A world of difference

Several people dismissed from French ministries after positive drug tests

Several people working in French ministerial offices and the wider state administration have been removed from their positions after testing positive for drugs, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has confirmed.

The revelation comes after Lecornu ordered an unprecedented campaign of surprise and mandatory saliva tests among ministerial staff, senior civil servants and officials with access to sensitive information.

“There have been positive tests, and people have been removed from their positions,” Lecornu said, without giving a precise number or identifying those involved.

There is a world of difference as to the resulting knowledge between a cursory observation that notes only generalities and an attentive examination that considers particular details.

R. Austin Freeman - The Surprising Experiences of Mr. Shuttlebury Cobb (1927)

The Burnham regime seems to be crumbling already

Trump 'will not forget' Miliband criticism as appointment sparks anger

• Ed Miliband's appointment as Foreign Secretary under new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has caused the White House to be “deeply concerned.”
• Sources close to President Donald Trump warn he "will not forget" Miliband's past scathing criticisms, including calling him a "racist, misogynistic, self-confessed groper."
• Miliband is viewed in Washington as an "unreasonable 'nut zero' extremist" due to his climate stance and perceived blocking of North Sea oil production.

Naturally Miliband will emit some ameliorative language to downplay his inability to govern his tongue, particularly in a role where this matters. It's a poor appointment though, a posturing extremist such as Ed Miliband should have been shown the door.

It's an indication that the Burnham regime is already showing significant cracks. He does not have an abundance of pragmatic and capable people free from damaging ideologies and seems to be unaware of it. Or he lacks the political courage to do anything about it. Cracks either way.

Angela Rayner Is Back

It's a bit early to parody Angela...

Hmm - no it isn't.

A very bad, bad, bad, bad, bad call

David Dimbleby ‘appalled’ by BBC making ‘very bad call’ to cut up to 2,000 jobs

David Dimbleby has said he is “appalled” by cuts at the BBC which will result in up to 2,000 people losing their jobs.

The national broadcaster aims to make £500 million in savings over two years, with job cuts announced in April set to take place over the next three years.

Speaking to Radio Times, the former Question Time host, 87, expressed his dismay at the decision.

“Why on earth have they done that? The best analysis of politics, both national and international… I’m appalled. Very bad, bad, bad, bad, bad call,” he said.

Oh come on David, the dear old BBC is doing its best to insert its clammy corporate hand into the taxpayer's pocket - what more do you want?

Do we assume that a BBC subscription service would be a very bad, bad, bad, bad, bad call in your world? Does it hand over too much choice to the plebs - something like that?

Do we also assume that having to pay for a BBC licence merely to watch live events on paid subscription services such as Sky is not  a very bad, bad, bad, bad, bad call?

Let us proactively invest in some twaddle

As we have a brand new, fresh from the political hothouse Prime Minister and a proactive new wave of government decision-makers, we should look to the future and begin this fine Tuesday morning with some aspirational twaddle.

Preparing for the next wave of decision-makers

Across organisations, a generational shift is already under way. Generation Z, those born from the late 1990s onwards, are entering the workforce in growing numbers and bring with them distinct expectations, values and a redefinition of what leadership looks like.

By 2030, Gen Z and millennials will account for nearly 75% of the global workforce. Ambition has not diminished, it has evolved. As noted by Forbes, only a small proportion see leadership as an immediate goal, while a much larger cohort still aspires to senior roles over time, provided these roles align with wellbeing and sustainable workloads.

Research suggests that organisations that proactively invest in this next generation of leaders are already seeing benefits in greater adaptability, more inclusive cultures, and stronger alignment with purpose-driven work, as research links inclusive leadership and development investment to improved organisational adaptability, innovation, and employee engagement. The message is clear - preparing Gen Z for leadership is not a future consideration, it is an immediate strategic priority.

It was in 1915 the old world ended

In D. H. Lawrence’s 1923 novel Kangaroo, his main character Richard Lovat Somers realises that the Britain he once knew had ended in 1915 –

 

Awful years—’16, ’17, ’18, ’19—the years when the damage was done. The years when the world lost its real manhood. Not for lack of courage to face death. Plenty of superb courage to face death. But no courage in any man to face his own isolated soul, and abide by its decision. Easier to sacrifice oneself. So much easier!

