Skip to content

Obviously

However, senior figures in the party and Jewish organisations have claimed the swell in membership is an example of “entryism” – the tactic of infiltrating an existing party with the goal of influencing it from within.

As Your Party imploded given the total inability of the British left to ever do anything they fled to the Greens. Which is duffering the same problem.

Those hard left groupuscules gain the support of those in hard left groupuscules and pretty much no one else. It’s the Reform/Restore problem of how far to the knuckle dragging right does anyone go? Because you do get to stage where the knuckle draggers turn off more than the support they themselves bring. Throw out all the tinted gains as much support – and as much revulsion – as nationalise everything and have the Comissars tell everyone what to do.

Jus’ the way it works.

Wait ’till she finds out about HRT

Are you tired? Feeling flat and irritable? Finding it difficult to concentrate? Maybe you’re experiencing the seemingly ubiquitous symptoms of modern life. Or, if you’re a man, you may have been told by countless uncredentialed online influencers that you’re probably suffering from “low T”.

For decades, testosterone has been marketed to men as a means to maximise virility. But in recent years, social media has fuelled the “T-maxxing” trend, in which men are encouraged to maximise their testosterone levels through either natural or artificial means.

Low testosterone is being blamed in the rightwing manosphere for a crisis of masculinity; global search interest in the term is up 60% from last year.

You know, manipulation of hormone levels is bad, very bad….

Eh?

Disabled people are being blocked from travelling abroad by NHS care boards and local councils that refuse to let them use their care funding outside the UK, the Guardian has learned.

Campaigners warn of a “postcode lottery” in England where the right of a disabled person to travel overseas depends on where they live or the whim of local officials – even when there is no extra cost to the taxpayer.

Disabled care users report having to abandon travel plans at the last minute, or go for years without a break, when authorities refuse to pay for their care abroad, even though they have agreed to meet all the travel expenses.

News to me that we do pay for people to go on their hols.

Lucy Robinson, 38, told the Guardian she had been prevented from attending international work events and going on a holiday because health officials in Oxfordshire had refused to allow her to use her care package abroad.

Robinson, who is quadriplegic and has a team of 24-hour personal assistants,

The claim is, apparently, that the NHS should pay for the complete team to go on such trips.

Campaigners have emphasised this is not about “holidays on the NHS”. There is no extra cost for the health service or local authorities, which are already paying for the care. In almost all cases, the care recipient is expected to pay for their assistant’s expenses and arrange their insurance.

Hmm. Dunno to be honest – seems like quite a big ask.

To explain

The deeply contented edifice that is the Financial Times, populated by teams of people who have done particularly well from maintaining the status quo of the last 45 years, does need to feel that it is under threat, because the reality is that the winds of change are blowing, and they are heading its way.

Spud pitched a piece to the FT which declined. They are therefore neoliberal – until he’s at war with Eastasia at least.

The wisdom of Nigel

The row centres on comments by Orla Minihane, Restore’s spokesman on the safety of women and girls, who argued that all British girls deserved protection against abuse, regardless of their families’ heritage.

At an event held by Restore’s Gateshead branch, she said: “We’ve got to protect our girls, but we have to remember that there are Indian, Asian girls, Pakistani girls, Bangladeshi girls, Somalian girls, who were born here, who are suffering this fate every day. And we have got to protect them also.”

The comments prompted a backlash from hard-line figures linked to Restore on social media, who argued that “white native girls are our priority” and “our own come first”. And they were furious when other senior figures backed Ms Minihane.

I recall, back in 2008, that at Ukip anyone who’d ever been BNP, NF or any of the rest of them was not allowed to join Ukip. On the basis that this sort would turn up if they were allowed. Restore, by trying to be that one step further out from Reform is facing exactly the same problem.

The point is not that such should not have parliamentary representation, or have a political representative. Bill Stone’s comment about cunts is true. It’s also not about whatever we might, or you or I might, think about the matter itself. Rather, there are views which are outside the Overton Window. Yes, it’s possible to shift that window, as has been done – most notably about the EU – and that takes time. It may even be a good idea to shift that window – as with the EU. But at any particular time there are ideas that are simply outside it. Electoral politics means that you cannot win if you are too wildly outside it. You lose too many toward the centre for however may you pick up at the extreme.

Please do note, this isn’t about the specific of this policy or complaint. Nor is it about whether Overton should or can be shifted. It’s that any party looking for electoral success has to cut off – as Restore is going here – the tail end of ideas. This is true of any set of ideas too.

