On the subject of the BBC, Dimbleby Major isn’t pulling many punches in his documentary series What’s the Monarchy For? Far less emollient to Charles and his brood than his wee brother.
DD looking somewhat etiolated, and I’m a bit worried about that dark blemish on his lip.
And I have just submitted my first ever complaint to the BBC as a licence fee payer in response and I suspect thousands more will be doing so.
Appalling republican bias from near beginning to end with barely lip service given to any pro monarchy arguments, a disgraceful piece of pro republic propaganda. I do NOT pay my licence fee for this!!
I suggest all PB monarchists do likewise, we cannot let the BBC get away with this! David Dimbleby's father will be ashamed of him and turning in his grave tonight!
I enjoyed the first episode. I liked the bit where one of the interviewees pointed out Dimbleby’s own inherited position — good on him for keeping that in!
More people should remember Richard Dimbleby and the important work he did on changing societal attitudes to cancer.
Don’t forget the critical piece on the spaghetti farming industry
Reportedly there's an unpublished version of the US Nat Sec document.
This report says there is a longer internal version of the NSS that gets into more detail on weakening the EU. It also proposes a new grouping of countries called the C5— US, China, Russia, Japan, and India— that’s not hemmed in by G7 rules. No Euro representation unless you count Russia. https://x.com/thomaswright08/status/1998499602220425474
If the US administration were run by Russian agents, it could not be doing a better job.
I see Badenoch has listed Brexit as one of the negative economic shocks experienced by the British economy in recent times.
That will come as a surprise to the “PB Tories” on here, who represent perhaps the final platoons of Brexity Hiroo Onodas, or Comical Alis.
No, it won’t. Of course it came at a near term cost (but also opened up a potential future upside with a capable government). It’s just that some people believe that’s all that matters (hence the tedious rendition of “Brexit is bad” related ad nauseum) and others believe that the political freedoms were worth the cost
Your compadres refuse to concede any cost. That’s the issue.
I’m glad you do.
I don't know which compadres you refer to, but I don't know any PB Brexit supporters who don't acknowledge a cost. Of course there was a cost. There was moderate to significant trade disruption with the EU, and British people lost some of their privileges in getting around the Continent easily.
By contrast, many, I would say a plurality of remoaners here cannot being themselves to acknowledge equally true benefits, not future aspirations, just basic prosaic facts like: 1. We no longer pay significant sums into the EU's coffers 2. We are no longer liable for additional EU debt
There are plenty more, but let's start with those two basic facts. When ScottP, Foxy, FF43, Cicero, Roger and *many* more, have the ability to acknowledge those simple facts without requiring medical assistance, come back to us for an informed debate. If anything, I'd say the less foamy contributors on the remain side here are in the minority.
Of course we no longer pay into the EU budget. But a lot of that was to cover the costs of regulatory functions that we are now responsible for ourselves at greater cost. Hence the growth in the civil service after Brexit.
The entire staff of the European Commission is only about 30,000 so even if we replicated their entire operation, it would only account for a fraction of the increase in the headcount of the civil service, which in any case takes us back to below the level of the Blair years.
Although that chart does raise the question about what was cut between 2004 and 2015?
I think it was a lot of functions that were spun off to government agencies that technically weren’t counted in the numbers
Yes: that was my fear - in other words it liked like we were saving... But were we really?
Reportedly there's an unpublished version of the US Nat Sec document.
This report says there is a longer internal version of the NSS that gets into more detail on weakening the EU. It also proposes a new grouping of countries called the C5— US, China, Russia, Japan, and India— that’s not hemmed in by G7 rules. No Euro representation unless you count Russia. https://x.com/thomaswright08/status/1998499602220425474
If the US administration were run by Russian agents, it could not be doing a better job.
They might become profitable before they deliver a single supersonic business jet.
A natural gas turbine is almost identical to a jet engine, so the symergies are pretty obvious. (It's also interesting that GE is in both the natural gas turbines and the jet engines businesses, while Rolls Royce is not.)
They’re also designing and building the engine themselves from scratch, so the generators are a great way to put thousands of hours on the design before they have to put them on aeroplanes, where failures are much more costly.
Reportedly there's an unpublished version of the US Nat Sec document.
