News Round-Up
- “Jimmy Carter dead at 100: Former president passes away in Georgia” – Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100, almost two years after announcing he would spend his final days in hospice care, reports the Mail.
- “South Korea airport crash: Jeju Air plane smashes through wall, killing 179 people” – A passenger plane crashed while landing at an airport in South Korea yesterday, killing all but two of the 181 people on board, says the Telegraph.
- “Bird strike ‘would not have crippled landing gear of doomed Jeju jet’” – The twin-engine Boeing 737-800 carrying 181 people is believed to have encountered a flock of birds as it came in to land at Muan International Airport on Sunday morning. But experts query whether that was the cause of the crash, according to the Mail.
- “Labour is gaslighting the public to hide its economic failings” – Playing fast and loose with the facts has eroded trust in the Government’s vision for the country, writes Julian Jessop in the Telegraph.
- “Labour or Liz? The taxing question that could come back to haunt Sir Keir Starmer” – Can you be pro-growth while raising taxes? Can you cut regulation but still protect workers and the environment? Or put more simply, can you be both Labour and Liz? Sky News political correspondent Rob Powell puzzles over Labour’s plans for growth.
- “Starmer has an obvious scapegoat for Britain’s deepening economic woes” – If the Prime Minister is looking for someone to blame for the economy’s failure to launch under Labour, there is one obvious candidate: step forward Rachel Reeves, says Roger Bootle in the Telegraph.
- “Britain and the Chagos, the seven-year mess that’ll cost us all” – Diplomatic dithering under both Conservative and Labour governments means the taxpayer’s final bill for handing the islands to Mauritius remains a mystery, reports the Sunday Times.
- “Poor maths skills to blame for Britain’s benefits crisis, says Santander boss” – Bank chief claims lack of financial literacy is fuelling spiralling worklessness in U.K., according to the Telegraph.
- “Farmers plot supermarket blockade in New Year” – Farmers are plotting a New Year supermarket blockade to ramp up protests over the Government’s inheritance tax raid, says the Telegraph.
- “Government accused of ‘bullying’ to get pylons built under Ed Miliband’s Net Zero drive” – The Energy Secretary has vowed to take on “the blockers” as resistance to Milliband’s Net Zero masts grows across the U.K., reports the Telegraph.
- “Why councils are about to switch off your street lights” – Local authorities are trying to plug holes in their budgets while meeting carbon footprint targets. But will their plans put people at risk? asks the Telegraph.
- “Pro-Palestine group whose director is accused of Hamas links hosted in Parliament” – A pro-Palestinian campaign group was hosted in Parliament despite the fact that the organisation’s director has been accused of being “one of the senior Hamas members in Europe”, according to the Telegraph.
- “We must shake off the progressive habit of national self-flagellation” – This country is not responsible for all the ills of the world, and people should stop saying it is, writes Nick Timothy in the Telegraph.
- “We will not comply” – Il Donaldo Trumpo has posted a clip of Donald Trump announcing he will cut federal funding from any institution that imposes mask mandates or vaccine mandates when he’s President.
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THE GREATEST MESSAGE FOR THE NEW YEAR THAT I HAVE EVER HEARD!
AND
Made against a backdrop of a painting of a pack of foxhounds.
Cometh the hour, cometh IL DONALDO!
Three cheers for the President of the good old USA!
Now all we need is a Prime Minister who takes to the Grouse Moors at the end of August.
There is one party leader who.might fit the bill…..
“Poor maths skills to blame for Britain’s benefits crisis, says Santander boss”
Giving kids a strong sense of entitlement and ambition for luxury but low earnings potential, in other words. I pay my staff well, but I am chased weekly by them to be paid early because they are skint, one memorable time, so that they had money for the daughters nail appointment and horse riding session on Saturday. The famous passage from Mr Micawber comes to mind…
I’ve come strongly to the opinion that to get back on the right track we should reinstate the 11 plus and have Grammar Schools for the academically able, and Technical Schools where the less able are taught the practical skills that will enable them to earn a living and enable them to have a happy life. Equity of outcome is of course the absolute enemy of this, and people will howl at the so called unfairness of it. But able kids don’t need to be in environments with low ability disruptive oiks, and the oiks don’t need to know how to do differential equations. Give them skills and plenty of physical exercise instead. Let the Eagles soar.
