UK - England, Wales, N.Ireland, Scotland

[RTH10260]

Obvious question is why was she using personal phone for top-secret conversations?

Cause she had already attained her level of incompetence according to the Peters Principle and should never have gotten PM, independant of this revelation.

[Volkonski]

[Suranis]

So I was flicking Channels at my moms home and I came across the most ludicrous titles I've seen in a while "Bigfoot in Britian." Ya people are claiming to have seen a big Primate in forests in the UK.

I mean... ffs. Ok. Bigfoot is extremely unlikely in the USA, but there is a faint possibility as you can at least say there's a lot of space for a big Ape to hide. England??? Are you for real?

So I flipped to it and its this guy "doing an investigation" who says after 2 years ha has found nothing "conclusive" but that's "not surprising." No shit.

Sp there's a 2 hour and a half documentary on Blaze with some guy wandering around various forests in England, talking with some people, and staring talking to a camera a camera at night abut how the forest is dark and there could be abything out there, and showing really unconvincing photos. Squatch hunting is thrilling!!

Ok this isn't anything serious in this post, but I just think this is hilarious.

[Chilidog]

Besides, as far as I am aware, people out on bail in the US can be fitted with Ankle bracelets without being convicted of anything.

The key difference is that in the US, people are released on bail after an arrest for a criminal act that has already been comitted.

This bill allows people to be arrested and fitted with a monitor for activities that have not actually happened.

[RTH10260]

‘Don’t embarrass the king’: Liz Truss told to forgo a lengthy honours list
Former prime minister could be told to limit rewards for allies and friends after her disastrous seven-week tenure

Toby Helm Political editor
Sun 30 Oct 2022 06.00 GMT

Liz Truss will be advised by Buckingham Palace not to present a long list of resignation honours after her short and disastrous premiership, according to senior figures with experience of the system.

One source with close knowledge of honours protocol told the Observer that, given her time in No 10 lasted just seven weeks and was marred by economic crisis and U-turns, rewarding lots of allies and friends would be seen as inappropriate by the Palace, by cabinet secretary Simon Case and almost certainly by the new prime minister, Rishi Sunak.

“These things are done in a very British way,” said the source. “I think it will be clear that this would not be right. It will a be a case of … you don’t want to embarrass the king, do you?




https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ard-allies

[RTH10260]

only the best from the country that gave us John le Carré and 007

Ministers creating ‘wild west’ conditions with use of personal phones
Unsecured mobiles, email accounts and WhatsApp chats could pose national security risk, intelligence experts warn

Peter Walker, Dan Sabbagh and Pippa Crerar
Sun 30 Oct 2022 19.05 GMT

Ministers risk creating “wild west” conditions in matters of national security by the increased use of personal email and phones to conduct confidential business, intelligence experts and former officials have warned.

After a week tainted by a row over the use of a personal email account by the home secretary, it was revealed on Sunday that Liz Truss’s mobile is alleged to have been hacked by overseas agents.

Ministers did not deny the report into the attack on Truss’s phone, the discovery of which took place over the summer during the Tory leadership contest she would go on to win.

Richard Dannatt, the former head of the British army, accused the pair of “ill discipline” and “poor judgment” on Sunday. “This, frankly, is not good enough,” he added. “If these people aspire to be in senior positions, positions of leadership, they’ve got to be disciplined.”

Suella Braverman’s position as home secretary – Rishi Sunak restored her to the job a week after Truss had sacked her over the data breach – is seen as particularly vulnerable, amid separate claims that she ignored legal advice about people being held too long in terrible conditions at the Manston asylum processing centre in Kent.

One cabinet minister said there was an increasing assumption that she would have to go soon: “I don’t think she’ll survive long. It isn’t just the leaks, it’s that she’s not making decisions.” Labour, meanwhile, said there was “a troubling pattern” to Braverman’s actions.

The home secretary was sacked by Truss for using a personal email to send a confidential government document on immigration policy to the Tory backbencer John Hayes, a mentor and close ideological ally.

It has since emerged that Truss allegedly used her personal phone while foreign secretary for numerous exchanges, including with officials from other nations, and for private chats with Kwasi Kwarteng, who was later her chancellor when she was in No 10.

Asked about claims in the Mail on Sunday that these chats could have been read by Russian agents, Michael Gove, also brought back to the cabinet by Sunak last week, did not deny this. The levelling up secretary said only that “very robust protocols” were in place within government.

