the brilliantly leaping gazelle

The fact that Labour think that Andy Capp is the answer to anything proves only that their asking themselves the wrong questions. Instead of asking themselves ‘How can we defeat Reform?’, they’d better off asking themselves ‘Why have so many former Labour voters switched to Reform?.’ And more crucially, ‘What can we do to win them back?’ Before asking themselves ‘But anyway, are the sort of people who’d vote for Reform the kind of people we’d want to vote for us?’

As has been noted by many others many times, changing leader may offer Labour MP’s, councillors and party members an illusion of change, but the real problem isn’t the leader. They’re just the figurehead. The problem is the Labour party itself. It has ceased to be what is was created to be; a vehicle through which the working class could effect political change for their betterment. Now it seems to view the working class, well the white portion of it anyway, with a contempt bordering on loathing.

And the single root cause of the reciprocal loathing which the working class feel for Labour is best expressed in a single word; Brexit. No other issue in British political history has had such a polarising effect upon quite so many people. The betrayal still smarts, passions may not be so inflamed but they’re still smouldering nonetheless.  It is the prism thorough which every most every political action since then can be properly understood.

Sick of all the judicial attempts to thwart it, the political reluctance to properly enact it and the widespread fury of every elite towards those who had voted for it, they majority who voted for Brexit had had enough.  The 2019 general election triumph of Boris’s Johnson was proof of that. And when that didn’t work, when the wheels finally came off that bus and the general election of 2024 happened, Reform UK got nearly 15% of the votes. Not bad for a party that a month and one day earlier – June 3rd – had basically never existed. However, on June 3rd, Farrago announced he’d be standing for Reform UK and from that moment on, the battle lines were redrawn.

Whatever charges might be levelled at Farrago, no-one can question his steadfast refusal to betray his beliefs. One might disagree with them, but he’s never wavered from them. And they all stem from a single proposition; that uncontrolled immigration was ruinous for the British people. And because membership of the EU meant we longer controlled our borders, we should leave it.  Simple and not confusing in the least. The people that hold him single-handedly responsible for Brexit are conveniently overlooking the fact that the EU we voted to leave was not the EU we joined.

For a start off it wasn’t called the EU. It was the European Economic Community (EEC). The then PM signed a treaty with it in 1971 and after three years of ‘associate’ membership of it, the British public finally got a vote on whether to join or not. Which they did. As well they might. Back then the EEC was, as the name implies, focused on almost exclusively on economic ties; trade harmonisation, closer co-operation and loads of other stuff that normal people tended to ignore in favour of having a life. 

Then in 1992, the EEC suggested a radical expansion of its remit. Not content with being just an economic trading entity, it sought to become a social, judicial one and financial one. Did John Minor, the then PM have any qualms about surrendering a a large part of Britains sovereignty to Brussels, for their courts and laws to supersede ours or to allow loads of European workers to flood in and undercut  British ones? Or was he just as terrified by their reaction as he was of his own ‘Eurosceptic’ backbench MP’s – who he called ‘bastards   Did Minor put this proposal to a public vote, or did he just nod it through? The fact that we had the referendum vote in 2016 answers that.

The fact that that result was stymied answers why Farrago made the decision he on June 3rd. By then vast swathes of the electorate, regardless of their previous political allegiance,   had come to realise that a vote for any of the existing parties was a vote for the existing state of affairs. Quite why Reforms success shocked anyone was shocking. From nowhere to almost 15% of the vote in a month is a clue as to the deep-seated mistrust of a sizeable minority of the British people of the Westminster elite.

And how did the Westminster elite attempt to prove them wrong? What efforts did they go to that might indicate that they were finally addressing the grievances which Brexit had revealed? What strategy did they employ to bring that 15% back into the political mainstream? By demonising them, of course. Calling them ‘far right’, ‘bigots and ‘racists.  Denigrating them, questioning their motives, making all manner sinister inferences. Ironically, doing all this while calling for unity, for tolerance, and other brazen hypocrisy’s. 

The only unity that the Labour Party achieved in securing was that a new leader would be the solution. That it was Emu alone who bore all the responsibilities for their dismal standing. However, if the Labour Party believes that the answer to restoring public trust in politics and the democratic process is to impose a new PM on the British public without calling a general election first, it just proves why people distrust it all in the first place. 

Well, the majority that voted for Brexit and who now vote for Reform, anyway.  

