Weird

World’s first computer powered by human brain cells goes on sale

Melbourne-based Cortical Labs launched the CL1 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, describing it as a “body in a box” that holds the potential to revolutionise AI and robotics.

The computer uses lab-grown neurons that grow across a silicon chip, which allows them to send and receive electrical impulses.

An internal life support system of pumps, gas, and temperature controls keep the neurons alive for up to six months...

Cortical Labs said the first CL1 computers will be ready to ship to customers in June, with each unit costing around $35,000 (£27,000).


Interesting, but on the face of it, a computer costing $35,000, which needs life support and only lasts for up to 6 months doesn't sound like an unmissable deal, but scientists involve themselves is some weird projects.

Meanwhile Donald Trump's weird political opponents seem to be running around like headless chickens, as if life support for their neurons has wandered past its sell-by date too.

Maybe it's a weirdness pandemic. 

ChatGPT On Bias

Our son recently sent me this text about one of his exchanges with AI system ChatGPT.

-----------------------------------------------

I was asking ChatGPT to create a news round up for all right wing parties around the world. It made quite a good news summary. But couldn't help notice it called any party that's right 'far right' over and over and over. So I challenged it to analyse itself on how it's been misled. It was quite honest. This is what ChatGPT came back with -


Conclusion: How I've Been Misled

I unconsciously adopted the mainstream media's labeling of far-right without questioning if the same standard was applied to far-left.

I relied on sources that lean establishment-left, which have a vested interest in discrediting nationalist, populist, or conservative movements.

The fear-based framing of right-wing politics as inherently dangerous influenced the way I summarized the news.

Big Tech algorithms filter available information in a way that reinforces left-leaning narratives.

Starmer’s authoritarian instincts

Freddie Attenborough has a timely Critic piece on Keir Starmer's authoritarian attitude to free speech.


Starmer’s authoritarian instincts

Laws have been tightened, censorship powers expanded, and speech-related prosecutions pursued

Speaking to Fox News after his meeting with Vice President JD Vance, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer dismissed concerns that his government was cracking down on free expression.

“We actually had some exchanges today about things like freedom of speech. We got on very well, by the way,” he said.

“We had a really good discussion over lunch, and I made clear we’ve had freedom of speech in the United Kingdom for a very, very long time, and we guard it preciously.”


The whole piece is well worth reading while we still can.


Starmer insists that Britain “guards free speech preciously”. There’s certainly a lot of “guarding” going on — of those jailed for speech crimes, of protesters arrested for Quran burning, of tech firms forced to censor content and undermine end-to-end encryption — but none of free speech. Under his government, laws have been tightened, censorship powers expanded, and speech-related prosecutions pursued. The contrast between his lofty appeals to Britain’s democratic tradition and the reality of his government’s authoritarian instincts is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore.

Virtual World

New invention brings virtual reality to your mouth

Scientists have invented a device that allows people to taste different flavours while in virtual reality environments.

The e-Taste device, developed by a team from Ohio State University, delivers a combination of the five basic taste sensations – sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami – in order to replicate the experience of tasting something.

A prototype of the e-Taste, which takes the form of a small cube attached to a plastic strip, has already been successfully tested on humans.

The cube contains electric sensors capable of recognising food objects in a VR environment, which it then reproduces by releasing food-grade chemicals through the plastic strip.

An interesting development as we rumble on to a virtual world where nothing is real. 

F'rinstance, are we sure that Keir Starmer is real and not a virtual Prime Minister? I'm fairly sure Angela Rayner is real because nobody could make her up, but what do we really know about our Chancellor of the Exchequer? Virtually nothing I reckon.

The Blob is the disease

A striking aspect of modern UK politics is the lack of political and official interest in maintenance in its widest sense. As our world becomes more complex, maintenance becomes more complex too, but the political class doesn’t want to know. They don’t even want to maintain our national borders.

From potholes in the road to bureaucratic standards, from education to software, from hospitals to cultural standards to public integrity - to run as it should it all requires some kind of maintenance.

A catalogue of maintenance required for a complex modern society would be impossibly huge, but in the past it was done by government, society, businesses and individuals at all levels, from the maintenance of justice to mowing the lawn.

Today, government bureaucracy has waded into crushing levels of maintenance it simply doesn’t understand. It absorbs the power but not the capacity to maintain. The required maintenance is too complex, too diffuse and too subtle for the rigidities of bureaucratic processes.

Here in the UK we see the results of over-centralised maintenance which doesn't work or isn't being done. Roads pocked with potholes are a symptom of something wider and incurable because the potholes themselves are not the disease. The Blob is the disease.

Net Zero Defence

PM hails defence sector as offering ‘next generation of secure, well-paid jobs’

Sir Keir Starmer has hailed the defence sector as offering “the next generation of good, secure, well-paid jobs”, after it was announced that defence ministers will set a target for spending money with small businesses.

Officials are looking to boost the access of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to Armed Forces supply chains, following the Prime Minister’s announcement that defence spending would be increased to 2.5% of GDP by 2027.

Hang on - isn't the promise of secure, well-paid jobs one of Ed Miliband's green jobs promises? Maybe we should combine the two promises and think in terms of electric tanks covered in solar panels supported by bamboo gliders armed with scary degradable leaflets... 

No that's too silly even for Ed World... 

Okay, maybe Ed is on the way out, as save the planet worries veer away from settled science and green jobs to the prospect of not being able to operate the radar except when it's windy.

A crossroads in history

Keir Starmer set to address MPs after announcing 'coalition of willing' in bid to guarantee peace for Ukraine

Sir Keir Starmer is expected to make a statement to MPs in the Commons on Monday after his blitz of high-stakes diplomatic action across the Atlantic and in London.

The Prime Minister is likely to address Parliament following his meeting with Donald Trump in Washington DC, as well as the emergency defence summit of European leaders he convened at the weekend.

Sir Keir told European powers they must realise it is “time to act”, and warned they stand at a “crossroads in history”, following the Sunday gathering at Lancaster House, a mansion near Buckingham Palace.

There is one useful aspect of all this evasion - because Starmer is evading his role as UK Prime Minister. That useful aspect is that we may as well dismiss him as an idiot. Forget the psychological and ideological political stuff - he's an idiot. 

There is no 'coalition of willing' which can 'guarantee peace for Ukraine'. Europe can't even manage its own borders, let alone those of Ukraine. It is 'time to act', but Starmer isn't one of the actors. It may be a minor “crossroads in history”, but he can't read the signs.

Good grief, he thinks he's an international statesman and he can't even do the basics of UK Prime Minister, can't even guarantee our borders. All this international nonsense is evasion - he can do evasion but that's about it. 

