Mandate

Starmer loses another top aide but clings on – for now

In front of a packed meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Sir Keir also vowed that as long as he had “breath in my body” he would fight against Nigel Farage on behalf of the country, adding that he had “won every fight I’ve ever been in”.

He said: “After having fought so hard for the chance to change our country, I’m not prepared to walk away from my mandate and my responsibility to my country, or to plunge us into chaos as others have done.”

A chap is bound to wonder what Starmer's 'mandate' is supposed to be, but of course the answer is that the only mandate any of them recognise is to stay in power.

Yet a chap is also bound to wonder if silly political words such as 'mandate' have become useless verbal baggage, words which impress nobody. Or maybe they have evolved into a kind of mystical twaddle akin to astrology, climate dooming and celebrity lingo...

Hang on...

Have twaddle speakers adopted and covertly formalised the language Twaddlish as a signal of social superiority? As the advantages of an upper echelon accent fade away, perhaps Twaddlish has taken its place. 

Gosh, perhaps the mandate of state education is to promote Twaddlish.

Miller

 

To live a normal life again

‘To live a normal life again, it’s a dream come true’: UK’s first climate evacuees can cast off their homes and trauma

Forty-odd residents of Clydach Terrace in Ynysybwl, south Wales, relieved by council buyout after years in fear of fast flooding...

Of the 18 houses on the street, only 6a and 6b – newer builds set back from the road, and up a slope – will remain. One woman living there said she would not be moving, but her son, a little further down the road, will be...


It took some chutzpah to work the notion of 'climate evacuees' into the headline of a story which could have been a more analytical example of the various natural, self-imposed and civil engineering challenges of flood defence. 

The Grauniad manages it but - 

In some ways, the street is uniquely unlucky. The classic mining community row of early 20th-century stone houses was built on a natural floodplain, and its narrowness means there is no room for flood waters to dissipate. Crucially, the terrace is in a basin, meaning that a rise of just a centimetre over the retaining wall can almost instantly turn into 2 metres of water, engulfing nearby houses within minutes.

Beyond the Sleaze II

A sobering Blackout News piece on signs that Germany is gradually losing its automotive industry, much of it through self-inflicted official incompetence. Sounds familiar and reminds me of the sharp increase in the number of Chinese cars I've seen on local roads in the last year or so.

AI translation from the original German.

Germany is losing the automotive industry – if production migrates, it will not come back

The decline of the German automotive industry does not come with sirens, but with briefcases. The findings are brutal: the automotive industry is losing its substance – and much faster than many believe. This is reflected in plant closures, insolvencies and cancelled development budgets. There is a point at which all whitewashing ends: once production has migrated, it usually does not come back. This is because tools, supply chains and routines disappear with production, while new locations build up know-how at the same time. To do this, the suppliers follow the manufacturers to the locations abroad.

For the automotive industry, energy costs, taxes and approval times are crucial. This shapes the cost structures at the respective location. Germany combines high energy prices with a high tax burden, while permits eat up time. At the same time, the infrastructure is crumbling in many places and this is driving additional costs into every calculation. As a result, even strong brands are losing pace and speed, even though demand continues to exist globally.

Beyond the Sleaze

It's telling how our local sleaze-fest tends to obscure all kinds of stories about events in the wider world. This one for instance, which may be more significant than we are allowed to know.

 
Behind Turkmenistan’s Neutrality, Quiet U.S. Military Ties Endure

In late January, U.S. Special Envoy for South and Central Asia, Sergio Gor visited Turkmenistan. Accompanying Gor was U.S. Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll.

Driscoll’s presence in Turkmenistan, a country with a roughly 1,150-kilometer border with Iran, sparked some speculation that his visit was related to escalating tensions between Washington and Tehran. But while it is unusual for any top foreign military officials to visit Turkmenistan, U.S. military officials have stopped by Turkmenistan relatively often over the course of the last 30 years...

Much about the U.S.-Turkmen military relationship remains unknown, save to a select few in those two countries, but it is clear these ties are enduring and important for Turkmenistan.

Potential New Labour Leader

Not a person I know much about, but surely Labour must have some decent MPs who could do the job.  One would do.

Mental Capers

PM 'acted in good faith' when appointing paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein's friend Peter Mandelson, says cabinet minister

Pat McFadden said "the prime minister [has] acted in good faith" in terms of his appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador and called for him to return his payoff.

'Like ferrets in a sack': Labour at war as Starmer engulfed by Mandelson scandal

A Labour grandee has accused senior party figures of “acting like ferrets in a sack” as Keir Starmer faces his biggest crisis as prime minister over the Peter Mandelson scandal.

Lord Blunkett pleaded with his colleagues to “get our act together” on another grim day for the PM.

Sons of sophistry and grandsons of cant, they had considered themselves capable of proving the greatest absurdities by the mental capers to which they had accustomed their acrobatic intellects.

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez - The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916)