Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Yes, he's bound to have become more sophisticated since then.
According to his biographer, Crick, Dulwich College were so concerned at his attitudes that they declined to make him a prefect when he was in the sixth form there. You are nevertheless correct about his increased sophistication. He has evidently learned to smoke and drink since.
What percentage of sixth formers became prefects though?
In my school, any sixth former with a pulse....about 66%
Just had a read of his Wikipedia. How could they not know he would say things like that?
"Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Dutch title: Gratis geld voor iedereen) promotes a more productive and equitable life based on three core ideas: a universal and unconditional basic income paid to everybody, a short workweek of fifteen hours, and open borders worldwide with the free exchange of citizens between all nations."
Bloody hell, the US negotiation with Russia is being conducted entirely by dodgy real estate grifters. On both sides.
Most know Kirill Dmitriev as the Russian president’s envoy. But to more than 200 investors in Ukraine, he is known for taking part in a Kyiv real estate project that ended in a fraud and criminal case. Using articles from 2011, I was able to find more details... https://x.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1992826709637480822
Shades of John of Gaunt in Richard II ..This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world, Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it, Like to a tenement or pelting farm..
"Reform UK's support has surged in London while backing for Labour languishes at a record low in the capital, according to a new poll. The latest Savanta survey released today found Nigel Farage's party were supported by 23 per cent of voters in London, up from 15 per cent in June. This put Reform ahead of the Tories, who were down one percentage point to 20 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent (-2) and Greens on 10 per cent (-3). Support for Labour was at 32 per cent, which is the joint lowest recorded by Savanta - who have polled London voters since 2020 - following the same result in June."
Pre Nathan Gill imprisonment and the highlighting across the Commons and media
@Mexicanpete may get his wish that Gill damages Farage and Reform by association
Gill is far too obscure a figure for his conviction to have an impact.
I've seen an outline of an attack ad on this subject, blimey, if it sees the light of day it might be the most controversial political video in the history of the UK.
Off topic, but related to what some of you have begun to discuss:
What happens when you shut off warning signals? Megan McArdle offers a vivid example from California:
The results of this thinking can be seen in a recent report from the University of California at San Diego, which like the rest of the UC system stopped accepting standardized test scores in 2020. In 2024 the school had to redesign its remedial math program to create a class that focused entirely on remediating elementary school and middle school math. In 2025, more than 8 percent of entering students needed that class.
These are college students who chose to enroll in a major with a math requirement yet struggle to round numbers to the nearest hundred, add or divide fractions, or work with negative numbers.
Most astonishingly, in 2024, the majority of kids who needed a refresher on the most basic skills had taken at least one higher-level high school math course, such as calculus or statistics, and had an average grade point average in their math classes of 3.65. More than one-quarter of them had straight A’s in a subject they demonstrably didn’t understand.
(For the record: I briefly skimmed the report, and hope to find time to study it before the end of next week.)
This is an utter disgrace and Israel should be thrown out of the Eurovision song contest and banned for at least 40 years.
Eurovision to change voting rules after claims of Israeli government 'interference'
The reduction in the number of votes that can be made online, or via SMS or phone call, from 20 to 10 was "designed to encourage more balanced participation", said contest director Martin Green.
The Eurovision Song Contest is changing its voting system, following allegations of "interference" by Israel's government this year.
Israeli singer Yuval Raphael received the largest number of votes from the public in the contest in May, ultimately finishing as runner-up after the jury votes were counted.
But a number of broadcasters raised concerns about Israel's result.
After the final, Irish broadcaster RTE requested a breakdown in voting numbers from contest organiser the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), while Spain's public broadcaster, Radio Television Espanola (RTVE), called for a "complete review" of the voting system to avoid "external interference".
In September, Dutch public broadcaster AVROTROS said it could no longer justify Israel's participation in the contest, due to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
It went on to say there had been "proven interference by the Israeli government during the last edition of the Song Contest, with the event being used as a political instrument". The statement did not elaborate on the means of "interference".
I remember Max saying he and his family voted 60 times on repeat dial the year before. I doubt it has much to do with Israel directly. The Board of Deputies will get word out through their congregations that an Israeli singer needs help. "All you need do is phone this number until your fingers bleed....No...No...No..... don't worry you wont need to watch the programme........'
Ah, the great global Jewish conspiracy.
You unpleasant little man
Read it again and you will see Roger is debunking interference from Mossad in Tel Aviv. Diaspora votes arise organically and have long been a factor in Eurovision.
The astroturfing of votes for Israel last year was absurd.
I have no problem with individuals having multiple votes, but they should only be allowed to vote once for each song.
Others, since this is a betting site, may want to consider how this failure -- and many others -- might affect Gavin Newsom's chances in a presidential run.
Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Quite - the level of derangement is hilarious. Because of course all other politicians were saintly youngsters.
Farage could say, I said some horrible things when I was young. I am very sorry for the people I have hurt.
Does he have to apologise? Maybe not. It was a very long time ago. His political problem though is that no-one believes the leopard has changed its spots.
The Washington Post say it is a 19 point plan that European leaders have proposed and that Russia is likely to reject the deal.
Starmer and the EU have played a blinder if the reports are true.
Why do we need 19 points?
1) Ukraine and Russia withdraw back to their respective 1991 boundaries. 2) Russia pays compensation to Ukraine. 3) Putin and his leadership face justice.
What are the other 16 points required?
I've got a proposed 3-point peace deal as well.
1) Israel and Syria withdraw back to their respective 2024 boundaries. 2) Israel pays compensation to Syria. 3) Netanyahu and his leadership face justice.
Who started the 2024 Israel/Syria conflict again?
It wasn't Israel, was it?
Don't attack another country if you aren't prepared to lose the war you start.
Israel started the 2024 Israel/Syria conflict. The Assad regime fell. Syria was not attacking Israel. Israel marched through a UN buffer zone and took Syrian territory, while also bombing Syria.
Syria started the war with Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas both started fighting Israel and Hezbollah were operating within Syria even prior to the fall of Assad. The Assad regime fell to be replaced with proscribed Islamists terrorists* that supported wiping out Israel too.
* The UK Government's definition at the time, not even counting Israel's views.
Your repeated, false, insinuations that Syria is a poor defenceless nation attacked unprovoked, are entirely fallacious and false.
List attacks by Syrian military on Israel in 2024 or 2023. Oh, there aren't any.
OK, list attacks by the Syrian opposition (who took over Syria in 2024) on Israel in 2024 or 2023. Still none.
Even the Israeli government makes no claims of Syrian attacks as being the casus belli.
Yes, the Assad government had been supporting Hezbollah, who have periodically attacked Israel, but the Assad regime had just fallen. Israel attacked the new government, who had been fighting against Hezbollah, who supported Assad.
You need a casus belli to start a war, Syria and Israel are already at war, so no casus belli required.
Yes Israel took advantage of their enemy falling to secure a better footing, that's just smart, when you're at war and your enemy shows a weakness during the conflict. If Putin fell and Ukraine reacted to take some land to help them with the war, would you object to that?
You are again, falsely, insinuating that the new regime is peaceful. This is a new regime we proscribed as terrorists.
The attacks were by Hezbollah. The new regime are Hezbollah's enemy. Israel and Syria had been at war and technically there had never been a peace treaty, but there had been no significant fighting for years. The Israeli/Syrian border had a UN buffer zone that was working very well, and the Israeli military just took it over, f*** the UN, and grabbed territory.
The Israeli rationale is that they need to occupy the Golan Heights so that their opponents can't attack them from there. But then it was they need to occupy the UN zone to protect their occupation of the Golan Heights. And now they need to occupy deep into Syria to protect their occupation of the UN zone, to protect their occupation of the Golan Heights, to protect actual Israeli territory. It's just expansionism, a desire for a greater Israel, very similar to Putin's desire for a greater Russia.
We have proscribed the new Syrian regime as terrorists, but we haven't bombed them. You are allowed to dislike your neighbours. You should not invade your neighbours except for a very limited set of circumstances.
But you think Israel is "more important" than other countries, so the rules don't apply to them.
My novel that I failed to get published because none of the people in the industry have any taste started with, "Something funny happened today. Funny peculiar, I mean".
100k words, 10k cigarettes, 1k coffees, 0k interest - apart from one reader at Bloomsbury who said some bits made him giggle.
With all due respect, I rather think that your second paragraph makes for a more interesting opening for your novel than your actual opening.
I know this is Peston, but the government is quite timid enough for this to be true...
John Fingleton’s review for the government of how to reduce unnecessary barriers and costs for nuclear power development is a tour de force, a compelling road map for how to accelerate important infrastructure investment in the UK - which is the sine qua non of improving growth and living standards (read John’s nutshell below).
For the last eight weeks he was assured that the prime minister and chancellor would accept and implement the recommendations in full. He even tweaked an important clause at the government’s request, to give them a bit more flexibility over the means to implementation.
I understand he has now been told that at the budget tomorrow the welcome will be conditional, subject to further work and review - because the Chancellor has been nobbled by a legal and planning adviser, who claims the Fingleton recommendations somehow breach the UK’s environmental, trade and human rights obligations.
He and his colleagues believe this is nonsense. They examined the legal considerations in their assessment. But they fear that yet again the dead hand of official caution has squashed - potentially for months and years - important growth-enhancing investment. https://x.com/Peston/status/1993295277877334275
This is an utter disgrace and Israel should be thrown out of the Eurovision song contest and banned for at least 40 years.
Eurovision to change voting rules after claims of Israeli government 'interference'
The reduction in the number of votes that can be made online, or via SMS or phone call, from 20 to 10 was "designed to encourage more balanced participation", said contest director Martin Green.
The Eurovision Song Contest is changing its voting system, following allegations of "interference" by Israel's government this year.
Israeli singer Yuval Raphael received the largest number of votes from the public in the contest in May, ultimately finishing as runner-up after the jury votes were counted.
But a number of broadcasters raised concerns about Israel's result.
After the final, Irish broadcaster RTE requested a breakdown in voting numbers from contest organiser the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), while Spain's public broadcaster, Radio Television Espanola (RTVE), called for a "complete review" of the voting system to avoid "external interference".
In September, Dutch public broadcaster AVROTROS said it could no longer justify Israel's participation in the contest, due to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
It went on to say there had been "proven interference by the Israeli government during the last edition of the Song Contest, with the event being used as a political instrument". The statement did not elaborate on the means of "interference".
I remember Max saying he and his family voted 60 times on repeat dial the year before. I doubt it has much to do with Israel directly. The Board of Deputies will get word out through their congregations that an Israeli singer needs help. "All you need do is phone this number until your fingers bleed....No...No...No..... don't worry you wont need to watch the programme........'
Ah, the great global Jewish conspiracy.
You unpleasant little man
Read it again and you will see Roger is debunking interference from Mossad in Tel Aviv. Diaspora votes arise organically and have long been a factor in Eurovision.
The astroturfing of votes for Israel last year was absurd.
I have no problem with individuals having multiple votes, but they should only be allowed to vote once for each song.
