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When WILL this serpentine creature now given such power by Starmer be forced to answer for his actions?: STEPHEN GLOVER

When WILL this serpentine creature now given such power by Starmer be forced to answer for his actions?: STEPHEN GLOVER

Daily Mail​17 hours ago
Who is one of the most influential figures in the Labour Government and yet almost unknown to the British public?
Who secretly brokered the recent controversial deal whereby Britain agreed to hand over £101million annually to Mauritius for 99 years in return for a lease on a base in the Chagos Islands, which a previous administration had already secured with a payment of £3million in 1968?
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How realistic is Nigel Farage's promise to cut crime in half?
How realistic is Nigel Farage's promise to cut crime in half?

The Independent

time20 minutes ago

  • The Independent

How realistic is Nigel Farage's promise to cut crime in half?

N igel Farage claims that he has a plan to 'cut crime in half, take back control of our streets, [and] take back control of our courts and prisons '. The Reform leader says that 'we are facing nothing short of societal collapse', wants to build emergency 'Nightingale prisons ' on Ministry of Defence land, and has semi-promised to send convicted murderer Ian Huntley to El Salvador (admittedly a bit of a vote winner). It's an ambitious package, but there are questions about its viability... Is Britain facing societal collapse? No. If it was, you wouldn't get back alive from the pub or be able to get petrol or bread. Is crime up? On some measures and in some places, against certain given periods of time, it is up; on other measures, it's down. The variations in the way crime is measured are one issue – it's risky to go by the number of crimes recorded by the police, because people will sometimes not bother to report them, especially the less serious matters, so statisticians treat these figures with caution. The other way of measuring crime rates, which should also be adjusted for changes in population, is by conducting surveys among the public – but not everything is included. Somewhat confusingly, Farage seems to think that the survey data is unreliable because people have given up telling the police about, for example, thefts that might affect their insurance. That doesn't make sense. Types of crime also necessarily change over time; there are very few thefts of car radios or bank blags these days, but there's massively more cybercrime and fraud. Even in London, described by Farage as 'lawless', not all crime is up; there's a long-term trend down in murder and rape, for example, and there are still plenty of tourists. So fact-checking any politician on the subject of crime is virtually impossible. All such claims need to be treated with the utmost care. What about the costings? Farage presented a 'costings sheet' that purports to show that the whole massive package – recruiting 30,000 more police, opening new 'custody suites', restoring magistrates' court operations, building prisons, paying rent for offenders deported to prisons in El Salvador or Estonia, and the rest – would come to £17.4bn over a five-year parliament: a mere £3.48bn per annum. The costings seem to be optimistic, based on some arbitrary assumptions such as always being able to cut costs to a minimum. They are not independently audited by, say, the Institute for Fiscal Studies – and if it were really all so cheap to do, the Tories and Labour would surely have taken the opportunity to transform the crime scene and turn Britain into a paradise long ago. As for funding even the admitted £17.4bn, there are no specific named savings elsewhere, just some recycled claims about the (contested) cost of net zero and the supposed economic miracle wrought in Argentina by President Milei. Probably not enough to calm the bond markets under a Farage government. Is the UK 'close to civil disobedience on a vast scale'? So Farage claims. His critics say that his 'I predict a riot' remarks tend to have a self-fulfilling quality to them, as seen in the 'Farage riots' in Southport and elsewhere a year ago. Essex Police, who are currently dealing with violent unrest in Epping – perpetrated by 'a few bad eggs', as Farage terms it – won't thank him for his comments. And the anecdotes? Uncheckable, just as Enoch Powell's were in the infamous 'rivers of blood' speech in 1968. We may never know whether, for example, a former army sergeant was denied a job as a police officer because the force was 'having trouble with its quotas' or for some other reason. Reform's tactics are also reminiscent of the Trump playbook, demonstrating an obsession with incarceration and policing by fear. If Farage could build a British Alligator Alcatraz on a disused RAF base in Suffolk, he probably would. But using grass snakes, presumably. Can Farage cut crime in half in five years? It feels implausible. If he could, then presumably he could abolish crime altogether if he were given a decade in office. The 'zero tolerance' approach sounds fine, but if the pledge that every shoplifting offence, every whiff of a spliff, and every trackable mobile phone theft has to be investigated is taken literally – as he seems to intend – then even 30,000 more officers wouldn't be sufficient, and the expanded court and prison system would collapse. Much the same goes for 'saturation' levels of policing deployed on stop-and-search exercises in high-knife-crime areas. Sending many more people to jail is also very costly, but, more to the point, the recent Gauke report explains why prison doesn't work and just makes everything worse. To get crime down under Reform UK, we'd need to turn the UK into a police state.

