Streeting is now the betting fav for Next PM and I think that's right. He's my bet at 8/1 and I like that bet. This isn't a policy or competence problem it's about public persona and comms. Starmer is unable to forge a connection with the public. It's just one of those things. If he is replaced it will be for this reason and therefore the replacement will be driven accordingly. Not principally a left v right (of the party) question but who of the realistic alternatives is the best communicator. That's Streeting (by miles) and so I think he'll get it. Value at anything over 4 imo.
What about the issue of vulnerability in his seat?
Off this plane or off the "planes" he is constantly on?
It sounds proper Thick of It stuff. Is he on the plane, yes he is just boarding now, shit shit shit, stop him boarding at all costs, he has already boarded, ring him, ring him now, do anything to stop that plane....SPAD goes running across the runway infront of the jumbo jet waving arms madly.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
BIB - A bastion against most racism. The left has long had an issue with anti-semitism (just as you can argue that the right has an issue with Islam). I think you are blind to this.
Now Labour have arrived at favouring tge WASPI women, they really have got to the "we'll just spaff public money on any old chancers" stage. Depressing it took less than 18 months. They just cannot say no.
To be fair, I *hope* that the WASPI review will be 'yes, we have now looked at the new information - as we are required to do - but no, there is no change to the decision'.
But I may just be being overly optimistic.
Politically it's probably better for this government to let the judicial review run with the likely finding that the pension age increase implementation was illegal, even though it will cost more than to compensate WASPI now.
Which is what your "yes, we have now looked at the new information - as we are required to do - but no, there is no change to the decision" actually means, and why they might do it.
Having said that, the whole policy being judged illegal is a can of worms they likely want to head off. No good options for the government here.
The ombudsman has not found the policy to be illegal. They’ve found that the WASPI women were not sufficiently informed of the change.
Indeed, as my recollection was that the courts up to the Supreme Court found that the government had taken reasonable steps to inform the ladies of the change in pension age, which they were able to mitigate in any case by not retiring at 60. The ombudsman result seems to fly in the face of that, but I admit I haven't paid much attention to the detail or why the decision was different
I have always been aware that my pension age has increased to 67, in fact at one point I think 68 was proposed but the government moved the dates back a bit
It’s 68 from 2044 and is currently under review due to report back by 2029.
I’d be due to “retire” at 67 in 2044, and I reckon it will be 70 by the time I get there in 2047. There’s way too much money that can be saved by pushing the pension age by a year every decade.
Don’t you get a lower pension being abroad too ?
There’s a weird rule that if you move abroad when claiming a pension then it gets frozen in money terms, and I’ve been buying NI topups that should help with the total amount, but I’m working on the assumption that I end up with little to nothing from the UK State by way of pension.
I thought it all depended on the country you went to. Believe many get all the raises , Australia was one where you don't.
Perhaps outside the EU, when that was a thing. Can’t say I’ve looked into it too much, I work on the assumption that there won’t be much of a state pension when I retire, especially I continue to live abroad, or that at best there might be something means-tested rather than today’s universal entitlement.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
It's worth a note that I have unusually not seen any Ref UK Councillors defenestrating in the last 10 days or so.
There's the usual background of "Oops did I really say that the police now are a bunch of politically indoctrinated British hating scum (amongst other things), immediately before I was elected" stuff, but not defenestrations.
I'm not sure whether they have all gone away on a team building exercise around a re-enactment of the assault on the Ehrenfels by the Calcutta Light Horse in 1943 (Operation Creek * aka The Goa Incident), or just run head on into the budgetary process.
The last time I looked at the change numbers was about 30 days since the end of conference, and ignoring the conference specials it was approximately evens in and out for RefUK since then.
Checking, since the start of Nov, transfers involving RefUK are as below. It's level from Ind / Con / Byelections. Obvious caveats are small samples, and this log page being when they log it not the date of the change etc.
Totals. Ref Losses: 3. Ref Gains: 9
Ref -> Con: 1 Ref -> Ind: 1 Ref -> Vacant: 1
Con -> Ref 3 Ind -> Ref 3 Vacant -> Ref 3
A few days ago I made it part way through building an SS to analyse that log page to give a table by pairs of parties, but did not have time to finish it.
Quick calc of councillor attrition since Aug 1st.
Reform lost 30 councillors of 861 they had, a 3.5% attrition in 3 months. They gained 97 in the same period (inward defections plus elections)
Labour lost 110 councillors of 6056 they had, a 1.8% attrition in 3 months. They gained 14 in the same period.
There is somewhat higher attrition and this is of newer councillors.
I've not done Con yet.
Full councillor attrition rates since Aug 1: Ref 30/861, 3.5% Con 98/4335, 2.3% Labour 110/6056, 1.8% GRN 15/903, 1.7% LD 22/3202, 0.7%
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
What a mess Labour are in with Starmer and Reeves making Truss look good and delivering a slow motion economic disaster and turning in on themselves
Many would sit back with a smug expression but not me
This is a deadly serious crisis for the country and we have 3 more years of it
What makes you think only 3 more years of it?
It is highly likely that the next government of any colour will struggle as much. The demographic challenges, the run down nature of all public services, the desolation of town centres, the stagnant productivity, the rule of the pluto-gerontocracy over the over-burdened young, the lack of any economic strength outside financial services in London, the military and environmental challenges etc.
None of these end when Starmer and Reeves go, to be replaced by Farage and Tice. Sure, we will fly a few more flags as the ship sinks ever lower in the water, but there won't be a magic cure. We are 10 years on from Farage's last magic cure of Brexit and look how that has improved the nation.
Oh, and I didn't mention the forthcoming worldwide recession, higher interest rates, stock market bubble
.
You’re an investor
These are all opportunities to make some money.
As I am 60 and retired I have been gradually switching my investments from equities to mixed assets/income fund/bonds and money market funds.
Meanwhile the FTSE nudges 10,000 !!
Yes, I have shifted my portfolio quite substantially more defensively over the last 6 months.
Pretty much everything looks overvalued to me at present with little upside potential.
I started shifting when I saw Warren Buffett was moving to cash. He’s the GOAT.
I see little upside in tech for sure.
I’m quite happy with my dividend portfolio.
Party is not over yet and last 6 months have been very good. I have reduced some risk but money is still in equities at the moment , I am up 12% so far this year.
Agreed. I think there's plenty more bubble before the burst.
(DYOR)
Indeed and we’re all at different stages of our journey. I’d tell someone like our friend 18 year old whose putting £25 a month into an S&S ISA stay 100% in equities.
Newly retired like me, I’ll gradually switch until I’m about 25% equities.
I think it depends whether you're talking about your whole pension pot in drawdown mode. Even then 25% sounds low for the longterm.
If like me you opted for a traditional annuity or have a DB pension anyway then I think beyond a certain point cash makes no sense as you're just losing money year in year out versus inflation.
(I did put our entire house-build fund into cash tbf - I couldn't face the prospect of explaining to Mrs P that we had run out of money because of some random stock market crash.)
What a mess Labour are in with Starmer and Reeves making Truss look good and delivering a slow motion economic disaster and turning in on themselves
Many would sit back with a smug expression but not me
This is a deadly serious crisis for the country and we have 3 more years of it
What makes you think only 3 more years of it?
It is highly likely that the next government of any colour will struggle as much. The demographic challenges, the run down nature of all public services, the desolation of town centres, the stagnant productivity, the rule of the pluto-gerontocracy over the over-burdened young, the lack of any economic strength outside financial services in London, the military and environmental challenges etc.
None of these end when Starmer and Reeves go, to be replaced by Farage and Tice. Sure, we will fly a few more flags as the ship sinks ever lower in the water, but there won't be a magic cure. We are 10 years on from Farage's last magic cure of Brexit and look how that has improved the nation.
Oh, and I didn't mention the forthcoming worldwide recession, higher interest rates, stock market bubble
.
You’re an investor
These are all opportunities to make some money.
As I am 60 and retired I have been gradually switching my investments from equities to mixed assets/income fund/bonds and money market funds.
Meanwhile the FTSE nudges 10,000 !!
Yes, I have shifted my portfolio quite substantially more defensively over the last 6 months.
Pretty much everything looks overvalued to me at present with little upside potential.
I started shifting when I saw Warren Buffett was moving to cash. He’s the GOAT.
I see little upside in tech for sure.
I’m quite happy with my dividend portfolio.
Party is not over yet and last 6 months have been very good. I have reduced some risk but money is still in equities at the moment , I am up 12% so far this year.
Agreed. I think there's plenty more bubble before the burst.
(DYOR)
Indeed and we’re all at different stages of our journey. I’d tell someone like our friend 18 year old whose putting £25 a month into an S&S ISA stay 100% in equities.
Newly retired like me, I’ll gradually switch until I’m about 25% equities.
I think it depends whether you're talking about your whole pension pot in drawdown mode. Even then 25% sounds low for the longterm.
If like me you opted for a traditional annuity or have a DB pension anyway then I think beyond a certain point cash makes no sense as you're just losing money year in year out versus inflation.
(I did put our entire house-build fund into cash tbf - I couldn't face the prospect of explaining to Mrs P that we had run out of money because of some random stock market crash.)
If you are of working age, it is too darn risky not to be heavily invested in the big tech stocks as a hedge. If the technology hits a dead end you will still have your job.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
What a mess Labour are in with Starmer and Reeves making Truss look good and delivering a slow motion economic disaster and turning in on themselves
Many would sit back with a smug expression but not me
This is a deadly serious crisis for the country and we have 3 more years of it
What makes you think only 3 more years of it?
It is highly likely that the next government of any colour will struggle as much. The demographic challenges, the run down nature of all public services, the desolation of town centres, the stagnant productivity, the rule of the pluto-gerontocracy over the over-burdened young, the lack of any economic strength outside financial services in London, the military and environmental challenges etc.
None of these end when Starmer and Reeves go, to be replaced by Farage and Tice. Sure, we will fly a few more flags as the ship sinks ever lower in the water, but there won't be a magic cure. We are 10 years on from Farage's last magic cure of Brexit and look how that has improved the nation.
Oh, and I didn't mention the forthcoming worldwide recession, higher interest rates, stock market bubble
.
You’re an investor
These are all opportunities to make some money.
As I am 60 and retired I have been gradually switching my investments from equities to mixed assets/income fund/bonds and money market funds.
Meanwhile the FTSE nudges 10,000 !!
Yes, I have shifted my portfolio quite substantially more defensively over the last 6 months.
Pretty much everything looks overvalued to me at present with little upside potential.
I started shifting when I saw Warren Buffett was moving to cash. He’s the GOAT.
I see little upside in tech for sure.
I’m quite happy with my dividend portfolio.
Party is not over yet and last 6 months have been very good. I have reduced some risk but money is still in equities at the moment , I am up 12% so far this year.
Agreed. I think there's plenty more bubble before the burst.
(DYOR)
Indeed and we’re all at different stages of our journey. I’d tell someone like our friend 18 year old whose putting £25 a month into an S&S ISA stay 100% in equities.
Newly retired like me, I’ll gradually switch until I’m about 25% equities.
I think it depends whether you're talking about your whole pension pot in drawdown mode. Even then 25% sounds low for the longterm.
If like me you opted for a traditional annuity or have a DB pension anyway then I think beyond a certain point cash makes no sense as you're just losing money year in year out versus inflation.
(I did put our entire house-build fund into cash tbf - I couldn't face the prospect of explaining to Mrs P that we had run out of money because of some random stock market crash.)
If you are of working age, it is too darn risky not to be heavily invested in the big tech stocks as a hedge. If the technology hits a dead end you will still have your job.
In the middle of the financial crash, my brother put a bunch of money into shares of the big British banks. When they were penny stocks, pretty much.
His reasoning was that, either the government would save them or money wasn't really going to be much use.
Will the last pub standing please remember to turn the pumps off.
LBC has confidential information from their top Treasury mole that booze might go up, like in every budget since Mike Yarwood used to joke about 5p on fags and 10p on booze.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
Carlson’s latest guest was talking about chemtrails, and the one before that is a guy called Nick Fuentes who admits to being a Nazi.
He’s one of many who earn their living from social media, who have realised that the more crazy you sound the more ‘engagement’ you get.
Downing Street sources tell me they were not pro-actively putting it out that the PM would fight fight and fight again against any leadership challenge - though they say he would - but that they were reactively responding to journalists’ questions about an unspecified coup.
And although they weren’t engaged in any grand plan to save the prime minister, they wanted to make the point to those contemplating a coup that any coup would damage market/investor confidence in the sustainability of UK government debt.
"Vote for me otherwise the markets will be upset" just confirms that the market is in charge, not Starmer. We *really* need to pay off the debt, or at least enough of it to reduce the pressure to manageable levels.
