro-rata for the others would be approx 31 losses for Green, 100 for Lib Dem, 140 for Conservative, and 200 for Labour. I think if any of the others had lost that many - eg 1+ per day for Labour - we would have heard about it.
I'd love to see comprehensive numbers, which I have not got or time to generate. To my eye, Reform losses could be anything between 3x and about 5x the rate of any of the others, depending on how eg defections from say Con->Ref are counted. Are the 20 Con losses who went to Reform at Conference in the "lost Tories" dataset?
The easiest numbers to get at would perhaps be amongst the dataset of 1600 Councillors elected in May 2025, or possibly as a proxy amongst Council Leaders leaving their role. There are lots of varied influences (eg fewer paper candidates for the others, people returning to former parties) adding to the Reform loss rate.
(Obviously politically I try and do my bit to help wash away the foundations of the Reform sandcastle, to get the thing politically 6 feet under as soon as is humanly possible.)
Off topic, on topic what's even the point of Worcestershire county council "consulting residents" on a 10% tax rise. The answer is going to be "No" (And that's as polite as it'll get). The "consultation" surely will cost money - if they really need to raise 10% they need to declare bankruptcy or some such, no point asking residents...
The problem is they aren't bankrupt or close to being so but if they want to provide something other than the social care and the absolute bear minimum amount of legally required services for a few more years they need a lot of money now...
Remember social care is slowly bankrupting local authorities but the main word there is slowly, expect to see a lot of councils doing little for years but not going bankrupt until finally the social care bill destroys them
Agreed, my own council in Pembrokeshire does only the bare minimum so that they can provide the mandated services. Unfortunately the council is moribund because of it. Too many independent farmers just concerned with their own slurry pits next to their farms and nowhere else.
Newly elected fuker becomes locally very unpopular very quickly when people realise they are not getting a moon on a stick. Fukers turn nasty.
Use the unpopularity of elected fukers as the political weather vane. They're making an embarrassment of themselves in places like Kent, and there is a lot more to come.
Why would one elected Senedd member become unpopular? They are not going to be in a position to offer a moon on a stick as the Welsh government will remain Labour. The new Senedd member will be freely able to snipe from the sidelines
Good morning
As you say one Reform member is not going to change anything, but what should worry labour is that it is very likely many Reform candidates will be elected to the Senedd next May, as well as Plaid, posing the problem of who actually governs Wales in the next Senedd
The only possible governing combinations are, surely, Plaid/Labour or Reform/Tory and the former will presumably return more members to the Senedd. So seems nailed on.
If it is a hung parliament due to the LibDems or Greens getting a few then, again, it's going to be a Plaid FM and Labour DFM. Inconceivable that LibDems or Greens would touch Reform.
Then again, my knowledge of Welsh politics is less than profound.
In the medium term, you could see Reform's dream scenario as winning the Assembly election by getting most votes and seats, but then being blocked from taking power by a Labour-Plaid coalition. Excellent grievance material to take into the general election.
If Reform are the largest party following the May 2026 Senedd election, it would be unwise in the longer term for other parties to gang up against them to prevent them trying to run a minority administration.
I have asked before and I will again. How does the frequency of 'incidents' with new Reform councillors match up to the whole? Rotten Boroughs details on a biweekly basis the utter shit that goes down in local government around the country. I see little different in Reform, except that everyone is paying attention.
Much more common with Reform, I think. Remember that fewer than 1000 of over 18,000 councillors in the UK are Reform - Lib Dems have more than three times as many, Tories more than four times as many, and Labour more than five times as many. There are a dozen Reform led councils out of 369. They'll hope and expect to grow that in 2026 and beyond, but they're on a par with the Greens as a force in local government at the moment.
Whilst I appreciate there is some more focus on them, you've got to see numbers of suspensions and problems in the context of a party that is really pretty small in terms of numbers of councillors.
I reckon that too. Current numbers by party are:
Labour (5,981), Conservative (4,268), and Liberal Democrats (3,206). Other parties include Reform UK (926), the Green Party (906) https://opencouncildata.co.uk/
Reform have lost 31 in just under 6 months, including 8-9 in September, and half a dozen in recent days. Dates are a little ambiguous of course, as it is a varied process. And that is irregular losses, not involving normal elections.
