Thursday 27th July 2023

[refitman]

Morning all.

[frog222]

Morning refit

Finally got around to watching this. oh dear, first LOL of the day .

[frog222]

I've been looking at @chrischirp to see where she says that covid is down and staying down , but didn't find that so far! I can well believe there have been fights going on in some nesting somewhere tho .

Still, that led me to have a look at the @IndependentSage clips .

Interesting to see from a reply that the NationalCrime Agency is sewage-testing for cocaine, but Jenny Harries and suchlike are not testing for covid in England . Trump was right about inconvenient testing !

[RogerOThornhill]

Good morning.

Part of Dorries constituency are getting a little tired of her inaction...great letter.

[RogerOThornhill]

I see that farage wants the whole of the Nat West Board to resign.

I wonder at what point someone in the Government is going to point out that the value of the investment in Nat West that they hold - about 39% I believe - will slide even more and any thought of being able to sell off more shares will be put on hold.

And someone could point out to Farage that he could have done something about banks offloading customers a while back...but then it wasn't about him so...

This point also marks the start of a much bigger campaign for me. As I have said before, the only reason I decided to go public – and ultimately cause myself quite a fair degree of embarrassment – is that I realised over the last couple of years that many people had wrongly had their bank account closed.

[frog222]

Matthew Parris is resuming his R4 Great Lives series next week.

He will be ‘platforming’ Ken Loach .

What is Labour’s position on this new BBC scandal ?

[AnatolyKasparov]

Morning refit

Finally got around to watching this. oh dear, first LOL of the day .

Mendoza is a full-on AS crank. Are these sorts of people your heroes?

[refitman]

I see that farage wants the whole of the Nat West Board to resign.

I wonder at what point someone in the Government is going to point out that the value of the investment in Nat West that they hold - about 39% I believe - will slide even more and any thought of being able to sell off more shares will be put on hold.

And someone could point out to Farage that he could have done something about banks offloading customers a while back...but then it wasn't about him so...

This point also marks the start of a much bigger campaign for me. As I have said before, the only reason I decided to go public – and ultimately cause myself quite a fair degree of embarrassment – is that I realised over the last couple of years that many people had wrongly had their bank account closed.

Hmmmm

[AnatolyKasparov]

Matthew Parris is resuming his R4 Great Lives series next week.

He will be ‘platforming’ Ken Loach .

What is Labour’s position on this new BBC scandal ?

Parris is not a Labour member so can do what he likes, why is this even being posted on here.

[refitman]

Matthew Parris is resuming his R4 Great Lives series next week.

He will be ‘platforming’ Ken Loach .

What is Labour’s position on this new BBC scandal ?

Parris is not a Labour member so can do what he likes, why is this even being posted on here.

Perhaps because Labour have decided to libel one of the UK's most respected living directors as a vicious anti-Semite and used that as an excuse to eject people from the Party. If Loach is as terrible as Reeves, Aitken et al make out, they would be kicking up a fuss over him being platformed by the BBC?

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Oops Rachael Maskell was sounding a bit left wing on CH4 news, endorsing rent controls and the reigning in of landlords' profits. In fact she even questioned whether providing housing should be run as a profit making business at all.

I expect a loud alarm began sounding in Labour HQ and a crack team of goons are already on their way to whisk her off for re-education.

[AnatolyKasparov]

She's a funny one actually, quite *right* wing in some respects.

[refitman]

Just think, if it was renationalised we could afford benefits for more than 2 children

[Sky'sGoneOut]

She's a funny one actually, quite *right* wing in some respects.

Many socialists are. My (thankfully brief) flirtation with the SWP crowd in my youth ended because they were about the most right wing people I knew. Stingy bastards as well, I don't think I ever saw one of them buy a round.

[AnatolyKasparov]

One of my relatives was in the SWP (and stood as a Socialist Alliance candidate back in the 2001 GE)

He eventually became disillusioned as so many of their people do.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Just think, if it was renationalised we could afford benefits for more than 2 children

In the meantime it would be good if we could have a regulator which put consumers first rather than the energy companies. Ofgem set the energy price cap as high as it did to allow the energy companies to make up for their previous losses at our expense. This was done to provide 'robustness' in the system after all those smaller companies went bust when the wholesale gas price rises destroyed their profit margins. But surely them's the breaks in a 'free market'? Now we're back to the same situation we had with the banks in that the remaining energy companies are deemed too essential to fail so Ofgem allowed the likes of British Gas to trouser millions of pounds of our money through higher bills. Which they're now paying out in increased shareholder dividends. At least with the banks the government and Bank of England obscured their reverse Robin Hood thievery using quantitive easing whereas this time Ofgem have quite transparently and willingly allowed these companies to make record profits by taking it directly from us. And not just our own money but the public money given out in cost of living payments.

And talking of the banks they're also raking it in because of the rises in interest rates. I mean it's curious, when interest rates rise, why do mortgages go up accordingly but not savings rates? It's a total mystery.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

CH4 news earlier had a debate on the dire housing situation we face with a bunch of folk representing the various interested parties. Unsurprisingly everyone talked a lot of sense apart from the two landlords. In answer to a tenant who said he was paying nearly 50% of his income in rent after having it hiked by 30% in a property where the mortgage has been paid off both landlords bemoaned the rises in mortgage rates (which didn't apply to his complaint) and whinged about tax hikes which only apply to their profits.

A friend of mine had this earlier this year, lived in a place for 12 years which is owned by a (now retired) couple, it's a house they inherited so no mortgage, and out of the blue they told her she had to pay an extra £200 a month because 'market rates'. She managed to negotiate them down to £150 but we still feel like stringing the fuckers up. It's pure greed.

I saw a place on Zoopla a few months ago on a half decent street quite near me so booked a viewing (a friend was thinking of moving so I was checking places out). It was a tiny ground floor flat, with a kitchen so small swinging a gerbil would be a challenge and a bathroom so petit the miniature sink overhung the toilet requiring at least a beginners level of contortionism to have a poo. The rent was £700 pcm. No agency fees. Which believe it or not sounded promising.

A week later he got back to me, the listing had been removed then re-appeared with a rent of £1000 pcm, for a place where you can't even shit in comfort.

[Sky'sGoneOut]