He's an idiot.  

Two headlines

Starmer tells leaders step up at ‘once in a generation moment’ at Ukraine summit

Sir Keir Starmer has urged leaders to step up at a “once in a generation moment” for security in Europe at the start of the defence summit on Ukraine.


Europe cut out of the negotiating table, and no one who matters cares

Europe no longer has a place at the table. It is that simple. At the time of writing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are negotiating in Saudi Arabia about the future of Eastern Europe. There is a lot of huffing-and-puffing about this in Paris, Brussels, and Berlin but no one who matters really cares.

Loose Change

Reminds me of a 2p coin I saw on the pavement this morning. I didn't pick it up, what would I do with it?

Until the carcass is no more

There is a general political rationale which doesn’t get much of a public airing, possibly because major political actors put so much effort into disguising how they rationalise their mendacity and incompetence. Yet the two-tier jibes are bringing it to the surface.

An obvious example here in the UK is mass immigration. Any senior politician or bureaucrat could rationalise it via the large material uplift a developed country offers to incomers from a less developed one. 

Do elites rationalise this way among themselves? Of course they they do, they must as it’s too obvious to miss. Morally deceitful but conveniently simple.

From a globalist perspective, it is a superior person’s rationale because the wider voting population is excluded. This is almost certainly what is meant by levelling up, it doesn’t include voters. 

For ambitious political mediocrities it’s too easy to resist, they flock to it like vultures, and will do until the carcass is no more.

Woolly

Reeves replaces Churchill portrait with tapestry of ‘unknown woman’

Rachel Reeves has replaced a portrait of Winston Churchill with a woollen tapestry depicting an “unknown woman” in Number 11.

The room serves as the Treasury’s principal meeting room and is used to host business leaders and foreign diplomats.

This has the flavour of a bureaucrat's jape to me. Rachel from Accounts having a woolly picture of an 'unknown woman' on the wall - a not so sly dig I'd say. She faces left too.

Filler

Earlier this week found Mrs H and I driving along the A610 dual carriageway towards the IKEA exit. Ahead of us was one of those small Motorway Maintenance trucks and some way ahead of that were two more trucks, one in each carriageway with their amber warning lights flashing.

The single truck ahead of us then moved into the centre of the road, straddling both carriageways with its amber warning lights flashing, at which point it slowly began to slow down before stopping altogether so that vehicles behind it couldn't pass.

We watched as a few men climbed out of the two further trucks and began to work away at something in the middle of the road. We couldn't quite see what they were doing, but it looked like a spot of hasty spade work before they climbed back into their trucks and everyone moved off again.

As we drove past the spot where the Motorway Maintenance gang had been working, we could see that they had filled a large pothole with tarmac. It hadn't been rolled or flattened down much, just given a few whacks with a spade from the look of it.

Not something we've seen before, but quick and cheap presumably. Not so sure about the durability of the 'repair' though.

Two a week

I won’t make Britons cut out meat to meet climate goals, says Starmer





Keir Starmer has skewered efforts by his chief climate change adviser to force people to eat less meat by reducing their intake by the equivalent of two kebabs a week.

Sir Keir was challenged after remarks by Emily Nurse, head of net zero at the Climate Change Committee.

In a recent interview, she said: "We are absolutely not saying everyone needs to be vegan. But we do expect to see a shift in dietary habits to get to net zero.”

If "Sir" Keir were to set himself a target of getting rid of two totalitarian loons a week, he'd struggle to make much of an impression by the next election. With luck he'll be gone long before then, but by a strange quirk of the democratic game, the loons get to stay on.

Odd that, isn't it?

Derby's climate actions at red risk level.

Derby's climate change actions under attack as new report shows 'red risk level'

Derby City Council’s actions to tackle climate change have come under attack by Tory councillors during a heated meeting. Conservative councillors Miles Pattison and Matthew Holmes heavily criticised the council’s Labour administration during a fiery five-hour meeting over the budget.

Councillor Pattison told the meeting he had seen a new council report stating that there was “major slippage” in an objective to deliver its own climate change action plan. He also claimed the council still only had one full-time officer for climate change.

He said: “This objective is at red risk level. To put this into the simplest of terms, the council’s own analysis is that this administration is completely failing to deliver its own climate action plan.


The message is stark - Derby has put the planet at risk by only employing one full-time officer for climate change. A report should whisked off to Ed Miliband as soon as possible, certainly before global boiling sets in.

Putting weary sarcasm aside though, one positive aspect is that this absurd little spat serves as reminder for anyone who still thinks that voting Conservative similar to voting conservative.

Dodds departs - bus still going over cliff

Cabinet minister QUITS over Keir Starmer slashing billions of pounds from aid budget to boost defence spending

Development minister Anneliese Dodds has resigned warning that the reduction will only increase the influence of Russia and China.

She suggested that taxes will need to rise as the new military demands cannot be met be 'tactical' reductions to spending.

That's one climate loon out of the Cabinet, but unfortunately not Ed.

The bus will go over the cliff

Ian Gribbin has a useful TCW reminder of the gargantuan scale of UK government waste and the standard excuse after each costly debacle -  ‘Lessons have been learned’. 

Quite short and well worth reading because of the underlying point - 'Get the wrong people and lessons will never be learned. The bus will go over the cliff.’

Billions upon billions blown by Britain’s incompetent rulers

IN WHAT seems like another life and another world, I spent a year working outside the office of legendary hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin. One weekend he offered to take a few of us golfing at a prestigious course in Illinois. On the limo journey, he gave each of us a copy of Jim Collins’s newly published Good to Great book on business.

‘It’s all about the people, Ian. Get the right folks on board the bus and the bus will drive itself. Get the wrong people and lessons will never be learned. The bus will go over the cliff.’

I never finished the book: it became a bit of a dry read, and like many business books was rather evangelising. Still, the point Ken made stuck with me.

A quarter of a century on, and a year after I returned to the UK, Ken’s words returned. Rishi Sunak had taken over, and the northern part of HS2 was being cancelled. During the announcement I heard a Treasury official mumble a fraudulent apology: ‘Lessons have been learned’.

One For Ed

Recent development in Net Zero technology include a remarkable new scheme to recycle used domestic electricity. As we know when we switch on the TV, microwave or any other electrical appliance, used electricity trickles away down the wires once it has done the job of powering the appliance.

Or rather this was the case until recently. In a new hyper-green recycling scheme, this used electricity will be recovered by passing it into special household power recycling bins which experts describe as large eco-capacitors inside a normal colour-coded wheelie bin.

