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What is clear is that on top of the substantial (in my opinion) sums paid by Lord Alli for clothes for Keir Starmer (including more than £2,000 for glasses) there were also significant payments made by the same person to provide clothes for Starmer’s wife.
OK.
And (let me add this), will he be paying tax on these gifts, which appear to be personal benefits in kind resulting from his appointment?
Ah, what fun.
The Willkommen is turning frosty even in Germany’s integration capital
Almost ten years after Angela Merkel opened the borders tensions are visible in Offenbach, the city with the highest proportion of migrants
What’s that “even” doing there?
Think on it, immigration’s a problem or it isn’t. Integration’s a problem or it isn’t. If either are problems then they’ll – logically – be greatest where immigration is highest and therefore integration has the greatest effect – or not.
The first major study into the Conservatives’ controversial shake-up of childcare has revealed that nursery staff are often doing more “crowd control” than education, because of the increased number of children they are looking after.
This isn’t school nor university. It is crowd control. Some frun with crayons while Mummy’s a power skirt.
The Legal Feminist, a forum to discuss feminist issues in the legal system, is preparing to fight back against proposals from the industry regulator which could see barristers punished if they fail to act in a way which “advances equality, diversity, and inclusion”.
Barrister Naomi Cunningham, who specialises in discrimination, said she fears the vagueness of a new proposal from the Bar Standards Board (BSB) paves the way for “arbitrary enforcement” meaning barristers with “unpopular or unfashionable views” get excluded.
All very Vyshynsky, isn’t it? Lawyers would routinely berate the people they were supposedly defending for shaming Comrade Stalin etc…
The Canadian military has admitted that new sleeping bags issued to troops last year were not suited to “typical Canadian winter conditions”.
Sigh.
More allegations of sexual abuse made against French priest Abbé Pierre
Catholic church says it will open its records on the once-revered Emmaüs founder, who died in 2007
He’s already found out about it all, hasn’t he? All about God, forgiveness, the weighing of souls and all that?
Seven men were jailed for sexually abusing two girls in Rotherham in the latest convictions under the UK’s biggest-ever law enforcement operation against child sex abuse.
It would be racist – islamophoboic even – to tell us the background, religion, ethnicity or anything. So, of course, they don’t.
The agency said Mohammed Amar, Mohammed Siyab, Yasser Ajaibe, Mohammed Zameer Sadiq, Abid Saddiq, Tahir Yassin and Ramin Bari were jailed on Thursday and Friday for the offences which were committed between April 2003 and April 2008.
It is wholly and entirely legal to print the names of those convicted.
For who long though?
Marlena Meczynska-Shiibashi, 38, waited until her boyfriend, 50, had fallen asleep and then poured bleach on his face.
As he was confused and fumbling for his clothes in the dark, she stabbed him in the groin, narrowly missing his penis.
The music teacher later said in court: “I wanted to harm his penis but because he moved I got his thigh instead.”
On Friday, she was sentenced to seven years in prison at Lewes Crown Court after she pleaded guilty to wounding her boyfriend with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.
The court heard that the couple had been in an on-again off-again relationship since 2011.
On the day of the attack in April last year, Maczynska-Shiibashi had tried to initiate sex with her partner at her home in Hastings, East Sussex, but he refused, saying: “Please don’t.”
‘I realised it was bleach’
He then went to sleep but was woken when he felt liquid being poured onto his left cheek.He told the court: “My next recollection was some liquid being poured over the left side of my face. When I inhaled I realised it was bleach. It went into my nose and ear.
“I sat up straight away and that’s when she threw the remainder of the contents of the glass into my face.”
The victim said he tried to use his phone torch to find his clothing and managed to get his socks on when he was stabbed in the groin.
Blinded by the bleach, he described feeling warm liquid running down his leg.
Putting your socks on might not have been the appropriate reaction to some crazed bint trying to cut your willie off……
Rachel Reeves has been urged to impose an “exit tax” on wealthy investors moving their money out of the country.
Resolution Foundation, a Left-leaning think tank, has called for Labour to hit those relocating overseas with a capital gains tax charge.
The people are peons to be chaken down as the deep state desires.
Fuck ’em.
The Office for Budget Responsibility issued a report yesterday that showed their ignorance of a great many issues and, in the process, highlighted the danger of relying on people who do not understand the substance of what might happen in the real world but who would rather, instead, extrapolate financial data in ways that are utterly impossible.
OK, well, etc. He should have read the rest of the report but it obviates most of what he’s said. But that claim of ignorance. Spud tells us that:
But what they ignore altogether is that if public spending grows to 60 per cent of GDP – as they say is likely – then it is utterly implausible that taxes will stay at 40 per cent of GDP. That simply cannot happen if inflation is to be controlled. Because they do not understand that state spending is funded by government money creation, the result is that they do not apparently appreciate that taxes will have to rise if the state commands so much of the output of the state to meet essential needs – which all of these issues will represent. Unless they do, inflation would follow, like night does day.
Instead, they assume, wholly without reason, that there is a limit to which taxes can go, whatever the circumstances. Only dogmatic belief, and not evidence, can explain this bizarre assumption. They have only to look at other times of crisis (like wartime, in the UK’s most recent experience of existential threat) to realise that no such limit on tax raising exists. But they apparently have not been able to undertake that simple exercise and think that there is a ceiling on tax revenues beyond which it cannot rise. Their neoliberal beliefs blind them to reality.
Hmm.
