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Myself, I’d warn Gazza

This has not been Gary’s position to date, and I warmly welcome the change of heart because I think it is necessary and because it makes the prospect of effecting change very much higher.

It also creates a much stronger common ground between us because we both absolutely agree that inequality is the fundamental cause of many of our problems in the UK and that government action to tackle this is essential, with taxation being by far the most effective tool available for this purpose.

If The Sage of Ely thinks you’re onto something then you should realise that you’re wrong.

Rhiannon

Post-traumatic stress disorder – a diagnosis I have had in the past – is another one of those conditions people like to claim isn’t real.

Oh. Rilly?

Is “overdiagnosis” the new culture-war buzzword of choice? I had been wondering this for a while, and then Wes Streeting claimed on Sunday that there is an “overdiagnosis” of some mental health conditions. Now I am certain it is.

I first noticed the term being used in relation to anxiety and depression, then attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and most recently autism. Two books on overdiagnosis, Suzanne O’Sullivan’s The Age of Diagnosis and Searching for Normal by Sami Timimi, have garnered attention across the media, adding fuel to a new fire that we might characterise as “Bloody everyone has a label these days, don’t they?”.

This is not to say that these authors and medical professionals don’t have valid points, or that the medicalisation of societal issues isn’t of concern. We all know how “therapy speak” has leached into public discourse, how teens are now throwing around terms such as “trauma response” and “stimming” – lifted from earnest TikToks – with a confidence that must seem startling to some of their elders, who grew up with the idea that you only went to a shrink or a counsellor if there was something “wrong” with you, or you were about to get divorced.

As the lady once shouted at me in outrage, she’s a national columnist at The Guardian, doncha’ know? Thoroughly middle class bint on a good whack and with media fame!

PTSD?

So, well, how much is this?

I am a single father and get personal independence payments (Pip). I have mental health issues and was diagnosed with autism towards the end of the Covid pandemic. I also receive universal credit, getting the limited capability for work-related activity element, which, we now know, will be cut for new claimants and frozen for existing ones like me. As inflation continues to rise, the freeze will mean that my income falls and I’m left struggling even harder to make ends meet.

How much will someone in that position actually be getting? For of course The G doesn;t give us that number. So, how much is it?

Typical Guardian fuckwit

What does Maga-land look like? Let me show you America’s unbeautiful suburban sprawl
Alexander Hurst

I drove 2,000 miles with a French friend across my home country – and saw the endless nowhere land that is the crucible of Trumpism

“But Dear God, do you see what happens when the proles have their own money they can spend as they like? They want houses with gardens, a patio deck, a pool! Shops full of things, cars so they can go wherever, anywhen! This is why we have to take control, force them back into hovels where they’ll be happy nibbling their raw turnip.

After all, if they, the working class, get all that then what market will there be for our own status as bourgeois?”

That is Hurst’s point. And he can fuck off along with that horse he rode in on.

Robert Reich really is a ghastly little shit

To friends of democracy around the world: we need your help.

You know that the Trump regime is brutally attacking US democracy. Most of us did not vote for Donald Trump (half of us didn’t even vote in the 2024 election). But he feels he has a mandate to take a wrecking ball to the constitution.

Like most bullies, the regime can be constrained only if everyone stands up to the bullying – including you.

First, if you are considering a trip to the United States, please reconsider. Why reward Trump’s America with your tourist dollars?

Spending by non-Americans in the United States is a significant source of tax revenue and a major “export” of this nation. There’s no reason for you to indirectly support Trump’s economy.

Yep. He wants those minimum wage workers at Disneyland/world laid off because Orange Man Bad won a free and fair election.

Putrid little shit.

Not sure this shows what the journo thinks it does

An analyst has been accused of using working-from-home rules to make nearly £1 million from insider trading.

Redinel Korfuzi, 37, a former Janus Henderson research analyst, denies money laundering and conspiracy to commit insider dealing.

OK, naughty boy etc etc.

They are said to have netted £963,000 in relation to 11 companies’ shares including Daimler, Jet2 and THG and Russian tech firm Mail.ru, now known as VK. Mr Korfuzi is accused of misusing confidential information on these companies.

Jamie Ross, who worked with Mr Korfuzi at Janus Henderson on European equities, …………The fund manager was then taken through a list of the potential transactions through which Korfuzi is said to have profited through confidential information.

Asked about a transaction involving Mail.ru, a personal email service, between September 22 and October 2, 2020, Mr Ross said he had “initial interest” in the transaction but “would have quickly lost that interest when I found out the aim of the company”.

Mr Forster asked: “In terms of Mr Korfuzi’s interest, would you have expected him to show much interest in this, in your view of it?”