It’s all a bit nuts the public vote. Each country should invite their public to apply for a vote, successful voters are randomly drawn and each country provides a max of 5000 voters. They each have a unique code to vote and they are submitted centrally to Eurovision. It ensures a good size cross section of people interested in Eurovision but prevents astroturfing.
I see jury trials are going for everything apart from rape and killings. I thought that's the opposite of what Labour wanted (maybe not killings, but I thought they wanted to scrap jury trials for rape).
"Reform UK's support has surged in London while backing for Labour languishes at a record low in the capital, according to a new poll. The latest Savanta survey released today found Nigel Farage's party were supported by 23 per cent of voters in London, up from 15 per cent in June. This put Reform ahead of the Tories, who were down one percentage point to 20 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent (-2) and Greens on 10 per cent (-3). Support for Labour was at 32 per cent, which is the joint lowest recorded by Savanta - who have polled London voters since 2020 - following the same result in June."
Pre Nathan Gill imprisonment and the highlighting across the Commons and media
@Mexicanpete may get his wish that Gill damages Farage and Reform by association
Gill is far too obscure a figure for his conviction to have an impact.
I've seen an outline of an attack ad on this subject, blimey, if it sees the light of day it might be the most controversial political video in the history of the UK.
So the video will show clips of Nathan Gill spouting his pro Russian bollocks and a voiceover saying he accepted bribes and is doing 10 years in prison for that then it moves onto to other Nigel Farage related politicians saying the same bollocks and then the narrator says 'They didn't need to be paid, they believe in this pro Russia bollocks from the heart.'
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
Lovely to read that extract.
Over the years I worked my way through all the Dickens novels, borrowing many from a solicitor friend who had been left a full set by a former client, finishing earlier this year with A Tale of Two Cities.
Hopefully will live long enough to repeat the trick. There really is nothing quite like a Dickens, particularly during a long winter evening.
Sounds wonderful, Burges - definitely the best of times.
Except dickens was paid by the word so wrote way too many of them - it was the worst of times
The mistake many people make with Victor Hugo, Dumas, Dickens etc is to try and read them in great chunks, or all in one go.
They are made to be read in bites, over a period.
A modern example of something similar is Cryptonomicon. The digressions *are* the point.
"Reform UK's support has surged in London while backing for Labour languishes at a record low in the capital, according to a new poll. The latest Savanta survey released today found Nigel Farage's party were supported by 23 per cent of voters in London, up from 15 per cent in June. This put Reform ahead of the Tories, who were down one percentage point to 20 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent (-2) and Greens on 10 per cent (-3). Support for Labour was at 32 per cent, which is the joint lowest recorded by Savanta - who have polled London voters since 2020 - following the same result in June."
The Washington Post say it is a 19 point plan that European leaders have proposed and that Russia is likely to reject the deal.
Starmer and the EU have played a blinder if the reports are true.
Indeed. Trouble is that somehow we need to alight on a deal that both Russia and Ukraine can swallow.
The only deal Russia will accept is one that converts Ukraine into Belarus.
Indeed, which is why the only way this war finishes is with an exhausted Russian army and a collapsed Russian economy.
Western leaders all need to realise this, and do everything they can to achieve that goal. Give the Ukranians everything they need to take out the Russian economy over the winter, and the war will soon be over. Also play the Russians at their own game to a limited extent - make sure there’s power cuts in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and further threaten Kaliningrad.
I see jury trials are going for everything apart from rape and killings. I thought that's the opposite of what Labour wanted (maybe not killings, but I thought they wanted to scrap jury trials for rape).
As someone pointed out, interesting that a professed Human Rights Lawyer (Starmer) and chums are removing the right to trial by jury and automatic right of appeal.
Others, since this is a betting site, may want to consider how this failure -- and many others -- might affect Gavin Newsom's chances in a presidential run.
I suppose the next really big betting thing may well be the 2028 Presidential election. I rather fancy that Starmer and co will hang on through thick and thin until the last rays of their very faded sun can no longer be seen*.
So far, I think that Vance has to be close to a lay for Republican nominee. Being Trump's right hand man has to mean that the erratic old fool could well sweep him aside with a wave.
*You see - that's what comes of quoting Dickens down the thread - I come up with laughable floweriness!
Off topic, but related to what some of you have begun to discuss:
What happens when you shut off warning signals? Megan McArdle offers a vivid example from California:
The results of this thinking can be seen in a recent report from the University of California at San Diego, which like the rest of the UC system stopped accepting standardized test scores in 2020. In 2024 the school had to redesign its remedial math program to create a class that focused entirely on remediating elementary school and middle school math. In 2025, more than 8 percent of entering students needed that class.
These are college students who chose to enroll in a major with a math requirement yet struggle to round numbers to the nearest hundred, add or divide fractions, or work with negative numbers.
Most astonishingly, in 2024, the majority of kids who needed a refresher on the most basic skills had taken at least one higher-level high school math course, such as calculus or statistics, and had an average grade point average in their math classes of 3.65. More than one-quarter of them had straight A’s in a subject they demonstrably didn’t understand.
(For the record: I briefly skimmed the report, and hope to find time to study it before the end of next week.)
I find this extraordinary. I was in a discussion about maths the other day.... can't recall how we got into it ..... but when I was a pharmacy student back in the late 50's we used to have to be able to work in both the metric system and the old (?antediluvian) apothecaries system, using and converting doses and ingredients between milligrams and grains, millilitres and minims. And get them right. And without a calculator. And we did it, regularly and consistently. And correctly, because unless you did, ninety percent of the time, you didn't pass.
"Reform UK's support has surged in London while backing for Labour languishes at a record low in the capital, according to a new poll. The latest Savanta survey released today found Nigel Farage's party were supported by 23 per cent of voters in London, up from 15 per cent in June. This put Reform ahead of the Tories, who were down one percentage point to 20 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent (-2) and Greens on 10 per cent (-3). Support for Labour was at 32 per cent, which is the joint lowest recorded by Savanta - who have polled London voters since 2020 - following the same result in June."
Pre Nathan Gill imprisonment and the highlighting across the Commons and media
@Mexicanpete may get his wish that Gill damages Farage and Reform by association
Gill is far too obscure a figure for his conviction to have an impact.
I've seen an outline of an attack ad on this subject, blimey, if it sees the light of day it might be the most controversial political video in the history of the UK.
So the video will show clips of Nathan Gill spouting his pro Russian bollocks and a voiceover saying he accepted bribes and is doing 10 years in prison for that then it moves onto to other Nigel Farage related politicians saying the same bollocks and then the narrator says 'They didn't need to be paid, they believe in this pro Russia bollocks from the heart.'
I'm not sure which of the three parties this proposed add comes from, but in many ways they should all co-sponsor it and repeat it every week for the next 180 weeks.
Questions over Russian influence on Reform and Farage are incredibly important when he is a proposed Prime Minister candidate, in a way they were more peripheral when he merely disrupter in chief.
"Reform UK's support has surged in London while backing for Labour languishes at a record low in the capital, according to a new poll. The latest Savanta survey released today found Nigel Farage's party were supported by 23 per cent of voters in London, up from 15 per cent in June. This put Reform ahead of the Tories, who were down one percentage point to 20 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent (-2) and Greens on 10 per cent (-3). Support for Labour was at 32 per cent, which is the joint lowest recorded by Savanta - who have polled London voters since 2020 - following the same result in June."
Pre Nathan Gill imprisonment and the highlighting across the Commons and media
@Mexicanpete may get his wish that Gill damages Farage and Reform by association
Gill is far too obscure a figure for his conviction to have an impact.
I've seen an outline of an attack ad on this subject, blimey, if it sees the light of day it might be the most controversial political video in the history of the UK.
So the video will show clips of Nathan Gill spouting his pro Russian bollocks and a voiceover saying he accepted bribes and is doing 10 years in prison for that then it moves onto to other Nigel Farage related politicians saying the same bollocks and then the narrator says 'They didn't need to be paid, they believe in this pro Russia bollocks from the heart.'
"Saying similar things to Gill without even being paid for it" probably shouldn't be a political defence, but that depends on how teflon any such figure is, if they even exist.
And the think about teflon is that it's brilliant until it develops a scratch. Ask anyone who has ever bought a cheap frying pan.
I know this is Peston, but the government is quite timid enough for this to be true...
John Fingleton’s review for the government of how to reduce unnecessary barriers and costs for nuclear power development is a tour de force, a compelling road map for how to accelerate important infrastructure investment in the UK - which is the sine qua non of improving growth and living standards (read John’s nutshell below).
For the last eight weeks he was assured that the prime minister and chancellor would accept and implement the recommendations in full. He even tweaked an important clause at the government’s request, to give them a bit more flexibility over the means to implementation.
I understand he has now been told that at the budget tomorrow the welcome will be conditional, subject to further work and review - because the Chancellor has been nobbled by a legal and planning adviser, who claims the Fingleton recommendations somehow breach the UK’s environmental, trade and human rights obligations.
He and his colleagues believe this is nonsense. They examined the legal considerations in their assessment. But they fear that yet again the dead hand of official caution has squashed - potentially for months and years - important growth-enhancing investment. https://x.com/Peston/status/1993295277877334275
That is so utterly inevitable.
He is talking about eliminating a whole tranche of the Enquiry Industrial Complex. Thousands of lawyers will suddenly have much less work. Thousands of managers will have less bullshit to write about. Whole consultancies will go out of business.
It reminds me of when (before the US Republicans jumped the shark), they proposed flattening Federal Income Tax to a couple of rates and getting rid of all the deductions. Bill Clinton actually said the quiet bit out loud, in a speech - "This would throw tens of thousands of lawyers out of work".
"Reform UK's support has surged in London while backing for Labour languishes at a record low in the capital, according to a new poll. The latest Savanta survey released today found Nigel Farage's party were supported by 23 per cent of voters in London, up from 15 per cent in June. This put Reform ahead of the Tories, who were down one percentage point to 20 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent (-2) and Greens on 10 per cent (-3). Support for Labour was at 32 per cent, which is the joint lowest recorded by Savanta - who have polled London voters since 2020 - following the same result in June."
Pre Nathan Gill imprisonment and the highlighting across the Commons and media
@Mexicanpete may get his wish that Gill damages Farage and Reform by association
Gill is far too obscure a figure for his conviction to have an impact.
I've seen an outline of an attack ad on this subject, blimey, if it sees the light of day it might be the most controversial political video in the history of the UK.
So the video will show clips of Nathan Gill spouting his pro Russian bollocks and a voiceover saying he accepted bribes and is doing 10 years in prison for that then it moves onto to other Nigel Farage related politicians saying the same bollocks and then the narrator says 'They didn't need to be paid, they believe in this pro Russia bollocks from the heart.'
Didn’t Farage work for RT at one point, so there’s plenty of video of him in their studio?
I know this is Peston, but the government is quite timid enough for this to be true...
John Fingleton’s review for the government of how to reduce unnecessary barriers and costs for nuclear power development is a tour de force, a compelling road map for how to accelerate important infrastructure investment in the UK - which is the sine qua non of improving growth and living standards (read John’s nutshell below).
For the last eight weeks he was assured that the prime minister and chancellor would accept and implement the recommendations in full. He even tweaked an important clause at the government’s request, to give them a bit more flexibility over the means to implementation.
