The core purpose of government is to provide freedom from fear. That means freedom from physical threat, Freedom from want, freedom from discrimination and freedom from the deliberate chaos that destroys the social fabric on which democracy depends.
Couple of hundred million dead people would like to point out that freedom from government is also of value….
Luba Kassova, lead author of the report, said: “What we concluded by doing this analysis is that the gender-inequality lens is all but missing from coverage of the Epstein story. This means that news coverage does not get to the root causes of the problem.”
Birds able to screw $50k a year – which is the sort of value of a freebie apartment in New York – out of blokes for the very occasional blow job. Taking advantage of male idiocy in this way is very gender unequal.
Media coverage of violence against women and girls and misogynistic harassment is at a “pitiful” low, despite a proliferation of high-profile cases of men abusing women and children, and a rise in AI-assisted violence against women and girls, new research shows.
Of course, given that this report stems from the same “university” that used to employ Spud – Islington Tech – they get this the wrong way around. This is, of course, abuse of male sexuality by those with the monopoly on what men desire.
Fans of Nicola Sturgeon will not be drawn to read Joanna Cherry’s new memoir. Which is a pity, for Keeping the Dream Alive reads like a much-needed antidote – or at least balance – to Sturgeon’s own autobiography, published last year, a book that painted her as a much-abused feminist saint whose only concern was for the welfare of others and, above all, for the project of Scottish independence.
Cherry is having none of that. Page after page of delicious details concerning the internal machinations at the highest levels of the Scottish National Party (SNP), in the decade that followed the independence referendum, are a godsend to Scottish-politics addicts.
It’s the ugly kids doing the entertainment bitchfest. Always has been, always will be:
Time and again, Cherry complains of being ignored or humiliated by seemingly trivial and spiteful acts by some of her Westminster colleagues. For example, she claims that the tradition of “prayer cards”, where members can use small green cards to reserve a specific seat in the chamber if they’re not present for prayers at the start of the session, was exploited by the party leadership, which would regularly ensure that every place on the front bench was reserved for other front-bench colleagues, forcing Cherry to ask questions and make statements and speeches from the more junior position of the back benches.
This is it, there is no other. This is how ag subsidies are decided, this is how the price of ‘leccie is decided. It’s all whinges over who gets two slices of glace cherry on their cake instead of only one.
It’s a wholly awful method of running a place. As we can observe…..
Pet owners across the UK could be banned from buying flea treatment for cats and dogs under new government rules.
Ministers have begun an eight-week consultation on letting only veterinary practitioners or pharmacists give out the potent, pesticide-based flea treatments, to ensure “correct usage”. At the moment, the flea and tick treatments can be bought from any pet shop.
That’s right children, “restrictive practice”. If only vets can sell Advantix then there will be no competitive pressure to reduce the price of Advantix. “Restrictive practice”.
So, Amazon wants low prices on its site. If you’re selling elsewhere cheaper, then you don’t get access to the goodies – promotion, good siting etc – on Amazon. Seems OK to me.
CA claims this means Amazon is forcing higher prices everywhere else. Well, no, not really.
Hundreds of previously redacted records reveal how Amazon has put pressure on independent sellers using its platform into raising their prices on the sites of competitors such as Walmart and Target, so that Amazon can appear to have lower prices, California authorities allege.
Not wholly – the pressure was to lower their prices on Amazon, surely?
The vast majority of this sum has been paid, as will be noted, since the Bank of England decided, wholly unnecessarily, to increase the Bank of England base rate from 2022 onwards, with the supposed goal of tackling inflation in the UK economy, on which those interest rate increases did not, and could never have had, an impact, because the inflation in question was imported from international commodity markets, where prices were inflated as a consequence of the actions of financial speculators, some of them undoubtedly based in UK commercial banks, who artificially inflated commodity prices after the onset of war in Ukraine.
Must be the shortage of tin foil bringing that level of economic understanding on, no?
Lord George Robertson – a former Labour defence secretary, and former Secretary General of NATO – has made a claim about the UK’s defence capability that is not merely wrong; it is dangerously wrong.
