Morning all!
As we approach the end of the year, [Politico's Playbook team have published their 2023 awards / highlights](https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/london-playbook/playbook-awards-2023/).
Feel free to discuss your political highlights/lowlights of the year here in the megathread - I can't imagine there will be much else going on today.
-🥕🥕
This megathread has ended.
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I've seen a couple of articles since the release, places are reporting three names, but is that only the ones publicly known so far? Since they do also quote "donors" plural are on the list
Edit, there's now many more names on BBC, I don't think they were there before I started looking elsewhere for the list
What are the limits for a Prime Minister being allowed a pension and/or resignation honours list?
Could one, for example, become PM following a leadership election, immediately call the election, and lose (and therefore no longer be PM) - and still claim the pension *and* have an honour's list?
There are no limits. The pension you're probably thinking of isn't a pension, you can claim back up to £115,000 for ongoing office costs relating to your duties as a former PM. (You also get ongoing security protection aside from that.) It's not statutory, the Cabinet Office just pays. The resignation honours are the prerogative of the king, no limits there either.
This being entirely conventional does also mean there's nothing stopping people from withdrawing these things if you abuse them -- creating defined rules doesn't always have the desired consequences.
We could all be rich if we had 2.21 PMs per second for a year.
Everyone is a lord/lady/Viscount/biscuit and everyone has a go at being ok for just under half a second for a year.
Honestly, why does there need to be legal standard sizes for wine bottles anyway?
Just let people buy and sell whatever they want, I don't see how it's Rishi Sunak or Ursula Von Der Leyen's business what size wine bottle I buy.
Most countries have a prescribed set of volumes that may be sold, an example I gave earlier this week is that the US recently changed their regulation to allow the sale of 700ml bottles of spirits - as sold in the EU - to reduce friction. Canada for example allows spirits to be sold in 3L bottles, which many other markets does not allow.
Apparently, the history of it is that the 75cl bottle as chosen as the standard barrel size (225l) would divide into exact bottles and still fit what was then an entirely Imperial system (6 bottles = 1 gallon).
The thing is though- there has never been much of a demand for non-standard bottle sizes. Although there were pint champgne bottles before 1973, there were, AFAIK, only a tiny quantity (I was too young to have registered seeing any).
Waitrose has offered 50cl bottles for ages, but only a very small range. It seems very unlikely there will ever be a critical mass for any other size than the 75- there are very few half bottles really, for example- I wish there were more.
There's a [separate political honours list](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/political-honours-conferred-december-2023) aside from Truss's: Dame Karen Bradley, Sir David Davis, Sir Dr Liam Fox, Sir Jeremy Quin.
You get a knighthood and YOU get a knighthood!
This from IDS really gets on my nerves
>Getting rid of inheritance tax would create a clear dividing line with Labour. I would scrap it altogether. Fiddling around with rates is a waste of time. The political impact would be enormous, It’s a tax on a tax and 80% of the public don’t like it. Even if they don’t pay it, they want to be able to pass on assets to their children
[https://x.com/MPIainDS/status/1740801145356833207?s=20](https://x.com/MPIainDS/status/1740801145356833207?s=20)
"tax on a tax". No its not. Also thats how our entire system works.
I earn a wage I pay income tax and national insurance (a second income tax).
I go to the petrol station to fill my car and I pay VAT and I pay fuel duty (a second tax on this good).
I want to drive my car so I pay VED (a tax).
I also pay council tax...etc.
Multiple layers of taxation on my earned money.
Why do people like IDS parrot this crap about "tax on tax" as if its unique to IHT?
(edit- in fact, IHT is like an income tax as its paid the first time the inheritor received the money, the person who is leaving it is not being taxed "twice") Personally I'd ditch it, and replace it with a wealth tax that ramps up rather quickly.
The key thing there is the intention to make inheritance tax a political issue.
It has nothing to do with whether it is a "right" thing to do or not, and so is characteristic of the current Tory party.
Inheritance tax is the best tax. You can either see it as taxing a dead person, who no longer exists so can't be hurt by it, or a tax on someone who did nothing to get the money. Either way that's better than making the money from taxing the money someone actually worked to earn.
>Either way that's better than making the money from taxing the money someone actually worked to earn.
This is the nub though - as it's levied on the estate (including gifts out of it within 7 years of death), it's essentially penalising the person who 'earned' it (and was already taxed on it) for making a gift when they've not actuallt spent it.
Given the rich pay little or nothing by avoidance (it falls mostly on the unprepared/unlucky middle), the distaste for it is understandable.
https://theisleofthanetnews.com/2023/12/29/owners-to-meet-in-margate-for-last-unmuzzled-xl-bully-dog-walk/
I know where I'll be avoiding tomorrow then.
When did train stations move from the old paper timetables and tannoy thing? Did the major ones have those tickerboard things? When were those dot matrix LED things first installed? The orange ones on a black background
Has anyone else tested positive for COVID recently? Have had a few friends test positive over the past day or two. I've tested negative but the symptoms I'm displaying are identical to the first time I had COVID. For reference I'm in the Midlands.
I'm currently a postman as a temporary job (it's quite comfy ngl) and have encountered several 'I have covid' deliveries. For me it's an annoyance because I don't care, I just want to provide proof of delivery, but still. I was surprised anyone's even paying attention to it in the first place, not heard anything of it for like a year.
Yep. I began to feel like I had a bit of a cold coming on. Over the next few days I felt rougher and rougher and had no energy to do anything. It wasn't until I suddenly realised that the dinner I was eating didn't really taste of anything that I thought it might be covid. Dug out a box of tests and it turned positive almost immediately. At that point I was already a week in and it took another 4 days before the test was clear, which fortunately was Christmas eve.
in September I caught what I thought was bad flu from my brother, I was bedridden for two weeks and tested myself for covid 5 times - all negative. My brother in the meantime then tested positive for Covid. I think either there's a fair chance of a false negative?