I understand he has now been told that at the budget tomorrow the welcome will be conditional, subject to further work and review - because the Chancellor has been nobbled by a legal and planning adviser, who claims the Fingleton recommendations somehow breach the UK’s environmental, trade and human rights obligations.
He and his colleagues believe this is nonsense. They examined the legal considerations in their assessment. But they fear that yet again the dead hand of official caution has squashed - potentially for months and years - important growth-enhancing investment. https://x.com/Peston/status/1993295277877334275
Reduce safety regulations for the nuclear industry? Watch the documentaries on what the negligent t****rs did at Sellafield under the current "overly strict" regulations. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v80s4 We'd be paying for it for generations. It's not just the UK either, the nuclear industry's habit of throwing the difficult stuff into a pond for someone else to deal with was the problem at Fukushima.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
Ugh! The stench was disgusting! SeanT managed to summon up enough strength to pick himself up off the filthy floor of the dark and dingy room he found himself in. And then he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his left buttock, and his trousers started peeling apart! SeanT screamed in anguish, but the relentless agony soon blacked him out and he fell back onto the grubby cobblestones. Only then did the malicious Bum-throbber crawl out of SeanT's trousers, another victim for it to feed on...
Exquisite maybe but is Dickens really the great writer we crack on about ? This section is the one often quoted because perhaps it is a parody of itself. Sorry but I prefer the Brontes, Thackery, well just about anyone really. What is Pickwick Papers beyond four tedious fops running around southern England in search of a plot, which they never find ?
I find Dickens quite variable. To my mind his best book, one I have read several times and would read again, is Great Expectations. A genuine page turner!
I agree with that. Generally I prefer the more comedic books but I also think Copperfield is the best. Despite the title, which deterred me from reading it until I'd read almost all the others, I've always enjoyed Bleak House too, where this thread started.
If anyone has never read Hard Times - well done, you've done something more worthwhile instead!
The one few read but I think is among the best is Barnaby Rudge. Yes, Hard Times is completely unreadable.
I know this is Peston, but the government is quite timid enough for this to be true...
John Fingleton’s review for the government of how to reduce unnecessary barriers and costs for nuclear power development is a tour de force, a compelling road map for how to accelerate important infrastructure investment in the UK - which is the sine qua non of improving growth and living standards (read John’s nutshell below).
For the last eight weeks he was assured that the prime minister and chancellor would accept and implement the recommendations in full. He even tweaked an important clause at the government’s request, to give them a bit more flexibility over the means to implementation.
I understand he has now been told that at the budget tomorrow the welcome will be conditional, subject to further work and review - because the Chancellor has been nobbled by a legal and planning adviser, who claims the Fingleton recommendations somehow breach the UK’s environmental, trade and human rights obligations.
He and his colleagues believe this is nonsense. They examined the legal considerations in their assessment. But they fear that yet again the dead hand of official caution has squashed - potentially for months and years - important growth-enhancing investment. https://x.com/Peston/status/1993295277877334275
Perhaps I withdraw my earlier positive comment on Ed Miliband. He needs to be front-running this hard against his own bureaucracy if he wants to get any more praise from me!
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
Lovely to read that extract.
Over the years I worked my way through all the Dickens novels, borrowing many from a solicitor friend who had been left a full set by a former client, finishing earlier this year with A Tale of Two Cities.
Hopefully will live long enough to repeat the trick. There really is nothing quite like a Dickens, particularly during a long winter evening.
Sounds wonderful, Burges - definitely the best of times.
Except dickens was paid by the word so wrote way too many of them - it was the worst of times
The mistake many people make with Victor Hugo, Dumas, Dickens etc is to try and read them in great chunks, or all in one go.
They are made to be read in bites, over a period.
A modern example of something similar is Cryptonomicon. The digressions *are* the point.
Didn't Dickens write for periodicals? So that one had a fortnight to read a chapter before the next one arrived, or something like that?
Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Yes, he's bound to have become more sophisticated since then.
According to his biographer, Crick, Dulwich College were so concerned at his attitudes that they declined to make him a prefect when he was in the sixth form there. You are nevertheless correct about his increased sophistication. He has evidently learned to smoke and drink since.
What percentage of sixth formers became prefects though?
At my school about 10%, with a few senior prefects and a head boy.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
Lovely to read that extract.
Over the years I worked my way through all the Dickens novels, borrowing many from a solicitor friend who had been left a full set by a former client, finishing earlier this year with A Tale of Two Cities.
Hopefully will live long enough to repeat the trick. There really is nothing quite like a Dickens, particularly during a long winter evening.
Sounds wonderful, Burges - definitely the best of times.
Except dickens was paid by the word so wrote way too many of them - it was the worst of times
The mistake many people make with Victor Hugo, Dumas, Dickens etc is to try and read them in great chunks, or all in one go.
They are made to be read in bites, over a period.
A modern example of something similar is Cryptonomicon. The digressions *are* the point.
Didn't Dickens write for periodicals? So that one had a fortnight to read a chapter before the next one arrived, or something like that?
"Reform UK's support has surged in London while backing for Labour languishes at a record low in the capital, according to a new poll. The latest Savanta survey released today found Nigel Farage's party were supported by 23 per cent of voters in London, up from 15 per cent in June. This put Reform ahead of the Tories, who were down one percentage point to 20 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent (-2) and Greens on 10 per cent (-3). Support for Labour was at 32 per cent, which is the joint lowest recorded by Savanta - who have polled London voters since 2020 - following the same result in June."
Pre Nathan Gill imprisonment and the highlighting across the Commons and media
@Mexicanpete may get his wish that Gill damages Farage and Reform by association
Gill is far too obscure a figure for his conviction to have an impact.
I've seen an outline of an attack ad on this subject, blimey, if it sees the light of day it might be the most controversial political video in the history of the UK.
So the video will show clips of Nathan Gill spouting his pro Russian bollocks and a voiceover saying he accepted bribes and is doing 10 years in prison for that then it moves onto to other Nigel Farage related politicians saying the same bollocks and then the narrator says 'They didn't need to be paid, they believe in this pro Russia bollocks from the heart.'
The Washington Post say it is a 19 point plan that European leaders have proposed and that Russia is likely to reject the deal.
Starmer and the EU have played a blinder if the reports are true.
Why do we need 19 points?
1) Ukraine and Russia withdraw back to their respective 1991 boundaries. 2) Russia pays compensation to Ukraine. 3) Putin and his leadership face justice.
What are the other 16 points required?
I've got a proposed 3-point peace deal as well.
1) Israel and Syria withdraw back to their respective 2024 boundaries. 2) Israel pays compensation to Syria. 3) Netanyahu and his leadership face justice.
Who started the 2024 Israel/Syria conflict again?
It wasn't Israel, was it?
Don't attack another country if you aren't prepared to lose the war you start.
Israel started the 2024 Israel/Syria conflict. The Assad regime fell. Syria was not attacking Israel. Israel marched through a UN buffer zone and took Syrian territory, while also bombing Syria.
Syria started the war with Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas both started fighting Israel and Hezbollah were operating within Syria even prior to the fall of Assad. The Assad regime fell to be replaced with proscribed Islamists terrorists* that supported wiping out Israel too.
* The UK Government's definition at the time, not even counting Israel's views.
Your repeated, false, insinuations that Syria is a poor defenceless nation attacked unprovoked, are entirely fallacious and false.
List attacks by Syrian military on Israel in 2024 or 2023. Oh, there aren't any.
OK, list attacks by the Syrian opposition (who took over Syria in 2024) on Israel in 2024 or 2023. Still none.
Even the Israeli government makes no claims of Syrian attacks as being the casus belli.
Yes, the Assad government had been supporting Hezbollah, who have periodically attacked Israel, but the Assad regime had just fallen. Israel attacked the new government, who had been fighting against Hezbollah, who supported Assad.
You need a casus belli to start a war, Syria and Israel are already at war, so no casus belli required.
Yes Israel took advantage of their enemy falling to secure a better footing, that's just smart, when you're at war and your enemy shows a weakness during the conflict. If Putin fell and Ukraine reacted to take some land to help them with the war, would you object to that?
You are again, falsely, insinuating that the new regime is peaceful. This is a new regime we proscribed as terrorists.
The attacks were by Hezbollah. The new regime are Hezbollah's enemy. Israel and Syria had been at war and technically there had never been a peace treaty, but there had been no significant fighting for years. The Israeli/Syrian border had a UN buffer zone that was working very well, and the Israeli military just took it over, f*** the UN, and grabbed territory.
The Israeli rationale is that they need to occupy the Golan Heights so that their opponents can't attack them from there. But then it was they need to occupy the UN zone to protect their occupation of the Golan Heights. And now they need to occupy deep into Syria to protect their occupation of the UN zone, to protect their occupation of the Golan Heights, to protect actual Israeli territory. It's just expansionism, a desire for a greater Israel, very similar to Putin's desire for a greater Russia.
We have proscribed the new Syrian regime as terrorists, but we haven't bombed them. You are allowed to dislike your neighbours. You should not invade your neighbours except for a very limited set of circumstances.
But you think Israel is "more important" than other countries, so the rules don't apply to them.
BiB 1 - Yes, by Hezbollah, from within Syria.
BiB 2: Technicalities matter. There was no peace treaty, they are at war.
BiB 3: No, we haven't bombed them, but we (and the USA including under Clinton, Obama and others) and other developed nations have bombed other terrorists.
BiB 4: There are no rules against fighting nations you are at war with. Please find me any rule against that, ever ratified, by anyone.
I know this is Peston, but the government is quite timid enough for this to be true...
John Fingleton’s review for the government of how to reduce unnecessary barriers and costs for nuclear power development is a tour de force, a compelling road map for how to accelerate important infrastructure investment in the UK - which is the sine qua non of improving growth and living standards (read John’s nutshell below).
For the last eight weeks he was assured that the prime minister and chancellor would accept and implement the recommendations in full. He even tweaked an important clause at the government’s request, to give them a bit more flexibility over the means to implementation.
I understand he has now been told that at the budget tomorrow the welcome will be conditional, subject to further work and review - because the Chancellor has been nobbled by a legal and planning adviser, who claims the Fingleton recommendations somehow breach the UK’s environmental, trade and human rights obligations.
He and his colleagues believe this is nonsense. They examined the legal considerations in their assessment. But they fear that yet again the dead hand of official caution has squashed - potentially for months and years - important growth-enhancing investment. https://x.com/Peston/status/1993295277877334275
Reduce safety regulations for the nuclear industry? Watch the documentaries on what the negligent t****rs did at Sellafield under the current "overly strict" regulations. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v80s4 We'd be paying for it for generations. It's not just the UK either, the nuclear industry's habit of throwing the difficult stuff into a pond for someone else to deal with was the problem at Fukushima.
The stuff they are talking about binning is nothing to do with nuclear safety.
That's to fall into "All the regulations are about safety" bullshit.
See the comedy of hundreds of millions being spent at Sizewell to save fewer salmon than are in the window of my local fishmonger.
