Getting fees out of clients is like getting blood out of a stone.

Those barristers may not get paid by Tesco for years & not without a fight - they’re prohibited from taking retainers and from turning down cases, and though they can refer cases on to other barristers, the circumstances in which they can do this are very limited.

Correct.

You qualify through low income, and as the list to get council housing is long, need is taken into account also.

Right to Buy allows council tenants to buy their homes at a substantial discount on market value. This is alright, as it promotes stability and gives tenants equity, but at the same time, council tenants don’t get evicted anyhow, even if their income has become very high, and you can pass on a tenancy when you die if a relative was living in the council house with you.

But the money from the sale of council houses to tenants does not get ploughed back into buying or building more council housing, and the people who bought them can in turn sell them on the open market rather than back to the council.

This has made it near impossible for councils to maintain levels of housing stock, let alone increase it to reflect population growth. In central London, many types of essential worker are hard to obtain as too few can afford to live within commuting distance - large & high quality housing estates in the centre and all through the Boroughs having been sold off under the scheme long ago & snaffled up by developers.

Thatcher brought it in as a populist policy, and to weaken state services, but every other PM after permitted the policy to carry on unaltered.

Most of them seem closer to being wrong’uns than weird.

It is only working in the US context as it isn’t an insult per se, yet really gets under the skin of their conservatives due to their obsession with conformity, and enables everyone to mock their ludicrous ideas without expending energy explaining why each of them are so awful.

Tell people you vaguely know, too.

We dumbly agree, out of convenience or some notion that if we wanted to read the paper edition we’d have to pay for it, but one can shell out cash for the paper, pick it up in a waiting room, read a friend’s copy, etc.

As soon as we attach a subscription to an online edition, all that happens is they get more data on us (as we are les inclined to delete their tracking cookies) whilst handing over solid confirmation that we are who they suspected we probably are.

If you must subscribe, use a dedicated browser & multiple measures to confound tracking.

Right now, they can’t.

Money has gone, opportunity for very cheap borrowing (which is what a sane government would have grasped enthusiastically grasped in the wake of the last crash instead of breaking out to exploit everyone harder) is gone.

Maybe, if Reeves is given scope to do her shit, this country can not merely stall the accelerating decline, but turn stuff around.

Nothing is more vital right now & for some time than keeping faith against the odds that that can happen.

There is nothing to lose by trying to hold our nerve.

Nah, they’re nutters with very weird ideas about Britishness, Irishness & everything else, but they no more look to the English for ideas about their own identity & how to manifest it than the English look to NI loyalists as a guide.

If anything they tend to rather despise Englishness, seeing their own culture as the one true, loyal holdout to the Union.

The aprons do seek to emulate Masonic regalia, but the ideals of the Orange Order are entirely contrary to those of Freemasonry, which in any case is not specifically English or even British.

In the absence of irrelevant descriptors, many people struggle to remember that fascists can seem quite normal in other respects. Giving a few details helps them to imagine the woman. In turn this can quell fallacies that attach to ideas about “respectable” or “nice”.

That doesn’t matter with regard to this woman as her behaviour is now a matter for the courts, but reminds Times readers that the terror threat doesn’t come solely from disaffected louts hopped up on larger & sun exposure (& who may be quite partial to kicking off violently anyhow).

I’d think that in the absence of much to go on about her, they lifted stuff from her Twitter bio.

UK Labour’s position on Gaza is no different to that of the Tories (or to the DNC in the US). In Scotland, the SNP is strongly pro-Gaza, but were wiped out. That’s likely to have been in matters besides Palestine, but voters had the option to prioritise it and roundly rejected it. In NI & Wales, pro-Gazan candidates did less considerably less well than predicted 18 months ago. A few pro-Gazan candidates ran for the Workers’ Party - a handful of them won seats, but others, including their party head lost theirs. Meantime far-right Reform loathe Israel & loathe Palestine more, but made massive gains.

In France, pro-Gazan FI is a major component of NFP, the alliance which got the biggest vote share, but they only scraped that by working strategically with the rest of the left & with the neolibs to see off the far-right, and even this alliance did not win a majority. Within this there’s little to no agreement on Palestine, and FI’s position drew in some voters and alienated others.

Nope, because those recent gains were in spite of positions on Gaza & in any case there are few positions which the US could take which would be more grimly anti-Palestinian than that of the GOP.

It is a very long time since I’ve read as ahistorical writing as this article. We all wish that support for Palestine were there, but it very demonstrably is not.

Nothing could be more delicious to Mogg’s ears than the destruction of the UK economy. All the better for a disaster capitalist to feed upon, and all the cheaper the labour & deregulated the conditions to serve up to other greedy scumbags.

Gonna guess the Torygraph ITV asked him in interview to give his childrens’ names and about the lack of photoshoots including them, and that this was his reply.

He’ll hardly have rung them up specially to announce this

Make it happen, people.

Not that I think Sunak has any intention of sticking around in UK politics after the election, but still.

A whole week later and no bizarre dreams involving the Keirbot army, nor anything related to same.

Which ombudsman do I go to here about this complaint?

Of course, but that’s considerably harder to address via criminal law.

Going after people in office (& people running for office & political parties) for misleading the public is much easier, as you can impose a duty on them.

Most one could do is go after them once in office if they lied whilst campaigning for election to that office. You could maybe go after them even if they don’t win that election.

It probably needs to be done as a strict obligation to not say anything in office or when campaigning which is not verifiably true.

Would also need to be backed with hefty fines on parties if one of their candidates are proven to have lied, or if the party spread that lie.

Tbh any version would be very hard to get right, and if it isn’t robust the likes of Farage will use it as yet another tool of discord & disruption as they attack democratic institutions and the rule of law.

That Keirbot is weirdly hot. Will be holding you responsible if it, or a Keirbot army, features in some bizarre sex dream tonight.

“Farage was determined to be there at the start of it, aged 29, having been propelled to live life to the full, he has said, after being knocked down by a Volkswagen Beetle and then having his left testicle removed due to cancer.”

Volkswagen Beetles

ONE ball

So much hope we’re not being reference trolled here. This is too much delicious (if ominous) synchronicity. Cackling but I do not like it, not one bit.

He’s still pretending to pretend that he’s merely hard right.

This guy is openly and avowedly fascist, and probably thinks Farage is a filthy liberal, albeit a very useful one.

Reminder that Sunak’s father was an NHS GP, and his mother a pharmacist who ran her own local pharmacy, so he has a lot of personal knowledge of the strain healthcare was under during much easier times.