Yet we have Andy Burnham saying we should tell the bond markets to sod off and hand out more welfare.
The bond markets might well tell him to sod off in return, if that actually happened.
Streeting is now the betting fav for Next PM and I think that's right. He's my bet at 8/1 and I like that bet. This isn't a policy or competence problem it's about public persona and comms. Starmer is unable to forge a connection with the public. It's just one of those things. If he is replaced it will be for this reason and therefore the replacement will be driven accordingly. Not principally a left v right (of the party) question but who of the realistic alternatives is the best communicator. That's Streeting (by miles) and so I think he'll get it. Value at anything over 4 imo.
Streeting is great, agreed it's not left vs right, it's able to communicate vs not. I'd be very happy if he took over.
I differ over Streeting.
Replacing Starmer with Streeting is neither easy nor repairs the issues with this government. Better presentation of the same vacuous policies doesnt help, and Streeting isn't up to much in his day job. I also think him unpopular with the PLP, so if it goes to a contest he wont get the gig. He who wields the knife rarely wears the crown.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
Some of us pointed to Carlson as an illustration of MAGA breaking up, not least over military support for Israel breaking the Trumpian isolationist pact.
Streeting is now the betting fav for Next PM and I think that's right. He's my bet at 8/1 and I like that bet. This isn't a policy or competence problem it's about public persona and comms. Starmer is unable to forge a connection with the public. It's just one of those things. If he is replaced it will be for this reason and therefore the replacement will be driven accordingly. Not principally a left v right (of the party) question but who of the realistic alternatives is the best communicator. That's Streeting (by miles) and so I think he'll get it. Value at anything over 4 imo.
Streeting is great, agreed it's not left vs right, it's able to communicate vs not. I'd be very happy if he took over.
I differ over Streeting.
Replacing Starmer with Streeting is neither easy nor repairs the issues with this government. Better presentation of the same vacuous policies doesnt help, and Streeting isn't up to much in his day job. I also think him unpopular with the PLP, so if it goes to a contest he wont get the gig. He who wields the knife rarely wears the crown.
He has a paper thin majority too. Ok in 2026 when there is still 3 years to go, but would become an issue closer to an election.
Some insane cognitive dissonance going on about Trump meeting Ahmad Al-Sharaa. Imagine the hysterics if someone like Harris, Biden etc had invited him into the Oval Office.
For once, I don't have too much of a problem with Trump doing this. There's no guarantee it will work out, obviously, but there will be no improvement in the region without stability in places like Syria.
I quite vividly recall a number of the PB right wingers rubbishing me for saying the US should be talking to him.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
Carlson’s latest guest was talking about chemtrails, and the one before that is a guy called Nick Fuentes who admits to being a Nazi.
He’s one of many who earn their living from social media, who have realised that the more crazy you sound the more ‘engagement’ you get.
And despite some people saying that "it's unfair to judge people by their guests", it is totally fair to judge people by how they behave towards them.
Tucker agreed with Dugin, when he was on the show, praised him and Putin.
Dugin is a self described Russian Fascist - complete with writing books on it.
Tucker has done the same will a long list of appalling people - when I say appalling, we are talking about people who would get banned from joining Reform.
If you like Tucker, then you are liking those choices.
No PM would be popular right now, especially so if they were trying to do the right thing and get the country back on track.
He has tried planning reform but effots appear to have stalled. He has tried welfare reform but ended up with a bill to spend more. What else is there? What is it that you think he is doing to get us 'back on track'?
FPT.
Planning hasn't stalled - its getting done by end of the year. Renters rights bill has passed - huge deal for people who rent (ie no one on this forum). Bringing railways back into public ownership. NHS waiting lists falling (not much but a little). Got onshore wind going again.
But the biggest thing i think is we have a sensible chancellor who is grappling with the difficult fiscal decisions rather than doing unfunded tax cuts and pretending all will be okay.
They completely messed up welfare reform though.
Lets see. As a (rare pb?) renter who supports rebalancing the relationship away from landlords to tenants, the renters rights bill seems like a mess. Taking a third of your parliamentary term to get planning changes through is stalling if you are committing to record housebuilding, and that is if does happen by the end of the year. And will the chancellor actually make some bold decisions and raise an extra £50bn+ or just tinker at the margins?
They have been far too timid and cautious which worked fine when seeking power but is a terrible strategy that pleases no-one when in government.
Property is always a long term game. Getting such significant changes through in a little over a year is remarkably quick; it is the biggest set of changes since 1988. "Renters Rights" organisations (who I have criticised previously) think it is a major success.
And it will be 5 years before we know how well it has succeeded.
For developers the system has to be both intensely tactical and intensely strategic at the same time.
That is because it can take years to get anything through planning, and parish pump politics or random national politics means it can happen quickly - with intense pressure to build it NOW as planning permission turns into a pumpkin in 3 years (unless innovative measures taken which impose other restrictions), or it can take a decade if the local Council are so minded.
And maintaining a building organisation, workforce etc through that is very difficult. The buffers that are needed are insane.
So there's a need for long term landbanks to anticipate all possible future paths, and maintain the workforce capable of building to a high quality, and a guessing game as to what will happen. And there needs to be the project margin to absorb all possible outcomes.
And small builders cannot afford to play that game.
I can point you to an industrial estate locally next to the "edge of town retail park" which when I checked was still owned by Tesco, left over from the mad expansion period decades ago when they were a) Looking for a supermarket site in this area of 80k people and b) Buying up sites to block competition.
Casual chatter to someone from say Savills or Innes England can supply insight on how that all works.
That's one area that needs to be simplified by stability in the short and long term planning system. It all adds costs to the bottom line, which I think none of us here want.
All very interesting but do you think.....
Will Labour build anywhere close to the 1.5m promise by the next election? Will housing costs for those struggling have increased or decreased by the next election? Will those wanting to start a family and needing more space find it easier by the next election? Will the handbroke on the economy from poor housing mobility be removed by the next election?
Politically they have stalled on this, even if there are lots of good reasons why they were likely to do so.
As a general comment, very little will change by the next election. Nothing happens that quickly in housing. The shortest realistic timescale for anything sustainable is a decade.
Will Labour build anywhere close to the 1.5m promise by the next election? No. At target time I called it as 1 million will be good, 1.25 million will be seen as a big success. Especially as the next election will be after ~4.5 years, not 5. It will be an argument about forecasts.
Will housing costs for those struggling have increased or decreased by the next election? It depends what you mean by "struggling", and to whom you are referring. Everybody always says they are struggling, regardless of what circumstances are. Listen to all the home counties retirees complaining about council services not getting better when Council funding is 1/4-1/3 below what it was. Yet more expensive cars on driveways are everywhere, and most of us still go abroad most years.
Will those wanting to start a family and needing more space find it easier by the next election? See my general comment.
Will the handbroke on the economy from poor housing mobility be removed by the next election? That could possibly be mitigated by a tax rebalancing (eg Proportional Property Tax which incorporates removal of Stamp Duty alongside a 0.5% of value Council Tax), or other quite tactical measures such as addressing under-occupied spare bedrooms in the owner occupied sector by further incentivising lodgers as an alternative to pied-a-terre flats.
It is important to note that property prices have significantly rebalanced already, which is part of the journey.
Nothing happens that quickly in housing.
Well Rayner and Reeves managed to drive construction into a recession quick enough:
The S&P Global UK Construction PMI fell to 44.1 in October of 2025 from 46.2 in the previous month, below market expectations of 46.7 to reflect a tenth consecutive contraction in British construction activity. The rate of contraction was the sharpest since May of 2020. Construction firms continued to report poor market conditions and fewer tender opportunities. Consequently, employment in the sector dropped at the sharpest pace in over five years, in addition to lesser subcontractor usage. The poor demand drove costs of input materials to drop. Civil engineering works plummeted from the previous month (35.4), with surveyees reporting a lack of new work to replace previously completed projects. Declines were also observed for residential construction (43.6) and commercial building activity (46.3).
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
Some of us pointed to Carlson as an illustration of MAGA breaking up, not least over military support for Israel breaking the Trumpian isolationist pact.
There has always been a section of Isolationist Ultra Right, in the US, that wants to end the alliance with Israel. Tucker has joined that grouping.
MAGA has herded the cats of the NutRight into a group, based on Trump worship and Getting Things Done (AKA Owning The Libtards).
The context of Trump delivering the judges who killed Roe VS Wade was a big, big uniter among that crowd.
A splinter of the US Ultra Right is still a part of the US Ultra Right. Which is a hideous, hideous thing, to any decent social democrat.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Who were you before your re-appearance as durham? Sometimes your posting history is useful particularly after a post as stupid as that one. You're clearly not Jewish. But for the record I wouldn't describe Keir Starmer as anti semitic either. I described him as an opportunist. I'd also describe him as ignorant on the subject despite having a Jewish wife. That is not the same as growing up in a Jewish family which would make you much more nuanced than Starmer on the subject.
Waymo is coming to London and the prospect is sort-of welcomed by YouTube's Tom the Taxi Driver, who thinks Uber might be the long term loser. At the start of the video, he holds up a Spectator article about the benefits of self-driving private hire vehicles for itinerant flint knappers.
What a mess Labour are in with Starmer and Reeves making Truss look good and delivering a slow motion economic disaster and turning in on themselves
Many would sit back with a smug expression but not me
This is a deadly serious crisis for the country and we have 3 more years of it
What makes you think only 3 more years of it?
It is highly likely that the next government of any colour will struggle as much. The demographic challenges, the run down nature of all public services, the desolation of town centres, the stagnant productivity, the rule of the pluto-gerontocracy over the over-burdened young, the lack of any economic strength outside financial services in London, the military and environmental challenges etc.
None of these end when Starmer and Reeves go, to be replaced by Farage and Tice. Sure, we will fly a few more flags as the ship sinks ever lower in the water, but there won't be a magic cure. We are 10 years on from Farage's last magic cure of Brexit and look how that has improved the nation.
Oh, and I didn't mention the forthcoming worldwide recession, higher interest rates, stock market bubble
.
You’re an investor
These are all opportunities to make some money.
As I am 60 and retired I have been gradually switching my investments from equities to mixed assets/income fund/bonds and money market funds.
Meanwhile the FTSE nudges 10,000 !!
Yes, I have shifted my portfolio quite substantially more defensively over the last 6 months.
Pretty much everything looks overvalued to me at present with little upside potential.
I started shifting when I saw Warren Buffett was moving to cash. He’s the GOAT.
I see little upside in tech for sure.
I’m quite happy with my dividend portfolio.
Party is not over yet and last 6 months have been very good. I have reduced some risk but money is still in equities at the moment , I am up 12% so far this year.
Agreed. I think there's plenty more bubble before the burst.
(DYOR)
Indeed and we’re all at different stages of our journey. I’d tell someone like our friend 18 year old whose putting £25 a month into an S&S ISA stay 100% in equities.
Newly retired like me, I’ll gradually switch until I’m about 25% equities.
I think it depends whether you're talking about your whole pension pot in drawdown mode. Even then 25% sounds low for the longterm.
If like me you opted for a traditional annuity or have a DB pension anyway then I think beyond a certain point cash makes no sense as you're just losing money year in year out versus inflation.
(I did put our entire house-build fund into cash tbf - I couldn't face the prospect of explaining to Mrs P that we had run out of money because of some random stock market crash.)
If you are of working age, it is too darn risky not to be heavily invested in the big tech stocks as a hedge. If the technology hits a dead end you will still have your job.
In the middle of the financial crash, my brother put a bunch of money into shares of the big British banks. When they were penny stocks, pretty much.
His reasoning was that, either the government would save them or money wasn't really going to be much use.
I bought Rolls Royce when the entire world's airlines were pretty much grounded thanks to covid.
Spectacular gain over the next four or five years.
Sadly only small sums involved as I have limited savings. But still a win's a win!
Huh, that wesforleader website template is entirely unbranded. Unless I'm missing something (possible!), there's no indication of who built it at all, not even in the comments.
Thousands of NHS staff redundancies in England will now go ahead after a deal was reached with the Treasury to allow the health service to overspend this year to cover the cost of pay-offs.
The government said earlier this year 18,000 admin and managerial jobs would go with NHS England, the body that runs the NHS, being brought into the Department of Health and Social Care alongside cuts to local health boards.
NHS bosses and health ministers had been in talks with the Treasury over how to pay for the £1bn one-off bill with the health service wanting extra money.
The Treasury blocked that, but the BBC understands a compromise has been reached with the NHS permitted to overspend this year.
How many workers in the rest of the economy would get that much for being made redundant.