Abolishing Ofwat is fine but not enough: teach water bosses that failure has consequences
Abolishing Ofwat is fine but not enough: teach water bosses that failure has consequences

The Guardian

time21 minutes ago

  • The Guardian

Abolishing Ofwat is fine but not enough: teach water bosses that failure has consequences

In a bone dry summer, every drop of water counts. So, even though the rain is finally falling again now, it's still hard to take it for granted, or to ignore the way that everything in the countryside still feels unnervingly out of rhythm: earth too cracked, grass too bleached, wheat harvest being brought in too early, rivers too low – and, knowing what Thames Water has been pumping into them, water quite possibly too dirty to cool off in. In May, the company was fined £122.7m for the combined sins of sewage dumping and continuing to pay shareholder dividends despite its environmental failings. It responded by protesting that it might go bust if actually held accountable for its actions, a sentence that sums up everything people find infuriating about the water industry. Yet its resentful customers have no choice but to keep paying bills that are expected to rise by a third over the next five years – though Thames Water, inevitably, asked to be allowed to charge more – while wondering how we ever let a commodity this precious become so badly managed, heading into a volatile new era of summer drought and winter flood. Rivers, Jon Cunliffe notes in his newly published review of what a new Labour government should do about the water industry, are part of a country's national identity. There's a romance and a history to be preserved here, not just a life-giving water supply to be extracted or wildlife habitats to be protected. Being a neutral civil servant, what he doesn't explicitly add is that lately they have also come to symbolise corporate failure and decline of the public realm, but that too is part of the picture. Few will disagree with Cunliffe's verdict that the current regulator, Ofwat, isn't up to negotiating the complex trade-offs involved here, and that there should be a new watchdog, bringing together various powers currently scattered across Whitehall, with the ability to take control of failing water companies if needed. His ideas for increasing accountability, curbing excessive dividends and creating a new social tariff for those who can't afford to pay is welcome too. (Bills were kept too low for too long, the review concludes, meaning that when the inevitable hike came it was painfully sharp.) But that's the easy bit, compared with facing up to the consequences of chronic underinvestment by an industry that has in parts seemed quick to take the profits and slower to take responsibility. There will be outrage on the left that Cunliffe doesn't advocate nationalisation, though politically that idea was off the table before he started. (Labour said before the election that it wasn't keen to take water back into public ownership, and nothing about the fiscal hole in which it has since found itself has made the idea of spending billions on doing so more appealing: Cunliffe's terms of reference were set accordingly.) The review argues that ownership models are anyway something of a red herring – water is nationalised in Scotland but bathing water quality isn't much better there than it is south of the border, and while Welsh Water's not-for-profit model could be viable for some English companies, even that isn't necessarily a magic bullet. All of which may well be true, but might sound more convincing had ministers given him free rein to consider all the options equally. As it is, it's hardly his fault that this plan – which would still see water bills rising steeply to fund the investment in creaking infrastructure that everyone accepts is necessary – is the answer of the Treasury official he used to be, rather than of a politician. Where's the moral hazard, the price any private business should be forced to pay for failure, if in the end their customers just get stuck with the tab? It's not our fault if companies who were granted a monopoly back in 1989 over the supply of something humans literally can't live without still managed somehow to make a commercial hash of it. No wonder the water minister, Emma Hardy, will take the summer to decide exactly which of Cunliffe's recommendations Labour plans to accept. The dilemma this government finds itself in over water is, of course, not unique. It is part of a common thread now linking everything from welfare reform and the still unresolved problem of funding social care, to the momentous decisions on tax now facing Rachel Reeves in her autumn budget; that these are all expensive and deep-seated problems this government's predecessors repeatedly dodged or kicked down the road. And, although Labour's commitment to actually facing reality is admirable, it turns out there were good reasons everyone else chose to bravely run away. Years of ducking and diving have only magnified those problems, to the point where selling the kind of sacrifices now required to a reluctant public is almost impossible. Getting the future governance of the industry right is crucial, of course, but that's not the end of it. Thames Water should be allowed to fail, on the grounds that it has done nothing to deserve a taxpayer bailout, and if its lenders have to take a hit, well, them's the risks. Parliament should keep digging, investigating the historic failures of oversight that allowed us to get into this mess. But, somehow, ministers need to find a broader way of conveying that failure has consequences, and not just for the taxpayer. A harder rain needs to fall, not just into rapidly shrinking reservoirs, but on to some of those responsible for managing them. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

I admit to being a ‘Terf': Tired of Explaining Reality to Fools
I admit to being a ‘Terf': Tired of Explaining Reality to Fools