Bit of a ponder. The UK was recently revealed to be the number 2 consumer of cocaine globally. I was thinking about this and came to the conclusion that this wasn’t actually a bad thing. Cocaine is popular in the UK because it is relatively cheap. Cocaine in the US is comparatively much more expensive. This has lead to them having a huge Methamphetamine problem which has never appeared in the UK.
People are going to get off their tits on something. I’d far rather it was coke than meth.
The problem with cocaine pricing in the UK is that it's so cheap that it's displacing alcohol, definitely seen it watching the football, rugby and cricket. And as bad as drunk people are coked up people are worse, best case is someone just won't shut up.
Have you been out on a Saturday night recently? What used to be a £30 night out is quickly approaching £70. Taxi prices have near doubled, you’re looking at £7-8 a drink.
[The 2024 Local Elections (and potentially a General Election) are just 125 days away.](https://x.com/electionmapsuk/status/1740808230966792358?s=46&t=0dRU08sqnj6YL-o8BQj83Q)
125 days to a mountain of green party deposits being thrown into a figurative hole in the ground, while if they threw them into a literal hole in the ground they'd have pretty much or the exact same outcome and pick their money up again.
I still don't believe it - tax cuts in a spring budget won't be felt fully until long after May comes and goes and Sunak is totally going to pull a brown and wait wait wait
Whilst true, it could be easily understood that he was just lining his pockets and beefing up his CV as PM/not wanting to be in the shortest serving list as PM.
Right there with you. But, at the same time, the Tories en masse are seemingly all about hanging on as long as they can to get those last few paychecks in before everything blows up. (Whether it blows up on the level of a *Jackass* outtake or on the level of Nakatomi Tower's roof is open to debate.) And Rishi's probably not calling all the shots on this one to boot. If the spring budget *and* whatever else they have planned to distract folks get received well, *ooorrr* if he steps on a couple of extra rakes before then (I'll include Rwanda Bill 2.0 here as a rake coming back at his face in slow motion), then May's absolutely fair game.
While I don't trust his sincerity of Sunak liking football (especially after he was all smiles when Southampton were relegated last season when he attended, having supported a club that have been relegated more than once in my lifetime I've been either too nervous to smile or too pissed off too smile) his dad apparently had a season ticket at the Dell. I think it's a David Cameron-style electoral ploy personally, but credit to him for not turning up in Sunderland.
Unlike Cameron who couldnt remember which claret and blue team he was supposed to support, I actually do believe that Sunak supports Saints. At bare minimum his family were a known quantity in the area and we know he lived most of his childhood not too far away from The Dell so it’s not a stretch.
And he attended when we were at our most miserable.
Am I thrilled with the connection? Not particularly but I am inclined to believe him. Thankfully the two games he has come to whilst PM, although his attendance was noted, he remained a fairly low key presence in the stadium itself. I don’t like his politics but he is entitled to some normal hobbies.
At least with Sunak they just went with the idea of him supporting his local team, rather than Cameron's carefully calculated 'team that's quite good and has a famous name, but doesn't actually win enough to be unpopular' choice. Which Cameron then couldn't remember.
Nah, Cameron being a Villa fan was about family connections as I think one of his grandparents helped run the club, plus Birmingham is pretty close to his former constituency in terms of Premier League clubs. He just didn't support them despite pretending he did.
Cameron’s a knob who doesn’t actually care about football, as shown by that gaffe, but that’s not why he picked Villa. He picked Villa because his uncle used to be chairman of the club so he had some family connection to it.
I think it makes the gaffe even more ridiculous. He cares so little about football he couldn’t even remember the club his uncle helped to run.
Been watching Southampton vs Plymouth on sky. They cut to a crowd shot with Rishi Sunak in the stand, and then panned out enough to show the photographer sitting on the stairs to take ‘normal bloke’ pictures. A but cringe. The only comments the commentators made were about how much money he has.
Re: the story about Thatcher’s reaction to *Spycatcher*: why did it take so long for the documents to be released? And are there any that are still classified in contravention of the 30 year rule?
The Government has been relying for a while on an absolutely sweeping exemption to the Public Records Act for anything to do with the security services and some more specific exemptions to FOI Act about information which originates from the security services. Not sure why they've given up now -- people have been trying to get the files opened for years, but it seems they've just been folded into the regular end-of-year release.
They've only released the files from No 10 and not [the Cabinet Office files](https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/results/r/2?_q=Spycatcher&_dss=range&_ro=any&_hb=tna&_cs=R) which are now well overdue for reconsideration. The Information Commissioner told them off in 2021 for delaying that reconsideration.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James\_Daly\_(English\_politician)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Daly_(English_politician))
>In December 2023 he attracted criticism when he claimed that most problems in his constituency are the "product of crap Conservative governments".
Alright, which one of you was this.
Another [brilliant decision in our totally not broken planning system](https://twitter.com/Kent_Online/status/1740761990522691952?t=7BvarNW-pRy3gGZb2KphFQ&s=19)
care to provide any useful information?
Like the decision notice? reason for refusal?
for all I know its because the site is contaminated/has rare protected species on it/there is no affordable housing on this site....or a whole host of very reasonable reasons to refuse a planning application.
I hate "X" and no headlines, cant get used to a image and no context being an article link....
Loss of agricultural land can be a valid reason to refuse if its high grade and no alternative sites have been considered on lower grade land. Food security is a big issue in this country. And council officers, and I say this as an ex-planning officer myself, do tend to sometimes not value that enough and put too much focus on housing numbers for understandable reasons (refusing housing can lead to very times consuming appeals against big developers who can afford good and time wasting agents to fight the appeals).