There is, however, growing concern about the use of non-official communication methods by ministers and some political appointees, whether via personal phones and private emails, or through encrypted chat applications such as WhatsApp.



https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... ity-threat

[RTH10260]

I guess we can expect a change in the UK government in the next days or hours

Embattled Braverman insists she is not at fault for Manston crisis
Home secretary says she never blocked hotels for refugees and was not to blame for overcrowding at refugee centre

Pippa Crerar, Rajeev Syal and Aletha Adu
Mon 31 Oct 2022 21.15 GMT

Suella Braverman has insisted she was not to blame for the crisis at Manston refugee centre, as she attempted to shore up her precarious political position by aggressively ramping up her rhetoric over immigration.

The embattled home secretary claimed she had “never blocked” the use of hotels to ease pressure on the asylum processing centre in Kent or ignored legal advice on the matter – despite multiple sources insisting that she had been warned over the conditions.

Senior government sources told the Guardian she had “commissioned” external legal advice because she disagreed with the internal Home Office view that more hotel accommodation should be procured for refugees to address overcrowding.

Braverman, already under fire over the security breach that saw her sacked as home secretary less than a fortnight ago, faced growing pressure over the situation at Manston on Monday. The centre is now housing 4,000 migrants, more than double its capacity, leading to disease and a heightened the risk of unrest.

Tory MP Sir Roger Gale, the local MP, blamed Braverman for the situation. “That facility operated absolutely magnificently and very efficiently indeed until five weeks ago, when I’m afraid the home secretary took the policy decision not to commission further accommodation, and it is that that has led to the crisis at Manston,” he said.



https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ton-crisis

[RTH10260]

Rishi Sunak preparing years of tax rises to plug £50bn fiscal black hole
PM set to hike taxes across the board to repair nation’s finances after Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget

Danya Hajjaji
Mon 31 Oct 2022 23.59 GMT

Rishi Sunak is preparing years of tax rises for Britain in an effort to make up for a £50bn fiscal hole left by Liz Truss’s disastrous tenure in Downing Street, according to a Treasury insider.

After a meeting between the prime minister and Jeremy Hunt on Monday to plan the upcoming autumn statement, a Treasury source said things were going to get “rough”.

Both Sunak and his chancellor reportedly agreed that “tough decisions” need to be undertaken due to the “eye-watering” size of the blow to public finances dealt by Truss’s mini-budget.



https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... black-hole

[RTH10260]

The global market after Brexit ...

UK-backed battery firm Britishvolt considers entering administration
Company struggling to find investors willing to fund effort to build giant £3.8bn ‘gigafactory’ in north-east

Jasper Jolly
Mon 31 Oct 2022 22.58 GMT

The UK government-backed battery startup Britishvolt is on the brink of entering administration with the potential loss of almost 300 jobs, after it struggled to find investors willing to fund its effort to build a giant £3.8bn “gigafactory” in north-east England.

The company had considered an administration as early as Monday, two sources with knowledge of Britishvolt’s operations told the Guardian. Britishvolt has lined up the accountancy firm EY to carry out the administration if it goes ahead.

Britishvolt was founded less than three years ago with the ambitious aim of building an enormous factory that would be able to supply batteries to carmakers.

It quickly became a flagship project for the UK automotive industry, and gained the support of the former prime minister Boris Johnson, who repeatedly cited the project as an example of Britain leading the way in the shift away from fossil fuels.

The government eventually promised the company £100m in financial support, while the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, was chancellor. However, Britishvolt has not yet received the money, which was earmarked for tooling equipment within the factory, which has not been bought.

A collapse for the business could nevertheless prove embarrassing for the Conservative government. The Labour MP Ian Lavery on Monday told the BBC that Britishvolt’s chairman, Peter Rolton, had asked the government to bring forward £30m of the support, but that the business secretary, Grant Shapps, had refused the request.




https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... igafactory

[RTH10260]

‘Prevalent’ predatory, misogynistic culture in police, official report finds
Inspectorate uncovers widespread vetting failures with officers cleared to join after committing serious crimes

Vikram Dodd Police and crime correspondent
Wed 2 Nov 2022 00.01 GMT

Defective vetting and failures by police leaders have allowed a “prevalent” culture of potentially thousands of officers who are “predatory” towards women to join and stay in the ranks, a damning official report has concluded.