How many of these NHS England redundant workers will then be get another job in the NHS ?
The jobs they are doing currently - do you really think they will all vanish?
There is a reason that a trope in Yes Minister is that reorganisations and mergers of departments are great, because it allows the head count to grow massively....
FWIW (and I am also sceptical), Streeting was claiming this morning that the £1bn upfront cost would save around £1bn annually in future years.
What a mess Labour are in with Starmer and Reeves making Truss look good and delivering a slow motion economic disaster and turning in on themselves
Many would sit back with a smug expression but not me
This is a deadly serious crisis for the country and we have 3 more years of it
What makes you think only 3 more years of it?
It is highly likely that the next government of any colour will struggle as much. The demographic challenges, the run down nature of all public services, the desolation of town centres, the stagnant productivity, the rule of the pluto-gerontocracy over the over-burdened young, the lack of any economic strength outside financial services in London, the military and environmental challenges etc.
None of these end when Starmer and Reeves go, to be replaced by Farage and Tice. Sure, we will fly a few more flags as the ship sinks ever lower in the water, but there won't be a magic cure. We are 10 years on from Farage's last magic cure of Brexit and look how that has improved the nation.
Oh, and I didn't mention the forthcoming worldwide recession, higher interest rates, stock market bubble
.
You’re an investor
These are all opportunities to make some money.
As I am 60 and retired I have been gradually switching my investments from equities to mixed assets/income fund/bonds and money market funds.
Meanwhile the FTSE nudges 10,000 !!
Yes, I have shifted my portfolio quite substantially more defensively over the last 6 months.
Pretty much everything looks overvalued to me at present with little upside potential.
I started shifting when I saw Warren Buffett was moving to cash. He’s the GOAT.
I see little upside in tech for sure.
I’m quite happy with my dividend portfolio.
Party is not over yet and last 6 months have been very good. I have reduced some risk but money is still in equities at the moment , I am up 12% so far this year.
Agreed. I think there's plenty more bubble before the burst.
(DYOR)
Indeed and we’re all at different stages of our journey. I’d tell someone like our friend 18 year old whose putting £25 a month into an S&S ISA stay 100% in equities.
Newly retired like me, I’ll gradually switch until I’m about 25% equities.
I think it depends whether you're talking about your whole pension pot in drawdown mode. Even then 25% sounds low for the longterm.
If like me you opted for a traditional annuity or have a DB pension anyway then I think beyond a certain point cash makes no sense as you're just losing money year in year out versus inflation.
(I did put our entire house-build fund into cash tbf - I couldn't face the prospect of explaining to Mrs P that we had run out of money because of some random stock market crash.)
If you are of working age, it is too darn risky not to be heavily invested in the big tech stocks as a hedge. If the technology hits a dead end you will still have your job.
In the middle of the financial crash, my brother put a bunch of money into shares of the big British banks. When they were penny stocks, pretty much.
His reasoning was that, either the government would save them or money wasn't really going to be much use.
I bought Rolls Royce when the entire world's airlines were pretty much grounded thanks to covid.
Spectacular gain over the next four or five years.
Sadly only small sums involved as I have limited savings. But still a win's a win!
Buy on bad news is one approach.
Which was smart - the fundamentals of RR aero engines are that they were on top of the game, with a massive order book (based on being an engine option for a huge percentage of future aircraft), and investing heavily in staying there.
We were talking of company reputations yesterday. RR aero engines has the reputation they deserve. It's the one they've worked for and spent many billions on.
In more positive news, SSE just announced a £6bn per annum investment program for the rest of the decade (which is I think about double what they're currently spending ?).
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
Do you keep a log on everyone? The other day you produced a post of mine from ten years ago! I don't disagree with anything you have said about Carlson. I see him as a repentant sinner and a very astute advocate for whichever cause he's fighting. It was pro Trump when he worked for Fox. Now he's free-lance his published opinions are different. I don't know if you've ever met a lawyer? My family is full of them. It is possible to argue a case without your particular views coming into it. If indeed you have any.
Now Labour have arrived at favouring tge WASPI women, they really have got to the "we'll just spaff public money on any old chancers" stage. Depressing it took less than 18 months. They just cannot say no.
To be fair, I *hope* that the WASPI review will be 'yes, we have now looked at the new information - as we are required to do - but no, there is no change to the decision'.
But I may just be being overly optimistic.
Politically it's probably better for this government to let the judicial review run with the likely finding that the pension age increase implementation was illegal, even though it will cost more than to compensate WASPI now.
Which is what your "yes, we have now looked at the new information - as we are required to do - but no, there is no change to the decision" actually means, and why they might do it.
Having said that, the whole policy being judged illegal is a can of worms they likely want to head off. No good options for the government here.
The ombudsman has not found the policy to be illegal. They’ve found that the WASPI women were not sufficiently informed of the change.
Indeed, as my recollection was that the courts up to the Supreme Court found that the government had taken reasonable steps to inform the ladies of the change in pension age, which they were able to mitigate in any case by not retiring at 60. The ombudsman result seems to fly in the face of that, but I admit I haven't paid much attention to the detail or why the decision was different
I have always been aware that my pension age has increased to 67, in fact at one point I think 68 was proposed but the government moved the dates back a bit
It’s 68 from 2044 and is currently under review due to report back by 2029.
I’d be due to “retire” at 67 in 2044, and I reckon it will be 70 by the time I get there in 2047. There’s way too much money that can be saved by pushing the pension age by a year every decade.
Don’t you get a lower pension being abroad too ?
There’s a weird rule that if you move abroad when claiming a pension then it gets frozen in money terms, and I’ve been buying NI topups that should help with the total amount, but I’m working on the assumption that I end up with little to nothing from the UK State by way of pension.
Waymo is coming to London and the prospect is sort-of welcomed by YouTube's Tom the Taxi Driver, who thinks Uber might be the long term loser. At the start of the video, he holds up a Spectator article about the benefits of self-driving private hire vehicles for itinerant flint knappers.
Uber wanted to be Waymo. Waymo have got there first.
Waymo's development approach seems to be yielding big dividends for them now.
For those who don't know - all these automation projects start out as a Mechanical Turk*. That is with people in an office, ready to take over. The sign that the technology is working or failing, is how the number of interventions shrinks or grows. Amazon Fresh's attempt at automation failed - it stalled on the high number of interventions. Tesco is running a very small pilot, testing different technology for the same thing, by the way. Apparently that is actually working - number of interventions dropping.
Waymo is down to very few interventions - and all are decisions. Instead of taking over the actual driving, the remote operator is telling the car "Do option D on your list".
So the cost ratio drops. And/Or they can massively increase the number of vehicles per operator.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
Carlson’s latest guest was talking about chemtrails, and the one before that is a guy called Nick Fuentes who admits to being a Nazi.
He’s one of many who earn their living from social media, who have realised that the more crazy you sound the more ‘engagement’ you get.
And despite some people saying that "it's unfair to judge people by their guests", it is totally fair to judge people by how they behave towards them.
Tucker agreed with Dugin, when he was on the show, praised him and Putin.
Dugin is a self described Russian Fascist - complete with writing books on it.
Tucker has done the same will a long list of appalling people - when I say appalling, we are talking about people who would get banned from joining Reform.
If you like Tucker, then you are liking those choices.
I’m generally in favour of talking to people, but if every other day your guest is an extremist loon and despite being an experienced journalist you give them very little pushback, then it’s fair to draw conclusions from that.
Downing Street sources tell me they were not pro-actively putting it out that the PM would fight fight and fight again against any leadership challenge - though they say he would - but that they were reactively responding to journalists’ questions about an unspecified coup.
And although they weren’t engaged in any grand plan to save the prime minister, they wanted to make the point to those contemplating a coup that any coup would damage market/investor confidence in the sustainability of UK government debt.
"Vote for me otherwise the markets will be upset" just confirms that the market is in charge, not Starmer. We *really* need to pay off the debt, or at least enough of it to reduce the pressure to manageable levels.
Why am I reminded of the scene in Blazing Saddles where the sherif *takes himself hostage*
I half-expect Reeves any moment now to step out of the Treasury and say "ignore all the warnings about bank runs, our banks are sound".
These people behind the scenes all seem determined to run government exactly as portrayed on The Thick of It.
The Thick of it like Yes Minister before it were pretty much dramatised documentaries.
I am sure it is bad in Downing Street and I would be happy to see the back of Starmer and Reeves, but all those frotting themselves on Chris Mason and Henry Zephman's exclusive were consoling themselves just three and a quarter years ago that Boris Johnson was getting all the big calls right during a time of equal if not considerably worse chaos.
And for BigG, Livermore and the poster that accuses me of straw man arguments this is not whataboutery it is comparing and contrasting responses to a similar situation under a different administration.
Downing Street sources tell me they were not pro-actively putting it out that the PM would fight fight and fight again against any leadership challenge - though they say he would - but that they were reactively responding to journalists’ questions about an unspecified coup.
And although they weren’t engaged in any grand plan to save the prime minister, they wanted to make the point to those contemplating a coup that any coup would damage market/investor confidence in the sustainability of UK government debt.
This is anonymous quotes about anonymous quotes.
There is a very curious group incestuousness about this, as between politicians and media. Evidence: the media are active generally in disclosing names who would prefer not to be in the public eye. But not in cases like this.
I understand that journalist X will be given a quote on an anonymous basis and will protect their source, but journalists Y, Z, A, B and C, including great rivals of X are remarkably inactive in finding out and publicising who has in fact spoken to journalist X.
Result: this morning the evidence that Streeting lied directly to various media outlets is strong. The journalists know whether he was lying or not. It wasn't put to him, and wasn't clarified with us. And we are being treated as the audience in a play, not as citizens of an open democracy with a free press.
Now Labour have arrived at favouring tge WASPI women, they really have got to the "we'll just spaff public money on any old chancers" stage. Depressing it took less than 18 months. They just cannot say no.
To be fair, I *hope* that the WASPI review will be 'yes, we have now looked at the new information - as we are required to do - but no, there is no change to the decision'.
But I may just be being overly optimistic.
Politically it's probably better for this government to let the judicial review run with the likely finding that the pension age increase implementation was illegal, even though it will cost more than to compensate WASPI now.
Which is what your "yes, we have now looked at the new information - as we are required to do - but no, there is no change to the decision" actually means, and why they might do it.
Having said that, the whole policy being judged illegal is a can of worms they likely want to head off. No good options for the government here.
The ombudsman has not found the policy to be illegal. They’ve found that the WASPI women were not sufficiently informed of the change.
Indeed, as my recollection was that the courts up to the Supreme Court found that the government had taken reasonable steps to inform the ladies of the change in pension age, which they were able to mitigate in any case by not retiring at 60. The ombudsman result seems to fly in the face of that, but I admit I haven't paid much attention to the detail or why the decision was different
I have always been aware that my pension age has increased to 67, in fact at one point I think 68 was proposed but the government moved the dates back a bit
It’s 68 from 2044 and is currently under review due to report back by 2029.
I’d be due to “retire” at 67 in 2044, and I reckon it will be 70 by the time I get there in 2047. There’s way too much money that can be saved by pushing the pension age by a year every decade.
Don’t you get a lower pension being abroad too ?
There’s a weird rule that if you move abroad when claiming a pension then it gets frozen in money terms, and I’ve been buying NI topups that should help with the total amount, but I’m working on the assumption that I end up with little to nothing from the UK State by way of pension.
I thought it all depended on the country you went to. Believe many get all the raises , Australia was one where you don't.
Perhaps outside the EU, when that was a thing. Can’t say I’ve looked into it too much, I work on the assumption that there won’t be much of a state pension when I retire, especially I continue to live abroad, or that at best there might be something means-tested rather than today’s universal entitlement.
These are the current countries where someone living will receive increases to the state pension.
(Canada, Australia and New Zealand are the most notable exceptions where you'd imagine British people might be moving to. Notable that the US is a country where British pensioners will receive an annual increase in the state pension.)
But, like you say, who knows what the rules will be in the 2050s, or what form the state pension will take?
This is a topic where the government are unusually honest: they won't extend it to other countries because it would be expensive.
Some insane cognitive dissonance going on about Trump meeting Ahmad Al-Sharaa. Imagine the hysterics if someone like Harris, Biden etc had invited him into the Oval Office.
For once, I don't have too much of a problem with Trump doing this. There's no guarantee it will work out, obviously, but there will be no improvement in the region without stability in places like Syria.
I quite vividly recall a number of the PB right wingers rubbishing me for saying the US should be talking to him.
Agreed. Leaders should be talking to each other, even the terrible ones, if it means fewer wars.