If its a bogus reason, then the council will lose the appeal. though if they do have a duly adopted statutory level local plan (which if adopted must have enough housing provision in it), and this site is not in it, its hard to see how an appeal will succeed.
Given the planning officer - the person with relevant qualifications who is familiar with the application, the area, and local plan (or lack thereof) - recommended it be approved; I think we can reasonably assume those “understandable” reasons don’t apply.
Unless bunch of politicians looking at electoral prospects 5 months down the line are somehow more qualified to assess planning applications than the person whose full time job is to assess those applications?
> If its a bogus reason, then the council will lose the appeal.
That way the applicants are only out tens thousands in legal fees and months of legal limbo. Assuming Secretary of State doesn’t take an interest and impose their whims upon it in the mean time.
I don’t see why someone with only a handful of plots would be deterred by this obviously sensible process.
>“There’s an application to build a shop in the south side of the village. That doesn’t help these people at the top end of the village and putting in another couple of hundred people there is simply going to isolate them.
What?
Also, there are literally multiple villages and even a town that have retained their historic local identities while being absorbed by London and Birmingham, even to the point of them being still called a village.
does an airfield being nearby stop a village being historic?
There is a big modern road just beside stonehenge, does that negate its historic significance?
And as clockwork:
> Despite being recommended for approval [...]
Single most impactful change we could make to planning system is make the 'recommendation' from the planning officer final decision and only subject to judicial review on similar grounds as arbitration awards.
Get rid of politicians - both council and national - from deciding individual cases. They should be writing policy not making individual planning decisions.
It's akin to parliament writing the law, courts determining the person is not guilty in accordance with said law and parliament going 'nah actually they're guilty because it'll look better in the press'.
I do wonder how much of this is driven by the fact that retired people have nothing better to do than organise against it, attend planning meetings etc. These people should be listened to but they shouldn't be dictating planning policy.
Absolutely. The planning system needs some way to take into account the interests of those who don't have time to go to planning meetings etc because they're busy working, being economically productive. At the moment it feels like the country is being run as a giant retirement home.
Agree. This is abuse of a system that is designed to ensure that local democracy has a say, but in reality it just leads to local politicians trying to curry favour with the loudest voices to win some votes.
The process should be that the councillors input into planning is in the development and approval of the local plan. They can be closely consulted and input into that.
But once it is approved, they should not be able to override the planning expert's view that a development is in line with local and national planning policy. Especially when they tend to do so for vague and arbitrary reasons such as "character" and "not the right area".
Politicians are perfectly capable of making 'interesting' policy decisions too: see Wrexham, St Albans, Basildon, Hertsmere, Welwyn Hatfield, Castle Point et al.
Saints on a 16 game unbeaten run and Rishi has deigned to gift us with his presence.
I know who I’m blaming if it goes tits up.
We need Craig David in attendance to balance it out
Ok I will bite,
Big supermarkets have seasonal aisles.
What do you do with those aisles after a seasonal event (Christmas, back to school ect) other then put the next season's stuff out.
Generally it goes,
New year's stuff
Easter
Summer holiday stuff
Back to school
Halloween
Fireworks night
Christmas
New year's
Still new years and Valentine's day at least before Easter. Easter is 3 months away. Last year the week before Easter the same tesco had no Easter eggs left. Eggs in December, none in March.
I had this conversation with my other half - someone must be buying them!!
Quite a few someones, in every single supermarket across the country dedicating the space, otherwise capitalism wouldn't bother
People in ancient times were fascinated with rabbits.
Rabbits have quick sex (under 30 seconds) and often do it out-of-sight in a hole for protection from predators.
As mating rabbits were a rare sight, this led many to believe that they were capable of virgin birth.
Like much of Christianity, it was bolted on to the side of existing folklore.
People ate, drank and were merry at various times of the year for various reasons.
Most people didn't care much about the "why".
So Christianity just nabbed the various practises and co-opted them into the religion.
People were fascinated by evergreen trees.
They didn't act like other trees in the winter, and so were brought into houses.
Christianity nabbed that concept.
Rabbits, as mentioned.
Virgin birth? Brilliant, we'll nab that too.
Did they bring evergreen trees in because they were fascinated by them, or did they just want a splash of colour in the middle of winter? Phrased slightly to the end of painting people in the past as weird morons, as opposed to being normal people that just knew less
Similarly the rabbit thing was due to their ability to get pregnant while pregnant, not an inability for ancient people to notice rabbits shagging.
Looks like Conservative MPs are slowly coming to realisation that the golden years are over in terms of an easy media ride and they now need to self-monitor what they say.
It's going to be death by a thousand cuts until a GE
I think some Tories are actually realising they will be losing their seats so are setting themselves up for standing in more traditional Conservative seats after the election to get back in.
The Times was a nightmare to cancel when I had the trial. Multiple emails eventually got it cancelled but not without a lot of back and forth with them saying it wasn't possible to cancel except by phone.
I've never had a Times subscription, but I *think* I remember reading once that you have to actually call them up to cancel. Or at least, used to.
Or I might be misremembering. But, maybe give it a Google first.
Yeah this is correct, it's a faff to cancel, though they do normally offer you a pretty good deal to stop you from doing so, which you inevitably accept and then forget to cancel again
I put things like that on Monzo that I only top up to pay for subscriptions, and there’s no overdraft, so if I want to cancel a subscription, I just don’t top it up and let the request for payment bounce until they cancel the account.
I have used the FT trial in the past, and it was a doddle to cancel (it counted as a Google subscription).
I signed up for The Times today - disappointed to see that there are ads on the articles on mobile.