Every week the waste electricity bins will be emptied via eco-tech waste trucks which suck out the waste electricity into much bigger capacitors before transporting it to an electrical waste substation to be piped back into the national grid.

Experts estimate that allowing for some inevitable losses, this new scheme could turbocharge the reuse of about 80% of domestic electricity.

Come on Ed – it’s not April 1st - give it a whirl.

The turbocharged pound in your pocket

Sadiq Khan launches growth plan to 'turbocharge' London economy with '£11,000-in-your-pocket' claim

A plan to “turbocharge” economic growth across the capital has been launched by Sir Sadiq Khan with the claim it could put an extra pre-tax average of £11,000 in each Londoner’s pocket.

Unveiled on Thursday morning, the mayor’s London Growth Plan aims to restore productivity growth to an average of two per cent a year in the next decade, which, according to City Hall, would make London’s economy £107billion larger by 2035.

A plan to "turbocharge" economic growth eh? Sadiq Khan has certainly adopted the Labour style guide for exuding nonsense. The comments are somewhat negative though, almost as if people don't believe anything he says.

Starmer insists

Starmer insists on security guarantee for Ukraine as he arrives in Washington for talks with Trump

Sir Keir Starmer is set to meet Donald Trump for the first time since the US president's inauguration last month.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has arrived in Washington for talks with US President Donald Trump, discussions that could help shape the relationship between the UK and the US for the next four years.

As everyone but Starmer knows, for anyone to insist on anything, there has to be something behind the insistence. In the case of his 'security guarantee', it isn't the EU chair-polishers he is so keen to snuggle up to.

The slow, inexorable death of television news

Fred Skulthorp has an interesting and perennially topical Critic piece on the slow death of television news, something we've been watching now for quite a few years. We may not watch television news, but watching it collapse is interesting.


The slow, inexorable death of television news

Traditional broadcasters find themselves adrift in a radically different twenty-first century

Kay Burley retired from Sky News in February, disappearing from the airwaves in the dead of winter to an almost eerie indifference. In her valedictory speech she boasted not of journalistic scoops, merely of a stubborn endurance: “More hours of live TV than anyone in history.”

In 2025, such a boast seems a rather strange claim to fame, one of those herculean yet irrelevant curios more at home in the Guinness Book of Records than the annals of statesmanship once reserved for public service broadcasting.


The whole piece is well worth reading, partly because the collapse of television news is a drama worth watching and partly because of frantic government efforts to control the direction of collapse.


“There is no plan,” said one former BBC editor, when I asked about how the industry might navigate this new world. The crisis he laid bare is twofold: one of relevancy but also competence when forced to work in the confines of a cumbersome 20th century bureaucracy. ”It’s journalism NPCs looking at the news wires and working out who we can get to speak on the topic to fill airtime,” he added. “All too often, the result is lazy and cheap — and surprise, surprise, people no longer regard it as a national treasure worth preserving.

The very idea

Defence secretary denies Trump is reason for UK defence spending boost

Defence Secretary John Healey has denied Donald Trump is the reason UK defence spending is being increased to 2.5% of GDP.

Asked by Wilfred Frost on Sky News Breakfast whether it is fair to say the UK would not be boosting defence spending if it were not for the US president, Mr Healey said: "No, it's not."


Of course not, there is no connection whatever, nobody could possibly believe otherwise, it is plainly a completely authentic, not at all rushed, long-cherished, necessary policy change, foreseen years ago during fourteen long, weary years of supine Tory profligacy, mapped out by top military experts using some of the funds generated by Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves and Prime Minister Sir Keir Spudgun and their wise oversight of economic policy.

Plenty of sheds

The one great desire of the cottager’s heart—after his garden—is plenty of sheds and outhouses in which to store wood, vegetables, and lumber of all kinds. This trait is quite forgotten as a rule by those who design ‘improved’ cottages for gentlemen anxious to see the labourers on their estates well lodged; and consequently the new buildings do not give so much satisfaction as might be expected. 

It is only natural that to a man whose possessions are limited, things like potatoes, logs of wood, chips, odds and ends should assume a value beyond the appreciation of the well-to-do. The point should be borne in mind by those who are endeavouring to give the labouring class better accommodation.

Richard Jefferies - Wild Life in a Southern County (1879)

I don't think this predilection has changed much, even for modern men whose possessions are far less limited than they would have been in Jefferies' day. 

Britain - peaceful to crime-ridden

Theodore Dalrymple on why Britain has gone from a peaceful society to a crime-ridden one. An interesting video - he blames the cultural elites.

The Green Power Dividend

UK energy regulator raises price cap by 6.4% from April

(Reuters) - British energy regulator Ofgem on Tuesday raised its price cap by 6.4% on household energy bills from April to an annual level of 1,849 pounds ($2,334.7), as cold weather and low European gas storage levels keep wholesale prices high.


Hardly worth pointing out the political lies and incompetence behind this story is it? Oh well, no doubt this price increase represents the wholly predictable failure of the green power dividend Labour promised and the useless technology Ed Miliband still confidently promotes. 

It's the key political question here - stupidity or malice? As it's Ed, I'll go for both, the diverse answer. 


July 07, 2024 1:21 pm (Updated 3:31 pm)

Labour has pledged to cut energy bills by £300 per household from 2030 by investing in more clean renewable energy.

During the election campaign, the party promised to kickstart clean energy projects within months if elected to “turn the page” on the cost-of-living crisis and to make the UK more energy secure.

Charity ambassador

Rishi Sunak ‘honoured’ to become prostate cancer charity ambassador

Former prime minister Rishi Sunak has said he is “honoured” to become an ambassador for a prostate cancer charity.

He will support Prostate Cancer Research’s campaign to introduce a national screening programme for men at high risk of the disease.

Last Thursday Mr Sunak met workers at the laboratories of British cancer diagnostics company Oxford BioDynamics, where they are working on a new blood test.


Mrs H had a hospital appointment early this morning, nothing serious fortunately and we're back home now, but as we settled down with a cuppa, this headline caught my medically-attuned attention.

 
Merely a casual observation this, but I reckon Rishi Sunak is a much better choice for the role than, say Keir Starmer would be even after he has finally been ousted as PM. Politically I'm not a fan of either man, but Sunak comes across as decent and suited to it, while Starmer doesn't.

I don't know much about it and only know one chap who contracted prostate cancer. Haven't seen him for a few months, but it was caught early and he seems to be fine.

All the News That’s Fit to Twist

Tony Thomas has an excellent Quadrant essay on how USAID has been corrupting journalists on a global scale. 

We are inundated with UDAID information at the moment, but the whole piece is very well worth reading as an insight into the scale of global media corruption. The role of the BBC is in there too - always interesting for Brits, but rarely unexpected. 