Pro-rata for the others would be approx 31 losses for Green, 100 for Lib Dem, 140 for Conservative, and 200 for Labour. I think if any of the others had lost that many - eg 1+ per day for Labour - we would have heard about it.
I'd love to see comprehensive numbers, which I have not got or time to generate. To my eye, Reform losses could be anything between 3x and about 5x the rate of any of the others, depending on how eg defections from say Con->Ref are counted. Are the 20 Con losses who went to Reform at Conference in the "lost Tories" dataset?
The easiest numbers to get at would perhaps be amongst the dataset of 1600 Councillors elected in May 2025, or possibly as a proxy amongst Council Leaders leaving their role. There are lots of varied influences (eg fewer paper candidates for the others, people returning to former parties) adding to the Reform loss rate.
(Obviously politically I try and do my bit to help wash away the foundations of the Reform sandcastle, to get the thing politically 6 feet under as soon as is humanly possible.)
Councillor losses are likely to be bathtub curved and any proper analysis would need to think about how that's modelled. If you used the May 2025 dataset I'd suggest excluding anyone who's already been a councillor before - reform or otherwise - to get a new blood failure rate. A separate analysis for retreds would be another interesting piece of work.
Speaker can't give time if MPs want Prince Andrew debate
His statement essentially says that he cannot give parliamentary time for criticisms of the prince under convention through things like urgent questions.
However, if MPs they can do it through being given time via the government or the backbench business committee.
Speaking today in the House, Hoyle said: "I know there has been some commentary on what members of this House may or may not discuss in the chamber in relation to Prince Andrew, some of which is inaccurate.
"There is understandably great interest from members and from the public on this matter. For the benefit of the House, I would like to be clear that there are ways for the House to properly consider this matter.
"Any discussions about the conduct or reflections on members of the royal family can be properly discussed on the substantive motions. And I know some members have already tabled such a motion. I am not able to allocate time for a debate on such a motion, but others are able to do so, if wishing to do that.
"But on questions, the long-standing practice of the House, as set out in Erskine May, is that criticism of members of the royal family cannot be made as part of questions. I hope this is helpful clarification, as there is lots of online speculation."
Off topic, on topic what's even the point of Worcestershire county council "consulting residents" on a 10% tax rise. The answer is going to be "No" (And that's as polite as it'll get). The "consultation" surely will cost money - if they really need to raise 10% they need to declare bankruptcy or some such, no point asking residents...
Looking at the report and the first and last pages of the consultation document, it's all online, so presumably uses one of the common online[edit] questionnaire services that all sorts of societies and groups do. NB that if you can't do it because you aren't online, you have to ask for a paper copy online. So not that expensive.
The questio is how much this biases the result. And what the aim is. Could be to blame the government and the voters (including the ones who didn't fill it in).
Background is that there's a legal cap at +5%, unless they hold a referendum first.
So this could be part educational to make the residents "understand why cuts are coming" which could also help with blaming the Government, consultation to find out what they think, or a referendum itself.
It could also be aimed at breaking the "yes we can get lower taxes and better services" delusion (which I would support).
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
Excellent, tsundoko is right up there with döstädning as epitomising life for me.
Having looked up döstädning, there is a certain amount of clash.
There is a legitimate case for giving away books that have been read, and that book shelves should be reserved for unread books. I try to do this, but do make an exception for reference works.
If you have a book that nobody in the house is ever going to read (again), then it doesn't belong in your house.
Newly elected fuker becomes locally very unpopular very quickly when people realise they are not getting a moon on a stick. Fukers turn nasty.
Use the unpopularity of elected fukers as the political weather vane. They're making an embarrassment of themselves in places like Kent, and there is a lot more to come.
Why would one elected Senedd member become unpopular? They are not going to be in a position to offer a moon on a stick as the Welsh government will remain Labour. The new Senedd member will be freely able to snipe from the sidelines
Good morning
As you say one Reform member is not going to change anything, but what should worry labour is that it is very likely many Reform candidates will be elected to the Senedd next May, as well as Plaid, posing the problem of who actually governs Wales in the next Senedd
The only possible governing combinations are, surely, Plaid/Labour or Reform/Tory and the former will presumably return more members to the Senedd. So seems nailed on.
If it is a hung parliament due to the LibDems or Greens getting a few then, again, it's going to be a Plaid FM and Labour DFM. Inconceivable that LibDems or Greens would touch Reform.
