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Cometh the Hour

But let me be clear, we do not need a new Labour Prime Minister. Even less do we need a new Conservative Prime Minister. And we most certainly do not need Nigel Farage in Number 10, not that I really think he has any ambition to get there, so keen has he been in the past to avoid responsibility, accountability and the loss of personal income that will go with both.

Instead, we need new politics. The rise of the Green Party of England and Wales reflects that fact, but so far the offering is flawed, potentially by policy incoherence, but also by entryism, which will always be a problem for a party in its position, where its popularity is rising so rapidly.

That is why the foundations matter. And it is to those foundations that I want to dedicate my time.

Cometh the Potato. Perhaps as Leader, perhaps in the more eminent position of eminence graisseux. But cometh all the same, eh?

Blimey

By keeping everything on a small scale, most micropubs do not make more than £90,000 profit in a year, which keeps them below the VAT registration threshold.

The Tele needs to get with the program. It’s sales, not profits, of under £90k that leaves out VAT.

But, you know journos and numbers. Acshully, journos and knowledge…..they don’t even get booze right these days, O Tempora, O Mores…..

Oh Dear. Never Mind.

Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative MP for Sutton Coldfield, agreed that the result risked leaving Birmingham “ungovernable”, adding: “There was the hope that there might be a chance for strong and sensible leadership. But I’m afraid that is not the result that the electorate has delivered.

Perhaps the electorate prefers not to have strong leadership?

Now, if I had just been elected there I would have one and only the one constant refrain. Abolish the Equality Act. That binmen’s strike is cause by the insane insistence that the dinner ladies and classroom assistants must be paid the same amounts as the binmen. Work of equal value, see?

So just hammer away at that. We cannot solve this problem while national politics insists upon this. Thus this is something that has to be solved by national politics. And just keep shouting that. Just say it to local newspaper reporters, the local TV station, interviews with anyone, every speech in the council chamber. Go all very boring and Cato on them. Delenda est equalitas.

Sure, it doesn’t help much with everything else but politics is about using the issues available to make the point.

The set reading text for today is The Mouse That Roared

Sir Keir therefore had a 45-minute warning that his premiership was being formally challenged – by an MP almost no one outside Westminster or her north London constituency has ever heard of.
Ms West told the BBC that she already had 10 backers for her “stalking horse” bid, which is designed to trigger a leadership election that another contender would win.

After all, the impossible does happen, sometimes twice before breakfast.

Ouch

Reform UK came second, pushing Labour into a distant third place. Plaid won 43 seats, Reform 34, Labour nine, the Conservatives seven, Greens two and Liberal Democrats one.

49 needed for a majority. PC plus L or C? How else can one be cobbled together?

In other words

In our view, that’s a good thing. But as the anti-datacenter movement has grown, it’s come under fire from all sides, including from liberal critics who dismiss it as another privileged form of nimby (not in my backyard) politics with naive demands. A New York Times op-ed, for example, called the fight against datacenters a “myopic” “distraction” from the “real fight”. In truth, anti-datacenter organizing is the real fight, one centered on an industry choke point that people can reach out and touch. This brewing populist resistance isn’t just about limiting local development – it represents a critical new front in the fight against tech-enabled authoritarianism. Where else can people push back on job-eating algorithms, distorting deep fakes, and autonomous drone strikes?

We’ve found some trivial issue we can organise around and thereby haave comfy jobs sa anti-capitalists.

Well done, Lads

Snigger

Not only is deep canvassing persuasive but, by contrast to almost all other approaches, the change appears to be durable, at least over the course of months. It seems to have been a decisive factor in the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York.

What makes the difference is the listening. There’s a solid rule in life: if you don’t listen to other people, they won’t listen to you. I’m often told that people are “too exhausted” to engage in politics. That can mean they’re overwhelmed by work and family life. But it can also refer to the exhaustion of being unheard. The sense that no one is listening is alienating and demoralising.

Another benefit is that deep canvassing allows people to change their minds without losing face. A study in the journal Political Communication found that when someone is heard attentively and without judgment, “they are more likely to become more open-minded and process information in a less defensive manner”. Active listening creates “a sense of shared social identity”, which can build “faith in wider democratic processes”.

