Looks like Sunak is trying to do a whole lot of buying of paddles there, mebbe a bit of patching of the canoe, but the canoe remains exactly in the same creek it was before.

It's like the nurses. Retaining the current one counts as a new one.

I bet all the struggling families using food banks can’t ******* wait for it.

Scottish Water which is publicly owned, has invested nearly 35% more per household in infrastructure since 2002 than the privatised English water companies. It charges users 14% less and does not pay dividends and has only a fraction of untreated waste discharges

Which goes to demonstrate how badly Scottish Water has failed, the venture capitalists, fund managers, millionaires and hedge fund managers haven't made a single penny.

I bet that Scottish Water's board are criminally underpaid as well.....

....checks.....

Chief Exec is paid about a third of what the CEO of Thames Water is paid.

Shareholders aren't making any money, directors aren't making as much money, clearly the business is failing the most important stakeholders.

Highest taxes in decades - just as the Tories promised!

Heh, reminds me when I holidayed in St Mary's Bay/Dymchurch as a young kid - rows and rows of old army barracks were used as accommodation for parties of school children - we'd be stopped from swimming because of 'effluence', which I understood to be something horrible.

Brexit is certainly a return to rosy(?) nostalgia. Things ain't are what they used to be.

I have come to realise that shareholder return is only a "nice to have" in big business, the prime driver is maximising executive income

Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk

Yeahbut these are Tory taxes and so automatically better than and different from Labour taxes, which are A Bad Thing.

Can't remember all the names of the CEO merry-go-round at HP some years ago, but the packages some of the losers got, along with next assignments, made it clear that the number one priority in some quarters is taking care of 1% club members.

Changing the reduction in Universal Credit payment for part time workers is being called a tax cut for those on the lowest wages.

Perhaps a salient factor here might be the (extraordinarily expensive) pandemic and lockdown measured that the country's been through over the past 20-odd months.

I just have a gut feeling that this might be relevant to the rationale underpinning tax increases.......

3p off the price of a pint when a pint was £1 would be significant. 3p off the price of a pint that is already £4-£8 is a fart in the wind compared to just how much poorer the Tories have deliberately made us.

To be fair, most people don't go to the beach to actually swim, they just go through the motions.

Brexit is like watching someone bleed out. Highly discomfitting! I wish someone would wave a magic wand and reverse what appears to be the effects of an undetected, highly destructive Zika-like pandemic prior to the 2016 Brexit vote and Trump election.

The current lot made it quite clear that you can't hide behind external factors, remember these are the shower that pinned the financial meltdown on Labour.

I've described it as a death by a thousand cuts, I was being optimistic, it's a death by 10,000 cuts.

Perhaps other factors are involved.

https://www.independent.co.uk/busine...-b1946730.html

It's a tiny shift in favour of pubs rather than home drinking as the duty cut applies to beer sold in 40+ litre containers. It helps a £4 pub pint inch a few pence closer to supermarket bottles and cans at less than half the price.

OTOH, it's free money for the big brewers who shift lots of their mass produced beer in 9 gallon kegs or larger but a competitive setback for small craft brewers who sell very little in large kegs.

I'm pretty sure that Betteridge's Law applies here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-59084086

Remember Boris Johnson can't even seem to get a deal (or at least stick to one) when one exists already.

I distinctly remember Boris standing on the steps of Downing Street and promising that we would soon have the highest taxes since the War and be swimming in our own ****.

Well, what surprise! No one looked at Lex Greensill getting guubmint work, just after he stopped (officially at least) being Call Me's advisor, to see if there might be even a hint of a smigeon of a tad of a conflict of interest - https://www.theguardian.com/business...-contracts-nao - Spoiler Alert: Of course there were sodding COIs, why else was no one looking?

Meanwhile, in other news, the DHSC is not complying with FOI requests about Owen Paterson and his non-lobbying for the company that just happened to have bunged him loads of cash for not doing anything - https://www.theguardian.com/politics...terson-meeting.

Spoiler Alert: If they aren't releasing things after all this time there is something they don't want out there, 'cos if they have information showing Paterson did no wrong The Guardian would have had it by return of post.

Who knew it? Turns out filling our rivers and beaches with gallons and gallons of human **** is actually really popular.

Westminster voting intention:

CON: 39% (+2)
LAB: 33% (-)
GRN: 10% (-)
LDEM: 8% (-1)
REFUK: 3% (-1)

via @YouGov, 27 - 28 Oct
Chgs. w/ 21 Oct

Sigh...Nice to see the The Great British Public are really bothered about The Important Issues of the Day - https://www.theguardian.com/media/20...code-tim-davie - because What Really Matters is Wearing Ties and Not Wearing Jeans...FFS!

