The fact Starmer won’t even think about joining the single market is stupid too.

Joining the single market would simplify border issues but it wouldn’t solve them… We’d have to join the Customs Union and the common VAT area as well to do that. SM-only is not completely pointless but there is a massive political risk attached because it doesn’t solve all the problems its advocates pretend it does.

There are only two ways to make Brexit work. One is to be an EU member in all but name (following all the rules but having a very limited role in making the rules). The other is a united Ireland (with a lot more expenditure on customs and warehousing in Britain).

The first is politically impossible, and also pointless. The second is up to the people of the island of Ireland and requires a British govt which is willing to invest in the real economy, rather than keeping most of us around to create the illusion of a real country instead of a tax haven based on a massive casino.

National Highways says the radar detects 89% of stopped vehicles - but that means one in 10 are not spotted.

At least 79 people have been killed on smart motorways since they were introduced in 2010. In the past five years, seven coroners have called for them to be made safer.

National Highways’ latest figures suggest that if you break down on a smart motorway without a hard shoulder you are three times more likely to be killed or seriously injured than on one with a hard shoulder.

No brainer. But then they quote this prick without directly challenging the contradiction:

The agency’s operational control director Andrew Page-Dove says action was being taken to “close the gap between how drivers feel and what the safety statistics show”.

The ‘gap’ seems to be a result of drivers having a much more accurate perception than the people paid to defend them.

National Highways says reinstating the hard shoulder would increase congestion and that there are well-rehearsed contingency plans to deal with power outages.

Just add more lanes. That’ll work. It’s never worked but obviously it’ll work. Fuckwits.

It is very easy to have a play with a benefits calculator to find out what reality looks like for yourself.

In-work benefits keep working people who earn less than they need to survive at or slightly above the poverty level. For people who are unable to work, due to sickness, disability or a lack of available jobs, it keeps them stuck below the poverty level with just about enough to survive but not to thrive.

As the article points out, the philosophy this system was built on was not necessarily well thought out at the time. In the post-covid era it is disastrous.

All barristers are only as good as the evidence given to them

That’s not entirely true. The Secret Barrister made a good point on the site I won’t visit to grab the link: people always ask how you can defend someone you know is guilty; they never ask how you can prosecute someone who you know is innocent.

We have an adversarial system, not an inquisatorial one. Barristers are paid to present one case or the other, not decide what is true for themselves.

There are barristers and judges who may well be sanctioned, professionally if not also criminally, for their part in this scandal. Richard Morgan is one that sticks in my mind. He relied on an entirely circular argument (Lee Castleton signed off the accounts therefore the reliability of Horizon is irrelevant, even though it produced the accounts that Castleton had to sign if he wanted to continue trading). If you read/watch his appearance at the inquiry, it appears to literally dawn on him during the questioning. He was professionally negligent and he should not be allowed to get away with it.

The CPS, and equivalents in Scotland, brought around a third of the wrongful prosecutions.

The barristers the CPS employs to bring prosecutions are the same barristers used by the Post Office, using the same courts and the same judges.

This scandal just shines a light on how impossible the criminal justice system is for ordinary people with more limited means. Bates vs PO only happened because they managed to find 555 claimants (500 being the minimum their funders needed to risk it).

There was a case settled in 2003 because the court appointed a single independent expert to act for both sides and he pointed out all the holes in the Post Office case. That should have been the end of it. But they made the Cleveleys subpostmaster sign a confidentiality agreement, slandered the expert, and carried on prosecuting.

I told Post Office the truth about Horizon in 2003, IT expert says

This is disgusting. PIP is designed to help with additional costs incurred due to an illness or disability but there are loads of people who are too sick to work who don’t need it, and many others who do need it but don’t qualify.

Cold weather payments should be extended to everyone who is reliant on benefits to survive (which would mean almost every benefit other than PIP being a qualifying benefit).

She has used her considerable platform to make trans lives worse in many ways, not just with regard to sport.

Because she is a transphobic piece of shit, you see.