This report says there is a longer internal version of the NSS that gets into more detail on weakening the EU. It also proposes a new grouping of countries called the C5— US, China, Russia, Japan, and India— that’s not hemmed in by G7 rules. No Euro representation unless you count Russia. https://x.com/thomaswright08/status/1998499602220425474
If the US administration were run by Russian agents, it could not be doing a better job.
Reportedly there's an unpublished version of the US Nat Sec document.
This report says there is a longer internal version of the NSS that gets into more detail on weakening the EU. It also proposes a new grouping of countries called the C5— US, China, Russia, Japan, and India— that’s not hemmed in by G7 rules. No Euro representation unless you count Russia. https://x.com/thomaswright08/status/1998499602220425474
If the US administration were run by Russian agents, it could not be doing a better job.
(I hope this report is untrue. We'll see.)
I do too. That's absolutely mad.
Its true. In other news, the first Democrat mayor of Miami in over 30 years. The Republicans are going to be massacred next year.
Reportedly there's an unpublished version of the US Nat Sec document.
This report says there is a longer internal version of the NSS that gets into more detail on weakening the EU. It also proposes a new grouping of countries called the C5— US, China, Russia, Japan, and India— that’s not hemmed in by G7 rules. No Euro representation unless you count Russia. https://x.com/thomaswright08/status/1998499602220425474
If the US administration were run by Russian agents, it could not be doing a better job.
(I hope this report is untrue. We'll see.)
I do too. That's absolutely mad.
Its true. In other news, the first Democrat mayor of Miami in over 30 years. The Republicans are going to be massacred next year.
That's less dramatic than it sounds as the position is traditionally non-partisan and Miami itself normally does vote blue in general elections (although the county as a whole went red last year).
I see Badenoch has listed Brexit as one of the negative economic shocks experienced by the British economy in recent times.
That will come as a surprise to the “PB Tories” on here, who represent perhaps the final platoons of Brexity Hiroo Onodas, or Comical Alis.
No, it won’t. Of course it came at a near term cost (but also opened up a potential future upside with a capable government). It’s just that some people believe that’s all that matters (hence the tedious rendition of “Brexit is bad” related ad nauseum) and others believe that the political freedoms were worth the cost
Your compadres refuse to concede any cost. That’s the issue.
I’m glad you do.
I don't know which compadres you refer to, but I don't know any PB Brexit supporters who don't acknowledge a cost. Of course there was a cost. There was moderate to significant trade disruption with the EU, and British people lost some of their privileges in getting around the Continent easily.
By contrast, many, I would say a plurality of remoaners here cannot being themselves to acknowledge equally true benefits, not future aspirations, just basic prosaic facts like: 1. We no longer pay significant sums into the EU's coffers 2. We are no longer liable for additional EU debt
There are plenty more, but let's start with those two basic facts. When ScottP, Foxy, FF43, Cicero, Roger and *many* more, have the ability to acknowledge those simple facts without requiring medical assistance, come back to us for an informed debate. If anything, I'd say the less foamy contributors on the remain side here are in the minority.
Of course we no longer pay into the EU budget. But a lot of that was to cover the costs of regulatory functions that we are now responsible for ourselves at greater cost. Hence the growth in the civil service after Brexit.
The entire staff of the European Commission is only about 30,000 so even if we replicated their entire operation, it would only account for a fraction of the increase in the headcount of the civil service, which in any case takes us back to below the level of the Blair years.
Although that chart does raise the question about what was cut between 2004 and 2015?
I think it was a lot of functions that were spun off to government agencies that technically weren’t counted in the numbers
Yes: that was my fear - in other words it liked like we were saving... But were we really?
Reportedly there's an unpublished version of the US Nat Sec document.
This report says there is a longer internal version of the NSS that gets into more detail on weakening the EU. It also proposes a new grouping of countries called the C5— US, China, Russia, Japan, and India— that’s not hemmed in by G7 rules. No Euro representation unless you count Russia. https://x.com/thomaswright08/status/1998499602220425474
If the US administration were run by Russian agents, it could not be doing a better job.
I see that the government is implementing a one civil service favourite of merging police forces in the name of “efficiency”
Thames Valley police has been trying to take over the Hampshire & IOW Constabulary for decades… the analysis is always the same: response rates go down and stations get centralised into Reading.
A less good, less responsive service with a centralised bureaucracy. Of course the civil service wants it
Reportedly there's an unpublished version of the US Nat Sec document.