It was in 1915 the old world ended. In the winter 1915-1916 the spirit of the old London collapsed; the city, in some way, perished, perished from being a heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears, and horrors. The integrity of London collapsed, and the genuine debasement began, the unspeakable baseness of the press and the public voice, the reign of that bloated ignominy, John Bull.

No man who has really consciously lived through this can believe again absolutely in democracy. No man who has heard reiterated in thousands of tones from all the common people, during the crucial years of the war: “I believe in John Bull. Give me John Bull,” can ever believe that in any crisis a people can govern itself, or is ever fit to govern itself. During the crucial years of the war, the people chose, and chose Bottomleyism*. Bottom enough.

The well-bred, really cultured classes were on the whole passive resisters. They shirked their duty. It is the business of people who really know better to fight tooth and nail to keep up a standard, to hold control of authority. Laisser-aller is as guilty as the actual, stinking mongrelism it gives place to.

It was in mid-winter 1915 that Somers and Harriet went down to Cornwall. The spirit of the war—the spirit of collapse and of human ignominy, had not travelled so far yet. It came in advancing waves.

We hear so much of the bravery and horrors at the front. Brave the men were, all honour to them. It was at home the world was lost. We hear too little of the collapse of the proud human spirit at home, the triumph of sordid, rampant, raging meanness. “The bite of a jackal is blood-poisoning and mortification.” And at home stayed all the jackals, middle-aged, male and female jackals. And they bit us all. And blood-poisoning and mortification set in.

We should never have let the jackals loose, and patted them on the head. They were feeding on our death all the while.

 
D. H. Lawrence - Kangaroo (1923)

* A reference to Horatio Bottomley

Serious Scrumping

Hunger drives North Korean children to raid state orchards

Even farmworkers say the children deserve sympathy, not blame

Hunger is driving teenagers in Kwail county, South Hwanghae province, to sneak into state orchards this summer. They pick peaches and plums to eat on the spot or carry home. Guards increasingly look the other way rather than punish them. A source in the province described the pattern to Daily NK recently, pointing to worsening hunger among North Korean children in 2026.

Peaches and plums are now in season, the source said. In Kwail county, teenagers in groups of two or three have been slipping into orchards to eat fruit or take it home. “Orchard guards only shout to scare them off,” the source said. “They don’t chase after them to catch them.”

Kwail county is a hub of North Korea’s fruit industry, known mainly for apples but also producing pears, peaches, grapes, persimmons and apricots, according to the source. Most of the fruit grown there goes to central government officials and Pyongyang residents.

PM Possibles

While reflecting on the way Andrew Burnham was shoved into No 10, a chap is bound to wonder if Labour could have chosen anyone at all, not necessarily a politician. 

Someone acceptable to the Labour Party, well known and a party member of course. Yet presumably membership could have been sorted for a public figure who was not a politician but might be interested in a spell as UK Prime Minister.

For example, should they so choose, were Labour Party fixers able to nudge famous people such as Gary Lineker, Lenny Henry or Stephen Fry into giving it a go via a safe seat, just as Burnham did?

Just a thought while I finish my morning coffee.

Germany in decline

Germany in decline: Foreign media see the disintegration of infrastructure and industry

In July 2026, foreign media are increasingly reporting on Germany in decline. British and Spanish newspapers as well as international business media combine railway chaos, dilapidated bridges, Stuttgart 21 and the crisis at Volkswagen into a comprehensive picture. They describe an economy whose infrastructure is decaying, whose industry is losing its competitiveness and whose government is not initiating any reforms that really help. The criticism no longer concerns individual mishaps, but Germany's economic and state ability to act.

Germany in decline becomes the judgment of foreign media

The British magazine "The Spectator" published the article "Germany is quietly disintegrating" on July 6. The author refers to unpunctual trains, closed bridges and the threat of job cuts at Volkswagen. He describes the reaction of the federal government as a "shrug of the shoulders that is sold as a reform". Germany once embodied technical reliability and industrial strength. In the meantime, the question arises as to why Europe's largest economy is no longer able to repair its own bridges in time.

My impression from the outside is that Germany cannot elect political parties with enough nous and determination to do anything about decline. Surely the crisis at Volkswagen must have some political impact.

The political situation seems to similar to that in the UK, voting for worthwhile reform isn't happening. We've just been landed with a dud from Manchester as Prime Minister who even at this early stage seems to think going back to the 1970s is a good idea.