Then again, my knowledge of Welsh politics is less than profound.
In the medium term, you could see Reform's dream scenario as winning the Assembly election by getting most votes and seats, but then being blocked from taking power by a Labour-Plaid coalition. Excellent grievance material to take into the general election.
If Reform are the largest party following the May 2026 Senedd election, it would be unwise in the longer term for other parties to gang up against them to prevent them trying to run a minority administration.
I expect it is more likely a Plaid minority government with confidence and supply from a much diminished labour party
Newly elected fuker becomes locally very unpopular very quickly when people realise they are not getting a moon on a stick. Fukers turn nasty.
Use the unpopularity of elected fukers as the political weather vane. They're making an embarrassment of themselves in places like Kent, and there is a lot more to come.
Why would one elected Senedd member become unpopular? They are not going to be in a position to offer a moon on a stick as the Welsh government will remain Labour. The new Senedd member will be freely able to snipe from the sidelines
Good morning
As you say one Reform member is not going to change anything, but what should worry labour is that it is very likely many Reform candidates will be elected to the Senedd next May, as well as Plaid, posing the problem of who actually governs Wales in the next Senedd
The result of the Caerphilly by-election is significant, as it will be a strong indicator of whether or not Reform is likely to win the full Senedd election in May 2026. If they are successful then, I fear for the future of Wales.
After years of labour it is time for a new look Senedd, though I expect a Plaid minority government post May 26
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Yes, there is. "Books Do Furnish a Room".
And there is the satisfaction of building up a library for perusal in the years to come - like laying down a wine cellar. (But you can't re-drink a bottle of wine)
- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why? - The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national” - From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport - Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship. - So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.
In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.
It’s all been done before
As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.
History tells us that things done to the “undesirables” at breakfast are done to the Jews by mid-morning, to blacks at lunchtime and everyone else by afternoon tea.
“Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
Deporting people who have a legal right to be here has been done to black people multiple times already - hence the Windrush scandal.
Windrush scandal, from unfortunate oversight to policy of main opposition parties in ten years.
It forced the resignation of a Tory Home Secretary, and now it is Tory party policy.
The opinion polls suggest that more than half the vote at the next GE will go to Reform and the Tories. Things can deteriorate very quickly.
10 days until I can make my application for Irish citizenship.
Clearly there are lots of fellow travellers to Tommy & Co in NI, but I don't know too much about the politics of the Right down south. Could the horseshoe apply? (cf - somewhat obscurely - assaults of Republicans on the Chinese minority in NI).
GB News have spent the last couple of days fulminating about one of their affiliate reporters who was allegedly "pepper sprayed by the Guardia". He placed himself in front of the lines of rioters facing the riot coppers.
The GB News comments are full of the same conspiracy theories about the Guardia as they are about the police in the UK.
Electorally there is essentially no far right in Ireland. There are a bunch of hard-right parties, but they've made no progress.
There is a lot of far-right agitation online in Ireland, and violent protests/arson against refugees.
One of the reasons that the far-right parties have made little electoral progress is that independents and local politicians from Fianna Fail/Fine Gael do pretty well at giving voice to local opposition to refugee housing, etc.
Incidentally, it is Garda (singular) and Gardaí (plural). Though most people just talk about, "The Guards", unless they're being sarcastic and want to use all the syllables in "An Garda Síochána" (The Peace Guard).
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
Excellent, tsundoko is right up there with döstädning as epitomising life for me.
Having looked up döstädning, there is a certain amount of clash.
There is a legitimate case for giving away books that have been read, and that book shelves should be reserved for unread books. I try to do this, but do make an exception for reference works.
If you have a book that nobody in the house is ever going to read (again), then it doesn't belong in your house.
Books are not ornaments.
What is it you would rather have in the space where bookshelves are? Some “Live, Love, Laugh” signs? A Jack Vetriano Poster? Some tribal African masks?
They are a rare thing that follow both of William Morris’s suggestion to “ Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
I have asked before and I will again. How does the frequency of 'incidents' with new Reform councillors match up to the whole? Rotten Boroughs details on a biweekly basis the utter shit that goes down in local government around the country. I see little different in Reform, except that everyone is paying attention.
