Yeah, I can imagine watching the west endlessly debate how you’re allowed to defend your country is quite frustrating when Israel is given carte blanche to start a regional conflict.

I did read it, I just think it demonstrates the same problem as Stramer’s freebies, rich people pushing money around in policies to buy influence.

In her resignation letter, published by the Sunday Times, external, the Canterbury MP lambasts the prime minister for accepting gifts worth tens of thousands of pounds while scrapping the winter fuel payment and keeping the two-child benefit cap.

Very funny thing for someone who accepted a £10k private donation and didn’t vote on the winter fuel payment to say. Shouldn’t expect moral consistency from a transphobe.

Do my eyes deceive me or is this good news? From the Treasury???

One thing these kinds of articles that are designed to stoke generational conflicts never mention is that rich people live longer. Like, obviously older people would be proportionally richer, the poorer people from that generation are dead. Also, friendly reminder, all this stoking of generational conflicts does is distract us from the real divide in society.

This is the same Blackstone that spent half a billion in June on build-to-rent houses.

Making the public foot the bill for decades of under-investment as these companies paid out £10s of bns in dividends and continuing on with the failure of privatisation.

I’ve linked to them before and my interpretation of ‘reputable news source’ is one that at least tries to be reliable. So as long as they don’t publish outright disinformation, stuff like the Daily Mail or the Grayzone, then you should be fine. I trust Wikipedia’s Reliable sources page for stuff like this.

Are you really surprised this Labour party would have unscrupulous donations?

he had been advised not to hold in-person surgeries by the Speaker’s Office

Apparently this is false. From PA Media:

“The Speaker’s Office and Parliament’s security team have no recollection of telling Nigel Farage that he should not hold in-person surgeries in his constituency, the PA news agency understands.”

Hey, whores work for their money unlike this waste of sperm.

The Italy-Albania deal being referenced isn’t them keeping asylum seekers in Albania while their claim is processed, it’s shipping them off to Albania while their claim is processed.

I assume you mean Albania? That’s what the part I quoted is about.

Sir Keir has signalled he is open to pursuing an arrangement similar to Italy’s migration deal with Albania, whereby asylum seekers will be held in the Balkan state while their claims are processed.

Thank god they scrapped that gimmicky Rwanda scheme, eh?

The other is Labour Yimby, a grassroots group started by activists, which drew a crowd for its first parliamentary reception and is backed by some of the most vociferous housing campaigners from the new intake: Milton Keynes North’s Chris Curtis, Chipping Barnet’s Dan Tomlinson and Earley and Woodley’s Yuan Yang.

So I did some googling and I fell down a real rabbit hole, so I’m making that everyone else’s problem as well. Apologies for the long comment posted nearly a day later.

It’s surprisingly hard to find any direct info on this ‘Labour YIMBY’ group online (the name doesn’t help). Their website is very sparse (and also doesn’t use HTTPS for whatever reason), which seems to be where the Guardian is getting this idea they’re a ‘grassroots’ group from. The only other info on their website is a mailto link for marc.harris@labouryimby.org.uk^[1]. The website was registered in April and their Twitter account was created in May, this is also the only source of official communication I could find of the group. Politico puts the launch of the group on 9 July at an event held in the Walker’s of Whitehall, however. This doting report by Chris Worrall tell us that consultancy group College Green Group and construction lobby group LPDF^[2] sponsored the event and made speeches. Ethan Shone’s reporting is more damning:

While Parliament was in recess, [Labour YIMBY] held a summer reception along with the Fabian Society think tank. The event was hosted and sponsored by international lobbying firm FTI Consulting, which represents Keepmoat Homes, property developer Hammerson, “whole life cycle real estate company” Impact Capital Group and asset managers such as Macquarie and Vanguard. FTI employee Abdi Duale, who is currently standing for reelection to Labour’s National Executive Committee, gave a speech at the reception. The YIMBYs held another reception, this time in Parliament, this week. Duale was again present, as was Mike Katz, the director of lobbying firm Field Consulting, who is also chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, and Paul Brocklehurst, the chair of LPDF, an industry lobbying group for some of the biggest developers.

This second reception is the one mentioned in the Guardian article, one sponsored by self-described ‘build-to-rent’ group Get Living, a group who had to pay £18 million for flammable-style cladding in January. Despite their young age and supposed grassroots-ness, they were able to get quite a few big name for this reception, including a minister:

At the Labour YIMBY reception in parliament’s Churchill room, including a speaker from property management firm GetLiving … Work and Pensions Minister Andrew Western … Labour MPs Emily Thornberry, Stella Creasy, Chris Curtis, Yuan Yang, James Asser, Tom Rutland, Kanishka Narayan, Mike Reader, Uma Kumaran, Sonia Kumar, Gurinder Josan, Deirdre Costigan, Sean Woodcock, Johanna Baxter, Dawn Butler, Jim Dickson and Ruth Cadbury, who was working the room lobbying for transport committee chair … Labour Together’s Charles White, Can Vargas and Jack Shaw … NEC’s Abdi Duale … JLM chief Mike Katz … Labour YIMBY Chair Marc Harris … Sodali & Co’s Simon Petar … Airbus’ Tom Williams … Hacks Josiah Mortimer, Jonn Elledge, Lee Harpin and Tom Scotson.

Personally, I wouldn’t consider a group of Labour insiders that’s able to attract sponsorships from industry lobby groups to be a ‘grassroots group’.

Also, lots of words start off as acronyms and then lose that status. ‘Laser’ is a good example: originally ‘Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation’, but now always written in lowercase.

But we generally only do that for acronyms that become familiar and well know (scuba, taser, etc). The article itself feels the need to spell out what it stands for and putting it in lower case just reeks of trying to manufacture that familiarity and the legitimacy such familiarity carries.

But for Labour in government, it is not just a dividing line with the Tories but also what it sees as its most powerful attack on the new electoral threat from the Greens. Political strategists plan to paint the Greens as local blockers to a raft of projects from electricity pylons to affordable housing.

For a party that won its first council majority in 2023, it amazing how much the the Greens come up in this ‘NIMBY’ discourse. The fact Labour centrists feel the need to take digs at them is encouraging though, it shows that they’re scared of losing ground to the Greens.

Also, I hate who every was the editor on this article, YIMBY / NIMBY are acronyms, they should be spelt in all caps.

Honestly, I don’t think politicians should be able to accept these kinds of gifts at all. The Tories are almost certainly worse and it is unfair that Labour is held to a higher standard in this regard, but at the same time I don’t think that excuses Starmer accepting more gifts than any Labour leader since 1997.

Not enough capacity:

To host a game at the tournament European football’s governing body Uefa [sic] requires stadia to have a minimum capacity of 30,000. […] Windsor, which is also home to Irish League outfit Linfield holds 18,000. It would need another 12,000 seats to be able to host a game.

As someone who spends more money than I should on music from Bandcamp, I’m interested to see if they ever get payments working. I remember people talking about a federated BC alternative, where the 10% platform fee goes to the instance you’re on, when they got bought by that music licensing company.

Also, first paragraph under “Integrating with the Fediverse”, you put Bandcamp when I think you meant Bandwagon.