As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s about who you want to benefit from your clicks. Pirate her books and articles if you want to know what she has to say (but honestly, it’s not much so probs don’t bother).

She’s very similar to JK Rowling, even if Jordan Peterson is as far as she’s got in her adventures with the far right so far.

You have an incorrect mental timeline on sports inclusion. Some sporting bodies have recently begun to introduce bans under pressure from conservative politicians desperate to distract the people they are pickpocketing. The stronger trend is for inclusion, because two years on gender-affirming hormones eliminates all the advantages a trans woman might have apart from extra height for those who went through a male puberty because they weren’t lucky enough to get puberty blockers early enough.

Laurel Hubbard: First transgender athlete to compete at Olympics

The 43-year-old became eligible to compete at the Olympics when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 2015 changed its rules allowing transgender athletes to compete as a woman if their testosterone levels are below a certain threshold.

(Feel free to look up Hubbard’s performances before and after transition.)

One of the big tells with Lewis is her scare-mongering about trans women in women’s prisons. It has long been the case in the UK that women who are considered too violent to be housed in a women’s prison have been sent to men’s prisons. This applies to all women, cis and trans, and obviously includes trans women who have committed violent crimes against other women. People like Lewis seize on very rare instances where errors have been made to cause alarm and distress. Of course, they ignore the fates of trans women who have mistakenly been housed in men’s prisons without any of the protective segregation cis women in men’s prisons receive.

Also it was weird of you to bring up her race in the original comment - her being a white woman is orthogonal to the criticism you are making of her.

No idea why you think race and class are not relevant in a comment about her abuse of intersectionality. If you don’t understand, dictionaires exist.

I didn’t say they were. But people should be aware of who they are giving their clicks to.

And?

She’s a transphobic piece of shit who abuses the concept of intersectionality to claim eternal victimhood for middle-class white women. Empty-brained narcissist.

who the fuck keeps receipts for stamps?

They’re charging (fining) the recipients £5 to collect the post so the people they’re robbing couldn’t possibly have the relevant receipt anyway.

They better have some very good evidence that the problem is not with their stamps given the decades-long saga with the Post Office (which started years before Royal Mail was sold off as a separate entity).

You’re nitpicking the headline while agreeing with the article.

“What is striking is that the uncool, mean standards of FOSS conduct that many of us have decried for years, and that many defended as authentic, tough, etc., ended up not just being exclusionary loser behavior, but a significant attack surface.”

Yes, that and increasing conditionality of benefits (which were originally designed to place a floor under which no employer could sink).

Minimum wage is a neoliberal policy, necessitated by the fact that capital would happily starve its own workforce to death and only then wonder why it could not find any more workers to exploit.

The Scandinavian countries are, I think, the only wealthy countries left with no minimum wage. Because sectoral bargaining still works there (hence Musk’s travails in Sweden).

I haven’t read this report but any research like this needs to also look at the proportion of the workforce who are at or close to the minimum wage, which has steadily increased since 1999. It has undoubtedly improved things for the most easily exploited workers but it has also meant that wages in general have pancaked downwards. Overall inequality has increased even as minimum wage improved things for the very lowest paid. This headline is reporting the good news while ignoring the bad.

It’s not even like he was caught unawares doing his usual schtick without realising Ms Ghey was present. Not that it would be OK anyway. But Starmer literally introduced her at the start of PMQs. Grotesque. Absolutely grotesque.

I do know what fascism is. And I know why liberals usher it in whenever there is the merest hint of a threat from the left.

Do more reading and less cheer-leading.

Stop cheerleading for more competently implemented fascism. FFS

As in 1997, a pineapple could beat the Tories at the next election. Nobody needs you cheerleading the Labour right as if everything will magically be fine if only they’re in power. It won’t. It’ll be a fucking disaster for generations to come. That’s the best of your least worst options and the very least you can do is make it clear that you are not fucking happy about it.

Yeah, you’re right. Do the same thing over and over again and definitely get different results this time.