Much more common with Reform, I think. Remember that fewer than 1000 of over 18,000 councillors in the UK are Reform - Lib Dems have more than three times as many, Tories more than four times as many, and Labour more than five times as many. There are a dozen Reform led councils out of 369. They'll hope and expect to grow that in 2026 and beyond, but they're on a par with the Greens as a force in local government at the moment.
Whilst I appreciate there is some more focus on them, you've got to see numbers of suspensions and problems in the context of a party that is really pretty small in terms of numbers of councillors.
I reckon that too. Current numbers by party are:
Labour (5,981), Conservative (4,268), and Liberal Democrats (3,206). Other parties include Reform UK (926), the Green Party (906) https://opencouncildata.co.uk/
Reform have lost 31 in just under 6 months, including 8-9 in September, and half a dozen in recent days. Dates are a little ambiguous of course, as it is a varied process. And that is irregular losses, not involving normal elections.
Pro-rata for the others would be approx 31 losses for Green, 100 for Lib Dem, 140 for Conservative, and 200 for Labour. I think if any of the others had lost that many - eg 1+ per day for Labour - we would have heard about it.
I'd love to see comprehensive numbers, which I have not got or time to generate. To my eye, Reform losses could be anything between 3x and about 5x the rate of any of the others, depending on how eg defections from say Con->Ref are counted. Are the 20 Con losses who went to Reform at Conference in the "lost Tories" dataset?
The easiest numbers to get at would perhaps be amongst the dataset of 1600 Councillors elected in May 2025, or possibly as a proxy amongst Council Leaders leaving their role. There are lots of varied influences (eg fewer paper candidates for the others, people returning to former parties) adding to the Reform loss rate.
(Obviously politically I try and do my bit to help wash away the foundations of the Reform sandcastle, to get the thing politically 6 feet under as soon as is humanly possible.)
Councillor losses are likely to be bathtub curved and any proper analysis would need to think about how that's modelled. If you used the May 2025 dataset I'd suggest excluding anyone who's already been a councillor before - reform or otherwise - to get a new blood failure rate. A separate analysis for retreds would be another interesting piece of work.
Yes - probably. Except that for Ref UK it is speeding up again, and is now at 1% per month. The trend is difficult to predict.
And Farage having abandoned vetting, and ignoring a lot of serious issues (eg numbers of known recent supporters of extremist political groups, and more who are associates) , are questions which he is trying to bury rather than address. Also extreme right groups regard Reform as a stalking horse they can ride into the mainstream.
That comes back to in my view the core reason why it will fail - that Farage is trying to ride too many diverse horses to be sustainable, and is failing to manage his party. That is incumbent on him as it is set up as his personal vehicle, controlled from the centre.
- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why? - The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national” - From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport - Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship. - So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.
In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.
It’s all been done before
As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.
Important to remember. If you have a grandparent or closer born on the island of Ireland you're eligible for citizenship, and can therefore be deported if this goes through. Theoretically.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
Excellent, tsundoko is right up there with döstädning as epitomising life for me.
Having looked up döstädning, there is a certain amount of clash.
There is a legitimate case for giving away books that have been read, and that book shelves should be reserved for unread books. I try to do this, but do make an exception for reference works.
If you have a book that nobody in the house is ever going to read (again), then it doesn't belong in your house.
Books are not ornaments.
What is it you would rather have in the space where bookshelves are? Some “Live, Love, Laugh” signs? A Jack Vetriano Poster? Some tribal African masks?
They are a rare thing that follow both of William Morris’s suggestion to “ Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
There is nothing more beautiful than a library, IMO. Even if it's just your own lot of books, it beats most alternatives.
- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why? - The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national” - From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport - Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship. - So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.
In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.
It’s all been done before
As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.
History tells us that things done to the “undesirables” at breakfast are done to the Jews by mid-morning, to blacks at lunchtime and everyone else by afternoon tea.
“Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
Deporting people who have a legal right to be here has been done to black people multiple times already - hence the Windrush scandal.
Windrush scandal, from unfortunate oversight to policy of main opposition parties in ten years.
It forced the resignation of a Tory Home Secretary, and now it is Tory party policy.
The opinion polls suggest that more than half the vote at the next GE will go to Reform and the Tories. Things can deteriorate very quickly.
10 days until I can make my application for Irish citizenship.
Clearly there are lots of fellow travellers to Tommy & Co in NI, but I don't know too much about the politics of the Right down south. Could the horseshoe apply? (cf - somewhat obscurely - assaults of Republicans on the Chinese minority in NI).