In fact the bullshit regulation are great to hide real problems behind. Grenfell had metric tons of documents to prove that it was structurally sound, ecologically sound, socially cohesive etc etc. Even that it was fireproof. There was one tiny flaw - it was covered in fire lighters.
Another classic was the Royal Navy shells scandal in WWI. It turned out that the main armament shell of the battleships were shit. An extremely long and complex testing regime had been used. Until a mathematician pointed out that the effect was that if a shell in a batch failed, test the next one. If that failed...... Yes, find one that works and it's all good. So a huge pile of paperwork proved it was all good. They fixed the testing and created the Green Boy shells - that would reach the German magazines, reliably. Bit late for Jutland, though.....
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
Lovely to read that extract.
Over the years I worked my way through all the Dickens novels, borrowing many from a solicitor friend who had been left a full set by a former client, finishing earlier this year with A Tale of Two Cities.
Hopefully will live long enough to repeat the trick. There really is nothing quite like a Dickens, particularly during a long winter evening.
Sounds wonderful, Burges - definitely the best of times.
Except dickens was paid by the word so wrote way too many of them - it was the worst of times
The mistake many people make with Victor Hugo, Dumas, Dickens etc is to try and read them in great chunks, or all in one go.
They are made to be read in bites, over a period.
A modern example of something similar is Cryptonomicon. The digressions *are* the point.
Didn't Dickens write for periodicals? So that one had a fortnight to read a chapter before the next one arrived, or something like that?
They all did (apart from Neal Stephenson) - that was how many novels were published back then. The complete thing was then published after the last magazine issue - a bound set, as it were.
Which is why I say they were written to be consumed bit by bit.
"Reform UK's support has surged in London while backing for Labour languishes at a record low in the capital, according to a new poll. The latest Savanta survey released today found Nigel Farage's party were supported by 23 per cent of voters in London, up from 15 per cent in June. This put Reform ahead of the Tories, who were down one percentage point to 20 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent (-2) and Greens on 10 per cent (-3). Support for Labour was at 32 per cent, which is the joint lowest recorded by Savanta - who have polled London voters since 2020 - following the same result in June."
Pre Nathan Gill imprisonment and the highlighting across the Commons and media
@Mexicanpete may get his wish that Gill damages Farage and Reform by association
Gill is far too obscure a figure for his conviction to have an impact.
I've seen an outline of an attack ad on this subject, blimey, if it sees the light of day it might be the most controversial political video in the history of the UK.
So the video will show clips of Nathan Gill spouting his pro Russian bollocks and a voiceover saying he accepted bribes and is doing 10 years in prison for that then it moves onto to other Nigel Farage related politicians saying the same bollocks and then the narrator says 'They didn't need to be paid, they believe in this pro Russia bollocks from the heart.'
Which party has done the ad?
That I am not allowed to disclose, it is hasn't been filmed it is in its infancy.
"Reform UK's support has surged in London while backing for Labour languishes at a record low in the capital, according to a new poll. The latest Savanta survey released today found Nigel Farage's party were supported by 23 per cent of voters in London, up from 15 per cent in June. This put Reform ahead of the Tories, who were down one percentage point to 20 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent (-2) and Greens on 10 per cent (-3). Support for Labour was at 32 per cent, which is the joint lowest recorded by Savanta - who have polled London voters since 2020 - following the same result in June."
Pre Nathan Gill imprisonment and the highlighting across the Commons and media
@Mexicanpete may get his wish that Gill damages Farage and Reform by association
Gill is far too obscure a figure for his conviction to have an impact.
I've seen an outline of an attack ad on this subject, blimey, if it sees the light of day it might be the most controversial political video in the history of the UK.
So the video will show clips of Nathan Gill spouting his pro Russian bollocks and a voiceover saying he accepted bribes and is doing 10 years in prison for that then it moves onto to other Nigel Farage related politicians saying the same bollocks and then the narrator says 'They didn't need to be paid, they believe in this pro Russia bollocks from the heart.'
This is an utter disgrace and Israel should be thrown out of the Eurovision song contest and banned for at least 40 years.
Eurovision to change voting rules after claims of Israeli government 'interference'
The reduction in the number of votes that can be made online, or via SMS or phone call, from 20 to 10 was "designed to encourage more balanced participation", said contest director Martin Green.
The Eurovision Song Contest is changing its voting system, following allegations of "interference" by Israel's government this year.
Israeli singer Yuval Raphael received the largest number of votes from the public in the contest in May, ultimately finishing as runner-up after the jury votes were counted.
But a number of broadcasters raised concerns about Israel's result.
After the final, Irish broadcaster RTE requested a breakdown in voting numbers from contest organiser the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), while Spain's public broadcaster, Radio Television Espanola (RTVE), called for a "complete review" of the voting system to avoid "external interference".
In September, Dutch public broadcaster AVROTROS said it could no longer justify Israel's participation in the contest, due to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
It went on to say there had been "proven interference by the Israeli government during the last edition of the Song Contest, with the event being used as a political instrument". The statement did not elaborate on the means of "interference".
I remember Max saying he and his family voted 60 times on repeat dial the year before. I doubt it has much to do with Israel directly. The Board of Deputies will get word out through their congregations that an Israeli singer needs help. "All you need do is phone this number until your fingers bleed....No...No...No..... don't worry you wont need to watch the programme........'
Ah, the great global Jewish conspiracy.
You unpleasant little man
Read it again and you will see Roger is debunking interference from Mossad in Tel Aviv. Diaspora votes arise organically and have long been a factor in Eurovision.
The astroturfing of votes for Israel last year was absurd.
I have no problem with individuals having multiple votes, but they should only be allowed to vote once for each song.
The BBC announced a limit for SPotY. Trouble is, per person limits are hard to police given families share devices and internet connections.
I see jury trials are going for everything apart from rape and killings. I thought that's the opposite of what Labour wanted (maybe not killings, but I thought they wanted to scrap jury trials for rape).
If literally true (and SFAICS the latest report hasn't yet reached the BBC or Guardian) then matters for which you can be, and really are, jailed for 30 years + will be without a jury. Including big time drug dealers, top burglars, GBH with intent practitioners and so on.
Expect the legal profession to have a few things to say. Personally I am more in favour than I used to be.
Others, since this is a betting site, may want to consider how this failure -- and many others -- might affect Gavin Newsom's chances in a presidential run.
I've just had a look Jim, but you've started many discussions there and I don't know which one you mean. Do you have a date/time?
I know this is Peston, but the government is quite timid enough for this to be true...
John Fingleton’s review for the government of how to reduce unnecessary barriers and costs for nuclear power development is a tour de force, a compelling road map for how to accelerate important infrastructure investment in the UK - which is the sine qua non of improving growth and living standards (read John’s nutshell below).
For the last eight weeks he was assured that the prime minister and chancellor would accept and implement the recommendations in full. He even tweaked an important clause at the government’s request, to give them a bit more flexibility over the means to implementation.
I understand he has now been told that at the budget tomorrow the welcome will be conditional, subject to further work and review - because the Chancellor has been nobbled by a legal and planning adviser, who claims the Fingleton recommendations somehow breach the UK’s environmental, trade and human rights obligations.
He and his colleagues believe this is nonsense. They examined the legal considerations in their assessment. But they fear that yet again the dead hand of official caution has squashed - potentially for months and years - important growth-enhancing investment. https://x.com/Peston/status/1993295277877334275
Reduce safety regulations for the nuclear industry? Watch the documentaries on what the negligent t****rs did at Sellafield under the current "overly strict" regulations. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v80s4 We'd be paying for it for generations. It's not just the UK either, the nuclear industry's habit of throwing the difficult stuff into a pond for someone else to deal with was the problem at Fukushima.
The stuff they are talking about binning is nothing to do with nuclear safety.
That's to fall into "All the regulations are about safety" bullshit.
See the comedy of hundreds of millions being spent at Sizewell to save fewer salmon than are in the window of my local fishmonger.
In fact the bullshit regulation are great to hide real problems behind. Grenfell had metric tons of documents to prove that it was structurally sound, ecologically sound, socially cohesive etc etc. Even that it was fireproof. There was one tiny flaw - it was covered in fire lighters.
Another classic was the Royal Navy shells scandal in WWI. It turned out that the main armament shell of the battleships were shit. An extremely long and complex testing regime had been used. Until a mathematician pointed out that the effect was that if a shell in a batch failed, test the next one. If that failed...... Yes, find one that works and it's all good. So a huge pile of paperwork proved it was all good. They fixed the testing and created the Green Boy shells - that would reach the German magazines, reliably. Bit late for Jutland, though.....
Did you find out about the shell scandal from a book? Quite interested to know the title if you did.
I know this is Peston, but the government is quite timid enough for this to be true...
John Fingleton’s review for the government of how to reduce unnecessary barriers and costs for nuclear power development is a tour de force, a compelling road map for how to accelerate important infrastructure investment in the UK - which is the sine qua non of improving growth and living standards (read John’s nutshell below).
For the last eight weeks he was assured that the prime minister and chancellor would accept and implement the recommendations in full. He even tweaked an important clause at the government’s request, to give them a bit more flexibility over the means to implementation.
I understand he has now been told that at the budget tomorrow the welcome will be conditional, subject to further work and review - because the Chancellor has been nobbled by a legal and planning adviser, who claims the Fingleton recommendations somehow breach the UK’s environmental, trade and human rights obligations.
He and his colleagues believe this is nonsense. They examined the legal considerations in their assessment. But they fear that yet again the dead hand of official caution has squashed - potentially for months and years - important growth-enhancing investment. https://x.com/Peston/status/1993295277877334275
Reduce safety regulations for the nuclear industry? Watch the documentaries on what the negligent t****rs did at Sellafield under the current "overly strict" regulations. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v80s4 We'd be paying for it for generations. It's not just the UK either, the nuclear industry's habit of throwing the difficult stuff into a pond for someone else to deal with was the problem at Fukushima.
(Note, this is not any kind of criticism of you personally - I would give good money that not one person in a thousand expressing an opinion on this has even read a couple of pages of it.)
I see jury trials are going for everything apart from rape and killings. I thought that's the opposite of what Labour wanted (maybe not killings, but I thought they wanted to scrap jury trials for rape).
As someone pointed out, interesting that a professed Human Rights Lawyer (Starmer) and chums are removing the right to trial by jury and automatic right of appeal.
Wonder what that means in immigration cases?
There is currently no automatic right to appeal a jury trial. You have to apply for leave to appeal - at which you can have two (in a sense three) bites, to a single judge (if not granted by the trial judge) and then to three appeal judges.
This is an utter disgrace and Israel should be thrown out of the Eurovision song contest and banned for at least 40 years.
Eurovision to change voting rules after claims of Israeli government 'interference'
The reduction in the number of votes that can be made online, or via SMS or phone call, from 20 to 10 was "designed to encourage more balanced participation", said contest director Martin Green.
The Eurovision Song Contest is changing its voting system, following allegations of "interference" by Israel's government this year.
Israeli singer Yuval Raphael received the largest number of votes from the public in the contest in May, ultimately finishing as runner-up after the jury votes were counted.
