Tuesday 14th of May 2024

[frog222]

Good morning

12° Brrrr!

[RogerOThornhill]

Morning.

Oops!

[frog222]

Tom Peck --

Why gamble on change when you can stick with the people who’ve just brought you five straight years of never-ending, self-indulgent narcissistic chaos?

He was even asked, at the end, if it was a case of “better the devil you know”. He replied: “In a word, yes.”

There are a few people out there who really are, by now, very keen on a different devil. They’re on their third different devil in five years after all, only one of which they ever voted for.

It’s hard to say if this counts as firing the gun on the election campaign, as that gun has been fired many times now and it doesn’t appear to have frightened a single voter into changing their mind — at least not in the way the prime minister hopes.

It does mark an ever louder shouting of the key message, that Starmer is Corbyn in disguise. That “Labour’s current deputy leader, and shadow foreign secretary voted against our nuclear deterrent, the ultimate guarantor of our security”.

That, in fairness, is something of a killer line. David Lammy will probably be foreign secretary by the end of the year, and he really did vote against renewing Trident in 2016. Back then, half of Labour’s MPs ignored Corbyn’s instructions on that vote. Lammy and Rayner were not among them.

“Labour want to pretend this is all ancient history, but it is not,” he said, not unfairly.

What was rather less ancient history, however, is the war on woke lanyards, which Esther McVey had launched about forty minutes earlier. This, she said, was “the full-throttle common sense fightback”.

It would turn out to mainly involve fighting back against civil servants who are “trying to introduce their political views by the back door via lanyards”. These, she said, would be banned. No more rainbow lanyards, no more Palestine lanyards, no more lanyards at all.

This may be a perfectly sensible policy. Political lanyards are a serious problem. Some of us were there at the Conservative Party conference in 2017 when Jeremy Hunt, then the health secretary, announced that childhood obesity was “our biggest public health risk” while wearing a lanyard featuring only the words of the event’s official sponsor, Tate & Lyle. That sort of thing can make you look ridiculous.

Look, no one is suggesting that a government isn’t capable of doing more than one thing at once. But is it possible to wonder whether, when the prime minister is about to do a major speech about the terrifying future that awaits us and which only he can save us from, it might not be wise to have another member of his government simultaneously getting very annoyed about lanyards?

“I refuse to accept the doomsterism and the cynical narrative of decline that my opponents hope will depress people into voting for them,” he said, right at the end. This, I believe, is the first time Sunak has ever said a word that was, for all intents and purposes, invented by Boris Johnson.

Trouble is, he doesn’t quite seem to know how to use it. You only get to call your opponents doomsters and gloomsters by selling them sunny optimism instead. If Boris has any desire to do his successor a favour, he might wish to quietly tell him that people aren’t going to come with you to the sunlit uplands if you insist on scaring the hell out of them first.

[frog222]

Morning.

Oops!

Lucy Fisher @LOS_Fisher -
A Labour contact gets in touch to stick the boot in…

“On the day Rishi Sunak proclaims the Tories as the great protectors of our national security, it turns out they can’t even protect a database of contacts. You couldn’t make it up.”

I'm looking for the sort of 'lanyards' that McVile has declared war on ????????

[frog222]

[AnatolyKasparov]

The very existence of a "minister for common sense" is itself an act of total unseriousness. Even without the actual individual being who it is.

[RogerOThornhill]

This must have come as a severe disappointment to the usual suspects.

No evidence foreign students are abusing UK graduate visas, review finds
Migration Advisory Committee says the risks are low, despite Tory claims the route is being exploited

https://www.theguardian.com/education/a ... sas-review

There is no evidence of widespread abuse of the UK’s graduate visa route, the government’s immigration advisers have concluded, despite repeated claims from senior Conservatives that it is being exploited to enter the jobs market.

The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) said the graduate visa entitlement – allowing international students to work for two or three years after graduating – should remain in place. Members said the risks of abuse were relatively low and “not undermining” the integrity and quality of the higher education system.

A lot of comments on X on the theme of "They're all going to 3rd rate unis" whereas the evidence is that they aren't. It's the Russell Group ones who will suffer when international applications drop off a cliff - you only have to look at the numbers of top unis ditching courses and shedding staff to see that.

[AnatolyKasparov]

The likes of Seb "gizza seat" Payne are already rubbishing it, as expected.

[refitman]

Soooo, fuck Labour a bit more?