Trump going to North Korea during his first term was quite the spectacle, and he seems to have made progress on peace with a number of leaders in the last few months - with the obvious exception of Putin.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
Do you keep a log on everyone? The other day you produced a post of mine from ten years ago! I don't disagree with anything you have said about Carlson. I see him as a repentant sinner and a very astute advocate for whichever cause he's fighting. It was pro Trump when he worked for Fox. Now he's free-lance his published opinions are different. I don't know if you've ever met a lawyer? My family is full of them. It is possible to argue a case without your particular views coming into it. If indeed you have any.
PB comments are searchable
Tucker Carlson is multiple times worse than GB News. He is multiple times worse than Nigel Farage. He is a major spreader of racist, extremist politics in the US.
When it comes to lies - he was a major player in Fox New pushing the "Stolen election" garbage in the US. Which led to Fox paying Dominion Voting Systems three-quarters of a *billion* - under US law, you really have to work at your lies to be liable for that kind of money.
There are more than enough people who've met him, who say that he believes in things like Great Replacement, that the UK is overrun with Muslims etc etc.
Even if he didn't, then spreading that filth, while agreeing with it, makes him complicit.
And if you support him, that is what you are agreeing with.
Thousands of NHS staff redundancies in England will now go ahead after a deal was reached with the Treasury to allow the health service to overspend this year to cover the cost of pay-offs.
The government said earlier this year 18,000 admin and managerial jobs would go with NHS England, the body that runs the NHS, being brought into the Department of Health and Social Care alongside cuts to local health boards.
NHS bosses and health ministers had been in talks with the Treasury over how to pay for the £1bn one-off bill with the health service wanting extra money.
The Treasury blocked that, but the BBC understands a compromise has been reached with the NHS permitted to overspend this year.
How many workers in the rest of the economy would get that much for being made redundant.
How many of these NHS England redundant workers will then be get another job in the NHS ?
The jobs they are doing currently - do you really think they will all vanish?
There is a reason that a trope in Yes Minister is that reorganisations and mergers of departments are great, because it allows the head count to grow massively....
FWIW (and I am also sceptical), Streeting was claiming this morning that the £1bn upfront cost would save around £1bn annually in future years.
I mean if that were half true it just makes it ridiculous that the Treasury were blocking it. How many other savings get blocked because we are so scared by accepting up front costs?
Waymo is coming to London and the prospect is sort-of welcomed by YouTube's Tom the Taxi Driver, who thinks Uber might be the long term loser. At the start of the video, he holds up a Spectator article about the benefits of self-driving private hire vehicles for itinerant flint knappers.
Uber wanted to be Waymo. Waymo have got there first.
Waymo's development approach seems to be yielding big dividends for them now.
For those who don't know - all these automation projects start out as a Mechanical Turk*. That is with people in an office, ready to take over. The sign that the technology is working or failing, is how the number of interventions shrinks or grows. Amazon Fresh's attempt at automation failed - it stalled on the high number of interventions. Tesco is running a very small pilot, testing different technology for the same thing, by the way. Apparently that is actually working - number of interventions dropping.
Waymo is down to very few interventions - and all are decisions. Instead of taking over the actual driving, the remote operator is telling the car "Do option D on your list".
So the cost ratio drops. And/Or they can massively increase the number of vehicles per operator.
I am looking forward to give the Chinese equivalents a go in a few weeks...apparently they drive far less like they are driving ms daisy and more like a teenager with road rage.
Streeting is now the betting fav for Next PM and I think that's right. He's my bet at 8/1 and I like that bet. This isn't a policy or competence problem it's about public persona and comms. Starmer is unable to forge a connection with the public. It's just one of those things. If he is replaced it will be for this reason and therefore the replacement will be driven accordingly. Not principally a left v right (of the party) question but who of the realistic alternatives is the best communicator. That's Streeting (by miles) and so I think he'll get it. Value at anything over 4 imo.
Streeting is great, agreed it's not left vs right, it's able to communicate vs not. I'd be very happy if he took over.
I differ over Streeting.
Replacing Starmer with Streeting is neither easy nor repairs the issues with this government. Better presentation of the same vacuous policies doesnt help, and Streeting isn't up to much in his day job. I also think him unpopular with the PLP, so if it goes to a contest he wont get the gig. He who wields the knife rarely wears the crown.
Remember unlike Tory MPs, Labour MPs don't get to pick the final 2 to go to the members, anyone who gets enough nominations goes on the ballot paper. There is no mechanism for Labour MPs to VONC their leader either like Tory MPs have, they can only nominate a challenger to the leader which again goes to the membership to decide. Hence Corbyn remained Labour leader winning the members ballot despite losing most of the support of the PLP.
A big problem is that examiners make less money than driving instructors. And face repeated check tests which are very stringent. Also, the way they are allocated work is less flexible.
So become a driving instructor, you get more money, less agro and make your own schedule - most driving instructors are self employed and the driving test companies are offering them work via a booking system.
Thousands of NHS staff redundancies in England will now go ahead after a deal was reached with the Treasury to allow the health service to overspend this year to cover the cost of pay-offs.
The government said earlier this year 18,000 admin and managerial jobs would go with NHS England, the body that runs the NHS, being brought into the Department of Health and Social Care alongside cuts to local health boards.
NHS bosses and health ministers had been in talks with the Treasury over how to pay for the £1bn one-off bill with the health service wanting extra money.
The Treasury blocked that, but the BBC understands a compromise has been reached with the NHS permitted to overspend this year.
How many workers in the rest of the economy would get that much for being made redundant.
How many of these NHS England redundant workers will then be get another job in the NHS ?
The jobs they are doing currently - do you really think they will all vanish?
There is a reason that a trope in Yes Minister is that reorganisations and mergers of departments are great, because it allows the head count to grow massively....
FWIW (and I am also sceptical), Streeting was claiming this morning that the £1bn upfront cost would save around £1bn annually in future years.
I mean if that were half true it just makes it ridiculous that the Treasury were blocking it. How many other savings get blocked because we are so scared by accepting up front costs?
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Starmer is undoubtedly out of his depth. He is not a political animal and doesn't understand the idea that for example Jenrick can decry the use of asylum hotels whilst a few years ago claiming credit for filling hotels up with asylum seekers. I don't suppose he understands the daily diet of hatred and lies from the Telegraph, the Mail and GBNews. He could of course have done something about GB News by demanding OfCom manage them to the terms of their charter, but he hasn't and he won't.
The communications from Downing Street are probably the worst of any Government in living memory, Truss's included. They never claim credit for small wins and are always on the back foot firefighters there own errors or unhinged nonsense dreamed up by Allister Heath or Allison Pearson.
Starmer and Reeves, Reeves in particular is the story. They have to go. After the budget is probably as good a time as any. They could resign for having to break their manifesto commitments claiming their inheritance was far worse than anticipated.
Thousands of NHS staff redundancies in England will now go ahead after a deal was reached with the Treasury to allow the health service to overspend this year to cover the cost of pay-offs.
The government said earlier this year 18,000 admin and managerial jobs would go with NHS England, the body that runs the NHS, being brought into the Department of Health and Social Care alongside cuts to local health boards.
NHS bosses and health ministers had been in talks with the Treasury over how to pay for the £1bn one-off bill with the health service wanting extra money.
The Treasury blocked that, but the BBC understands a compromise has been reached with the NHS permitted to overspend this year.
Did anyone get news of the Starmer bunker story before 22:19 last night?
From WHOIS: Domain Information Name WESFORLEADER.COM Registered On 2025-11-11T22:19:15Z
wesforleader.co.uk and wesforleader.uk were also registered on the 11th by the same domain name registrar.
Once put up a (spoof) SaveOurLocalMP twitter account and ran some joke comments about him being under threat etc, Local rag picked it up, until they tumbled to some of the sillier comments. Just checked Google and the pages are still there somewhere on Twitter. It's easy to set hares running, if you wish.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
Do you keep a log on everyone? The other day you produced a post of mine from ten years ago! I don't disagree with anything you have said about Carlson. I see him as a repentant sinner and a very astute advocate for whichever cause he's fighting. It was pro Trump when he worked for Fox. Now he's free-lance his published opinions are different. I don't know if you've ever met a lawyer? My family is full of them. It is possible to argue a case without your particular views coming into it. If indeed you have any.
PB comments are searchable
Tucker Carlson is multiple times worse than GB News. He is multiple times worse than Nigel Farage. He is a major spreader of racist, extremist politics in the US.
When it comes to lies - he was a major player in Fox New pushing the "Stolen election" garbage in the US. Which led to Fox paying Dominion Voting Systems three-quarters of a *billion* - under US law, you really have to work at your lies to be liable for that kind of money.
There are more than enough people who've met him, who say that he believes in things like Great Replacement, that the UK is overrun with Muslims etc etc.
Even if he didn't, then spreading that filth, while agreeing with it, makes him complicit.
And if you support him, that is what you are agreeing with.
No PM would be popular right now, especially so if they were trying to do the right thing and get the country back on track.
He has tried planning reform but effots appear to have stalled. He has tried welfare reform but ended up with a bill to spend more. What else is there? What is it that you think he is doing to get us 'back on track'?
FPT.
Planning hasn't stalled - its getting done by end of the year. Renters rights bill has passed - huge deal for people who rent (ie no one on this forum). Bringing railways back into public ownership. NHS waiting lists falling (not much but a little). Got onshore wind going again.
But the biggest thing i think is we have a sensible chancellor who is grappling with the difficult fiscal decisions rather than doing unfunded tax cuts and pretending all will be okay.
They completely messed up welfare reform though.
Lets see. As a (rare pb?) renter who supports rebalancing the relationship away from landlords to tenants, the renters rights bill seems like a mess. Taking a third of your parliamentary term to get planning changes through is stalling if you are committing to record housebuilding, and that is if does happen by the end of the year. And will the chancellor actually make some bold decisions and raise an extra £50bn+ or just tinker at the margins?
They have been far too timid and cautious which worked fine when seeking power but is a terrible strategy that pleases no-one when in government.
Property is always a long term game. Getting such significant changes through in a little over a year is remarkably quick; it is the biggest set of changes since 1988. "Renters Rights" organisations (who I have criticised previously) think it is a major success.
And it will be 5 years before we know how well it has succeeded.
For developers the system has to be both intensely tactical and intensely strategic at the same time.
That is because it can take years to get anything through planning, and parish pump politics or random national politics means it can happen quickly - with intense pressure to build it NOW as planning permission turns into a pumpkin in 3 years (unless innovative measures taken which impose other restrictions), or it can take a decade if the local Council are so minded.
And maintaining a building organisation, workforce etc through that is very difficult. The buffers that are needed are insane.
So there's a need for long term landbanks to anticipate all possible future paths, and maintain the workforce capable of building to a high quality, and a guessing game as to what will happen. And there needs to be the project margin to absorb all possible outcomes.
And small builders cannot afford to play that game.
I can point you to an industrial estate locally next to the "edge of town retail park" which when I checked was still owned by Tesco, left over from the mad expansion period decades ago when they were a) Looking for a supermarket site in this area of 80k people and b) Buying up sites to block competition.
Casual chatter to someone from say Savills or Innes England can supply insight on how that all works.
That's one area that needs to be simplified by stability in the short and long term planning system. It all adds costs to the bottom line, which I think none of us here want.
All very interesting but do you think.....
Will Labour build anywhere close to the 1.5m promise by the next election? Will housing costs for those struggling have increased or decreased by the next election? Will those wanting to start a family and needing more space find it easier by the next election? Will the handbroke on the economy from poor housing mobility be removed by the next election?
Politically they have stalled on this, even if there are lots of good reasons why they were likely to do so.
As a general comment, very little will change by the next election. Nothing happens that quickly in housing. The shortest realistic timescale for anything sustainable is a decade.
Will Labour build anywhere close to the 1.5m promise by the next election? No. At target time I called it as 1 million will be good, 1.25 million will be seen as a big success. Especially as the next election will be after ~4.5 years, not 5. It will be an argument about forecasts.
Will housing costs for those struggling have increased or decreased by the next election? It depends what you mean by "struggling", and to whom you are referring. Everybody always says they are struggling, regardless of what circumstances are. Listen to all the home counties retirees complaining about council services not getting better when Council funding is 1/4-1/3 below what it was. Yet more expensive cars on driveways are everywhere, and most of us still go abroad most years.
Will those wanting to start a family and needing more space find it easier by the next election? See my general comment.
Will the handbroke on the economy from poor housing mobility be removed by the next election? That could possibly be mitigated by a tax rebalancing (eg Proportional Property Tax which incorporates removal of Stamp Duty alongside a 0.5% of value Council Tax), or other quite tactical measures such as addressing under-occupied spare bedrooms in the owner occupied sector by further incentivising lodgers as an alternative to pied-a-terre flats.