The way to change politics is to talk to your neighbours.

Imagine a technique that can heal Britain of division and keep out the hard right. I call it ‘radical listening’
George Monbiot

But the more you talk to your neighbours then the more you will find out that some to more than you thought of your neighbours are, in fact, hard right.

After all, there’s no guarantee at all that the actual culture itself agrees with George now, is there?

Usual guff

Whoever wins today’s elections, democracy is the loser under first past the post
Polly Toynbee

That it is possible to throw the bsatards out is rather the point of an electoral system, no?

Finally, eh?

On Wednesday, the body published a long-awaited review of Cass’s findings, conducted by 12 union members.

Prof David Strain, the chair of the BMA’s board of science, who led the review, said the Cass report’s methodology was robust and the BMA was no longer opposed to any of its 32 recommendations.

Presumably they found some union members with actual subject expertise rather than political insistences and so the verdict changed.

Nonce prisoners

Watkins was a “particularly notorious and high-profile” prisoner, who had received threats from other prisoners including on the day before he was killed, said Storey.

Gedel, whom prison officers described as “perky” when they detained him after the attack, allegedly said “have a good night’s sleep Watkins lad” when he was taken past the cell where the former singer was receiving medical treatment.

Gedel told police he was jealous of “nonce prisoners” because they “got treated like royalty”, the court heard, and he thought it was disgusting to share a wing with sex offenders at HMP Wakefield, often labelled “monster mansion” because of the number of high-profile prisoners.

Good honest criminals disgusted with sharing a prison with nonces.

This is well enough known that it’s a cliche, isn’t it?

This might need more work, this story

For hundreds of years, he was known only as “Jersey”, an enslaved boy of about 11 rendered in oil on canvas by the great 18th-century portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds.

But now the life of the youngster, believed to be Reynolds’ earliest depiction of a person of colour, has begun to emerge, thanks to a research project.

Details found in admiralty records and other archives have unearthed information about Jersey’s identity, his military service and even hint he may eventually have found freedom.

Erm, no. At least, I think no.

He was discharged from another ship in the summer of 1753 and then vanished from the records, not appearing on the musters of other ships Ourry served on. One theory is that he was sold on to someone else, another that he was given his freedom and joined another vessel.

David Olusoga, a historian, broadcaster and National Trust ambassador, said the research had helped bring Boston Jersey out of the shadows.

He said: “This project asks us to look more closely at a familiar past, revealing a life long obscured and reminding us that history is shaped as much by those rendered invisible as by those remembered.

“To tell Jersey’s story is to confront the silences within our history, and to recognise the individuals whose lives have too often been hidden from view.”

NAM Rodgers – a real historian – strongly suggesats, at lesat, that the Navy didn’t recognise slavery when it came to those who served. Obviously it did recognise the institution, slave ships and all that. But in terms of anyone who served it just didn’t recognise it. You couldn’t be a slave and a seaman, the one precluded the other.

Now, whether this applied, wholly and completely, to boy servants is a detail I don’t know. But it’s one of those things that I think is certainly possible. Be interesting to know in fact.

This works. No, really.

Former China defence ministers convicted of corruption in latest purge of military leaders
Ex-defence ministers, Li Shangfu and Wei Fenghe both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, among the most severe sentences in a years-long purge

If you are the authoritarian, dictatorial, type, then you’d quite like all your underlings to be corrupt. For when you do want to get rid of them you’ve got the mechanism right there. Plus, hanging a few scares all.

The idea just doesn’t work so well if all are honest.

I added the highlight in italics because that is the core question I am being asked, and it really did not take long to deal with this one, as the argument that politicians cannot be trusted with fiscal policy is, in my opinion, one of the strangest claims in modern economics.

We already trust politicians with:

Creating laws

Managing budgets of hundreds of billions of pounds or dollars, and maybe more

Managing;
education
health
setting taxes
broader fiscal policy
providing a social safety net, and more
Declaring war

But we are told they cannot be trusted to manage interest rates to supposedly manage demand within the economy to deliver agreed inflation targets,

Given the shite they manage with that list then no, they cannot manage interest rates to beat inflation. Obviously.