Mr Ross replied: “It would have been very clear to him this was not something I would have sanctioned, and was an investment I would not have been interested in.”

The prosecutor then asked Mr Ross about a transaction involving Jet2, between February 4 and February 12, 2021. Mr Ross replied that Janus Henderson did not have a position on the package holiday company, adding that the proposed transaction would not have interested him at all.

Yes, of course this is all going to be more complicated etc. But so far the coworker/manager seems to be saying that whatever he did with those two companies wasn’t insider – or at lesat, not abuse of the Janus position because they didn’t have an interest.

Cheap promise really

Donald Trump has pledged to reverse America’s anti-fossil fuel policy and open hundreds more coal-fired power plants in an effort to make US industry more competitive with China.

He wants to halt the closures of coal plants – the “dirtiest” form of power generation – driven by environmental regulations, that have shut down hundreds of power stations and which threaten 120 more.

Everyone thinking of spending money is fully aware that the next administration might not look so kindly upon coal plants. Given the price of frack natural gas I’m not sure there’s all that much in it between the two forms anyway.

That extant plants should not be forced to close early, yes, both that’ll happen and should also happen. But new ones? I think they’ll be in short supply TBH.

Ah, this is the political definition of nothing then?

Rachel Reeves’ National Insurance tax raid will not raise “a single penny” for public services, according to analysis by the shadow chancellor.

Businesses were hit with an increase in employers’ NI from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent in October’s Budget, with the aim of raising £25.7 billion a year.

But Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, claimed the Chancellor’s “economic mismanagement” meant all the expected money either was not raised in the first place or has been frittered away.

So, some will indeed be raised it’ll just not be spent upon what you think it should be?

He said: “The Chancellor promised £25 billion from her jobs tax, but we’re likely to end up with less money for our public services because of Labour’s economic mismanagement.

Much of the mismanagement would have happened without the tax, no?

We need to know the year here

From Western Bloke (formerly Bloke on M4):

I saw Billy Ocean live. I wouldn’t describe myself as a big fan, but the gig was at the park near me and not very expensive, so I went and he was great.

OK. So which year was that? For we’ve also a recently arrived commentator around here, Norman. Who played in Billy Ocean’s touring band. So, did one commentator see the other live?

Oh, right

The overwhelming impression left by all this is that the DWP is making a change not justified by evidence to support a demand for cuts from HM Treasury that cannot be supported by estimated beneficial evidence of gains resulting from the action.

This is austerity, in other words, imposed by choice on – as The Guardian describes them – some of the UK’s most severely disabled people.

I hope that judicial review is brought. I’ll be chipping in towards the costs if it happens. Bullies picking on the most vulnerable deserve to be challenged.

So electoral politics doesn’t have the power to vary things then. Good to know.

Seems fair to me

Taxpayers are footing a £130m-a-year bill for disability benefit claims linked to alcohol and drug abuse, official statistics show.

What’s a civilisation for if we can’t divert 0.005% of everything to supporting boozers, topers and souses?

This is just so unexpected!

Britain’s landlord crackdown has driven the number of long-term empty homes to a record high as buy-to-let investors quit, new analysis shows.

One in 94 homes in England last year had been vacant for at least six months, up from one in 95 a year earlier and the highest proportion on record since at least 2013, excluding the pandemic, according to analysis of council tax data by Property Investments UK.

Analysts blamed the Government’s buy-to-let crackdown which is pushing landlords to sell up.

Nationally, 272,257 homes were lying empty long-term. Based on the average household size, this meant homes for 650,000 people – nearly enough to accommodate the strain on housing supply driven by net migration of 728,000 in the year to June 2024.

Increase the cost of supply – lower the price that can be charged by supplying, that is – and supply falls.

Gosh.

If only we had a science which could explain this.

This interests….

Burrows boasted in emails of “living in paradise” while in Phuket province under the name of his friend Peter Leslie Smith, whose details he had used to fraudulently obtain a passport in 1997 and leave the country without detection.

Chester Crown Court heard how Burrows found work at an advertising company and even featured in the local news in 2019 after his retirement.

Police had launched four unsuccessful appeals on BBC’s Crimewatch UK to locate the serial child abuser.

On Monday he was found guilty of 54 sexual offences at Chester Crown Court, including indecent assault of boys, buggery, attempted buggery and indecency with a child.

So, buggery’s an offence. As it has been since H VIII’s time. It was a hanging offence until the 1860s and there’s – apparently, I did once track it down and it seemed true – a year in the 1830s (?) when England hanged more for buggery than for murder.

But, clearly, buggery’s not an offence after a cuddle and a Judy Garland movie.