But a number of broadcasters raised concerns about Israel's result.
After the final, Irish broadcaster RTE requested a breakdown in voting numbers from contest organiser the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), while Spain's public broadcaster, Radio Television Espanola (RTVE), called for a "complete review" of the voting system to avoid "external interference".
In September, Dutch public broadcaster AVROTROS said it could no longer justify Israel's participation in the contest, due to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
It went on to say there had been "proven interference by the Israeli government during the last edition of the Song Contest, with the event being used as a political instrument". The statement did not elaborate on the means of "interference".
I remember Max saying he and his family voted 60 times on repeat dial the year before. I doubt it has much to do with Israel directly. The Board of Deputies will get word out through their congregations that an Israeli singer needs help. "All you need do is phone this number until your fingers bleed....No...No...No..... don't worry you wont need to watch the programme........'
Ah, the great global Jewish conspiracy.
You unpleasant little man
An odd insult to be directed at Roger to be perfectly honest.
Reform are on about 32% in the polling average if you exclude YouGov. Wonder why the firm is putting them so much lower.
YouGov consistently low, Find Out Now consistently high. Differences in picking the responders and in how to interpret the raw data. FON's model assumes, I think, a larger than usual turnout from Reformy types, similar to 2016 Brexity types. No-one has a clue. John Curtice will let us know at 10 pm on election night. Until then it's a better board game than Monopoly. But game is the word.
I know this is Peston, but the government is quite timid enough for this to be true...
John Fingleton’s review for the government of how to reduce unnecessary barriers and costs for nuclear power development is a tour de force, a compelling road map for how to accelerate important infrastructure investment in the UK - which is the sine qua non of improving growth and living standards (read John’s nutshell below).
For the last eight weeks he was assured that the prime minister and chancellor would accept and implement the recommendations in full. He even tweaked an important clause at the government’s request, to give them a bit more flexibility over the means to implementation.
I understand he has now been told that at the budget tomorrow the welcome will be conditional, subject to further work and review - because the Chancellor has been nobbled by a legal and planning adviser, who claims the Fingleton recommendations somehow breach the UK’s environmental, trade and human rights obligations.
He and his colleagues believe this is nonsense. They examined the legal considerations in their assessment. But they fear that yet again the dead hand of official caution has squashed - potentially for months and years - important growth-enhancing investment. https://x.com/Peston/status/1993295277877334275
Reduce safety regulations for the nuclear industry? Watch the documentaries on what the negligent t****rs did at Sellafield under the current "overly strict" regulations. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v80s4 We'd be paying for it for generations. It's not just the UK either, the nuclear industry's habit of throwing the difficult stuff into a pond for someone else to deal with was the problem at Fukushima.
The stuff they are talking about binning is nothing to do with nuclear safety.
That's to fall into "All the regulations are about safety" bullshit.
See the comedy of hundreds of millions being spent at Sizewell to save fewer salmon than are in the window of my local fishmonger.
In fact the bullshit regulation are great to hide real problems behind. Grenfell had metric tons of documents to prove that it was structurally sound, ecologically sound, socially cohesive etc etc. Even that it was fireproof. There was one tiny flaw - it was covered in fire lighters.
Another classic was the Royal Navy shells scandal in WWI. It turned out that the main armament shell of the battleships were shit. An extremely long and complex testing regime had been used. Until a mathematician pointed out that the effect was that if a shell in a batch failed, test the next one. If that failed...... Yes, find one that works and it's all good. So a huge pile of paperwork proved it was all good. They fixed the testing and created the Green Boy shells - that would reach the German magazines, reliably. Bit late for Jutland, though.....
Did you find out about the shell scandal from a book? Quite interested to know the title if you did.
It's covered in a number of places - DK Brown includes it in Warrior to Dreadnaught.
Basically, the shells were poorly hardened and filled with picric acid. Which is more powerful than TNT. However, it is vulnerable to shock.
So British shells, on hitting armour of moderate thickness - 6 inches or so - would explode as they passed through/break up.
It has ben suggested that this happening, regularly in tests, convinced Fisher and others that only light armour was needed for the Battlecruisers.
The Germans used TNT, but their fuses were problematic as well. They tended to initiate on hitting armour as well, though not as severe a problem.
The Green Boy design was a modified shape, better heat treatment of the metal (not just madly hardening - a bit more subtle), TNT fill and a fuze design stolen from Krupp (it was modified to actually work).
The result was a shell that could pass through 13" of armour (for a 15" shell) reliably and detonate 20-30 *feet* behind. Which would be beyond all the wing compartments of the target ship - so it would be gong bang in an engine room, boiler room or magazine.
The changes were fairly simple, and could have been done year before the war - if the problems had been recognised as problems, by batches of shells being failed.
This is an utter disgrace and Israel should be thrown out of the Eurovision song contest and banned for at least 40 years.
Eurovision to change voting rules after claims of Israeli government 'interference'
The reduction in the number of votes that can be made online, or via SMS or phone call, from 20 to 10 was "designed to encourage more balanced participation", said contest director Martin Green.
The Eurovision Song Contest is changing its voting system, following allegations of "interference" by Israel's government this year.
Israeli singer Yuval Raphael received the largest number of votes from the public in the contest in May, ultimately finishing as runner-up after the jury votes were counted.
But a number of broadcasters raised concerns about Israel's result.
After the final, Irish broadcaster RTE requested a breakdown in voting numbers from contest organiser the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), while Spain's public broadcaster, Radio Television Espanola (RTVE), called for a "complete review" of the voting system to avoid "external interference".
In September, Dutch public broadcaster AVROTROS said it could no longer justify Israel's participation in the contest, due to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
It went on to say there had been "proven interference by the Israeli government during the last edition of the Song Contest, with the event being used as a political instrument". The statement did not elaborate on the means of "interference".
I remember Max saying he and his family voted 60 times on repeat dial the year before. I doubt it has much to do with Israel directly. The Board of Deputies will get word out through their congregations that an Israeli singer needs help. "All you need do is phone this number until your fingers bleed....No...No...No..... don't worry you wont need to watch the programme........'
Ah, the great global Jewish conspiracy.
You unpleasant little man
An odd insult to be directed at Roger to be perfectly honest.
Not remotely, he dives headfirst into any antisemitic trope that he can find.
I know this is Peston, but the government is quite timid enough for this to be true...
John Fingleton’s review for the government of how to reduce unnecessary barriers and costs for nuclear power development is a tour de force, a compelling road map for how to accelerate important infrastructure investment in the UK - which is the sine qua non of improving growth and living standards (read John’s nutshell below).
For the last eight weeks he was assured that the prime minister and chancellor would accept and implement the recommendations in full. He even tweaked an important clause at the government’s request, to give them a bit more flexibility over the means to implementation.
I understand he has now been told that at the budget tomorrow the welcome will be conditional, subject to further work and review - because the Chancellor has been nobbled by a legal and planning adviser, who claims the Fingleton recommendations somehow breach the UK’s environmental, trade and human rights obligations.
He and his colleagues believe this is nonsense. They examined the legal considerations in their assessment. But they fear that yet again the dead hand of official caution has squashed - potentially for months and years - important growth-enhancing investment. https://x.com/Peston/status/1993295277877334275
Reduce safety regulations for the nuclear industry? Watch the documentaries on what the negligent t****rs did at Sellafield under the current "overly strict" regulations. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v80s4 We'd be paying for it for generations. It's not just the UK either, the nuclear industry's habit of throwing the difficult stuff into a pond for someone else to deal with was the problem at Fukushima.
The stuff they are talking about binning is nothing to do with nuclear safety.
That's to fall into "All the regulations are about safety" bullshit.
See the comedy of hundreds of millions being spent at Sizewell to save fewer salmon than are in the window of my local fishmonger.
In fact the bullshit regulation are great to hide real problems behind. Grenfell had metric tons of documents to prove that it was structurally sound, ecologically sound, socially cohesive etc etc. Even that it was fireproof. There was one tiny flaw - it was covered in fire lighters.
Another classic was the Royal Navy shells scandal in WWI. It turned out that the main armament shell of the battleships were shit. An extremely long and complex testing regime had been used. Until a mathematician pointed out that the effect was that if a shell in a batch failed, test the next one. If that failed...... Yes, find one that works and it's all good. So a huge pile of paperwork proved it was all good. They fixed the testing and created the Green Boy shells - that would reach the German magazines, reliably. Bit late for Jutland, though.....
Did you find out about the shell scandal from a book? Quite interested to know the title if you did.
It's covered in a number of places - DK Brown includes it in Warrior to Dreadnaught.
Basically, the shells were poorly hardened and filled with picric acid. Which is more powerful than TNT. However, it is vulnerable to shock.
So British shells, on hitting armour of moderate thickness - 6 inches or so - would explode as they passed through/break up.
It has ben suggested that this happening, regularly in tests, convinced Fisher and others that only light armour was needed for the Battlecruisers.
The Germans used TNT, but their fuses were problematic as well. They tended to initiate on hitting armour as well, though not as severe a problem.
The Green Boy design was a modified shape, better heat treatment of the metal (not just madly hardening - a bit more subtle), TNT fill and a fuze design stolen from Krupp (it was modified to actually work).
The result was a shell that could pass through 13" of armour (for a 15" shell) reliably and detonate 20-30 *feet* behind. Which would be beyond all the wing compartments of the target ship - so it would be gong bang in an engine room, boiler room or magazine.
The changes were fairly simple, and could have been done year before the war - if the problems had been recognised as problems, by batches of shells being failed.
"Reform UK's support has surged in London while backing for Labour languishes at a record low in the capital, according to a new poll. The latest Savanta survey released today found Nigel Farage's party were supported by 23 per cent of voters in London, up from 15 per cent in June. This put Reform ahead of the Tories, who were down one percentage point to 20 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent (-2) and Greens on 10 per cent (-3). Support for Labour was at 32 per cent, which is the joint lowest recorded by Savanta - who have polled London voters since 2020 - following the same result in June."
Pre Nathan Gill imprisonment and the highlighting across the Commons and media
@Mexicanpete may get his wish that Gill damages Farage and Reform by association
Gill is far too obscure a figure for his conviction to have an impact.
I've seen an outline of an attack ad on this subject, blimey, if it sees the light of day it might be the most controversial political video in the history of the UK.
So the video will show clips of Nathan Gill spouting his pro Russian bollocks and a voiceover saying he accepted bribes and is doing 10 years in prison for that then it moves onto to other Nigel Farage related politicians saying the same bollocks and then the narrator says 'They didn't need to be paid, they believe in this pro Russia bollocks from the heart.'
Which party has done the ad?
That I am not allowed to disclose, it is hasn't been filmed it is in its infancy.
Ah ok. Well I look forward to it. Whatever it takes, you know.
They shouldn't have been included in the first place
Why? I find it an odd view from a Conservative.
If you get a State Pension, due to no longer being able* to work, then are you required to only shop at Aldi and subsist on value beans and own brand bread? Or are you allowed to use your own money to top up your pension and shop at Waitrose for top cuts of steak and claret?
If the latter, why should someone with a disability and mobility needs** who qualifies for disability benefits be limited to driving a budget car that is entirely covered by those benefits, rather than using their own money to top that up and get something fancier?