His argument is that the Iran War now justifies higher defence spending, and that social security is the obstacle standing in the way of a proper defence strategy for Britain. This video explains why that argument is the precise inversion of the truth.
Defence is not about weapons, budgets, or protecting elite interests overseas. Defence is about protecting people. It is about ensuring people enjoy freedom from fear, including from physical threat, from poverty, from want, and from the social instability that erodes the fabric of a nation from within. By that definition, which is the only definition that actually serves the majority of British citizens, social security is not the enemy of defence: it is the foundation of it.Consider what a serious defence requires. You need a fit population. You need people who are healthy, well-nourished, mentally resilient, educated, and able to serve.
You do not build that population by cutting the systems that feed children, heat homes, and provide security in times of illness and unemployment. You destroy it.
Cut social security, and you cut the recruitment pipeline for the armed forces themselves. You weaken national resilience precisely when you claim to be strengthening it.
So when the Mad Mullahs launch atomic bomb tipped rockets at London our defence is “Hey, look at our Gini!”.
Not even if they tried to tell me my own age.
The owner of the Drax power plant in North Yorkshire received record subsidies of almost £1bn for burning trees to generate electricity in 2025, a climate thinktank has calculated.
The company was paid £999m last year for generating about 4.5% of Great Britain’s electricity from its biomass plant, costing each household £13 a year, according to analysts at Ember.
As has been pointed out the actual emissions here are higher than if they just burned the coal the plant is built on top of. And, obviously, cheaper. But this is what you get when you allow lanyards to try to plan things.
So, hang the lanyards.
where only 4,522 social and affordable homes were started in 2024-25, down sharply from the 26,386 starts in 2022-23, according to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).
And Barrat Redrow is reducing the amount of land it buys to build upon, as Berkeley recently also did.
Summat’s wrong with housebuilding, eh?
My best guess – and it is only a guess – is that there’s no profit in it. For the planning system demands all the potential profit and more in Sec 106 bennies. So, no one builds as there’s no profit in it.
Had he simply paid all the extra money he extracted from Ecotricity as salary or bonus, Vince would have coughed up nearly £27m in income tax, assuming a rate of 45 per cent. Of course, it’s hard to know the counterfactual, or precisely what he did pay. But, according to the tax expert Dan Neidle, the £7m share buyback would probably have been taxed at the top dividend rate, which was 37.5 per cent in 2015, while the £33m difference between his purchase and sale of shares in the Electric Highway Company would (assuming that HMRC concluded that the purchase cost of £49 really was market value) have been taxed at the capital gains tax rate then prevailing of just 20 per cent.
Worth reading this about Dale Vince. No, he doesn;t pay himself dividends, as he says he wouldn’t. It’s also true that his cash extraction from the company is really interestingly tax efficient. But read it all.
If you can’t get past the subscription, try archive.ph
Allbirds, the maker of minimalist wool sneakers beloved by Silicon Valley, announced on Wednesday that it is leaving shoes behind and pivoting to artificial intelligence. The new focus and rebrand as “NewBird AI” sent the company’s stock up 582% as of mid-day during a flurry of trading.
The surging stock price and new direction is a bizarre, rapid turnaround for a company that had fallen into disrepair in recent years. Once valued at $4bn, Allbirds’ shares had lost 99% of their worth since 2021 and earlier this month the company announced plans for a $39m sale to brand management firm American Exchange Company.
Typical Guardian and finance. It’s nothing, at all, to do with a shoe firm pivoting to AI.
They sold the shoe brand to an investor. They’ve thus got a shell company which is quoted on a major exchange. The shell company raised some more money – $50 million – and that is to be spent upon graphics cards for those who want AI compute time.
Could be a good idea, could be a bad one. But it’s really nothing at all to do with a shoe company doing AI. It’s someone picking up a quoted shell.
Dianna Russini, one of the NFL’s most high-profile reporters, is photographed holding hands with New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel at a fancy resort in Sedona, Arizona. Rumors fly. Vrabel and Russini, who are both married to other people, issue statements denying the assumptions of something untoward. But the firestorm only grows. Russini resigns from her post at the Athletic, Vrabel continues with his job as usual.