It is important to note that property prices have significantly rebalanced already, which is part of the journey.
Nothing happens that quickly in housing.
Well Rayner and Reeves managed to drive construction into a recession quick enough:
The S&P Global UK Construction PMI fell to 44.1 in October of 2025 from 46.2 in the previous month, below market expectations of 46.7 to reflect a tenth consecutive contraction in British construction activity. The rate of contraction was the sharpest since May of 2020. Construction firms continued to report poor market conditions and fewer tender opportunities. Consequently, employment in the sector dropped at the sharpest pace in over five years, in addition to lesser subcontractor usage. The poor demand drove costs of input materials to drop. Civil engineering works plummeted from the previous month (35.4), with surveyees reporting a lack of new work to replace previously completed projects. Declines were also observed for residential construction (43.6) and commercial building activity (46.3).
They had all the right ideas on this, coming into government. They've delivered very little indeed of significance.
I wouldn't say Labour had the right ideas on housing. They had a vague intention to build a (completely inadequate) number of new houses, which collided with reality pretty quickly when they weren't wiling to promote effective competition in the building industry free or encourage small-scale developments of the kind that are routine in continental Europe.
And I wouldn't say they've delivered very little indeed of significance - we've actually gone a fair distance backwards under Labour, as the figures for housing starts show, despite their rhetoric.
It's a great shame, because about the one area I thought Labour might do better than the Conservatives was on housing. But working under a planning system, when virtually every other civilised country takes a zoning approach, and working through the current oligopolistic industry, that has an incentive, like all oligopolies, to provide too few products of low quality at extortionate prices.
Overall, Labour has gone backwards not forwards, in this, as in just about everything else, betraying the people they claim to represent. The scale of their failure is remarkable and tragic.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
Do you keep a log on everyone? The other day you produced a post of mine from ten years ago! I don't disagree with anything you have said about Carlson. I see him as a repentant sinner and a very astute advocate for whichever cause he's fighting. It was pro Trump when he worked for Fox. Now he's free-lance his published opinions are different. I don't know if you've ever met a lawyer? My family is full of them. It is possible to argue a case without your particular views coming into it. If indeed you have any.
PB comments are searchable
Tucker Carlson is multiple times worse than GB News. He is multiple times worse than Nigel Farage. He is a major spreader of racist, extremist politics in the US.
When it comes to lies - he was a major player in Fox New pushing the "Stolen election" garbage in the US. Which led to Fox paying Dominion Voting Systems three-quarters of a *billion* - under US law, you really have to work at your lies to be liable for that kind of money.
There are more than enough people who've met him, who say that he believes in things like Great Replacement, that the UK is overrun with Muslims etc etc.
Even if he didn't, then spreading that filth, while agreeing with it, makes him complicit.
And if you support him, that is what you are agreeing with.
GBNews and Nigel are in the same Venn diagram circles as Tucker. Their bile is just nowhere near to the same level of concentration. It's still pretty unpleasant though.
Anyway after Trumpgate we can expect the BBC to become more like GBNews and feature Farage even more than he is currently featured. This is the penance for upsetting Donny Diapers.
Thousands of NHS staff redundancies in England will now go ahead after a deal was reached with the Treasury to allow the health service to overspend this year to cover the cost of pay-offs.
The government said earlier this year 18,000 admin and managerial jobs would go with NHS England, the body that runs the NHS, being brought into the Department of Health and Social Care alongside cuts to local health boards.
NHS bosses and health ministers had been in talks with the Treasury over how to pay for the £1bn one-off bill with the health service wanting extra money.
The Treasury blocked that, but the BBC understands a compromise has been reached with the NHS permitted to overspend this year.
How many workers in the rest of the economy would get that much for being made redundant.
How many of these NHS England redundant workers will then be get another job in the NHS ?
The jobs they are doing currently - do you really think they will all vanish?
There is a reason that a trope in Yes Minister is that reorganisations and mergers of departments are great, because it allows the head count to grow massively....
FWIW (and I am also sceptical), Streeting was claiming this morning that the £1bn upfront cost would save around £1bn annually in future years.
I mean if that were half true it just makes it ridiculous that the Treasury were blocking it. How many other savings get blocked because we are so scared by accepting up front costs?
Good question (and that's part of why I'm a little sceptical, as the argument seemed a bit too simplistic).
You do have to set against that the evident long standing inability of governments of all stripes to understand how investment works, so it's not totally impossible that he's on to something.
What idiot thought it was a good idea to allow companies to hoard and resell driving test slots in the first place?
Probably more that it wasn't necessary to block it, until it was. My question with this one is why it's taken so long to put in place the obvious fixes for a problem that's been reported on for several years already.
Incidentally, in " 36 MoD driving examiners will be brought in to conduct tests one day a week for a year, at an estimated cost of £100,000", I wonder what the cost derives from? Is it an actual extra cost, or is it effectively what one bit of government (the MoD) is charging some other bit (the DoT) for the time of some employees who the MoD would have been employing regardless?
Did anyone get news of the Starmer bunker story before 22:19 last night?
From WHOIS: Domain Information Name WESFORLEADER.COM Registered On 2025-11-11T22:19:15Z
wesforleader.co.uk and wesforleader.uk were also registered on the 11th by the same domain name registrar.
Once put up a (spoof) SaveOurLocalMP twitter account and ran some joke comments about him being under threat etc, Local rag picked it up, until they tumbled to some of the sillier comments. Just checked Google and the pages are still there somewhere on Twitter. It's easy to set hares running, if you wish.
Oh yes, but domain name rental costs a spot of cash and spoof twitter accounts don't. That's a little more commitment by whoever the actioner is. Plus there are the TLD variants...
Now Labour have arrived at favouring tge WASPI women, they really have got to the "we'll just spaff public money on any old chancers" stage. Depressing it took less than 18 months. They just cannot say no.
To be fair, I *hope* that the WASPI review will be 'yes, we have now looked at the new information - as we are required to do - but no, there is no change to the decision'.
But I may just be being overly optimistic.
Politically it's probably better for this government to let the judicial review run with the likely finding that the pension age increase implementation was illegal, even though it will cost more than to compensate WASPI now.
Which is what your "yes, we have now looked at the new information - as we are required to do - but no, there is no change to the decision" actually means, and why they might do it.
Having said that, the whole policy being judged illegal is a can of worms they likely want to head off. No good options for the government here.
The ombudsman has not found the policy to be illegal. They’ve found that the WASPI women were not sufficiently informed of the change.
The ombudsman has found the WASPI women to be victims of maladministration and has recommended compensation. The ombudsman's recommendations have no force in law. The Judicial Review will look at the policy from the same procedural perspective and if it comes to same conclusion as the ombudsman on essentially the same information, it will have force of law. ie the pension age increase implementation was illegal.
The government has to then remedy that illegality. If it can head off the JR through compensation it doesn't have to accept illegality. Any responsible corporation would settle in those circumstances but the government has to worry about the political optics of handing out cash to WASPI women who aren't a popular group.
The moral of the story, do things by the book and don't screw up. To be fair to this government, the previous administration did the screwing up
This is not quite correct. The maladministration related to notification - and at a relatively late stage - and only for a period of about a year or so. The WASPI campaign has been quite dishonest in presenting this as a means to overturn the entire legislation changing the pension age. I will try and dig out the detailed explanation from actual pension/trust lawyers who understand this issue. I wouldn't believe a word the WASPI women say. They are both entitled and dishonest and, frankly, as a group wholly undeserving.
Thousands of NHS staff redundancies in England will now go ahead after a deal was reached with the Treasury to allow the health service to overspend this year to cover the cost of pay-offs.
The government said earlier this year 18,000 admin and managerial jobs would go with NHS England, the body that runs the NHS, being brought into the Department of Health and Social Care alongside cuts to local health boards.
NHS bosses and health ministers had been in talks with the Treasury over how to pay for the £1bn one-off bill with the health service wanting extra money.
The Treasury blocked that, but the BBC understands a compromise has been reached with the NHS permitted to overspend this year.
How many workers in the rest of the economy would get that much for being made redundant.
How many of these NHS England redundant workers will then be get another job in the NHS ?
The jobs they are doing currently - do you really think they will all vanish?
There is a reason that a trope in Yes Minister is that reorganisations and mergers of departments are great, because it allows the head count to grow massively....
FWIW (and I am also sceptical), Streeting was claiming this morning that the £1bn upfront cost would save around £1bn annually in future years.
I am highly sceptical of the savings.
Both NHS England and ICB's* are losing 50% of their staff, and have known this all year. No one knows who or what roles, so it has been impossible to get anything done all year that requires input from these bodies. All the staff seem to be concentrating on their CVs and/or exit strategy, much as you would expect.
For example a project in my unit to shift a lot of work to community service has not made any progress in 6 months, despite it being more convenient for patients, reducing footfall on our major hospital sites, better quality control and also cheaper for the NHS. We need staff in NHSE and ICBs to make it happen.
* ICB is Integrated Care Board, the successor to Primary Commissioning Trusts, with added involvement of councils and a role in Social Care provision. Denuding them of staff is very likely to cause a lot of bed-blocking because of loss of that co-ordination. Cynically, I expect these bodies to be reinvented next year as a triumphant innovation to fix bed-blocking and Social Care.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
Do you keep a log on everyone? The other day you produced a post of mine from ten years ago! I don't disagree with anything you have said about Carlson. I see him as a repentant sinner and a very astute advocate for whichever cause he's fighting. It was pro Trump when he worked for Fox. Now he's free-lance his published opinions are different. I don't know if you've ever met a lawyer? My family is full of them. It is possible to argue a case without your particular views coming into it. If indeed you have any.
PB comments are searchable
Tucker Carlson is multiple times worse than GB News. He is multiple times worse than Nigel Farage. He is a major spreader of racist, extremist politics in the US.
When it comes to lies - he was a major player in Fox New pushing the "Stolen election" garbage in the US. Which led to Fox paying Dominion Voting Systems three-quarters of a *billion* - under US law, you really have to work at your lies to be liable for that kind of money.
There are more than enough people who've met him, who say that he believes in things like Great Replacement, that the UK is overrun with Muslims etc etc.
Even if he didn't, then spreading that filth, while agreeing with it, makes him complicit.
And if you support him, that is what you are agreeing with.
GBNews and Nigel are in the same Venn diagram circles as Tucker. Their bile is just nowhere near to the same level of concentration. It's still pretty unpleasant though.
Anyway after Trumpgate we can expect the BBC to become more like GBNews and feature Farage even more than he is currently featured. This is the penance for upsetting Donny Diapers.
All three are beyond the pale for me. Tucker is by far the worst. He agrees and pets actually Nazis and Fascists.
As to Trumpgate - that's just down to the stupidity of those involved. The sane thing to do is to take the opportunity to tighten up standards and improve things. Not capitulate to those beyond the pale.
What idiot thought it was a good idea to allow companies to hoard and resell driving test slots in the first place?
Probably more that it wasn't necessary to block it, until it was. My question with this one is why it's taken so long to put in place the obvious fixes for a problem that's been reported on for several years already.
Incidentally, in " 36 MoD driving examiners will be brought in to conduct tests one day a week for a year, at an estimated cost of £100,000", I wonder what the cost derives from? Is it an actual extra cost, or is it effectively what one bit of government (the MoD) is charging some other bit (the DoT) for the time of some employees who the MoD would have been employing regardless?
It is a weird number as well, read literally that would be about 7-8 FTE equivalent so how can it cost just £100k? Unless Diane Abbott is in charge of their salary package perhaps.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
Do you keep a log on everyone? The other day you produced a post of mine from ten years ago! I don't disagree with anything you have said about Carlson. I see him as a repentant sinner and a very astute advocate for whichever cause he's fighting. It was pro Trump when he worked for Fox. Now he's free-lance his published opinions are different. I don't know if you've ever met a lawyer? My family is full of them. It is possible to argue a case without your particular views coming into it. If indeed you have any.
PB comments are searchable
Tucker Carlson is multiple times worse than GB News. He is multiple times worse than Nigel Farage. He is a major spreader of racist, extremist politics in the US.
When it comes to lies - he was a major player in Fox New pushing the "Stolen election" garbage in the US. Which led to Fox paying Dominion Voting Systems three-quarters of a *billion* - under US law, you really have to work at your lies to be liable for that kind of money.
There are more than enough people who've met him, who say that he believes in things like Great Replacement, that the UK is overrun with Muslims etc etc.
Even if he didn't, then spreading that filth, while agreeing with it, makes him complicit.
And if you support him, that is what you are agreeing with.
