Category: UK

Because the City of London Owns England

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Following announcements by G-7 countries about standardizing a minimum tax for trans-national corporations and cracking down on tax evasion and tax havens, the UK has decided to go to the mat for its finance industry, AKA the “City of London”, whose core competency is tax evasion and money laundering:

U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak is pressing for the City of London to be exempt from a plan by global leaders to make multinationals pay more tax to the countries where they operate.

Finance ministers from the Group of Seven advanced economies struck a historic deal last weekend that could force the world’s biggest companies to pay a minimum corporate tax rate of 15%.

Sunak is expected to make the case that financial services, including global banks with head offices in London, should be exempt from the plan when talks move to the G-20 next month.

………

A European Union official pushed back against the idea of an exemption. The EU expects all companies to pay their fair share of taxation, the official said at a briefing for journalists on Wednesday.

If they get an exemption, the City of London will spend its time turning client companies, and their subsidiaries into finance institutions so that hey can continue to evade taxes.

The UK would be hurt by this as much as any other nation, but they are the poodles of their finance industry, they have been since at least Margaret Thatcher.

Tweet of the Day

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These are not the Tweets of the day:

The real poetry will come when the self-interested narcissist who weaponised falsehood realises he cannot inflict damage on the other self-interested narcissist who weaponised falsehood, because he undermined truth-telling as a functional quality in political discourse.

— Ian Dunt (@IanDunt) May 26, 2021

These are the two Tweets before the Tweet of the day.

The Tweet of the day is the one following, which I am quoting and Bowlderizing, because it reads, “It’s like Aesop’s Fables for c%$#s,” and I just don’t feel comfortable dropping the “C-Bomb” on the blog.

It is, however a perfect metaphor for Boris Johnson former senior political advisor, Dominic Cummings, testifying against the PM’s handling of the pandemic.

The man who made fecklessness the new normal in British politics is now complaining that Boris Johnson is a feckless git.

Of Course They Do

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The UK, normally the United States’ poodle in all matters, is not offering its support for Biden’s global business tax plan. 

This is not a surprise.  The British financial sector, known colloquially as the City of London, has two areas where it dominates world markets: Tax evasion and currency speculation.

The US may dominate the UK, but the City of London owns the whole government, lock, stock and barrel.

Of course they are objecting to a plan with makes revenue shifting a less profitable enterprise.  It’s their profits that they are protecting.

Of Course they Are Blaming Corbyn

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There were by-elections in the UK yesterday, and labour completely screwed the pooch, loosing a seat that they have held since its founding 62 years ago.

Jeremy Corbyn is being blamed, because ……… Blairite Labour is sees Boris Johnson and the Tories as the opposition, and people who actually support progressive policies as the enemy.

It is not 1995.  It’s not even 2008.

The great recession changed things, and you are going to get more Boris Johnsons and more Donald Trumps until they stop sucking up to predatory capital as a campaign strategy:

Keir Starmer is facing immediate pressure from the left of Labour to change course after losing the Hartlepool byelection and a string of council seats to the Conservatives.

It came as Boris Johnson, visiting Hartlepool after the Conservatives took the seat for the first time in its 47-year history, said the result – which turned a Labour majority of 3,600 into a Tory win by nearly 7,000 votes, a 16-point swing – was “a mandate” for the government to press on.

………

While Labour had accepted the early results were likely to be among the worst of the series of votes across England, Scotland and Wales, the immediate message from Starmer and his allies was to push for a more rapid move away from the Jeremy Corbyn era.

Corbyn out-performed expectations in 3 of 4 elections with the party infrastructure actively sabotaging him.

You followed that up with party purges against him and his supporters.

If you think that the problem is that you are not moving fast enough away from Corbyn, you are delusional.

………

Diane Abbott, who was shadow home secretary under Corbyn, tweeted: “Keir Starmer must think again about his strategy.” She added: “Crushing defeat for Labour in Hartlepool. Not possible to blame Jeremy Corbyn for this result. Labour won the seat twice under his leadership.”

Richard Burgon, the Leeds East MP who was shadow justice secretary under Corbyn, said Starmer’s team “needs to urgently change direction”. He tweeted: “It should start by championing the popular policies in our recent manifestos – backed by a large majority of voters.”

A spokesman for Momentum, the Corbyn-allied Labour group, said: “The leadership are reacting to this disaster by promising ‘more change’ – but over the last year we’ve gone backwards. It’s time to change direction, not double down on a failed strategy.”

They are going to double down on a failed strategy, because playing to win means that they lose power within the party. 

One of Tony Blair’s “innovations” for Labour was the imposition of a top-down process in selecting MPs in many seats, and if the left takes power, and has the guts to deal with members more interested in power IN the party than the power OF the party, their positions will be far less secure.