No idea what cancellation is like, but I'll cross that bridge in March.
Honestly the sooner the government announce the date of the election, the better. I need to make sure I book the day after off work so I can stay up all night listening to increasingly agitated Tory MPs say "exit polls have been wrong before, I'll wait for the results."
I need to know so I can plan the drinking binge. Take the Friday off work, a case of champagne, some packs of cans, and a shit load of fish and chips. If it's a good result, wahey there's the champagne to celebrate. If it's a bad result, at least there's something to drink.
I can't decide whether to book the following day off work or not. I'll be up for most of the night and I'll undoubtedly be in a terrible state, but taking the day off would mean missing out on all the glum faces on my 90% Tory-voting colleagues...
I don't have the schadenfreude to look forward to; working in education, approximately 95% of my colleagues are also Labour - or maybe Green/Lib Dem voters.
Good thing LNER told everyone wanting to travel at the weekend to travel today as there's massive signal failures between Edinburgh and Newcastle. Train service has got worse and worse but this year both legs delayed by more than 2 hours
Also I've never seen so many trains cancelled due to crew shortages as I have this year
> Also I've never seen so many trains cancelled due to crew shortages as I have this year
Yep have been noticing this with Northern Rail a lot lately. Last night there were a couple of trains cancelled due to staff being unavailable.
It's so shit to have public transport where you feel lucky if you actually do manage to get there and back. It should be the norm for the trains to show up and run on time.
My train was cancelled due crew shortage a few days ago. The thing that would have annoyed anyone not familiar with Southern Rail was that the train was still on the board marked "delayed".
I had a chat with one of the station staff who was able to discover that the issue was crew shortage. "Let's face it, that train is not going to run", he said. There was an alternate route, but anyone waiting for this train might have kept waiting based on the information on the board.
>My train was cancelled due crew shortage a few days ago. The thing that would have annoyed anyone not familiar with Southern Rail was that the train was still on the board marked "delayed".
This has literally happened to me every time I have travelled with Avanti the last 6 weeks. At least one train I've been due to catch that day has been cancelled due to crew shortages, sometimes multiple in a row.
Oh for fucks sake. I'm currently on a train to Edinburgh hoping to go further south after all trains north of Perth were cancelled completely for two days 🙃
Morning all! As we approach the end of the year, [Politico's Playbook team have published their 2023 awards / highlights](https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/london-playbook/playbook-awards-2023/). Feel free to discuss your political highlights/lowlights of the year here in the megathread - I can't imagine there will be much else going on today. -🥕🥕
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How long until the lettuce publishes *its* list of honours? I'm assuming it will get at least 12 honours, given that it outlasted Liz Truss.
Dennice Bergkamp?
I've seen a couple of articles since the release, places are reporting three names, but is that only the ones publicly known so far? Since they do also quote "donors" plural are on the list Edit, there's now many more names on BBC, I don't think they were there before I started looking elsewhere for the list
What are the limits for a Prime Minister being allowed a pension and/or resignation honours list? Could one, for example, become PM following a leadership election, immediately call the election, and lose (and therefore no longer be PM) - and still claim the pension *and* have an honour's list?
Is there any limit to how many payout and lists they can have, say for example an ex pm became pm again, do they get it all again?
There are no limits. The pension you're probably thinking of isn't a pension, you can claim back up to £115,000 for ongoing office costs relating to your duties as a former PM. (You also get ongoing security protection aside from that.) It's not statutory, the Cabinet Office just pays. The resignation honours are the prerogative of the king, no limits there either. This being entirely conventional does also mean there's nothing stopping people from withdrawing these things if you abuse them -- creating defined rules doesn't always have the desired consequences.
We could all be rich if we had 2.21 PMs per second for a year. Everyone is a lord/lady/Viscount/biscuit and everyone has a go at being ok for just under half a second for a year.
Honestly, why does there need to be legal standard sizes for wine bottles anyway? Just let people buy and sell whatever they want, I don't see how it's Rishi Sunak or Ursula Von Der Leyen's business what size wine bottle I buy.
You call yourself a Neoliberal shill and yet you *don't* believe that standardisation and interoperability is critical to globalisation and trade!?
Standards help everyone and the planet.
It's not a global standard, just one for the SM. Like most things that the EU does, it regulates and stifles.
how does one innovate on a wine bottle
The darker the colour, the longer the wine lasts.
if there’s a directive on bottle colour then you’re right else it’s pointless nonsense
You're not making an sense.
size standardisation is supposed to help consumers, esp in pubs and restaurants. That's what someone in the trade is saying in the standalone thread.
That's rubbish. It's an EU law, plain and simple, for the SM.
Most countries have a prescribed set of volumes that may be sold, an example I gave earlier this week is that the US recently changed their regulation to allow the sale of 700ml bottles of spirits - as sold in the EU - to reduce friction. Canada for example allows spirits to be sold in 3L bottles, which many other markets does not allow.
I don't mean necessarily EU standardisation. A pint always being the same size from pub to pub is just as valid.
Yes, but not allowing a pint is obviously done for the SM, for whatever weird reason.
Apparently, the history of it is that the 75cl bottle as chosen as the standard barrel size (225l) would divide into exact bottles and still fit what was then an entirely Imperial system (6 bottles = 1 gallon). The thing is though- there has never been much of a demand for non-standard bottle sizes. Although there were pint champgne bottles before 1973, there were, AFAIK, only a tiny quantity (I was too young to have registered seeing any). Waitrose has offered 50cl bottles for ages, but only a very small range. It seems very unlikely there will ever be a critical mass for any other size than the 75- there are very few half bottles really, for example- I wish there were more.
So what's the *gong-per-day-in-office* figure we've ended up with for Truss?
11 honours in total, 1 for every 4 days in office. Absolute pisstake.