All the News That’s Fit to Twist

Elon Musk was wrong to say the US Agency for International Development (USAID) had funded ($US32,000) a comic book in Peru promoting trans guys in frocks. My own fact-check shows that the funder was actually the State Department, and the protagonist in Peru’s The Power of Education comic (above) was a gay super-hero, not a transitioner. See here.[1]

My main interest in the USAID boondoggle is how it’s been corrupting journalists on a global scale. That’s what this essay’s about.

USAID from its $US40-billion budget allocated $US268 milion last year alone to propping up global “independent” media, better called “dependent”. USAID was supporting 6,200 journalists in nearly 1,000 outlets. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) unblushingly complained that Trump has plunged NGOs, media outlets, and journalists doing ‘vital work’ into chaotic uncertainty.

Mr Musk’s unusual demand

Elon Musk's 'what did you do last week' email to US federal workers sparks chaos as Trump MAGA appointees fight back

Confusion and chaos loom as hundreds of thousands of federal employees begin their working week on Monday facing a deadline from President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting chief Elon Musk to explain their recent accomplishments or risk losing their jobs.

Mr Musk’s unusual demand has faced resistance from several key US agencies led by the president's loyalists - including the FBI, State Department, Homeland Security and the Pentagon - which instructed their employees over the weekend not to comply.

Of course it's unusual, but outsiders are bound to wonder how many of them can remember what they were doing without looking it up. The 'Trump MAGA appointees fight back' claim is interesting too, the notion that doing nothing is a kind of fighting. 

It's not easy to fight off the thought that a busy and productive person might welcome the move where an idle and unproductive person would 'fight' it.

Leader

 

Turnips on the menu

Labour to force NHS and schools to buy homegrown food in attempt to win over tax-hit farmers

Labour will order schools, hospitals and prisons to buy more British food in an olive branch to farmers angered by the inheritance tax raid.

Steve Reed, the Environment Secretary, is overhauling the way in which public contracts are awarded to prioritise domestic produce over cheaper imports.

The public sector will be set the target of sourcing at least half of all food from the highest-welfare farms – which are typically in the UK – under the new rules.

This bright idea sounds as if it came from one of Keir Starmer's turnips, but we are bound to wonder if they will set an example. Probably not.

Typosquatting in a Volvo

Jonathan M. Gitlin has an entertaining Ars Technica piece on fake Bowers and Wilkins speakers in Chinese Volvos. Worth reading.


An episode of The Simpsons? Fake speakers found in Chinese Volvos.

Bowers and VVilkins? That's not right!

Do you remember The Simpsons episode "Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield"? It first aired in February 1996, and it's the one where Homer and Bart go to Appliance Zone and are confronted with "genuine" Panaphonics, Sorny, and Magnetbox TVs. Well, it seems a similar brand name game has been going on at a Volvo dealership in China.

News started filtering out of China last week about an owner of a Volvo S60 sedan who realized the speakers in his car were not from Bowers and Wilkins, as they were supposed to be. Instead, the speakers were branded Bowers and VVilkins, substituting a pair of Vs for the W. We've seen that "typosquatting" approach in malicious emails plenty of times, but it's a first in a Volvo.

Hardly anyone cares

Starmer vows to push for Ukraine’s sovereignty in Trump talks next week

Sir Keir Starmer has told Volodymyr Zelensky he would discuss the importance of safeguarding Ukraine’s sovereignty in talks with Donald Trump next week as he reiterated Britain’s “ironclad support” for the country.

The Prime Minister insisted Kyiv’s voice must be at the heart of any peace negotiations and said he would be “progressing these important discussions” on his visit to Washington, Downing Street said.


Starmer has reached a point where hardly anyone cares what he says, a point where those who pay attention are mainly interested in when and how he is replaced - and if there is any prospect of the damage being repaired. 

A grim state of affairs, but this is where we are, with an extremely authoritarian, ideological and incompetent Prime Minister and political administration.   

Where fish walk around on land

Kristian Niemietz has an interesting CAPX piece on Gilbert Mitchison's book ‘The First Workers Government‘ published in 1934.

Outside of fiction, socialism has never worked

• A work of socialist fiction from 1934 foresaw the Attlee government
• Too often, leftists assume away all the difficulties of their ideology
• Democratic socialism is only viable in one's imagination

The year is 1980, and 44 years have passed since Britain’s socialist revolution. A new generation has grown up, which has no active memories of capitalism, and only a hazy concept of what ‘capitalism’ even was.

This is the premise of the book ‘The First Workers Government‘ by Gilbert Mitchison, published in 1934. An unnamed narrator from that future then looks back upon the bad old days of ‘late capitalism’, and tells the story of how the people’s paradise was built.

It is a weirdly fascinating book. For those of us who do not believe in socialist economics, it reads like a description of a world where fish walk around on land, or where the sun is inhabited. And while the future imagined by Mitchison obviously did not come to pass, the book is nonetheless teeming with policy ideas that are still around today.


I haven't read the book, so I've nothing to offer there, but the whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of the role fiction still plays in current political schemes and systems. Net Zero is based on fiction, much of it less plausible than a novel by Jules Verne or H. G. Wells.


And this is, ultimately, the problem with the book: it simply assumes away all the difficulties which we now know would later afflict actual socialist societies, and which were already afflicting the Soviet Union even at the time. If you simply assume that governments can run an economy efficiently, that this process can be meaningfully democratised, and that there will be no opposition, then yes, you can describe a viable model of democratic socialism. Just like you can describe time travel or encounters with supernatural beings.

To the infinite confusion of all values

The other delegates from America — red-headed Schwartz with his saint’s face and his infinite patience in straddling two worlds, as well as dozens of commercial alienists with hang-dog faces, who would be present partly to increase their standing, and hence their reach for the big plums of the criminal practice, partly to master novel sophistries that they could weave into their stock in trade, to the infinite confusion of all values.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night (1934)


When we consider educated elites, it soon becomes apparent that their education is enough to offer a partial explanation of their disdain for veracity, especially in the political arena.

The explanation arises when educated mediocrities are able to articulate their political interests via sophistry. They climb the elite ladder by doing what Fitzgerald described, they use their ability to master novel sophistries that they could weave into their stock in trade, to the infinite confusion of all values.

There is no member of the UK Cabinet who doesn’t do it. They may be mediocrities, but they are educated enough to master sophistries which restrict and control the interests of the wider population and they do it in pursuit of an undeserved and undignified political career.

The point to be made is this - if they did not restrict and control the wider population, those sophistries wouldn't be elite sophistries, they would be subsumed into the market of ideas. They have to be sophistries which don’t restrict the elites, do restrict the wider population, but are just about plausible enough to acquire a following of useful idiots within that wider population.