GB News have spent the last couple of days fulminating about one of their affiliate reporters who was allegedly "pepper sprayed by the Guardia". He placed himself in front of the lines of rioters facing the riot coppers.
The GB News comments are full of the same conspiracy theories about the Guardia as they are about the police in the UK.
Electorally there is essentially no far right in Ireland. There are a bunch of hard-right parties, but they've made no progress.
There is a lot of far-right agitation online in Ireland, and violent protests/arson against refugees.
One of the reasons that the far-right parties have made little electoral progress is that independents and local politicians from Fianna Fail/Fine Gael do pretty well at giving voice to local opposition to refugee housing, etc.
Incidentally, it is Garda (singular) and Gardaí (plural). Though most people just talk about, "The Guards", unless they're being sarcastic and want to use all the syllables in "An Garda Síochána" (The Peace Guard).
Heh. Thanks.
I have seen lots of ways of spelling it - so I took an average .
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
I like the phrase ‘books do furnish a room’ (incidentally the title of one of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time series which I have read and is on my bookshelves) which is literally true and also covers the room of the mind. My partner disagrees, I fear having moved on from expelling the motorbike in the spare room and carbs in the cupboard, unnecessary books may be next. She now reads more books than me but has a very pragmatic attitude towards them.
There is some pleasure to be had in shelves of books that have been enjoyed, even if unlikely to ever be read again.
I read perhaps a book every fortnight, and even if I live another 3 decades am unlikely to get back to many, particularly with so many unread books on the shelf. So they are better off elsewhere.
Sadly, my motorbike went some years ago, though I still have helmet and dreams.
For book people who have walls of them, they are much more than the book you happen to be reading, and do more than furnish a room. (I am currently on my third trip round DTTMOT). I haven't read all the books I have for the same reason as I haven't drunk all the wine in the cellar (if I had a cellar in my case), and in addition they are a tangible mark not only of where, in your mind, you are and plan to go, but where, in my case over 70 years, you have been. They are savings banks of affection as well as signposts of the future.
However they do need pruning from time to time, but not uprooting.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
Excellent, tsundoko is right up there with döstädning as epitomising life for me.
Having looked up döstädning, there is a certain amount of clash.
There is a legitimate case for giving away books that have been read, and that book shelves should be reserved for unread books. I try to do this, but do make an exception for reference works.
If you have a book that nobody in the house is ever going to read (again), then it doesn't belong in your house.
Books are not ornaments.
What is it you would rather have in the space where bookshelves are? Some “Live, Love, Laugh” signs? A Jack Vetriano Poster? Some tribal African masks?
They are a rare thing that follow both of William Morris’s suggestion to “ Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
Ah ha. That's possibly how the Crown Estates can get Andrew out of Royal Lodge.
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
Excellent, tsundoko is right up there with döstädning as epitomising life for me.
Having looked up döstädning, there is a certain amount of clash.
There is a legitimate case for giving away books that have been read, and that book shelves should be reserved for unread books. I try to do this, but do make an exception for reference works.
If you have a book that nobody in the house is ever going to read (again), then it doesn't belong in your house.
Books are not ornaments.
What is it you would rather have in the space where bookshelves are? Some “Live, Love, Laugh” signs? A Jack Vetriano Poster? Some tribal African masks?
They are a rare thing that follow both of William Morris’s suggestion to “ Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
There is nothing more beautiful than a library, IMO. Even if it's just your own lot of books, it beats most alternatives.
They are also a form of map of your life if you keep them. From books you read at school and university and onwards. They show what you learned from, laughed at, were influenced by. There will be the sort of light history books chaps pick up at airports on the way to a holiday which are a reminder of a time and place. There are the pretentious ones you can mock yourself over having bought thinking you looked intellectual or edgy but never got past the first few pages. There might be poetry you referenced to impress a girl with. Every book on your shelves marks a piece of your life and can be a happy or painful reminder. Why would you throw them out?
Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.
BBC Breakfast @BBCBreakfast 1h 'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope' Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.
Alfred went to Rome didn't he?
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.
Thanks, long time since I read the relevant Alfred Duggen novel!
Never read that, but Pollard's biography of Alfred has him going there when he's a pretty young boy (I think, it's also been a while).
