Restore Britain scarcely acknowledges that history. Instead, it assumes that Britain’s current problems arise because government has become too large. That is the central proposition on which everything else in the paper depends. Cut spending. Cut taxes. Reduce regulation. Withdraw the state. And, it claims, prosperity will follow. That is an extraordinarily simple view of how an economy works.
Works for me.
Freight drivers are allowed to take free passenger journeys, using a so-called Freight Travel Duty Pass, if they are on their way to collect a goods train. They must also carry documentary evidence proving this is the purpose of their trip. Other journeys for work purposes must be paid for, with NTS covering reasonable travel expenses.
Fake duty rosters used
However, some of the 160 drivers – who work for a subsidiary of NTS, Direct Rail Services (DRS) – were supplied with fake duty rosters suggesting they were travelling to pick up a train even when they were not, allowing them to make free journeys illegally.
Whistleblowers have told The Telegraph that the practice was widespread, endorsed by some managers, and went on for decades – potentially cheating taxpayers out of millions of pounds.
You know, dues, traditional, like. It’s not the worst ever Spanish Practice. Probably has a net cost of zero – the marginal cost of the one extra train journey is in fact zero – but still…..
But renewables are already cheaper, and better for us, than fossil fuels in almost all situations.
He then links to Max Roser. Who is a lovely chap but not actually correct on all things.
We can indeed say that generating electricity can be cheaper by renewables. Which is a different statement from running a nation on renewables is cheaper. It’s that second which is important of course and it’s also that second which is not true as yet.
But it’s not just him, and it’s not just journalism. The radical right moves as a pack, and Heath is just one of many now insisting that climate catastrophe is something we should simply suck up.
How weird. Absolutely everyone says – no, really, everyone – that we’re going to have to do some adaptation. Which is what sucking it up is, adaptation.
George does seem confused on this subject.
At the start of the film, there is no guilt in Gilligan’s pleasure walking into a chicken shop (“Bring on the wings!”). Growing up in a low-income household in London, a bucket of KFC was a family treat. He’s even done voiceover work for a Nando’s advert; “It’s just chickens, right?”. What works so well in the film is that Gilligan’s shock as he digs deeper into the industry doesn’t look manufactured for the camera. The UK rears one billion chickens a year and, in Lincolnshire, Gilligan meets animal welfare activists in balaclavas (“This is like Call of Duty. I’m scared!”). He learns about the environmental harm to rivers that chicken farming causes, and explores racist ideas around black people and fried chicken.
Fair enough. No one will learn these things unless they’re told them, obviously.
Gilligan speaks to a psychologist who explains how ultra-processed foods hook us, making us feel great – and then comes the crash. You can see the difference in Gilligan, who is lethargic and grumpy. It might not kill him, but his chicken diet is doing harm.
The obvious objection to all this is that of course you’re not meant to eat fried chicken every day. But, as he finds out, half the calories in people’s diets in the UK come from ultra-processed foods
Ultra-processed? Fried chicken? Whut?
This is fried chicken is bad, u-p is bad, therefore f c is u-p, right? Which is bad logic let alone bad observation or classification.
In a study published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, 1,682 adults were asked to read one of six short stories, three of which were written by humans and three by ChatGPT. Each AI story had a similar theme to one of the human-authored works.
The team told participants whether their story was written by a human or AI, but this information was not always correct. The researchers then asked participants to rate how absorbing and engaging they found the story, and its quality.
Participants who read an AI-generated story rated it as more absorbing and of higher quality than those who read a story written by a human. However, participants gave higher ratings to stories they had been told were written by people.
AI is more competent than most. At most things too. It’s not – so far at least – better than the best.
Also note that the human preference still seems to be for the human production. Seems fair, given human desires etc.
Who recommends what?
Some cash is turning up. No, I am not going to be wildly stock trading. I’ve written about stocks for a couple of decades now and my hit rate is not that great. A few, proper, conviction trades have worked. But no, I am not about to be playing with junior miners and the like.
So, boring dividend stocks, capital making an income. Fags, booze, life assurance companies, that sort of stuff.
But, I need a platform to do this on. IB seems to be much more for traders looking for leverage. Schwab maybe? US and UK would make sense to me – don’t know enough about Europe to get involved. And slightly worried about that US thing of interest and dividends paying 30% withholding.
But, which platform then?
Best would be to have US, UK and Oz (for the occasional junior miner) on the one account. And maybe Jersey etc?
