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October 2025

He’s just so well informed, ain’t ‘ee?

nor do we have any dollar debts.

This is not, in fact, true.

Sure, we’ve not much $ government debt but there is some out there.

Then there’s the usual mistake:

And secondly, the demand for government bonds is strong and continuing precisely because  banks, life insurance companies, pension funds, and foreign governments, in particular, all want to own them.
…..
The Economist also failed to notice that around a quarter of all UK government debt is owned by the government.

Demand for gilts is so strong that the Bank of England has to own a quarter of all in issue given that demand for gilts is so strong.

Economic planning’s difficult, see?

Last week, as part of its revisions to legacy gross domestic product figures, the ONS made a draconian cut to its estimate for the household savings ratio in the final quarter of 2022, hacking it by 4.1 percentage points to a little over 5 per cent. The near-halving of the ratio amounted to one of the largest downgrades by the statistics office in the past three decades. The ONS also made deep cuts to its estimates for the years 2022 to 2024.

Because you don’t, in fact, know the numbers you think you know that you’re doing your planning from.

Calling Sir Cowperthwaite to the white telephone, A Herr Hayek is on the line.

There’s your problem then

Come harvest time, foreign workers are our salvation across many areas in the agricultural sector. This year the government made 43,000 seasonal visas available for agricultural workers via six approved agencies, including the one Krastanova works for, Fruitful Jobs. “What we’d term ‘local’ won’t do it for minimum wage, or indeed any wage that makes using them financially tenable for us as a business,” Cran-Crombie says.

You’re paying too little as against the other options available.

Which tells us soemthing interesting about the past too. We’re told that the proles were driven off the land by enclosure and then they just had to work for The Man in the factories for a pittance.

Whereas something rather more truthful would be that the factories paid – in cash and working/living standards terms – better than the fields. Which is why people flooded from one to the other.

They all kept shtum last time

Leavitt’s words did little to explain Trump’s thinking as to why he might have posted the fake video. But, in truth, it was only the most recent example of increasingly odd behavior from Trump, who has – like his predecessor Joe Biden – been subject to questions over his mental acuity in recent months.

But because R then it’s all v important this time, right?

A point of information here

Activists from New Zealand detained in Israel after they were removed from vessels carrying aid to Gaza are being held in poor conditions without access to water and legal representation, their families have said, as dozens more passengers from the Global Sumud Flotilla were set to be deported.

You don’t get legal representation if you’re held by the US border police either. So?

Political economist tries economics

The answer  is that we have to rebuild those public goods on which we all depend: health, education, housing, and infrastructure.

Health, beyond pandemics, is not a public good. Education, beyond the societal effects of basic literacy, is not a public good. Housing, beyond dead bodies stinking up the streets, is not a public good. Infrastucture might, sometimes, be a public good.

Public goods are things that are non-excudable and non-rivalrous. Can the NHS not treat something? Yep, so it’s excludable. A university can exclude – not a public good. We actually put locks on houoses to make them excludable.

They’re not public goods.

As Chris Snowden has pointed out

Joe Wicks: My fight against UPFs and why fat jabs aren’t the answer
The fitness coach has made a documentary highlighting the problems of ultraprocessed foods which has not gone down well with some of his followers

Apparently all that money piled up in lockdown ha gone. So, new gig, new grift required. If van Tulleken can why not?

This is interesting then

The phrase “opioid crisis” will forever be linked with the US, where the overprescription of these drugs, driven by aggressive marketing campaigns, caused millions to become addicted to painkillers. But the scale of the tragedy in America can overshadow dangers elsewhere. It is not the only country where trouble is brewing over these highly addictive drugs.

Two of those countries are England and Wales, where yearly deaths due to drug poisoning are at their highest since records began. At last count, in 2023, they stood at 5,448. And almost half of those, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), are due to opioids, a growing menace. Deaths from this group of chemical compounds, which includes heroin and morphine as well as synthetic newer versions like nitazene and fentanyl, have doubled in the last decade.

So, maybe the American problem was not caused by overprescription if the same thing is happening in a place without the overprescription?

Not that I know anything in particular but it’s an obvious question to ask, no?

Racism about shaving apparently

The secretary is going to outlaw beards in the military. “No more beardos!” he rejoiced. “We don’t have a military full of Nordic pagans.”

Beards are mostly already banned, but there are exceptions for religious reasons or temporary exemptions for medical conditions such as shaving rashes. It’s interesting to note that the ethnic group most susceptible to these skin conditions is not white men.

Dunno about anyone else but I do tend to think that the prevalence of shaving rashes can be left as just one of those things rahther than some signifier of a deeper racism. But maybe that’s just me.

I mean I know, but still, really?

Yes, yes, the NHS is the national religion and all that but seriously?

Sarah Mullally, the first female archbishop of Canterbury, is a trailblazer with invaluable NHS leadership skills

We tend not to think of the NHS as being well led now, do we?

The 63-year-old is a person who understands the levers and cogs of a historic institution such as the Church of England or a national institution such as the NHS.

She’s a bureaucrat.

The real and enduring impact of Anglican churches is felt in villages, towns and cities across the UK, across the world, where people gather to pray, run food banks, host AA meetings, reach isolated elderly people, invite parents and toddlers to play, and offer shelter for people who are hungry or homeless.