GBNews and Nigel are in the same Venn diagram circles as Tucker. Their bile is just nowhere near to the same level of concentration. It's still pretty unpleasant though.
Anyway after Trumpgate we can expect the BBC to become more like GBNews and feature Farage even more than he is currently featured. This is the penance for upsetting Donny Diapers.
As I have said before, I don't watch any 24 news channels. They are all dripping wet with Farage/trump crap.
What idiot thought it was a good idea to allow companies to hoard and resell driving test slots in the first place?
Probably more that it wasn't necessary to block it, until it was. My question with this one is why it's taken so long to put in place the obvious fixes for a problem that's been reported on for several years already.
Incidentally, in " 36 MoD driving examiners will be brought in to conduct tests one day a week for a year, at an estimated cost of £100,000", I wonder what the cost derives from? Is it an actual extra cost, or is it effectively what one bit of government (the MoD) is charging some other bit (the DoT) for the time of some employees who the MoD would have been employing regardless?
That 1,872 mandays a year. £100K sounds rather cheap.
Labours beleaguered government have to face Kemi’s resurgent Conservatives at PMQs 🤤 Which attack line will Kemi use? I suggest 93 criminals released early in just a few months this year - and that’s just the ones spotted, who knows the true figure - so why did a clamp down come so late if ministers were aware of these figures all spring and summer, sitting on their hands and doing nothing? Anything BBC related would be a waste of time, red herring, and not building pressure on what matters.
Thousands of NHS staff redundancies in England will now go ahead after a deal was reached with the Treasury to allow the health service to overspend this year to cover the cost of pay-offs.
The government said earlier this year 18,000 admin and managerial jobs would go with NHS England, the body that runs the NHS, being brought into the Department of Health and Social Care alongside cuts to local health boards.
NHS bosses and health ministers had been in talks with the Treasury over how to pay for the £1bn one-off bill with the health service wanting extra money.
The Treasury blocked that, but the BBC understands a compromise has been reached with the NHS permitted to overspend this year.
How many workers in the rest of the economy would get that much for being made redundant.
How many of these NHS England redundant workers will then be get another job in the NHS ?
The jobs they are doing currently - do you really think they will all vanish?
There is a reason that a trope in Yes Minister is that reorganisations and mergers of departments are great, because it allows the head count to grow massively....
FWIW (and I am also sceptical), Streeting was claiming this morning that the £1bn upfront cost would save around £1bn annually in future years.
I am highly sceptical of the savings.
Both NHS England and ICB's* are losing 50% of their staff, and have known this all year. No one knows who or what roles, so it has been impossible to get anything done all year that requires input from these bodies. All the staff seem to be concentrating on their CVs and/or exit strategy, much as you would expect.
For example a project in my unit to shift a lot of work to community service has not made any progress in 6 months, despite it being more convenient for patients, reducing footfall on our major hospital sites, better quality control and also cheaper for the NHS. We need staff in NHSE and ICBs to make it happen.
* ICB is Integrated Care Board, the successor to Primary Commissioning Trusts, with added involvement of councils and a role in Social Care provision. Denuding them of staff is very likely to cause a lot of bed-blocking because of loss of that co-ordination. Cynically, I expect these bodies to be reinvented next year as a triumphant innovation to fix bed-blocking and Social Care.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
Do you keep a log on everyone? The other day you produced a post of mine from ten years ago! I don't disagree with anything you have said about Carlson. I see him as a repentant sinner and a very astute advocate for whichever cause he's fighting. It was pro Trump when he worked for Fox. Now he's free-lance his published opinions are different. I don't know if you've ever met a lawyer? My family is full of them. It is possible to argue a case without your particular views coming into it. If indeed you have any.
PB comments are searchable
Tucker Carlson is multiple times worse than GB News. He is multiple times worse than Nigel Farage. He is a major spreader of racist, extremist politics in the US.
When it comes to lies - he was a major player in Fox New pushing the "Stolen election" garbage in the US. Which led to Fox paying Dominion Voting Systems three-quarters of a *billion* - under US law, you really have to work at your lies to be liable for that kind of money.
There are more than enough people who've met him, who say that he believes in things like Great Replacement, that the UK is overrun with Muslims etc etc.
Even if he didn't, then spreading that filth, while agreeing with it, makes him complicit.
And if you support him, that is what you are agreeing with.
GBNews and Nigel are in the same Venn diagram circles as Tucker. Their bile is just nowhere near to the same level of concentration. It's still pretty unpleasant though.
Anyway after Trumpgate we can expect the BBC to become more like GBNews and feature Farage even more than he is currently featured. This is the penance for upsetting Donny Diapers.
As I have said before, I don't watch any 24 news channels. They are all dripping wet with Farage/trump crap.
A guard: I don't watch TV. It's a cultural wasteland filled with inappropriate metaphors and an unrealistic portrayal of life created by the liberal media elite.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
Do you keep a log on everyone? The other day you produced a post of mine from ten years ago! I don't disagree with anything you have said about Carlson. I see him as a repentant sinner and a very astute advocate for whichever cause he's fighting. It was pro Trump when he worked for Fox. Now he's free-lance his published opinions are different. I don't know if you've ever met a lawyer? My family is full of them. It is possible to argue a case without your particular views coming into it. If indeed you have any.
PB comments are searchable
Tucker Carlson is multiple times worse than GB News. He is multiple times worse than Nigel Farage. He is a major spreader of racist, extremist politics in the US.
When it comes to lies - he was a major player in Fox New pushing the "Stolen election" garbage in the US. Which led to Fox paying Dominion Voting Systems three-quarters of a *billion* - under US law, you really have to work at your lies to be liable for that kind of money.
There are more than enough people who've met him, who say that he believes in things like Great Replacement, that the UK is overrun with Muslims etc etc.
Even if he didn't, then spreading that filth, while agreeing with it, makes him complicit.
And if you support him, that is what you are agreeing with.
I would have agreed with you a month ago. A ghastly creature who supports everything I loathe. I had seen him rarely on Fox news and it's a station whose politics I hate.
Then a month ago I watched a podcast put out by a couple of podcasters I like and they ran an interview between him and Ted Cruz. He was very astute and recently as his opiions chime more closely with mine I'm watching him more often. That's the way it works
Streeting is now the betting fav for Next PM and I think that's right. He's my bet at 8/1 and I like that bet. This isn't a policy or competence problem it's about public persona and comms. Starmer is unable to forge a connection with the public. It's just one of those things. If he is replaced it will be for this reason and therefore the replacement will be driven accordingly. Not principally a left v right (of the party) question but who of the realistic alternatives is the best communicator. That's Streeting (by miles) and so I think he'll get it. Value at anything over 4 imo.
Streeting is great, agreed it's not left vs right, it's able to communicate vs not. I'd be very happy if he took over.
I differ over Streeting.
Replacing Starmer with Streeting is neither easy nor repairs the issues with this government. Better presentation of the same vacuous policies doesnt help, and Streeting isn't up to much in his day job. I also think him unpopular with the PLP, so if it goes to a contest he wont get the gig. He who wields the knife rarely wears the crown.
I too believe Streeting is a victory of presentation over substance. I am beginning to realise that Badenoch claiming Rayner's scalp was a bigger win than it first appeared.
What idiot thought it was a good idea to allow companies to hoard and resell driving test slots in the first place?
Probably more that it wasn't necessary to block it, until it was. My question with this one is why it's taken so long to put in place the obvious fixes for a problem that's been reported on for several years already.
Incidentally, in " 36 MoD driving examiners will be brought in to conduct tests one day a week for a year, at an estimated cost of £100,000", I wonder what the cost derives from? Is it an actual extra cost, or is it effectively what one bit of government (the MoD) is charging some other bit (the DoT) for the time of some employees who the MoD would have been employing regardless?
The driving test backlog was already a problem (but not a serious one) before the pandemic & then the pandemic backlog tipped the entire system into a new, failed state.
It’s somehow typical of the UK as a whole that it has taken five years for the system to make any systematic changes whatsoever that might alleviate the problem. The DVSA has been aware of the issue almost right from the start, it’s not awareness that’s the problem - it’s that the ability of the bureaucracy to react to problems & implement change is incomprehensibly sclerotic.
What idiot thought it was a good idea to allow companies to hoard and resell driving test slots in the first place?
Probably more that it wasn't necessary to block it, until it was. My question with this one is why it's taken so long to put in place the obvious fixes for a problem that's been reported on for several years already.
Incidentally, in " 36 MoD driving examiners will be brought in to conduct tests one day a week for a year, at an estimated cost of £100,000", I wonder what the cost derives from? Is it an actual extra cost, or is it effectively what one bit of government (the MoD) is charging some other bit (the DoT) for the time of some employees who the MoD would have been employing regardless?
That 1,872 mandays a year. £100K sounds rather cheap.
Thousands of NHS staff redundancies in England will now go ahead after a deal was reached with the Treasury to allow the health service to overspend this year to cover the cost of pay-offs.
The government said earlier this year 18,000 admin and managerial jobs would go with NHS England, the body that runs the NHS, being brought into the Department of Health and Social Care alongside cuts to local health boards.
NHS bosses and health ministers had been in talks with the Treasury over how to pay for the £1bn one-off bill with the health service wanting extra money.
The Treasury blocked that, but the BBC understands a compromise has been reached with the NHS permitted to overspend this year.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
Do you keep a log on everyone? The other day you produced a post of mine from ten years ago! I don't disagree with anything you have said about Carlson. I see him as a repentant sinner and a very astute advocate for whichever cause he's fighting. It was pro Trump when he worked for Fox. Now he's free-lance his published opinions are different. I don't know if you've ever met a lawyer? My family is full of them. It is possible to argue a case without your particular views coming into it. If indeed you have any.
PB comments are searchable
Tucker Carlson is multiple times worse than GB News. He is multiple times worse than Nigel Farage. He is a major spreader of racist, extremist politics in the US.
When it comes to lies - he was a major player in Fox New pushing the "Stolen election" garbage in the US. Which led to Fox paying Dominion Voting Systems three-quarters of a *billion* - under US law, you really have to work at your lies to be liable for that kind of money.
There are more than enough people who've met him, who say that he believes in things like Great Replacement, that the UK is overrun with Muslims etc etc.
Even if he didn't, then spreading that filth, while agreeing with it, makes him complicit.
And if you support him, that is what you are agreeing with.
I would have agreed with you a month ago. A ghastly creature who supports everything I loathe. I had seen him rarely on Fox news and it's a station whose politics I hate.
Then a month ago I watched a podcast put out by a couple of podcasters I like and they ran an interview between him and Ted Cruz. He was very astute and recently as his opiions chime more closely with mine I'm watching him more often. That's the way it works
Streeting is now the betting fav for Next PM and I think that's right. He's my bet at 8/1 and I like that bet. This isn't a policy or competence problem it's about public persona and comms. Starmer is unable to forge a connection with the public. It's just one of those things. If he is replaced it will be for this reason and therefore the replacement will be driven accordingly. Not principally a left v right (of the party) question but who of the realistic alternatives is the best communicator. That's Streeting (by miles) and so I think he'll get it. Value at anything over 4 imo.
Streeting is great, agreed it's not left vs right, it's able to communicate vs not. I'd be very happy if he took over.
I differ over Streeting.
Replacing Starmer with Streeting is neither easy nor repairs the issues with this government. Better presentation of the same vacuous policies doesnt help, and Streeting isn't up to much in his day job. I also think him unpopular with the PLP, so if it goes to a contest he wont get the gig. He who wields the knife rarely wears the crown.
I too believe Streeting is a victory of presentation over substance. I am beginning to realise that Badenoch claiming Rayner's scalp was a bigger win than it first appeared.
I think you're right and I'd never rated her. As a Labour supporter is necessary that your values chime with the Party. It's not about the odd policy here and there but 'Labour Values' has to have a meaning. When he sacked Abbott it just seemed cruel and unnecessary but maybe he had good reason. Now I think he was just a shit!
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
BIB - A bastion against most racism. The left has long had an issue with anti-semitism (just as you can argue that the right has an issue with Islam). I think you are blind to this.
I rather enjoyed @Roger telling me off yesterday. He really doesn't like women having opinions of their own. Or perhaps it's just me.
No matter. I am writing a note to myself, to be pinned to the fridge, which I shall be cleaning behind later, to remember that I must not have opinions unless they have been pre-approved or, better still, given to me by men, who will also tell me when to express them, if at all. And then I shall put my pinny on and peel some potatoes.
I do hope that makes dear old Rog feel better. I do so want to be kind.
PS From the book I am reading when all my household duties are done -
It's worth a note that I have unusually not seen any Ref UK Councillors defenestrating in the last 10 days or so.