So, we’ve a change in the meaning of the word – or the definition of the criminal offence perhaps. My guess – and it is a guess – is that buggery now means unwanted/imposed/forced, as in rape. My guess is also that this was true – in fact, if not wholly in definition – back into the past. Well, obviously, as this was true yesterday. But how many yesterdays?

When did buggery as a prosecutable offence become not the act between consenting adults (if indeed it ever was that in practice) but the violence of rape with the act?

My suspicion is that back under the Bloody Code there was very little hanging of people for a shared interest in interior decoration but that there would have been a certain frowning upon in the streets with violence……

Big sticks work!

Who knew?

The number of migrants caught illegally crossing the US southern border has dropped by 82 per cent since Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

In February, 8,347 people were arrested trying to illegally cross the border, according to US border patrol statistics, putting the new administration on track for the lowest year of migrant crossings in decades.

The numbers represent a staggering decline in arrests at the Mexico border since December, the final full month of the Biden administration, when the border patrol apprehended 47,330 migrants.

This means that we could stop he boats at the cost of what, half a dozen 5 inch shells? Well aimed 5 inchers…..

But government has just such power to do things!

But no. It would appear that there is no such plan. In reality, the whole thing is probably just a wild misunderstanding. A spokesman for the healthcare provider behind the form said that asking such questions is now “required by New Jersey law” – after local politicians decreed that healthcare providers must collect detailed demographic data about all their patients, including sexual orientation. I suspect that these politicians didn’t have the sexual orientation of newborn babies in mind. None the less, this is how their law has been interpreted.

Whatever the explanation, though, the farce doesn’t end there. Because the questionnaire doesn’t just ask about your baby’s sexuality. It also asks about your baby’s gender identity.

Among the wide variety of possible answers listed on the form are “male”, “female”, “genderqueer” – and, rather curiously, “trans woman” and “trans man”. In the context, surely it should be “trans baby”. But then, if a man can identify as a woman and a woman as a man, I suppose there’s no reason why a baby shouldn’t identify as an adult.

Possibly we should be collecting the statistics upon gay and trans etc. The Cowperthwaite response often appeals but maybe.

Recording these of babies is, of course rather odd. But that’s what happens then the blunderbuss of government and the law is used upon a point. Recording pink, blue or rainbow of babbies is not a grand problem. But you just wait until government gets around to how we’re going to power society, feed it, house it…..

Mr Pooter Lives!

The result is a situation where the law cannot be relied on in the USA. The application of the law is now claimed to be solely dependent on the political whim of the President.

I received an invitation to attend a meeting at the World Bank on Friday, in New York. I will not be going. The risks are too high. Visiting a country where the president thinks he can act in the way Trump is doing is to put oneself in harm’s way. I am not willing to do that.

Because Trumpism would indeed specifically target the Sage of Ely.

No?

This isn’t about what it’s about

OK, so people are nasty about fattos. They shouldn’t be. OK, seems fair enough. But that’s not what this column is about, not at all. The writer is a writer. That is, a writer. Someone who needs to be societally supported as they use words to explore the human condition type of writer. You know, important:

Non-thin people are everywhere, our experiences are real and important, and yet, flicking through programmes for writers’ festivals, women’s festivals, arts festivals, I notice a consistent distinct lack of opportunities to discuss fatness or body image – in a time when it is increasingly necessary to address.

No one’s hiring me to do festival gigs. This isn’t about fattos at all it’s a job application to get in on the grift.

Man’s an absolute loon

Instead, Miliband has laid out lofty plans for the North Sea to be “at the heart of Britain’s energy future” by transforming itself into a hub of “homegrown” green power.

“Oil and gas production will continue to play an important role and as the world embraces the drive to clean energy, the North Sea gives Britain a chance to show new leadership once again,” Miliband said this month.

The problem here is:

Amid the sweeping ambitions, a key question remains: what will happen to the tens of thousands of oil and gas workers who risk becoming jobless?

Under plans recently put forward by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, many would transfer their skills to new roles in offshore wind, carbon capture and hydrogen production.

‘S industrial planning all over again, innit? Labour’s just some lump of economic asset that can be moved around the plan as the pencil suckers see fit. Never has worked before and it’s not going to work now….

Must be bad, eh?

South Africa’s Zulu king has scandalised his more conservative subjects and set off a months-long royal soap opera, after taking the unprecedented step to openly divorce his first wife.

King Misuzulu kaZwelithini earlier this year overturned generations of Zulu royal tradition and family discretion to publicly file for a split from the mother of his children.

While Zulu kings have traditionally practised polygamy, with no limit to the number of wives they might have, divorce did not take place – and if it did, it was kept out of the public eye – making the king’s recent announcement such a bombshell.

If you can just move along to however many others you wish to have – possibly just ignoring the first – howbad does it have to be to bother to divorce that first?