Your Tax Money At Work

Mountbatten-Windsor, now evicted to Marsh Farm on the Sandringham Estate, Norfolk, had a lease that permitted subletting, though it was not known how much he received through this.

He paid a £1m premium and £7.5m on refurbishment of Royal Lodge under the 75-year lease in 2003, and could be entitled to between £301,967.66 and £488,342.21 compensation by surrendering it early, the report said. However, the crown estate has previously said it is likely he will not be owed any compensation once dilapidations are taken into account.

That’s one way a lease can work. It’s the way most National Trust leases work. The building requires repair – or requires a lot of maintenance. So, you agree to pay all those costs and no – or peppercorn – rent. Wholly standard.

Meanwhile, the Prince and Princess of Wales’s Forest Lodge home in Windsor underwent £400,000 repairs carried out by the crown estate before the couple moved in with their three young children last year.

William and Catherine took out a 20-year lease in July on the Grade II-listed Georgian house, with gardens, paddock, a barn and three cottages set within 7.4 hectares, and pay £307,200 rent a year, reviewed every five years, the NAO said. They paid no upfront premium, and are responsible for internal refurbishments and alterations.

Or the landlord pays all the repairs before you move in, you pay no premium, and you pay full market rent while there. It’s possible, obviously, to mix and match these terms in any manner you like too.

Neither of these are odd, strange or even unusual sets of terms. But you can bet that there will be some who bitch about both sets of terms.

Fun, eh?

The NHS is taking action to tackle antisemitism after a government-ordered report found that Jewish patients and staff face “routine ostracism” in the service.

Anti-Jewish hatred in the NHS means some patients hide their identity and staff “suffer in silence”, a review by Lord Mann, the government’s adviser on antisemitism, has found.

What action is the NHS taking then? Hanging anyone wearing a keffiyeh to work? Inquiring minds want to know….

A coalition of more than a hundred refugee children’s organisations has said controversial plans to use AI to assess the age of young asylum seekers could lead to more children wrongly ending up in adult prisons or detention centres.

To be able to stick more claimed kiddies into adult centres. Thus, presumably, the complaint is that it might work?

A former CIA official with a top-secret security clearance has been accused of stealing 303 gold bars worth more than $40m (£29.7m) and stashing them at his home.

Well, OK, crooks everywhere. Obviously.

Between November 2025 and March this year, Mr Rush allegedly made several requests to the US government to receive the bars, each weighing one kilogram, for “work-related expenses”, then kept them at his home.

So a spy can just say “I need a gold bar or three for work” then?

The New York Times reported that he was a former senior CIA executive, though it is not clear what role Mr Rush held while at the organisation.

The FBI also noted that Rush appeared to have lied to his employers for two years about his education and military background.

They say Mr Rush had falsely claimed to be a navy pilot and graduate of Clemson University in South Carolina and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, according to The Associated Press.

Instead, he enlisted in the navy in 1997 and served in the US navy reserve from 2004 until 2015, when he was honourably discharged as a lieutenant. He also did not attend either college, the outlet discovered.

And, also, they don’t check CVs?

These are the spies on our side, right?

Alan Milburn is right, a young generation has been betrayed. Forget Tony Blair: we must attend to this
Polly Toynbee

OK:

The diagnosis is dire. Alan Milburn has published the first part of his forensic report on the lives and chances of young people, their fate after leaving school or college, the inadequacy of their health, education and pastoral care, and the reluctance of employers to hire them. This is a “moral crisis”, he says. There are now more than a million young people not in work, education or training (Neets), and Milburn expects that number to rise to 1.25 million without radical change. The government needs a “big idea”, he tells me. This should be it, “the spine, the purpose”.

So, a disaster. What should we do?

The right will find little comfort here. Did the raised employers’ national insurance, the increase in the minimum wage and the extra working rights cause the lack of entry-level jobs for the young? “Bullshit,” Milburn says bluntly. “This didn’t start two years ago. It’s not the cause of the crisis.”

So, no, we’re not going to undo the bad things that have made it worse. Govt never admits to error, eh?