Telegraph

time21 minutes ago

  • Telegraph

I admit to being a ‘Terf': Tired of Explaining Reality to Fools

One of the things that makes me feel most patriotic – and such feelings do not come easily, trust me – is that I live on Terf Island. Baffled Americans who have swallowed the Kool Aid and recite things like 'Trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary people are valid', while living in a country that chops the breasts off disturbed young women, look at the likes of me and my friends, who want kids left alone, and think it is us who have the problem. For them we are some kind of monsters. We, the Terfs of Terf Island (a misguidedly derogatory nickname that reflects the UK's important role as the centre of gender-critical feminism), want to protect the rights of women and children. And with support we are slowly turning the pernicious gender juggernaut round in just about every area. I can't remember the first time I was called a Terf. It was meant as an insult (trans-exclusionary radical feminist). Originally, the only bit that I felt applied to me was 'feminist'. I did not want to exclude trans people. I am not that radical. But I am tired. It's been a long old battle trying to explain that biology should not trump ideology. TERF: Tired of Explaining Reality to F---wits. To be labelled a Terf was an attempt to shut bolshy women down. Now, a new book, Terf Island, by Sex Matters campaigner Fiona McAnena, reflects the struggle by looking at the social history of the resistance to gender ideology. It's out on August 1, and is well worth a read. As the book highlights, our basic objections were (and still are) to men in women's spaces, men in women's sports, the medicalisation and sterilisation of children, and the erasure of the word women from language so that we became 'people with cervixes' or 'gestational carriers'. The idea that sex itself was changeable and just an undefined feeling in your head? We didn't buy any of this and we were seen as old, redundant, out of touch. Why wouldn't a bunch of awkward, often middle-aged women (which included lesbians) just go along with the shiny new creed where no one was born male or female anymore and everyone could be everything on a whim, the trans activists must have wondered. How mega exciting! (And how profitable for big pharma, big medicine, big shrinkery.) Who would not want to be modern and sexually ambiguous? As for stuff like rights and spaces and protections for women and safeguarding for children… who cares? That was from the dark days, before rainbow lanyards and flags. Yet Terfs just would not get with the programme. We committed the biggest sin of all. We simply did not believe that a man in a wig and stockings could be a woman. What's more, we organised – and held gatherings supported by the advocacy group Woman's Place. Networks were created. The Lesbian and Gay Alliance was formed. Court cases where women had been discriminated against for their 'gender-critical beliefs' were won. Bit by bit, Terf Island was countering the ultra-effective lobbying of Stonewall, which had wormed its way into many public sector bodies. In Scotland, Sturgeon's push to allow gender self-ID fell apart after we saw where that could lead – Isla Bryson, a rapist in a female prison. Since then, Labour, having idiotically signed up to the SNP's self-ID cause, has been coming round. We have had the Sullivan Review, the Cass Review and the Supreme Court ruling, all seeking to improve data collection, policy-making and definitions around sex and gender, rooted in biological fact. I've been maligned for years as a Terf, so excuse me while I celebrate the victories of grassroots groups of busy women against much of the establishment. Other European countries, Australia and, whisper it, some Americans are now paying attention to our push-back, particularly on puberty blockers and 'gender medicine'. Trump's slogan at the election ' Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you ' tapped into the unease many were already feeling. But cult thinking is hard to give up. Tim Roca, the Labour MP for Macclesfield, does not appear to have got the memo that his party has accepted that the word woman means biological woman. He found the Supreme Court judgment 'very depressing', even though it simply clarified the law. He described 'transphobes' as 'swivel-eyed' and 'not very well people'. It's going to be very hard for these people to row back. One-hit wonder Kate Nash has recorded a song that rambles on and then addresses people like me as germs. ('Exclusionary, regressive, misogynist (germ, germ)/Yeah, you're not rad at all.') A young posh duo called the Lambrini Girls perform a muddled ditty with the chorus 'Shut your stupid f---ing mouth you stupid f---ing Terf / There's a reason your kids aren't returning your calls, Carol'. I am afraid these people may think they are rad and out-there but they are missing what is going on. You know, in the world? The slow-motion car-crash of the tribunal of Sandie Peggie, who was cleared of misconduct after NHS Fife suspended her when she complained about having to share a changing room with Dr Beth Upton, a transgender medic, is revealing what happens when an organisation panders to the whims of a trans-identifying male. We end up with a nurse suspended for wanting to change in private. The Peggie case is covering NHS Fife in gender woo-woo that it can't shake it off. It has beclowned itself by putting gender ideology above common sense. This is the level of insanity that Terfs have stood against for years now. But it's changing.

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