The challenge for the established church, praying for every soul, not just those who come to Sunday services, is to get our doors open, keep them open, welcome everyone without exception and never allow the church to become a cosy club of the already initiated.

Not much there about the fear of hell and damnation, is there?

The Rev Lucy Winkett is rector of St James’s Piccadilly and priest in charge of St Pancras church, Euston Road, and a writer, broadcaster and musician

She is an answer to the prayers of all those who long for change in society
Lucy Winkett

Orthodox member of the lanyard class is going to change everything, is he?

Rightie Ho Then

But I saw a definition recently, which I thought was really good. It was written by a chap whom I vaguely know  called Umair Haque, and he suggested that fascism divides humanity into superhuman and subhuman groups, and that’s all that we need to know to define whether a person is fascist or not, or whether an ideology is fascist or not.

As neoliberals are lesser and not neoliberals are not lesser then that makes Spud a fascist.

Good to know, eh?

Anyone dividing into proletariat and bourgeoisie – for the purposes of extolling the proles that is – is a fascist but then we know that of SWP and Stalin and all that lot anyway.

Anyone insisting that only Arabs – the higher peoples – can live in the Middle East is a fascist. Anyone insistent that whites, as lesser beings, cannot be in Africa……well, you get the point.

As so often the moment we take one of Spud’s assertions seriously we find ourselves in a lunatic world.

Oh Aye?

I blame Tony Blair:

Labour sabotaged the trial of two alleged Chinese spies by refusing to describe the country as the “enemy”, it has been claimed.

Chris Cash, 30, and Christopher Berry, 33, had been accused of handing foreign policy reports to the Chinese government when charges against them were dropped last month in what the prime minister’s spokesman described as an “extremely disappointing” turn of events.

Prosecutors said that the “evidential standard” for the offence — namely the collecting and passing of information that would be “directly or indirectly useful to an enemy” — was “no longer met”.

It has now emerged, however, that ministers withdrew a key witness who had been tasked with testifying that China was an “enemy” of the UK, according to The Telegraph.

For it was ‘ee that downgraded the punishment for Hig Treason from the hempen dance.

Not that that’s wholly relevant given that the trouble here is withholding evidence, not the punishment, but fun just to mention it again.

This is very weird

Before sentencing Combs on Friday, Subramanian also delivered remarks in court and said that Combs “abused the power and control with women you professed to love”.

“You abused them physically, emotionally and psychologically,” he said.

Subramanian said that “a substantial sentence must be given” to “send a message to abusers and victims alike that abuse against women is met with real accountability”.

But of course Combs was found not guilty of everything except Mann Act violations – transporting someone interstate for the purposes of paid sex or whatever it is. The judge is then sentencing him for all the stuff he was found not guilty of. Or even hadn’t been charged with and possibly weren’t even illegal.

That seems, umm, odd shall we say?

So, that’s that one put to bed then

Software giant Palantir snubs ‘undemocratic’ digital ID scheme
The US-based company, which had been touted as a potential bidder, said that it would not seek any contracts around it

Global Witness* and Neck Dearden can stop hyperventilating. Because they really were lining up to say that the only thing wrong with it is that the American hypercapitalists would steal Our Data.

*They might be Global Justice Now by now.

Fun, innit?

They could do that because of an arcane Senate procedure called “reconciliation”, which allowed the big ugly to get through with just 51 votes rather than the normal 60 required to overcome a filibuster.

The majority wins in a democracy and this is an arcane procedure. But, you know, Robert Reich.

Anyway, the 60 and filibsuter. That’s about whether to have a vote at all. It actually makes no difference at all to the vote itself.

I’m really not sure you know

For 24 long months now, Gaza has become the most dangerous place in the world to practise our profession. Israel prohibits foreign journalists from entering the territory, so the truth relies exclusively on Palestinian reporters – almost all of whom are members of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, affiliated to the IFJ. Too often they work without protection and without refuge for their families. And all too often, they are directly targeted.

So, all journos are locals. With their families and frieds – as well as themselves – all living under Hamas rule.

I would assume the same percentage of journos are Hamas as percentage of the population. But then I’d go further. Hamas are not known for being cuddly civil libertarians. So I’d assume that all output from journos accords with Hamas views. Not – necessarily – because the journos themselves are Hamas but because Hamas knows the journos, their families and friends and where they all live.

I’d expect simple self-preservation to mean that the news reported is the news Hamas wants reported.

As I’ve pointed out before we didn’t believe German media in 1944 (or Soviet in 1980 and so on) so why should we now?

The Plan

To answer the Galbraith Question, we must reverse the imbalance he described, requiring that we:

Rebuild public goods, requiring investment in housing, health, education, infrastructure, and culture as the true basis of prosperity.

Tax private excess. Wealth, inheritance, and speculative gains must be taxed to fund collective provision.

Challenge advertising. We must regulate the industries that profit from manufacturing insecurity and demand.

Redefine prosperity. We must measure success not by consumption of status goods but by the quality of public life.

Kneecap ticket sales are down so we’re going to confiscate Granny’s house to pay them.

Comrade.

Why is this unlikely?

A world expert on ancient fermented beverages, McGovern was perhaps an unlikely ambassador for prehistoric booze: Dr Pat, as he was known, sported an excessively bushy beard, a thatch of white hair, an array of cardigans and large wire spectacles. He was proper and polite, the epitome of the respectable professor.

It’s every Camra member ever, isn’t it?

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