Sigh.

The next Scottish government will need to make “really difficult” spending decisions soon after taking power, including tackling its large public sector pay bill, senior economists have said.

Economists with the Fraser of Allander Institute, at the University of Strathclyde, believe the manifestos published by Scotland’s political parties during the campaign failed to tell voters about the true scale of the challenge.

Because the Fraser laddies maintain a connection with reality they will be dismissed as neoliberals and anyway, it’s all the fault of the English. Obviously.

And with someone like that to blame of course everyone’s spent buckets in order to buy votes.

Andy Burnham has a credible plan to return to Westminster “within weeks”, his allies have said, with the Greater Manchester mayor expected to use a byelection fight to set out a new agenda for government.

If gives someone like Burnham a job – and an income – from which to plot for the centre. So too with Zack and being a London AM. He gets £60k a year for the AM jobe, a subsidy to the Green Party job.

That’s the problem with these many layers of politics – a breeding ground for politicians.

There have been further listings of confidential health records of UK volunteers on the Chinese website Alibaba since the breach reported last week, and the government is braced for further leaks, the science minister has said.

Addressing a House of Lords debate on the attempted sale of data belonging to 500,000 UK Biobank volunteers, Patrick Vallance said the government had worked with Chinese officials to remove additional postings on the online marketplace.

“New listings will emerge – there have been additional listings posted since the government were made aware of the issue last week – and we continue to work with the Chinese government to remove them quickly,” Lord Vallance said.

Looks like our precious health data would be safer if Palantir had it all.

This week, though, the Labour leader of the city council, John Cotton, announced that a settlement with Unite was, miraculously, “within sight”. Cotton said the settlement could not be approved by the council before the local election next week, but pledged to get it over the line “as a matter of absolute priority” if Labour are voted back in. “Only Labour”, he warned, “can end this dispute.”

Aha, aha, aha.

The crisis with the bins began two years later, when Unite launched its strike, triggered by the council’s decision to scrap the Waste Recycling and Collection Office (WRCO) role. Workers argue that the change downgraded their jobs and pay. The council says the WRCO role is redundant.

No, the lawyers have said that that’s just a transparent attempt to get around the Equality Act – wimmins must be paid equally for work of equal value, the judges have defined this as school dinners ladies, classroom assistants and binmen – so they can’t do that any more. The council doesn’t have enough cash to pay the dinner ladies and assistants £8k a year more each.

There is no solution without abolishing the Equality Act.

Historically it may come to be recognised as equivalent to the 1948 creation of the NHS, with Ed Miliband the Nye Bevan of our day. He has fought his cause in much the same ruthless way Bevan did. He faces the same ferocious (and politically deranged) opposition from the right, who will have to eat their hats over rejecting renewables. Just as the NHS is a prime reason for pride in Britain, we can expect the same national pride in homegrown energy independence, freeing us from rollercoaster markets and mercurial foreign oil and gas dictators: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump or ayatollahs.

But the NHS was a shit idea.

Local government should be local, right?

There is also an added local dimension to the party’s campaigning in Havering. Mr Farage has promised an independence referendum on whether the borough should leave Greater London altogether, escaping Sir Sadiq’s control and returning to its Essex roots.
“Sixty years on from the 1965 expansion of London, people here still feel they’re part of Essex,” says Mr Farage after his walkabout. “Go to Chislehurst and they still say they’re part of Kent, and they still write it on their envelopes.

Back to the ancient counties, the boroughs and all. And doesn’t actual democracy mean that the people themselves get to decide such things?

The prime minister said on Friday that it was “unforgivable” and “staggering” that senior officials did not tell him that Mandelson failed a security vetting process weeks before he took up his role as ambassador to Washington.

Olly Robbins was forced out of his job as permanent secretary of the Foreign Office on Thursday after it was revealed his department granted Mandelson developed vetting clearance against the advice of the relevant agency.

So, acshully, Mandy didn’t fail. Beause the clearance was issued. Even if against advice, but it’s the ministry which decides and issues.