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Newcastle council could be complicit in sportswashing, campaigners claim

https://www.theguardian.com/football/ar ... ners-claim

Looks like even the Labour council are getting in on the act in Geordie Arabia.

One email in the batch released thanks to the efforts of NUFCFAS and BBC Radio 4’s File on 4, was from Michelle Percy, the council’s director of investment and growth, to Amanda Staveley, one of Newcastle’s minority British co-owners.

It detailed “an ambition to attract further investment from the Gulf region, to increase exports from the north-east and bring in tourists”. Percy also suggested the north-east could develop a “joint energy institute lead by north-east and Saudi Universities”.

Nick Kemp, the council’s Labour leader, asked Newcastle United for more than £23m to fund free school meals, and a council officer wrote to Staveley asking her to lobby high-level UK government contacts to try to secure funding for the restoration of the Tyne Bridge.

I understand times are tight but a Labour council going cap in hand scrounging money from one of the most repulsive regimes on the planet is grotesque.

[frog222]

Talking of repulsive drug billionaires live in luxury in Dubai and similar

George Greenwood
, Investigations Reporter |
Emma Yeomans
Tuesday May 14 2024, 4.00pm BST, The Times


Amoney launderer who bought two luxury Dubai apartments from his prison cell in the north of England is among dozens of British criminals found to have secretly invested millions of pounds in the Gulf state.

A Times investigation has discovered more than £200 million of property in Dubai that has been bought by criminals convicted i
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/brit ... -kqxhsjqfp

-------------------------------------
The wife of the notorious crime boss Daniel Kinahan has been selling and letting high-end Dubai properties despite international attempts to freeze her husband’s assets, The Times can disclose.

Caoimhe Robinson, who married Kinahan in 2017, has sold significant assets in the Gulf state since July 2022, according to leaked records.

In the months before she began selling her properties, the United States announced sanctions against senior members of the Kinahan cartel and rewards of up to $5 million (£4 million) for information leading to the arrest of Daniel, his father Christopher, or his brother Christopher Jr.

The United Arab Emirates had also frozen the assets of senior members of the Kinahan crime gang early in 2022.

Members of the Kinahan crime syndicate are wanted amid accusations of drug and gun smuggling, murder and money laundering, including distributing South American cocaine and heroin in Ireland, the UK and mainland Europe.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/shes ... -96x3pn70c

---------------------------------------------------------------

In haste, past my bedtime !

[Sky'sGoneOut]

A lot of comments on X on the theme of "They're all going to 3rd rate unis" whereas the evidence is that they aren't. It's the Russell Group ones who will suffer when international applications drop off a cliff - you only have to look at the numbers of top unis ditching courses and shedding staff to see that.

Leeds is a Russell Group uni and has always had loads of international students, when I was there my girlfriend was one of them. The largest contingent were the Chinese who were spending an absolute fortune to study there. It's crazy to hobble not just universities but businesses throughout cities who rely on student custom, and for what? To desperately appeal to knuckle dragging racists who'll have barely read a book in their lives. How profoundly depressing.

As far as I'm aware all of the international students I knew left once they'd finished their degrees, well apart from one, my ex unfortunately who I occasionally still bump into more's the pity.

[RogerOThornhill]

I dunno, this maybe the dimmest of any of the current batch of right wing commentators. She's definitely not a journalist.

Why would you want an advisory committee to be elected by people who have not a single clue as to who the experts in their particular field are?

[Sky'sGoneOut]

12° Brrrr!

It's currently 20° here with the windows open, which I'm most definitely not moaning about. Going from chucking £20 a week into my old gas meter from 1969* to luxuriating in warmth for free has been a most welcome change.

What's weird, and this was true last year as well, is that parts of the North, including Yorkshire, have become consistently warmer than the South coast by quite a margin, at least inland. Which is not something I ever saw being predicted by the modelling of how climate change would effect the UK. Maybe it's a blip? A freak occurrence just lulling us into a false sense of security before the Gulf Stream shifts South and we all freeze to death.



*Just in case anyone doesn't believe a gas meter could be that old.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

I dunno, this maybe the dimmest of any of the current batch of right wing commentators. She's definitely not a journalist.

She's just another right wing grifter talking bollocks for cash.

In the tragic world country we now live in where bands are making a loss producing music it's easier to make a living being a dick on Twitter and in the Telegraph/Mail than doing something worthwhile and offering joy to others.

To be fair though Charlotte does seem pretty bad at it given that tweet has fewer likes than an old Fairport Convention song I tweeted at the weekend.