This report says there is a longer internal version of the NSS that gets into more detail on weakening the EU. It also proposes a new grouping of countries called the C5— US, China, Russia, Japan, and India— that’s not hemmed in by G7 rules. No Euro representation unless you count Russia. https://x.com/thomaswright08/status/1998499602220425474
If the US administration were run by Russian agents, it could not be doing a better job.
(I hope this report is untrue. We'll see.)
I do too. That's absolutely mad.
Its true. In other news, the first Democrat mayor of Miami in over 30 years. The Republicans are going to be massacred next year.
That's less dramatic than it sounds as the position is traditionally non-partisan and Miami itself normally does vote blue in general elections (although the county as a whole went red last year).
But still a bad result for the Republicans.
The Democrats also flipped a +12 Trump seat in the Georgia Senate last night, albeit only just 51:49. Clearly Democrats are much more motivated to vote in these special elections but the Republicans are getting close to the point where a lot of their gerrymandering could backfire and result in a very efficient Democratic vote. The increasing willingness of GOP members to speak out of turn on Trump is obviously linked to this.
Reform don’t do themselves any favours with posts like Zia Yusuf’s here. I don’t get why politicians say things which are so easily rebutted; Farage is in favour of accepting the Afghan interpreters, they’re not small boat people, it undermines their whole agenda to just attack everything
You were standing right next to Farage when he confirmed the Afghan resettlement scheme will continue. The deception is already so evident with these c****
That clip highlights two things: Farage fundamentally still has the instincts of the liberal British establishment, and events continue to push him towards a harder line on immigration.
Since that clip we've gone from Starmer calling it far-right to question the role of the ECHR to questioning its role himself.
But surely most people don’t mind giving asylum to people that have helped us in a war effort? The small boat problem is absolute insanity, but that doesn’t mean genuine asylum seekers should be banned.
Anyway, my point was that Yusuf is attacking Philp for saying something Farage agreed with, which I think is a mistake
Wrong way round.
Afghans weren't helping Britain.
Britain was helping Afghans.
And it turned out that the Afghans actually preferred the side they were supposed to fighting against.
Oh is that right? So the interpreters weren’t really deserving of asylum? I don’t know, I just assumed they were good guys
You might not have noticed at the time but back in 2021 the Afghan military either defected to the Taliban or deserted with hardly a shot being fired.
The same Afghan military which the western world had been funding, training and arming for nearly twenty years.
The subsequent babbling about helping Afghan interpreters and Afghan special forces is merely because people aren't willing to admit that it had been a total waste of British lives and money.
To put the collapse of the Afghan government into context.
It took over two years from the withdrawal of the US military from South Vietnam for the government to be toppled and even then that took an outside invasion plus the stopping of US funding.
In Afghanistan the government collapsed before the US was able to withdraw its military and it collapsed to some blokes in pick up trucks armed mostly with beards.
It took 16 months for the Afghan puppet government to collapse after Trumps deal with the Taliban to relase 5000 Taliban fighters. There were only 2500 US troops in Afghanistan when Biden took power.
"The people who govern us have no conception of national culture or identity outside of a veneer of sentimentality and a code of liberal “values” with little relationship to our own political tradition. Their morality is niceness and their religion is individualism. The incredible gift of a culture defined by peaceable cooperation, and not riven by ethnic or religious conflict, is not seen as the fragile inheritance of generations of national effort, but as the product of the human rights and equalities laws of the past decades. The fact — the incontrovertible fact — that dizzyingly rapid migration undermines this situation is simply outside of their imaginative universe."
"The people who govern us have no conception of national culture or identity outside of a veneer of sentimentality and a code of liberal “values” with little relationship to our own political tradition. Their morality is niceness and their religion is individualism. The incredible gift of a culture defined by peaceable cooperation, and not riven by ethnic or religious conflict, is not seen as the fragile inheritance of generations of national effort, but as the product of the human rights and equalities laws of the past decades. The fact — the incontrovertible fact — that dizzyingly rapid migration undermines this situation is simply outside of their imaginative universe."
Reform don’t do themselves any favours with posts like Zia Yusuf’s here. I don’t get why politicians say things which are so easily rebutted; Farage is in favour of accepting the Afghan interpreters, they’re not small boat people, it undermines their whole agenda to just attack everything
You were standing right next to Farage when he confirmed the Afghan resettlement scheme will continue. The deception is already so evident with these c****
That clip highlights two things: Farage fundamentally still has the instincts of the liberal British establishment, and events continue to push him towards a harder line on immigration.
