Thursday 19th September 2024

[refitman]

Morning all.

[refitman]

Something, something, the grownups are in charge now

[frog222]

Good morning and haha refit, you beat me to that one !

"something something" -- neatly timed to NOT be registered before the election ....

Leaving aside Starmer's £2500 spectacles and the Missis's splendid array of new frocks ...

I read this Times one earlier -- https://archive.ph/BpKjU

3.9 million on sickness benefits as Covid continues to take toll
Every local authority in England and Wales bar one has had a rise in claimants, with experts suggesting the pandemic may have hit an ailing population and NHS harder

(( "bar one" -- The City of London ! ))

Some 37 per cent of new disability benefit awards are primarily for mental health problems, up from 28 per cent before the pandemic. New claims for learning disabilities have more than tripled, while those for other mental health issues have doubled.

While the rise in mental health claims is across all ages, it is particularly noticeable among the young with 82 per cent of new claims among 16-year-old girls for mental health issues, compared with 12 per cent among 64-year-olds.

While the Conservatives attributed such rises to the “medicalisation of normal emotions” and planned to stop cash payments for such conditions, Labour has prioritised better mental health support.

(( linked article -• Thousands go straight from university to long-term sickness ))

Latimer said: “The crucial point is that it is not yet known what factors are driving this increase. Figuring out what is behind the recent rise must surely be a top priority for the government if it is going to be able to respond appropriately.”

One of several differences between the UK and many comparable forrin parts -- we basically don't have no-fault evictions and anyway ALL evictions are illegal in the winter months . That particular form of precarity is enough to drive people into depression .

The Times commenters were at their worst, so I couldn't be bothered . One person who'd go down well with them here --

[frog222]

[Sky'sGoneOut]

It's back. I can barely contain my excitement.

[refitman]

Kirby is both a Kipper columnist and a think tank director. Gonna have some truly cursed opinions from her.

[frog222]

Jill Kirby on Gaza, February QT --

https://www.thenational.scot/news/24123 ... za-stance/

[frog222]

Interesting series

Undercover as a hotel cleaner in Ireland: ‘Lifting the heavy mattress, I cry tears of rage and exhaustion’
Saša Uhlová

The next evening, I meet Sará in the back yard. She is totally down, saying she should have stayed in Slovakia and worked for €4 an hour there, rather than put up with what she has to do here in Ireland.

She has come here with her boyfriend Sebastian, who works as a cook, to pay off their debts. If they didn’t have the debt to pay off, or even if they had enough for their fare home, they would leave. But they have nothing.

Every employee has a right to one day off a week. But because there aren’t enough staff, some haven’t had a day off in weeks. In the schedule sent out, the hours change all the time, but the underlying system is clear to everyone: they pay for as few hours as they can get away with.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... s-schedule

Fatcat politicians don't give a toss for working conditons of the underclass .

[AnatolyKasparov]

Its being argued that getting free tickets to watch Coldplay is an example of Starmer's poor judgement in these matters.

I wouldn't disagree, save for the fact that in this case actually paying for them would have been far worse.

(lifted from somewhere else, sorry not sorry)

[frog222]

LOL

[frog222]

Russian takeover bid -- only two dead ...

[AnatolyKasparov]

And don't forget that an end to that 1990s instability was what Putin promised, and a large part of what made him genuinely popular for so long.

[frog222]

And don't forget that an end to that 1990s instability was what Putin promised, and a large part of what made him genuinely popular for so long.

and it only cost him a few apartment bombings with a few hundred dead so that he could then flatten Grozny .

Cheap at the price !

[refitman]

Anyone else getting flashbacks to the end of the Major years - cash for Qs and all that?


Labour appear to be trying the sleaze and shitting the bed speed run.

[refitman]

Labour spokesperson pouring cold water (flat beer?) on this is at least a sign they're not complete morons

[AnatolyKasparov]

Anyone else getting flashbacks to the end of the Major years - cash for Qs and all that?


Labour appear to be trying the sleaze and shitting the bed speed run.

Except that Peston (not for the first time) doesn't seem to actually understand what he is getting excited about.

Though not as bad as Laura K, he is emphatically not a reliable source.

Chaminda Jayanetti - not exactly a Starmer fanboy - explains thus: "most of this profit is due to 'fair value movements on investments'. That means, changes in the value of investments - those aren't taxed until the investment is sold. Therefore £178m of that £231m profit isn't really 'profit' in the normal way". Which isn't *exactly* what Pesto was exclaiming earlier......