To describe the level of numeric skill necessary as “mathematics” is an exaggeration as mere arithmetic would be enough. My father’s generation left village schools at 14 years of age with more than enough understanding to set up and run their own businesses and to avoid dependence on the state all their lives.
The FSA was required to ensure the public understood financial products. It was never really interested in that as it focussed on archane definitions and weird rules which have reduced the range of products available and all-but destroyed the Stock Exchange. Financial advice is rare these days.
The FSA confuses protection (risk transfer) products as “investments” while it made not a squeek of protest when Gordon Brown and all his successors refer to government spending as “investment”. No wonder the confusion has trickled down through society (or upwards if you believe as I do in the sovereignty of the people).
“Equity of outcome is of course the absolute enemy of this, and people will howl at the so called unfairness of it.”
There is nothing unfair in your proposal. If the outcome is happy lives for both the academically able and the erm less able then I would conclude this is equity. Woke has nothing to do with equality as we on DS know very well. We live in an Orwellian world now.
“Why councils are about to switch off your street lights”
Actually, I don’t think that’s a rotten idea. Main routes and troublesome junctions should, but what about the quiet suburban streets that see virtually no traffic from midnight to 5am. Lighting and all the systems to do it are tremendously expensive and difficult to maintain. The biggest problem is that the fanatics will get aboard the idea and ruin what could have been something practical and worthwhile.
Certainly as a child in the 60s I remember street lights in our semi rural area being switched off during the small hours. I had one outside my bedroom window, and I knew it was after 6am on a winter’s morning if the light had come back on.
The country was a different place back then! Machete wealding thugs and postcode gangs didn’t exist but would certainly make the most of darker streets.
I’m not against power and cost savings but what do we pay our council taxes for then? Roads riddled with potholes, poor general community services and council tax rates raising non stop, what do we actually get from it, an empty bin every fortnight? Oh I’ve just thought of something, rainbow 🌈 crossings and £30,000 statues of unknown foreigners outside our diverse council headquarters and of course, shiny new council headquarters!
…and grants to all sorts of minority interest groups, translation services, accommodation for homeless immigrants, LEZs, cycle lanes, and numerous “climate change” management groups.
Don’t forget the pensions Dinger which account for between 25 – 30 % of Council Tax.
Regreatably, in many parts of the country it is not safe after dark because of the number of addled and rootless people about.
I tend to agree. Darkness is healthy. Cars have headlights, people where I live have torches anyway. Perhaps motion sensors too, as long as they don’t pick up the foxes, deer etc.
These days when flying at night I can’t help thinking about how much night lighting has increased in the last decades. Flying in Europe on clear nights you just see lights everywhere. Also increasingly in Asia.
You’d think that if we were really that concerned about our carbon emissions leading to catastrophe, the one thing one could certainly do without it lighting up cities, towns and villages in the middle of the night when practically no one is about.
Certainly when there was an actual real existential threat, during WWII, they didn’t take long to impose blackouts.
This is one of the many things I think about frequently with the Boiling Seas narrative being shoved down our throats – in that case, why is everything being pushed to become unnecessarily electrified (for example, my new washing machine now has an electric display when the previous model functioned just fine with a knob; all new cars now have a massive touchscreen display rather than some buttons and a dial; change your mobile phone for the next model every 5 minutes and do EVERYTHING online with apps and whatnot; they are even apparently building massive, massive data centres for all this new AI that we MUST have, which will double or triple the world’s electricity consumption or something similarly ridiculous)…
If people really, really believed that we are on the verge of catastrophe, surely all this would stop immediately?
Reminder, not only are the seas boiling, but according to Gutierres, the oceans are overflowing.
Quite what into is another matter, which he does not explain…
No street lights where I lived. You are responsible for equipping yourself with a torch – head torches are great or a heavy one that doubles up for defense. A waste of power and adding to light pollution. Remember that the ner-do-wells may be more afraid of the dark than you!