The state will tax more as it spends more – it will have no choice but do so to prevent inflation, the causes of which the OBR clearly does not understand. If state spending reaches 60% of GDP, expect taxes to be at least 55% of GDP, and as a result, debt will not accumulate as the OBR suggests. In that one observation, I have solved the whole crisis the OBR says exists.
Well, one thought is that perhaps you cannot, in fact, collect 55% of GDP in taxes. Maybe?
As they didn’t in WWII despite Spud’s confident “They have only to look at other times of crisis (like wartime, in the UK’s most recent experience of existential threat) to realise that no such limit on tax raising exists.”
Ahem:
When World War II began in 1939, Britain’s stock of debt stood at 135 per cent of GDP. Spending as a share of GDP rose to its WWI peak of 62 per cent in 1944-45, of which 80 per cent was defence spending. Tax revenues as a share of GDP rose to 39 per cent.
However, they are also not enough. The massive health crisis these foods are creating, from increasing obesity to the rise in diabetes and dementia, with effects also seen in other physical and mental health, requires much more, including:
Planning controls on fast food outlets
Statutory limits on fructose content in food
Total advertising bans
Massive health warnings on packaging
Selective tax changes
Regulation on food displays in supermarkets highlighting risks
Statutory requirements for changes in school and hospital meals
Eventual bans on these abusive substances.
The man is going to ban pears. No, really, he is. High in fructose, see?
Rapid intensification of Hurricane Francine is a sign of a hotter world
Oliver Milman
The storm’s winds increased 35mph in 24 hours – something that global heating is only making more common
So, yeah, we said that global warming would cause more hurricanes. But this is different, right? Climate chaos means the hurricanes are heating up faster.
Lads, make sure you get this message out, right? Because it’s embarrassing having to explain why the more hurricanes didn’t turn up……
Low-paid migrant workers are an immediate drain on the public purse, costing taxpayers more than £150,000 each by the time they hit state pension age, according to the Government’s tax and spending watchdog.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said the average low-earner who came to Britain aged 25 cost the Government more overall than they paid in from the moment they arrived.
Bit of a pity they say this after, not before, allowing a few million in…..
Let us be clear about one thing: steel blast furnaces are in terminal run-off across the world. The US has not built one since 1964. It had 125 in the mid-1970s. Twelve are left today.
My saying was that no one is ever going to build another blast furnace in a rich country ever again.
No, not China, foreign competition. It’s that there’s so much scrap steel – we use less steel in anything we make these days – that recycling is the way to go in volume. This is why Nucor – whih hsa never run a blast furnace – hsa come from nothing to 50% or whatever it is of the US market. The decline of “the steel industry” is really the decline of blast furnaces and that’s a technological move, not a trade or foreign competition one.
Dame Diana Johnson, the policing minister, became a victim of crime while delivering a speech to senior officers about an “epidemic” of theft.
“New York City has a moral obligation to confront its historical role in the institution of slavery, including harms and long-lasting consequences,” Ms. Maser said in a statement.
As the effects upon now are zero then that’s that then, we’re done.
The Census reported there were 262,000 trans people, equivalent to 0.5 per cent of the population, or one in 200 people. It was the first time the survey had asked whether people identified as a gender that was different from their registered birth sex.
People whose first language was not English were four times more likely to say they were trans than those with English as their main language.
It led to anomalies such as a greater proportion of people in the London boroughs of Newham and Brent declaring themselves trans than that in places such as Brighton.
No, that doesn’t pass that simple test, does it?
Sand on picturesque Cornwall beach being ‘mined and sold for profit’
Isn’t that disgusting. For profit, eh? Sadly, there are far too many people for whom that would be the end of the story. It’s for profit, is it? Then ban it!
As it actually happens, they’re dredging to keep the harbour open …..
The analysis, for the European Trade Union Institute, shows that, contrary to what the far right has us believe – and what is increasingly received wisdom – its voting patterns on proposed EU directives do not indicate a pro-worker stance on socioeconomic issues, let alone a leftwing one. Quite the contrary: on virtually all eight issues we examined, the far – right’s voting behaviour suggests a stance that is indifferent, if not outright hostile, to workers’ rights. One striking example is the clear rejection of pay transparency and an opposition to an EU directive on adequate minimum wages, mainly among members of the ID group.
We are lefties. We define what is a pro-working laddie policy. People not on our lefty side do not vote as we think they should on economic policy. Therefore those not on our lefty side are not on the side of the working class.
That, you know, lefty economic policy might be shit for the working class doesn’t get a look in here.
Golfers defy 17 million-to-one odds with back-to-back holes in one
Two golfing friends have defied odds of 17 million to one by achieving the sport’s holy grail of a hole in one in consecutive shots.
Steve Wilmshurst, who is 58, and his 70-year-old playing partner Liam Nairn achieved the extraordinary feat on Monday while playing the 16th hole at the Studley Wood Golf Club in Oxfordshire.
Wilmshurst and Nairn were playing as part of a foursome and the National Hole-In-One Registry quotes the odds of two players achieving that feat on the same hole as 17 million to 1. An individual player is quoted at 12,000 to one to make a hole in one.
The odds, at the start, of two consecutive shots being a hole in one would be 12,000×12,000. One in 144 million.
But, well, some holes might get a hole in one, others definitely won’t. So, conditional one the first one going in the second is more likely – it’s possible to do a hole in one on this hole that is.
17 million to one sounds weird though.
And of course, once the first one went in then the odds of the second doing so are one in 12,000.
If only we still had that yacht floating around to explain this to us…..