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Question Time came tonight from Ashton-under-Lyne which is Angela Rayner's neck of the woods and now that Labour are in power the majority of the audience is made up of Labour voters. So did they appear happy? Nope.

For Labour we had Lucy Powell. Dear oh dear. Lucy faced questions on gifts to politicians, the removal of the Winter fuel payments, scrapping the Rwanda policy, and the dire state of mental health provision in the NHS. She was met with stony silence throughout interspersed by sporadic sniggering. According to Lucy taking tens of thousands of pounds worth of 'gifts' is fine apparently because most of them aren't real gifts, they're tickets to events and functions which politicians are required to attend as part of their job, but even if that were true quite how it pertains to Keir Starmer and his wife getting expensive clothes (and specs) is beyond me. When that was put to her she avoided giving an answer. On removing the Winter fuel allowance she was all over the place though at least she didn't repeat her previous idiotic claim that they were doing it to stop a run on the pound. On the one hand she claimed it was necessary to save money due to the 'black hole' while on the other she said she hoped it would encourage poorer pensioners to sign up for pension credit, which would negate any savings. On this occasion when this blatantly obvious contradiction was pointed out to her she simply stared ahead gormlessly as if pretending not to have heard anything. As for scrapping the Rwanda nonsense, here she had the opportunity to argue for a more humane system but did we get that? You bet we didn't, Lucy went on a bellicose rant about how many more people Labour had returned to their countries of origin over the Summer on planes fit to burst, boasting it was much more than the Tories had ever managed. It was a genuinely awful performance worthy of one of of her Tory predecessors, both in its smug arrogance, its dishonesty, and its ugly rhetoric. If a Labour MP can't even get a single clap (never mind a round of applause) from a majority Labour audience so soon after they've won an election there's something seriously wrong.

For the Tories we had Graham Stuart. Graham did exactly what I expected him to do, accuse Labour of hypocrisy, I mean it's an open goal, and it worked. He railed against Starmer's freebies while expressing his fury at Labour freezing pensioners to death and lo and behold a Tory MP starts getting applause for the first time in living memory. He attacked Labour from the right and the left with consummate ease, it didn't matter that he was being a massive hypocrite himself, all that mattered was there was element of truth to what he was saying. I mean given our previous experience of Graham it's pretty evident he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer and yet there he was easily besting Labour's Leader of the House of Commons.

For the Lib Dems we had Tim Farron. Thank god for Tim. In explaining why he never accepts any political gifts he said that if he couldn't justify it to someone in Kendal market he wouldn't accept it. Then got the loudest applause of the night for making a staunch defence of immigration as a force for good while lambasting the utterly broken asylum system the Tories have left us.

For friendly Labour economists we had Mariana Mazzucato. When I say friendly it would seem Mariana has been advising Labour in some capacity and she did her best to appear supportive of the 'five missions' (I confess my ignorance of these missions), however when it came to making cuts versus investing in services and infrastructure she was very clear that following the former course would be a mistake, what look like quick fix savings to the treasury often have much higher knock on costs in the longer term, and it was also good to hear someone trash the idea that a country is equivalent to a household financially, we don't hear it nearly enough.

For torn faced right wing crones we had Jill Kirby. The fact that this awful woman got applause for criticising Labour's Winter fuel allowance cut by offering the far more equitable solution of making it taxable for richer pensioners shows what a fucking mess Reeves has made of this.

[AnatolyKasparov]

But meanwhile I am seeing some fairly trustworthy people I look at on Twitter saying Powell "wasn't as bad as expected" and Stuart was totally useless.

Might just have to have a bit of a watch later to be sure

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Just as an aside, I'm sorry if none of that was funny. It's hard to be jovial about the fact that a new government has come in and almost seamlessly morphed into a slightly less shit version of the last one.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

But meanwhile I am seeing some fairly trustworthy people I look at on Twitter saying Powell "wasn't as bad as expected" and Stuart was totally useless.

Might just have to have a bit of a watch later to be sure

Tell you what AK, let's make this interesting, I'll give you £10 for every single individual clap Lucy Powell receives throughout the entire programme, and if that turns out to be none you have to admit here on this forum that maybe Refitman and I have a point. While also drawing a cats face on a cardboard box, wearing it on your head and filming yourself stalking a bird. Preferably a Goldfinch.