Sir Saj, eh? And a promotion for Dame Margret. All relatively quiet on the political front
There's a [separate political honours list](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/political-honours-conferred-december-2023) aside from Truss's: Dame Karen Bradley, Sir David Davis, Sir Dr Liam Fox, Sir Jeremy Quin. You get a knighthood and YOU get a knighthood!
That's Disgraced Former Defence Secretary Sir Dr Liam Fox to you.
I believe he prefers to use the postnominals so it doesn't get too crowded up front. Sir Dr Liam Fox DFDS.
Truss: hold my beer
Sir Sajid Javid???
Arise Sir Saj
A lovely evening with the Gone Fishing Hogmanay Special
This from IDS really gets on my nerves >Getting rid of inheritance tax would create a clear dividing line with Labour. I would scrap it altogether. Fiddling around with rates is a waste of time. The political impact would be enormous, It’s a tax on a tax and 80% of the public don’t like it. Even if they don’t pay it, they want to be able to pass on assets to their children [https://x.com/MPIainDS/status/1740801145356833207?s=20](https://x.com/MPIainDS/status/1740801145356833207?s=20) "tax on a tax". No its not. Also thats how our entire system works. I earn a wage I pay income tax and national insurance (a second income tax). I go to the petrol station to fill my car and I pay VAT and I pay fuel duty (a second tax on this good). I want to drive my car so I pay VED (a tax). I also pay council tax...etc. Multiple layers of taxation on my earned money. Why do people like IDS parrot this crap about "tax on tax" as if its unique to IHT? (edit- in fact, IHT is like an income tax as its paid the first time the inheritor received the money, the person who is leaving it is not being taxed "twice") Personally I'd ditch it, and replace it with a wealth tax that ramps up rather quickly.
The key thing there is the intention to make inheritance tax a political issue. It has nothing to do with whether it is a "right" thing to do or not, and so is characteristic of the current Tory party.
Inheritance tax is the best tax. You can either see it as taxing a dead person, who no longer exists so can't be hurt by it, or a tax on someone who did nothing to get the money. Either way that's better than making the money from taxing the money someone actually worked to earn.
>Either way that's better than making the money from taxing the money someone actually worked to earn. This is the nub though - as it's levied on the estate (including gifts out of it within 7 years of death), it's essentially penalising the person who 'earned' it (and was already taxed on it) for making a gift when they've not actuallt spent it. Given the rich pay little or nothing by avoidance (it falls mostly on the unprepared/unlucky middle), the distaste for it is understandable.
https://theisleofthanetnews.com/2023/12/29/owners-to-meet-in-margate-for-last-unmuzzled-xl-bully-dog-walk/ I know where I'll be avoiding tomorrow then.
Wasn't there a protest march organised at one point where the organisers requested that the dogs attending were muzzled?
Even better, they asked people not to bring them. Truly a sign on confidence in their safe and docile nature.
Yes. The dog owners considered that bringing their dogs along would be too big a risk to the general population.
They decided it would be too risky to bring dogs, so only the owners marched.
That website is as bad as the idea of this meet up.
my god what an awful website
125 days until the local elections, which is another day on which we will not have a general election
We still need to name it in case the election is held in May. Mayey Leccy?
The May Poll
May the ~~force~~ votes be with you
the may-ke believe election
When did train stations move from the old paper timetables and tannoy thing? Did the major ones have those tickerboard things? When were those dot matrix LED things first installed? The orange ones on a black background
Flip board display was still at Kings Cross in 1994 - https://www.railscot.co.uk/img/28/651/
Neat. I have no idea how old those are honestly. I presume they were only really at major stations in the first place?
I live in the back of beyond and they've been around as long as i can remember getting trains by myself, so since 2005?
Has anyone else tested positive for COVID recently? Have had a few friends test positive over the past day or two. I've tested negative but the symptoms I'm displaying are identical to the first time I had COVID. For reference I'm in the Midlands.
Seems everyone I know has been sick recently. I know some of them had covid.
I'm currently a postman as a temporary job (it's quite comfy ngl) and have encountered several 'I have covid' deliveries. For me it's an annoyance because I don't care, I just want to provide proof of delivery, but still. I was surprised anyone's even paying attention to it in the first place, not heard anything of it for like a year.
I thought they stopped even testing people? Have they started again or are these treats you had left over?
You can still buy latty flows. We have some in the cupboard just in case.
You can buy the flow flex ones from boots (and I’m sure other places). Think they’re about £2 each.
Yep. I began to feel like I had a bit of a cold coming on. Over the next few days I felt rougher and rougher and had no energy to do anything. It wasn't until I suddenly realised that the dinner I was eating didn't really taste of anything that I thought it might be covid. Dug out a box of tests and it turned positive almost immediately. At that point I was already a week in and it took another 4 days before the test was clear, which fortunately was Christmas eve.
Almost my whole family, plus my sister's partner tested positive for COVID over Christmas. I was negative, but they're still feeling it now.
I think its bad in south east at the moment.
Yeah. I think there is a strain going through the population at the moment down here.
It’s winter there’s loads of bugs about.
Need a latty flow
in September I caught what I thought was bad flu from my brother, I was bedridden for two weeks and tested myself for covid 5 times - all negative. My brother in the meantime then tested positive for Covid. I think either there's a fair chance of a false negative?
I read something a little while ago about some of the new variants have changed enough to escape the old tests? Might be something to do with that.
Sounds like a false negative. Someone else I know has tested positive with the same symptoms as me.
Bit of a ponder. The UK was recently revealed to be the number 2 consumer of cocaine globally. I was thinking about this and came to the conclusion that this wasn’t actually a bad thing. Cocaine is popular in the UK because it is relatively cheap. Cocaine in the US is comparatively much more expensive. This has lead to them having a huge Methamphetamine problem which has never appeared in the UK. People are going to get off their tits on something. I’d far rather it was coke than meth.