What fun, eh?

A government spokesperson said: “Diego Garcia is a key strategic military asset for both the UK and the US. Ensuring its long-term operational security is, and will continue to be, our priority – it is the entire reason for the deal.

We ensure the security of a military base by giving it away to a foreign govt largely controlled by one of our enemies/rivals.

Only someone who did PPE could believe that.

It’s a big problem for the National Trust, which rents out 2,500 properties – a large number of which are thatched and built with cob and timber. The charity must upgrade them under the net zero rules at significant cost, and many of the properties are listed or else impossible to upgrade to the required standard.

All must, etc etc. But that’s the problem – some cannot. So, what do we then do with old properties – like listed ones – that cannot be brought up to standard?

Bureaucracies simply don;t do nuance, nor do dictats from the centre. Sigh.

Since then, the US has pushed countries across the region to terminate these agreements, branding them “forced labour” and even “human trafficking” because the Cuban state retains a share of salaries. Conveniently ignoring that these doctors were trained free of charge by the Cuban government, unlike their heavily indebted counterparts in countries such as the UK where medical graduates have the onerous burden of student debt for decades.

So, if you get trained by the State – say, we go back to grants for uni – then the State gets to allocate your labour forever? You become, in fact, helots of the State?

Well, there’s an argument in favour of student loans then, eh?

The Greek prime minister has vowed to tackle what he has called a “deep state” he says is plaguing the country, as he sought to address a growing political crisis over a farm fraud scandal that has forced the resignation of multiple government ministers.

Not which govt scandal, not which Greek govt scandal, but which Greek govt farm subsidies from the EU scandal? This the one where payments were being made for olive groves 5 miles out in the Gulf of Corinth, that Greek govt scandal about EU farm subsidies?

False claims allegedly involved banana plantations on Mount Olympus, olive groves on military air force installations and archaeological sites being cited as grazing land for livestock.

Could actually be that one, yes.

The Fair Work Agency (FWA), which is being launched on Tuesday, is a cornerstone of Labour’s Employment Rights Act. It will bring together several existing labour enforcement bodies and its responsibilities will include policing the minimum wage, holiday pay and modern slavery.

At a recent meeting with civil society groups, Matthew Taylor, its incoming chair, listed the five priorities the Department of Business and Trade had laid out for the FWA in its first year. These included “thought leadership” and “reducing regulatory burdens”.

Brand new bureaucracy, massive efficiency gain by combining several pre-extant. Then one of the major goals is “thought leadership”.

These morons actually believe all the TED talks shite, don’t they?

You have to tell the system what you’re going to plant in hte garden in order to gain planning permission?

Kill the system with fire. Take off and dust it from orbit, it’s the only way.

Up to 12,000 of Britain’s most prolific shoplifters will avoid jail under Labour laws scrapping most prison sentences of under one year.
Judges and magistrates should only impose jail sentences of less than one year in “exceptional circumstances” as part of the Sentencing Act passed last year.
Ministry of Justice data show that 98 per cent of shoplifters currently in jail would qualify for alternative “community punishments” under the new law, which took effect last month.

Yes, this does mean that disincentives also matter.

The base idea of having government is that we gain public goods from government. Defence of the real magainst the Frenchies, public order through a criminal law system and so on. These are the prime duties, the purpose, of the system.

So, we’ve not an RN any more, we’ve not public order as we’ve not a criminal law system worthy of the name – why in buggery do we bother feeding all the lanyards therefore?

She said: “The council continually denied it but the figures here, that the Guardian have exposed, show the truth. The facts are clear. The council needs to stop wasting Birmingham residents’ money trying to break the strike and instead resolve the strike.”

The Equality Act says that binmen must be paid the same as workers of equal value – teaching assistants and school dinner ladies. Pay sufficient to get binmen to turn up must be offered to all those many, many others when they’re already happily enough turning up for work.

Brum is not allowed to vary pay so that they get enough binmen without paying all those many, many, others more.

Rewscind the Equality Act at the strike would be over 30 minutes later.