*the general assumption behind the state pension, rather than aimed at you specifically **this is the bigger issue - if there is one - that people are receiving benefits inappropriately, even if it's genuine disability but not one that incurs costs in this area
If anyone wants to buy a luxury car with their own money then of course they should be able to do so.
What they shouldn't get is a grant to do so, and a tax exemption to do so.
If we want to make vehicles VAT free to help people get about then that should apply to absolutely everyone. Or absolutely everyone should be paying VAT and of course there should be more VAT (as it is a percentage) on luxury vehicles.
Giving people a tax break on VAT that is more than most working people's car costs outright is absurd.
The sane way of doing this is something like the way NHS spectacles work - there is support given to various groups to buy spectacles. You get an NHS voucher.
This is enough to buy a fair range of specs.
If you want Dolce & Gabbana - then you can use the voucher for that and top up the rest.
You don’t grants or VAT off the extra.
That is how Motability works. Personal Independence Payment is a cash amount which gets diverted to Motability as they keep their hire costs (as its a hire) at the level which matches PIP levels. The rates are low due to the VAT savings. You can take your PIP payment and use it for a PCP contract on a Jag or Range Rover but you wont get a VAT saving.
It's the interface between tax law and benefits law. Most people would like both tax (law) and benefits (law) simplified but we are where we are.
They shouldn't have been included in the first place
Why? I find it an odd view from a Conservative.
If you get a State Pension, due to no longer being able* to work, then are you required to only shop at Aldi and subsist on value beans and own brand bread? Or are you allowed to use your own money to top up your pension and shop at Waitrose for top cuts of steak and claret?
If the latter, why should someone with a disability and mobility needs** who qualifies for disability benefits be limited to driving a budget car that is entirely covered by those benefits, rather than using their own money to top that up and get something fancier?
*the general assumption behind the state pension, rather than aimed at you specifically **this is the bigger issue - if there is one - that people are receiving benefits inappropriately, even if it's genuine disability but not one that incurs costs in this area
If anyone wants to buy a luxury car with their own money then of course they should be able to do so.
What they shouldn't get is a grant to do so, and a tax exemption to do so.
If we want to make vehicles VAT free to help people get about then that should apply to absolutely everyone. Or absolutely everyone should be paying VAT and of course there should be more VAT (as it is a percentage) on luxury vehicles.
Giving people a tax break on VAT that is more than most working people's car costs outright is absurd.
The sane way of doing this is something like the way NHS spectacles work - there is support given to various groups to buy spectacles. You get an NHS voucher.
This is enough to buy a fair range of specs.
If you want Dolce & Gabbana - then you can use the voucher for that and top up the rest.
You don’t grants or VAT off the extra.
That is how Motability works. Personal Independence Payment is a cash amount which gets diverted to Motability as they keep their hire costs (as its a hire) at the level which matches PIP levels. The rates are low due to the VAT savings. You can take your PIP payment and use it for a PCP contract on a Jag or Range Rover but you wont get a VAT saving.
It's the interface between tax law and benefits law. Most people would like both tax (law) and benefits (law) simplified but we are where we are.
The VAT exemption should go now imo (c.f. VAT on school fees). I believe it was originally introduced (by Margaret Thatcher no less) because the allowance did not cover the cost of (the relatively more expensive) cars in the 1970s*. That's clearly no longer the case so it's probably time to remove that exemption. The effect will be to increase dramatically the up-front non-refundable cash deposits required for most Motability vehicle leases.
I doubt it will save HMG much money but it will probably make the DM readership switch from outrage at Motability supplying BMWs to outrage at the government hiking the price of cars for people with disabilities.
*There is another factor regarding VAT - equipment specifically for people with disabilities (e.g. a wheelchair) is exempt from VAT. This seems appropriate to me, but a whole car is clearly not specifically 'equipment for people with disabilities' (except Wheelchair Accessible Vehicles - WAVs - which are very expensive and should imo retain the VAT exemption).
Interesting BBC article on what research indicates are the stages of the brain:
Childhood - from birth to age nine Adolescence - from nine to 32 Adulthood - from 32 to 66 Early ageing - from 66 to 83 Late ageing - from 83 onwards
Ageing kicking in there at 66 - so I'd better make hay in the next 9 months.
(although I bet it's the usual artificial creation of discretes out of a continuum - like decades and generations etc)
I'm 87 and I've certainly noticed a bit of mental deterioration over the last couple of years.
Both my wife 85 and I at 81 are similar but then we are just grateful to be together with family nearby popping in regularly
In the last 6 months my mobility has deteriorated considerably with my consideration to buying a mobility scooter to add to my mobility chair and bed as I need a walking stick permanently
The moral in this tale is always do your bucket list while you can especially as you age, as age does not come alone
Interesting BBC article on what research indicates are the stages of the brain:
Childhood - from birth to age nine Adolescence - from nine to 32 Adulthood - from 32 to 66 Early ageing - from 66 to 83 Late ageing - from 83 onwards
Ageing kicking in there at 66 - so I'd better make hay in the next 9 months.
(although I bet it's the usual artificial creation of discretes out of a continuum - like decades and generations etc)
I'm 87 and I've certainly noticed a bit of mental deterioration over the last couple of years.
Both my wife 85 and I at 81 are similar but then we are just grateful to be together with family nearby popping in regularly
In the last 6 months my mobility has deteriorated considerably with my consideration to buying a mobility scooter to add to my mobility chair and bed as I need a walking stick permanently
The moral in this tale is always do your bucket list while you can especially as you age, as age does not come alone
One of the pension providers for our Faculty pension scheme had interesting proposals by which your payments were front loaded so you got the most pension when you still had the health to do things with the pension contributions dropping over the years rather than increasing. Struck me as a really clever idea.
Interesting BBC article on what research indicates are the stages of the brain:
Childhood - from birth to age nine Adolescence - from nine to 32 Adulthood - from 32 to 66 Early ageing - from 66 to 83 Late ageing - from 83 onwards
Ageing kicking in there at 66 - so I'd better make hay in the next 9 months.
(although I bet it's the usual artificial creation of discretes out of a continuum - like decades and generations etc)
I'm 87 and I've certainly noticed a bit of mental deterioration over the last couple of years.
We have too.
(I'm joking! Your are still on the ball and long may that continue).
Joke accepted. I do feel a bit slower, mentally, though, than 'once upon a time', and my memory, especially during conversations, is by no means what it was. I usually put it down to the effects of Covid!
This is an utter disgrace and Israel should be thrown out of the Eurovision song contest and banned for at least 40 years.
Eurovision to change voting rules after claims of Israeli government 'interference'
The reduction in the number of votes that can be made online, or via SMS or phone call, from 20 to 10 was "designed to encourage more balanced participation", said contest director Martin Green.
The Eurovision Song Contest is changing its voting system, following allegations of "interference" by Israel's government this year.
Israeli singer Yuval Raphael received the largest number of votes from the public in the contest in May, ultimately finishing as runner-up after the jury votes were counted.
But a number of broadcasters raised concerns about Israel's result.
After the final, Irish broadcaster RTE requested a breakdown in voting numbers from contest organiser the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), while Spain's public broadcaster, Radio Television Espanola (RTVE), called for a "complete review" of the voting system to avoid "external interference".
In September, Dutch public broadcaster AVROTROS said it could no longer justify Israel's participation in the contest, due to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
It went on to say there had been "proven interference by the Israeli government during the last edition of the Song Contest, with the event being used as a political instrument". The statement did not elaborate on the means of "interference".
I remember Max saying he and his family voted 60 times on repeat dial the year before. I doubt it has much to do with Israel directly. The Board of Deputies will get word out through their congregations that an Israeli singer needs help. "All you need do is phone this number until your fingers bleed....No...No...No..... don't worry you wont need to watch the programme........'
Ah, the great global Jewish conspiracy.
You unpleasant little man
An odd insult to be directed at Roger to be perfectly honest.
I’m always hearing the term ‘mansplaining’ being bandied about on here (largely by blokes it has to be said). I’m sure Roger is grateful to all the goysplainers here telling him the correct way for a Jew to think.
Interesting BBC article on what research indicates are the stages of the brain:
Childhood - from birth to age nine Adolescence - from nine to 32 Adulthood - from 32 to 66 Early ageing - from 66 to 83 Late ageing - from 83 onwards
Ageing kicking in there at 66 - so I'd better make hay in the next 9 months.
(although I bet it's the usual artificial creation of discretes out of a continuum - like decades and generations etc)
I'm 87 and I've certainly noticed a bit of mental deterioration over the last couple of years.
Still doing pretty good, OKC, based on here. The one I found most interesting is a typical person's adolescence lasting into their early 30s. That rings true. In fact for me I'd say early 40s. A great thought then occurs - if my brain was 10 years later than the norm emerging from adolescence, this probably means it'll be 10 years later with all the rest. No serious mental ageing for me until I'm 93!
Interesting BBC article on what research indicates are the stages of the brain:
Childhood - from birth to age nine Adolescence - from nine to 32 Adulthood - from 32 to 66 Early ageing - from 66 to 83 Late ageing - from 83 onwards
Ageing kicking in there at 66 - so I'd better make hay in the next 9 months.
(although I bet it's the usual artificial creation of discretes out of a continuum - like decades and generations etc)
I'm 87 and I've certainly noticed a bit of mental deterioration over the last couple of years.
Both my wife 85 and I at 81 are similar but then we are just grateful to be together with family nearby popping in regularly
In the last 6 months my mobility has deteriorated considerably with my consideration to buying a mobility scooter to add to my mobility chair and bed as I need a walking stick permanently
The moral in this tale is always do your bucket list while you can especially as you age, as age does not come alone
Agree with the moral. If you do buy a mobility scooter get one that is legal on the road as well as footpaths. If your paths are anything like ours they're full of poorly mended investigations into water, gas etc faults.
I rather envy you your nearby family; our 'nearest' relative is a grandson 45 minutes away. Our nearest son is about 90 minutes away, the other side of the Dartford Crossing.
I know this is Peston, but the government is quite timid enough for this to be true...
John Fingleton’s review for the government of how to reduce unnecessary barriers and costs for nuclear power development is a tour de force, a compelling road map for how to accelerate important infrastructure investment in the UK - which is the sine qua non of improving growth and living standards (read John’s nutshell below).
For the last eight weeks he was assured that the prime minister and chancellor would accept and implement the recommendations in full. He even tweaked an important clause at the government’s request, to give them a bit more flexibility over the means to implementation.
I understand he has now been told that at the budget tomorrow the welcome will be conditional, subject to further work and review - because the Chancellor has been nobbled by a legal and planning adviser, who claims the Fingleton recommendations somehow breach the UK’s environmental, trade and human rights obligations.
He and his colleagues believe this is nonsense. They examined the legal considerations in their assessment. But they fear that yet again the dead hand of official caution has squashed - potentially for months and years - important growth-enhancing investment. https://x.com/Peston/status/1993295277877334275
Reduce safety regulations for the nuclear industry? Watch the documentaries on what the negligent t****rs did at Sellafield under the current "overly strict" regulations. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v80s4 We'd be paying for it for generations. It's not just the UK either, the nuclear industry's habit of throwing the difficult stuff into a pond for someone else to deal with was the problem at Fukushima.