The Duggan historical novels went out of print and are hard to get nowadays, which is a shame I think. Surprised they haven't been reprinted by people such as OUP and Red Fox, whence I am currently revisiting my childhood reading in the form of Sutcliffe and Treece (and filling in the ones I missed at the time).
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is an outstanding novel about Arthur.
Good to hear; it's on the recently-bought-and-to-read heap on the shelf above my PC!
In all seriousness, have you thought of joining a library? There's no point in buying books you don't read.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
A pairing : ‘tsundoko’ & ‘antilibrary’.
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
Excellent, tsundoko is right up there with döstädning as epitomising life for me.
Having looked up döstädning, there is a certain amount of clash.
There is a legitimate case for giving away books that have been read, and that book shelves should be reserved for unread books. I try to do this, but do make an exception for reference works.
If you have a book that nobody in the house is ever going to read (again), then it doesn't belong in your house.
Books are not ornaments.
What is it you would rather have in the space where bookshelves are? Some “Live, Love, Laugh” signs? A Jack Vetriano Poster? Some tribal African masks?
They are a rare thing that follow both of William Morris’s suggestion to “ Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
Ah ha. That's possibly how the Crown Estates can get Andrew out of Royal Lodge.
Ha-Ha, if forgot the Royal Family include the William Morris clause in their leases.
Speaker can't give time if MPs want Prince Andrew debate
His statement essentially says that he cannot give parliamentary time for criticisms of the prince under convention through things like urgent questions.
However, if MPs they can do it through being given time via the government or the backbench business committee.
Speaking today in the House, Hoyle said: "I know there has been some commentary on what members of this House may or may not discuss in the chamber in relation to Prince Andrew, some of which is inaccurate.
"There is understandably great interest from members and from the public on this matter. For the benefit of the House, I would like to be clear that there are ways for the House to properly consider this matter.
"Any discussions about the conduct or reflections on members of the royal family can be properly discussed on the substantive motions. And I know some members have already tabled such a motion. I am not able to allocate time for a debate on such a motion, but others are able to do so, if wishing to do that.
"But on questions, the long-standing practice of the House, as set out in Erskine May, is that criticism of members of the royal family cannot be made as part of questions. I hope this is helpful clarification, as there is lots of online speculation."
Hoyle told MPs to ask others for time
Alternatively the next MP up for a private member's bill could raise a Bill of Attainder
- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why? - The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national” - From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport - Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship. - So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.
In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.
It’s all been done before
As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.
Important to remember. If you have a grandparent or closer born on the island of Ireland you're eligible for citizenship, and can therefore be deported if this goes through. Theoretically.
The way things are going I think anyone who has a connection to another country or has family that do should start to think about a plan B. Not as a baseline but as contingency planning. This country might be heading somewhere very dark. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.
Comments
The first time he was only about four or five.
Only comment I would add is that the problem is unrealistic voter expectations. Very difficult to govern now. And "political rebuilding" would require a leader with very special qualities indeed. Maybe cometh the hour, cometh the man (or woman)?
Boris, curiously, managed for a time to ride it all out with the distractions of Brexit and Covid (and the promise of levellling up - brilliant politics) but his conduct and the economic impact of Covid did for him.
As you say, if Reform actually form a Government, the contact with reality is likely to lead to a collapse. Nige will skip off and that'll be that. But then what? My real fear is the dissolution of the UK as a result of all this. Things can always get worse.
My view is the immigration service deliberately targeted people they knew probably had the right to live here, but were easy pickings.
There's more detail here, including links to the Threat Letter and Wolff's Lawsuit:
https://michaelpopok.substack.com/p/an-exclusive-interview-with-michael
The one that they may be more concerned about is the intention to pull all the relevant parties into court to be interviewed ("deposed"?) after subpoena.
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/our-role/plans-policies-performance-and-projects/our-projects/catalogue-week/catalogue-week-2023/transcribing-passenger-lists/
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/commonwealth-migration-since-1945/passenger-list-from-windrush/
The opinion polls suggest that more than half the vote at the next GE will go to Reform and the Tories. Things can deteriorate very quickly.
10 days until I can make my application for Irish citizenship.
Unfortunately my Irish heritage stopped at a great grandparent.
For centuries, people referred to Brunanburgh as “The Battle.”
They are expanding their range, trying harder and harder areas.
Very easy to see selling operator backup as a subscription.
I bet there are zillionaires trying to get a personal Waymo, right now.