Officers staged unwarranted stops of women in an abuse of power known as “booty patrols”, with crimes such as sexual assault covered up and ignored along with large-scale harassment of female officers and members of the public.

The report published on Wednesday from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) was ordered after the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard in March 2021 by a serving Metropolitan police officer, Wayne Couzens.

It details senior officers pursuing women for sex, the watching of pornography on duty and misogynistic comments about crime victims and the public.

The report lists a decade of warnings to police chiefs after past serious sexual assaults and abuses of power by serving officers, with the inspectorate finding that chiefs were “complacent” and failed to appreciate “the danger to the public”.

Officers were cleared to join after “committing offences such as robbery, indecent exposure, possession of controlled drugs, drink-driving and domestic abuse-related assaults”, the report found.

It examined eight forces including the Met and the Civil Nuclear constabulary, the two forces where Couzens was an armed officer, as well as Kent, where he served as a special constable.

The lead inspector, Matt Parr, said: “We concluded that a culture of misogyny, sexism, predatory behaviour towards female police officers and staff and members of the public was prevalent in all the forces we inspected, which is a depressing finding.

“We believe that the poor behaviour towards women we were told about is prevalent in many – if not all – forces.”




https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... port-finds

[RTH10260]

opinion piece

Rishi Sunak’s only been in office for a few days – and the errors are already piling up

Polly Toynbee
Tue 1 Nov 2022 06.00 GMT

His first week has not gone well. It’s felt long and eventful with a pile-up of errors that augur trouble ahead: politics is not a grasp of flow charts, but a subtle art. Rishi Sunak is a relative beginner and not, it seems, a quick learner.


https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... itain-week

[RTH10260]

Money speaks

Boris Johnson ‘quit PM race over risk to £10m earnings’, sources say
If the ex-PM had lost the leadership contest, his value stood to drop by half, according to the entertainment industry

Toby Helm Political editor
Sun 6 Nov 2022 08.00 GMT

Boris Johnson would have forfeited earnings of at least £10m a year from speeches and sales of his memoirs if he had fought a leadership battle against Rishi Sunak and lost, according to informed sources in the entertainment industry, who believe financial considerations played a part in his decision to pull out.

Since he resigned in July, Johnson is known to have been in talks with entertainment and talent agencies including Endeavour, run by US businessman Ari Emanuel, and the Harry Walker Agency (HWA), one of its subsidiaries.

HWA’s clients include Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Serena Williams.

Johnson’s earning potential is said by some of those he had been in talks with before Liz Truss’s resignation to have been put at about £20m a year.



https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ources-say

[RTH10260]

How Qatar bought up Britain
As the world’s attention turns to the emirate for the World Cup, an Observer investigation reveals that it and its ruling family have amassed a £10bn property empire

Rob Davies and Joseph Smith
Sat 5 Nov 2022 16.00 GMT

Prince Andrew, Boris Johnson and the prime minister of Qatar gazed through rain-spattered glass on to the streets of London far below as they celebrated the opening of Britain’s tallest building, the Shard.

For Johnson, then mayor of London, the unseasonably cold July day in 2012 symbolised London’s resurgence after the devastation of the global financial crisis.

Prince Andrew marked the occasion by abseiling down a section of the 310-metre tower for charity, saying afterwards that he had easily overcome the “psychobabble” about fear of heights.

But the day was perhaps most auspicious for Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, known colloquially as HBJ. The great steel-and-glass edifice that now loomed over Britain’s capital had been built with nearly £2bn of Qatari investment.

The building served as a totem for a strategy that he pioneered: Qatar – a British protectorate from 1916 to 1971 – was deploying its vast oil-and-gas wealth to buy huge chunks of the nation that once ruled over it.

As an Observer audit now reveals today, the Qataris’ British property empire has ballooned since then into a sprawling portfolio likely to be worth in excess of £10bn.



https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng ... up-britain

[Gregg]

These people from Arab Caliphates, Eastern European and Asians investing huge amounts in Western real estate are ultimately life insurance policies for the day coming when the people in those countries start lining them up in front of walls.

When the mob gets close there is nothing more comforting than knowing that if you can just make the airport, you have a very comfortable landing waiting in London, New York or Brussels as well as enough income producing commercial real estate to live like Sun Kings for generations.

