Thursday 3rd July 2025

[refitman]

Morning all.

[Frog222]

Morning !

Now to cheer everybody up

[Frog222]

" An analogue PM in a digital age " -- so accurate .

As his biographer Julian Jackson makes clear, De Gaulle’s “certain idea” was not always consistent, and was never a fully articulated programme – more a stance than a doctrine. But De Gaulle’s idea had very clear features, which millions of French voters understood and often approved of. He stood for a distinct French historical identity, for France’s political independence, for its grandeur and for its social cohesion.

Whether Starmer has a certain idea of Britain, let alone has held that idea all his life, is hard to know. His recent interview with his biographer Tom Baldwin suggests not. The interview is oddly naive. It is full of regrets and admissions of bad judgment but has little sense of history or people. Yet the need for Starmer to tell an uplifting story to Britons about Britain is at least as important as his need to solve some of his more specific policy problems.

" Little sense of history = OUCH ! "
( Surrounding oneself with Union flags just does not compensate for deep ignorance )

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... er-britain

[Frog222]

A pleasantly warm day now, T° doubled since it was 11 in the middle of the night !

High tide at 2 so organising around a prowl then . Now going out to take the rotoscythe for a walk

[Frog222]

First lol of the day does to 'Wes' and those parliamentarians

" Weight loss injections are the “talk of the House of Commons tea rooms” and widely used by MPs, the health secretary has said as he pledged to widen public access to them.

Speaking as the government launches a 10-year-plan for the NHS, Wes Streeting said access to weight loss injections such as Ozempic and Mounjaro should be “based on need and not the ability to pay”.

Currently people with a body mass index (BMI) of 35 or more, or 30 or more with a linked health condition, can be prescribed jabs on the NHS through specialist weight-management services.

It is estimated that about 1.5 million people in the UK are already taking weight loss drugs, which may have been prescribed through specialist weight loss services or obtained via private prescription costing hundreds of pounds a month."

https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... eeting-nhs

[refitman]

I'm sure this is fine. I'm sure this will cause no problems for Labour.

[Frog222]

I'm sure this is fine. I'm sure this will cause no problems for Labour.

Second lol of the day
Back from beach prowl, northerly made some interesting breaking waves but manageable for my height .

Liked this reply --

Nick Hall ‪@nickhall.bsky.social‬
Adam Curtis voice: "But the ministers discovered there was a problem with the synthetic voters. On election day, they simply did not turn up. And the next day, Reform UK swept to power." 3 juillet 2025 à 14:47
·

[Frog222]

17.08 BST liveblog

But since the Counter-terrorism and Border Security act 2019 introduced section 12(1)(a) to the Terrorism Act 2000, you could also be looking at up to 14 years if you “express an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation”, without even needing an intention that your listener or listeners should agree. Being reckless about that suffices.

So by bringing Palestine Action, for example, within the ambit of the terrorism laws anyone who is young and foolish enough to say that their heart is in the right place, or that the government should listen to them, is committing a very serious offence for which they could be prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned as a terrorist.

[Frog222]

[refitman]

[Sky'sGoneOut]

For anyone looking for a QT review it's finished for the Summer which is a shame as I was looking forward to seeing who Labour would be cruel enough to send out to defend Monday's fiasco.

I must confess (believe it or not) that I got something wrong the other night. When Labour released their green paper on welfare reform I assumed (along with many others) that all of it would have been included in the bill they were so desperately trying to pass. But it turns out it wasn't. Inexplicably a number of measures weren't included. One of which being the scrapping of the Work Capability Assessment for UC/ESA which I was going on about the other night. So basically they left out a number of critical components of their welfare reform agenda which will now need to be separately legislated and voted upon.

Did they forget? Did the dog eat their homework? Nobody knows. Whatever the reason they're going to have to go through all the same shit again and do they have the stomach for it? We shall see.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

I may have my misgivings about a certain Mr Corbyn but I'll follow Zarah Sultana to the ends of the Earth simply because of her name.