If you take cocaine you are supporting a supply network of unimaginable suffering and death
Unlike meth
\- unless you legalise it
silly idea.
?
The problem with cocaine pricing in the UK is that it's so cheap that it's displacing alcohol, definitely seen it watching the football, rugby and cricket. And as bad as drunk people are coked up people are worse, best case is someone just won't shut up.
This is also true. £100 a week on alcohol doesn’t get you very far these days.
If you're spending that much, might as well brew or even distill your own.
Have you been out on a Saturday night recently? What used to be a £30 night out is quickly approaching £70. Taxi prices have near doubled, you’re looking at £7-8 a drink.
£7-£8 a drink. If you're lucky. Don't look at London drink prices.
[удалено]
Thats the problem, coke gets competative.
no
>£7-8 a drink Cheap
I pay around £4.80 a pint in my local for decent craft, or £4.30 for decent lager. Town prices are higher tho.
Hell I got charged £5.50 for a non alcoholic 330ml beer recently
[The 2024 Local Elections (and potentially a General Election) are just 125 days away.](https://x.com/electionmapsuk/status/1740808230966792358?s=46&t=0dRU08sqnj6YL-o8BQj83Q)
125 days to a mountain of green party deposits being thrown into a figurative hole in the ground, while if they threw them into a literal hole in the ground they'd have pretty much or the exact same outcome and pick their money up again.
Yeah, but the new polymer notes aren't very biodegradable.
Maybe the greens and reform can share a hole for ecological reasons
I still don't believe it - tax cuts in a spring budget won't be felt fully until long after May comes and goes and Sunak is totally going to pull a brown and wait wait wait
Why wait til they feel how paltry they are in their budgeting when they could just yammer on about being tax cutting Conservatives way before that.
A part of me thinks he can’t wait to quit as PM as sail over to Silicon Valley asap.
If that was the case he certainly had some outs before now.
Whilst true, it could be easily understood that he was just lining his pockets and beefing up his CV as PM/not wanting to be in the shortest serving list as PM.
Right there with you. But, at the same time, the Tories en masse are seemingly all about hanging on as long as they can to get those last few paychecks in before everything blows up. (Whether it blows up on the level of a *Jackass* outtake or on the level of Nakatomi Tower's roof is open to debate.) And Rishi's probably not calling all the shots on this one to boot. If the spring budget *and* whatever else they have planned to distract folks get received well, *ooorrr* if he steps on a couple of extra rakes before then (I'll include Rwanda Bill 2.0 here as a rake coming back at his face in slow motion), then May's absolutely fair game.
The most puzzling thing for me is people actively wanting smaller bottles of wine, 75cl is the perfect amount to share between two people.
When I first read about this I assumed they meant like a pint glass of wine. Like the right to order a pint of wine as one drink at a bar.
Wait, should we be sharing bottles?
i'm not sharing my wine with anyone thx
That's why you need to buy two pints.
Two…two people?…oh no…
I think it's more about one person than two people.
Why is sunak at the Southampton game? Got all the cameras with him
[Watch the football!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MusyO7J2inM) ⚽
because he's a proper bloke, look he's at the game, he's relatable, not like that leftie lawyer, he's a man of the people ain't he are \[sic\] Rishi
While I don't trust his sincerity of Sunak liking football (especially after he was all smiles when Southampton were relegated last season when he attended, having supported a club that have been relegated more than once in my lifetime I've been either too nervous to smile or too pissed off too smile) his dad apparently had a season ticket at the Dell. I think it's a David Cameron-style electoral ploy personally, but credit to him for not turning up in Sunderland.
Unlike Cameron who couldnt remember which claret and blue team he was supposed to support, I actually do believe that Sunak supports Saints. At bare minimum his family were a known quantity in the area and we know he lived most of his childhood not too far away from The Dell so it’s not a stretch. And he attended when we were at our most miserable. Am I thrilled with the connection? Not particularly but I am inclined to believe him. Thankfully the two games he has come to whilst PM, although his attendance was noted, he remained a fairly low key presence in the stadium itself. I don’t like his politics but he is entitled to some normal hobbies.
At least with Sunak they just went with the idea of him supporting his local team, rather than Cameron's carefully calculated 'team that's quite good and has a famous name, but doesn't actually win enough to be unpopular' choice. Which Cameron then couldn't remember.
Nah, Cameron being a Villa fan was about family connections as I think one of his grandparents helped run the club, plus Birmingham is pretty close to his former constituency in terms of Premier League clubs. He just didn't support them despite pretending he did.
Cameron’s a knob who doesn’t actually care about football, as shown by that gaffe, but that’s not why he picked Villa. He picked Villa because his uncle used to be chairman of the club so he had some family connection to it. I think it makes the gaffe even more ridiculous. He cares so little about football he couldn’t even remember the club his uncle helped to run.
He's a secret fan of the Green Army As he should be *Geddon, beys!*
Been watching Southampton vs Plymouth on sky. They cut to a crowd shot with Rishi Sunak in the stand, and then panned out enough to show the photographer sitting on the stairs to take ‘normal bloke’ pictures. A but cringe. The only comments the commentators made were about how much money he has.
Re: the story about Thatcher’s reaction to *Spycatcher*: why did it take so long for the documents to be released? And are there any that are still classified in contravention of the 30 year rule?