I caught the weather report at the end of the BBC News yesterday, and it cheered me right up. I’m not joking. It really did. I was smiling my best Cheshire Cat smile, proper ear to ear action. So much so, that by the end of it, my face was aching. The reasons for my reaction can best be summed as amusement at humans capacity for self-delusion. Because with every weather warning, with every school closure because of the hot weather and with every death that occurs because of it, the more it is revealed to be the nonsense it is.

The weather report started off with the UK. Hottest day since records began, all sorts of records being broken, still more to be broken, weather warnings, hosepipe bans….blah blah blah. Then the map zoomed out to reveal what is happening in Europe. The same there too. Some parts better than others, but its only a matter of degree. The cheery takeaway I got was that whatever we do in the UK, no matter how important we think what we do is and no matter how urgent the need for action is, it won’t make a flying fuck of difference. We can all believe all manner things to be true, but believing in something, no matter how hard you want it to be true, doesn’t make it so. What the UK does only matters if the rest of the world does it too and as the weather map detailing the extreme heat engulfing the rest of Europe proved, the rest of the world clearly isn’t.

Conversely, the first part of the global warming self delusion was predicated upon discrediting research which proved it existed. That the research that discovered it in the first place, proved it was real was commissioned by the very same people who then spent years challenging its veracity. This is not some a fever-dream bought on by the heat either. ‘Big Oil’ knew. The dates may be disputed, the earliest I’ve found goes back to 1959, most go with the mid ’60’s, the more charitable plump for the late ’70’s but at any rate, it was long before any United Nations sponsored snout jamboree.

I refuse to call it climate change. Global warming had a honesty to it. It was all right there in the name. It was’t difficult to understand. Things are getting warmer and the whole world is affected. Action was needed. Unfortunately, that action was a name change. Climate change makes me think of a wealthy Victorian consumptive who retreats to the Swiss Alps for a year on the orders of her doctor. It reminds me of the mayor in ‘Jaws’. Mindful of the need to protect the towns tourist revenues, he wants the first victims death certificate changed because, as he puts it, ‘When you say barracuda, people say ‘what’, but when you say shark, you’ve got a panic on your hands’

So of course people continued having children because thats what people do and thats what capitalism needs. It doesn’t matter if one consumes less of this thing, more of that thing and starts consuming a new thing, its still consuming. Whatever it is that being consumed, no matter how ethically sourced its components are, no matter how well the workers that turn those components into the finished product are treated, that finished product will still have to be manufactured, packaged, and transported before its sold. And it follows that the more people there are to buy things, the more things will be bought.

The continued growth in the global population is yet another example of self-delusion. I can understand my parents thinking when they had me. To them, my life would be better than theirs. That was always the thinking of all parents, ever. since always. But now? Who could look at the state of the world now, full of myriad uncertainties and unforeseeable problems, full of dangers known and unknown and think, full of disease, scarcity and the wars they cause, and think ‘Yeah, I’ll bring a child into all of this, they’re bound thank me for that!’

I think we can all agree that is hot. We might not all agree on what the causes are or if there are any changes that we can make that will have long term effect in reversing them. But in the short term, the very short term I mean – like the next few days, weeks and months – we can all agree on that at least.

But I can’t be the only person who thinks that the advice given as to how to keep cool during this hot weather is as patronising as it is flawed. I’ll get the patronising out of the way first. To this end, The UK Health Security Agency published ‘How to keep cool and stay well during hot weather.’, a few days ago.

‘Avoid the sun when it is strongest, typically between 11am and 3pm. If outdoors, apply high protection sunscreen regularly, wear a wide-brimmed hat and seek shade.’ Did anyone really need to told that? Avoid the sun? How is that not basic fucking common sense? How is that not taking the piss?

More piss taking follows. ’Limit strenuous physical activity, or plan physical activity for times of the day when it is cooler, like the early morning or evening.’ Just In case anyone was thinking of running a marathon, scaling Ben Nevis or anything like that. Because, you know, that might happen, if people aren’t told.

They then follow it up with this humdinger ‘avoid hot, closed spaces like stationary cars.’ This is why we pay taxes, to pay the salaries of these geniuses. Money well spent. Makes you proud to be British.

