Always degenerating into repetition

Labour MP blames Starmer for ‘soul-destroying’ local election results

• Rebecca Long-Bailey criticised Sir Keir Starmer, describing Labour's recent local election results as 'soul-destroying'.
• Speaking to the BBC on Friday, the Salford MP stated that Labour had been 'squeezed' by both Reform and the Greens.
• This squeeze resulted in the loss of several 'really good' councillors and candidates for the party.
• Long-Bailey noted that many residents felt unable to vote for Labour due to the party's national actions.
• She suggested Labour’s recent slogans, rhetoric, and decisions had not resonated well in local communities.

Man’s life consists in a connection with all things in the universe. Whoever can establish, or initiate a new connection between mankind and the circumambient universe is, in his own degree, a saviour. Because mankind is always exhausting its human possibilities, always degenerating into repetition, torpor, ennui, lifelessness. When ennui sets in, it is a sign that human vitality is waning, and the human connection with the universe is gone stale. Then he who comes to make a new revelation, a new connection, whether he be soldier, statesman, poet, philosopher, artist, he is a saviour.

D.H. Lawrence - Reflections on the death of a porcupine and other essays (1925)

Keir Starmer is entirely unable to offer that new revelation, or as Rebecca Long-Bailey puts it, a soul. His eventual replacement won’t be able to offer it either.

But we already know that.

The remarkable decline of British nuclear capability

James Price has a useful if depressing CAPX piece on the need to regenerate British nuclear capability. 


Britain needs to ignore the Blob and go nuclear

• A groundbreaking American nuclear project puts the UK to shame
• Nuclear power should be a British success story, but it isn't
• Time and again, Nimbyism and bureaucracy have got in the way of affordable energy

Three C-17 Globemasters. Eight shipping containers. The first nuclear reactor in history to be moved by air. While it feels like the opening of one of those special-forces slop series on Amazon that I count as one of my guiltiest pleasures, this is the very real Operation Windlord.

The operation, conducted by the US Air Force in February to ferry a five-megawatt unit from California to a desert lab in Utah, is now in its next phase: engineers are racing to switch it on by July 4, the 250th anniversary of American independence. The reactor was built by Valar Atomics, a three-year-old startup that, like Operation Windlord, takes its name from Lord of the Rings.

There was a time when this story would have been Britain’s. When Queen Elizabeth opened Calder Hall in 1956, we became the first nation on earth to feed grid-scale civil nuclear power into a domestic electricity supply. By 1965, the year of Winston Churchill’s funeral, Britain had built more operational reactors than the United States, the Soviet Union and France combined. We commissioned 26 of them between 1956 and 1971, with sites approved in months and reactors connected to the grid in under five years.

Then, thanks to the usual morass of blob mentality and Nimbyism, we stopped. We have not built a single new commercial reactor since Sizewell B in 1995. The one we are currently building, Hinkley Point C, is on track to be the most expensive nuclear station in human history: roughly six times what South Korea spends per megawatt for the same job. There is a fascinating essay explaining this in Works in Progress that reads more like tragedy than history.

The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of how hopelessly adrift we are in the UK. There are moves towards nuclear, but nothing very encouraging. 

The link to Works in Progress is worth following too - it's a complex story.

Civil Servants Faking Office Attendance

 

Sir Keir Plans Slower Train Wreck

PM 'planning major reset in bid to save job - but ministers tell him to plan resignation instead'

Sir Keir Starmer is said to be planning a major "reset" speech in a bid to save his job - just as pressure grows for him to step aside completely.

The Prime Minister is set to make an address on Monday to win back young voters from the Greens - which have already started eating away at Labour councils up and down the country.

But around his Cabinet table, ministers are said to have started suggesting he should set the wheels in motion to stand down.

While multiple Labour MPs went public in the early hours of Friday morning to call for him to go.

He's an incompetent, delusional obsessive, but Ed Miliband isn't any better. 

Ed Miliband was reported to have privately suggested Sir Keir should set out a timeline for his departure.p

What a rabble they are. 

Beneath the façade

David Shipley has a useful Critic piece on organised crime operating from dodgy small businesses on the high street. Useful because it is yet another of those familiar issues the Establishment has chosen to ignore for years. Apparently even the BBC has condescended to notice now though. 

 

The underworld on the high street

Beneath the façade of everyday commerce, organised crime has quietly captured British high streets

Something may be stirring in Britain. After decades in which our institutions turned a blind eye to the reality of mass migration and multiculturalism, it seems reality is dawning on them.

Earlier this month the BBC ran a series of exposes titled “The Immigration Fraudsters”, reporting on what they called a “shadow industry of law firms and advisers” helping people to cheat the asylum system (although Suella Braveman raised the issue three years ago). Now the Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI) has published a detailed report which reveals the extent to which whole sectors of the economy have become dominated by organised crime. This has also been an open secret for many years — as far back as 2001, the UK’s “Drugs Czar” described how money laundering was taking place in London, often via “legitimate businesses” operated by Turks and Eastern Europeans. Indeed only last May Robert Jenrick made a video in which he spoke about “weird Turkish barber shops”.

Familiar but the whole piece is worth reading if even politicians are required to notice. This is the hot-spot map produced in the Chartered Trading Standards Institute report. No surprises there either.

 

Crucial day

Polling stations open at start of crucial day for Keir Starmer’s premiership

Polling stations across Wales, Scotland and parts of England have opened for millions to cast their vote in crucial elections for Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership.

They are expected to be the toughest test for the Prime Minister since the general election in 2024, with devastating results predicted for the Labour Party.

Some 1,850 Labour seats are expected to be lost in councils across England, according to polling guru Lord Robert Hayward.


A crucial day for voters? A loss of 1850 council seats may sound like a resounding vote of no confidence for Keir Starmer, but further down we have this picture of possible replacements. It's a reminder of how crucial voting is - or isn't.

 

Vote Green, end history

'Vote Green, make history,' says Zack Polanski as he seeks major gains in London local elections

The Green Party leader said he was aiming to break Labour’s ‘stronghold’ grip on the capital

Zack Polanski urged Londoners to “vote Green, make history” as he sought to radically redraw London’s political map...

“People in London are really struggling and they need to know that they have councillors who are out there batting for them every single day, protecting local services, making sure we're investing in the community, that we have council homes, homes that people can actually afford to live in in London.”


Sounds like another terminological inexactitude from Zack. By "batting for them every single day" he probably means every day apart from Saturdays, Sundays and bank holidays. In cases where the "batting" requires an innings from specific council staff members, we have to add annual leave, maternity leave, paternity leave, compassionate leave, lunch breaks, coffee breaks and sickies.

Then we have training courses, established procedures, processes, legal issues, risk assessments, budgetary constraints, consultations, duty of care, social issues, environmental issues, and the cycle of reorganisations.

Plus the debilitating effect of tedium.