These are the sort of wankers that insisted that I had to wear ties at work years ago, including the one some ****** tried to strangle me with (and don't even bother with mentioning clip-ons) and that if you wear a suit you are Automatically Better At Everything And Obviously Superior. Wankers all.

On a related note: Carrot Flower Queen just reminded me of a complaint made about an on-call consultant in Newcastle, who was called in, dashed in, still wearing shorts and a T-shirt, saved yer man's life in double quick time...Relatives complained that he wasn't wearing a collar and tie...

Really some folk need to have a long, hard look at themselves and then give themselves a good talking to and then shut the **** up.

The last person who tried to make we wear a tie to work ended up moving to a remote Scottish island. Coincidence?

I grew up (for a certain value of grew up of course) in Emsworth & spent a lot of my childhood swimming in those waters. We scattered my Mother's ashes on the foreshore along there. Not a pleasant thought.

Yeah, that’s an interesting one. We also scattered our mother’s ashes at her favourite beauty spot, thus just slightly de-beautifying it. Hopefully less so than raw sewage, though. Also in Wales, so hopefully the Welsh Government won’t bring in same rules.

MP who sexually harassed member of his staff reinstated to Conservative Party

An MP who sexually harassed a member of his staff will have his Conservative Party membership reinstated on Monday.
Rob Roberts, the MP for Delyn, began a 12-week suspension from the party on 9 August, and was also suspended from Parliament for six weeks in May.
But come Monday, he will become a member of the party again.

However, the Tory whip - which would make him a Conservative MP in the Commons - will remained suspended, so he will continue as an independent MP.
When his 12-weeks party suspension was announced, his former employee told the BBC it was "disconcerting" that someone who caused "so much concern amongst younger members of the party should be allowed to continue their membership".

MP Rob Roberts told staffer to be 'less alluring'
Earlier this year, an independent panel found Mr Roberts sexually harassed a member of his staff.
The former employee told the BBC the MP had repeatedly propositioned him and asked him to be "less alluring".

Mr Roberts said he apologised for a "completely improper" breach of trust "in the MP-staff relationship".
But because of a legal loophole, he did not face a recall petition - which can lead to a by-election - as he was suspended by an independent panel rather than a parliamentary committee.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-59088563

Translation - "how dare they make an accusation and not allow it to be swept under the carpet"

It looks like the Tories didn’t suspend him for harassing a female member of staff, but did for his harassing a male member of staff. Hopefully the difference is due to it by then being a repeated offence.

Rishi Sunak sent a message to Rachel Reeves on Twitter asking why she hadn’t welcomed his £20million investment in her constituency!
Only thing is as the local paper points out - it’s not in her constituency but in the Tory one next door!

...and even then:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...s-20m-largesse

I suppose from a Westminster perspective, it's all Up North so it's all the same and it's all grim. :rolleyes:

Does Sunak actually think he's MP for Richmond near That There London rather than the market town in Swaledale?

But then, isn't he one of the ones who think Scotland starts at Hadrian's Wall (y'know around 30 miles south of where I live)?

When you have many homes it's rather difficult to remember where you are day to day!

don’t like your mates being punished for breaking lobbying rules? propose a ridiculous replacement system on the same day a Tory MP is due to be suspended

Don't like the treaty you just signed?
Break it.

Don't like the a corrupt MP has been found by independent committee to be corrupt?
Break the independent committee".

Don't like parliament?
Break Parliament by unlawfully proroguing it.

Am I starting to see a pattern here?

When there are no personal consequences for breaking the rules, why would any respectable right-winger ever bother to adhere to them ?

Even if there are consequences for their actions - like if the EU act against the UK - those consequences fall on other people rather than the Prime Minister.

As with so much else, the whole Paterson saga is gaslighting in extremis. As I'm typing, Johnson is at PMQ's, making a number of false claims (there's a certain level of irony in the fact that Johnson is permitted to openly lie to the House, but any attempt to call him out on this by a member of the opposition will be rebuked as a breach of rules...), such as claiming that Paterson was denied 'natural justice' and a right of appeal, which has been strongly denied by the chair of the standards committee.

Then again, as noted by commentators on social media, it speaks volumes that of the 59 signatories to the amendment to get Paterson off the hook, 6 have had allegations upheld against them by the standards commissioner in the past year. And they're also holding second jobs worth more than a million £...

And as the FT's political columnist Robert Shrimsley noted: