https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...dow-banks-that-use-new-boe-tool-to-be-secret/ Bank of England are going to offer anonymous credit to banks, pensions and hedge funds if they blow up. I am truly lost for words at the idiocy of this. As usual, UK taxpayers will be absolutely rinsed by this
The scale of the mess we have been keft in by 14 years of Tory rule should not be underestimated … 207 crown court trials in England and Wales were declared “ineffective” in 2023 – meaning they were postponed on the day – because the prison escort and custody service (Pecs) failed to produce the accused. That figure was up 44% on the year before and a near trebling of the number from five years ago There is growing concern about rising court backlogs, wasted funds and harrowing ordeals for victims and defendants forced to navigate the justice system. Lawyers say the rise in escort delays is both a cause and symptom of an increasingly dysfunctional system. The two private Pecs providers, GeoAmey and Serco, say they are facing increasing challenges, many of which are outside their control
Brexit, the gift that just keeps on giving … British food exports to the EU have fallen by £3bn a year according to the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy Brexit trading barriers cost each household £210 extra for food in the two years up to 2021 The Office for National Statistics says Brexit cost the UK £1m an hour in 2022 The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates Brexit will cause UK trade to fall by 15%
Daniel Finkelstein in the Times today summed up Populism after Reform's conspiracy theory claims: Last week Arla Foods, the dairy giant that produces, among other things, Lurpak butter, announced it was experimenting with Bovaer, a cow feed additive. Bovaer might help with methane production by cows, thus aiding the battle against climate change. It is widely used. And it is entirely safe. Extensive research demonstrates that conclusively. Yet instead of being congratulated — as doubtless it expected to be — for trying to tackle climate change without expecting consumers to change their habits, Arla found itself accused of involvement in a global plot. Ludicrously, it was charged by critics with working with Bill Gates to poison humanity. The Reform MPs Rupert Lowe and Richard Tice have announced they are boycotting Arla and Bovaer. Tice described Arla’s use of the additive as “woke”. The establishment is messing with the roast beef of Old England to please Greta Thunberg. It’s “political correctness gone mad” cow disease. Naturally, able and hardworking people can express the odd ill-thought-out opinion. But I don’t think that is what is going on here. I think the Arla theory is both dangerous and deliberate. Far from being lazy or stupid, it is a power play. Populism is a claim to represent the will of the people. Populists argue that this will is being constantly frustrated, with the country drifting further and further from “common sense”. Solutions to national problems would be relatively simple if there were not so many people getting in the way with their so-called expert opinions. Imagine if we didn’t have to worry about facts or people who get in the way with their nuance and contradictions and conflicting advice. Life would be so much easier. The political success of populism depends on persuading people that every regulatory authority, every scientific report, every university, every mainstream newspaper, every court, every lawyer, every broadcast journalist, every political alternative, every doctor, every drug company, is part of a conspiracy that is undermining the popular will. None of them can be trusted.
Don’t know if anyone else noticed but I saw, yesterday, that the average price of a house in England is now 8.6 times the average annual wage. Hopefully Labour will push through their plans to build, build, build and maybe arrest the price rises and give young people an opportunity to buy their own homes. I expect the usual ignoramuses will be quoted as saying that the young are still buying too much coffee and eating too much avocado on toast whilst they sit in their £ million plus house that they bought for tuppence decades ago. In Scotland and Wales the figure is something like 5.5 times the average annual wage, so although still an issue not as bad of an issue as in England.
Too much avocardo on toast!!!? A couple of poached eggs on top with mushrooms alongside. Even better if the bread used is seeded wholemeal. Our Match Day breakfast.