OK, This is Funny.

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It’s cruel, and crass, but today’s joke from Least I Could Do is really damn funny.

I would argue that of the Prince Philip funereal jokes, this one is the best.

To state the blatantly obvious, it’s funny to make jokes about creatng a fake Tinder profile for Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, but it is most assuredly NOT funny to actually make such a profile on Tinder.

It is even less funny to make a fake Grindr profile for Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor.

As an aside, does anyone know that the statute of limitations is for Lèse-majesté laws in the UK?

Iawn, Pa Un Ohonoch Chi Sydd Wedi Bod Yn Ffycin Defaid? *

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It appears that as a result of Covid-19, efforts to reduce the population of feral goats has been curtailed, and so feral Llandudno Goats have been running rampant over portions of Wales. 

Is it just me, or does anyone else have an image of some poor bureaucrat trying to convince goats to wear a condom?

The goats of the Great Orme headland in Wales were a worldwide sensation during the first Covid lockdown last year after they were pictured roaming brazenly around the deserted streets of nearby Llandudno.

This year there has been a population explosion of the kashmiri goats in their north Wales headland home after the Covid crisis forced countryside wardens to cancel a planned contraception campaign.

………

Sally Pidcock, warden of the Great Orme country park, said there were estimated to be about 30 billy goats – the males are the ones that tend to travel – at large Llandudno and roughly 150 less adventurous males, plus females and kids, back on the Great Orme.

Pidcock said a campaign to give contraceptive injections to nanny goats last summer had to be postponed because of Covid. “It means there are more kids being born on the Great Orme now than there would have been,” she said. As long as Covid allows, a contraceptive vaccination campaign will take place this summer.

We live in strange times.

*This is Welsh for, “Which one of you boys been f%$#ing the sheep?

This is Completely Insane

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Boris Johnson and his merry band of blood-thirsty prats have decided that nuclear weapons are an appropriate response to agents of foreign governments hacking systems in the UK.*

This is completely bat-sh%$ insane.

Britain is prepared to launch nuclear weapons if the country was faced with an exceptionally destructive attack using cyber or other “emerging technologies”, according to the integrated defence review.

The stark statement marks a change from existing UK policy, which had been that Trident missiles could only be launched against another nuclear power, or potentially in response to extreme chemical or biological threats.

The new policy says Britain would “reserve the right” to use nuclear weapons in the face of “weapons of mass destruction”, which includes “emerging technologies that could have a comparable impact” to chemical or biological weapons.

It sets the UK in a different direction to the US, where the newly elected president, Joe Biden, had floated the idea during his election campaign of making the “sole purpose” of nuclear weapons to deter or if necessary to retaliate against a nuclear attack.

No further detail was spelled out in the document, published on Tuesday, but analysts said the shift in language was significant. Tom Plant, a director at the Royal United Services Institute thinktank, said: “This is clearly an indication that the UK government perceives the potential for some combination of novel technologies, in years to come, to rival existing WMD.”

Just imagine what happens if someone starts downloading pr0n using Boris’ Netflix account.

Shall we play a game?

Love to.  How about Global Thermonuclear war?†

And then there is this.

Discussion about Britain’s new nuclear policy unveiled by Boris Johnson, reversing 30 years of modest disarmament since the end of the cold war, dominated the publication of a 100-page integrated review of defence and foreign policy.

It confirmed leaks from Monday night that the UK would allow the cap on its nuclear weapon stockpile to rise to 260 from a target of 180 “by the mid-2020s” – and that the UK would abandon a second pledge to hold a lower number of operational warheads, previously set at 120.

This is a violation of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NNTP) which the UK is a party to.

Defence sources said the decision to lift the warhead cap by over 40% was motivated by a desire to be more assertive about nuclear weapons. “If we have them, let’s not apologise for it, let’s own it,” an insider added.

So this is just all dick swinging.  Lovely.

So now, Boris is the world’s problem.

*As Anna Russell would say, “I’m not making this up, you know.”
†Yes, I know. I am referring to two completely different movies. Get over it.

Thank You George Washington

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George Washington was a number of things, some good, he led the Revolutionary Army successfully against the British, some awful, he owned slaves, and one thing that was absolutely remarkable, he completely shut down any suggestion that he, or anyone, be king of the United States.

Even if you have a good king, the various retainers and hangers on are toxic, because it becomes a snake pit, as is shown by the recent interview between Harry Mountbatten-Windsor and Meghan Markle and Oprah Winfrey.

I’ve read some short reports of the interviews, and realized that beyond my immeasurable pleasure in NOT having a royal family in the United States, I really don’t care.

I am grateful to the choices made by George Washington, and the more I know of him, the more I admire him.