Nothing to do with me

PM Mark Carney Blames Canada Wildfires on — ‘Climate Change Is Everyone’s Responsibility’

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney dismissed the possibility that his government could be doing more to contain the out-of-control wildfires ravaging Ontario this week and sending toxic smoke down to flood much of the American Midwest and Northeast, demanding the United States do more to fight alleged “climate change.”

The comments, made during a press conference in Ontario, are Carney’s first in the aftermath of a torrent of outrage in the United States as millions of people were told not to leave their homes on Thursday to avoid becoming sick from inhaling Canadian fire smoke. Disillusion at the inaction by the Canadian government is also reportedly growing among the First Nations communities most directly affected by the fires, including some that have burned to the ground entirely and found little to no support from Ottawa.

Canada’s extensive forests have traditionally experienced regular summer fire seasons, controlled through indigenous methods such as controlled burns and the removal of dry, dead tree branches and other material that serves as kindling for large fires. In the past decade, as the Canadian government has largely abandoned forest management as a national policy, these fires have grown larger, more dangerous, and more polluting. The Canadian government has no federal emergency response agency and no national fire authority, leaving the country’s provinces on their own to respond to the fires.

What an odious chap Carney is, but he has at least confirmed what he is, a man who will never accept responsibility for anything he may righteously choose to disown. He has also confirmed that this is a major political attraction of the climate game, the adaptable righteousness.

Would Andrew Burnham accept at least some responsibility in similar circumstances? Probably not.

Bridgnorth Litter Pickers do it themselves

An entertaining little insight into the reality of everyday bureaucracy.

The Noodles of Power

Some interesting comments about the levers of power from former No 10 insiders - Burnham may find those levers have been softened to the consistency of noodles.

Will Andy Burnham spark an exodus of London’s middle classes?

Andy Burnham has had it easy, at least compared with what will hit him when he walks through the door of No 10.

“He’s going to get the shock of his life when he sees how degraded and different it is from what it was when he left,” says former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara. “People who haven’t been in government since 2016 are really clueless about how different it is. People feel powerless.”...

Yet Burnham has largely still to answer how he will pay for his radical reforms. Having broadly committed to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules, he has ruled out ramping up borrowing and has shown few signs of making significant welfare savings.

So that leaves a third possible option — tax rises. “If he does follow through on some of his tax and spend rumours, we might actually see an exodus of people... the middle class essentially starting to go,” says Cleo Watson, deputy chief-of-staff to Boris Johnson when he was Prime Minister.

But we already know this - so do the Labour MPs who shoved Burnham into No 10.

Expect gibberish and gesticulation

Trump threatens Canada with tariffs for smoke blanketing the US

President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to impose additional tariffs on Canada, blaming the country for wildfire smoke that has blanketed large swaths of the United States.

“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable,” the Republican president wrote on Truth Social Friday afternoon.

Trump added that he planned to call Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to discuss how his government intends to respond.

Trump won't get much out of Carney apart from gibberish - and maybe some gesticulation.

It was a mere basic inability to front novel situations which was somehow in the dragoman; he retreated from everything difficult in a smoke of gibberish and gesticulation.

Stephen Crane - Active Service (1899)

By gum this is horribly uninspiring - he doesn't know what to do next

 

A Litany of False Claims

Robert Bradley Jr. has a useful and interesting MasterResource piece on years of broken "clean energy" promises in the US.


False Optimism, Broken Promises of Wind and Solar Advocates

“… I also know this credit won’t go on forever. It was never meant to, and it shouldn’t…. I have expressed support in the past for a responsible, multi-year phase out of the wind tax credit. But…”

– Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), an original author of the 1992 Production Tax Credit (PTC)

Special government favor has propped up solar power since the 1970s and wind power since the early 1990s. One decade turning into the next, the (not-so) “clean energy” lobby has repeatedly made promises that their technologies are, or soon will be, competitive with electricity generated from natural gas, petroleum, or coal.

Documentation of this failure is well reported here at MasterResource and by the Institute for Energy Research. This particular post reproduces in large part a 2015 piece by the American Energy Alliance (IER), “Wind Fail: 20 Quotes for 30 Years of False Hopes.”