If anyone needs to be told any of this then why have they got the right to vote, why aren’t they prevented from having children? These are the people who should be on a database, who should be removed from society and placed under house arrest. For our good, because of the risks they pose to everyone else. And for their good, denied access with to any sharp objects, anything glass, tinned or ceramic, and rope. Or anything that might be re-purposed as a rope; shoelaces, bedsheets or electrical cord. Plastic cutlery only. Natural selection is being reversed. People are now being protected from the consequences of their own stupidity in a way that would’ve seen their ancestors regret trying to keep a wooly mammoth as a pet.

If the government had, in an act of the utmost cunning, published this information precisely so they could identify who exactly was in need of such advice, like a modern day Trojan Horse, prior to removing them from society for the common good, then I’d take my hat off to them. A ‘wide-brimmed’ one, obviously.

See? The plan works! Just as it was reported over the weekend that Emu would resign as PM on Monday morning, he actually did. Not quite, well not immediately anyway. In a move that to me sounded like it was cooked  by a trans activist who masquerades to as political adviser to Emu, there’s going to be a transition phase.

Of course there is. Except this to enable Andy Capp to become fully aware of just how much poison the chalice can hold. It will need to be a big chalice. And not so he can become one of 0.01% of women that Emu once claimed had a penis.This transition, will be weirdly appropriate, inasmuch as it typifies his instinctive approach to being PM. Obsessively managerial. I’m not sure if this smooth transition, organised handover period or whatever it is their trying to tell us it is, is a good thing or not.

On the one hand, it avoids the interline warfare that any leadership contest necessarily entails. One only needs to think back to the last Conservative government for not one but two examples of how wonderful that turned out. 

Oddly enough, the same demands that Farrago is making for a general election are the same calls that Emu made after Boris’s Johnson stood down. And in much the same way, they are being ignored, as all concerned know they will. Gordon the Gopher ignored similar calls after I’m Tory Plan B stepped down and he was only following in John Minors footsteps when Milk Snatcher was ousted. Once again, the plan reinforces itself; we know from experience how the story goes. The government carries on governing whilst the opposition opposes.

It is also sensible to at least have a sense of the some of problems Andy Capp will have before he has to deal with them. And equally to be aware not only of the resources he does – and doesn’t – have at his disposal to try and sort them out, but also by that spending more on this and spending more on that, he has less to spend on the other. It allows him the time to get his ducks in in row, to consider what his priorities might be. 

He might well conclude that the Chagos Island deal is not one of them and that the estimated £3.4 billions a year the taxpayer will handover for 99 year of them might be better spent here at home.

Alternatively he might, after realising exactly how dire the situation really is – national debt almost £3 trillions, the interest on that being £112 billions a year or £320 millions a day – think ‘fuck it, give everyone what they want.’ Well not everyone, not the financial markets, but the everyone that has gotten used to the government shelling out for everything. Which, quite fortuitously, also happens to be the demographic Labour needs to woo back from the Greens and Reform. He might emulate what a friend of mine did some years ago. Because of illness, they’d accumulated a large amount of debt. They discovered that if you didn’t reply to any of the threatening letters demanding payment, answer any of their phone calls – they had a code to identify which ones to answer – for a period of seven years, you were free and clear. So they didn’t and eventually, they were. 

Obviously banks, credit card companies and all of the other financial parasites that rely on debt to keep them in profits, don’t make this widely known. Indeed, when my friend told me about this and that they were planning doing it, my first thought was ‘this sounds too good to be true.’ But bizarrely, it was. Totally legal. But if Andy Capp tried it, he’d have to give it reassuringly sensible name. 

Remember how after the financial crash of 2008 just printing off billions of new money wasn’t just printing off billions of new money. Quantitive easing wasn’t a Chinese herbal laxative. No, it was an exceptional economic response to exceptional times. Might ‘radical financial restructuring’ sound more plausibly obfuscatory than simply blanking it out and hoping for the best?  Or maybe thats what the transition phase is all about, moving from government borrowing on the global financial markets to a programme of radical financial restructuring?=

Is Moribund the most dangerous man in Britain? Is is The Minister for Net Zero either enacting a terrible revenge on the British people, or worse, an unwitting agent of the Chinese State? Or more innocently, but no less ruinous for the UK, massively deluded, dangerously naive or recklessly optimistic? He may be some, none or all of these things. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. Whatever he is, his actions and the cascade effect that these actions create are many things, but sensible, desirable and in this country’s best interests they most certainly are not.