Our YouTube traffic in July was only around 1.1 million views, when at present something closer to 2 million is more commonplace,
A quick look at ad rates for creators says $1 to $5 per 000. It would surprise if Spud were at the top end of that.
£1500 a month income?
£3,000? Out of which he’s got to pay the staff?
The aim of the day is not to deliver a series of lectures, but to offer an opportunity for discussion, chaired by John Christensen, with me introducing each theme. Each session will then be open to Q&A, discussion, and a focus on finding solutions to the problems our economy and society face.
Discussion, eh?
This meeting is not about defining the issues, as the meeting we held in Cambridge earlier this year was.
How Trotskyist. Anyone who ever did student politics knows this one. No, sorry, we cannot discuss this issue, that was at the last meeting….
Vistry proposed lifting Fitzgerald’s total take-home pay in August 2023, from £3.4m to £5.6m a year, which was 28 times the pay of the average worker.
If the average tea boy is on £200k that will make houses expensive.
Here, too, though, it is more than just a railway. The officials I talked to while travelling around China on its stunning network were clear about this. Many of the early lines were built between the largest cities but now the system, which they hope to increase by at least 10,000 miles by 2040, is being expanded to smaller towns and cities to create a genuinely national network. This remarkable project is seen as a way of uniting the country in the same way the railways in Germany and Italy created nations out of these fragmented countries in the 19th century.
That was the original concept in the UK when HS2 was first conceived and its progenitor, Andrew Adonis, registered HS3, HS4 and HS5 as companies. We can but dream that this will ever be realised. For the story of high-speed rail I found was of go-ahead nations embracing the future, while others, including alas Britain, are being left behind.
High Speed rail makes no economic sense in Britain at all. So, appeal to summat else instead.
And so, appeal to uniting the coiuntry. Just as central government is working to divide the place up into local satrapies.
Well done that man, vry well done.
The SPD parliamentary group cited survey data from a patients’ rights lobbying group showing that 77% of medically declared cancer survivors face what it called discrimination when taking out private insurance policies.
Well, yes, OK. So there are increased risks, insurance is pricing risks and?
Sg_plumber asked: How come pretty much everybody (at least on TV) always forgets to mention that yes, the climate crisis is fuelling these extreme weather events?
Jonathan Watts: I agree. This is not just exasperating, it is frightening. The climate and nature crises are the greatest threats humanity has faced, yet many media organisations downplay or ignore it. Social media is even worse, propagating misinformation and distracting people from the root cause of the problem (petrochemical companies, big agriculture and every rising emissions of greenhouse gases). The Guardian is able to devote much of its resources to covering these topics because it does not have an owner and because our readers make very clear that they want a big share of their contributions to go to this topic.
So the self-selecting staff are in – as happens with groupthink – an ever faster purity spiral.
Cutting fossil fuel pollution is indeed a fundamental solution, and it must be accompanied by a never-ending list of other adaptation measures. I would argue our coverage is pretty good at including both bits. Every article I’ve written on wildfires this summer has included rising temperatures and land abandonment.
But land abandonment is not driven by fossil fuel companies, is it?
Gold-Loan3142 asked: How do we challenge the mainstream ‘“perpetual growth” economics that infuses almost all discussion of the economy?
Jonathan: You have touched on one of the core issues. The obsession with endless GDP growth on a finite planet can only end in tears. The only question is when. There have been numerous academic challenges to this and alternatives, such as Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics and Bill McKibben’s Economics as if the World Mattered. There are also some very interesting studies and books on degrowth by the likes of Jason Hickell and many others.
Signing up to every fucking nutter out there isn;t going to help either.
If I can stray outside my journalist role, I have long believed that what the world needs is not just economic degrowth but ecological regrowth. We need a system of trade, currency, taxation, incentives that rewards countries and companies for restoring the world’s battered ecosystems.
And now you’re arguing to add more value – more economic growth, by definition.
The key is to do this while never letting the petro-companies off the hook. They have tried in the past to convince people that the responsibility for the climate crisis lies with individual consumers. That was why they pushed the idea of carbon calculators. But the real blame lies with them. Most of the big oil companies are expanding production and making record profits.
Those bastard oil companies, eh?
The real concern is that these fools consider themselves the adults in the room. Rather than the kiddies fooled by a charlatan like Hickel.
