The goal here is that it’s famously difficult for third parties to get an appropriate measure of media attention in the UK. The newspapers are highly partisan, and the TV news interprets the ‘balance’ requirement to mean they can just give the government view and the main opposition view on every issue (unless the government and main opposition happen to agree - which is why the Lib Dems got a fair hearing in the media on Iraq in the early 2000s).

So third parties need to have a gimmick to trick the media into giving them airtime, which then allows them to talk about their issues. Charles Kennedy did it but being entertaining on chatshows and HIGNFY; Nigel Farage does it by being outrageous and offensive; and Ed Davey has worked out that he can do it through stunts.

The MPs wanted Cleverly anyway but they shit the bed trying to engineer an easy opponent for him in the final two. He’s now said he’s not going to join the shadow cabinet, so while Badenoch has to deal with all the struggles of being LOTO, Cleverly will be on the backbenches, giving speeches to constituency parties, improving his reputation, sounding like some sort of experienced elder statesman to contrast with Badenoch.

A VONC to put Cleverly in charge seems very likely unless Starmer’s polling numbers really tank over the next few years.

This is patently absurd. Labour already inherited the highest tax burden in 70 years from the Conservatives - this budget increases the tax burden by a further £40bn to fund extra spending. Government borrowing is also going to increase by an average of £32bn a year for the next five years due to this budget.

If this is what they call austerity, I’d hate to see what these people think government largesse looks like…

Will the clocks still go back and forward an hour to help the farmers get up early though?

He’s obviously talking his own book, but there does seem to be genuine concern that the government’s analysis of the non-dom crackdown suggests that, yes, it will lead to a reduction in tax revenue. Because many of these people can in fact just move…

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/rachel-reeves-budget-non-dom-changes-tax-b2619863.html

I’m still annoyed that the Daily Star keeps getting credit for this joke.

The joke about Truss’s premiership having the shelf life of a lettuce was from the Economist. And it wasn’t about the 49 days she was PM - it was referencing the seven days or so that Truss was actually in the driving seat, once you take away the mourning period around the Queen’s death when nothing could happen, and then the period after the mini-budget when Jeremy Hunt and the grown-ups took charge.

What the Star did was just riff on the Economist’s joke by setting up a webcam.

A recent migrant, identifying himself as ‘Nigel F from Clacton’, told reporters he was thrilled by his new life in Russia and the prospect of not having to see brown people at the shops or gay people on TV anymore.

But the tribunal heard neither Ms Jones nor the customer was interviewed, no notes were produced by Mrs Smith and no written account of the decision was made.

[…]

The judge said: "The disciplinary process and the dismissal were a sham designed to placate the customer.

What I know about HR is that the employer actually has a tonne of leeway to get rid of people as long as they can demonstrate they have followed a proper process with an audit trail.

The reason this person was fired that’s mentioned in the headline (which I think isn’t unreasonable - of course you can’t call the customer a twat!) is kind of irrelevant here, it’s the fact the employer didn’t run a true process to back up the decision that has got them.

Wait, how many 25 year olds in 2024 do you think remember the Mighty Boosh (2003-07), or Chicken Run (2000), or Who Shot Phil Mitchell (2001), or Caroline Quentin-era Jonathan Creek (1997-2000), or know people who were extras in the Harry Potter films (2001-11), or remember the Animals of Farthing Wood TV programme (1993-97), or spilled their drink on Miquita Oliver at a squat party in 2007 (2007)?

but leaving them anywhere helps everyone

Leaving them anywhere is the whole problem. My neighbour is in his 70s and uses a mobility scooter. I see parents having to detour their pushchairs onto the road to get around them. People are literally leaving these bikes lying horizontal across the pavement!

This isn’t a problem with bikes that individuals own. This isn’t a problem with the Santander bikes either. This is a specific problem with Lime bikes and the likes, because the Lime bike system is set up to encourage people to dump their bikes anywhere and Lime does nothing to discourage this. Lime is a multi-million pound private enterprise that is profiting on what is effectively the littering of our public spaces.

Personally I’d favour using punitive market-based mechanisms to solve this - fine Lime £100 or £200 for every mis-parked bike, which would align their incentives with society’s and quickly lead them to being a lot more discerning about who they rent their bikes out to and how they enforce against misuse of the bikes. But I suspect this would destroy their business model anyway - the overwhelming majority of Lime bikes I see out and about are not parked in an orderly way, so what you’re calling a public disorder problem must account for the vast majority of their customer base - it’s a business model set up to cater to hooligans. So maybe just banning the product outright is the better option. The Santander bikes are very widely available for anyone who needs them and they operate with a system that overwhelmingly enforces orderly parking.

🥳

This is exactly my issue. I’m not against 20mph in urban areas, but 20mph limits on roads that are clearly designed for 30mph (or more) are a lazy solution. Every subconscious instinct of an experienced driver on these roads will be telling them to drive at 30 so they have to consciously focus on the speedometer to stay within the lower limit for prolonged periods, particularly with the proliferation of speed cameras we have in the UK - my fear in a 20 zone is often now that I’m going to cause an accident because I’m so focused on the speedometer and not the road.

The right solution is to actually turn these roads into 20mph roads (not 30mph with 20mph limits) through simple road design measures that will align drivers’ subconscious perception of the road with the speed the government wants them to drive at. I recognise that this can’t happen overnight but I see no effort by local or national government to even start investing in the set of changes needed to make 20mph sustainable. If these roads just felt like 20mph roads then people would be a lot less annoyed at driving within the speed limit and the government wouldn’t just be stoking up a massive political backlash that will end up returning them all to 30mph and abandoning all the road safety and air quality benefits that these policies are supposed to deliver for us.

‘Ah, Kamala, my old friend. Do you know the MAGA proverb that tells us cats and dogs are a dish that is best served cold? It is very cold in space.’

They can clearly enforce that more

Or, you know, at all…

I see far more Lime bikes sitting in the middle of the pavement than I do parked appropriately. Lime clearly has no incentive to punish bad parkers as all it does is lose them business for zero benefit.

The way to make the cost-benefit analysis work - and therefore to make Lime enforce against bad parkers - is for Lime to face a cost when their riders park badly. Local councils should just drive a van round and impound any Lime bikes thrown in the middle of the pavement and charge Lime £200 a pop to recover them - that would quickly get them to stop renting bikes out to hooligans.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_noun

Imagine the queue to see Larry lying in state.

Yes - that was the next sentence I wrote?

In 2017 his name was mentioned as a visionary comparable to the Wright Brothers and Zefram Cochrane (inventor of the warp drive) on a Star Trek episode set in the 2250s. It felt at the time that this line risked dating the episode but I don’t think anyone could have expected just how much he would go on trash his own reputation.

The only thing that saves this line is that we found out a few episodes later that the character who spoke it secretly came from the Mirror Universe - where he grew up Musk’s embrace of Nazism was probably seen as a virtue.

NIMBYs’ excuses are becoming more and more elaborate.