With the escalation of the war in Iran, their closure of the Straits of Hormuz – a vital shipping route through which most global oil and gas supplies are transported – and with it the inevitable surge in energy prices that causes, makes me consider questions that have plagued me for some years.This was evidenced a couple of Sundays ago, when whilst appearing on Laura Kuenssberg’s show, he said, “There is one lesson from this crisis, and only one in my view for the long term on energy policy, and that is that we need home-grown, clean power that we control.”

Exactly how detached from reality must one be to imagine that we have any control whatsoever over the weather? Power deprived from either wind or solar energy, is, by its very nature, far from dependable. The weather and its unpredictability has been so much a constant of living here that it has become a conversational ice-breaker at social gatherings.   

Regardless of the wisdom or otherwise as to whether achieving ‘Net Zero’ is desirable in and of itself, doing so by  2050, has – and is having – increasingly profound implications upon the way we live our lives. This is where my Moribund revenge theory comes in. Anyone who betrays their brother in order to win the Labour Party leadership, only for the electorate to reject him at the 2017 general election, has to be hurting. He’s only human, even though when he tries to smile he looks like Wallace. 

Quick recap. Net Zero is the the ambition to reduce the amount of carbon emissions we produce to to the same level as 1990. Sounds simple. But Isn’t. To achieve this, a series of drastic, expensive and complex changes to the way we live our lives would be needed. And not just changes to the way we live our lives either, but to the kind of lives we live.   

So revenge. Of the ‘I’ll get my own back. They’ll be sorry.’ kind. To that end, he’s charmed the membership of the Labour Party to such an extent that he’s basically unsackable by Emu. And therefore could, when Emu is eventually deposed, very well become the next Prime Minister. This would only fuel his desire for revenge. How maddening would it be to know you’ve finally got the top job, the one you’ve sacrificed so much for, not as a result of unbridled public enthusiasm for his soft-Left politics, but because of some shabby backroom deal?

Or there’s the notion that he’s an unwitting agent of the Chinese state. That it long ago identified the enthusiasm with which European countries embraced combating climate change and decided to use that enthusiasm against them. Its not just us that legally committed ourselves to achieving Net Zero by 2050. The French, Spanish and the Dutch have done so to. Not the Germans though. They have 2045 as their target.

One might think that as the Chinese are the worlds largest exporter of solar panels, wind turbines and quite a few of the other technical innovations upon what the whole Net Zero scheme depends, that the Chinese were setting an example. Possibly by demonstrating how a country might switch from fossil to renewable energy without a massive collapse to its economy. Being a trailblazer by showing that the living standards of its population were not affected. That essentially, things would remain pretty much the way they were.

Which they have, as far as the Chinese are concerned. Because while Britain is closing our few remaining coal powered fuel stations, China is opening them. It already has over 1,000 of them, which accounted for half of all global coal generated power in 2020.   This year it plans to open 85 new ones, adding 55 gigawatts (GW) of power to its capacity and already plans in place to add a further 500GW. But what is a GW? 

A GW is a unit of electric power equal to one billion watts or 1,000 megawatts. One GW can power roughly 750,000 to over a million homes, is roughly the same as nuclear power station produces and is a bit less than the flux capacitor needed to power Marty McFly’s DeLorean in ‘Back to the Future.’

So either he’s an unwitting agent for the Chinese, as they make the absurdity of Net Zero technologically possible, and in so doing, make the energy we produce more expensive and less plentiful. Or he’s a revenge obsessed madman, potentially just over a month away – because of the widely expected disaster for Emu of Mays local elections – from fully realising his demonic plans.

I don’t know which one is worse, him being a fool or mad. Net Zero may well confer benefits to future generations of Britons, cleaner, cheaper energy.  Just as equally, it may not. But right now, and for the lifetime of every Briton alive today, wherever we’re going ‘Back to’, it isn’t good.

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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) issued a statement earlier this week announcing something that should never have been needed to have been announced in the first place. 

According to ‘The Guardian’ ‘[The IOC] has banned transgender women and DSD athletes from the female category of events at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics and future Games.’ Pretty much the rest of the UK media had the same reaction, which essentially amounted to ’Transgender women banned’

Alternatively, they could’ve gone with the far more honest,  ‘IOC to prevent men from competing as women.’ Because that, in a nutshell, is all they’ve done. They haven’t banned anyone as much as they’ve belatedly defended the rights of biological women from being eroded still further by deluded men. A consequence of this, and not the reason for doing so, has been to restrict women’s events to biological women only.