Further to Tim’s post earlier an ASI article on why we MUST leave.
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-unelected-judge-and-the-flight-he-grounded
“A duty judge in Strasbourg, working alone, issued a Rule 39 order and grounded it. Nobody in Britain knows his name, not the public, not the ministers who authorised the flight in the first place. He heard no evidence in open court, gave no reasoned judgment, and answered to no electorate.
The argument against the ECHR is very simple. It’s as Johnathan Sumption put it. We are a common law system. Therefore having as our ultimate court of appeal something operating in the Roman law system does not work.
That’s it, that’s the thing.
Which is why we need to leave the ECHR and have our own – common law – Supreme Court deal with it.
It’s really very simple indeed and there is no arguing with it.
The madness of SpaceX
Posted on August 3 2026Do you remember all the hype about the SpaceX share offering and how maybe 100,000 people in the UK struggled to buy shares on launch day?
I suspect they are regretting their enthusiasm now.
Y’know how Spud is adamant that stock markets are just trading in second hand pieces of paper? How they never do raise new money for anything?
SpaceX raised $87.5 billion – with a b – at its IPO. New capital raised on a stock market. Bad thing apparently.
Armoured vehicles crash through the California desert, churning up clouds of smothering white dust. Drones loiter unseen, methodically marking their targets before dive-bombing. Soldiers, some blistered by the sun, trudge through the heat with weapons slung over their shoulders.
For 10 days in late July, the US, Britain and their allies are training to fight what their commanders call “the warfare of the future”, using cutting-edge technologies and tactics in a vast wargame known as Project Convergence.
This year, the project is taking place at Fort Irwin, an American army base deep in the Mojave, where the dusty red landscape resembles the surface of Mars and is almost as unforgiving to life.
A mate used to have a business out there. In fact, I aided in financing it – no, a loan for a few weeks, not equity.
This is all in the Tom Clancy books, this is where the USians go to pay Red V Blue. Which means having a stock of Russian tanks, APCs etc.
Russian tanks are metric, USian Imperial. Thus someone needs to have a warehouse full of metric spanners (OK, and some spare parts). Which is what he bought, the shed full of metric spanners.
Which is a fun little business to have, no?
Because digital political success is not just about being good on camera. Burnham’s style has been compared with that of the obvious originator of the model, Zohran Mamdani.
Nesrine, Honey? It was Trump I who really swung it by using digital. He entirely swerved around the traditional media by using Facebook. And it worked too, big time.
The first person Maria* called when she found out she was pregnant was her doctor. The second person was a lawyer. The single mother of one was in shock, and considering terminating the pregnancy. But she first had to make sure that she wasn’t about to do something illegal, because all she knew was that abortions were forbidden where she lived. “On top of the emotional mountain that was already there, I also had to deal with this,” Maria told me.
She also knew she wouldn’t get any information about abortions in her own country – that’s illegal too. After making her decision, she drove to a clinic across the border. It was a stressful, if short, 45-minute drive, at the end of which another hurdle was waiting: “Oh, you’re from Liechtenstein?” the receptionist said, according to Maria. “Then you have to pay immediately – 680 Swiss francs (£620) please.” She was taken aback and asked: “What if I can’t pay that right now?” The receptionist replied: “Then you’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
The law must be changed etc.
Liechtenstein’s archaic abortion laws need to be modernised. But a prince is standing in the way
Dunno. The last remnant of the Holy Roman Empire might be allowed to stay different maybe?
Since 2015, women are legally permitted to have an abortion outside the country, and the external border is never more than a 15-minute drive away. And anyway, it is allowed if the woman was raped or if her health is at risk, so what more could you ask for?
Well, quite.
Every period, right on schedule: the cramps arrive, and right behind them, the urgent need to poop.
If this is your experience, you’re in good company: in one study, 73% of healthy premenopausal women reported at least one significant gastrointestinal symptom in the days before or during their period. Abdominal pain and diarrhea were the most common complaints, but women reported nausea and constipation too.
Menstrual and digestive discomfort often coincide: “If you ask women about ‘period poops’ they’ll tell you they’re having menstrual cramps and those GI cramps at the same time,” said Taylor Judkins, a nutrition researcher at the University of Florida who has spent more than a decade studying the phenomenon.
I assume this is the sort of thing mothers would tell daughters about along the way in previous times. But The Guardian now stands in loco etc, no? Or at least, for some, the wimmins’ pages do…..