JetSetWilly

You can always find a line that passes between two points. Why would you even try to find a line that doesn’t pass between two points? What is the difficult part here.

The UK strongly backed Denmark over the greenland situation. I’d be a lot more worried about the EU’s “appeasement” of russia (slow acting germany, hungary etc) than the UK’s carefully navigated and level headed US relations. That’s what will undo the EU.

In Scotland one issue is that the UK electricity market is national (unlike in eg norway). So even if local supply is very high and interconnects are not large enough to export to england - we must pay the higher national rate. As octopus ceo suggested if the UK energy market has regional pricing then electricity in scotland would often be a lot cheaper and in some cases industrial demand would move there. But that would disadvantage the SE of England so will never happen.

Conversely, standing charges ARE regionalised - because that does advantage the SE of England. Oh well!

The issue is that quite often the wind doesn’t blow - often for several weeks like last january - and the sun barely shines for much of the year. So renewables mean the country just has to pay for (and subsidise) a whole ton of extra infra but can’t actually retire non-renewable infra because you can’t rely on renewables. This strategy is why UK electricity is so absurdly expensive.

And when presented with this politicians and “green” sorts will handwave about pumped storage or whatever despite that basic back of the envelope calculations will show we can’t build enough of that to store 4 weeks worth of electricity for a whole country.

Restoring a democracy and getting rid of a dictator sounds pretty peace-prize worthy to me. If Kissinger can get it then he’s always got a chance.

Much like “intellectual property”, “international law” is a nonsense term that tells you only that the person who employs it lives in their own bubble, captured by powerful interests of others.

It would be great to run this on a collection of interesting threads over different periods and not just one snapshot. For example, the thread from the day Trump got elected in 2016, the thread from the day of brexit and so on. Those are the times when people make many passionate predictions about how the future will play out, be good to see them retroactively scored.

DEI was mentioned in a footnote, it didn't seem to be the main thrust of the memo. I agree it would have been better to not mention it at all, the decision is perfectly defensible on the basis of all the previous non-footnoted points.

I apologise for my first comment, it seems like those critical of the latest decision are painting a simplistic picture - "this was one side attempting to be kind vs other side deliberately being unkind". But it doesn't appear to be the case to me.

Curiously you left out the broken spine.

Of course the terrorist-excusers like to make out that it was just a bit of paint, what's the issue? It was 7 million pounds of damage (to be paid for out of our defence budget, so that's 7 million quid less to spend on other things) and put some of our key national defence infra out of commission for a period to boot.

But of course, that's ok - we should allow such groups to exist going around attacking people, crippling them and destroying national infrastructure to the tune of millions, its just free speech innit.

No sensible country in the world would allow such groups to exist.

I'm sure you'll also find that lawyers make statements in favour of hopelessly guilty murderers. That's what they are paid to do. Your "freedom of expression" does not include hitting people with sledgehammers and attacking and disabling national defence infrastructure. Of course, we should withdraw from the HRA precisely because it is perverted in this way by lawyers, but those bald statements do not in fact show that hitting people with sledgehammers is legitimate freedom of expression or protest, and it appears that committing such acts is the principle reason for PA to exist.

Yes. They are both groups that only exist to commit violence against people to further their political aims. They may differ in how extreme they are, but the core of it is they are violent and we should have absolute zero tolerance against such groups.

Raising taxes is only “necessary” because of their total lack of gumption when it comes to reducing spending. For example, 1 car in 3 on the roads in the UK is funded via PIP and that has been meteorically increasing as a proportion in the last few years. Labour bottled it in the face of their own backbench rebellion over very reasonable measures earlier in the year, and now they are coming to pick our pockets.

They’ll say they are making hard, necessary decisions, but the truth is that ramming up taxes is the default mode easy decision for labour.