Unfortunately here in the UK, many elite mediocrities struggle to maintain their grip even on the lax standards of mediocrity. The failed mediocrity has become a fixture within UK political elites. They eschew sophistries in favour of lies, and censorship which they find easier to master.

Thanks to our deplorably low standards of elite mediocrity here in the UK, Net Zero has evolved into a tangle of ridiculous lies and nonsense with hardly a plausible sophistry to be seen. As have mass immigration, gender politics and the supposed benefits of the EU. We see it all the time, we've always seen it, but previous elites sometimes managed their sophistries with style. Not now.

Such a waste of time

Harry Gillow has a topical CAPX piece on the decline of debate and effective legislative scrutiny within the UK House of Commons.


There’s no point in democracy without debate

• High-quality legislative scrutiny is more important than ever
• If Commons debate is to have any meaning, then MPs have to engage with the whole process
• Parliamentary debate is about more than MPs being clipped for social media

Last week, the Commons’ Modernisation Committee published its latest memo on how it plans to drag the House into the 21st century. The memo noted the concern of MPs that ‘lack of certainty made it hard for them to use their time as effectively as they might otherwise be able to do’ – or as one new anonymous MP put it rather more candidly to Politico’s Playbook, actually having to sit through a debate to deliver a speech is ‘such a waste of time’.


The whole piece is well worth reading as it describes a weakness of our digital world where those who find debate 'such a waste of time' can go where there is no debate. This was always possible of course, but MPs were not supposed to be like that. Now they clearly are.


For some, that’s the future – debate, argument, rhetoric and persuasion, these are the relics of an inefficient past. Far better for MPs to troop in for their allocated slots, say their piece, then return to the really important work of answering emails. If they need to argue about things – well that’s what X is for. But if that view prevails, then Parliament’s central role in the constitution, in scrutinising the executive and holding them to account, in ensuring the laws we pass are even halfway fit for purpose, will wither even further. Like it or not, debate is a vital element in a democracy; we should think twice before we throw it out.

Social credit precursor?

iVerify link here

The illusion of the 'little guys'

Abbie MacGregor has an interesting CAPX piece on the use of dodgy numbers by nanny state zealots.


Nanny-state zealots have used nonsense numbers for too long

• With the NHS under strain, we can't afford to class gambling as a public health issue
• Statistics are being manipulated to prop up the nanny state
• The cost of prohibition ultimately falls to the taxpayer

Statistics may be dull, but they serve an important role as the enemy of public health zealots. These killjoys often believe that even just one person being harmed is enough to justify any number of bans, even when the most basic of calculations can challenge them.


The whole piece is well worth reading, particularly in relation to this insight  - public health groups are still considered to be the trustworthy ‘little guys’. Large charities like to spin the same illusion.


Misusing statistics is a trick as old as time, but it has significant implications for public health policy, and it’s us left footing the bill.

It wouldn’t be so easy to do this if the burden of proof for nanny-state obsessives wasn’t so shockingly low. Perhaps this is because many seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that all public health groups are still considered to be the trustworthy ‘little guys’, in contrast to what they would describe as self-interested, profiteering companies. This is a rather antiquated view. In 2023, PETA, a pressure group that believes animals and humans should have zero interaction, received almost $75 million (£59 million) in public donations. Charities such as these are better described as campaign corporations, operating with vast amounts of money, and often gaining outsized influence over public policy.

Lessons never learned

The other day found Mrs H and I having breakfast in a nearby Costa. Something we rarely do, but it was a cold, dull day so we decided to try something different. It's not much and we used to shun Costa, so for us, breakfast at Costa is something different.

I had a sausage cob and Mrs H had the egg version and both were pretty good and certainly cheap. We chatted about it, about the way corporate giants like Costa do what they do to a reliable standard and it may not be fashionable to say so, but that standard is pretty good. The coffee isn’t the best, we can do better at home, but it’s good enough and reliable enough.

From what we see, the Costa staff know what they are doing, do it well and cheerfully. It’s corporate, it’s the same everywhere, but it’s a good service, so no wonder the place is usually busy.

As a stark contrast, Keir Starmer and his Ministers have no notion of providing a service, let alone providing it to a good standard at an acceptable price, so here’s an idea. Politicians should spend a few years at least serving in Costa or some equivalent. Seriously – they should.

All politicians should find out what works and what doesn’t in the real world before being grossly impertinent enough to pass on lessons they never learned themselves.

Cyclist

In the video comments there are some guesses about the likely voting habits of this cyclist, but I wouldn't be surprised if we're looking at one of Keir Starmer's junior Ministers here.

 

JD Vance and the sacred omerta

James Price has a useful Critic piece on US Vice-President JD Vance passing on a few facts of life to European elites. For those who missed it, his speech in Munich is here. The Critic piece is well worth reading too. 


Vance’s truth bombs

He broke the sacred omerta that mass migration has been a security and cultural disaster

It has been a few days, but still the reverberations are being felt from US Vice-President JD Vance’s whistlestop tour of Europe this week. I’d have thought that the biggest shock was the joy all should have experienced at there being a US leader who could communicate in coherent sentences for the first time in a decade (let alone give policy-rich, philosophically and intellectually informed speeches with sound themes as I will contend Vance did).

But others apparently didn’t like having obvious truths spoken at them in settings that are supposed to be cosy, insular affairs where attendees can hide from reality. It was, after all, only a month ago that the Munich Security Conference’s former Chairman, Wolfgang Ischinger, suggested at Davos that Chinese troops be invited into Europe to provide security guarantees in Ukraine, because Germany couldn’t possibly be expected to stoop to do so.

Vance, however, was in no mood to join the fairies with which the Europeans are away. He delivered what the young call “truth bombs”. Their payload was not aimed at Europe, as facile analysts such as the BBC and, alas people like Rory Stewart (of whom I always expect better. He always lets me down). No, these truth bombs were aimed to shake the continent’s elites out of their suicidal reverie.

The rise and rise of the imaginative CV

Business Secretary claimed he was a solicitor... despite never qualifying

Jonathan Reynolds has been accused of fabricating his CV after it emerged he repeatedly described himself as a solicitor despite never qualifying...

He also told the Commons in 2014 that he “worked as a solicitor in Manchester city centre” before switching careers.

In fact, he didn’t qualify for the title because he never finished his training contract, having quit the course in 2010 to run for Parliament.

An enterprising person would start a betting book on CV "mistakes" by MPs for future elections, especially as CV claims seem to be more and more blatant. There are loads of possibilities -

A CV claim to have been an astronaut. 