It won’t be true if we ever move to a PR electoral system but it is true of a FPTP one.

All more than a bit odd

Ministers are considering a shake-up of the government’s social mobility watchdog that could range from giving it more teeth to abolishing it outright.

The move comes amid concerns that the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) – originally conceived under Gordon Brown’s government in 2010 – has become ineffective.

Class in Britain – one’s social level perhaps – has never actually been about economics. Not that government really has switches they can flip about economics and incomes of individials anyway. But the idea that they have control of how other people at large regard and determine the class of those they view is truly absurd.

Our Ange is fairly rich and very powerful – as is Ms. Haigh – but neither are going to be described as class acts. That’s just the way this country runs. So trying to determine it centrally ……..

Weird, weird, ideas

The Dutch tech company ASML is Europe’s most valuable company, thanks to its production of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines. These underlie the most advanced chip-making in the world, and as such are one of few possible choke-points on the entire AI industry. ASML has mastered the technology and intricate supply chain to make the $400m per unit machines needed to etch patterns on to silicon, where light is focused to a 13.5 nanometre wavelength (about 1/10,000th of the width of a human hair). Without its machines, there are no chips; without the chips, there are no more datacentres. That means everything from Taiwanese chip-maker TSMC’s $265bn investment in future fabrication facilities (known as “fabs”), to the $7tn-worth of datacentres that the industry is expected to build globally (though primarily in the US) by 2030. Without more datacentres using these current and next-generation chips, AI’s progression along an exponential growth (and risk) curve would come to a halt.

So the EU bans the export of ASML machines, the EU therefore controls AI development and isn’t that lovely?

Living in Paris is affecting Laddie’s brains. He’s starting to think like an enarque.

Eh?

Take a house as an example. You can increase a home’s value by taking out a bigger mortgage, and on paper your financial wealth has grown. But the house is the same house. No new bedrooms, no new kitchen, and no new real wealth has been created by increasing its price. What has changed is the claim on it, and the power that claim represents.

Why does taking out a mortgage on a house change the price of the house?

Is this just Spud being Spud?

This matters. Partly that is because private wealth cannot exist without public wealth. The roads, schools, hospitals and legal systems that make economic activity possible are public wealth, but poverty prevents some people from even having access to them.

Again, eh? Someone’s too poor to be able to walk down the road? Whut?

Fuck off, you vile, ghastly, shits

Criminals deemed a danger to society will be freed from jail under Andy Burnham’s early release plans, MPs and former justice secretaries have warned.

Opponents said Mr Burnham’s plans to create more prison space by ending a category of indefinite sentences could lead to “high-risk” offenders returning to the streets.

Folk get put in chokey for what they have done, not for what they might do.

Cunts.

Abject nonsense

A recruitment executive who was allowed to buy back the assets of his bust company in instalments, despite it accumulating almost £3m of debt, has placed his new business into liquidation after falling behind with promised payments to the administrator.

The news is the latest event to raise questions about the practice of “phoenixism”, accounting’s controversial art of liquidating companies to allow directors to return with a new entity, free of debts.

The tactic, which is legal, is often justified by supporters who argue it can save jobs and help secure some returns for creditors – although HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) estimates it costs the UK taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds a year.

If a company goes bust it doesn’t have the money to pay the taxman. So allowing someone to buy the company increases, not reduces, the amount available to pay the taxman.

That a phoenix then goes bust again just shows that it wasn’t a good business in the first place – that’s why it went bust. But this issue of HMRC losing out. By definition the pheonix offer must be the best available and also better than the returns from liquidation. Therefore it – by definition – increases payment to HMRC, not reduces.

Yes, I know what Jim is going to say. The above is still true.

They’re not saying, are they?

On the subject of forced marriage – the annual report from the people trying to deal with it is out or summat – we get this:

Dame Jasvinder warned some perpetrators hid behind accusations of racism.

She said: “They (perpetrators) will try and put you on the back foot. ‘This is our culture. This is our religion. You’re being racist’ or whatever, to put you on the back foot, to make you look the other way.

“And I do feel that it still does exist in terms of professionals having the confidence (to report such safeguarding concerns). Cultural acceptance does not mean accepting the unacceptable.”

And, you know, which culture?

The Home Office said forced marriage was “not a problem specific to one country, religion or culture; there is no archetypal victim or perpetrator, and no two cases are the same”.