There's the usual background of "Oops did I really say that the police now are a bunch of politically indoctrinated British hating scum (amongst other things), immediately before I was elected" stuff, but not defenestrations.
I'm not sure whether they have all gone away on a team building exercise around a re-enactment of the assault on the Ehrenfels by the Calcutta Light Horse in 1943 (Operation Creek * aka The Goa Incident), or just run head on into the budgetary process.
The last time I looked at the change numbers was about 30 days since the end of conference, and ignoring the conference specials it was approximately evens in and out for RefUK since then.
Checking, since the start of Nov, transfers involving RefUK are as below. It's level from Ind / Con / Byelections. Obvious caveats are small samples, and this log page being when they log it not the date of the change etc.
Totals. Ref Losses: 3. Ref Gains: 9
Ref -> Con: 1 Ref -> Ind: 1 Ref -> Vacant: 1
Con -> Ref 3 Ind -> Ref 3 Vacant -> Ref 3
A few days ago I made it part way through building an SS to analyse that log page to give a table by pairs of parties, but did not have time to finish it.
Quick calc of councillor attrition since Aug 1st.
Reform lost 30 councillors of 861 they had, a 3.5% attrition in 3 months. They gained 97 in the same period (inward defections plus elections)
Labour lost 110 councillors of 6056 they had, a 1.8% attrition in 3 months. They gained 14 in the same period.
There is somewhat higher attrition and this is of newer councillors.
I've not done Con yet.
Yes - it's against a complex background.
I asked Mark Pack about that, and his approach on tracking Reform defenestrations is to limit his dataset to those elected in the Elections in May.
That is incomplete, but avoids making 27 adjustments every time.
And Mark's objective in this particular case will imo be unobtrusively to seed consistent media narratives (and old school Google SEO) using his now more prominent platform (as a Baron). That has more or less been his practice for 15+ years - be somewhat political at the edges in the direction he likes, but not enough to undermine his position of authority in topics where it exists.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
BIB - A bastion against most racism. The left has long had an issue with anti-semitism (just as you can argue that the right has an issue with Islam). I think you are blind to this.
I rather enjoyed @Roger telling me off yesterday. He really doesn't like women having opinions of their own. Or perhaps it's just me.
No matter. I am writing a note to myself, to be pinned to the fridge, which I shall be cleaning behind later, to remember that I must not have opinions unless they have been pre-approved or, better still, given to me by men, who will also tell me when to express them, if at all. And then I shall put my pinny on and peel some potatoes.
I do hope that makes dear old Rog feel better. I do so want to be kind.
PS From the book I am reading when all my household duties are done -
Have you got pre-approval of the type of potatoes you are peeling?
When I married into a Peruvian family, I discovered this is not a simple question.
What a mess Labour are in with Starmer and Reeves making Truss look good and delivering a slow motion economic disaster and turning in on themselves
Many would sit back with a smug expression but not me
This is a deadly serious crisis for the country and we have 3 more years of it
What makes you think only 3 more years of it?
It is highly likely that the next government of any colour will struggle as much. The demographic challenges, the run down nature of all public services, the desolation of town centres, the stagnant productivity, the rule of the pluto-gerontocracy over the over-burdened young, the lack of any economic strength outside financial services in London, the military and environmental challenges etc.
None of these end when Starmer and Reeves go, to be replaced by Farage and Tice. Sure, we will fly a few more flags as the ship sinks ever lower in the water, but there won't be a magic cure. We are 10 years on from Farage's last magic cure of Brexit and look how that has improved the nation.
Oh, and I didn't mention the forthcoming worldwide recession, higher interest rates, stock market bubble, fall of the US system of government, etc etc
Its being so cheerful that keeps me going.
Worse than that, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is optimistic.
When Cramer gets optimistic about stocks then it’s time to move everything to gold, bonds, and cash.
The Reverse Cramer ETF was one of the best performing ETFs last year
I don’t know how true it was, but I saw one “league table” that had Buffet, Soros, Pelosi, and Inverse Cramer, all in the top five!
It's not *quite* true, because there are some commodity ETFs that did quite extraordinarily well, but the last year both the Inverse Cramer and the Pelosi ETFs outperformed the S&P by a massive amount.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
BIB - A bastion against most racism. The left has long had an issue with anti-semitism (just as you can argue that the right has an issue with Islam). I think you are blind to this.
I rather enjoyed @Roger telling me off yesterday. He really doesn't like women having opinions of their own. Or perhaps it's just me.
No matter. I am writing a note to myself, to be pinned to the fridge, which I shall be cleaning behind later, to remember that I must not have opinions unless they have been pre-approved or, better still, given to me by men, who will also tell me when to express them, if at all. And then I shall put my pinny on and peel some potatoes.
I do hope that makes dear old Rog feel better. I do so want to be kind.
PS From the book I am reading when all my household duties are done -
As one in a position of assumed authority, I'm happy to pre-approve your opinions, especially the ones that I do not agree with.
Thousands of NHS staff redundancies in England will now go ahead after a deal was reached with the Treasury to allow the health service to overspend this year to cover the cost of pay-offs.
The government said earlier this year 18,000 admin and managerial jobs would go with NHS England, the body that runs the NHS, being brought into the Department of Health and Social Care alongside cuts to local health boards.
NHS bosses and health ministers had been in talks with the Treasury over how to pay for the £1bn one-off bill with the health service wanting extra money.
The Treasury blocked that, but the BBC understands a compromise has been reached with the NHS permitted to overspend this year.
How many workers in the rest of the economy would get that much for being made redundant.
How many of these NHS England redundant workers will then be get another job in the NHS ?
On the latter question, not many of them. Over a decade, jobs in this area will have been reduced by more than two thirds (~40% cuts under the Tories and now 50% of what was left going in the merger with DHSC). People are moving to the private or third sector.
On the former, I’ve not see details, but I believe the redundancy packages that have been on offer have been similar to that in the private sector.
He points out that the "letter before action" came from the same lawyer who mugged the mainstream channels in the USA, from what he calls the "Trump libel industrial complex".
His view has aspects of "hang tough and wait for the TACO, when Trump loses interest". But I think they underplay the context of the internal dynamics around the BBC board and the delays in statements etc, and the politics of various campaigns to undermine the BBC.
Completely off topic (except on the topic of Michael Wolff): his book Burn Rate, about his dot com company (Wolff New Media) is a hilarious must read. Especially the bit where he's in negotiations to merge with a business run by one of the Murdoch children, and they are arguing that as they are losing more money, they should be valued more highly.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
Do you keep a log on everyone? The other day you produced a post of mine from ten years ago! I don't disagree with anything you have said about Carlson. I see him as a repentant sinner and a very astute advocate for whichever cause he's fighting. It was pro Trump when he worked for Fox. Now he's free-lance his published opinions are different. I don't know if you've ever met a lawyer? My family is full of them. It is possible to argue a case without your particular views coming into it. If indeed you have any.
PB comments are searchable
Tucker Carlson is multiple times worse than GB News. He is multiple times worse than Nigel Farage. He is a major spreader of racist, extremist politics in the US.
When it comes to lies - he was a major player in Fox New pushing the "Stolen election" garbage in the US. Which led to Fox paying Dominion Voting Systems three-quarters of a *billion* - under US law, you really have to work at your lies to be liable for that kind of money.
There are more than enough people who've met him, who say that he believes in things like Great Replacement, that the UK is overrun with Muslims etc etc.
Even if he didn't, then spreading that filth, while agreeing with it, makes him complicit.
And if you support him, that is what you are agreeing with.
I would have agreed with you a month ago. A ghastly creature who supports everything I loathe. I had seen him rarely on Fox news and it's a station whose politics I hate.
Then a month ago I watched a podcast put out by a couple of podcasters I like and they ran an interview between him and Ted Cruz. He was very astute and recently as his opiions chime more closely with mine I'm watching him more often. That's the way it works
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
BIB - A bastion against most racism. The left has long had an issue with anti-semitism (just as you can argue that the right has an issue with Islam). I think you are blind to this.
I rather enjoyed @Roger telling me off yesterday. He really doesn't like women having opinions of their own. Or perhaps it's just me.
No matter. I am writing a note to myself, to be pinned to the fridge, which I shall be cleaning behind later, to remember that I must not have opinions unless they have been pre-approved or, better still, given to me by men, who will also tell me when to express them, if at all. And then I shall put my pinny on and peel some potatoes.
I do hope that makes dear old Rog feel better. I do so want to be kind.
PS From the book I am reading when all my household duties are done -
Thousands of NHS staff redundancies in England will now go ahead after a deal was reached with the Treasury to allow the health service to overspend this year to cover the cost of pay-offs.
The government said earlier this year 18,000 admin and managerial jobs would go with NHS England, the body that runs the NHS, being brought into the Department of Health and Social Care alongside cuts to local health boards.
NHS bosses and health ministers had been in talks with the Treasury over how to pay for the £1bn one-off bill with the health service wanting extra money.
The Treasury blocked that, but the BBC understands a compromise has been reached with the NHS permitted to overspend this year.
Most people get the government minimum, as ever feather bedded terms for government gilded lily workers. If they are so free with our cash then they should make the same terms as minimum for everyone made redundant.
Lots of people in the private sector get enhanced redundancy packages. It is very common.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
Whatever one thinks of SKS, he isn't an antisemite, unlike you.
Roger is Jewish, so I believe self hating Jew is the term used by types like you.
His latest enthusiasm is for Tucker Carlson - apparently, all Tucker's racism, sexism, lies, Trump arse licking, participation in the "Stolen election" lies etc are a bit exaggerated. Because Carlson has come out as anti-Netanyahu.
Do you keep a log on everyone? The other day you produced a post of mine from ten years ago! I don't disagree with anything you have said about Carlson. I see him as a repentant sinner and a very astute advocate for whichever cause he's fighting. It was pro Trump when he worked for Fox. Now he's free-lance his published opinions are different. I don't know if you've ever met a lawyer? My family is full of them. It is possible to argue a case without your particular views coming into it. If indeed you have any.
PB comments are searchable
Tucker Carlson is multiple times worse than GB News. He is multiple times worse than Nigel Farage. He is a major spreader of racist, extremist politics in the US.
When it comes to lies - he was a major player in Fox New pushing the "Stolen election" garbage in the US. Which led to Fox paying Dominion Voting Systems three-quarters of a *billion* - under US law, you really have to work at your lies to be liable for that kind of money.
There are more than enough people who've met him, who say that he believes in things like Great Replacement, that the UK is overrun with Muslims etc etc.
Even if he didn't, then spreading that filth, while agreeing with it, makes him complicit.
And if you support him, that is what you are agreeing with.
GBNews and Nigel are in the same Venn diagram circles as Tucker. Their bile is just nowhere near to the same level of concentration. It's still pretty unpleasant though.
Anyway after Trumpgate we can expect the BBC to become more like GBNews and feature Farage even more than he is currently featured. This is the penance for upsetting Donny Diapers.
As I have said before, I don't watch any 24 news channels. They are all dripping wet with Farage/trump crap.
A guard: I don't watch TV. It's a cultural wasteland filled with inappropriate metaphors and an unrealistic portrayal of life created by the liberal media elite.
Keir proved himself an opportunist and an inept one. He jumped on an anti semite bandwagon which then developed a life of its own and turned into full McCarthyism. He hollowed out his Party just like Johnson had.
Even Diane Abbott perhaps the person who most understood the nature of racism was singled out and disgraced. It was The French revolution Starmer-McSweeny style.
"From the River to the Sea lets have EQUALITY"was now sufficient for instant dismissal as an unfortunate Labour candidate found a few weeks before polling......
But then one of those weird things happened that makes even fate sceptics question.... Israel began the most vicious genocide most of us have wittnessed. "From the River to the Sea" became a new rallying cry but this time for Israeli Ministers to describe their dreams of ethnic cleansing.......
(.....I wonder whether Abbott and all those candidates cast aside or sent to re-education classes laughed or cried?)
......I hope he goes. The Left have for most of my life been a bastion against racism. Starmer is no longer someone I trust to keep that going. Whether through ignorance or ambition I don't know or care . But I want Farage and his Ilk stopped and starmer isn't the person to do it.
BIB - A bastion against most racism. The left has long had an issue with anti-semitism (just as you can argue that the right has an issue with Islam). I think you are blind to this.
I rather enjoyed @Roger telling me off yesterday. He really doesn't like women having opinions of their own. Or perhaps it's just me.
No matter. I am writing a note to myself, to be pinned to the fridge, which I shall be cleaning behind later, to remember that I must not have opinions unless they have been pre-approved or, better still, given to me by men, who will also tell me when to express them, if at all. And then I shall put my pinny on and peel some potatoes.