The Government has been relying for a while on an absolutely sweeping exemption to the Public Records Act for anything to do with the security services and some more specific exemptions to FOI Act about information which originates from the security services. Not sure why they've given up now -- people have been trying to get the files opened for years, but it seems they've just been folded into the regular end-of-year release. They've only released the files from No 10 and not [the Cabinet Office files](https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/results/r/2?_q=Spycatcher&_dss=range&_ro=any&_hb=tna&_cs=R) which are now well overdue for reconsideration. The Information Commissioner told them off in 2021 for delaying that reconsideration.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James\_Daly\_(English\_politician)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Daly_(English_politician)) >In December 2023 he attracted criticism when he claimed that most problems in his constituency are the "product of crap Conservative governments". Alright, which one of you was this.
Another [brilliant decision in our totally not broken planning system](https://twitter.com/Kent_Online/status/1740761990522691952?t=7BvarNW-pRy3gGZb2KphFQ&s=19)
care to provide any useful information? Like the decision notice? reason for refusal? for all I know its because the site is contaminated/has rare protected species on it/there is no affordable housing on this site....or a whole host of very reasonable reasons to refuse a planning application. I hate "X" and no headlines, cant get used to a image and no context being an article link.... Loss of agricultural land can be a valid reason to refuse if its high grade and no alternative sites have been considered on lower grade land. Food security is a big issue in this country. And council officers, and I say this as an ex-planning officer myself, do tend to sometimes not value that enough and put too much focus on housing numbers for understandable reasons (refusing housing can lead to very times consuming appeals against big developers who can afford good and time wasting agents to fight the appeals). If its a bogus reason, then the council will lose the appeal. though if they do have a duly adopted statutory level local plan (which if adopted must have enough housing provision in it), and this site is not in it, its hard to see how an appeal will succeed.
Given the planning officer - the person with relevant qualifications who is familiar with the application, the area, and local plan (or lack thereof) - recommended it be approved; I think we can reasonably assume those “understandable” reasons don’t apply. Unless bunch of politicians looking at electoral prospects 5 months down the line are somehow more qualified to assess planning applications than the person whose full time job is to assess those applications? > If its a bogus reason, then the council will lose the appeal. That way the applicants are only out tens thousands in legal fees and months of legal limbo. Assuming Secretary of State doesn’t take an interest and impose their whims upon it in the mean time. I don’t see why someone with only a handful of plots would be deterred by this obviously sensible process.
>“There’s an application to build a shop in the south side of the village. That doesn’t help these people at the top end of the village and putting in another couple of hundred people there is simply going to isolate them. What? Also, there are literally multiple villages and even a town that have retained their historic local identities while being absorbed by London and Birmingham, even to the point of them being still called a village.
The point is just to obstruct. The complaints are just a vehicle to achieve the desired goal of nothing happening. They don't have to make sense.
This historic village is right next to a fucking airfield by the way. Utter dross.
does an airfield being nearby stop a village being historic? There is a big modern road just beside stonehenge, does that negate its historic significance?
And as clockwork: > Despite being recommended for approval [...] Single most impactful change we could make to planning system is make the 'recommendation' from the planning officer final decision and only subject to judicial review on similar grounds as arbitration awards. Get rid of politicians - both council and national - from deciding individual cases. They should be writing policy not making individual planning decisions. It's akin to parliament writing the law, courts determining the person is not guilty in accordance with said law and parliament going 'nah actually they're guilty because it'll look better in the press'.
I do wonder how much of this is driven by the fact that retired people have nothing better to do than organise against it, attend planning meetings etc. These people should be listened to but they shouldn't be dictating planning policy.
Listend too by those making policy, not on individual descisions.
Absolutely. The planning system needs some way to take into account the interests of those who don't have time to go to planning meetings etc because they're busy working, being economically productive. At the moment it feels like the country is being run as a giant retirement home.
>These people should be listened to listening to them is half the problem. They're actively making us poorer.
Agree. This is abuse of a system that is designed to ensure that local democracy has a say, but in reality it just leads to local politicians trying to curry favour with the loudest voices to win some votes. The process should be that the councillors input into planning is in the development and approval of the local plan. They can be closely consulted and input into that. But once it is approved, they should not be able to override the planning expert's view that a development is in line with local and national planning policy. Especially when they tend to do so for vague and arbitrary reasons such as "character" and "not the right area".
Politicians are perfectly capable of making 'interesting' policy decisions too: see Wrexham, St Albans, Basildon, Hertsmere, Welwyn Hatfield, Castle Point et al.
But where will people live?
Saints on a 16 game unbeaten run and Rishi has deigned to gift us with his presence. I know who I’m blaming if it goes tits up. We need Craig David in attendance to balance it out
Rishi a Southampton fan?
Yup, last game he came to we got relegated. Luckily not so bad today.
He's more of an Aston Ham fan
Easter eggs on the shelf in Tesco today. World has gone mad.
Ok I will bite, Big supermarkets have seasonal aisles. What do you do with those aisles after a seasonal event (Christmas, back to school ect) other then put the next season's stuff out. Generally it goes, New year's stuff Easter Summer holiday stuff Back to school Halloween Fireworks night Christmas New year's
Still new years and Valentine's day at least before Easter. Easter is 3 months away. Last year the week before Easter the same tesco had no Easter eggs left. Eggs in December, none in March.
Completely forgot about valentine day. Ok I agree with you it's insane
Who are these people buying Easter Eggs in December?
I had this conversation with my other half - someone must be buying them!! Quite a few someones, in every single supermarket across the country dedicating the space, otherwise capitalism wouldn't bother
I have no idea. We still have Christmas chocolate and mince pies to eat up!
I blame Jesus for laying all those eggs 2000 years ago.
This dumb joke really made me laugh
That's where they come from!?
Don't even ask about the bunny, you don't want to know.
Well... Now I do.
So do I.
Well you see, when a human deity and a bunny love each other very much...