The stuff they are talking about binning is nothing to do with nuclear safety.
That's to fall into "All the regulations are about safety" bullshit.
See the comedy of hundreds of millions being spent at Sizewell to save fewer salmon than are in the window of my local fishmonger.
In fact the bullshit regulation are great to hide real problems behind. Grenfell had metric tons of documents to prove that it was structurally sound, ecologically sound, socially cohesive etc etc. Even that it was fireproof. There was one tiny flaw - it was covered in fire lighters.
Another classic was the Royal Navy shells scandal in WWI. It turned out that the main armament shell of the battleships were shit. An extremely long and complex testing regime had been used. Until a mathematician pointed out that the effect was that if a shell in a batch failed, test the next one. If that failed...... Yes, find one that works and it's all good. So a huge pile of paperwork proved it was all good. They fixed the testing and created the Green Boy shells - that would reach the German magazines, reliably. Bit late for Jutland, though.....
Did you find out about the shell scandal from a book? Quite interested to know the title if you did.
It's covered in a number of places - DK Brown includes it in Warrior to Dreadnaught.
Basically, the shells were poorly hardened and filled with picric acid. Which is more powerful than TNT. However, it is vulnerable to shock.
So British shells, on hitting armour of moderate thickness - 6 inches or so - would explode as they passed through/break up.
It has ben suggested that this happening, regularly in tests, convinced Fisher and others that only light armour was needed for the Battlecruisers.
The Germans used TNT, but their fuses were problematic as well. They tended to initiate on hitting armour as well, though not as severe a problem.
The Green Boy design was a modified shape, better heat treatment of the metal (not just madly hardening - a bit more subtle), TNT fill and a fuze design stolen from Krupp (it was modified to actually work).
The result was a shell that could pass through 13" of armour (for a 15" shell) reliably and detonate 20-30 *feet* behind. Which would be beyond all the wing compartments of the target ship - so it would be gong bang in an engine room, boiler room or magazine.
The changes were fairly simple, and could have been done year before the war - if the problems had been recognised as problems, by batches of shells being failed.
A lesson to compare with the Kriegsmarine *and* the US Navy screwing up their torpedo fuzing in the 1930s,* considerably to the benefit of the British and the Japanese for the first year or two of their respective wars. Wonder what the next nasty surprises will be?
*edit: for want of realistic testing, partly justified with notions of keeping it secret (and economy too as well as as bureaucratic infighting)
I've been to Priddy's Hard (north of Weevil Yard which is where they baked the hard biscuits), Gosport. Seen the piers where these very shells for much of the RN were landed, trucked/railed to the processing sheds for scrapping or refurbishment, the store shed (or rather its base, now car park IIRC), and the outlet pier whnece they were barged to the fleet. Now a museum full of RN ordnance of the kind my father handled. Plenty of 15 inch guns and shells still in service in his time. Two now in front of the IWM in London, of course.
The Washington Post say it is a 19 point plan that European leaders have proposed and that Russia is likely to reject the deal.
Starmer and the EU have played a blinder if the reports are true.
Why do we need 19 points?
1) Ukraine and Russia withdraw back to their respective 1991 boundaries. 2) Russia pays compensation to Ukraine. 3) Putin and his leadership face justice.
What are the other 16 points required?
I've got a proposed 3-point peace deal as well.
1) Israel and Syria withdraw back to their respective 2024 boundaries. 2) Israel pays compensation to Syria. 3) Netanyahu and his leadership face justice.
Who started the 2024 Israel/Syria conflict again?
It wasn't Israel, was it?
Don't attack another country if you aren't prepared to lose the war you start.
Israel started the 2024 Israel/Syria conflict. The Assad regime fell. Syria was not attacking Israel. Israel marched through a UN buffer zone and took Syrian territory, while also bombing Syria.
Syria started the war with Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas both started fighting Israel and Hezbollah were operating within Syria even prior to the fall of Assad. The Assad regime fell to be replaced with proscribed Islamists terrorists* that supported wiping out Israel too.
* The UK Government's definition at the time, not even counting Israel's views.
Your repeated, false, insinuations that Syria is a poor defenceless nation attacked unprovoked, are entirely fallacious and false.
List attacks by Syrian military on Israel in 2024 or 2023. Oh, there aren't any.
OK, list attacks by the Syrian opposition (who took over Syria in 2024) on Israel in 2024 or 2023. Still none.
Even the Israeli government makes no claims of Syrian attacks as being the casus belli.
Yes, the Assad government had been supporting Hezbollah, who have periodically attacked Israel, but the Assad regime had just fallen. Israel attacked the new government, who had been fighting against Hezbollah, who supported Assad.
You need a casus belli to start a war, Syria and Israel are already at war, so no casus belli required.
Yes Israel took advantage of their enemy falling to secure a better footing, that's just smart, when you're at war and your enemy shows a weakness during the conflict. If Putin fell and Ukraine reacted to take some land to help them with the war, would you object to that?
You are again, falsely, insinuating that the new regime is peaceful. This is a new regime we proscribed as terrorists.
The attacks were by Hezbollah. The new regime are Hezbollah's enemy. Israel and Syria had been at war and technically there had never been a peace treaty, but there had been no significant fighting for years. The Israeli/Syrian border had a UN buffer zone that was working very well, and the Israeli military just took it over, f*** the UN, and grabbed territory.
The Israeli rationale is that they need to occupy the Golan Heights so that their opponents can't attack them from there. But then it was they need to occupy the UN zone to protect their occupation of the Golan Heights. And now they need to occupy deep into Syria to protect their occupation of the UN zone, to protect their occupation of the Golan Heights, to protect actual Israeli territory. It's just expansionism, a desire for a greater Israel, very similar to Putin's desire for a greater Russia.
We have proscribed the new Syrian regime as terrorists, but we haven't bombed them. You are allowed to dislike your neighbours. You should not invade your neighbours except for a very limited set of circumstances.
But you think Israel is "more important" than other countries, so the rules don't apply to them.
BiB 1 - Yes, by Hezbollah, from within Syria.
BiB 2: Technicalities matter. There was no peace treaty, they are at war.
BiB 3: No, we haven't bombed them, but we (and the USA including under Clinton, Obama and others) and other developed nations have bombed other terrorists.
BiB 4: There are no rules against fighting nations you are at war with. Please find me any rule against that, ever ratified, by anyone.
All this “technically, they were still at war” is posturing because you think Israel shouldn’t be held to the same standards as other countries. In your earlier post, you said a peace treaty should see Russia AND Ukraine withdraw to their 1991 boundaries. I suggest a similar peace deal for Israel and Syria, both withdrawing to their 2024 boundaries, and you are utterly horrified by the suggestion.
I know this is Peston, but the government is quite timid enough for this to be true...
John Fingleton’s review for the government of how to reduce unnecessary barriers and costs for nuclear power development is a tour de force, a compelling road map for how to accelerate important infrastructure investment in the UK - which is the sine qua non of improving growth and living standards (read John’s nutshell below).
For the last eight weeks he was assured that the prime minister and chancellor would accept and implement the recommendations in full. He even tweaked an important clause at the government’s request, to give them a bit more flexibility over the means to implementation.
I understand he has now been told that at the budget tomorrow the welcome will be conditional, subject to further work and review - because the Chancellor has been nobbled by a legal and planning adviser, who claims the Fingleton recommendations somehow breach the UK’s environmental, trade and human rights obligations.
He and his colleagues believe this is nonsense. They examined the legal considerations in their assessment. But they fear that yet again the dead hand of official caution has squashed - potentially for months and years - important growth-enhancing investment. https://x.com/Peston/status/1993295277877334275
Reduce safety regulations for the nuclear industry? Watch the documentaries on what the negligent t****rs did at Sellafield under the current "overly strict" regulations. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v80s4 We'd be paying for it for generations. It's not just the UK either, the nuclear industry's habit of throwing the difficult stuff into a pond for someone else to deal with was the problem at Fukushima.
(Note, this is not any kind of criticism of you personally - I would give good money that not one person in a thousand expressing an opinion on this has even read a couple of pages of it.)
The charge is fair. See below
Ch 2 summary "secure energy to the grid", my understanding is that the power stations were frequently offline, particularly the magnox.
Ch 4 Summary "Time and cost are added to decommissioning and waste management programmes by not agreeing proportionate end states for sites or progressing the Geological Disposal Facility, whilst layering caution upon caution in nuclear waste management." the Magnox reactors have had the easy stuff removed and the rest sealed in a big dirty white box for the next 85 years when the reactor is scheduled to be decommissioned. That's symptomatic of the industry's culture of leaving it for next generation but 3 to deal with, not "caution".
"89 e) The policy on geological disposal and site end states constrains waste disposal options" - geological disposal facility, fair, someone needs to bite the bullet and upset their constituents in Cumbria. "site end state" the current policy is that they safely decommission and dispose of the reactor and highly contaminated parts as well as the easy barely contaminated stuff. Their current solution is to cover up the difficult part and monitor it for 100 years. I can't see any acceptable change in policy apart from a shorter timescale to clean it up, I very much doubt that's what they intend.
90 "or keeping long-term storage and institutional controls in place" see above, it's not, they'd like to just leave the reactor at site with an infinite monitoring contract.
"93. Exploration of broader options for end states would also help ease the nation’s decommissioning burden from a cost, schedule and risk perspective whilst maintaining acceptable safety and environmental performance." bollocks! They'll just leave the highly contaminated parts at site, deteriorating over time and the tax payer will be on the hook for a never-ending "care and maintenance" monitoring contract that will eventually become a far more difficult and expensive clean-up because the structural integrity of the plant will have deteriorated.
109 ... SMRs aren't small, they're about Magnox size
I agree that there needs to be "urgency" and "cultural" changes, in relation to the decommissioning, urgent = couple decades not centuries and the cultural change would be that they deal with the decommissioning and waste they've created. In relation to new facilities, that needs to be a cultural change from achieving contract award then holding the govt and taxpayer to ransom while allowing delays to escalate uncontrollably to making a genuine attempt to deliver on time and budget.
Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Yes, he's bound to have become more sophisticated since then.
According to his biographer, Crick, Dulwich College were so concerned at his attitudes that they declined to make him a prefect when he was in the sixth form there. You are nevertheless correct about his increased sophistication. He has evidently learned to smoke and drink since.
What percentage of sixth formers became prefects though?
At my school about 10%, with a few senior prefects and a head boy.
Same with me.
That was my point: saying “he was dreadful he wasn’t a prefect” is potentially meaningless
Comments
On both sides.
Most know Kirill Dmitriev as the Russian president’s envoy. But to more than 200 investors in Ukraine, he is known for taking part in a Kyiv real estate project that ended in a fraud and criminal case. Using articles from 2011, I was able to find more details...
https://x.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1992826709637480822
Shades of John of Gaunt in Richard II
..This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm..
