Afternoon music
Stray thought
I have seen continuing news reports, for 2 days now, about the terrible funicular railway crash in Lisbon: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62lmed42p1o.
Not just TV news reports, but reports leading the TV news.
This seems to me like overkill, really. After all, terrible as the crash was, killing 16 people, it was 2 days ago, no-one is still trapped or requiring rescue, plenty of major news is happening elsewhere and, in the end, this did not even happen in the UK. A straightforward crash incident, which happened in seconds, or a few minutes, which was a one-off incident, and the causes of which will no doubt be investigated (very likely a cable problem, possibly metal fatigue, and insufficient maintenance). Yet the BBC and Sky News still have reporters on the scene. Why? Enough.
Angela Rayner
Well, Angela Rayner, whose “resistible rise” must have given hope to ambitious, brainless, cultureless “chav” women all over Britain, is now gone: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/05/angela-rayner-stands-down-over-stamp-duty-row.
Whatever the exact rights and wrongs of Angela Rayner’s (latest) property purchase, the background to the matter was the “fill your boots” mentality with which this Labour Friends of Israel misgovernment is suffused.
It became known a year ago that Angela Rayner had accepted gifts of clothes, I think also cash donations, and free trips to noisy vulgar clubs in Ibiza, the appalling nightclub, drink, and drugs island. Not that she was alone in accepting “freebies”. Her boss, Starmer-stein, had accepted clothes for himself and his Jewish wife, and even free eye-glasses!
Angela Rayner also postponed, on rather spurious grounds, some of the previously-scheduled 2025 UK local elections, which postponements—whatever the reasons for postponement— looked bad at a time when Labour was already losing ground greatly to Reform UK.
The postponed local elections will now not take place until May 2026. Both Labour and Conservative parties must be dreading them.
That whole “fill your boots” or “make hay while the sun is shining” mentality, which pervades Starmer’s Labour Friends of Israel cabal, was also a major factor putting paid to the Conservative Party’s electoral chances in 2024, after years of crony-corruption under (mainly) “Boris”-idiot, Liz Truss (briefly, in her 49 days as PM), and the little Indian money-juggler, Sunak.
So what now for Angela Rayner? She had been puffed as the successor to Starmer. Perhaps, though that seems far less likely now, bearing in mind the public perception of her. Some may think her a greedy, moneygrasping, “typical MP”; others say “it was not her fault, because she failed to take obvious steps to avoid the situation which arose“. Well, so not dishonest, simply careless and/or clueless? Not a very good impression either way.
In any case, Labour is now facing a really major challenge from Reform UK, which is really just the public’s proxy method for “getting rid of both Lab and Con“. The idea that Angela Rayner might be the next Prime Minister always seemed to me unlikely to happen, and now seems a very remote possibility indeed.
As to Rayner herself, the resignation will hit her rather hard financially. Loss of her Government position means that her salary is halved, she now being left with “only” the (just under) £94,000 p.a. MP salary (and attendant expenses). She now also loses whatever access she may have had to the country houses used on weekends by Government ministers. There are smaller hits as well, such as loss of the government cars and drivers that ferry ministers around.
Wider political fallout? Well, just another hit that Starmer could have done without. The Reform annual conference is taking place now, and Angela Rayner may be good ammunition for Farage. Also, the news will mute any criticism of Reform people for whatever they may say during the conference.
In any case, people are intending to vote Reform to stamp on Lab and Con, so anything negative in the msm about Farage and Reform will not, I think, have much effect, because people already know that Farage and especially his cohorts are not the best and brightest. That makes little difference to how people are intending to vote.
Riverbanks
“Huge tracts of precious riverside habitats for water voles and other wildlife in England are being lost as they are not covered by post-Brexit farming rules, campaigners warn.
New analysis by the Wildlife Trusts found more than 400 square km of riverside habitat in England may have been lost since the UK left the EU in 2020.
Under the common agricultural policy (CAP), which subsidised farming when the UK was in the bloc, farmers had to keep a 2-metre buffer between their fields and the rivers. But with the UK’s exit from the CAP, farmers may try to increase their income by ploughing to the edge of their field – an area that, at present, is unprofitable for them.
As well as being a critical habitat for wildlife, waterway banks are home to plants that filter pollution from the water.“
[Guardian]
As regular readers of the blog know, I am not very pleased about the farming lobby. Not all farmers are greedy, moneygrasping, environmentally-destructive nuisances, but many are.
I remember that on TV from the early 1960s, when I was about 5 or 6 years old.
Tweets seen
For me, the point is not that Nadine Dorries is an idiotic woman, an expenses-blodger and outright fraud, or that “Boris”-idiot and Liz Truss are nominally (and only nominally) better-educated versions of the same brainless type, but that the whole political system we now have in the UK promotes such cretins, selects them as candidates etc.
My view is that the Reform candidates are relatively unpolished, most of them, so the relative absence of the bright lights of msm publicity and exposure might actually help Reform. That may sound cynical, but the old System parties are just waiting for Farage’s candidates to slip on banana skins.
So former fraudulent expenses-cheat and puppet of the Jewish/Israel lobby, Ed Balls (husband of similar Yvette Cooper; they are both members of Labour Friends of Israel) has his latest rubbish political prediction blown out of the water only one day after he made it! An idiotic person, despite the quite academic CV; hugely over-promoted.
Incidentally, both Balls and part-Jew George Osborne are or were Bilderbergers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilderberg_Meeting.
Her incompetence is now going to be transferred to the Foreign Office.
Yvette Cooper. Labour Friends of Israel. Expenses cheat. Fraudster. Zelensky supporter. What could possibly go wrong?
…and the “Conservatives will be in the lead” idiot is in…New Zealand. It would be late at night there; maybe that explains the tweet.
Good grief. Lammy is a total ignoramus. As Foreign Secretary (and in every other role, including that of MP) he has been a bad joke. Now his head is on the stick of “Deputy Prime Minister”. Britain has become a joke country.
Utter cretin.
https://twitter.com/danwootton/status/1964010301210198159
Worth watching.
Late tweets
In any case, that (((Zeffman))) character is wrong. The new “Lord Chancellor” is ignorant black, David Lammy, who takes over from equally ignorant Shabana Mahmood. Both of them together were only at the practising Bar for a very short time. Not really qualified for the office.
Insufficient range to reach Moscow or Petersburg, but enough to reach Minsk.
Late talking point
Certainly sounds very familiar to me…
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 