Tenebris Nox

Isn’t the concern that “Those that need them still” won’t get them? There is a HUGE amount of unclaimed benefits in this country. Many old people can’t cope with the level of tech you need to apply (you can’t just phone up or pop into a benefits centre in most parts of uk).

Do we, though? Macron’s reaction seems to go too far the other way. Surely a “Congratulations on your reelection, Mr President and we look forward to working with you in the interests of both our countries” would be sufficient.

My first two heads were both involved in fraud. This was in the early days of grant maintained schools. The first one set up a printing business within the school and staff could only do photocopying etc through the printers. He was taking home a nice cut of the “profits”. The second one defrauded the school for about a million pounds in a scam where her husband sold the school computer equipment, got a stupid deputy to sign for empty boxes and then claimed that the computers had been supplied. That head went on the run to Spain. Eventully went to the High Court and she got away with it. We were told by local LEA that if we leaked anything to the press we would be prosecuted.

Also have to mention the heads who pretend you aren’t there when you try to talk to them in a corridor. I was once told never to approach one head because “Kings only talk to other kings!”

Regular state school. I worked in another where the executive head hired a private investigator to keep an eye on staff who were on longer-term illnesses and do “background checks”.

It works fine. Not many videos there - but it’s early days. It doesn’t seem to be a desktop app. Works through the Loops app.

Really awful. Starmer could congratulate Trump without indulging him.

Worked in a school where the head refused to employ any of the candidates who turned up for interview because none of them wore a poppy (and one of them wore tan-coloured shoes that hadn’t been polished, too!) Some of the candidates were perfectly suitable and the school needed to fill the post to help reduce workload on the rest of us.

Labour: like the Tories but better at it.

Nanny state etc. What do people want? A government that looks after them? The freedom to vote means the freedom to die of chicken-egg-poisoning. Dying of food poisoning is a fundamental British value that woke experts will have to rip from my stinking hands. (or something like that.)

How big does a movement need to be to describe itself as “mass”?

I’m not sure that any party that wants to participate in the Westmister House of Distraction is anything other than riddled with state security services operatives.

Who actually cares which party wins which seat? Surely the idea that voting for any of these chancers will make any meaningful difference has been long given up? Regardless of whomever has more seats in Westminster, their agenda is to continue the reversal of post-WW2 social gains.

I saw that one of the polls predicted the tories would be left with only 25 seats.

That’s 25 seats too many!

He claimed that he wears a hat following a hammer attack which left him hospitalised and severely scarred.

Yes, it’s an idea for an alternate reality where Labour retained some belief in equality and wealth redistribution. Sadly we live in a hellish neoliberal mirror universe where the Labour leadership salivate whenever the Davos Boys ring austerity’s bell.

Time for UK to become Limitarian. Tax the excessively rich at 100% above £10 million. No one needs more money than that.

You could be right. I listened to a Tory minister on the radio today talking about ending anonymity on the internet and - more interestingly - about silo-ing parts of the internet so that certain groups, such as children, could only access certain “versions” of the internet. I wonder whether that’s the longer-term agenda.

I grew up with even less access. At school we used paper and ticker-tape to program computers. And there was no tv (which was black and white anyway) during the day. Those were the days. Boring as fuck!

This apparently “spontaneous” group of “ordinary mothers” looks surprisingly media-trained. I’d be interested in knowing more about the founders. When the “keep our schools open during covid” group were examined they turned out to be a puppet of a right-wing thinktank.

HMRC claim that only 5% of UK don’t pay their taxes.

That 5% is worth £36 billion a year!

I’ve got my suspicions about who that 5% are. Damn you you single-parent, new trainer-wearing, work-shy benefit claimants! Damn you!

It’s worth getting a copy of the new book by Ingrid Robeyns extract here. To answer your point directly: surely making everyone “middle class” is a mechanism for dealing with inequality (and poverty).