And isn’t that a nice piece of blindness?

Interesting positions

The yes campaign had argued that joining the EU could offer greater security amid war in Ukraine and the Middle East, and given the US president’s unpredictable attitude towards the Arctic.

But the no campaigners’ warnings that EU membership would threaten the country’s sovereignty and fishing waters turned the vote in their favour.

So yes was arguing some pie in the sky and no was stating truths. Isn’t it joyous to find a small corner of politics where truth won out for a change?

Erm, why?

There is hardly a serious economist to be found who does not think that, in the face of mounting budgetary pressures, he should raise taxes.

Why not, ermm, cut spending in order to balance the books?

But, but….

The Chancellor is understood to want next month’s Budget to be framed as low-key and to make sure that inevitable tax rises are much lower than those pushed through by Rachel Reeves, his predecessor.

If Rachel pushed through substantial tax increases then why is it necessary to increase taxes again?

Umm, no, not really

To push the market interest rate on government bonds upwards, investors have to push the price of those bonds down. And there is only one way they can do that: they have to sell government bonds. Full stop.

But to have a significant effect, they have to sell enough of them. And, crucially, having sold them, they cannot then buy them back without reversing the very pressure they are supposedly trying to create.

They can, in fact, just stop buying them. Issuance of new to cover this year’s deficit is what, £100 billion? Another £200 billion matures each year and must be rolled over? About that?

£300 billion has to be sold each year, perhaps 10% of total ossuance. If people just stopped buying these new – a buyers’ strike – then that would push the price of gilts down. Pretty substantially too I’d say – but am not going to try to prove. So, Spud is, again, wrong….

To translate for you

Sunil Acharya is an international climate policy and just transition specialist based in Kathmandu, Nepal

So:

There is also a lesson for Nepal. It should not copy the economic model that created the climate crisis and call it development. We have an opportunity to build something different: an economy that puts people, livelihoods and ecological resilience before extraction.

Nepal must remain poor.

Loss and damage finance must therefore be additional to existing official development assistance, adaptation and mitigation finance. It needs to be accessible and predominantly grant-based.

And everyone else must pay for it. That’s what “just transition” means. The peasants remain peasants and the rich pay for them to stay that way.

The profits of Big Choke

Choking is sold to teens as a safe sexual practice. The research says it never is

Sold? So who’s making the profit? Which bastard capitalist shall we have a march against? Hmm, hmm?

Douglas says their survey found gender differences in prevalence rates. Young women were more likely to report having been strangled (61%) and young men were more likely to report strangling a partner (59%). Among trans and gender-diverse young people the rates were even higher, with 78% reporting ever having been strangled and 74% reporting ever having strangled someone else.

And what are we going to do about the perves then?

When Herbenick conducted her first nationally representative survey asking about sexual choking in the United States a decade ago, “the data came back and I was just floored,” she says. Only a small percentage of adults in midlife and beyond reported being choked, but for those aged 18-39, “more than a third of them had reported being choked during sex”.

The issue “felt really urgent”, says Herbenick, who is director of Indiana University’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion. When she spoke to her students about it, “they were like, ‘Oh no, it’s OK. We’re all doing the same thing.’

Ho hum, sexual fashions come and go then, eh? What to do, what to do?

All the experts who spoke to the Guardian agreed that widespread and robust sexual education that engages specifically with choking is a vital first step in preventing catastrophic health outcomes.

Probably not that. Talking to the newly sexually active about a particular sexual procaticew is going to increase, or reduce, the incidence of it?

No, I don’t have a solution either but having the middle aged – and likely middle class – sex ed teacher telling a class full of hormones “Definitely, don’t do that” might not work all the same.

Spring heeled intruder, eh?

He bounded into the packed rally, a spring-heeled intruder whose very presence announced a coup at last year’s Labour conference.

Polly just does have a thing for Labour PMs, don’t she? Recall the “one-eyed Viking”?

As for the rest of it just the standard insistence. If the current establishment are to lose power then quick, quick, change the electoral system.

Oh, right

NHS boss: Britain should learn from India’s world-class healthcare system
Dr Penny Dash says developing nation is using tech Britain ‘could only dream of’ to help patients

And there is some non-stupidity here. If you start with nothing then build something then you can indeed leap straight to the state of the art technology of the day. You are not led, through path dependence, to be limited by all the previous mistakes you’ve made.

But, also, make the NHS more like India. Hmm.