[The Weeping Angel]

Funny thing is that the engagement isn't particularly impressive in either case. Perhaps the numbers on Twitter were inflated by bots, but I recall them being a fair bit higher than that. If I took my "Hammer of the Greens" schtick from the other thread here on to Bluesky and followed a few people who followed me back, would I be getting much less engagement than those two?

Jolyon might do dubious fundraising, but he has got his head down and won some significant cases. Edwin just seems to be a bloke who decided everything was shit because Brexit.

Hayward says he's an author, he's written one book called Slaying Brexit Unicorns and that's about it. With Maughaum, he has won some cases, but he's also lost quite a few and has resorted to blaming the judges or, in one case, saying he won when he lost.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Quite a few people have got themselves a good following on the back of opposing Brexit. Here's one. Here she is today being corrected by someone who knows what they're talking about, and then flapping about BTL.

[The Weeping Angel]

What's the point? The responses are 90% negative, and no one will care.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Yeah this is well-targeted. Should have done more of this stuff when they restricted the WFA. I think the new WFA arrangement saves something like £450m compared with universality, and that’ll help.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Not sure of the wisdom of Shabana challenging the EHCR like she has. But she certainly isn't alone among European government ministers- including Donald Tusk, who is rightly something of a liberal hero. And there's a commitment not to leave it, which is an important difference from Reform and the Tories, how much people might play this down.

There's very little sense among lots of people, who profess to be "European" and "internationalist" in their outlook, that parties all over the liberal democratic world are facing challenges from right populism. Some that have won have made populist moves on immigration- Albanese accepted the Tony Abbott policy on boats, Carney has (to the surprise of this Guardian column) done something "MAGA inspired"-

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... nald-trump

I think Trump's instinct that Republicans were better off not passing the bi-partisan border bill was sadly spot on.

Argue against all of this stuff on principle, but the politics of this stuff is more complicated than some people make out, I think.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I don't think we should invade Iran either, and I'm pleased to see what the Attorney General said, but there's a lot of this sort of bored "heard it all before" on the left. It's not just a bunch of "Zionists and their puppets" who think there's a major problem here. (I'm not accusing Mark Berry of being like that, to be clear).

[Tubby Isaacs]

Ministers stepping up preparations for renationalisation of Thames Water
Environment secretary indicates that calls from creditors for leniency from fines and penalties will be rejected

I'm kinder to water companies than some people and have sympathy with the current board of Thames Water, who didn't cause the problems. But they rather pissed on their own chips by getting caught misleading the Select Committee the other week. And there's no way the Government could agree to this, however much it wants a private sector solution.. I don't know if this means nationalisation or whether some other solution will be found, but nationalization is getting more likely.



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

[Tubby Isaacs]

This isn't a "quid pro quo". It's somebody making an argument for something they are going to do anyway. A quid pro quo is "you do this, we'll do that". There's literally nothing that the one party (the oil company) are doing or being asked to do.

Oil company- you're being too hard on our industry, change this tax
Reeves- we're not changing it. And we're not anti your industry. We're investing in carbon capture for instance.

Why does everybody who works for The Guardian think they're Carl Bernstein?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... te-meeting

Reeves promised oil industry ‘quid pro quo’ over windfall tax in private meeting
Government accused of making ‘secret exchange deal’ with fossil fuel companies to compensate for tax hike

[Andy McDandy]

It's the old saying - journalism is saying "Jones is dead" and making people, despite not knowing or caring who Jones is, interested.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Disappointing to see Carla Denyer on there going along with "dodgy deal" rubbish. There is literally no deal of any kind involved.

So if a Green politician meets eg a steel manufacturer who doesn't like a green tax, and they say "We're not changing it, but we're not anti-steel, we'll commit to spend a lot of money on steel for infrastructure", that's a corrupt "quid pro quo" is it?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Vintage Guardian here.

Boswell, who leads the Scrap Carbon Capture campaign, called Reeves’s Equinor meeting “an outrageous spectacle”.

He said: “She begs Norway’s oil colossus to tax its huge profits, and then gifts it with far more in return – many billions over decades for climate-wrecking CCUS.”

She didn't "beg". She met an industry concerned about tax rises and carried them out anyway. Nor is there any gift to Equinor. They get to bid for work the government wants done, like anyone else.

The IPCC support carbon capture, but what do they know? Let's go with the one man and a dog campaigner.

[mattomac]

There is a campaign group for that?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Campaign group for everything. He's about as successful as you'd expect. I don't know if he gets to go to the Supreme Court and lose there as well.

In summer 2024, a judge rejected Boswell’s case, which argued that officials did not fully explore the environmental impacts of the scheme before approving it. The government also won the appeal in May.

He gets mentioned ahead of the Government and Equinox's perfectly reasonable responses, who get stuck at the end when nobody is reading. And ahead of this group, who you might think were more important.

The Climate Change Committee stated in its 2025 appraisal of the government’s net zero policies that the UK needs to scale up its CCUS capacity to 73m tonnes-a-year by 2050 to help meet its climate commitments.

"Government acts on expert advice", as the headline could be.

[Tubby Isaacs]

This is another classic of the "I don't like this (CCS) so it must be corrupt, not work at all" genre.

[Andy McDandy]

The DOGE definition of corruption - "I wouldn't have spent money on that".

[Bones McCoy]

The DOGE definition of corruption - "I wouldn't have spent money on that".

I didn't get my cut on that budget.