For those of us who went to prep school there and had to seing through tears 'We'll Keep a Welcome' please don't vote reform!.....
If he’s not used the exact words, he’s certainly danced around the subject or had lawyers edit very carefully.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/23/catherine-connolly-the-outspoken-leftwinger-set-to-be-irelands-next-president
Catherine Connolly is currently 1/18 to win the election tomorrow. The latest poll put her on 56% of the first preference vote, ahead of Humphreys on 32% and the withdrawn Gavin (who is still on the ballot paper, and some people intend to use as a cipher for RON/a protest vote) on 13%.
Didn't get much of a feel of the political fabric though - like most people we came, gawped, and left.
A quick squiz at Wikipedia also reveals:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caerphilly_Heart_Disease_Study
Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman to leave Strictly Come Dancing at end of series
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c77d3p6r2r8t
Also presenting it is probably the number 1 job on TV so everyone is going to want to host it
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgr42dw57ljo
Strictly - Beyond the Fringe
https://x.com/msmelchen/status/1981022488722047463
Tsundoko is Japanese for piling up books ready to read at some later date, it implies that part of the joy is the anticipation, combined with a wistfullness that life is too short.
An antilibrary is Umberto Eco’s notion that one should curate a personal collection of resources around themes you’re curious about; not shelves of read books. He kept 30 000 of them.
The problem being (presumably) that they can’t just stop & await human correction on the motorway, whereas that is usually a safe option in cities / towns. 99.99% self driving isn’t good enough if you can’t stop when you’re confused.
If they can get the confusion rate way down below the human rate, then they could argue that Waymo’s should be allowed to use them regardless, maybe? But there’s the inevitable bad PR to deal with there as well when a Waymo makes an inevitably dumb decision that a human would never make & kills someone, even if the overall death rate is way below the human one.
But yes, in general the average quality of local councillors is poor & my family’s experience suggests that anyone with any professional experience at all gets pushed straight into the more complex roles.
One of the comments I heard was that Labour struggled with this more than the Tories did at the local level, because the candidate pool for Tory Councillors tended to include more people with relevant professional experience - be it legal, accountancy or whatever. Modern Councils are little more than administrative bodies for the implementation of government policy these days, sadly.
They look to be testing highway driving in Phoenix.
There is a legitimate case for giving away books that have been read, and that book shelves should be reserved for unread books. I try to do this, but do make an exception for reference works.
If you're not careful councils end up being run of behalf of their employees rather than the people who rely on their services - a common fate of any organisation not faced with the icy asperities of the market-place.
Books are not ornaments.
Whilst I appreciate there is some more focus on them, you've got to see numbers of suspensions and problems in the context of a party that is really pretty small in terms of numbers of councillors.
The uniformed cops expression of disdain and menace completes the image. Two contrasting styles of police, and how to be French. It would make a great buddy movie.
And there is the satisfaction of building up a library for perusal in the years to come - like laying down a wine cellar. (But you can't re-drink a bottle of wine)
Clearly there are lots of fellow travellers to Tommy & Co in NI, but I don't know too much about the politics of the Right down south. Could the horseshoe apply? (cf - somewhat obscurely - assaults of Republicans on the Chinese minority in NI).
GB News have spent the last couple of days fulminating about one of their affiliate reporters who was allegedly "pepper sprayed by the Guardia". He placed himself in front of the lines of rioters facing the riot coppers.
The GB News comments are full of the same conspiracy theories about the Guardia as they are about the police in the UK.
I read perhaps a book every fortnight, and even if I live another 3 decades am unlikely to get back to many, particularly with so many unread books on the shelf. So they are better off elsewhere.
Sadly, my motorbike went some years ago, though I still have helmet and dreams.
https://www.argos.co.uk/search/maine/?clickOrigin=searchbar:cat:term:maine
Should they be pulped?
Or a collection of first editions? A bit too valuable to actually read. More pulp?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd6750qjp9vo
The questio is how much this biases the result. And what the aim is. Could be to blame the government and the voters (including the ones who didn't fill it in).
Remember social care is slowly bankrupting local authorities but the main word there is slowly, expect to see a lot of councils doing little for years but not going bankrupt until finally the social care bill destroys them
There have been times where I have given books of mine to people after I have read them when the book or subject has come up in conversation and I think they will enjoy or find interesting.
