28/07/2024

Don’t Say Asylum Seekers

somenews
Judges have been told to avoid saying ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘immigrants’. Well, you ain’t gonna get a show on GB News, then.

The new guidance sets out politically correct terms. It’s the classic story. Every so often we get a story of new words added to the dictionary and then old words banned in another story. One in one out.

Judges in England and Wales have been advised to avoid terms such as “gays” and “lame”. When I was growing up you’d call something lame if it was a bit naff. The generation above me did that with the word gay, so it’s good that we have movement on what is seen as acceptable.

Some of it is less useful. In the new edition of the Equal Treatment Bench Book it advises that “person seeking asylum” is now preferred to “asylum seekers”.

Now, hang on. I’m all for being polite but that two things mean exactly the same. And I know this as a GCSE English holder. Sorry, a person who holds a GCSE English.

It also says “immigrant” and “refugee” should only be used where such terms are factually correct. Well, yeah. If you’re calling someone an immigrant when they’re not, you shouldn’t be using that term. That’s how words work.

Homosexual is also banned. Surely any euphemism is far more offensive.

There’s no point causing offence where it doesn’t have to be caused but we do need a system where a judge isn’t worried about picking the wrong word when dealing with the case.

Fortunately we’ll never know if this is better or worse than the way things were as that would require our courts getting round to processing any asylum cases. By the time that happen there’ll be another edition out.

» Read the source story


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19/07/2024

Liz Truss Still Doesn’t Get It [Reality]

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Sometimes I feel bad about picking on Liz Truss. Hasn’t she been through enough? But then I realise she was lucky enough to get to be Prime Minister for a while and will get £155k a year allowance, which more than covers the hassle of ignore the things I have to say about her.

She has reached new levels of denial that would take most of us years of practice, like a Tibetan monk, to attain.

The UK recently had its King’s Speech. I saw it on TV. I preferred the film version, etc, etc.

The King doesn’t write it himself. If you have writers it shouldn’t end up that boring. Call me. I do scriptwriting work. I could have zinged that up a bit. I have a joke about it being like the film The King’s Speech I could offer.

There were 40 proposed bills, and with Labour’s majority there’s no reason they won’t all turn into laws. The House of Lords could slow the bills down, and one proposed bill is about abolishing hereditary peers in the House of Lords, so that one might get some pushback.

My favourite one is The Budget responsibility bill. People are calling it the “Liz Truss bill” and not in a good way. It gives powers to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) to make judgements on any major taxation or spending announcements. It basically has been put in place to stop anyone from being able to “do a Liz Truss” again. That’s some legacy, where your name becomes a reference for mucking up the UK economy.

It’s like saying, “My parking was so bad I did a Brian Harvey back there.”

As soon as the King had read out his script Liz Truss tweeted (Xed) her reply saying, “The bad policies include; giving more powers to the failed OBR.”

Failed? That’s rich. The OBR lasted more than 49 days. Did you?

Liz had also complained about the way it was described in the briefing notes for the speech. It had described Liz Truss's mini-budget as "disastrous" but she said that showed political bias.

Which political side thinks what happened wasn’t a disaster? Which party is in favour of making mortgage rates shoot up? I bet some of the mortgage providers didn’t mind.

You can argue about whose fault it was but the outcome was a disaster so it earns the adjective.

Here’s what I don’t get. Liz was aiming for growth. Great. We all love growth, in a non-medical setting. That wasn’t just Liz who wanted growth, that’s a pretty standard wish.

She doesn’t like the idea of the OBR, so she didn’t run her mini-budget by it. She feared that the OBR would tell her not to do it.

So, she did it and it caused a problem with the LDIs, the liability driven investments. After the fact Liz has admitted that she “didn’t know the existence” of LDIs and if she did she may have scaled back the mini-budget.

Maybe that’s why you should have run the budget by some sort of office that had responsibility for budgetary things.

And yet we know that if she had involved the OBR, and the OBR had said, “Hang on, this might be a problem for the LDIs,” Liz would have been the first crying about how the deep state was stopping her implementing her growth plans.

“I didn’t know of the existence of…” isn’t evidence that your plan was right all along. At best your plan was ill-informed. If you didn’t know what you were doing you should have asked someone who did but anyone who knew about these matters was already written off as part of the problem.

So, to sum up, it’s unfair to call her mini-budget that was a disaster “disastrous” and her lack of information on the results of her plans somehow makes it not her fault.

If I had that level of denial about reality I’d spend ten minutes every night brushing my hair.

» Read the source story


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12/07/2024

Would You Want To Meet The Rees-Moggs?

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After the General Election and the reporting of so many Portillo moments Michael himself must have felt like he was in Being John Malkovich, one question was being asked a lot, “What will all those Tory MPs do now?”

It looks like most won’t be involved in politics. But the same is true for the Tories that did keep their seats.

One shocking outcome is that Jacob Rees-Mogg is to become a reality TV star. It’s not I’m A Celeb, which is for the best. That show is about making famous people squirm as they eat kangaroo’s knobs, but posh people probably have that as a terrine, so there’s no fun there.