Those that would deny asylum seekers the right to apply in whatever country should read this and gain some understanding of the desperate straights people are trying to escape from in Syria and other repressive regimes. International help is needed to make Syria a place those that have fled can safely return to. https://www.theguardian.com/culture...ya-prison-with-testimonies-from-its-survivors
How many of you guys knew that people smuggling from Germany to the UK (or any other non EU country) was not deemed a criminal offence in Germany? People smuggling from Germany to an EU country however, IS a criminal offence in Germany. The reason? Brexit. Watch the short video in which it is explained and how the Labour government is now closing that loophole after talks with Germany, which appears to have been a central hub in the people movement. Why did the Tories not know this or, as it was as a result of their Brexit deal, were they fully aware but they allowed it to continue so they could crank up their anti asylum rhetoric?
I love this intelligent debate about history. I thought i should add thr fact about the famous Dambusters raid that it had no benefit in diminishing the Nazi industrial output. I believe that the demolition of the dams stopped the industry for a matter of months. Most of the casulties were female Russian prisoners. The Dambuster raid is lengendary but the reality was that it it achieved very little other than killing civilians and POWs. I admire the bravery of RAF pilots but feel the Bomber Command were actually quite crude in how they carried out their campaign.
Remarkable! Good that talking Bollocks and doing Nothing is being replaced with Doing Something and now the Gov need to get better at telling people what they’re doing
Yes, it`s far more nuanced than bomber command = bad. My great uncle Gilbert Fraser was killed when his Lancaster was brought down by flak over Milan. He was in the RAAF, after emigrating to Oz around 1930. He was a peaceful man - ironic that after seeking a better life for himself and his family, that his life should end back in Europe. I wonder what would have happened in WW2 if the Germans had really heavy bombers in large numbers, with sufficient fighter cover.
Glad you like intelligent debate because there's so much wrong in this post and I'm sure you'll be able to rethink given the evidence missed in your summary. The dams were rebuilt in a matter of months purely because the Germans set literally tens of thousands of workers (Speer's target was 70,000 and included 20,000 armaments workers) onto the repair job. 7,000 of them were moved directly from work on the Atlantic Wall defences where they would otherwise have been building bunkers and gun emplacements to defend against Allied invasion. A huge diversion of resources that would have made a difference to the soldiers on the Normandy beaches a year later. Speer, German armaments minister, said that it was "a disaster for us for a number of months". German sources recorded a 400,000-tonne drop in coal production in May 1943 that they directly attributed to the raid. Those merely scratch the surface of the effect of the raid, which goes right down to rivers hundreds of miles away needing to be dredged to make them navigable again. No raid by so few aircraft had ever made such an impact before. Even taking a simplistic view, if you move 70,000 workers onto a job for six months at a time when you're at war it might suggest that the effect was rather large.
Sorry to hear about yet another personal tragedy that's been washed out of history by simplistic "Bomber Command bad" revisionism. Here's another. My dad flew in Bomber Command, sixty missions in all. He survived but did so by baling out of a burning aircraft over mountains. We found out that the flight engineer on his plane hadn't been killed in the subsequent crash but that the plane had ended up in a stream and drowned. When my dad found this out, sixty years after it happened, he broke into tears. Personal sacrifice that's swept away in "Bomber Command bad" revisionism. I once asked my Dad, a deeply peaceful and devout Catholic, what he thought about his job. He replied that he'd been on the ground in Sheffield during the blitz and felt literally no remorse whatsoever at having a way to fight back. It's easy to forget that Bomber Command for a long time was the only tool the Allies had to take the war back to the enemy. Another fact that's easily ignored in "Bomber Command bad" revisionism. Vin
However convincing a case one makes to justify an atrocity, deliberately targetting civilians remains exactly that; an atrocity. Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought a swift end to a conflict which might have dragged on for months or even years; be that as it may, it would be an abuse of the English language to deny dropping atom bombs on Japanese cities quakifies as an atrocity.
In the whole of the blitz, that horrendous event that defines so much of our WW2 spirit, 44,000 civilians died. The allies killed 10x that - estimates between 450k and 600k. The fact people felt no remorse for killing innocents is not, in my opinion, a sign it was a positive event.