The female reporter’s career is in shambles. Meanwhile, it’s business as usual for the male head coach.
Who could have seen this coming?
The most obvious – and clearly my view – is that it always is the woman who is the brazen hussy and must be punished. The bloke’s just exercising his right to extra pussy after all.
Other than the religious argument- they’ve both sinned, into hte fires of Hell with both – there’s eally only the one other left. A coach shagging someone he directly employs is very Tsk given potential power imbalances. Other than that, well, and?
But a reporter, erm, haven’t we just been having problems with that? Wasn’t it some bird sho shagged everyone she ever interviewed? This was all though to be very bad for some reason. I mean I dunno, a reputation like that could make finding someone to interview easier. But it all was thought to be very bad, no?
So, it’s very bad then, right?
when we were both members of the Progressive Economic Forum, which eventually proved itself to be anything but progressive on the issue of modern monetary theory, as a result of which I was expelled from membership.
My assumption is that he couldn’t get his resignation in in time, unlike that accounting body.
Unsurprisingly, the reaction of markets to the UK situation has been adverse. Alongside Italy, it has seen the biggest increase in its potential government borrowing costs as a consequence of this war. They have increased by 0.5% as a result. Apart from Italy, France is the only other large country to see an increase of broadly similar scale, with its market interest rate increasing by 0.45%.
Interest rates going up by more than other places. OK.
Firstly, the sheer size of the London financial market-based economy is one reason why we will always have excessive market speculation against perceived government courses of action in the UK. When you provide a few people in the City of London with a toxic weapon, in the form of control over other people’s money, with the opportunity to speculate against the best interests of their government, whose thinking they believe, with good reason, will be excessively rigid when it comes to issues of economic management, you provide those few people with the opportunity to undertake speculative trades from which it is almost certain they can profit, at cost to both the country where they are resident, the government whose activities they are undermining, and the people whose funds they are using to undertake this activity.
It’s a conspiracy! The Joooos!
Actually, it’s that the UK has a vast budget deficit and an equally vast national debt. The former of which leads to inflation – as even MMT says. So, higher inflation, higher nominal interest rates. No conspiracy required.
The great British blackout was once a threat that hung over the country during the depths of winter, when generators struggled to meet demand or storms destroyed power lines.
But today, as the net zero revolution rolls on, the greatest threat to grid stability could land on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
According to the National Energy System Operator (Neso), the body responsible for keeping the lights on, the UK power grid is at increasing risk of being overwhelmed by surges in solar power.
Underpinning this threat is the fact that too many solar panels have been connected to the grid without any way of monitoring them or controlling their output.
This centralised planning, so, so good, innit?
Planning by politics, we are so blessed.
Walter Zanre told Sky News that wholesale olive oil prices had fallen in recent months but said supermarkets were refusing to follow suit.
“We brought prices down twice last year and it’s not all been passed on to the consumer, which is a huge frustration,” he said.
It follows a surge in the price of olive oil since 2022, after adverse weather in olive-growing countries led to poor harvests.
Spain, which produces almost half of the world’s olive oil, was hit by droughts and heatwaves in 2023 and 2024. The weather caused global olive oil production to fall by almost one million tonnes.
It caused higher prices for many well-known olive oils, including Filippo Berio, which uses a blend of oils from across Europe despite being an Italian brand.
The average price of a 500ml bottle of Filippo Berio has risen from £3.75 in 2022 to £7.50 now, according to the tracker Trolley.co.uk.
Tesco’s own-brand olive oil stands at £5.50 for 500ml. This is up from £5.20 this time last year, Trolley.co.uk data shows. The same-size bottle of Nicolas Alziari olive oil, at Waitrose, sells for £22.50.
The boss of Filippo Berio argued that prices should have come down rapidly for customers after stronger production more recently meant there was better availability of oil.
Obviously, supermarkets are charging what they are because they can. That’s how markets work, that supply, demand thing. Every individul supplier does their best to rip the consumer off – it’s the competition for the profits to be made which reduces prices.