The show will follow former Tory MP, his six children and family’s nanny in run-up to and aftermath of election. It’s a documentary on Discovery+, Meet the Rees-Moggs. It’s kind of like the one with the Osbournes but also totally the opposite of the one with the Osbournes.

It’s going to be posh watching and we Brits love a bit of that. We watch posh people being posh and we say, “Oh, look at them. Aren’t they odd?”

But in the back of our minds we think, “But they are our betters and should probably be in charge.”

We have such a strange relationship with old money types. We regard them as an oddity and yet willingly hand the keys to the country to them. “His vowels are tortured. We’d better make him a Prime Minister.”

The show will feature his six children. I’m hoping at least one of them is the rebel who is a mockney who wants to make a living as a live streamer, but I have a feeling I’ll be disappointed.

The documentary will be released this year and promises to “lift the lid on the man behind the public image” over the course of five hour-long episodes.

The show will look at the run up to the election and the result. Rees-Mogg has said: “Animals, children, an election and a film crew. What could possibly go wrong?”

I can answer that. From your point of view, a Labour landslide.

» Read the source story


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09/07/2024

A Quiet Place?

somenews
Wellness is to health care as a nutritionist is to a dietician, in that it sounds like it's related but it's totally unregulated and mainly nonsense. Yet I love reading about all of the new wellness trends.

It wasn't that long ago that grown adults were filling in colouring books to achieve mindfulness and no one thought it was a con.

Since then I have had children and find myself finishing pages of their colouring books when the kids lose interest but my obsessive compulsions can't leave anything unfinished. So much for making my mental health better.

The latest trend is silent retreats. These are places where you can go and you're not allowed to talk. If I wanted to be told to shut up I could stay at home.

For around £800-a-week you too could attend a silent retreat. Activities include yoga, which might make it the first time someone has started yoga and not gone on about it for weeks on end.

You have to turn your phone off and you're not allowed to read. Even knitting is discouraged. I know there are many habits people need to crack that use needles but I don't think knitting is one of them.

When you go for a walk you are given a badge to wear that explains that you're on a silent retreat and cannot speak. I think I'd simply risk being seen as rude rather than seen as the kind of odd-bod who'd spend money on this.

Former Tory MP Rory Stewart goes on such retreats for up to 11 days a year. He said, well, not much hopefully.

It's clearly the kind of self-obsessed and performative nonsense that bored middle-class people get up to but there might be something in it. Like London Fashion Week with people on the catwalk looking a right mess but some core themes make it to the High Street. There are some key points we could all learn from.

We don't have to spend good money to go to a place to sit in silence. There are coffee shops, libraries and some marriages where that happens for free.

We don't have to plunge ourselves into days of zero decibel existence but we could learn to shut up a bit. If you don't have anything to say you could stay silent. Trim out the small-talk.

If you are telling a story about something that happened at work, maybe get right into the detail instead of five minutes of biographical details that your partner doesn't care about.

Talking less might not directly improve your wellness, but it could help the wellness of the people around you.

» Read the source story


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03/07/2024

Starmer Clocking Off Early?

somenews
We have seen much made of the news that Sir Keir Starmer said he wouldn’t work past 6pm on Fridays.

What he actually said an interview on Virgin radio was that he tries to keep that part of the week as family time. You know, family time, a traditional Conservative value. He also said he realised he'd have to work after 6, but (as ever) why let the details get in the way of a partisan rant?

It's clearly a nothing-burger. If he gets the top job he'll be kept busy, but the funny thing is what the Tories have said. They posted on social media: “You deserve better than a part-time prime minister. The only way to prevent this is to vote Conservative on Thursday.”

Yeah. That'll work. You were heading to the worst defeat your party has ever suffered but that tweet will really swing things around.

Why do they think we fear a part-time PM? Rishi said he never clocks off before 6pm, and look what a pig's teat he's made of things. Looking back, if someone could have talked Liz Truss into clocking off early some of our mortgages would be less painful.

People on social media were posting things like, “Oh great. So let’s hope Russia don’t start a nuclear war after hours on a Friday then!” I replied to some saying they shouldn't worry because Russia is on a different time-zone.

They post that as if there wouldn’t even be a phone call put in to Keir. Someone in the MoD would say, “I know the missile is on its way but we can’t call the PM. He’s put his out of office on!”

Don’t be so daft. It’s an empty way to try to score points. And the problem is it doesn't score points, it highlights weakness. If this is your attack it shows you're out of good attacks.

I thought the era of boasting that you do ridiculous hours had passed. Some people in business used to show how dedicated they were by pointing out that they don’t have anything else going on in their life. It's like the post-Yuppie version of Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch.

The same people will say, “less is more,” in a meeting to try to sound clever.

It’s a trope in politics too. Thatcher boasted that she only slept 3 hours a night. Yeah, and she got dementia. The take-home message should be, "You might wanna take a nap."

Sir Keir might not work past 6pm on Friday. A lot of Tory MPs won’t work after Thursday, and that’s a day earlier.

» Read the source story


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