I do hope that makes dear old Rog feel better. I do so want to be kind.
PS From the book I am reading when all my household duties are done -
My original post to this was:
"Hang on. There was a real author called Maude Avery writing in the 50s?
Maude Avery, 1950s chain-smoking author, is a key character in John Boyle's The Heart's Invisible Furies (which is a great book btw). I assume Boyle based the name on the real Maude Avery but, a google search only brings up the fictional character. How odd."
But of course the quote is from John Boyle's The Heart's Invisible Furies. I'm laughing at my own stupidity now :-)
Comments
EDIT: https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/seatdetails.py?seat=Ilford North
https://x.com/PippaCrerar/status/1988542213354123673?s=20
Off this plane or off the "planes" he is constantly on?
It sounds proper Thick of It stuff. Is he on the plane, yes he is just boarding now, shit shit shit, stop him boarding at all costs, he has already boarded, ring him, ring him now, do anything to stop that plane....SPAD goes running across the runway infront of the jumbo jet waving arms madly.
Or would you prefer Alex Dugin?
Ref 30/861, 3.5%
Con 98/4335, 2.3%
Labour 110/6056, 1.8%
GRN 15/903, 1.7%
LD 22/3202, 0.7%
RFM: 31% (=)
LAB: 20% (+2)
CON: 19% (=)
LDM: 14% (+1)
GRN: 12% (=)
SNP: 2% (=)
Via
@Moreincommon_
, 7-10 Nov.
Changes w/ 31 Oct - 3 Nov.
If like me you opted for a traditional annuity or have a DB pension anyway then I think beyond a certain point cash makes no sense as you're just losing money year in year out versus inflation.
(I did put our entire house-build fund into cash tbf - I couldn't face the prospect of explaining to Mrs P that we had run out of money because of some random stock market crash.)
Though even then..
His reasoning was that, either the government would save them or money wasn't really going to be much use.
He’s one of many who earn their living from social media, who have realised that the more crazy you sound the more ‘engagement’ you get.
Replacing Starmer with Streeting is neither easy nor repairs the issues with this government. Better presentation of the same vacuous policies doesnt help, and Streeting isn't up to much in his day job. I also think him unpopular with the PLP, so if it goes to a contest he wont get the gig. He who wields the knife rarely wears the crown.
There's no guarantee it will work out, obviously, but there will be no improvement in the region without stability in places like Syria.
I quite vividly recall a number of the PB right wingers rubbishing me for saying the US should be talking to him.
Tucker agreed with Dugin, when he was on the show, praised him and Putin.
Dugin is a self described Russian Fascist - complete with writing books on it.
Tucker has done the same will a long list of appalling people - when I say appalling, we are talking about people who would get banned from joining Reform.
If you like Tucker, then you are liking those choices.
Rhetoric vs. Reality
Slogans won’t get Britain building again
https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/rhetoric-vs-reality
They had all the right ideas on this, coming into government.
They've delivered very little indeed of significance.
MAGA has herded the cats of the NutRight into a group, based on Trump worship and Getting Things Done (AKA Owning The Libtards).
The context of Trump delivering the judges who killed Roe VS Wade was a big, big uniter among that crowd.
A splinter of the US Ultra Right is still a part of the US Ultra Right. Which is a hideous, hideous thing, to any decent social democrat.
Waymo… Is This The Time to Be Worried?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUGIYxnnESs
Spectacular gain over the next four or five years.
Sadly only small sums involved as I have limited savings. But still a win's a win!
Buy on bad news is one approach.
We were talking of company reputations yesterday. RR aero engines has the reputation they deserve. It's the one they've worked for and spent many billions on.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/state-pensions-annual-increases-if-you-live-abroad/countries-where-we-pay-an-annual-increase-in-the-state-pension
Waymo's development approach seems to be yielding big dividends for them now.
For those who don't know - all these automation projects start out as a Mechanical Turk*. That is with people in an office, ready to take over. The sign that the technology is working or failing, is how the number of interventions shrinks or grows. Amazon Fresh's attempt at automation failed - it stalled on the high number of interventions. Tesco is running a very small pilot, testing different technology for the same thing, by the way. Apparently that is actually working - number of interventions dropping.
Waymo is down to very few interventions - and all are decisions. Instead of taking over the actual driving, the remote operator is telling the car "Do option D on your list".
So the cost ratio drops. And/Or they can massively increase the number of vehicles per operator.
*Named after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
I am sure it is bad in Downing Street and I would be happy to see the back of Starmer and Reeves, but all those frotting themselves on Chris Mason and Henry Zephman's exclusive were consoling themselves just three and a quarter years ago that Boris Johnson was getting all the big calls right during a time of equal if not considerably worse chaos.
And for BigG, Livermore and the poster that accuses me of straw man arguments this is not whataboutery it is comparing and contrasting responses to a similar situation under a different administration.
There is a very curious group incestuousness about this, as between politicians and media. Evidence: the media are active generally in disclosing names who would prefer not to be in the public eye. But not in cases like this.
I understand that journalist X will be given a quote on an anonymous basis and will protect their source, but journalists Y, Z, A, B and C, including great rivals of X are remarkably inactive in finding out and publicising who has in fact spoken to journalist X.
Result: this morning the evidence that Streeting lied directly to various media outlets is strong. The journalists know whether he was lying or not. It wasn't put to him, and wasn't clarified with us. And we are being treated as the audience in a play, not as citizens of an open democracy with a free press.
Trump going to North Korea during his first term was quite the spectacle, and he seems to have made progress on peace with a number of leaders in the last few months - with the obvious exception of Putin.
Tucker Carlson is multiple times worse than GB News. He is multiple times worse than Nigel Farage. He is a major spreader of racist, extremist politics in the US.
When it comes to lies - he was a major player in Fox New pushing the "Stolen election" garbage in the US. Which led to Fox paying Dominion Voting Systems three-quarters of a *billion* - under US law, you really have to work at your lies to be liable for that kind of money.
There are more than enough people who've met him, who say that he believes in things like Great
Replacement, that the UK is overrun with Muslims etc etc.
Even if he didn't, then spreading that filth, while agreeing with it, makes him complicit.
And if you support him, that is what you are agreeing with.
The average waiting time was 21.8 weeks at the end of June.
BBC News - Only learner drivers to be allowed to book tests
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn09v4d2xe7o
Labour list had a poll with Streeting first amongst Labour members for next leader amongst eligible candidates, then Rayner. Burnham was first but not eligible as not an MP. Excluding Burnham, Rayner and Streeting were tied with Ed Miliband third
https://labourlist.org/2025/09/andy-burnham-approval-leadership-labourlist-survation-poll/
A Sky Labour members poll had Burnham on 54%, Rayner 10%, Streeting 7% and Cooper and Ed Miliband tied on 6% with Mahmood on 2%.
In a final round Burnham beat all opponents head to head, Streeting beat Ed Miliband and Mahmood but Rayner and Cooper beat Streeting.
https://news.sky.com/story/almost-two-in-three-labour-members-back-burnham-over-starmer-for-leader-poll-show-13441078
So Cooper may be an outside bet too
So become a driving instructor, you get more money, less agro and make your own schedule - most driving instructors are self employed and the driving test companies are offering them work via a booking system.
The communications from Downing Street are probably the worst of any Government in living memory, Truss's included. They never claim credit for small wins and are always on the back foot firefighters there own errors or unhinged nonsense dreamed up by Allister Heath or Allison Pearson.
Starmer and Reeves, Reeves in particular is the story. They have to go. After the budget is probably as good a time as any. They could resign for having to break their manifesto commitments claiming their inheritance was far worse than anticipated.
And I wouldn't say they've delivered very little indeed of significance - we've actually gone a fair distance backwards under Labour, as the figures for housing starts show, despite their rhetoric.
It's a great shame, because about the one area I thought Labour might do better than the Conservatives was on housing. But working under a planning system, when virtually every other civilised country takes a zoning approach, and working through the current oligopolistic industry, that has an incentive, like all oligopolies, to provide too few products of low quality at extortionate prices.
Overall, Labour has gone backwards not forwards, in this, as in just about everything else, betraying the people they claim to represent. The scale of their failure is remarkable and tragic.
Anyway after Trumpgate we can expect the BBC to become more like GBNews and feature Farage even more than he is currently featured. This is the penance for upsetting Donny Diapers.
You do have to set against that the evident long standing inability of governments of all stripes to understand how investment works, so it's not totally impossible that he's on to something.
Incidentally, in " 36 MoD driving examiners will be brought in to conduct tests one day a week for a year, at an estimated cost of £100,000", I wonder what the cost derives from? Is it an actual extra cost, or is it effectively what one bit of government (the MoD) is charging some other bit (the DoT) for the time of some employees who the MoD would have been employing regardless?
Both NHS England and ICB's* are losing 50% of their staff, and have known this all year. No one knows who or what roles, so it has been impossible to get anything done all year that requires input from these bodies. All the staff seem to be concentrating on their CVs and/or exit strategy, much as you would expect.
For example a project in my unit to shift a lot of work to community service has not made any progress in 6 months, despite it being more convenient for patients, reducing footfall on our major hospital sites, better quality control and also cheaper for the NHS. We need staff in NHSE and ICBs to make it happen.
* ICB is Integrated Care Board, the successor to Primary Commissioning Trusts, with added involvement of councils and a role in Social Care provision. Denuding them of staff is very likely to cause a lot of bed-blocking because of loss of that co-ordination. Cynically, I expect these bodies to be reinvented next year as a triumphant innovation to fix bed-blocking and Social Care.
As to Trumpgate - that's just down to the stupidity of those involved. The sane thing to do is to take the opportunity to tighten up standards and improve things. Not capitulate to those beyond the pale.
Which attack line will Kemi use? I suggest 93 criminals released early in just a few months this year - and that’s just the ones spotted, who knows the true figure - so why did a clamp down come so late if ministers were aware of these figures all spring and summer, sitting on their hands and doing nothing?
Anything BBC related would be a waste of time, red herring, and not building pressure on what matters.
Then a month ago I watched a podcast put out by a couple of podcasters I like and they ran an interview between him and Ted Cruz. He was very astute and recently as his opiions chime more closely with mine I'm watching him more often. That's the way it works
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=guardian+points+of+view#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:7048dd2a,vid:qTnh2iU1z0U,st:0
It’s somehow typical of the UK as a whole that it has taken five years for the system to make any systematic changes whatsoever that might alleviate the problem. The DVSA has been aware of the issue almost right from the start, it’s not awareness that’s the problem - it’s that the ability of the bureaucracy to react to problems & implement change is incomprehensibly sclerotic.
McSweeney premium?
Will it work?
Or will there be a market in "learners" who are not learning?
When GEC took over, they roughly halved over time.
Many years ago, watched as a cast iron lefty fell down it on USENET.
If I book a test, now, it is done under my provisional license number.
She's learning.
No matter. I am writing a note to myself, to be pinned to the fridge, which I shall be cleaning behind later, to remember that I must not have opinions unless they have been pre-approved or, better still, given to me by men, who will also tell me when to express them, if at all. And then I shall put my pinny on and peel some potatoes.
I do hope that makes dear old Rog feel better. I do so want to be kind.
PS From the book I am reading when all my household duties are done -
I asked Mark Pack about that, and his approach on tracking Reform defenestrations is to limit his dataset to those elected in the Elections in May.
That is incomplete, but avoids making 27 adjustments every time.
And Mark's objective in this particular case will imo be unobtrusively to seed consistent media narratives (and old school Google SEO) using his now more prominent platform (as a Baron). That has more or less been his practice for 15+ years - be somewhat political at the edges in the direction he likes, but not enough to undermine his position of authority in topics where it exists.
When I married into a Peruvian family, I discovered this is not a simple question.
And I am unanimous on that.
You may now express yourself freely.
On the former, I’ve not see details, but I believe the redundancy packages that have been on offer have been similar to that in the private sector.
https://emptycity.substack.com/p/the-letter-the-bbc-could-send-back
@rentouljohn.bsky.social
By trying to save the PM, No 10 plotters have anointed Wes Streeting as his successor
https://bsky.app/profile/rentouljohn.bsky.social/post/3m5gmtqaejs2e
"Hang on. There was a real author called Maude Avery writing in the 50s?
Maude Avery, 1950s chain-smoking author, is a key character in John Boyle's The Heart's Invisible Furies (which is a great book btw). I assume Boyle based the name on the real Maude Avery but, a google search only brings up the fictional character. How odd."
But of course the quote is from John Boyle's The Heart's Invisible Furies. I'm laughing at my own stupidity now :-)