But reason is in short supply for some people when transgender enters the conversation. Quite why they have trouble believing that a male who has gone through puberty will, no matter how many drugs he takes, have numerous biological advantages over women, is baffling. The IOC helpfully produced the yet more scientific evidence that proves this. 

“There is a 10-12% male performance advantage in most running and swimming events. There is a 20+ per cent male performance advantage in most throwing and jumping events. And the male performance advantage can be greater than 100 per cent in events that involve explosive power, eg in collision, lifting and punching sports.”

But no-one really needed scientific evidence to confirm what thousands of years of human evolution had produced. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice to have it confirmed. But sports are the one area where the advantages of a trans women over a biological woman are so fucking obvious that its almost insulting to have to point them out.  Doing so does not transphobe make. 

And whilst this announcement is long overdue, it only applies to athletes wishing to compete at the Olympics. 

Nowhere else. So once every four years deluded men can’t do something that they can still do everywhere else the rest of the time. Worse, this announcement only highlights the risks to biological women and girls at the grassroots, schools and local level. The irony here is extraordinary. If biological women and girls don’t feel protected by sporting bodies to defend their rights with the same ferocity with which they defend transgender women’s rights, then they’ll simply not bother taking part.

At what point does the inclusion, dignity and fairness that transgender fantasists claim to want for themselves, cease to be a extended to others? Why is the media so blatantly and consistently gaslighting us on this issue, claiming that some people have been ‘banned’ when in fact these people have effectively had their cheating prevented? And if the media are gaslighting us about this, then one has to wonder what else are they gaslighting us about?  

The Chagos Island deal doesn’t easily lend itself to hilarity. Even if it is a hilarity that is made all the more hilarious on account of being unintentional 

In news which has understandably not garnered the full outrage it might otherwise have caused – on account of how the war in Iran is causing even more outrage – it was revealed that Mauritius is planning to sue Britain over delays in ratifying deal.  

Had Britain reneged on some crucial aspect of the deal? Negotiated in bad faith? Misled, deceived or otherwise failed to conduct itself properly? Or was it more to do with international law? A hitherto overlooked piece of legal precedent perhaps or a newly discovered treaty that even historians had been unaware of, each of which rendered the existing deal worthless? 

No, it is much simpler than that. The proverb ‘Counting ones chickens before they hatch’ might well have been coined to describe exactly this scenario. Essentially some of the money the Mauritian government had been hoping to get as part of the deal, and which they’d already allocated when calculating next years budget, was no longer the certainty it had been a couple of months ago.

The key point here is that the deal isn’t a deal. Nothing has been signed. It’s an agreement thats all. One thats involved expensive lawyers and many arduous meetings to be sure, with both governments taking part and with the British wary of creating an extensive legal precedent for other countries to follow, but an agreement nonetheless. Not a contract. 

What exactly it was called – a deal or an agreement – became the least of its problems when last month the UK government announced it was ‘pausing’ the whole process until the outcome of discussions with the US are concluded. For some reason which I’m not that interested in, any agreement cannot become a deal without the US’s blessing. That would be the US which has used the Diego Garcia base on the Chagos Islands to launch air strikes on Iran, and which has further underlined both its strategic importance and our diplomatic incompetence.

This creates a problem for the Mauritian government.  

The first payment of the total £35 billions the agreement proposes – £170 millions – isn’t happening any time soon.  “We will have to find Rs 10 billion (£170 millions).  We are exploring all possible avenues, but clearly the 2026-27 budget will not be an easy one,” said their Prime Minister, with wonderful understatement. 

According to the IMF – sadly the boring financial one and not the sexy top-secret spy movie franchise one with Tom Cruise  – Mauritius ‘faces challenges from high public debt, significant public investment needs, low productivity, and an ageing society.’  

Which is basically what we have here. We too have an ageing population. We are borrowing more just to pay for them. And everyone else on benefits. Our national debt is so big that simply paying the interest on it is the governments fourth largest spend.  

So yeah, unintentional hilarity will do just fine. 