On the other hand, brother harvested his olives (more for fun and exercise, but still) and was being paid €5 a litre at the mill. So on that own brand stuff there’s a 100% mark up, a 50% margin, including all the expenses of bottling, transport, the shop itself and so on. Seems reasonable enough to me.
A Labour MP who told the Commons that she was a rape victim is leading a rebellion that threatens to kill off David Lammy’s plans to cut jury trials.
Charlotte Nichols, the MP for Warrington North, has tabled an amendment to the Justice Secretary’s bill that would establish specialist courts with juries for victims of sexual offences, including rape and domestic abuse.
Once we have special courts then we’ll have special rules for them, special training for the judges and so on. This has been a desire of the more extreme feminists for decades, that rape and similar must be tried to different rules than everything else.
You know, that boring insistence upon evidence and all that malarkey? So passe, eh?
Once there are those special courts then inevitably will follow those special rules.
No.
“The US’s energy dominance strategy seeks to entrench dependence on fossil fuels, stall the green transition and strengthen US power,” said Kevin Cashman, a researcher with TSP, who wrote the analysis. But increasingly cheap and scalable solar power and battery storage weaken such a strategy.
“For countries like Cuba – with enormous renewable potential, but suffering blackouts and widespread suffering under a cruel and illegal US-imposed energy blockade – a transition to green electricity would reduce US leverage and provide a shining example to the world.”
Typicl lefty nonsense. Cuba must be a shining beacon to the world etc etc etc, boo hiss to the US etc.
So, it should go renewables, at a cost of only $8 billion. OK, I guess:
Which leaves the question: who would pay? “Financing this transition should … be understood as reparative climate finance,” the report argues. Not only would Cubans be able to pay back investments through savings on cheaper energy, but the transformation “would set an important example of a rapid energy transition under conditions of external constraint”.
You’ve got to pay for it, you you little British taxpayer you. Because socialism in Cuba has been so successful that they cannot possibly pay for it themselves.
Begoña Gómez, the wife of Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has been charged with embezzlement, influence peddling, corruption in business dealings and misappropriation of funds at the end of a two-year investigation by a judge in Madrid.
Gómez, 55, has been accused of using her influence as the wife of the socialist prime minister to secure and manage a post at Madrid’s Complutense University, and of using public resources and personal connections to further her private interests.
That’s like discovering an appreciation of markets in hte current British cabinet. Just not what you expect.
The investigation into Gómez was triggered by a complaint from Manos Limpias (Clean Hands), a self-styled trade union with far-right links that has a history of using the courts to pursue those it deems a threat to Spain’s democratic interests.
Those evil far-righties, eh?
The decision to formally charge Gómez comes at a fraught time for Sánchez as the prime minister’s younger brother, David, is due to be tried next month on charges of influence-peddling. According to another complaint from Manos Limpias, David Sánchez was handed a bespoke job by the socialist-led council of the south-western city of Badajoz in July 2017, when his brother was the national leader of the socialist party. He denies the charges.
Meanwhile, two senior former figures in Sánchez’s government are on trial for alleged corruption. The prime minister’s former right-hand man, the ex-transport minister José Luis Ábalos, is accused – along with his former aide Koldo García and the businessman Víctor de Aldama – of taking kickbacks on public contracts for sanitary equipment during the Covid pandemic. Ábalos and García, who deny all charges, are facing sentences of 24 years and 19 years respectively while Aldama, who has already admitted to his part in the alleged scheme, faces a seven-year sentence.
Evil, evil, far-righties.
Remind me: when did the British people vote to allow the mass immigration of millions of low-skilled foreign nationals, many of whom don’t work and never will? Immigrants who will cost the British taxpayer hundreds of billions – a national bill that breaks down into £20,000 for every single UK household, and could bankrupt the country.
Yes, £20,000 a British household. That is the real cost of the “Boriswave”, the mass immigration made legal and encouraged by successive Conservative governments, as exposed in a report launched yesterday by Reform UK.
The calculation might well be right, but that bill is pretty high, no?
We’re back in St Milt’s world – you can have free movement or a welfare state but only one of the two.