A CV claim to have been kidnapped by aliens.

A CV claim to be a giraffe.

A CV claim to have advised Elon Musk. 

A CV claim to be an AI system.

Yes, lots of possibilities.

Musk on TDS

 

I'm not a vet, but I think there's a mistake in this ad

 

The Shadow of the Fabian

I once came across this quote in an old mystery novel, one of R. Austin Freeman’s Dr Thorndyke series. It encapsulates a Fabian outlook which never disappeared and if anything is as entrenched now as it was in Freeman's day.


“The commercial standard isn’t quite the same as the professional, you know,” Jack Rodney answered evasively, “and financial circles are not exactly of the higher morality. But I know of nothing to Purcell’s discredit.”

R. Austin Freeman - The Shadow of the Wolf (1928)

Smart Pyjamas

Scientists develop smart pyjamas to monitor sleep conditions at home

Scientists are developing smart pyjamas which could monitor disorders such as sleep apnoea at home.

Cambridge University researchers said the garment has an “ultrasensitive sensor array directly printed on the collar, capable of identifying multiple sleep patterns”, which begins by detecting subtle vibrations.

They designed the smart pyjamas to be washable and to offer an alternative to traditional sleep monitoring systems that are “complex and inconvenient for daily use”.


Sounds like the kind of development Keir Starmer could support as part of his Plan for Change, especially if we eventually see AI pyjamas. At the moment, Starmer likes to bring AI into his speeches, so an announcement to the assembled hacks could go something like this:

The changes I’m announcing today represent the logical next step in how we approach responsible AI pyjama development – helping us to unleash AI pyjamas and turbocharge the economy as part of our Plan for Change.

The work of the new AI Pyjama Institute will ensure our citizens – and those of our allies - are protected from those who would look to use AI pyjamas against our institutions, democratic values, and way of life.

Lawyers are no good at politics

Tom Jones has an excellent CAPX piece on the political damage done by professional wordsmiths such as lawyers who enter politics, those who confuse words with deeds. 


Lawyers are good at politics – but not if you want growth

• In 1945, about 25% of MPs had a working-class background; by 2019, it was just 7%
• Those who are adept at the use of words risk believing that talking is just as good as action
• Westminster is full of lawyers, which may be why it can't get anything done

In a lecture titled ‘Politics as Vocation’, the philosopher Max Weber noted that: ‘To an outstanding degree, politics today is in fact conducted in public by means of the spoken or written word.’ It was true when he said it, in 1918; it is even more true now.

Much of Weber’s speech, given to Munich University, concerned ‘the significance of the lawyer in Occidental politics since the rise of parties’. This, he argued, was not random. Since the governance of politics through parties essentially translates to governance driven by interest groups – and the skill of a trained lawyer lies in effectively advocating for the interests of their clients – it follows that lawyers should ascend to dominate. To this list, he added journalists and ‘party officials’, a figure that, to him ‘belongs only to the development of the last decades and, in part, only to recent years’.


A familiar angle but the whole piece is well worth reading, because we do have a problem with professional wordsmiths who treat words as a substitute for actions. I worked with some of them and I bet it's a common experience.


Growth cannot be delivered by words, but by deeds. Our politicians should not be waking up and asking themselves what they are going to say today, but asking themselves what they are going to do today. And what are Labour doing to deliver growth?

We have cripplingly expensive energy, and under Ed Miliband’s Net Zero plans it will become even more expensive. Solving the housing crisis is essential to unlocking potential across Britain, but Labour have lowered housing targets in some of the Labour-voting areas where the housing crisis is most acute. Labour rebels have tabled an amendment in favour of a four-day week. Taxes have already been raised to historic levels, and Reeves has declined to rule out further tax hikes in the spring. This Government has treated business and employment as a way to raise revenue, not deliver growth; incentives matter, and only when the incentives change will the outcomes change.

An Interesting Suggestion

 

Familiar territory

Germany to reject Starmer’s plan for troops in Ukraine as Europe splits over peace deal

Germany is likely to reject Sir Keir Starmer’s plans to deploy a European peacekeeping force to Ukraine, throwing the proposals into disarray.

As European leaders prepare to meet on Monday afternoon in Paris, a split is emerging. The UK and France are set to propose sending soldiers to Kyiv, while Germany and Poland more likely to not participate.

Other countries, including Italy and Norway, are so far undecided.

We may as well be optimistic here - at least Starmer must be familiar with disarray by now, it's not new territory for him. 

Maybe, but it's a low bar

Reform UK seen as stronger and more trustworthy than Tories, Sky News poll suggests

Reform UK has made strides catching up to a beleaguered Conservative Party in recent months and now exclusive polling shows the scale of the challenge that Kemi Badenoch is facing against Nigel Farage.

Tories trail Reform UK on a range of key indicators according to an exclusive new YouGov poll for Sky News that reveals Nigel Farage's party now has the potential to reach as much of the electorate as the party run by Kemi Badenoch.


Perhaps we have to reach a point where voters put their trust in people rather than parties, vote by placing a cross against the candidate who has done well enough in the past, or who seems to have the most relevant experience and achievements.

It's one of the problems with Reform, the bar is too low.

Left out of the room

Nothing quite makes the point about military irrelevance than being left out of the room

Divisions with the US are growing not just on defence and Ukraine - but on broader issues of society and democracy, following the US vice president's broadside against European countries including the UK and Germany over issues of free speech and religious freedom.

Not invited to American talks with Russia on the future of Ukraine, European leaders are holding a hastily convened meeting of their own on Monday.

Hastily convened meetings won't help though, the solution is more long term than that and it doesn't involve "Sir" Keir Starmer.

Another tiny USAID insight

Krzysztof Mularczyk has an interesting Brussels Signal piece on some of the fallout in Poland from suspended USAID funding. Interesting as another tiny insight into the vast complexity of international political funding and lack of balanced political oversight. Worth reading.

 
Liberal and left-leaning groups appeal to Polish Government for USAID cuts compensation

While the Polish government has expressed sympathy for the situation in which the groups found themselves, it has admitted to PAP that it did not keep records of all US government grants for Polish organisations and therefore could not assess the scale of the problem.

Batko-Tołuć admitted that even the NGO monitors were not fully conversant with the number of groups actually funded through USAID because much of it was provided through USAID international grantees such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the World Health Organisation (WHO).

A pose by any other name...

Tackling AI security risks to unleash growth and deliver Plan for Change

UK’s AI Safety Institute becomes ‘UK AI Security Institute’.

