FlyTheNest

Morning all.

So much for the weather forecast, it's raining and I have a delivery of firewood at 11 !

Back to business, it looks like Starmer has left behind yet another live hand grenade, in this example for the whole Nation, not just Andy Burnham .

Aditya writes --

In December, Starmer and Donald Trump struck a deal on medicine. Downing Street agreed it would spend more on branded drugs, in return for the White House not jacking up tariffs on British pharmaceutical exports to the US. As I wrote at the time, the treaty stank. One of the greatest achievements of British democracy, our NHS, set up to save lives, had been used to save face with Trump. The most rapacious president in American history now had his hands on our healthcare system.

Wes Streeting and his Department of Health and Social Care gave almost no detail about how much this would cost, or what that meant for patients.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... deal-covid

It'd be interesting to know what the Civil Service advice on this was ?

They are trying the same shit on Germany --

(only a few seconds of publicity)

Ignore the thumbnail, youtube going crazy on those, it's about the US treating 'allies' as slaves . They are trying to extend their success with Starmer, screwing the NHS, see above,

The Trump fair is getting better, or worse - depending how you look at it

No shit.

I had an absolute nightmare with the DWP today.

A few weeks ago a guy I know in Zanzibar gifted me 5 million quid and now the DWP are saying I should have declared it and are threatening to prosecute me for benefit fraud. The absolute cheek of it! I was on the phone for over an hour explaining that it was no business of theirs why I received it and I could spend it on whatever I liked, a herd of robot zebras for example. They didn't take kindly to this and when I pointed out that according to their regulations one off gifts from friends shouldn't be classed as income for benefits purposes I'm pretty sure I heard the guy I was talking to swearing under his breath. There was talk of fines and court cases but I set him straight, 'Look here,' I said, 'Who do you think cares about a benefit claimant getting 5 million quid and not declaring it?' Well according to him lots of people. The press, politicians, especially Reform who he said really hate benefit scroungers like me. So we'll see what happens, luckily though they don't seem to have caught onto my side wheeze promoting magic beans on TikTok, well not yet anyway, I'm guessing suspicions may be raised when giant beanstalks start sprouting across the country, however I'm banking on the sudden appearance of carnivorous anti-English giants causing enough chaos for me to ride to freedom on one of my robot zebras.

I was speaking to my mate Zico from Tesco today. As you may have noticed while shopping recently supermarket refrigeration systems in this country can't handle the heat. Last week when all the refrigerators were down in my local shop he said they lost over £60,000 in sales. Despite his name he's from Croatia (where it gets hot) and he explained they have dual refrigeration systems there which swap from one to another automatically once it reaches a certain temperature and couldn't understand why supermarkets here didn't invest in such systems.

'Oh Zico', I said while gently shaking my head, 'despite being here for all these years you still don't understand this country at all, nobody invests more than the bare minimum if they don't have to, the natural order of things is to extract wealth, not use it usefully even if it means their business makes the occasional loss.'

Then we went back to talking about the World Cup and how both of our teams were crap.