A Litany of False Claims

It turns out that wind promoters like Sen. Grassley and AWEA have long made claims that wind would soon be cost competitive and that the PTC would not be needed forever. Here are of some of their claims over the years:

The whole piece is well worth reading as the optimism is just as false, the promises just as broken here in the UK.


Conclusion

The American Wind Energy Association surely knew in 2015 that their claims about wind being cost competitive were untrue. Without the PTC, no one would build wind turbines. As Warren Buffet said, “On wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

The dirty linen is collected and shamefully hurried away

UK's Burnham will pledge to be 'unashamedly Labour' as party leader

Andy Burnham will promise to be “unashamedly Labour” when he officially becomes the party’s leader on Friday before taking over from Keir Starmer as prime minister next week.

He will say in a speech that his government will have the “courage to fix the big things that politics has neglected” and the “conviction to argue for our plans”.

The former Greater Manchester mayor, who returned to Westminster last month as Makerfield member of parliament (MP), will be confirmed as Labour leader in a special conference and then enter No 10 on Monday.


Monday morning is a strenuous but somehow a glad morning in respectable households of regular habits. The clean linen is brought out in lovely white piles from the linen cupboard and distributed over the house, and the dirty linen is collected and shamefully hurried away and catalogued in a place without honour and thrown pell-mell in baskets and despatched, and then everybody has a sweet sense of relief.

Arnold Bennett - Elsie and the Child (1924)

An idiot’s guide to promoting “public health” policies

Christopher Snowdon has a delightfully incisive Critic piece on the authoritarian games played by those tedious food moralists who insist on promoting useless "public health" policies.

An idiot’s guide to promoting “public health” policies

How to make irrational authoritarian moralism sound like urgent common sense

The Health and Care Committee has published a report calling for yet another slew of anti-obesity policies. After taking “evidence” from such experts as the orthorexic children’s entertainer Chris van Tulleken and some “youth activists” from Jamie Oliver’s front group BiteBack, it has called for a ban on fast food outlets opening near schools, a ban on all outdoor advertising of high fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) food, a ban on companies associated with such foods advertising themselves even if they are not advertising an HFSS product, and a ban on companies which “derive more than a certain proportion of sales from less healthy products from any discussions on the formation of policy on food, diet and obesity prevention.”


The whole piece is well worth reading for the way it eviscerates political delusions of grandeur.


Most parliamentarians are powerless pygmies with delusions of grandeur. Having no answers to the big problems facing the country, they indulge themselves in the displacement politics of petty prohibition. They want to be seen as heroic, so be sure to flatter them by portraying the policy you are proposing as “bold” and “brave”. When the Health Committee proposed a sugar tax in 2015, it subtitled its report “Brave and Bold Action”. Jamie Oliver urged ministers to be “big and bold”. This week’s report from the Health and Social Care Committee uses the words “bold” or “bolder” six times. The first line of the press release calls for “a new, bold approach”. The committee’s chair, Layla Moran, said: “We ask this government to be bold, not to fudge and delay food restrictions.”

The Atomic Trampoline

 

Translating BBC Newspeak

New BBC boss pushes for new 'household levy' to replace licence fee: All would have to pay

levy = tax

Director-general Matt Brittin said he was 'open to all options' to fund the broadcasting giant after it was revealed that licence fee income has dropped by more than £1billion in real terms in the last decade.

open = not open

'We need universality, we need sufficiency,' he added.

need = want

A household levy would mean everyone pays a mandatory fee to the BBC regardless of whether people watch or listen to its programmes. The charge could be levied alongside utility bills, proponents of the idea say.

fee = tax

Mr Brittin stressed the need for the BBC to reinvent itself.

reinvent = entrench

And so on - BBC Newspeak, a special survival version. 

He waxes desperate with imagination

Starmer: I’ve left Britain better than I found it

Sir Keir Starmer has claimed he is leaving Britain in a better state than when he became Prime Minister.

During his final Prime Minister’s Questions today, the outgoing Labour leader said his Government had stabilised the economy, strengthened national security and enhanced the country’s global reputation.

Since winning a landslide victory in the 2024 general election, Sir Keir’s premiership has been blighted by a series of policy about-turns and scandals.

A man who is playing a part is always ultra-anxious and he often overdoes it, because he can never quite release himself from the fear that the person to be deluded must somehow notice what he, the deceiver, so plainly sees, i.e., the deceit.

J.M.W. van der Poorten Schwartz – The Black Box Murder (1889)