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Wednesday, 12 February 2025

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Labour suspends 11 councillors over offensive WhatsApp messages


Labour has suspended 11 councillors from the party following an investigation into offensive messages in a WhatsApp group.

Andrew Gwynne, the MP for Gorton and Denton in Greater Manchester, was sacked as health minister on Sunday and suspended from the Labour Party after messages were leaked.

Another MP, Burnley’s Oliver Ryan, was suspended on Monday,



The most striking aspect of this latest embarrassment is how it reveals yet again how many members of the political class prefer pub banter to the dull grind of professional behaviour and acquiring expertise. We've known it forever of course, it has been an issue for a very long time.

Perhaps the trick is to be occasionally amusing but always professionally competent, but at the moment most of us would probably settle for competent, or even occasionally competent. 


And therefore if the more foolish a man is, the more he pleases himself and is admired by others, to what purpose should he beat his brains about true knowledge, which first will cost him dear, and next render him the more troublesome and less confident, and lastly, please only a few?

Desiderius Erasmus - The Praise of Folly (1511)

Several



Google Calendar removes Black History Month and Pride Month because keeping them is ‘unsustainable’


The company has also removed references to Women’s History Month in March and Indigenous Peoples Month in November among other observances...

Several Google Calendar users have been left furious with the removal of the events.



That's good to hear - only several dissatisfied users. To brighten our day further, two of their comments are mentioned -


“Calendar used to capitulate to fascism,” one disgruntled user wrote on the user support page, adding: “This is shameful. Reinstate these calendar dates.”

“Grow a pair google. The ‘great’ orange leader doesn't get to own facts or history,” another wrote.

Tuesday, 11 February 2025

Sinking Flagship



Labour's 1.5m new homes goal thrown into doubt as minister admits we don't have enough workers to build them


Labour’s flagship pledge of 1.5 million new homes this Parliament was thrown into doubt as a minister admitted to a shortage of workers to build them.

Skills minister Baroness Smith of Malvern was frank about the need to train up more construction workers to achieve the challenging target to tackle the housing crisis in London and other parts of Britain..

“I’m not confident that we’ve got enough skilled workers, no that’s what we’ve inherited,” she told Times Radio.



It's strange how informed people will have known this already, even those who know nothing about the building industry. Maybe they did some research so I suppose that counts as cheating in political circles. Or maybe it's worse, maybe it's far right cheating.

As informed people also know, there is another major skills shortage in the Labour party, but somehow Skills minister Baroness Smith of Malvern is unlikely to tackle that one, presumably because the last government can't easily be held responsible for it. 
 

Dead people receiving checks



Bats



Starmer has declared war on £100m bat shed - but has he got a solution?


For the last six months, the prime minister has singled out the most hated construction site in Britain for criticism - a kilometre-long, £100m shed to protect bats in Buckinghamshire from the high speed trains of the future.

Sir Keir regularly thunders that this is the emblem of a broken planning system. His chancellor says such things will never happen again. But is their joint political sonar advanced enough to avoid a collision in the coming months?


Sir Keir regularly thunders? He doesn't come across as a thundering type, but maybe it's down to the acoustics of the bat shed.

It's typically political to single out one prominent aspect of the HS2 mess and present it as if this is almost the same as dealing with the problem. It's a start, but the way to go about it was in his hands from the beginning, or would have been had he adopted the Donald Trump approach. 

In that case, repeal laws, get rid of obstructive bureaucracy, abolish quangos would have been Starmer's primary activity from the off, but it wasn't. 

Instead we have had the winter fuel payment debacle, damaging tax rises, yet more immigration, ludicrous house building promises, absurd adherence to Net Zero, ridiculous international posturing and enough mendacity to fill a kilometre-long bat shed.

Monday, 10 February 2025

Quick Learners



French labour minister calls for speedy AI integration in business


French labour minister Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet has urged companies and employees to embrace artificial intelligence without delay, as President Emmanuel Macron hosted a major AI summit in the country...

“We must speed up AI adoption across all sectors,” she urged.



It is remarkable how quickly politicians acquire expertise. 

It's much the same in the UK, although Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet must envy the expertise of Ed Miliband. Our Ed seems to be the only person in the world to understand how and why the global climate changes even though he is not so hot on the best way to consume bacon sarnies. 

Political Parties Don’t Work



If we have learned anything political from recent decades, it must at least be a hint that voting for political parties is a waste of time. As a means to provide rational political oversight of government, political parties don’t work.

Here in the UK, Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem, SNP and Green have in one way or another demonstrated their inability to perform a rationally pragmatic political function unconstrained by ideology. To take a single example from many, it is possible to describe Keir Starmer’s Cabinet as a rabble, probably without raising a single informed eyebrow.

Here in the UK, the Establishment is now regional in the form of the EU and global in the form of the UN, WEF and a complex range of transnational bodies, including media. Political parties are not equipped to deal with this. Possibly could be but aren’t.

 Instead, political division has become a matter of hidden thoughts and motives, where parties are a way to hide the worst and display something better, or at least acceptable to the perennially optimistic voter.

We have Reform of course, which promises to correct the failings of established parties and as we know, this new party is attracting substantial numbers of potential voters if polls are any guide. Yet how will Reform ensure that it does not attract the charlatans, liars, ideologues and incompetents the other parties fail to guard against? We don’t know.

It could be said that voters of the UK have conducted a decades long experiment in the democratic value of political parties. The conclusion is unmissable, for UK voters political parties don’t work.