But there’s also one more point to be made. That central bank independence is said – by those who study it, of course – to have lowered the level of interest rates in the economy compared to the counterfactual, that politicians did directly control them. That is, the markets believe this to be true and thus, in a market based economic system it is true.

Difficult, really

The analysis also found that during this period where stroke incidents were on the rise, people from black African and Caribbean backgrounds were more than twice as likely to experience a stroke compared with their white counterparts.

More specifically, stroke incidence was 131% higher in black African and 100% higher in black Caribbean populations in comparison with their white counterparts.

People from black backgrounds are up to 47% more likely to have high blood pressure, and are also up to twice as likely to have diabetes than their white counterparts, even after adjusting for other risk factors including socioeconomic background.

Onviously, we could just cheiek “Waaacism”. And no doubt some will be doing so. It’s even possible that the lesser treatment mentionde could be due to that. But actual incidence of these diseases could also be read as something genetic. You know, that terrible, evil, idea that different groups of humans could, in fact, be different and therefore have different outcomes.

Which opens a whole can of worms, doesn’t it?

Wowsers

Want to reduce your intake of ultra-processed food? If so, cook at home more often, don’t eat late at night and chew your food more slowly.

Those are among some of the tips doctors have offered to help people limit the amount of UPF they consume given the acute and growing danger it poses to human health worldwide.

They demand that we stop enjoying one of the grand feats of capitalism. Excellent tasty food available for a – comparative – pittance. Also, that the wimmins git back into the kitchen. Can’t have people enjoying themsleves, with actual leisure time now, can we?

Given that the definition of UPF seems to be centering on anything produced for profit that’s the driving force here. Git back to 8 hours a day in the kitchen, wimmins. Freedom, choice, you’ve ‘ad yer lot.

Bit difficult for Gazza here

He hjust does live shouting that the Duke of Westiminster doesn’t pay tax.

The group paid out dividends of £53.7m to the duke’s family and its trusts, up from £52.4m in 2024. Grosvenor paid total taxes of £248m, against £107.4m in 2024, including £200m in the UK. This is largely because of UK property sales, which increased personal taxes on income and gains by £61m and corporate income tax payments by £71.9m.

Oh.

Hmm

On one side are millions of left-leaning Britons – many of them young – whose economic prospects are worsening, whose anxieties about the climate crisis are rising, whose horror at Israel and the US’s wars is absolute, and whose alienation from the compromises of conventional Labour politics is deep. This is the large minority of the electorate attracted by Jeremy Corbyn’s attempt to radicalise Labour between 2015 and 2019, and now increasingly drawn to Zack Polanski’s leftwing, populist reshaping of the Greens. For both leaders, the ultimate, hugely ambitious aim was or is to create a much more equal, environmentally sustainable country with a much more ethical foreign policy.

OK.

Yet fundamentally opposed to this project is another coalition of interests, including the rightwing media, the right of the Labour party, the Conservative party, corporate lobbyists, defenders of Israel and the Anglo-American “special relationship”, and supposedly realistic centrists from the opinion pages of the Financial Times to the deep-state recesses of Whitehall.

Otherwise known as “everyone else”.

Thus, Corbyn’s leadership was steadily undermined by claims that he was a dangerous extremist who threatened national security and economic prosperity and tolerated antisemitism, terrorism and Muslim sectarianism. A lifelong anti-racist, peace campaigner and assiduously inclusive constituency MP ended up being seen by too many voters as a promoter of division and prejudice.

Polanski is, in some ways, a very different leader: younger, less set in his ways and a better communicator. The Greens are less weighed down than the Labour left by negative perceptions. Yet it’s striking that only about eight months into his leadership,

And what if everyone else is actually correct here? Say, the economic proposals are populist nonsense and nothing more?

The fact that the Greens are attracting many ex-Corbynistas

As Caroline Lucas is so painfully finding out, the New Greens basically are the Corbies. They were ready for somewhere, Your Party so obviously failed and….