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There’s one inherent problem with being moral. Consistency. The effort it requires. Constantly having to navigate all those moral dilemmas. The endless evaluation of competing needs. Of doing all this when so much information is readily accessible. And where the charge of hypocrite is bandied about on social media with carefree abandon. Where a backlash is only few clicks away. Much easier then to criticise others for what you perceive to be their moral failings.

In everyday life this isn’t a problem. It may be mildly embarrassing, to be called out as a hypocrite for some moral transgression or inconsistency and friends may think a bit less of you for a few days, but in the real world, long term consequences are rare. If you’re builder, a school-teacher or a dentist, really, what’s the worst thats going to happen? In everyday life, one has to be a hypocrite just in order to survive. We all believe that the law should be obeyed, yet people break the speed limit or steal stationary from work or take illegal drugs.

When one is a politician however, a different set of rules apply. Everyone thinks so. As do they, but only as it applies to other politicians, not to them. A classic example of this occurred last week in the House of Commons. The Foreign Secretary, Mini-Cooper was announcing plans to cut the foreign aid budget by about 40%, and to use the saving, estimated to be £6 billions over the next three years, on defence.

But the way in which some MP’s reacted to the news, one might almost be forgiven the thinking that Mini-Cooper was planning to visit Afghanistan or Sierra Leone to better relish the effects of the cuts. Mind you, given that she was announcing the news to a largely empty chamber – only 23 MPs actually spoke – their outrage was designed with re-selection, election leaflets and media profile in mind, more than any moral consistency.

The MP who first drew my attention to this tawdry episode was Moanica Harding, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson on  International Development, who was widely quoted in the media as having denounced the planned cuts as ‘a moral catastrophe.’ Pausing only to allow her righteousness to become fully indignant, she thundered, ‘Where are the Labour party’s values, where did it mislay its moral compass?’

Hand on! This wasn’t the same Moanica Harding who voted in favour of abolishing the two child benefit cap, was it?  Only someone so utterly in thrall to be seen to be doing the right thing, as opposed to actually doing it, could possibly hold two seemingly incompatible opinions. Voting to abolish the cap is the very epitome of creating a moral catastrophe, because in effect it gives parents on benefits a financial reason to have unlimited children.  On any metric one cares to use – other than accruing supposed moral virtue – abolishing the cap only exacerbates the problem it wishes to cure.

Firstly, because children who’ve grown in a family whose income is solely on benefits are themselves more likely to lead a life or have a families that are benefit dependent.  We already have a welfare bill that is growing more unsustainable by the month without placing even more demands on it. The moral catastrophe that she is so concerned about happening abroad, is more acute than the one her she has helped create here. But it won’t be anything she’ll need to worry about though. Not for her a life on benefits. She has her MP’s salary to live on. Once the public has had enough of her, she’ll possibly be ennobled and get some cushy gigs in the world of overseas aid quango’s, charities and NGO’s. Then she’ll have her pension. The bill for her morals will fall on the future generations.

Quite a few of the MPs who spoke out against the cuts raised the issues one might expect them to raise. How important it was for Britain to play its part. To combat the spread of disease. To increase access to education, to broaden the provision of healthcare and to champion equality. That was a major concern. The rights of women, girls and the LGBT+ community. The disabled. 

Pick of the bunch though, was this from Brain Less, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bleeding Hearts who asked ,’Does the Foreign Secretary agree that we would gain respect by doing the right thing and restoring the 0.7% now, which would be worth its weight in gold not just for the people of those troubled places but for ourselves in the months, years and decades ahead?’

He too voted to abolish the benefit cap. A bit rich of him to be suddenly talking about ‘doing the right thing’ now.  The ‘troubled places’ he is so vexed about may soon be places near his home. By 2065, the government estimates that nearly half of all the UK’s population will not paying tax – more than a quarter being over 65 and 15% under 18 – but will still expecting the state to provide for them.  This creates the second problem. 

More borrowing on account of less people paying tax. In what universe do these MPs live? Are they not aware than the government already spends nearly a tenth of its entire budget on paying interest on the national debt. Not the debt itself. The interest. £122 billions. When are MPs going to start putting local issues before global ones?

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One of the most interesting revelations to emerge from the whole foreign aid budget cut was the fact that one of its largest single expenditures doesn’t even go abroad. It stays right here. Some 20% of it was spent on housing and supporting asylum seekers in 2024. And because housing and supporting asylum seekers is a statutory duty – legally binding – it’s exempt from the cut.