Since that clip we've gone from Starmer calling it far-right to question the role of the ECHR to questioning its role himself.
But surely most people don’t mind giving asylum to people that have helped us in a war effort? The small boat problem is absolute insanity, but that doesn’t mean genuine asylum seekers should be banned.
Anyway, my point was that Yusuf is attacking Philp for saying something Farage agreed with, which I think is a mistake
Wrong way round.
Afghans weren't helping Britain.
Britain was helping Afghans.
And it turned out that the Afghans actually preferred the side they were supposed to fighting against.
Oh is that right? So the interpreters weren’t really deserving of asylum? I don’t know, I just assumed they were good guys
You might not have noticed at the time but back in 2021 the Afghan military either defected to the Taliban or deserted with hardly a shot being fired.
The same Afghan military which the western world had been funding, training and arming for nearly twenty years.
The subsequent babbling about helping Afghan interpreters and Afghan special forces is merely because people aren't willing to admit that it had been a total waste of British lives and money.
To put the collapse of the Afghan government into context.
It took over two years from the withdrawal of the US military from South Vietnam for the government to be toppled and even then that took an outside invasion plus the stopping of US funding.
In Afghanistan the government collapsed before the US was able to withdraw its military and it collapsed to some blokes in pick up trucks armed mostly with beards.
It took 16 months for the Afghan puppet government to collapse after Trumps deal with the Taliban to relase 5000 Taliban fighters. There were only 2500 US troops in Afghanistan when Biden took power.
Reportedly there's an unpublished version of the US Nat Sec document.
This report says there is a longer internal version of the NSS that gets into more detail on weakening the EU. It also proposes a new grouping of countries called the C5— US, China, Russia, Japan, and India— that’s not hemmed in by G7 rules. No Euro representation unless you count Russia. https://x.com/thomaswright08/status/1998499602220425474
If the US administration were run by Russian agents, it could not be doing a better job.
(I hope this report is untrue. We'll see.)
I note that the UK is excluded, and Russia (with an economy a fraction the size of the UK) is excluded.
Fuck 'em.
The best way to make sure that this withers on the vine is for the Europeans (including the UK) Ukraine, and to ensure that Russia is defeated.
That would require European leaders to show some leadership.
And you're never going to get that from Starmer, Macron and Tusk.
Their successors will likely be even less willing to stand up to Trump or Putin.
This is balls. I hold no brief for Starmer, but the European leaders are absolutely working for a deal to get Ukraine what it needs, while trying to manage the senile old fascist in the White House. They are quite deliberately not grandstanding because that could provoke the cheeto faced rapist into some new outrage. It is necessarily a delicate and slow process, but the UK got 8 billion to Kyiv as a temporary measure and there is more beyond. The Europeans know that stopping Putin is existential but they have to work very carefully. Trump's dementia will get more insane before he is impeached from office after the Republicans are crushed at the midterms... we have another year if this shit to deal with, at least. Patience is needed.
Talk and more talk.
That's what European leaders are good at, not so good at action though.
They've been talking about giving all the confiscated Russian assets to Ukraine for over three years but never seem to do so.
And if stopping Putin is existential why are we so ill prepared for war:
Comments
(Think about it)
But still a bad result for the Republicans.
(And the answer to your question is no)
I love the fact that they filmed that advert at Chiswick Station… sums it up really
Thames Valley police has been trying to take over the Hampshire & IOW Constabulary for decades… the analysis is always the same: response rates go down and stations get centralised into Reading.
A less good, less responsive service with a centralised bureaucracy. Of course the civil service wants it
Anyway, Trump and FIFA are made for each other.
Chronic stupidity, corruption, bad taste, a complete absence of shame and no idea of how they look to a sane observer.
When’s the wedding?
NEW THREAD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States–Taliban_deal#:~:text=The provisions of the deal,Taliban and the Afghan government.
The Afghan army was supposedly over 300,000.
Plus the US was giving air and equipment support to the Afghan military.
That's what European leaders are good at, not so good at action though.
They've been talking about giving all the confiscated Russian assets to Ukraine for over three years but never seem to do so.
And if stopping Putin is existential why are we so ill prepared for war:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yq5zdv907o