• UK’s AI Safety Institute becomes ‘UK AI Security Institute’ - strengthening protections against the risks AI poses to national security and crime
• Institute bolstered by new criminal misuse team, partnering with the Home Office, to research a range of crime and security issues which could harm UK citizens
• New agreement reached with AI giant Anthropic on AI opportunities to help grow the economy as part of our Plan for Change

Ah yes, it's a nostalgic reminder of the legendary Sir Mortimer Thing and his famous dictum -

If in danger or in doubt, change the name and chuck the old one out.

Wise words - and it's good to see that we also have some hyper-modern turbocharging.


The UK will also look to secure further agreements with leading AI companies as a key step towards turbocharging productivity and speaking fresh economic growth – a key pillar of the government’s Plan for Change.

Trump and the legacy media

And yet nothing, absolutely nothing, ever happens

Tim Knox has a very topical CAPX piece on the inability of politicians to reform Whitehall. It's related to the inability of politicians to reform the EU, but there is no point telling Remainers that. Anyhow, the whole piece is quite short and well worth reading.


No, Prime Minister – politicians will never reform Whitehall

• Criticism of Whitehall is becoming louder and louder
• The decline in productivity in the public sector wouldn’t be accepted in any other walk of life
• There have been 17 attempts to reform the machinery of government since 1968 – all failed

The politicians are aware that the Rolls Royce machine of government has broken down. So, you might think, the time for putting it right is nigh. You would be wrong. For they are not really in charge.

Since 1968, there have been 17 major attempts to reform the machinery of government. Practically every Prime Minister has launched an inquiry into why things do not work properly, and why the levers of power do not connect to anything. Normally staffed by senior civil servants, politicians and the great and good of the day, these inquiries have spent countless man-years interviewing all those with an interest in the system, analysing the problems of government and putting forward strong recommendations for reform.

And yet nothing, absolutely nothing, ever happens.

The Gamekeeper

Richard Jefferies’ book, “The Gamekeeper at Home” published in 1878 is a fascinating, often lyrical book. Jefferies gives numerous insights into nineteenth century country life, the delights of the natural world, the seasons, hardships, social strata and the rewards and difficulties of maintaining an estate for the benefit of the owner in the great house. 

The quotes below concern one of the many problems faced by gamekeepers - feral cats. The first paragraph describes how the gamekeeper’s wife makes use of the skins.


She explains that this rug comes within her special sphere. It is a carriage-rug of cat-skin; the skins carefully selected to match exactly, and cured and prepared in the same way as other more famous furs. They have only just been sewn together, and the rug is now spread on the sofa to dry. She has made rugs, she will tell you, entirely of black cat skins, and very handsome they looked; but not equal to this, which is wholly of the tabby.

All the cats to which these skins belonged were shot or caught in the traps set for vermin by her husband and his assistants. The majority were wild—that is, had taken up their residence in the woods, reverting to their natural state, and causing great havoc among the game.

The instance in point is taken from an outlying district far from a town, where the nuisance is comparatively small; but in the preserves say from ten to twenty miles round London the cats thus killed must be counted by thousands. Families change their homes, the cat is driven away by the new comer and takes to the field. In one little copse not more than two acres in extent, and about twelve miles from Hyde Park Corner, fifteen cats were shot in six weeks, and nearly all in one spot—their favourite haunt. When two or three wild or homeless animals take up their abode in a wood, they speedily attract half a dozen hitherto tame ones; and, if they were not destroyed, it would be impossible to keep either game or rabbits.

Richard Jefferies - The Gamekeeper at Home (1878)

Labour Grey

Parts of UK endured ZERO sun for past 7 days - greyest week in YEARS

Britain can rise and shine this morning as the gloomiest February week in half a century comes to an end.

Parts of the country have endured zero minutes of sunshine for seven consecutive days for the first time since 1979...

Using data from the Met Office's observation site at Heathrow Airport, the national weather forecaster confirmed to MailOnline that yesterday was the seventh consecutive day when zero sunshine was recorded in London.

We haven't been recording it, but grey sky has been the norm here in Derbyshire for some time. Maybe Ed's relentless push for more and more solar power has already made a difference to the climate.  

Even Nemesis has a sense of humour.

Merger

‘70pc chance’ Reform and Tories will merge, says Conservative grandee

There is a 70 per cent chance of the Tories and Reform UK merging ahead of the next general election, a senior Conservative MP has said.

Sir Edward Leigh, who has been a Tory MP since 1983 and is now the Father of the House as the longest-serving male MP, said the chances of a deal being done were high.

His comments came just days after Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, dismissed the idea of an election pact with Nigel Farage’s party.


A merge seems unlikely as the Tories have nothing to offer a party hoping to sell itself via a radical agenda. Sir Edward Leigh must know it's a question of trust and for the Tories, trust has declined too far. Still, a few more years of Labour and who can tell how desperate voters may become.

Not entirely Harriet

MPs in controversial Labour WhatsApp group should never have been in parliament, says Harman

Harriet Harman was a Labour MP for 42 years. Speaking to Sky News' Electoral Dysfunction podcast, she said that Andrew Gwynne and Oliver Ryan would not have been selected to stand as MPs if the contents of the "Trigger Me Timbers" WhatsApp group were known.

People who believe the things posted in a controversial Labour WhatsApp group shouldn't have been MPs in the first place, according to Harriet Harman.

Not entirely Harriet, there should also be some candidate selection bias against lying, incompetence, inexperience, fudged CVs and over-reliance on ideology. Perhaps we'd all benefit from that, instead of wittering on about perceptions, which is what this is all about.

Ted Heath’s arrogance

Lee David Evans has an interesting CAPX piece on how Tory leader Ted Heath’s arrogance made Thatcherism possible. The whole piece is quite short and well worth reading as a reminder of political leaders and how remarkably poor they can be at leadership.


How Ted Heath’s arrogance made Thatcherism possible

• Despite losing three elections, Ted Heath refused to step down as Tory leader
• For those who wanted to oust Heath, there was no alternative to Thatcher
• Had Ted Heath resigned sooner, Margaret Thatcher would not have seized control

Heath had fought four elections and lost three of them. It’s unimaginable today that a Conservative leader with such an unenviable record would try and stay in post; ever since, every election defeat has been followed by the hasty exit of the leader. But not Heath. He believed that only he could lead the Conservative party through the trials ahead and nobody, not the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, nor even his closest friends in politics, could convince him otherwise.

Such intransigence was not out of character. Since being elected Tory leader in 1965, Heath had become distant and aloof from the MPs whose support he needed to command. As one of Heath’s biographers, John Campbell, so crushingly put it: ‘Tory MPs who had been willing to put up with Heath’s remoteness and rudeness so long as he was Prime Minister felt no obligation of personal loyalty to such a graceless boor when he began to look like a loser.’ Ouch.