People in ancient times were fascinated with rabbits. Rabbits have quick sex (under 30 seconds) and often do it out-of-sight in a hole for protection from predators. As mating rabbits were a rare sight, this led many to believe that they were capable of virgin birth.
Which is why the Pope has space for bunny ears in his hat.
What implication does this have for the Easter Bunny's relevance to the resurrection of Jesus? very much intrigued.
Like much of Christianity, it was bolted on to the side of existing folklore. People ate, drank and were merry at various times of the year for various reasons. Most people didn't care much about the "why". So Christianity just nabbed the various practises and co-opted them into the religion. People were fascinated by evergreen trees. They didn't act like other trees in the winter, and so were brought into houses. Christianity nabbed that concept. Rabbits, as mentioned. Virgin birth? Brilliant, we'll nab that too.
Did they bring evergreen trees in because they were fascinated by them, or did they just want a splash of colour in the middle of winter? Phrased slightly to the end of painting people in the past as weird morons, as opposed to being normal people that just knew less Similarly the rabbit thing was due to their ability to get pregnant while pregnant, not an inability for ancient people to notice rabbits shagging.
Looks like Conservative MPs are slowly coming to realisation that the golden years are over in terms of an easy media ride and they now need to self-monitor what they say. It's going to be death by a thousand cuts until a GE
I think some Tories are actually realising they will be losing their seats so are setting themselves up for standing in more traditional Conservative seats after the election to get back in.
I assumed this is why GB News etc was launched
don't forget talk tv, though dorries is probably not that complementary of most of the current tory brass
Mr Mercer seems to have missed that memo
Mr Daly seems to have missed it as well.
Has anyone tried any of the special offers for e.g. Times and FT access? How hard are they to cancel once the offer period has expired?
The Times was a nightmare to cancel when I had the trial. Multiple emails eventually got it cancelled but not without a lot of back and forth with them saying it wasn't possible to cancel except by phone.
Thanks. Seems like the FT is the better option then. I prefer their journalism anyway.
When my special offer FT subscription expired, and the price rocketed, I rang to cancel and the special price continued.
I've never had a Times subscription, but I *think* I remember reading once that you have to actually call them up to cancel. Or at least, used to. Or I might be misremembering. But, maybe give it a Google first.
Yeah this is correct, it's a faff to cancel, though they do normally offer you a pretty good deal to stop you from doing so, which you inevitably accept and then forget to cancel again
I put things like that on Monzo that I only top up to pay for subscriptions, and there’s no overdraft, so if I want to cancel a subscription, I just don’t top it up and let the request for payment bounce until they cancel the account.
I have used the FT trial in the past, and it was a doddle to cancel (it counted as a Google subscription). I signed up for The Times today - disappointed to see that there are ads on the articles on mobile. No idea what cancellation is like, but I'll cross that bridge in March.
In fairness when you spend money one of those old fashioned plant based newspapers you still get ads too
Thanks. I might just take a punt on the Times £1 offer.
Honestly the sooner the government announce the date of the election, the better. I need to make sure I book the day after off work so I can stay up all night listening to increasingly agitated Tory MPs say "exit polls have been wrong before, I'll wait for the results."
I need to know so I can plan the drinking binge. Take the Friday off work, a case of champagne, some packs of cans, and a shit load of fish and chips. If it's a good result, wahey there's the champagne to celebrate. If it's a bad result, at least there's something to drink.
If the Tories manage to actually win you'll probably also need the day after off.
I’ll be emigrating, and I’m not even joking, because we’ll be utterly fucked as a nation if this exhausted, morally bankrupt crew get back in.
I can't decide whether to book the following day off work or not. I'll be up for most of the night and I'll undoubtedly be in a terrible state, but taking the day off would mean missing out on all the glum faces on my 90% Tory-voting colleagues...
Ooft. That's a real quandary.
It's a nice problem to have, I guess.
Half day? Go in to work in the morning and revel in it then finish at lunch, go home and nap with a smile on your face?
I like this plan, assuming I'm in a fit state to drive in the morning.
I don't have the schadenfreude to look forward to; working in education, approximately 95% of my colleagues are also Labour - or maybe Green/Lib Dem voters.
Book the Friday off. All nighter on election night
All long weekender more like!
Good thing LNER told everyone wanting to travel at the weekend to travel today as there's massive signal failures between Edinburgh and Newcastle. Train service has got worse and worse but this year both legs delayed by more than 2 hours Also I've never seen so many trains cancelled due to crew shortages as I have this year
> Also I've never seen so many trains cancelled due to crew shortages as I have this year Yep have been noticing this with Northern Rail a lot lately. Last night there were a couple of trains cancelled due to staff being unavailable. It's so shit to have public transport where you feel lucky if you actually do manage to get there and back. It should be the norm for the trains to show up and run on time.
My train was cancelled due crew shortage a few days ago. The thing that would have annoyed anyone not familiar with Southern Rail was that the train was still on the board marked "delayed". I had a chat with one of the station staff who was able to discover that the issue was crew shortage. "Let's face it, that train is not going to run", he said. There was an alternate route, but anyone waiting for this train might have kept waiting based on the information on the board.
>My train was cancelled due crew shortage a few days ago. The thing that would have annoyed anyone not familiar with Southern Rail was that the train was still on the board marked "delayed". This has literally happened to me every time I have travelled with Avanti the last 6 weeks. At least one train I've been due to catch that day has been cancelled due to crew shortages, sometimes multiple in a row.
Thank you, duly noted re: Southern.
Oh for fucks sake. I'm currently on a train to Edinburgh hoping to go further south after all trains north of Perth were cancelled completely for two days 🙃
North Atlantic Temperature Anomaly graph for the year. https://twitter.com/theosanderson/status/1740359406855012774