[RTH10260]

Seasonal fruit pickers left thousands in debt after being sent home early from UK farms
Nepali workers who quit jobs and borrowed cash to come to UK are out of work just weeks after arriving

Emiliano Mellino and Shanti Das
Sun 13 Nov 2022 07.00 GMT

Nepali workers hired to pick fruit on British farms say they have been left thousands of pounds in debt after being sent home only weeks after they arrived.

The fruit pickers were recruited under the government’s seasonal worker scheme and say they were offered work for six months. But less than two months after arriving, they were told they were no longer needed and instructed to book flights home.

Workers said they had quit jobs to come to the UK and have been left thousands of pounds in debt after borrowing money to cover their flights and fees to third-party job brokers. They also face steep airline charges to rearrange return journeys.

Some of the workers, who arrived in September, have already gone. Others who cannot afford tickets have been ordered to leave the farm where they were working in Kent – which has supplied supermarkets including Tesco, Co-op and M&S – or face being “blacklisted” from future jobs.

“If you ignore this email and we receive no answer … we will have to cancel your visas and to blacklist you, unfortunately,” one email sent to a group of workers by labour agency AG Recruitment on 4 November said.




https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... m-uk-farms

[RTH10260]

shameful!

And you know what: next season there will be no foreign workers who will want to come to work at slavery conditions in the farming industry.

[RTH10260]

Avian flu set to deal killer blow to turkey farmers at Christmas
Hard-hit producers who have lost tens of thousands of pounds after culling stock now fear they may not be able to continue

Joanna Partridge
Sat 12 Nov 2022 13.00 GMT

It is “eerily silent” on Steve Childerhouse’s poultry farm near Attleborough in Norfolk. At this time of year, he’d usually be working flat out, feeding his turkeys and geese for the busy Christmas period. But this year the sheds are empty, after avian influenza hit his farm in late September, wiping out all of his 11,000 free-range turkeys and 2,500 geese destined for local festive dinner tables.

In one fell swoop, a bird flu outbreak has devastated the 51-year-old’s livelihood. After almost 40 years – he started raising geese as a boy – Childerhouse is still coming to terms with the loss.

“I wouldn’t wish it on anybody,” he says, recalling how quickly the infection spread through his flock. He believes the disease was brought to his farm by wild birds, who initially passed it on to his geese.

The highly infectious bird flu that has been sweeping across Britain for more than a year now, and gained pace in recent weeks, is deadly for farmed animals such as turkeys and geese. However, any outbreak is also catastrophic for the farmers, as any remaining birds on the site have to be culled. At present the disease doesn’t pass easily from birds to humans.




https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... ges-flocks

[Volkonski]

shameful!

And you know what: next season there will be no foreign workers who will wnat to come to work at slavery conditions in the farming industry.

Is there no recourse for them for breach of contract under British law?

[Volkonski]

Photo from the avian flu article. So, British domestic turkeys have black feathers like wild turkeys? American domestic turkeys have white feathers.

[Volkonski]

Seems like the UK is suffering one disaster after another.

[RTH10260]

shameful!

And you know what: next season there will be no foreign workers who will wnat to come to work at slavery conditions in the farming industry.

Is there no recourse for them for breach of contract under British law?

I have the nasty gut feeling that contracts were signed overseas, aka Nepal, and that local law there applies.

[Azastan]

The black turkeys are a heritage breed. They can breed naturally. They are smaller than the standard white turkey, but are considered a premium quality bird.

The Norfolk Black is considered an endangered farm animal in the UK.

[Ben-Prime]

shameful!

And you know what: next season there will be no foreign workers who will want to come to work at slavery conditions in the farming industry.

And the Brexiteer Tories in the pocket of Big Agribusiness will be all, "Who could have forseen this?"

[Gregg]

shameful!

And you know what: next season there will be no foreign workers who will want to come to work at slavery conditions in the farming industry.

And the Brexiteer Tories in the pocket of Big Agribusiness will be all, "Who could have forseen this?"

Aside from the MAGA crowd here, the Brexit fools are some of the best "Usefull Idiots" ever recruited.

[Ben-Prime]

shameful!

And you know what: next season there will be no foreign workers who will want to come to work at slavery conditions in the farming industry.

And the Brexiteer Tories in the pocket of Big Agribusiness will be all, "Who could have forseen this?"

Aside from the MAGA crowd here, the Brexit fools are some of the best "Usefull Idiots" ever recruited.

I seem to recall that a certain Birther Viscount was a UKIP mucky-muck who continued to support Brexit even after the party ousted him. Go 'idiot', certainly.