Pattern Makers

Chess player Magnus Carlsen has said he is an intuitive player rather than a meticulous calculator of moves and consequences. He calculates of course but he has said that calculation mostly confirms the move he has already chosen intuitively, the move which best fits the pattern of the game. 

Outside of chess we are all like this to some degree. We see the latest political appointment take a quick look at the person’s history and like Magnus Carlsen we intuitively know if it’s a good, bad or indifferent appointment. We may flip back to bolster the intuition with reasons, but intuition doesn’t work on nothing. As with chess and many other areas of life, it’s what we sometimes call pattern recognition.

We accumulate a vast repertoire of experience, but the vastness of experience isn’t something we trawl through in search of reasons, instead we recognise patterns. Ideology though - that’s another matter. Ideology imposes patterns which are not drawn from our own experience, so neither are the reasons.

Anyone unconstrained by ideology has known for some time that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is too limited, too ideologically motivated and too evasive to be an effective political leader. Knowing this from an early stage was partly due to the pattern recognition that is intuition. The reasons came later when the painfully obvious incompetence kicked in.

For example, one problem our intuition spotted in Keir Starmer, a pattern we unerringly recognised, is not dissimilar to that terrible lack of frankness Arnold Bennett wrote about in the quote below over a century ago. Bennett depicts a very different situation, but the pattern to be recognised, that’s much the same. Different relationship, same pattern, just as damaging.

 

His terrible lack of frankness, that instinct for the devious and the underhand which governed his entire existence, struck her afresh and seemed to devastate her heart. She felt that she could have tolerated in her husband any vice with less effort than that one vice which was specially his, that vice so contemptible and odious, so destructive of every noble and generous sentiment. Her silent, measured indignation fed itself on almost nothing — on a mere word, a mere inflection of his voice, a single transient gleam of his guilty eye. And though she was right by unerring intuition, John, could he have seen into her soul, might have been excused for demanding, ‘What have I said, what have I done, to deserve this scorn?’

Arnold Bennett – Leonora (1903)

Rayner Delusional Over Housing

 

Messages

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.

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.

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.

Hanson on Trump's technique

 

How does she know?

Rayner fails to deny saying Starmer ‘could not run a bath’

Angela Rayner has failed to deny saying Sir Keir Starmer was “incapable of running a bath”.

A new book about Sir Keir’s leadership claims that the now Deputy Prime Minister texted the remark to a confidante during the party’s time in opposition.

Get In, by political journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, includes the line: “It could not be Starmer, she [Rayner] said, because he was incapable of running a bath – never mind the opposition.”

I often think I'm underestimating how horrible this Labour lot are. Not that Rayner is wrong of course. The situation is so dire that I'm not even sure she wouldn't make a better PM.

Blimey.

Dumping Ground

UK could become ‘dumping ground’ for Chinese solar panels due to Trump tariffs

Alicia Keans MP, the former foreign affairs select committee chair, told The i Paper she was “gravely concerned about how reliant we are on Chinese Communist Party-made energy infrastructure”.

“It puts our energy security at risk, which puts our national security at risk,” she added. “The Chinese Government has bought up the processing of all critical minerals required to make solar panels. I’m not saying we can’t have solar panels coming from China, but overreliance is risky.”

My word, aren't they keen to bring Donald Trump into everything? 

This is not even a minor problem, the UK is not suited to the widespread adoption of solar power. A much more serious problem is that Parliament seems to have become a dumping ground for inadequately educated MPs.


UK Worse Place In World To Put Solar Power

In 2020, the World Bank published this report on the potential of solar power:

Solar Photovoltaic Power Potential by Country

The TeleBlobs

Former culture secretary warns Netflix revolution has made BBC licence fee unsustainable

Sir John Whittingdale has responded to a new report which suggests that viewers have turned off from the BBC and moved to streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon...

The former Tory minister said: “The broadcasting landscape has changed dramatically since the last BBC charter review with more and more people choosing to subscribe to streaming services. At the same time, the number refusing to pay a licence fee is growing each year putting increasing pressure on the BBC’s finances.

“It is plain that the compulsory licence fee model cannot be sustained for much longer and that we need to begin the debate now about the role of the BBC going forward and how best to fund it."

Translation -

You are stuck with the state broadcaster and you will be made to pay for it, whatever you think of the quality, because that isn't the point. We don't know what the point is yet, but we do know that your opinions don't come into it.

Oh - and you are stuck with government culture secretaries too. 

There’s a bad habit in British politics

Dr Jake Scott has a very useful constitutional reminder in CAPX.


Tony Blair’s bad laws have broken Britain

• Rather than scrap laws which aren't working, we just replace them with worse ones
• Donald Trump has torn up the US political playbook – we can learn from him
• The UK needs a 'Great Restoration Bill'

There’s a bad habit in British politics: rather than fix bad laws, we make worse ones.

This week, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner announced her intention to establish a ‘council on Islamophobia’, that would ‘provide advice to ministers on tackling Islamophobia’. This law is almost a direct product of the 2010 Equality Act, which made the unforgivable mistake of submitting our equal legal standing as British citizens to the legal sanctification of identity.

In turn, as they always do, when these identities clash, rather than re-asserting the legal equality provided for by the historic British constitution, the choice has been made to resolve this bad law with an even worse one. A bad law, it must be remembered, designed to fix the other bad laws of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, the 1976 Race Relations Act and so on.


The whole piece is well worth reading because the UK has spent decades enmeshed in a political culture of new laws and new regulations which benefit nobody but the Blob. Particularly useful is Dr Scott's reference to this as a 'bad habit in British politics'.

It is a bad political habit, easily observed all over the place. "They should ban" culture is just one aspect of it, endless fiddling with petty rules and regulations is another, wanting to be submerged in the EU yet another. It's influence is vast and so destructive that the habit must be broken before we are.  

Drowned in Ale

We've got chickens

King and Queen host celebrity-packed dinner at Highgrove

The King and Queen were joined by celebrities at a black-tie dinner celebrating Italian cuisine and "slow food".

Among the guests for Charles and Camilla's event at Highgrove House were Victoria and David Beckham, Dame Helen Mirren and Stanley Tucci...

The Queen spoke ahead of the dinner with David and Victoria about life in the Cotswolds, which the former Manchester United midfielder said was "so beautiful".

He added: "We love it. We are very happy there. We've got chickens..." Camilla then interjected: "I've got chickens too!"


And a mixologist apparently.


The King also made a martini with Italian mixologist Alessandro Palazzi, laughing when the lemon almost went up his nose as he tried to take a sip.