What happens when you shut off warning signals? Megan McArdle offers a vivid example from California: (For the record: I briefly skimmed the report, and hope to find time to study it before the end of next week.)
I have no problem with individuals having multiple votes, but they should only be allowed to vote once for each song.
Others, since this is a betting site, may want to consider how this failure -- and many others -- might affect Gavin Newsom's chances in a presidential run.
Does he have to apologise? Maybe not. It was a very long time ago. His political problem though is that no-one believes the leopard has changed its spots.
The Israeli rationale is that they need to occupy the Golan Heights so that their opponents can't attack them from there. But then it was they need to occupy the UN zone to protect their occupation of the Golan Heights. And now they need to occupy deep into Syria to protect their occupation of the UN zone, to protect their occupation of the Golan Heights, to protect actual Israeli territory. It's just expansionism, a desire for a greater Israel, very similar to Putin's desire for a greater Russia.
We have proscribed the new Syrian regime as terrorists, but we haven't bombed them. You are allowed to dislike your neighbours. You should not invade your neighbours except for a very limited set of circumstances.
But you think Israel is "more important" than other countries, so the rules don't apply to them.
John Fingleton’s review for the government of how to reduce unnecessary barriers and costs for nuclear power development is a tour de force, a compelling road map for how to accelerate important infrastructure investment in the UK - which is the sine qua non of improving growth and living standards (read John’s nutshell below).
For the last eight weeks he was assured that the prime minister and chancellor would accept and implement the recommendations in full. He even tweaked an important clause at the government’s request, to give them a bit more flexibility over the means to implementation.
I understand he has now been told that at the budget tomorrow the welcome will be conditional, subject to further work and review - because the Chancellor has been nobbled by a legal and planning adviser, who claims the Fingleton recommendations somehow breach the UK’s environmental, trade and human rights obligations.
He and his colleagues believe this is nonsense. They examined the legal considerations in their assessment. But they fear that yet again the dead hand of official caution has squashed - potentially for months and years - important growth-enhancing investment.
https://x.com/Peston/status/1993295277877334275
They are made to be read in bites, over a period.
A modern example of something similar is Cryptonomicon. The digressions *are* the point.
Western leaders all need to realise this, and do everything they can to achieve that goal. Give the Ukranians everything they need to take out the Russian economy over the winter, and the war will soon be over. Also play the Russians at their own game to a limited extent - make sure there’s power cuts in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and further threaten Kaliningrad.
Wonder what that means in immigration cases?
So far, I think that Vance has to be close to a lay for Republican nominee. Being Trump's right hand man has to mean that the erratic old fool could well sweep him aside with a wave.
*You see - that's what comes of quoting Dickens down the thread - I come up with laughable floweriness!
I find this extraordinary. I was in a discussion about maths the other day.... can't recall how we got into it ..... but when I was a pharmacy student back in the late 50's we used to have to be able to work in both the metric system and the old (?antediluvian) apothecaries system, using and converting doses and ingredients between milligrams and grains, millilitres and minims.
And get them right. And without a calculator.
And we did it, regularly and consistently. And correctly, because unless you did, ninety percent of the time, you didn't pass.
Questions over Russian influence on Reform and Farage are incredibly important when he is a proposed Prime Minister candidate, in a way they were more peripheral when he merely disrupter in chief.
I doubt many people are aware of it at all, yet.
He is talking about eliminating a whole tranche of the Enquiry Industrial Complex. Thousands of lawyers will suddenly have much less work. Thousands of managers will have less bullshit to write about. Whole consultancies will go out of business.
It reminds me of when (before the US Republicans jumped the shark), they proposed flattening Federal Income Tax to a couple of rates and getting rid of all the deductions. Bill Clinton actually said the quiet bit out loud, in a speech - "This would throw tens of thousands of lawyers out of work".
Watch the documentaries on what the negligent t****rs did at Sellafield under the current "overly strict" regulations.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v80s4
We'd be paying for it for generations.
It's not just the UK either, the nuclear industry's habit of throwing the difficult stuff into a pond for someone else to deal with was the problem at Fukushima.
BiB 2: Technicalities matter. There was no peace treaty, they are at war.
BiB 3: No, we haven't bombed them, but we (and the USA including under Clinton, Obama and others) and other developed nations have bombed other terrorists.
BiB 4: There are no rules against fighting nations you are at war with. Please find me any rule against that, ever ratified, by anyone.
That's to fall into "All the regulations are about safety" bullshit.
See the comedy of hundreds of millions being spent at Sizewell to save fewer salmon than are in the window of my local fishmonger.
In fact the bullshit regulation are great to hide real problems behind. Grenfell had metric tons of documents to prove that it was structurally sound, ecologically sound, socially cohesive etc etc. Even that it was fireproof. There was one tiny flaw - it was covered in fire lighters.
Another classic was the Royal Navy shells scandal in WWI. It turned out that the main armament shell of the battleships were shit. An extremely long and complex testing regime had been used. Until a mathematician pointed out that the effect was that if a shell in a batch failed, test the next one. If that failed...... Yes, find one that works and it's all good. So a huge pile of paperwork proved it was all good. They fixed the testing and created the Green Boy shells - that would reach the German magazines, reliably. Bit late for Jutland, though.....
Which is why I say they were written to be consumed bit by bit.
Expect the legal profession to have a few things to say. Personally I am more in favour than I used to be.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/692080f75c394e481336ab89/nuclear-regulatory-review-2025.pdf
(Note, this is not any kind of criticism of you personally - I would give good money that not one person in a thousand expressing an opinion on this has even read a couple of pages of it.)
Basically, the shells were poorly hardened and filled with picric acid. Which is more powerful than TNT. However, it is vulnerable to shock.
So British shells, on hitting armour of moderate thickness - 6 inches or so - would explode as they passed through/break up.
It has ben suggested that this happening, regularly in tests, convinced Fisher and others that only light armour was needed for the Battlecruisers.
The Germans used TNT, but their fuses were problematic as well. They tended to initiate on hitting armour as well, though not as severe a problem.
The Green Boy design was a modified shape, better heat treatment of the metal (not just madly hardening - a bit more subtle), TNT fill and a fuze design stolen from Krupp (it was modified to actually work).
The result was a shell that could pass through 13" of armour (for a 15" shell) reliably and detonate 20-30 *feet* behind. Which would be beyond all the wing compartments of the target ship - so it would be gong bang in an engine room, boiler room or magazine.
The changes were fairly simple, and could have been done year before the war - if the problems had been recognised as problems, by batches of shells being failed.
Childhood - from birth to age nine
Adolescence - from nine to 32
Adulthood - from 32 to 66
Early ageing - from 66 to 83
Late ageing - from 83 onwards
Ageing kicking in there at 66 - so I'd better make hay in the next 9 months.
(although I bet it's the usual artificial creation of discretes out of a continuum - like decades and generations etc)
His own ethnicity does not change that.
It's the interface between tax law and benefits law. Most people would like both tax (law) and benefits (law) simplified but we are where we are.
Incidentally, that site has, once a week, "open threads", where you can discuss whatever you want. Including betting on politics, if you like.
(I'm joking! Your are still on the ball and long may that continue).
it's TSE pun worthy.
"I am a river; you are my canyon ... etc"
Full link, Telegraph preparing for when it becomes the Mail 2:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/0f3ffeb708709ffc
It's my sad duty to announce they've reimagined Kind Hearts & Coronets with Glen Powell in the Dennis Price role
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxBof_p3_es
The House of Lords will tear to bits any weakening of this.
I doubt it will save HMG much money but it will probably make the DM readership switch from outrage at Motability supplying BMWs to outrage at the government hiking the price of cars for people with disabilities.
*There is another factor regarding VAT - equipment specifically for people with disabilities (e.g. a wheelchair) is exempt from VAT. This seems appropriate to me, but a whole car is clearly not specifically 'equipment for people with disabilities' (except Wheelchair Accessible Vehicles - WAVs - which are very expensive and should imo retain the VAT exemption).
In the last 6 months my mobility has deteriorated considerably with my consideration to buying a mobility scooter to add to my mobility chair and bed as I need a walking stick permanently
The moral in this tale is always do your bucket list while you can especially as you age, as age does not come alone
I usually put it down to the effects of Covid!
NEW THREAD
If you do buy a mobility scooter get one that is legal on the road as well as footpaths. If your paths are anything like ours they're full of poorly mended investigations into water, gas etc faults.
I rather envy you your nearby family; our 'nearest' relative is a grandson 45 minutes away. Our nearest son is about 90 minutes away, the other side of the Dartford Crossing.
*edit: for want of realistic testing, partly justified with notions of keeping it secret (and economy too as well as as bureaucratic infighting)
I've been to Priddy's Hard (north of Weevil Yard which is where they baked the hard biscuits), Gosport. Seen the piers where these very shells for much of the RN were landed, trucked/railed to the processing sheds for scrapping or refurbishment, the store shed (or rather its base, now car park IIRC), and the outlet pier whnece they were barged to the fleet. Now a museum full of RN ordnance of the kind my father handled. Plenty of 15 inch guns and shells still in service in his time. Two now in front of the IWM in London, of course.
Ch 2 summary "secure energy to the grid", my understanding is that the power stations were frequently offline, particularly the magnox.
Ch 4 Summary "Time and cost are added to decommissioning and waste management programmes by not
agreeing proportionate end states for sites or progressing the Geological Disposal Facility,
whilst layering caution upon caution in nuclear waste management." the Magnox reactors have had the easy stuff removed and the rest sealed in a big dirty white box for the next 85 years when the reactor is scheduled to be decommissioned. That's symptomatic of the industry's culture of leaving it for next generation but 3 to deal with, not "caution".
"89 e) The policy on geological disposal and site end states constrains waste disposal options" - geological disposal facility, fair, someone needs to bite the bullet and upset their constituents in Cumbria.
"site end state" the current policy is that they safely decommission and dispose of the reactor and highly contaminated parts as well as the easy barely contaminated stuff. Their current solution is to cover up the difficult part and monitor it for 100 years. I can't see any acceptable change in policy apart from a shorter timescale to clean it up, I very much doubt that's what they intend.
90 "or keeping long-term storage and institutional controls in place" see above, it's not, they'd like to just leave the reactor at site with an infinite monitoring contract.
"93. Exploration of broader options for end states would also help ease the nation’s
decommissioning burden from a cost, schedule and risk perspective whilst maintaining acceptable
safety and environmental performance." bollocks! They'll just leave the highly contaminated parts at site, deteriorating over time and the tax payer will be on the hook for a never-ending "care and maintenance" monitoring contract that will eventually become a far more difficult and expensive clean-up because the structural integrity of the plant will have deteriorated.
109 ... SMRs aren't small, they're about Magnox size
I agree that there needs to be "urgency" and "cultural" changes, in relation to the decommissioning, urgent = couple decades not centuries and the cultural change would be that they deal with the decommissioning and waste they've created.
In relation to new facilities, that needs to be a cultural change from achieving contract award then holding the govt and taxpayer to ransom while allowing delays to escalate uncontrollably to making a genuine attempt to deliver on time and budget.
That was my point: saying “he was dreadful he wasn’t a prefect” is potentially meaningless