Possibly one of the best gifts you can give someone - a new insight, knowledge, enjoyment. They might also find they understand you better having read something you loved to read and pass it on to them.
Labour (5,981), Conservative (4,268), and Liberal Democrats (3,206). Other parties include Reform UK (926), the Green Party (906)
https://opencouncildata.co.uk/
Reform have lost 31 in just under 6 months, including 8-9 in September, and half a dozen in recent days. Dates are a little ambiguous of course, as it is a varied process. And that is irregular losses, not involving normal elections.
Pro-rata for the others would be approx 31 losses for Green, 100 for Lib Dem, 140 for Conservative, and 200 for Labour. I think if any of the others had lost that many - eg 1+ per day for Labour - we would have heard about it.
I'd love to see comprehensive numbers, which I have not got or time to generate. To my eye, Reform losses could be anything between 3x and about 5x the rate of any of the others, depending on how eg defections from say Con->Ref are counted. Are the 20 Con losses who went to Reform at Conference in the "lost Tories" dataset?
The easiest numbers to get at would perhaps be amongst the dataset of 1600 Councillors elected in May 2025, or possibly as a proxy amongst Council Leaders leaving their role. There are lots of varied influences (eg fewer paper candidates for the others, people returning to former parties) adding to the Reform loss rate.
(Obviously politically I try and do my bit to help wash away the foundations of the Reform sandcastle, to get the thing politically 6 feet under as soon as is humanly possible.)
Until this
Speaker can't give time if MPs want Prince Andrew debate
His statement essentially says that he cannot give parliamentary time for criticisms of the prince under convention through things like urgent questions.
However, if MPs they can do it through being given time via the government or the backbench business committee.
Speaking today in the House, Hoyle said: "I know there has been some commentary on what members of this House may or may not discuss in the chamber in relation to Prince Andrew, some of which is inaccurate.
"There is understandably great interest from members and from the public on this matter. For the benefit of the House, I would like to be clear that there are ways for the House to properly consider this matter.
"Any discussions about the conduct or reflections on members of the royal family can be properly discussed on the substantive motions. And I know some members have already tabled such a motion. I am not able to allocate time for a debate on such a motion, but others are able to do so, if wishing to do that.
"But on questions, the long-standing practice of the House, as set out in Erskine May, is that criticism of members of the royal family cannot be made as part of questions. I hope this is helpful clarification, as there is lots of online speculation."
Hoyle told MPs to ask others for time
So this could be part educational to make the residents "understand why cuts are coming" which could also help with blaming the Government, consultation to find out what they think, or a referendum itself.
It could also be aimed at breaking the "yes we can get lower taxes and better services" delusion (which I would support).
I had one from Notts CC in the last 2 years.
There is a lot of far-right agitation online in Ireland, and violent protests/arson against refugees.
One of the reasons that the far-right parties have made little electoral progress is that independents and local politicians from Fianna Fail/Fine Gael do pretty well at giving voice to local opposition to refugee housing, etc.
Incidentally, it is Garda (singular) and Gardaí (plural). Though most people just talk about, "The Guards", unless they're being sarcastic and want to use all the syllables in "An Garda Síochána" (The Peace Guard).
They are a rare thing that follow both of William Morris’s suggestion to “ Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
And Farage having abandoned vetting, and ignoring a lot of serious issues (eg numbers of known recent supporters of extremist political groups, and more who are associates) , are questions which he is trying to bury rather than address. Also extreme right groups regard Reform as a stalking horse they can ride into the mainstream.
That comes back to in my view the core reason why it will fail - that Farage is trying to ride too many diverse horses to be sustainable, and is failing to manage his party. That is incumbent on him as it is set up as his personal vehicle, controlled from the centre.
Theoretically.
Even if it's just your own lot of books, it beats most alternatives.
I have seen lots of ways of spelling it - so I took an average
How Sgt. Rod Banks and the Mosquito shadow modification network gave Mosquitos the extra ooph to avoid Luftwaffe fighters.
Rod Banks was a lowly engine fitter at RAF Marham, exceptional engineer and former Rolls Royce apprentice...
https://x.com/FennellJW/status/1981122447798915167
Great story - and a metaphor for how Britain still is.
However they do need pruning from time to time, but not uprooting.
"You left Europe because you wanted more investment. You have less investment."
https://x.com/BestForBritain/status/1981000123069940025